I was reading Sarah Lacy’s “If You’ve Got Social Media Fatigue, UR DOIN IT WRONG” on TechCrunch and was reminded of a passage from Henry David Thoreau’s seminal essay “Civil Disobedience” that I discuss in chapter 6 of my dissertation.

First the passage from Lacy’s article:

Sometimes metrics can be a bad thing and beware of any so-called “social media consultant” who tells you otherwise. What’s the value of a Retweet or a Like? It’s roughly the equivalent to sitting next to someone during a keynote who nods his head at a salient point. Someone hitting a button in front of them is hardly a heady endorsement—nowhere near the impact of someone calling you to tell you about a story he read. That actually takes more than one-second of attention and work.

This reminded me of the moral hazards of voting in electoral politics and Thoreau’s likening it to a sort of gambling with morality:

All voting is a sort of gaming, like chequers or backgammon, with a slight moral tinge to it, a playing with right and wrong, with moral questions; and betting naturally accompanies it. The character of the voters is not staked. I cast my vote, perchance, as I think right; but I am not vitally concerned that that right should prevail. I am willing to leave it to the majority. Its obligation, therefore, never exceeds that of expediency. Even voting for the right is doing nothing for it. It is only expressing to men feebly your desire that it should prevail. A wise man will not leave the right to the mercy of chance, nor wish it to prevail through the power of the majority. There is but little virtue in the action of masses of men. When the majority shall at length vote for the abolition of slavery, it will be because they are indifferent to slavery, or because there is but little slavery left to be abolished by their vote. They will then be the only slaves. Only his vote can hasten the abolition of slavery who asserts his own freedom by his vote.

With this last sentence Thoreau is no longer really speaking of voting, as becomes clear later on when he writes “Cast your whole vote, not a strip of paper merely, but your whole influence.” He is advocating civil disobedience and participatory democracy.¹

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Voting, Moral Hazard, and Like ButtonsRead More »

1. For more on participatory democracy, see chapters 6 & 7 of my dissertation ↩