To live in the 21st century is, if you have been paying attention, to live without dialogue. We are told that we exist suspended in bubbles and echo chambers, that our views are skewed so heavily that our own thoughts couldn’t possibly be ours anymore, but rather something influenced beyond our own agency.
The danger of such a prevailing narrative is that it might destabilise the confidence it takes to make a declaration of our own. It threatens to cheapen our thoughts, however mundane, as presently unworthy of action or even expression. Our selves, effected by online discourse for the past three decades, couldn’t possibly produce an engaging utterance. And without an ability to connect in discussion, we might be fated to alienation and loneliness.
But Kareem Rahma’s online talk show provides something of a countervalence, a clear framework for meaningful conversations in our time. Subway Takes allows its setting to inform its style - a place of brief but intensely unfiltered confrontation. Mass transit is where we cannot hide from one another. And so, at speed, participants are invited by Rahma to speak a brief polemical idea.
Allow people to pronounce words wrong, not hurting people’s feeling should not be the basis for morality, men should have to take yearly government mandated dance classes, America has become a monotone hellscape, we need to destroy the data centers, and on and on.
Where this format becomes most instructive as a blueprint for discussion and understanding is in Rahma’s immediate response. There are only two possibilities. The first is a full throated confirmation of the idea. Rahma will lend further dimensions to his guest’s perspective and commiserate with them, and we see, in real time, a connection form.
The second possible reaction is a rejection of the idea. But Rahma provides that rejection with a matching provocation, a challenge and willingness to be swayed. More time is given for the inciting notion to be fleshed out. And often, in that period, we witness the fundamentally human act of a person changing their mind. And then, we repeat the process of the first possibility: confirmation, commiseration, connection. But even when not convinced, Rahma performs a kind of generous understanding to show his guest hospitality and friendship.
As a dialectic, Subway Takes offers its viewers a way of being in the world that promotes self-confidence and shared-care, an ability to speak without hesitation that what is said is inane or wrong. To hear and build on each others' words. We are soothed into remembering that our ideas, however mundane or grandiose, can not only be worth expressing, but insodoing generate for us a kind of joy in collective meaning-making. By being together, in all of our différance, we can remember ourselves.
Of course, to say that the internet has rendered us solitary is just one story being told about our time. There is another possible narrative, one that our recent conversations reached people across difference and distance with such immediacy that it generated liberating potential. That there is a reason the world’s hoarders of money tripped over themselves to buy up and demolish our conversational tools. Or why our peer-to-peer technologies are currently being overthrown for machine intermediaries. It is possible that we were riding the train together all along. But we should thank Rahma for making that clear again.
