Antisocial, p.45
Antisocial, page 45
*“Gavin’s had Richard on his show,” a Proud Boy standing next to me explained. “They don’t agree about the J.Q. stuff, necessarily, but they agree on other stuff, and they’ve always had good debates.” After Hailgate, however, “Gavin started saying we shouldn’t be seen with them”—meaning the alt-right. “But then he also always talks about how we should never punch right and should only punch left instead. So I don’t know what the fuck to think.”
*Those looking for evidence that our national character was inherently noble didn’t have to look much further than Thomas Jefferson, author of the rhapsody of pluralism that is the Declaration of Independence.
*Those looking for evidence that our national character was inherently barbaric didn’t have to look much further than Thomas Jefferson, author of a classified ad in The Virginia Gazette demanding that a runaway slave, a “knavish” young man “inclining to corpulence,” be returned to his plantation at once.
*Nearly a quarter century after he wrote the Declaration of Independence, Thomas Jefferson became a candidate for president. He may have been an idealist, but he also wanted to win. He paid a pamphleteer, in secret, and the pamphleteer spread some scurrilous rumors about Jefferson’s opponent, John Adams—calling him, for instance, “a hideous hermaphroditical character which has neither the force and firmness of a man, nor the gentleness and sensibility of a woman.” Jefferson’s opponents, in turn, accused him of being “the son of a half-breed Indian squaw,” which was false. Later, Jefferson’s pamphleteer turned against him and accused him of having impregnated his slave Sally Hemings, which was probably true. In the twenty-first century, the only surprising thing about noxious political propaganda is that anyone still finds it surprising.
*Rorty took the title of his book from a sentence by James Baldwin in The Fire Next Time: “If we—and now I mean the relatively conscious whites and the relatively conscious blacks, who must, like lovers, insist on, or create, the consciousness of the others—do not falter in our duty now, we may be able, handful that we are, to end the racial nightmare, and achieve our country, and change the history of the world.” Baldwin did not overlook the cruelty of bigoted white people; in fact, he wrote, “neither I nor time nor history will ever forgive them.” Still, he devoted much of his career to examining the grievances of white bigots—not because he wanted to acquiesce to them, but because he wanted to understand them, if only to anticipate the damage that aggrieved white people could cause. Baldwin did not delude himself that changing the world would be simple, or even likely. But, history being contingent, he believed that it was possible.
*Many of their opinions were ephemeral and weakly held, subject to change based on rhetorical expediency. When they did make a consistent policy demand (e.g., “Build the wall”), it was often in service of such a reprehensible ulterior motive (e.g., white nationalism, or “Western chauvinism”) that it couldn’t be taken at face value. Even more strangely, many of them claimed to support such policies as student debt relief and universal health care—proposals that were more aligned with democratic socialism than with any recognizable form of conservatism.
*Journalism has both descriptive and normative functions, and they sometimes conflict. Descriptively, it wasn’t always wrong to refer to a particular Deplorable as, say, a “far-right provocateur.” Normatively, it often would have been better to put the term in more context, or to talk about the Deplorables as dangerously, untenably racist, or to avoid talking about them at all.
*In the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, as mass printing spread through Germany, so did waves of anti-Semitic violence. Some historians have argued that the former caused, or at least contributed to, the latter. The printing press enabled Martin Luther to distribute his Ninety-five Theses in 1517; it also enabled him, in 1543, to distribute one of his lesser-known works, a pamphlet called On the Jews and Their Lies. “I shall give you my sincere advice,” Luther wrote. “First, to set fire to their synagogues or schools and to bury and cover with dirt whatever will not burn, so that no man will ever again see a stone or cinder of them.” In 1572, Luther’s followers sacked the synagogue of Berlin. According to Antisemitism: An Annotated Bibliography, “The printing press played an indispensable role in disseminating Luther’s antisemitism.”
*There were a few skeptics, too, but they were largely ignored. In 1994, Alan Kay, a renowned forefather of computer programming, spoke at a national conference “about the Information Superhighway and its implications.” Most of the attendees—including the keynote speaker, Vice President Al Gore—were techno-utopians. Kay was not. “The new dynamic media we are discussing today will have an immense transforming impact on society similar to that of the printing press,” he said. “But much care has to be taken with design and education in order for the change to be positive. We don’t have natural defenses against fat, sugar, salt, alcohol, alkaloids—or media.” Kay wasn’t dismissed as a Luddite or an ignoramus—he couldn’t be, given his estimable career as a programmer—but he was treated as a crank, or as a cynic, when in fact he was merely acknowledging contingency. In an email, Kay told me that his only retrospective regret was that he wasn’t skeptical enough. “None of us were so pessimistic about humanity as to imagine just how blind 20th-century citizens in a so-called civilization could be,” Kay wrote. “The last 25 years have revealed much more about the problems of being human.”
*James Mill, a so-called philosophical radical writing in early-nineteenth-century England, argued that the first priority should be universal suffrage; once society became more truly democratic, he hoped, freedom of speech would take care of itself. His son, John Stuart Mill, dissented sharply from this view, arguing that freedom of speech was of paramount importance, and that it required protection from the tyranny of the majority. Subsequent generations of political theorists found flaws in both Mills’ arguments, or discarded them in search of a new set of free-speech principles. And still, after all that debate, to call the question unsettled would be an understatement.
*I first learned about this essay in Not All Dead White Men, a lucid account of how internet misogynists use and misuse the Greek and Roman canon. The book is by Donna Zuckerberg, a classicist based in Silicon Valley. She told me, “As a scholar, you have a mixed reaction when you see people online saying things like, ‘Ovid was the first pickup artist.’ In one sense, you go, Sure, that seems accurate, narrowly speaking. In another sense, you feel like saying, ‘Are you sure you are understanding the Ars Amatoria in its full context?’” She edits an online classics journal, Eidolon, which is published on the blogging platform Medium; the misogynist discourse she analyzes also takes place online, on message boards and subreddits devoted to “men’s rights.” “When a discussion in one of those places goes way off the rails,” she continued, “I’m often left wondering: How much of this is a design problem? How much has to do with the way the discussion is structured, verbally and visually, on the platform? How might this conversation be more productive in a classroom or another real-life space?” She acknowledged that this concern was “ironic, I guess, or at least notable, given who my brother is.” She trailed off, then asked to speak off the record. Her brother’s first name is Mark, and he is the founder and CEO of Facebook.
*“Understanding who you serve is always a very important problem, and it only gets harder the more people that you serve,” Zuckerberg told The New York Times in 2014. Either this phrasing reminded nobody of “To Serve Man,” the dystopian Twilight Zone episode, or nobody saw fit to mention it.
*There were some skeptics, of course. The heady utopianism of the Tahrir Square uprising in Cairo soon gave way to the despotic rule of the Muslim Brotherhood, and then to a military coup; Tunisia, the birthplace of the Arab Spring, became a breeding ground for ISIS; human-rights activists began to ask whether the Twitter Revolution had moved fast and broken the Middle East. “By allowing protesters to scale up quickly, without years of preparation, digital infrastructure acts as a scaffold to movements that mask other weaknesses,” the sociologist Zeynep Tufekci argued in the Journal of International Affairs in 2014. The same year, in a report called “Reflections on the Arab Uprisings,” Marc Lynch, a political scientist at George Washington University, wrote, “The new Arab media and social media proved to be just as capable of transmitting negative and divisive ideas and images as they had been at spreading revolutionary ones.” These warnings were incisive, but they were not widely heeded.
*“It was always positioned as an interesting intellectual question but not something that we’re going to go focus on,” a Facebook employee later told The New York Times.
*In 2012, Upworthy employees were invited to a conference to deliver a talk about (what else?) how to achieve virality. One of their slides, labeled “Upworthy’s Editorial Process,” featured a stock photo of a toilet, followed by an eight-step headline-writing process. Step 1: “You HAVE to crap out 25 headlines for every piece of content.” Step 2: “You WILL write some really stinky headlines.” Step 3: “Once you start getting desperate, you start thinking outside the box.” Step 3 was confusing—according to the logic of the metaphor, it seemed like an entreaty not to shit on the floor—but, as it turned out, “thinking outside the box” was actually encouraged. “#24 will suck,” the slide continued. “Then #25 will be a gift from the headline gods and will make you a legend.”
*One ClickHole post in particular served to illustrate just how thoroughly the science of clickable headline writing had been decoupled from the art of writing. The post ran under this headline: “The Time I Spent on a Commercial Whaling Ship Totally Changed My Perspective on the World.” The body of the post was the entire text of Moby-Dick.
*Three MIT computer scientists, writing in Science in 2018, found that false rumors on Facebook evoked more high-arousal emotions than the actual news, which was more likely to inspire such deactivating emotions as malaise and confusion. This was one of the explanations for the paper’s main finding: that fake news is consistently more likely to go viral than the truth.
*All real examples.
*“The BuzzFeed of today, thanks to these massive technological and demographic trends, reaches more people than the combined circulation of the 1950s versions of Time, Life, the New York Times, and the Washington Post. It is very hard to beat the scale of the social, mobile web!”
*“I have called this principle, by which each slight variation, if useful, is preserved, by the term Natural Selection,” Darwin wrote in the fifth edition of On the Origin of Species. “But the expression often used by Mr. Herbert Spencer of the Survival of the Fittest is more accurate, and is sometimes equally convenient.”
*N. K. Humphrey, an evolutionary psychologist at the University of Cambridge, took the idea a step further: “When you plant a fertile meme in my mind, you literally parasitize my brain, turning it into a vehicle for the meme’s propagation in just the way that a virus may parasitize the genetic mechanism of a host cell.”
*When I visited OMGFacts.com the next day, one of the most popular “facts” on the site was “Nicholas Cage natural odor is similar to the sweat of a homeless man!” [sic]. The source for this was a tabloid article, then ten years old, about a porn star who’d once dated Cage.
*Some of these user-generated aphorisms were later compiled in a small book called Gives Me Hope: The 127 Most Inspiring Bite-Sized Stories. This was what Spartz was referring to when he called himself a bestselling author.
*Russell was a former Christian missionary turned anti–child soldier activist. As Kony 2012 rocketed to popularity, Russell’s nonprofit received millions of dollars in donations, most of which he spent on salaries, overhead, and further promotion of the film. At the peak of the campaign’s viral success, Russell suffered a mental breakdown, and TMZ released footage of him pacing through downtown San Diego, nude, ranting incoherently. This footage, too, went viral.
*When your friend posted a link on Facebook, the interface made it look like all other links, no matter whether it came from nytimes.com or ntyimes.com or thenewyorktimessucks.wordpress.com. To see where the content originated, you had to squint until you found a line of text at the bottom of the post—tiny, light gray, and easily ignorable.
*His personal preferences seemed to be those of the average twentysomething Chicagoan—socially tolerant, fond of sports and beer and burgers, and so on—but he was vague about his politics.
*Eighty percent wasn’t a random figure; it was a reference to the Pareto principle, also known as the 80/20 rule, which was such a core tenet of Spartz’s thinking that he often used it as a transitive verb (“How can we 80/20 that?”). In the early twentieth century, an economist named Vilfredo Pareto observed that 20 percent of Italians owned 80 percent of Italy’s land. In the twenty-first century, management consultants stretched this observation about inequality into a universal law about productivity. “80/20 APPLIES TO EVERYTHING!” blared one of Spartz’s favorite books, 80/20 Sales and Marketing: The Definitive Guide to Working Less and Making More. “You can read 20 percent of this book and get 80 percent of the benefit.”
*At the time, Brainwreck/Dose was getting about 30 million pageviews a month. This was, I couldn’t help but notice, roughly the same as the monthly traffic to newyorker.com.
*Such content could be anywhere: a big viral site like BuzzFeed or Upworthy; a competitor closer to Dose’s size, like ViralNova or TwistedSifter; a niche corner of Twitter or Reddit or Pinterest.
*If Mary Mallon had been a housewife, Spartz pointed out, she would have infected only her family. It was because she worked as a cook that she is remembered by history as Typhoid Mary. Typhoid is a bacterial infection, not a virus; also, although I was hardly a marketing expert, it seemed unwise to associate one’s business model with fever, exhaustion, delirium, and death. Still, his point was well taken.
*When he wasn’t getting enough data from his own sites, he bought user data from third-party sources. The harvesting and selling of user data was a common practice at the time; it didn’t attract much notice, but those who did notice it found it quite unnerving. In 2014, David Lazarus, a Los Angeles Times business columnist, called a Verizon data-harvesting program “one of the more outrageous examples of how businesses loudly proclaim their commitment to safeguarding consumers’ privacy while quietly selling us out to the highest bidder.”
*“A popular government without popular information, or the means of acquiring it, is but a Prologue to a Farce or a Tragedy,” James Madison wrote in 1822. In the twenty-first century, with a looming climate crisis and a glut of nuclear warheads, the potential for human tragedy is orders of magnitude more grave than Madison could have anticipated.
*None of this implies, by any stretch, that the First Amendment should be ignored or diluted. It does imply, however, that the First Amendment, no less than the Second, raises dilemmas that are not easily resolved by glib, one-size-fits-all absolutism. First Amendment law is contingent, like everything else. In 1969, when the Fairness Doctrine was challenged on First Amendment grounds, the Supreme Court upheld the law unanimously. In the past few decades, however, the court has been on a more civil-libertarian kick. This has both costs and benefits.
*In this one respect, at least, they were just like the Big Swinging Dicks: almost all of them were men.
*All social groups have prevailing biases, of course. Traditional media gatekeepers are no exception. (The press is uniformly in favor of press freedom, for example.) But journalists are, by and large, a neurotic and embattled bunch; self-critique comes naturally to them. This means that, as a group, they tend to exhibit what Richard Rorty called “ironism,” a quality that, crucially, allows a vocabulary to remain supple and open to self-correction. An ironist, Rorty wrote, “has radical and continuing doubts about the final vocabulary she currently uses, because she has been impressed by other vocabularies.” The same could not be said of the new gatekeepers in Silicon Valley. Their prevailing vocabulary had much to recommend it—it was socially tolerant, evidence-based, open to experimentation—but the BSBs were hardly ironists. They took their own dogma quite seriously, and they were rarely impressed by anyone but themselves.
*In March 2019, Mark Zuckerberg indicated that Facebook would retreat from this expansive vision, focusing instead on “private, encrypted services.” A few days later, Chris Cox announced via Facebook post that he was leaving the company. “As Mark has outlined, we are turning a new page in our product direction,” Cox wrote. “This will be a big project and we will need leaders who are excited to see the new direction through.” The tech press parsed the post carefully enough to pick up the subtext: apparently, the category of people who were excited about Facebook’s new direction did not include Cox.
