Antisocial, p.43
Antisocial, page 43
This book would have been worse if not for the conversations I had with Bobby Baird, Zoe Chace, Adrian Chen, Kate Klonick, Robert Krulwich, Courtney Martin, Sruthi Pinnamaneni, and Kevin Roose. Thanks also to everyone at Data & Society, especially Matt Goerzen and Brian Friedberg, who both know more about /pol/ than anyone should.
Thank you to Samantha for trusting me with your story, and for the music recs.
I am grateful to my family for making me who I am—especially to Eric and Emily Marantz, to Dorothy Gray, to Julia Gray and Paul Marantz, and to the memory of Clare Marantz. Rachel, Brian, and Ilana Lustbader felt like family long before they actually became my family. A special shout-out to Kevin Brenner, who paid me to sit in a dumpster while day-dreaming about reportage, and to Robin Marantz Henig, who line-edited this whole book with a keen and sensitive eye—a much better gift than any turquoise-and-purple quilt!
Lastly, thank you to Gideon, my favorite guy in the world, and to Sarah Lustbader, the best person I know. I floated the idea of listing you as a coauthor, and the fact-checkers deemed it misleading but not exactly false, which sounds about right to me. Most of what’s good in this book, like most of what’s good in my life, is because of you.
Notes
Author’s Note: Antisocial is a work of reporting. The events described in the book really happened; with rare exceptions, which are noted below, the names are real. When I learned a fact from another reporter’s work, I have tried to cite it, either here or in the text; in most other cases, the facts and events recounted in the book are ones that I learned about through interviews, or reconstructed through research, or witnessed firsthand.
Books are copyedited, meticulously polished objects. Tweets are not. Instead of overloading every page with footnotes that say “sic,” I have used my judgment when quoting online posts, correcting a few obvious but trivial typos and leaving the rest—grammatical errors, self-contradictions, ugly slurs, bad takes—mostly untouched.
Writing about propagandists, bigots, and other bad-faith actors requires vigilance, careful editorial deliberation, and the constant weighing of conflicting values. I did my best to avoid falling into various potential traps: lionizing the bad actors or normalizing their behavior or repeating their talking points uncritically. In the end, my hope is that if diligent reporting can help to illuminate the causes of extremism in Syria or Sri Lanka or Belgium or the Philippines, maybe it can do the same at home.
“Morality, if it is to remain”: James Baldwin, “As Much Truth As One Can Bear,” The New York Times Book Review, January 14, 1962.
“Under all this dirt”: Lydia Davis, Can’t and Won’t (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2014), 90.
PART ONE: DEPLORABALL
“Everyone knows, or ought to know”: George W. S. Trow, “Collapsing Dominant,” Within the Context of No Context (New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 1997).
CHAPTER ONE: THIS IS AMERICA
For more than two decades: Jones’s remarkable conversion from Trump skeptic (July 12, 2015: “I don’t trust him as far as I can throw him”) to Trump booster (December 30, 2015: “If Trump isn’t sincere behind the scenes then I’ve been fooled”) was documented in exhaustive detail by the podcast Knowledge Fight, a talmudic, profane, and strangely delightful source of Infowars exegesis.
CHAPTER TWO: PRIDE
Zach, a skinny Proud Boy: Zach is an alias.
A prepublication copy: Trump, on Twitter, before the book was published: “.@AnnCoulter’s new book—‘Adios, America! The Left’s Plan to Turn Our Country into a Third World Hellhole’—is a great read. Good job!” After the book was published, the leftist magazine Current Affairs called it a “vicious, dehumanizing book” that nevertheless made for “effective propaganda.”
Buchanan never wrote for National Review: In subsequent interviews, Buchanan indicated that, if Buckley considered him persona non grata, then the feeling was mutual. But in later years, especially after Buckley’s death, the ban seemed to ease: National Review covered many of Buchanan’s books, sometimes quite positively, and invited him to appear on its podcasts several times.
His goal, he told an interviewer: David Corn, “Pat Buchanan, Editor,” The Nation, October 24, 2002, www.thenation.com/article/pat-buchanan-editor.
CHAPTER THREE: THE CONTRARIAN QUESTION
“Who cares if someone is racist?”: A year earlier, Cernovich had tweeted, “I went from libertarian to alt-right after realizing tolerance only went one way and diversity is code for white genocide.” He never retracted that statement or apologized for it. Apologies, he believed, made him look weak; he preferred to hedge and spin, maintaining as much plausible deniability as possible.
Spencer had permitted a Jewish videographer: The videographer’s name was Daniel Lombroso. Spencer later told me, “I didn’t know he was Jewish at the time.”
Thiel had a long history: “I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible,” he wrote in 2009, on a libertarian blog. “Since 1920, the vast increase in welfare beneficiaries and the extension of the franchise to women—two constituencies that are notoriously tough for libertarians—have rendered the notion of ‘capitalist democracy’ into an oxymoron.” In 2016, he said that colleges were “as corrupt as the Catholic Church was five hundred years ago.”
Many were blinkered coastal elites: In 1969, several Chicago police officers raided the home of Fred Hampton, the seventeen-year-old deputy chairman of the Black Panther Party, and Hampton ended up dead. The police officers told the media that they had been under fire and had shot Hampton in self-defense. The media repeated this claim. As Jeff Gottlieb and Jeff Cohen later reported in The Nation, much of the contemporaneous press coverage of the incident relied heavily, if not exclusively, on police statements. Police officers reenacted the raid on television for a local CBS affiliate, using a set built solely for this purpose. “The Chicago Tribune ran an account drawn from the policemen involved in the assault, and accompanied by a photograph of the apartment on which circles were drawn around what purported to be bullet holes caused by bullets fired at the police,” they wrote. The purported bullet holes turned out to be nail heads. Chicago Sun-Times reported this detail accurately at the time, but the larger truth—that the police had not acted in self-defense, and that Hampton was likely assassinated by agents of his own government—took years to emerge. Jeff Gottlieb and Jeff Cohen, “Was Fred Hampton Executed?” The Nation, December 25, 1976, www.thenation.com/article/was-fred-hampton-executed.
CHAPTER FOUR: TO CHANGE HOW WE TALK IS TO CHANGE WHO WE ARE
It seemed that he was earnestly trying: “After the DeploraBall, I found myself in an unpleasant conversation on the sidewalk outside with someone I surmised to be somewhat of a public figure (given the crowd around him), but who I did not recognize,” Mary Clare wrote later in an email to me. “I was entirely unaware of his views at the time. Now that I know more about who he is, I find his politics to be in direct conflict with my beliefs as a Catholic and as a conservative. I find his role in public discourse to be entirely unproductive and immoral.”
Just as Darwin had shown: Rorty used a wide array of canonical texts to bolster this view, citing many of the major Western philosophers of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries—Dewey, Nietzsche, Derrida, Habermas, Sartre, Rawls, and on and on. These philosophers didn’t agree on much, but according to Rorty, they all shared a contingent view of history.
INTERLUDE: MOVABLE TYPE
In 2013, for the first time: Maureen A. Craig and Jennifer A. Richeson, “On the Precipice of a ‘Majority-Minority’ America: Perceived Status Threat from the Racial Demographic Shift Affects White Americans’ Political Ideology,” Psychological Science 25, no. 6 (2014): https://doi.org/10.1177/0956797614527113.
PART TWO: A HUMAN SUPERPOWER
“The internet is almost the perfect distillation”: Interview with Eduardo Lago, conducted March 2000 but unpublished until “A manera de prólogo. Una conversación inédita con David Foster Wallace,” Walt Whitman ya no vive aquí (Madrid: Editorial Sexto Piso: 2018). First appeared in English as “A Brand New Interview with David Foster Wallace,” Electric Literature, November 16, 2018, https://electricliterature.com/a-brand-new-interview-with-david-foster-wallace.
CHAPTER FIVE: THE GLEAMING VEHICLE
“Content that evokes high-arousal emotion”: Jonah Berger and Katherine L. Milkman, “What Makes Online Content Viral?,” Journal of Marketing Research 49, no. 2 (2012): 192–205.
CHAPTER EIGHT: EATING THE WORLD
Peter, Reid, Mark, Marc, Elon: That would be Thiel, Hoffman, Zuckerberg, Andreessen, and Musk.
Graham, impressed by the young man’s display: This story is recounted in The Facebook Effect by David Kirkpatrick, published in 2011. As of this writing, Facebook’s market capitalization is $480 billion, ten percent of which would be more than enough to subsidize a few of The Washington Post’s foreign bureaus.
CHAPTER NINE: BRAINWRECK POLITICS
As long as these entrepreneurs: In theory, anyway. In practice, Cambridge Analytica’s parent company was found guilty of breaking British campaign-finance law, and was fined £15,000.
CHAPTER ELEVEN: THE INVISIBLE PRIMARY
In 1972, a poll suggested that Walter Cronkite: As the press critic Jack Shafer noted in Slate in 2009, the “Cronkite-equals-trust cliché” was never supported by robust evidence. The poll in question was mainly about politicians; Cronkite, the only newscaster on the list, was deemed only six points more trustworthy than the “average senator.” Two years later, when a more apples-to-apples poll compared Cronkite to his rival anchors at NBC and ABC, he ranked fourth in the “best-liked” category.
In 2013, according to a Reader’s Digest poll: Courtenay Smith, “Reader’s Digest Trust Poll: The 100 Most Trusted People in America,” Reader’s Digest, May 2013, www.rd.com/culture/readers-digest-trust-poll-the-100-most-trusted-people-in-america.
“The extent to which celebrity is prized”: The other three coauthors of The Party Decides were David Karol, Hans Noel, and John Zaller (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008).
more than fifty percent of American adults: Michael Barthel, “Newspaper Fact Sheet,” Pew Research Center, June 13, 2018, www.journalism.org/fact-sheet/newspapers; Shannon Greenwood, Andrew Perrin, and Maeve Duggan, “Social Media Update 2016,” Pew Research Center, November 11, 2016, www.pewinternet.org/2016/11/11/social-media-update-2016.
PART THREE: TOO BIG TO IGNORE
“The desire . . . to make a face”: Alice Munro, “The Beggar Maid,” The Beggar Maid: Stories of Flo and Rose (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1979).
CHAPTER TWELVE: BEYOND GOOD AND EVIL
Roissy in D.C. was a pseudonymous blog: The blog’s apparent author, Jim Weidmann, worked at the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority by day; by night, he was a prolific barfly, picking up women and then blogging about his exploits, as well as his broader theories about gender relations. His pseudonym was an allusion to Histoire d’O, a French erotic novel that was published and subsequently banned in the 1950s, in which a woman is brought to a mansion in the Paris suburb of Roissy-en-France, branded, and kept as a sex slave.
PUA sites, or “game” sites: PUA bloggers taught that game was a skill, and that, like any skill, it could be mastered with effort. A man’s “sexual market value” could be enhanced by obvious factors, such as wealth and attractiveness, and also by less intuitive life hacks, which the bloggers promised to reveal to their readers. Manosphere message boards were full of testimonials from anonymous men who purported to have bent the world to their will, running game on attractive women. The skill could also be transferred to other domains: you could run game on your bosses, your enemies, even your friends.
“misandry is the new Jim Crow”: Roissy went even further on his blog, upending consensus opinions in a tone of pseudopoetic nihilism: “Fuck you and your misplaced empathy. Fuck you and your phonyfuck indignation. Especially fuck you and your happy sappy shifting morality hands across humanity meek shall inherit the karmic magical moral comeuppance excuse mongering rationalizing hypocritical there but for the grace of no one but myself go I virtue on the cheap fantasyland pissant pawn of your selfish gene replicating cog in the bloodsoaked gears of the amoral universal machine bullshit. Stare into the gaping maw of the id monster motherfuckers because I am rubbing your face in its hot stinking breath.”
CHAPTER THIRTEEN: A FILTER FOR QUALITY
“A squirrel dying”: David Kirkpatrick, The Facebook Effect (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2010), 181.
Yet he encouraged everyone to take his advice: In one post, Graham gave advice on “what an essay really is, and how you write one. Or at least, how I write one.” It was a piece of writing about how to write, yet it was full of solecisms and mixed metaphors. In one paragraph, an essay was a train, a thread, a foot race, a pencil sketch, and a river, all at once. (“Err on the side of the river.”)
They approached Graham: This story is recounted in Christine Lagorio-Chafkin, We Are the Nerds: The Birth and Tumultuous Life of Reddit, the Internet’s Culture Laboratory (New York: Hachette, 2018).
CHAPTER FIFTEEN: REDUCTIO
Justice means obeying the law: This is Thrasymachus’s definition of justice, in Plato’s Republic (I, 338-c).
In early 2016, William Powers: Powers was part of an MIT research group that had a special arrangement with Twitter. The company gave the researchers an unprecedented amount of data—including all the tweets sent on the platform, hundreds of millions of them each day—and the researchers crunched the numbers and published their findings, both in scientific journals and on Medium. William Powers, “Who’s Influencing Election 2016?” Medium, February 23, 2016, https://medium.com/@socialmachines/who-s-influencing-election-2016-8bed68ddecc3.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN: THE MEDIA MATRIX
In early August, they started to dominate: Matt Drudge made his name in 1998, when he broke the story of the Monica Lewinsky scandal before any other outlet. After that, his site’s traffic exploded. In July 2016, Drudge got a billion and a half pageviews—more than The Washington Post, Bloomberg, Vice, and BuzzFeed combined. Drudge’s politics had always been cartoonishly anti-Democrat. In recent years, he’d grown increasingly fond of unscrupulous right-wing sites such as Infowars and Gateway Pundit. Yet mainstream media gatekeepers kept visiting the site, and over time it took on a most-photographed-barn quality: journalists kept looking at Drudge because they knew that other journalists were looking at Drudge, too.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN: FITNESS AND UNFITNESS
Its stories were often featured: A 2008 Nielsen ranking of the “Top 30 News Sites” listed WorldNetDaily.com at number 23, just above WashingtonPost.com. The most popular site on the list was the Drudge Report.
CHAPTER NINETEEN: POISE IS A CLUB
After 9/11, though, his rhetoric grew: In 2007, Dobbs claimed, falsely, that the U.S. had seen a recent spike in leprosy cases due to “unscreened illegal immigrants coming into this country.” In 2009, he started suggesting, also falsely, that Barack Obama may have been born abroad.
INTERLUDE: TRUST NOTHING
Facebook’s researchers divulged the experiment: Users were livid, and after that, Facebook either stopped conducting secret experiments or stopped telling the public about them. Adam D. I. Kramer, Jamie E. Guillory, and Jeffrey T. Hancock, “Experimental Evidence of Massive-scale Emotional Contagion through Social Networks,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, June 17, 2014, www.pnas.org/content/111/24/8788.
PART FOUR: THE SWAMP
“Shame gets a bad rap these days”: Zadie Smith, “Zadie Smith Interview: On Shame, Rage and Writing,” Louisiana Channel, video, April 16, 2018, https://vimeo.com/264942344.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE: THE NEWS OF THE FUTURE
Depending on your definition of “news”: In moments of panic, Spicer’s instinct was to blame the press, even when the press had nothing to do with the topic being discussed. When Trump signed an executive order banning residents of seven Muslim-majority nations from entering the United States, Spicer denied that the order was a ban. “But the president himself called it a ban,” Kristen Welker of NBC News said. “Is he confused, or are you confused?” Spicer replied, “I think that the words that are being used to describe it are derived from what the media is calling this.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE: VERY PROFESSIONAL AND VERY GOOD
By the standards of a press briefing: Earnest, living up to his name, posed gentle Socratic counterpoints. On one hand, “part of what’s built into our system is a respect for private companies to put in place their own policies”; on the other hand, social media is “predicated on freedom of expression.” This was a tension that free-speech absolutists never quite figured out how to resolve. When discussing their zealous devotion to the First Amendment, they tended to elide the inconvenient fact that Twitter and Facebook also had First Amendment rights, including the right to ban almost anyone from their platforms for almost any reason.
“I want people to be able”: This iteration is from an interview on Real Time with Bill Maher, in 2017, but Yiannopoulos repeated the idea whenever and wherever he could: on Fox News, on local news, on NPR, and on all available social media platforms, until he was banned from them.
