The Treachery of Signs: Why Feeds Are Turning Societies into Adversaries
sublius.substack.comIn hindsight of writing this I also wonder if Grant Wood understood the significance of the pitchfork bifurcation?
This is a really interesting examination of how (online) political communication works. Also, I love that they embrace serious thinking without hesitating and trying to sound 'cool' - they go right for the heart of it. Some excerpts:
At the intersection of culture, technology, and human cognition lies a framework for understanding the subtle architectures governing contemporary existence ...
Polarization emerges not merely from misinformation or malice, but from foundational structures of signification itself.
René Magritte’s iconic pipe, inscribed with “This is not a pipe,” exemplifies the treachery invoked in the title: a perpetual disjuncture between signifier and signified.
The crux resides in signs’ inherent underdetermination of interpretation. They resemble fragmentary mosaics, completed through contextual priors. In diverse societies, this fosters innovation. Algorithmic curation, however, transforms these interstices into abyssal rifts. Linguistic anthropology, crediting Paul Kockelman’s 2024 framework on semiotic agency, elucidates indexicality (signs’ tethering to social milieus) and enregisterment (their aggregation into typified forms). “Defund the police” may connote reform for one group, lawlessness for another, with divergences accruing in segregated enclaves.
Thank you. The HN audience demonstrates capacity for metapragmatic analysis, though institutional incentives favor semiotic complacency over methodological innovation.
The comfort of entrenched epistemological positions is precisely what the paper challenges. Algorithmic curation transforms semiotic underdetermination from productive interpretive flexibility into polarization infrastructure. Signs that previously functioned as fragmentary mosaics requiring contextual negotiation now aggregate into segregated meaning-spaces through automated enregisterment.
The empirical contribution lies in formalizing this transition. Traditional semiotics documented indexicality and enregisterment qualitatively. Computational systems generate quantifiable semiotic dynamics at scale. This enables measurement of phenomena previously accessible only through ethnographic observation.
The bifurcation model operationalizes what Kockelman's framework describes: semiotic agency under algorithmic mediation produces stable dual attractors where signs acquire systematically divergent interpretations based on enclave membership. "Defund the police" demonstrates this mathematically. Single signifier, dual signifieds, no shared interpretive ground. The system has bifurcated semiotically.
Applied semiotics requires acknowledging that meaning-making occurs within measurable dynamical systems, not transcendent hermeneutic spaces. The treachery is not that signs lie. The treachery is that signs now operate according to bifurcation dynamics while we continue analyzing them with pre-algorithmic frameworks.
The paper provides formal tools for empirical semiotics. Whether the field adopts them depends on whether methodological innovation overcomes institutional inertia. The dynamics documented in the paper apply to academic knowledge production as much as political discourse.
The Treachery of Signs Semiotic Mediation, Pitchfork Bifurcation, and Political Polarization in Algorithmically Curated Societies