Antisocial, p.42
Antisocial, page 42
“I have faith in our people,” Slowe replied.
People stood in the common area, eating from paper plates, watching a live feed of Place on a wall-mounted TV. One employee, reading the comments, brightened. “A bunch of people are finding swastikas and then telling everyone else where they are, so that people can go get rid of them,” she announced.
“I just saw it!” another employee said. He pointed to a section of the screen. As we watched, one swastika was erased, and another was modified to become a Windows ’95 logo. After a while, the swastika makers got bored and moved on.
At one point, the American flag was set on fire, its red, white, and blue pixels replaced with orange flames and black smoke. The defenders of the flag, still coordinating the efforts at r/AmericanFlaginPlace, rallied to stamp the fire out, and the Reddit employees cheered.
“Feels like watching a football game in extreme slow motion,” one said.
“Or like watching the election results.”
“Oh God, don’t say that.”
Toward the end, the square became a dense, colorful tapestry, chaotic and strangely captivating. It was a collage of hundreds of incongruous images: logos of colleges, sports teams, bands, and video-game companies; a transcribed monologue from Star Wars; likenesses of He-Man, David Bowie, the Mona Lisa, and a former prime minister of Finland. In the final hours, shortly before the experiment ended and the image was frozen for posterity, r/TheBlackVoid launched a surprise attack on the American flag. A dark fissure tore at the bottom of the flag, then overtook the whole thing. For a few minutes, the center was enveloped in darkness. Then a coalition of thousands of redditors joined up to beat back the Void; the stars and stripes regained their form, and, in the end, the flag was still there.
The final image contained no visible hate symbols, no violent threats—not even much nudity. Late in the day, Wardle emerged from hiding, poured himself a drink, and pushed back his hood. “It’s possible that I will be able to sleep tonight,” he said.
* * *
—
I wrote an article about Reddit, ending with the saga of r/Place. Everyone I knew interpreted the final scene differently. My most optimistic friends read it as an affirmation, another reason to keep faith in the basic good sense of the American people. My more pessimistic friends wondered whether I’d gone soft—where was my skepticism, my vigilance, my attunement to humanity’s deep deficiencies? I told both camps: the scene doesn’t imply that We Are Good or that We Are Bad. All I knew was that, on this particular day, on this particular part of the internet, the hordes had joined together to beat back the darkness. Even better, they’d done it on their own, without the guidance of gatekeepers, relying only on the wisdom of the crowd.
Then I got a direct message on Twitter. “For r/place, Reddit employees had mass white-out tools where they could quickly and easily remove swastikas,” the message read. “Those swastikas weren’t all replaced by other users.” The message came from a Twitter account with a female avatar photo, but the person behind it wouldn’t tell me her name. She claimed to be a former Reddit employee. “Heard about the white-out tools from an engineer who still works at Reddit,” she continued. “They’re probably feeding you quite a bit of propaganda tbh.”
I tried to report out the rumor, asking a few former employees who’d recently left the company.
“Totally sounds like something they would do,” one former employee said. “Why leave it to chance?”
“Doesn’t sound like them,” another former employee said. “I think they’re too old-school techno-libertarian to try playing tricks like that.”
I messaged the woman on Twitter, asking for more information, or for proof of her identity.
She didn’t respond.
A few weeks later, I tried again: “Maybe we could talk on the phone?”
No response.
A few weeks after that: “So was this just a troll?”
I never heard from her again.
GLOSSARY
A NOTE ABOUT TERMINOLOGY:
Language evolves constantly, especially on the internet. Affiliations and ideologies can change; words and symbols can be warped until they mean the opposite of what they once meant. As Reddit’s head of policy once said, when it comes to thorny questions about online speech, “It all depends on context.” The definitions below, then, are not immutable, and the brief character sketches are hardly exhaustive. The purpose of this glossary is more modest: to summarize a few concepts and terms that may be unfamiliar, and to introduce some key characters and their (ever-shifting) allegiances.
PEOPLE (in order of appearance)
Cassandra Fairbanks
Writer for a variety of outlets including Sputnik, Big League Politics, and The Gateway Pundit; former leftist turned alt-light activist; “I care more about free speech, including for Chelsea Manning and Julian Assange, than almost any other issue”
Jack Posobiec
Navy veteran; Republican operative turned alt-light activist; co-organizer of the DeploraBall; correspondent for the Rebel and One America News Network
Jeff Giesea
Digital entrepreneur; former employee of Peter Thiel; co-organizer of the DeploraBall; donor to online trolls and propagandists
Mike Cernovich
Purveyor of self-help books, herbal supplements, fitness advice, and internet memes; lawyer; former manosphere blogger; prolific tweeter; mottos include “Conflict is attention” and “Attention is influence”
Milo Yiannopoulos
Social media sophist; former Breitbart editor and columnist; peddler of books, T-shirts, coffee mugs, and crypto-fascist memes; self-described as “the most fabulous supervillain on the internet”
Lauren Southern
Former correspondent for the Rebel; Canadian; anti-immigration activist; “I’m in this awkward position where the alt-light calls me alt-right and the alt-right calls me alt-light”
Jim Hoft
Founder of The Gateway Pundit; “conservative gay activist”; conspiracy theorist
Roger Stone
Longtime Trump associate and campaign consultant; self-described “dirty trickster”; motto: “Admit nothing, deny everything, launch counterattack”
Alex Jones
Founder and chief anchor of Infowars; prolific conspiracy theorist
Gavin McInnes
Cofounder of Vice; cofounder of the Proud Boys, a “Western chauvinist” street gang; “I’m an Islamophobe, I’m a xenophobe, I’m pretty darn sexist”
Laura Loomer
Freelancer known for staging and livestreaming street confrontations; conspiracist; Zionist; Islamophobe
Lucian Wintrich
Former White House correspondent for The Gateway Pundit; alt-light culture warrior; creator of photography project called Twinks4Trump
Jerome Corsi
Infowars correspondent; prolific conspiracy theorist
Faith Goldy
Canadian; ran unsuccessfully for mayor of Toronto on a nationalist platform; fired by the Rebel after appearing on a neo-Nazi podcast
Will Chamberlain
Co-organizer of MAGA Meetups in D.C.; lawyer; “anti-anti-Semitic”
Jane Ruby
Co-organizer of MAGA Meetups in D.C.; retired health economist and entrepreneur; red-pilled by Andrew Breitbart
Andrew Breitbart
The John the Baptist of the Deplorables; motto: “Politics is downstream from culture”
Alt-right
Mike Enoch
Founder of the blog The Right Stuff and the podcast The Daily Shoah; anti-Semite and white supremacist; doxed shortly before Trump’s inauguration
Richard Spencer
Anti-Semite and white supremacist; coined the term “alt-right”; publicly toasted Trump’s election victory with what appeared to be a Nazi salute; founder of Radix Journal and AlternativeRight.com
Nathan Damigo
Founder of Identity Evropa; former U.S. Marine; white nationalist
David Duke
Anti-Semite and white nationalist; founder of the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan; former Louisiana state representative and presidential candidate
Disrupters
Steven Huffman, Alexis Ohanian
Cofounders of Reddit
Emerson Spartz
Founder of Dose, OMGFacts, and GivesMeHope; “viral guy”
Paul Graham
Silicon Valley entrepreneur; “the closest thing the technology community has to either a Bertrand Russell or a P. T. Barnum”
Mark Zuckerberg
Founder of Facebook; “We’re a technology company, not a media company”; “When you connect two billion people, you will see all the beauty and ugliness of humanity”
KEY TERMS
Alt-right
Coined in 2008 by Richard Spencer—first as “alternative right,” later abbreviated—the term has since been used in a variety of contexts, ranging from the most innocuous (an irreverent, web-savvy alternative to traditional conservatism) to the least (an anonymous swarm perpetrating harassment and bigotry). After the 2016 election, it became universally apparent that, edgy memes aside, the movement had always contained a core of sincere racism and anti-Semitism. Most often, in this book, I use “alt-right” the way Spencer and his acolytes use it—more or less interchangeably with web-savvy white nationalism.
Alt-light (a.k.a. New Right, American nationalism, civic nationalism, or Western chauvinism)
After the 2016 election, what had recently been one movement (the alt-right) split into two: the alt-right and the alt-light. The alt-right was characterized by lurid racism, anti-Semitism, misogyny, Islamophobia, and a tendency to spew disinformation; the alt-light claimed to reject overt racism and anti-Semitism, but seemed fine with the rest. In public, the leaders of the two factions were at pains to highlight their differences. “I’m not alt-right, dude,” one alt-light figure said. “They care about the white race. We care about Western values.” In private, the lines were often blurrier.
Activating emotions
Emotions—whether positive or negative, prosocial or antisocial—that tend to elicit a given behavior (e.g. clicking or sharing a link). Activating emotions beget engagement, and engagement begets virality.
Charlottesville 1.0
The alt-right’s term for their rally on May 13, 2017, in Charlottesville, Virginia. A few dozen white supremacists marched, with torches, around a statue of Robert E. Lee. A few dozen protesters held a candlelight vigil. The whole thing was fairly uneventful.
Charlottesville 2.0
The alt-right’s follow-up rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, in August 2017. This rally was far larger and more chaotic, and it culminated in a white supremacist driving his car into a crowd of protesters, killing one of them.
Cuck
A slur, laden with racist and sexist connotations, used by the alt-right and alt-light to denigrate those they see as weak or worthy of contempt. (Also, “cuckservative”: an insufficiently zealous conservative.)
Dox (both noun and verb)
To reveal someone’s name, address, or other personal information against that person’s will, as a form of retribution.
Echo
An anti-Semitic meme invented by bloggers and podcasters affiliated with The Right Stuff. The auditory version consists of an echo being added to a Jewish person’s name; the written equivalent consists of three parentheses placed around a Jew’s name, like so: (((Andrew Marantz))). Later reclaimed by Jewish writers and activists, some of whom wear the mark proudly.
Engagement
Clicks, shares, comments, likes—any metric that enables a social media company to quantify users’ response to a piece of content.
Human biodiversity
The hypothesis that people are different, that they differ in predictable ways, and that some groups of people—some races, for example—have drawn stronger cards in the genetic lottery. In other words, a form of intellectualized racism.
Jewish Question (JQ), the
Mild version: “Why are Jews overrepresented in media, academia, and banking?”
More overt version: “Are Jews white?”
Most overt version: “What should we do about the Jews?”
Before it was a topic of discussion among the alt-right, the Jewish Question was a topic of academic discussion in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Europe (notably in Bruno Bauer’s 1843 book Die Judenfrage) and in Nazi Germany (where the proposed answer to the question was “the Final Solution,” aka genocide).
LARP, LARPing
Live action role-playing. Literally, a kind of fantasy gaming, e.g. Dungeons & Dragons. Figuratively, on the internet, LARPing usually refers to an embarrassing or unconvincing form of pretense—for example, an awkward attempt to act out one’s online persona in the real world.
Manosphere
A loose affiliation of blogs and message boards, prominent in the early part of the 2010s, that promoted various forms of antifeminism. Subcultures within the manosphere included pickup artists, men’s rights activists, incels, volcels, and MGTOW (men going their own way). Prominent manosphere blogs included Return of Kings and Roissy in D.C.
Meme
Defined by Richard Dawkins in 1976 as any “unit of cultural transmission” that propagates “by leaping from brain to brain.”
Microtargeting
The process by which internet companies analyze user data in order to tailor ads, news stories, and other content to each consumer’s preferences.
Narrative, the
A nonnegotiable set of axioms and language rules—one that is, according to some fringe commentators, imposed and enforced by a nefarious cohort of media executives, political donors, and other cultural gatekeepers.
Overton window
The range of socially acceptable opinion, which can shift over time. Originally applied to legislative policy, now applied to matters of cultural or political concern more broadly.
Pepe the Frog
Formerly innocuous cartoon frog coopted by internet racists.
Red pill
A metaphor derived from the 1999 movie The Matrix: to take the red pill, or to be red-pilled, is to discover some forbidden truth. On many corners of the fringe internet, the “truth” in question is actually a dangerous lie: white supremacy, male supremacy, etc.
Shitposting
A style of discourse prevalent on some parts of social media (especially certain corners of 4chan, 8chan, Gab, some parts of Reddit). In the best case, the result is absurdist so-bad-it’s-good humor; in the worst case, the result is bigotry or incitement to violence.
Troll (both noun and verb)
In the early days of the internet, trolling was akin to a prank, even a kind of performance. To troll people was to get a rise out of them; a troll was an expert at doing this, often anonymously. Over time, trolling took on a darker connotation. These days, what’s sometimes called trolling is often more like propaganda, bigotry, or harassment.
Vocabulary
The philosopher Richard Rorty’s term for a society’s underlying set of assumptions, its way of talking to itself, its way of describing and interpreting the universe.
Acknowledgments
Writing a book is such an exercise in solipsism—for me, anyway—that it feels impossible to express sufficient gratitude to everyone who helped me, encouraged me, or put up with me over the past few years. But I’ll try. First, thank you to Rick Kot, who was always able to see the forest for the trees while continuing to perceive each tree in uncanny detail, and whose editorial insights and steady hand made this project possible. I’m also grateful to everyone else at Viking—Norma Barksdale, Diego Nuñez, Kristina Fazzalaro, Andrea Schulz, and Brian Tart—for taking a chance on a first book, and for seeing it through with such grace and aplomb.
Tina Bennett is a trenchant reader, an indomitable hype woman, an engaging polemicist, and the best agent in the business. I’m lucky to be the beneficiary of her talent. Thanks also to Laura Filion, Svetlana Katz, and everyone else at WME.
Many friends read parts of the manuscript, or the whole manuscript, and gave thoughtful comments throughout. My profound thanks go to Vinson Cunningham, Jonathan (Skoal) Gold, Sam Graham-Felsen, Antonia Hitchens, Meechal Hoffman, Patrick Radden Keefe, Gideon Lewis-Kraus, Rob Moor, Emily Nussbaum, Matthew Palevsky, Ari Savitzky, and Alexandra Schwartz. Drinks are on me forever.
I will never stop being amazed that I get to call The New Yorker my professional home. I have learned a tremendous amount from my colleagues there—especially the not-sung-enough editorial brain trust, including (but not limited to!) Nimal Eames-Scott, Rob Fischer, Carla Blumenkranz, Eric Lach, Eleanor Martin, Sharan Shetty, Emily Stokes, and Hannah Wilentz. Thanks, in particular, to Henry Finder, Pam McCarthy, Susan Morrison, and Dorothy Wickenden, for making the magazine what it is; to Deirdre Foley-Mendelssohn, a master of the editorial arts of perspicacity, hand-holding, schmoozing when there’s time, and working when there isn’t; to Daniel Zalewski—a uniquely gifted editor and writer, an attentive mentor, and a generous friend—who improves every piece of writing he touches, including this book; and to David Remnick, who somehow manages to be both a superhero and a mensch, and who gave me the space and encouragement I needed to embark on this project (and then line-edited the thing, incredibly, in no more than forty-eight hours). May you all continue to be exemplars of trustworthiness and taste, even in a postgatekeeper world.
Thank you to Molly Farneth for helping me get my Rorty straight, to Athmeya Jayaram for helping me replace my dead dogmas about J. S. Mill with living truths, and to Daniel May for innumerable conversations about pragmatism, the tragic paradoxes of liberalism, and the best parts of old Uncle Drew videos. Natalie Coleman and Sam Argyle provided invaluable research. I am especially indebted to Tyler Foggatt, a brilliant reporter and a befogged author’s secret weapon. Rozina Ali, Ewa Beaujon, Sean Lavery, Talia Lavin, and Nick Niarchos fact-checked this material, either for The New Yorker or for the book (or, in Sean’s case, both); in addition to saving my ass by correcting my mistakes, their services also included wise editorial counsel, incisive counterarguments, and deft turns of phrase that I was all too happy to steal.
