Antisocial, page 15
Was I being indoctrinated? Yes, I suppose I was being indoctrinated. I was also being indoctrinated to believe that puppies are cute, and that gravity is a force that causes objects to fall to Earth, and that it’s rude to interrupt people while they’re talking. Another word for the indoctrination of children is education. There is no such thing as a society without a Narrative; there are only better Narratives and worse ones.
In retrospect, my main complaint about my indoctrination is that it didn’t grow more sophisticated more quickly. Gravity does cause objects to fall to Earth, but it’s not a force; it’s a result of the curvature of space-time, which isn’t quite the same thing. The version of Martin Luther King that I learned about in elementary school (and then, with minor variations, in middle school and high school) was a storybook version of King: a stoic who had faith that our nation would eventually live up to its founding principles. This was true enough, but it left out a lot. The real Martin Luther King also believed that the United States was a fundamentally “sick” country, and that “justice for black people cannot be achieved without radical changes in the structure of our society.”
In 1991, Duke ran for governor of Louisiana. Translating his ideology into the vocabulary of the moment, he positioned himself as a chastened mainstream Republican. “I’m a Christian person, and I think we all evolve in our lives,” he told Phil Donahue, on Donahue’s daytime talk show. Duke didn’t disavow his former ideology, but he tried to make it sound abstract, in the style of the Southern Strategy: “People are now talking about the reverse discrimination going on, they’re talking about the need to reform the welfare system, they’re talking about the fact that forced busing is damaging education.”
Donahue, playing the role of the sober, objective newsman, neither agreed nor disagreed with Duke’s talking points. He let Duke go on for a few minutes before cutting to commercial: “We’ll be back with Mr. Duke, the candidate, in just a moment.” In the first round of voting, Duke came within two percentage points of first place, triggering a runoff. He lost the runoff election, but he won a majority of the white vote.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
The Invisible Primary
In the fall of 2015, I had breakfast with an anchor at a major TV network. For months, Donald Trump had been the front-runner in every Republican primary poll. The anchor and I talked about what most of the country was talking about, and would continue talking about for the foreseeable future: the astonishing rise of Trumpism, how unstoppable it seemed to be. The anchor and I were supposed to be members of the Fourth Estate, yet we felt powerless to do anything but watch the phenomenon unfold.
“How about a voluntary media blackout?” I suggested. “No more covering his tweets. No more covering every rally. Why take the bait?”
“Even if I agreed with your premise, which I’m not sure I do,” the anchor said, “it wouldn’t matter. First, there’s no way Fox News would participate in any blackout. Second, everyone knows that Trump is the story that gets ratings right now. Nothing else even comes close. Which means that the moment I tell my boss ‘I’m not covering Trump’ is the moment my boss tells me, ‘OK, it was fun working with you, we’ve got someone on their way right now to replace you.’ And then, even if all of TV could somehow be turned into a Trump-free zone, there’s still the internet.”
Right: the internet. I must have been reading too many think pieces* about how Trump’s lead would vanish as soon as the mainstream media stopped “giving him oxygen.” This metaphor made sense only if one imagined a scenario with a single oxygen source: Trump as deep-sea diver, say, with cable news as his scuba tank. But Trump was more like a wizened, ageless tortoise in an aquarium full of decentralized air pumps. TV and national newspapers were major oxygen sources, to be sure, but there were many others: shock-humor podcasts, celebrity-gossip blogs, foreign wire services, viral clickbait start-ups. And then there were the social networks, perhaps the biggest oxygen pumps of all, which were powered by millions of regular people who loved Trump or hated Trump enough to keep talking perpetually about Trump. Everything he did or said—everything he was—incited a sharp spike of activating emotion, positive or negative, in almost everyone. He was a ready-made viral meme.
TV executives are obsessed with ratings, but they’re also motivated, at least to some degree, by other factors: news judgment, time constraints, a sense of fairness, a capacity to feel shame. Social networks, on the other hand, were supposed to transcend such messy human subjectivity in pursuit of pure neutrality. They were designed to be feedback machines, giving users not what they needed but whatever they were likely to want, based on their stated and unstated preferences. Broadcasters could have decided to stop giving attention to Trump, and once in a while they did. But that wasn’t really possible on social media, where the content consisted of whatever people felt like talking about.
* * *
• • •
Andrew Breitbart, the John the Baptist of the Deplorables, is often credited with the maxim “Politics is downstream from culture.” Like all maxims, it’s reductive—the stream flows in both directions—and yet it was a shrewd, simple insight that led him to other shrewd, simple insights. In 2011, on Fox News, Breitbart was asked whether Donald Trump was a conservative. “Of course he’s not a conservative,” he said. However, a few seconds later, he added that someone like Trump could be a formidable presidential candidate: “Celebrity is everything in this country.”
To most pundits at the time, this seemed paradoxical. How could a nonconservative be the standard-bearer of the conservative movement? Why would the Republican Party let that happen? But Breitbart understood that the Republican Party doesn’t decide who its nominee will be. Voters do. Voters are just people, and people like who they like.
The chattering classes might assume that the factors that matter to them—the candidates’ policy agendas, their performances in TV debates, the endorsements they receive in local newspapers—will be the main factors that determine how people vote. But there is no rule requiring voters to pay attention to newspapers, or to cogent articulations of policy, or to anything else. If politics is downstream from culture, then political information spreads the way all information spreads. People base their behavior, including their voting behavior, on whatever scraps of information they happen to notice and remember: tabloid headlines, unclicked Google ads, specious rumors, reruns of The Apprentice.
Breitbart wasn’t blinded by political orthodoxy because he didn’t know much about it. Rather, he was a new-media savant, an early employee at both the Drudge Report and The Huffington Post—a disrupter. “My goal is to destroy The New York Times and CNN,” he said, in 2010. “The media class is the wall that we have to climb over in order for our voices to be heard.” Much of what Breitbart knew about politics he’d learned from a slim book called Rules for Radicals, published in 1971 by the community organizer Saul Alinsky. Alinsky was a leftist, and both Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton cited Rules for Radicals as a formative influence. Yet the tactics in the book are nonpartisan—“Power and fear are the fountainheads of faith,” Alinsky wrote—and a good number of twenty-first-century Alinskyans, if not a majority, are right-wing radicals.
Breitbart died in 2012. By then, it was starting to become clear that the best way to promote a radical message—one that institutional gatekeepers might find threatening or subversive—was to exploit the amoral openness of the social web. In addition to his maxim about politics and culture, Breitbart left behind an even simpler slogan, one that consisted of a single word: “War.” Or, as it was inevitably rendered by the social media foot soldiers who picked up the mantle of their fallen general: “#WAR.”
* * *
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In a 2008 book called The Party Decides, four political scientists argued that every presidential nominating process begins with an “invisible primary.” Before the first vote is cast, “party insiders” narrow the electorate’s choices, making preferred candidates seem inevitable and dark-horse candidates seem implausible. The relevant factors in an invisible primary were said to include endorsements, donations, and “the media.”
This last term was not defined anywhere in the book, presumably because its authors, like most educated people, assumed that they knew what “the media” was. (As a proxy for media coverage, they measured how often a candidate appeared in Time and Newsweek, which they called “a representative source, but not a perfect one.”) If they had tried to define the media, they might have invoked such criteria as the power to shape public discourse, or to spread information quickly to large swaths of the American populace. Applying those criteria in the age of social media, it was no longer clear why, apart from cliquishness or nostalgia, the label should apply to professional journalists but not to amateur podcasters, or to Twitch streamers, or to any bug-eyed doomsayer with a popular YouTube channel.
In 1972, a poll suggested that Walter Cronkite was the most trusted man in America. In 2013, according to a Reader’s Digest poll, the most trusted person in America was Tom Hanks. Michelle Obama, the highest-ranking political figure on the list, came in at No. 19, below Dr. Oz; Judge Judy was eight spots above Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg. “The extent to which celebrity is prized in our society and has infiltrated politics is shocking to me,” one of the authors of The Party Decides, Marty Cohen, said in a 2016 interview on NPR. He was trying to explain, in retrospect, what his theory had failed to predict. “Things that are very easy to debunk are gaining currency in politics,” he added. “We’ve lost the gatekeeper.”
* * *
• • •
Richard Dawkins coined the word “meme” in 1976, when he was in his thirties. For the next four decades, he continued teaching and writing bestselling books, and the meme of the meme kept evolving. By 2016, the memification of political discourse had become impossible to ignore. After Brexit and before the American election, I arranged to interview Dawkins by phone.
First, I told him about a wedding I’d recently attended in Vermont. The father of the bride, in his toast, had spoken first about the family’s ancestry and then about a set of ethical teachings that had been passed down through generations—categories that he referred to, respectively, as “the genes” and “the memes.” I happened to be standing next to the bride’s younger sister, so I heard her when she turned to a friend and whispered, with affectionate forbearance, “Dad is such a dork. He has no idea what a meme is.”
Dawkins laughed. “I hope you put her right!” he said. “The word seems to mean, to her generation, a picture with capital letters on it.” This definition, he continued, was “curiously narrow—a bit like deciding to use the word ‘animals’ to mean only rabbits.”
We talked about the virality industry, which he saw as a potential threat to liberal democracy. “We may be at a threshold,” he said. “In the past, I would’ve been tempted to say, about the internet, that although everybody has a megaphone, in many cases it’s a quiet one. You can put up a YouTube video, but who’s going to watch it? Now, however ridiculous what you’re saying is, if you make it memetically successful, something really bad can spread through the culture.”
When books were first published in late medieval Europe, Dawkins said, many novice readers were too dazzled by the medium to be appropriately skeptical: if it was printed on vellum, it was probably true. Perhaps, he speculated, something similar was happening now. “If a drunken yob yells abuse at you on the street, you just ignore it,” he said. “But if you see someone yelling some bit of nonsense on Twitter, right next to a link to a New York Times editorial or an official statement by the queen, you don’t quite tune out the nonsense in the same way.”
He sighed. “It’s a pessimistic thought,” he said, “but remember: from the replicator’s point of view, whether the replicator is a gene or a meme, success just means spreading itself. The survival of the species is not a factor.”
* * *
• • •
Every week, Trump said something so outrageous that it was deemed a campaign-ending gaffe. Every week, Trump remained the Republican front-runner. Most pundits continued to assure their audiences, and themselves, that his lead was a passing fluke. Nevertheless, it persisted. “I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody and I wouldn’t lose any voters,” Trump said in January 2016. “It’s, like, incredible.”
I logged on to Facebook and scrolled through my personalized News Feed: Trump outrage, outrage about Trump outrage, baby photo, joke about Trump outrage. By default, Facebook is a well-sealed filter bubble—you share with the people in your bubble, and they share with you. But if you ever want to see outside your bubble, all you have to do is look.
At the top of my screen was a tool I used so seldom that I sometimes forgot it was there: Facebook’s search bar. I typed in a few phrases (“International Jewish cabal,” “Huma Abedin Muslim Brotherhood spy,” “Only men can be president”). No idea was too outlandish. Whatever I looked for, I found it. The search results didn’t include much nudity or profanity, both of which Facebook’s moderators were quick to remove; but I did find plenty of invented crime statistics, misleadingly doctored photographs, and all manner of covert and overt bigotry.
These were a few of the oxygen bubbles keeping the Trump campaign alive. There were hundreds of them, more every minute, pumped out by sensationalist outfits with forgettable names: Liberty Writers, Being Patriotic, Expensive Designer Memes.* There was a good amount of left-wing garbage, and there was a lot more right-wing garbage. Some of it was standard xenophobic scaremongering based on thin sourcing or no sourcing at all. (“Burger King Just Announced THEY WILL FOLLOW ISLAMIC SHARIA LAW! Stop them!”) Some headlines named the activating emotion they aimed to produce and then ended abruptly, leaving a curiosity gap. (“You Won’t Believe What Hillary Just Did! OUTRAGE.”) There was a Facebook page called Fashy Memes, with stick-figure comics of shitlibs confessing to their status-signaling hypocrisy. Other viral posts contained no words at all—just an image of Trump looking heroic, or of Clinton looking ghoulish and frail, or of a black person caricatured as a monkey.
I wasn’t shocked to find racism and sexism on the internet. If anything, many of the memes, at least on Facebook, were surprisingly tame. (Reddit and 4chan were another story.) Nor was I baffled by the existence of rudimentary political propaganda, which has existed since the dawn of democracy.* What surprised me was how rapidly the stuff was spreading.
My time with Emerson Spartz had trained me to look, whenever I saw a new meme on Facebook, at a small set of numbers at the bottom of each post. These were tallies of the post’s engagement—how many comments it had received, how many times it had been liked or shared—which were harbingers of its present and future virality.* I scrolled through dozens of posts ranging from banal to bizarre to casually violent. Many of them had engagement tallies in the thousands, or in the tens of thousands. For a moment, I took solace in the fact that most of the memes I was seeing were so outré that they would be unprintable in any reputable newspaper. Maybe that would limit their reach. Then I reconsidered: more than fifty percent of American adults looked at Facebook daily, but less than fifteen percent subscribed to a newspaper. With nearly unfettered access to Facebook’s immense audience, why would a propagandist need anything else?
One morning in 2016, David Remnick walked into my office and glanced at my computer screen. I was wearing headphones and I hadn’t heard him come in. I must have been exploring a particularly foul patch of social media undergrowth, because he grabbed my shoulder, nodded toward the screen, and said, “OK, what the hell is that?”
“Have a seat,” I said.
I repeated a few of my Facebook searches, bringing up toxic memes and propaganda posts and reading out the engagement stats below each one: five thousand shares here, fifteen thousand likes there. By way of contrast, I opened the official Facebook pages of Reason, Foreign Affairs, The Nation, The Weekly Standard—any outlet I could think of, so long as it contributed more substantively to the pursuit of human knowledge than the Fashy Memes Facebook page. In some cases, the old gatekeepers seemed to be doing just fine. A few of the newer, more social-media-oriented companies (such as BuzzFeed and Vox, both of which produced a good deal of high-quality journalism) were doing better than fine. But, in many side-by-side comparisons, the bigots and propagandists were winning.
Then came the gut punch: The New Yorker’s Facebook page. A recent landmark piece of investigative journalism, conclusively linking Bashar al-Assad to international war crimes: eighty-seven shares. A lively and authoritative assessment of Aretha Franklin’s career, written by Remnick himself and including lengthy quotes from President Obama: seventy-eight shares. An intricate and poignant story about immigration and child care, one of the finest pieces of writing I’d ever read: fifteen shares. I kept scrolling until I found a post or two—a brash opinion column, a crowd-pleasing piece of satire—with share tallies in the triple digits. Nothing in the thousands.
“I get it, I get it,” Remnick said. “It’s not auspicious. But where’s the story in it?”
Most people, myself included, had grown accustomed to thinking of social media as an emergent property of the popular will, or of the open market, or of dumb luck. Teens posted their dance videos on Snapchat, and maybe, if the viral gods were smiling, a few of them got booked on Ellen and enjoyed fifteen minutes of mainstream fame. But the virality industry was not actually an unknowable mystery. It was, rather, the product of a large number of small human choices. At every step, there were people behind the curtain: consumers making and sharing the content, engineers designing the algorithms that distributed the content, moderators culling the content or failing to cull it.*
