By Gordon Hull
The Washington Post has a disturbing story about how “lies become truth in online America.” It narrates the story of two individuals. One spends his time in Maine, dishing out deliberately fake news stories designed to troll those on the right by saying completely absurd things and then watching them blindly repeat them as truths. Christopher Blair and his friends then occasionally wade into comments sections to chastise the vulnerable, as well as baiting people into saying racist things and getting their social media accounts removed and so on. “Nothing on this page is real” says one of the apparently fourteen (!) disclaimers on his site; he gets up to 6 million hits from believers a month. Blair would make up pretty much anything that aligns with stuff circulating on the far right:
“In the last two years on his page, America’s Last Line of Defense, Blair had made up stories about California instituting sharia, former president Bill Clinton becoming a serial killer, undocumented immigrants defacing Mount Rushmore, and former president Barack Obama dodging the Vietnam draft when he was 9. “Share if you’re outraged!” his posts often read, and thousands of people on Facebook had clicked “like” and then “share,” most of whom did not recognize his posts as satire. Instead, Blair’s page had become one of the most popular on Facebook among Trump-supporting conservatives over 55”
The second person is a 76-year-old retiree in Nevada who seems to credulously like or share pretty much everything the far right says. After moving to Nevada, outside of Las Vegas, Shirley Chapian joined Facebook to connect with people. She never liked Obama, and so she was receptive to claims that maybe he had faked his qualifications, or was really from Kenya. Things went downhill from there. Again, the WaPo:
“For years she had watched network TV news, but increasingly Chapian wondered about the widening gap between what she read online and what she heard on the networks. “What else aren’t they telling us?” she wrote once, on Facebook, and if she believed the mainstream media was becoming insufficient or biased, it was her responsibility to seek out alternatives. She signed up for a dozen conservative newsletters and began to watch Alex Jones on Infowars. One far right Facebook group eventually led her to the next with targeted advertising, and soon Chapian was following more than 2,500 conservative pages, an ideological echo chamber that often trafficked in skepticism. Climate change was a hoax. The mainstream media was censored or scripted. Political Washington was under control of a “deep state.””
She spends most of her days holed up inside, blinds drawn, staring at the screen and indifferent to the world outside. Of course she prides herself in her critical thinking.
What to do with this? It would be remiss of me not to notice the gender politics of this – not just that Blair is male. It’s also that our media image of someone hopelessly isolated online seems to skew toward an older woman, as in this piece from the Atlantic a few years ago that framed a story about whether social media is making us lonely with the story of 80+ year-old Yvette Vickers, who died alone in her apartment months before anybody found her body, perched in front of her computer. And it’s not like there’s any shortage of men, of all ages, believing and promulgating toxic stuff from in front of a screen.
That said, Blair and Chapian are nearly perfect instantiations of ideal types online, and serious consideration of their story strikes me as well worth the effort. One implication is that the debate about whether or not “the Internet makes us lonely” is somewhat misplaced. A lot of grant money has been spent on this one, and it covers questions such as whether and how social media use builds social capital, whether the explanation for data suggesting that people are lonely online is because antecendently lonely people tend to spend a lot of time online, or whether being online makes them lonely. Suffice it to say there’s some empirical and other problems. There’s also probably something to all this; there’s research reporting an inverse relation between teen happiness and screen time. Then again, teens also report going online for help with depression.
The Blair/Chapian story suggests that it’s not exactly that people online are alone or not, it’s that their social community tends to narrow to people more and more like themselves. That concern has of course been around a while, and Cass Sunstein was voicing it in the early 2000s. According to Sunstein, features inherent to online discourse tended to polarize it into small groups of the like-minded: people would gather in groups where they would adopt increasingly extreme positions to signal their membership, and they would also tend to trust whatever they heard online because they lacked the independent ability to verify claims about the world. That seems correct as far as it goes.
A second implication – and one that I think needs to be shouted from the rooftops as often as possible – is that all of this is substantially driven not by postmodern theory or Donald Trump or even Russian propaganda outlets. It’s driven by capital. Chapian for example has been the recipient of a lot of targeted advertising, as the above notes, and when she hits “like” because she is OUTRAGED by BREAKING NEWS, she is making somebody money. We collectively worry a lot about the privacy implications of targeted advertising, and how that works on social media to distort our preferences (this is about to get worse: Google now envisions smart home technology that can do things like look at your clothes and make shopping recommendations based on what it sees in your closet). All of this is not just a privacy concern, though, as there’s an element of subjectification insofar as all this targeted advertising works to slowly narrow the range of your interactions with other kinds of people, ideas and things (I’m sorry. I meant to say “efficiently help you find your niche”).
On the other hand, folks like Blair are hardly just political operatives. According to the WaPo, he can make around $14000 a month in advertising; he is one of the beneficiaries of Chapian’s credulity. So he has a serious business incentive to continue to produce more demos-destroying drivel. Hence he does so; if he really was concerned about the effects of his drivel and its uptake in Macedonian troll farms, he wouldn’t make the occasional foray into comments sections to tell all the hoi polloi how stupid they are, and he wouldn’t put up helpful disclaimers that nobody reads. He would stop producing drivel. But that would entail a real cost. And behind him of course Mark Zuckerberg hears the cash register ring every time Blair generates page hits and likes.
That is, one real effect of all of his creative output is again its contribution to the efficient sorting of individuals into narrower and narrower groups. There’s his friends, the ones who know the game and who mock the stupidity of their rivals. And then there’s the ever-narrower niches of the various conspiracy believers who increasingly inhabit echo chambers in which they hear a narrower and narrower range of views. Cass Sunstein’s worries about echo chambers online are baked into the business model of the Internet, and in that sense the information architecture is a hostile one, designed to benefit corporations and not people.
But what about dispossession? I have argued that big data functions as a mechanism of original accumulation that dispossesses us of our preferences. When Marx talks about original accumulation, he speaks of how peasants are deprived of their means of livelihood in order to become “free” labor. His focus is economic, and emphasizes the sheer violence of the process. At the same time, he alludes to a process of social dissolution: a condition where the worker is construed as someone who owns his own labor “presupposes the fragmentation of holdings, and the dispersal of the other means of production” (Capital I [Penguin ed.], 927) and:
“As it excludes the concentration of these means of production, so it also excludes co-operation, division of labor within each separate process of production, the social control and regulation of the forces of nature, and the free development of the productive forces of society” (927)
The enclosure movement destroyed an entire way of life, including social connections of individuals with one another. This is not to say that peasant life was to be celebrated; it was if nothing else a life of poverty. So too, the power structures of feudalism were often brutal. But it is to say that the process of turning individuals into subjects-of-capital is one that entailed the conversion of a diversity of social bonds into a homogeneity of competitive ties between fundamentally exchangeable workers. Deskilled and desocialized, always available and disposable: this is how Marx characterizes the members of the industrial proletariat to capital. Just as capital turns individual, diverse acts of labor into homogenous “labor power,” so too it converts the diverse individuals into instances of “free labor.” In so doing, those workers are deprived of a life in which different kinds of people occupying different social roles would routinely interact with one another. Rather, they are gobbled up by their factory jobs. Factory labor “confiscates every atom of freedom, both in bodily and in intellectual activity” (548) and “the special skill of each individual machine-operator, who has now been deprived of all significance, vanishes as an infinitesimal quantity in the face of science, the gigantic natural forces, and the mass of social labor embodied in the system of machinery” (549).
For Marx, this process is evident in the destruction of family ties: work “usurped the place not only of the children’s play, but also of independent labour at home, within customary limits, for the family itself” (517). The subjugation of the worker becomes recursively repeated inside the family structure, and the worker becomes a “slave-dealer” because he has to sell his wife and child (519). Gender roles are still important, and of course one shouldn’t automatically celebrate “the family.” The point is simply the conversion of the possibility of differentiated social ties into forced wage-labor ones and the subsumption of pretty much everything into it.
Read against the background of Marx, what the WaPo story suggests is that, because of the political economy of social media, and whether or not we are more lonely, we are more fundamentally being dispossessed of alterity - of the other. We still have all sorts of encounters, but they are increasingly into a mirror of people deliberately chosen as being similar to us, or who (for the sake of revenue generation) reflect our own preferences and prejudices back onto us. Insofar as ethics depends on an encounter with alterity, or concern for an Other in the sense of someone who is not like us, the business model of the Internet is slowly destroying it. Insofar as sociality depends on more than solipsism, there’s reason to be concerned. Regardless of the exact concepts or vocabulary, however, this is a problem of political economy.
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