Antisocial, p.18
Antisocial, page 18
Six months after Reddit went live, Huffman added a new function: comments. Now, in addition to links, users could type their thoughts, and other users could thread their thoughts below those thoughts, enabling a post to turn into a discussion. Each comment, like each link, could be upvoted or downvoted. This system allowed the cream to rise to the top. It also allowed redditors to gang up on people or ideas they disliked, downvoting them into oblivion. If the latter was an abuse of the system, then it was a form of abuse that existed from the start. On the day Reddit launched, Ohanian posted the site’s first link. Huffman, sitting at his computer a few feet away, immediately downvoted it. He didn’t have any particular objection to the link Ohanian had posted; he hadn’t even clicked on it yet. He was just being a jerk. “I consider myself a troll at heart,” he said later. “We now think of trolls as these racist, vile creatures, and obviously I don’t consider myself that. But making people bristle, being a little outrageous in order to add some spice to life—I get that. I’ve done that. That was kind of how I grew up on the internet.”
Redditors went by pseudonyms, so it wasn’t always possible to know exactly who was saying what. Still, many of the site’s early adopters, if not most, seemed to be sharp-tongued, contrarian young men like Huffman and Ohanian, interested in video games, computer programming, and crass, recursive humor. The Reddit community developed a bent for irreverence and an antipathy to pious groupthink. Reason was preferable to emotion. Irony was prized above ingenuousness. The site’s design, its tone, its meaningless internet points—all served to make it a petri dish for inside jokes and pet theories and hermetic, self-reinforcing worldviews.
In the early days, Reddit had few official policies about what should or shouldn’t be posted. Huffman and Ohanian were too busy keeping the site from crashing. Besides, even if they’d had the time to write down rules, they would have been loath to restrict the free flow of information. “Like most programmers at the time, we were pretty libertarian,” Huffman said later. “Not in the political, Ayn Rand sense—more in the ‘Fuck you, don’t tell me what to think,’ outlaw-hacker sense.”
In late 2005, Paul Graham posted his essay about Web 2.0. “Another place democracy seems to win is in deciding what counts as news,” he wrote. “I never look at any news site now except Reddit. I know if something major happens, or someone writes a particularly interesting article, it will show up there. Why bother checking the front page of any specific paper or magazine?” Sites like Reddit functioned as “a filter for quality,” he added. The gatekeepers had only been getting in the way. The news could be improved the way everything else could be improved: disrupt, disintermediate, democratize, give the power to the people.
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• • •
In 2017, the Supreme Court heard a case about a North Carolina law that prevented registered sex offenders from using social media. Did the law violate the First Amendment? Before answering that question, the Court had to consider another question: what is social media? In sixty minutes of oral argument, Facebook was compared to a park, a playground, an airport terminal, a polling booth, and a town square. Justice Sotomayor asked a question about high schoolers looking for jobs on LinkedIn. Justice Alito tried to compare Google+ to BettyCrocker.com. “Everybody uses Twitter,” Justice Kagan said. “This has become a crucially important channel of political communication.”
Of all possible metaphors, it might be best to compare founding a social network to hosting a party. It starts out small, with just the hosts and a few of their friends. Then word gets out, and strangers start to show up. People take cues from the environment. Mimosas in a sun-dappled atrium suggests one kind of mood; grain alcohol in a moldy basement suggests another. Sometimes, a pattern emerges on its own: Pinterest, a photo-sharing site founded by three men, happened to catch on among women. In other cases, the pattern seems more premeditated—more like a result of implicit gatekeeping. If you’re fourteen, TikTok’s user interface is intuitive; if you’re twenty-two, it’s intriguing; if you’re forty-five, it’s impenetrable. This encourages older people to self-deport.
Suppose you throw a party. Early on, you’re busy greeting people, fetching drinks, making sure the sound system works. Everyone seems to be having a good time. You could stand outside the front door with a flashlight, interviewing each potential guest, but instead you decide to leave the gates open. You don’t think about what might go wrong. On the whole, people are basically trustworthy. Why would someone want to ruin the party?
Inevitably, things go wrong. You play an obscene song. Someone complains. You play an unobjectionable song. Everyone stops dancing. One person sneaks into the bathroom for a cigarette, and you decide to look the other way—you sort of like the idea of hosting a raucous party, the kind with a trace of illicit smoke in the air. But then people start smoking in the hallway, and on the dance floor, and someone has an asthma attack. Sleazy men start making aggressive passes at women; word gets around, and many women decide to leave. Someone spreads a rumor that the bartender is poisoning the drinks. Another person makes a racist joke, and several people laugh; before you can confront them, they scatter into the crowd.
What can you do? You don’t want to let things get out of hand. You consider pausing the music, turning on all the lights, maybe identifying a few of the troublemakers and dragging them out by the collar. That would set an example, but it could also spoil the mood, and the party might never recover.
By far the easiest solution, and the only one that will set you up to be perfectly consistent in the future, is to do nothing, or almost nothing. You can’t spend all your time policing everyone. Instead, you establish a clear, simple policy: as long as none of your guests do anything violent or illegal, they can say whatever they want. After all, you believe in free speech.
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In 2005, Reddit was a sparsely attended party: a few sharp-tongued young men in a dank, cavernous warehouse. At the time, Facebook was only available to college students, and in order to join it you had to provide your real name, your birthday, and a valid school email address—the equivalent of being carded at the door. To join Reddit, all you needed was a username that hadn’t been claimed yet. You could start as many accounts as you wanted, all without providing a profile photo or a name. This encouraged creativity, and also mischief.
A few months in, Huffman built the warehouse’s first internal walls. People were posting links to vulgar and violent content—which was fine, except that Huffman wanted users to have some idea of what they were about to click on before they clicked on it. He labeled some content NSFW—not safe for work—and quarantined it from everything else. That was the end of pure democracy.
The NSFW content was shunted into a new room: reddit.com/r/NSFW. The separation of content proved useful, so Huffman made more rooms, called subreddits, each devoted to a specific topic: r/Programming; r/Science; r/FreeCulture, for techno-libertarians. He made a subreddit called r/Politics, not to amplify political news but to sequester it. “I don’t like thinking about politics all the time,” he said later; links to news stories were getting too popular, clogging up his feed. “So I went, ‘OK, nerds, talk about politics all you want, but go do it over here.’” Yet the walls between rooms were always permeable. If a political link or a programming link got upvoted enough times, the algorithm would crosspost it to Reddit’s home page.
Huffman and Ohanian believed in free speech, but they also believed in limits. “We always banned people,” Huffman said later. “We just didn’t talk about it very much.” Reddit was so small that Huffman could do most of the banning himself, on an ad hoc basis, using his common sense. “It wasn’t well thought out or even articulated, really. It was, ‘That guy has the N-word in his username? Fuck that.’ Delete account.” Bans were carried out inconsistently, because there was no set of consistent principles underlying them.
In 2006, Huffman and Ohanian sold Reddit to Condé Nast, an old-media conglomerate that owned more than twenty magazines, including Wired, Vanity Fair, Vogue, and The New Yorker. The sale made them twenty-two-year-old millionaires, but they didn’t fit in at a big corporation, and three years later they left. Huffman spent a few months backpacking in Costa Rica, played a lot of Call of Duty, and then cofounded a travel-search company. Ohanian became an angel investor and a techno-optimist at large, sometimes referred to in the press as “the Mayor of the Internet.” In their absence, the warehouse party that was Reddit grew bigger and wilder, and ominous cliques started to gather in the corners.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Attention Is Influence
While Mike Cernovich’s wife worked long days at the office, he spent most of his time at home, scouring the internet. Sometimes, even after she got back from work, he ignored her and kept his eyes fixed on the screen. The marriage was falling apart. In January 2011, he wrote a Crime & Federalism post explaining how to make two days’ worth of pork roast in a crockpot. The headline was “Bachelor Cooking/Muscle Meals.”
He started a new blog, “an online magazine for alpha males,” and called it Danger & Play, after a line from Thus Spoke Zarathustra.* The blog was full of pickup advice and lurid sex stories.* Any inhibition he’d displayed at Crime & Federalism was gone. If adrenaline was a drug, then he needed higher and higher doses to feel its effects. In one post, he would deny that he was a misogynist; a few weeks later, he’d write a post called “Misogyny Gets You Laid.” He knew that he was pushing the envelope, but he was pleasantly surprised by his readers’ tolerance for edginess. “As a woman, this post at first alarmed and disturbed me,” a British commenter wrote. “Then I realised you had a point.” She was commenting on a post called “How to Choke a Woman During Sex.”
For years, Cernovich had considered his informational intake to be eclectic, but he now realized that he’d only been scratching the surface. He read interviews with Nick Bostrom, a philosopher who posited that what we perceive as reality might actually be a computer simulation. He read Steve Sailer, whose refusal to kowtow to the Narrative had apparently caused the Southern Poverty Law Center to label him an extremist.* He read a blog by an autodidact named Mencius Moldbug, who argued that American democracy was a failed experiment that should be replaced by totalitarianism.* On his own blog, Cernovich started developing a more overt theory of white-male identity politics. His opponents were beta males, losers, or cucks; anyone who was too scared to debate controversial ideas, such as human biodiversity, had probably been cowed by the Narrative or indoctrinated by the globalist media.
One taboo opinion tended to beget another. Roissy, for example, was no longer just a pickup artist; he was now a full-blown anti-Semitic white nationalist whose slogan was “Diversity + Proximity = War.” Cernovich didn’t go that far—after all, his own wife wasn’t white, a fact that the alt-right trolls on Reddit and 4chan would certainly decry as “degenerate” if they ever found out. Still, he could see where the white nationalists were coming from, and he found their arguments provocative even when he didn’t agree with them. To an intellectually liberated man, no idea was off-limits.
Mike’s divorce was finalized in late 2011. His ex-wife kept the mattress; he kept the memory-foam mattress cover. She stayed in the apartment in San Francisco, and he bounced around—Las Vegas, Venice Beach. By the terms of the divorce, Mike was granted primary custody of the couple’s dog, Amicus. He was also granted about a quarter of his ex-wife’s Facebook stock. When the company went public the following year, his shares were suddenly worth $2.6 million. “I have had a seven figure payday,” he wrote later. “I never have to work another day in my life.”
Traffic to his blog was growing, but only incrementally. Most readers found Danger & Play by following a link from another manosphere blog. Links were a slow, one-to-one method of transmission; unless the mainstream showered the manosphere with attention, most normies would never know it existed. It wasn’t as if Dr. Oz was going to invite Roosh to promote Bang Estonia on daytime TV, or Terry Gross was going to interview Cernovich about his choking techniques. He tried not to take it personally—deriving self-worth from the establishment media was just another form of slave mentality. Still, if he wanted to make himself too big to ignore, he’d have to find another way.
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• • •
Roosh V had spent years consolidating a small but loyal following through his books and his blog. Around 2011, he began to use social media macrotargeting—in his case, a combination of rage-bait, trolling, and open bigotry—to propel his message into the mainstream. Exploiting content-sorting algorithms in this way was sometimes called a hack, but in fact macrotargeters were just using the social networks the way they were designed to be used.
Blogs were reverse chronological: the latest posts showed up first. But as social networks grew bigger and more complex, it became impossible for most users to keep up with everything their friends posted, and feeds stopped being sorted by simple chronology. Instead, each social network developed its own set of content-sorting algorithms, many of which, despite the good intentions of the engineers who built them, would start to function as filter bubbles or radicalization engines. Facebook had its News Feed, which prioritized dying squirrels over famines in Africa, bringing microtargeting to the masses. YouTube had a recommendation algorithm that served up the videos you were most likely to watch next, based on your past behavior—an invitation down an endless series of rabbit holes.*
In 2011, Roosh V wrote a listicle called “15 Reasons Why Washington DC Sucks for Guys.”* He promoted it using an old BuzzFeed trick: name-checking a specific locale in the headline, daring its denizens to stick up for themselves. It worked. A regional subreddit, r/WashingtonDC, linked to the post, calling Roosh “an unfunny, racist, misogynistic asshole.” The Reddit thread amassed 242 comments (“I couldn’t even finish it because this guy’s head was so far up his ass”; “I can’t believe I even gave that idiot a pageview”), including, eventually, a few comments from Roosh himself. “I got so much traffic from here and secondary links that I almost had to upgrade my hosting plan,” he wrote. “Sure this reddit traffic is 98% anti-roosh, but I’ll take the 2% who turn into regular readers.” This comment was downvoted several times, but Roosh didn’t mind the negative karma.
On Danger & Play, Cernovich wrote a post defending Roosh: the redditors who were calling him racist were only proving that “‘racist’ doesn’t actually mean anything.” Privately, Cernovich drew more specific lessons from this episode and others like it. He would later express them as his two primary laws of social media mechanics: “Conflict is attention” and “Attention is influence.”
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—
Cernovich joined Twitter, where he summarized his most outrageous ideas in fewer than 140 characters. (“There’s no reason to ever hit a woman,” he tweeted in 2013. “If you want to hurt her, destroy her soul.”) Among a particular coterie of leftist Twitter superusers, Cernovich’s online persona became a meme. Whenever he tweeted something egregious, the leftists would pass it around in a spirit of communal incredulity. One of them discovered Fit-Juice.com, and they started referring to Cernovich as JuiceBro; he adopted the nickname, hoping to neutralize its sting. He called his opponents social-justice warriors, or SJWs. He meant it as an insult, although some SJWs were happy to adopt the label—what was wrong with fighting for social justice?
On rare occasions, Cernovich made an argument and an SJW refuted it, or vice versa. More often, they communicated not through rebuttals but through repudiations—an OMG, a side-eye emoji, or a comment along the lines of “Wow. I can’t even believe this kind of person still exists in 2013.” This formulation was so familiar that, on 4chan and Reddit, it became another meme. “I can’t even!” the anonymous trolls would write, mimicking the SJWs. “Wow, just wow. It is the Current Year!”
So it went, the name-calling and the meta-name-calling. “Being an SJW is just fragile narcissism and exclusion through virtue signalling,” an anonymous Twitter user wrote. To virtue-signal: to construct a self-righteous public persona advertising one’s obeisance to the Narrative. On manosphere blogs and alt-right subreddits, the prevailing assumption was that all human interaction was a cynical game; by this logic, every tweet about social justice had to be somehow self-serving. It didn’t seem to occur to most manosphere disciples that some of what they saw as virtue-signaling might instead be sincere aspirations to virtue.
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• • •
“After the tech early-adopters, journalists were next to take to Twitter,” Jack Dorsey, the cofounder and CEO of the company, tweeted in 2015. “Journalists were a big part of why we grew so quickly.” Journalists still love Twitter. They tweet to communicate, to procrastinate, and to self-promote; they also scan Twitter in order to arrive at an understanding of What’s Happening in the World, which they then try to convert into story ideas.
No reporter can be everywhere, talking to everyone. Instead, reporters have traditionally used proxy techniques that range from more to less inadequate: anecdotal observations, interviews with experts, polling data. An opinion columnist turns a chat with her Uber driver into a parable about the gig economy. A TV talking head says, “Here’s what I’m hearing,” but what he really means is “Here’s what a few well-placed acquaintances told me at dinner last night.”
