A popular goal for many people online, particularly in the world of politics, is to try to “own” the other side. Show them up. Make them look bad.
In most cases, the “owning” is little more than a mean headline, whereas the truth is much more nuanced.
Last year Mary Harrington wrote a great piece for the New York Times titled “Thinking is Becoming a Luxury Good” where she dug into this very idea. From her article:
“For canny operators, such a public affords new opportunities for corruption. Oligarchs attempting to shape policy to their advantage will benefit from the fact that few will have the attention span to track or challenge policies in dull, technical fields; what a majority now wants is not forensic investigation but a new video short “owning” the other tribe.”
As she mentions, people are using this to their advantage. They know that the vast majority of folks will read a headline and run with it, without doing even a smidge more digging first.
Even those that dig in a little bit very rarely “do their research”, as Ryan Holiday explains:
“We should absolutely “do our research”—to borrow the term popular with conspiracy theorists—but by that, we mean actually do the research. Like, read real and credible authors on a topic, lots of them. Do actual thinking, not what feels like thinking. Ask real questions, instead of “just asking questions.” Listen to the answers. Allow ourselves to be proven wrong. Allow ourselves to learn new things. A podcast is not a sufficient briefing on a topic!”
It’s gotten to the point that if I see a headline that some person or group has been “owned”, I feel rather confident that it’s either partially or entirely based on a false or badly misconstrued argument.
For example, the recent hot button issue here in the US was the killing of Renee Good by ICE agent Jonathan Ross in Minnesota. Thousands (millions?) of people have offered hot takes online with their opinion, but who has really dug into things to try to see it from all sides? For info like that, I find value in watching people like Devin Stone (“Legal Eagle” on YouTube), who is a lawyer that recently published a 30 minute video digging deep into the situation.
We certainly don’t have time to dig deep into everything in every facet of life, but the quick “ownings” aren’t helping anyone.
