Superposters tend to be “more opinionated, more extreme, more engaged, more everything,” said Andrew Guess, a Princeton University social scientist. When more casual users open Facebook, often what they see is a world shaped by superposters like Mr. Wasserman. Their exaggerated worldviews play well on the algorithm, allowing them to collectively — and often unknowingly — dominate newsfeeds. “That’s something special about Facebook,” Dr. Paluck said. “If you end up getting a lot of time on the feed, you are influential. It’s a difference with real life.”

A great many general-interest Facebook groups that I see are dominated by trollish people whose visibility relies on how provocative they can get without being banned. This is true in many Quaker-focused groups. Facebook prioritizes engagement and nothing seems to get our fingers madly tapping more than provocation by someone half-informed.

Formal membership in a Quaker meeting is a considered process; for many Quaker groups, public ministry is also a deliberated process, with clearness committees, anchor committees, etc. On Facebook, membership consists of clicking a like button; public ministry, aka visibility, is a matter of having a lot of time to post comments. Public groups with minimal moderation which run on Facebook’s engagement-inducing algorithms are the public face of Friends these days, far more visible than any publication or recognized Quaker body’s Facebook presence. I written before of my long-term worry that with the rise of social media gatekeeping sites, we’re not the ones writing our story anymore.

I don’t have any answers. But the NYTimes piece helped give me some useful ways of thinking about these phenomena.

Facebook Fueled Anti-Refugee Attacks in Germany, New Research Suggests (Published 2018)

Towns where people use Facebook more also had more attacks on refugees, building on suspicions that the platform…

www.nytimes.com

I had been kicking around writing something on the uses and abuses of creeds in the Quaker tradition, but then I discovered that Ben Wood had written a fairly definitive version of that essay already. So read that instead.

Ben’s 2016 piece on Quakers and creeds is definitely worth a read. I checked my records and I must have missed it at the time, so I’ll share it now. He goes deep into the kinds of creeds that Penn and Barclay gave in their writings but also what the earlier Christian creed-makers were coming from. He also comes to today. Here’s a taste:

we cannot be creed-makers before we are story-preservers and story-tellers. We cannot hope to resolve differences unless and until we dig down into our own Quaker story; unless we come to terms with its power and implications. At least part of our sense of spiritual malaise is a reticence to engage with the depth of the Quaker tale. Partly that reticence is about a lack of teaching ministry among Friends. We haven’t given each other the tools to become skillful readers of our own narrative. We have assumed that people can just ‘pick this stuff up’ through a mysterious process of osmosis. This has led to a fragmentation of understanding about the meaning and implications of Quaker grammar.

In my world, talk of creeds has sprung up recently following the QuakerSpeak video of Arthur Larrabee’s nine core principles of unprogrammed Friends. His principles seem fairly descriptive of mainstream Liberal Friends to me, but predictably enough the video’s comments have people worried about any formulation: “Espousing core beliefs—no matter how well intentioned—risks introducing a creed.” One of my pet theories is that the mid-century truce over theology talk that helped Quaker branches reunite (at least on the U.S. East Coast) has stopped working.

Quakers and Creeds

The book certainly has its oddities, starting with the narrative voice: we are listening to a story told aboard a ship on the Thames that is waiting for a change of tide to send it on its way out to sea. The narrator-within-the-story, Marlowe, tells the entire tale in flashback, with Conrad only occasionally coming up for air to the deck of the Thames boat (Heart of Darkness was written as a three-part serial; I assume these narrative breaks are the stitching between installments).

I had heard much about this book over the years so I was curious to see the exact nature of the depravities upon which the infamous Kurtz had indulged himself. But two-thirds of the way through the book I realized we were never to really learn them. We know there’s a remote camp by a lake and an African tribe that regards him as some kind of demi-god, and we hear tell that he’s lawless toward other Europeans and single-minded in his quest for ivory. But these are all barely more than hinted glimpses.

The story turns out to be not so much about Kurtz as it is about Marlows’ imaginings as he gets deeper into the continent and gathers clues about the mystery man at the top of the river. I found this to be a relief, as Conrad seems almost as uninterested in fleshing out the Africans along the way. Kurtz is a brilliant civilized man; in the jungle his savagery is unleashed and he becomes a force unto himself.

I had to deal with a being to whom I could not appeal in the name of anything high or low. I had, even like the n******, to invoke him–himself his own exalted and incredible degradation. There was nothing either above or below him, and I knew it. He had kicked himself loose of the earth. Confound the man! he had kicked the very earth to pieces. He was alone, and I before him did not know whether I stood on the ground or floated in the air.

Yes, this is a working definition of a psychopath. If this were a modern Showtime or AMC television show, this would be the start of the action: the producers, writers, and actors would leave little gore or depravity to the imagination. But for Conrad this is the morality tale at the heart of the book. Shortly after being found, Kurtz conveniently dies and our narrator sails back downstream, going (we are helpfully told) twice the speed as before, back out to the ocean and civilization.

More: 

• Wikipedia: Heart of Darkness
• Heart of Darkness on Project Gutenberg