Antisocial, p.46
Antisocial, page 46
*In 2011, the venture capitalist Marc Andreessen argued that “software is eating the world.” He gave example after example. “The world’s largest bookseller, Amazon, is a software company,” he wrote. “Today’s dominant music companies are software companies, too: Apple’s iTunes, Spotify and Pandora.” He continued listing industries that were being disrupted: photography, telecom, cars, even agriculture. His argument was divisive at the time, but it ended up being so prescient that several of the ascendant start-ups Andreessen wrote about—Netflix, Pixar, Square—would soon be thought of simply as dominant companies in their fields, not as software companies per se.
*Many BSBs feared that the wrong kind of artificial intelligence would destroy humanity, or the planet—a nearly literal interpretation of software eating the world. The prospect was a remote one, and purely hypothetical, but within certain Silicon Valley circles it was a constant obsession. “It’s hard to fathom how much human-level AI could benefit society, and it’s equally hard to imagine how much it could damage society if built or used incorrectly,” read one sentence from the mission statement of OpenAI, a “non-profit research company” founded in 2015. It wasn’t clear whether or how OpenAI would be financially solvent. Still, its nine financial backers—including Peter Thiel, Elon Musk, and the president of Y Combinator—pledged, collectively, a billion dollars.
*At our lunch, the BSB characterized my critique by way of a food analogy. “So you’re saying that people like milkshakes and onion rings, and you want them to eat kale,” he said. “Well, good luck with that.” I found this strange, given that an ambitious initiative to prevent obesity—to alter various incentives, both governmental and nongovernmental, with the goal of helping people resist the natural self-destructive urge to binge on sugar and fat—seemed like precisely the sort of initiative that a civic-minded Silicon Valley philanthropist like himself might support (unless he happened to own stock in McDonald’s). Our conversation took place in the spring of 2016. Donald Trump, the consummate milkshake-and-onion-rings candidate, was the front-runner in every Republican poll.
*A few years later, I reached DeBaise by phone. She told me that when we’d first met, she’d been in the middle of “what I guess you could call an existential crisis,” which soon resulted in her quitting Dose to work for an education-related nonprofit. “In hindsight, we were just recycling content with no regard to what it actually was, solely paying attention to the metrics,” she said. “It’s not like we were the only clickbait factory doing that, but we were part of this wave of businesses exploiting the implicit trust that readers have—that if they see something online that looks like it’s coming from a real source, that there’s probably some thought and reliability behind it. These days, I don’t know how many people have that trust anymore.”
*At each step, the headlines became a bit more explicit (at least, by New Yorker standards). The web editors explained the logic: New Yorker subscribers, thumbing through paper copies of the magazine at their leisure, might not be put off by a droll headline, or even by a headline so elliptical as to be incomprehensible. Maybe they’d be enticed by something else on the page—the photo, the first few sentences, the byline—or maybe they’d need no enticement, relying instead on their faith in The New Yorker’s editorial sensibility. But most browsers on Facebook or Twitter weren’t like readers with the magazine spread before them; they were more like commuters hurrying past a bookstore on a wide public street. They might not even notice that they were passing a bookstore at all, much less feel the urge to wander inside. To capture their attention, the thinking went, you had to be a bit more aggressive.
*In Never Eat Alone, Keith Ferrazzi brags about his ideological flexibility, giving public-speaking tips to Howard Dean in one chapter and sucking up to William F. Buckley in another. Chapter 28, “Getting Close to Power,” starts with this epigraph: “As long as you’re going to think anyway, think big.” It’s from The Art of the Deal, a book ghostwritten by Tony Schwartz on behalf of Donald Trump.
*Facebook later confirmed to 60 Minutes that it had sent employees to embed with the Trump campaign. (“We encourage all candidates, groups, and voters to use our platform to engage in elections,” the company’s statement read, in part.) Facebook had offered similar help to the Clinton campaign, but the offer was rebuffed.
*“These issues are definitely more complex than I thought back then,” Spartz told me by email in 2019. “I’m still optimistic but definitely less techno-utopian because of how much Black Mirror-y stuff has happened, and as I grow up I’ve learned to see previously invisible complexities.” When we’d first met, Spartz had described artificial intelligence as “an amazing gift.” He now described it as “likely the single biggest existential risk to humanity.”
*In 2017, Reince Priebus would go to work for Donald Trump, the least pluralistic American president in recent memory, only to be fired six months later.
*Sailer borrowed the term from I, Sniper, a thriller by the novelist Stephen Hunter. In the book, one character, a newspaper reporter, explains the concept: “The narrative is the set of assumptions the press believes in, possibly without even knowing that it believes in them. It’s so powerful because it’s unconscious. It’s not like they get together every morning and decide ‘These are the lies we tell today.’ No, that would be too crude and honest. . . . They don’t even know they’re true believers, because in theory they despise the true believer in anything.”
*“The immigration debate happens on a high level of abstraction and sentimentality,” Sailer told me in one of our interviews. “It explains some otherwise inexplicable events—for instance, Angela Merkel, this cautious and middle-of-the-road politician, deciding to let in a million refugees. Where does that come from? Well, it kind of comes from the Zeitgeist, from this Narrative that has taken shape over time, in which it’s increasingly seen as morally unacceptable that some people live in nice countries and other people live in not-nice countries. To me, it just seems nuts to make policy this way.”
*From the group’s mission statement, as revised in 2016: “The HLMC is in no way allied to either of the two national political parties, and it should not be confused with the ‘conservative movement.’ We were in fact founded precisely because that movement has suppressed open discussion and seems entirely beholden to corporate donors and Republican Party bosses. From the standpoint of Conservatism, Inc., our group belongs to the ‘basket of deplorables’ that Hillary Clinton denounced in her presidential campaign.”
*Brimelow had been purged from National Review, and from conservative respectability, in the late 1990s, after repeatedly insisting that nonwhite immigration would cause the imminent downfall of the United States. After he was purged, his xenophobia grew only more frantic and more explicit. He founded VDARE in 1999. The site was named for Virginia Dare, the first white child born on American soil.
*In mid-2016, Gottfried, who is Jewish, insisted that he and Spencer be given credit for “co-creating” the term “alt-right.” After Hailgate, he reconsidered, saying, “Any suggestion that I might be associated with what is depicted as a neo-Nazi movement is especially offensive.”
*To most normies, the differences between 4chan and 8chan would have been tough to spot, a matter of splitting hairs. The sites were similar in many ways—internet ethnographers often spoke interchangeably of “chan culture,” or “channers.” The main difference was one of degree: 8chan was for people who felt that the hardcore rhetoric on 4chan wasn’t hardcore enough.
*This might have seemed like a sign of sociopathy, if taken literally. But who took memes on the internet literally?
*In 2019, a young white man, apparently radicalized on the alt-right internet, slaughtered fifty Muslims in Christchurch, New Zealand. Shortly before the massacre began, he wrote on 8chan, “It’s time to stop shitposting and time to make a real life effort post.”
*One of the purposes of staged drama, Aristotle wrote, is to “excite pity and fear,” thus “effecting the proper purgation of these emotions.” Catharsis, in Greek, means purging, or cleansing: you call forth the bile in order to rid yourself of it.
*Where did I find these think pieces? On the internet, of course.
*Most of these pages were operated by real red-blooded Americans; but it later became clear that a few of them, including Being Patriotic, were the work of the Internet Research Agency, a St. Petersburg–based company generating pro-Putin propaganda. In early 2018, an American grand jury indicted the Internet Research Agency, along with several other Russian individuals and entities, for meddling in the 2016 U.S. presidential election.
*Every human society has included an unruly fringe, and the fringe has always found a way to speak. On the day Mount Vesuvius erupted, in the year 79, the walls of Pompeii bore graffiti as salacious as any Reddit thread. On the Vicolo del Panettiere: ATIMETUS GOT ME PREGNANT. Inside the Inn of the Muledrivers, next to a doorpost: WE HAVE WET THE BED, HOST. I CONFESS WE HAVE DONE WRONG. On a wall of the Eumachia Building: SECUNDUS LIKES TO SCREW BOYS. Inside the basilica: A SMALL PROBLEM GROWS LARGER IF YOU IGNORE IT.
*The way Spartz put it was that every time a post was shared, its content was “exposed to a new cluster of people,” who could then share it further. Moreover, engagement statistics were signals to Facebook’s algorithm that a meme was picking up momentum. The algorithm was designed to reward success with more success: if a meme was being shared quickly, it would show up more prominently in other people’s feeds, causing it to spread even faster.
*A more Rortyan way of putting this: social media, the whole churning mess of it, seemed as if it were animated by little more than chance and the momentum of history, but it was better understood as a product of human contingency.
*“Mike was not just clever but actually smart, which is rare,” Peter Boltuc, a philosophy professor at the University of Illinois, said. “One of the most teachable students I’ve ever had. My main worry was that he would take the Nietzsche stuff too literally—the will to power, ‘male virtues,’ the transvaluation of values—that he would maybe even follow it all the way to the Heidegger stuff, the Nazi stuff. I did worry about that. I tried to give him other things to read, and other people to connect with, so that he wouldn’t get too lost.”
*“We set records for the amount of protein consumed,” Armstrong said later. “They certainly lost money on us.”
*Two years later, in 2006, a small podcasting company called Odeo pivoted to become a small “microtexting” company called Twitter. Its first headquarters was a nearly windowless space at 164 South Park, around the corner from where the Cernoviches lived.
*“Is global warming man-made? I don’t know, and I don’t have an opinion,” he wrote. “Everything I had ever been told about steroids was a lie. Why then should I take anything climatologists say on faith?”
*Juicing for Athletes, Juicing for Men, Juice Power. Although he occasionally alluded to his use of exogenous testosterone, these books were mostly about the licit kind of juicing.
*Other parts of the manosphere were not about how to attract women but about how to avoid them. Several forums were devoted to “men going their own way,” or MGTOW. Some of these men were voluntarily celibate (“volcel”), aspiring to a kind of postmodern asceticism. Other men were involuntary celibates (“incels”) who seemed inconsolably angry at women who wouldn’t sleep with them, or at women in general. Their forums were full of what they called rape jokes, although most of them weren’t very funny, and some didn’t seem like jokes at all.
*“Best time in history to be alive,” Mike Cernovich wrote. “You don’t need permission or the right family to succeed. If you want it, take it.”
*The New York Times, over the years, has called him “a well-known investor and esteemed figure in Silicon Valley,” “the closest thing the start-up world has to a pre-eminent guru,” and “the closest thing the technology community has to either a Bertrand Russell or a P. T. Barnum.”
*From “Keep Your Identity Small”: “I finally realized today why politics and religion yield such uniquely useless discussions.” From “How to Do Philosophy”: “Most philosophers up to the present have been wasting their time.”
*“The true man wants two things: danger and play. For that reason he wants woman, as the most dangerous plaything.”
*“Pick-up follows a Pareto principle (the 80/20 rule),” he wrote. “If a club is open for four hours, your best chance of meeting women will be in a given one-hour block of time.”
*In 2008, the SPLC announced this designation in a blog post. The comments below the post were unmoderated, and the following were quickly upvoted to the top:
No, he’s not politically correct, and his views on race are certainly not popular or pleasing to many. But he’s not the strawman you’re envisioning.
Sailer is simply someone who approaches social questions WITHOUT assuming that all groups of people are the same. It’s a valid assumption.
Isn’t it time the SPLC provided a complete list of acceptable things to think, say and do, so we poor benighted dupes of Evil won’t go wrong any more?
What Tribe owns the major Media outlets in the USA? There is the Problem.
*Moldbug’s essayistic voice exemplified the BSB attitude—blithely dismissive of received wisdom, self-assured to the point of hubris. A dropout from a PhD program in computer science, he approached the entire corpus of philosophy, history, and political theory with the swagger of an engineer, setting out to flout convention and reinvent the wheel. “The other day I was tinkering around in my garage and I decided to build a new ideology,” his first post began. “People have been talking about ideology since Jesus was a little boy. At least! And I’m supposedly going to improve on this? Some random person on the Internet, who flunked out of grad school, who doesn’t know Greek or Latin?” He raised these hypothetical objections, of course, only to dismiss them. He went on to imply that his lack of formal qualification was actually one of his primary qualifications, because it enabled him to see through the tissue of lies that he called the Cathedral—a system of brainwashing so total, so self-erasing, that even to notice it was to become a pariah.
Beginning in 2007 and ending in 2014, Moldbug unfurled his bespoke ideology on his blog, Unqualified Reservations. He wrote in a prolix, purple style, a hybrid of Thomas Carlyle and Tom Robbins. His blog became a canonical text in the alt-right, although he never self-identified with the movement—he usually called himself a formalist, while his followers usually called him a neoreactionary. Moldbug taught himself world history via Google Books, and his essays drew on a perversely eclectic array of primary sources, the more obscure the better—Gaetano Mosca, Francis Yeats-Brown, Wolfgang Schivelbusch. He had no truck with settled historical debates, points of academic consensus, or universal politico-ethical axioms along the lines of “Freedom is desirable” or “People should be treated equally.” In a post called “Why I am not an anti-Semite,” he began by noting that his father was Jewish, then continued to hold forth dispassionately on the Jewish Question. Another post, called “Why I am not a white nationalist,” was relatively ambivalent—“I’m not exactly allergic to the stuff”—and it linked approvingly to Steve Sailer, Jared Taylor, and other racist crimethinkers. Moldbug declared himself a full-throated defender of “human cognitive biodiversity,” the idea that there are inherent racial differences in IQ—about which, he suggested, “white nationalists [are] right, and everyone else [is] wrong.”
In 2017, Joe Bernstein, of BuzzFeed, published a piece exposing emails sent to and from Milo Yiannopoulos. The piece revealed, among other things, that Yiannopoulos was in close contact with Moldbug, whose real name was Curtis Yarvin, and that Yarvin had spent the night of the 2016 election at Peter Thiel’s house. When Yiannopoulos suggested that Thiel “needs guidance on politics,” Yarvin responded, “Less than you might think! . . . He’s fully enlightened, just plays it very carefully.”
*The most effective way for the video-recommendation algorithm to keep people glued to YouTube, it turned out, was for it to ramp up the intensity of its suggestions, sometimes at an alarming rate. You might search for nutrition advice and end up, three or four videos later, watching a Roosh V clip called “This Is Why You’re Fat.” You might start out listening to Adam Sandler’s “Hanukkah Song” and end up learning shocking new information about the Jewish Question. The first video ever uploaded to YouTube, “Me at the zoo,” was short and innocuous; after you were done watching that, however, the recommendation algorithm might show you a related piece of content that was more likely to cause an immediate spike of activating emotion, such as a clip of Harambe the gorilla dragging a three-year-old child through its enclosure at the Cincinnati Zoo.
