A Culture Can Survive Disagreements. It Rarely Survives Contempt.

A panel featuring a documentarian and ex-OpenAI engineer explaining the way out.

A loved one isn’t the only thing absence can make your heart grow fonder of. In today’s abundance of humans yelling at each other and into the void every second of every day, my heart has grown much fonder of what’s largely absent:

self-control, interest in the truth, intellectual humility, curiosity, creativity, growth through challenge, belief in the ability to grow through challenge, self-awareness, maturity…

Some claim Western culture has degraded because of demographic change or economic policy or the spread of new or old prejudices. All of these can be true in some way. But Western culture is unique for its history of valuing one thing that inoculates us against all of these problems and worse: character. Yet character is what I see most absent from every side of our culture, including some critics who lament our cultural degradation.

At its simplest, a culture is what a people believe and the actions those beliefs inspire. The difference between a culture that protects speech and one that punishes it is its beliefs about speech and the actions those beliefs inspire. When I look at American culture, I don’t see many of the “moral people” the Founders believed America’s future required (not to be confused with religious, immoral people). I see a people who have given up on supposedly lofty pursuits, like character. I believe this is partly why American culture is increasingly defined by pessimism and future-anxiety as opposed to the optimism and future-hope of past generations, despite those generations often facing far worse circumstances. Ideals like character, truth, and growth are inspirational. A culture that abandons the pursuit of ideals is not inspirational, not inspired.

Our culture’s discourse is stuck in a similar negative loop. The more people join the online trenches to yell past each other and perform the opposite of functional discourse, the more they fuel the degraded, embattled culture they claim to hate.

We’re on a kind of virtual hamster wheel, where every new version of an old conflict sparks that dopamine-driven sense that this time, something different might happen. This time, my comment, post, video, essay, debate might make a real difference. And maybe it chips away at the mountain, but we’re still on the hamster wheel, feeling like we’re getting nowhere fast.

I don’t have a satisfying solution, because good solutions aren’t usually satisfying; they’re effective but difficult, which is why many of us persist with our problems for decades instead of solving them. The only solution I have is a paradigm shift: we’ve lived through an early version of an important technology that did serious damage, but we’re on the cusp of reaching the better-designed, less destructive version. Think of our current online discourse like you do the first car—important, but wreaked havoc before it developed into today’s safer, more effective version.

The next generation of tech-mediated American discourse will do the opposite of what today’s does. Instead of playing to our worst impulses and enticing us to keep arguing in circles, it will call to our higher nature—truth-seeking, self-mastery, creativity—and give us a path to turn better arguments into better outcomes than just likes, followers, and ad revenue.

Many people are already trying to build different versions of this. The panel below that I spoke on was hosted by Integrally, a platform with exactly this mission. In that panel with author and documentarian Adam B. Coleman, fiction author and OpenAI’s first prompt engineer Andrew Mayne, and Qrio founder Stacia Wilson, we diagnose the problems in Discourse 1.0, share how we avoid them, and describe what Discourse 2.0 will look like. Or at least, how to prevent Discourse 1.0 from demoralizing you before its successor takes over.

If you’re someone who feels that the future of American culture depends on finding better ways to disagree, or you’re trying to build that future, this panel is for you:

⏱️ Timestamps:

0:00 Intro: Lauren Postler on liberty, education, and tech

0:55 “The Marketplace of Ideas Is Broken”: framing the panel

1:26 Why Integrally sponsors a panel on disagreeing well

2:18 Meet Adam Coleman: Black Victim to Black Victor

3:34 Adam Coleman: why we’re incentivized to argue in bad faith

5:04 Meet Salomé Sibonex: The Black Sheep and groupthink

5:46 Salomé Sibonex: the biggest myth about groupthink

8:58 Is tech the solution? Meet Andrew Mayne

10:17 Andrew Mayne: how AI changes the incentives of debate

12:04 Meet Stacia Wilson: vibe coding and decentralized truth

12:55 Stacia Wilson: what “sense-making” really means

14:36 Adam Coleman: use the platform, don’t let it use you

18:10 The attention economy: your time is someone’s money

19:29 Salomé Sibonex: intellectual humility persuades

22:40 Andrew Mayne: storytelling, narrative, and truth

25:29 The viral video factory: outrage manufactured for hire

26:18 Stacia Wilson: judging arguments by integrity, not agreement

30:06 Sense-making vs. critical thinking: an on-stage debate

32:42 Adam Coleman: the victor mindset vs. the victim mindset

36:13 Salomé Sibonex: staying grounded in the outrage economy

40:21 Andrew Mayne: should we be optimistic about AI?

42:08 Wrap-up: booth 516 and one last question

I’ve partnered with Integrally on this series because it’s a cool platform that helps you learn through constructively structured, anonymous debate. What’s not to love about a platform for discussing ideas that organically incentivizes people to make their best quality arguments and disincentivizes everything bad about social media Discourse 1.0? Try it for yourself and let me know what you think.

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