Antisocial, page 19
According to an old journalistic saw, “Two is a coincidence; three is a trend.” It’s a self-deprecating maxim, an admission that trend stories are rarely as meaningful as they are made out to be. Yet journalists continue to write trend stories, and editors continue to run them, if not out of laziness then out of low-grade ontological desperation. “Is this really a Thing?” an assignment editor may ask, fielding a pitch on an unfamiliar new subject—planking, or sexting, or Ron Paul’s presidential run. “Oh, it’s definitely a Thing,” the reporter who pitched the story will say. “My kids and their friends can’t stop talking about it.” Hardly an objective measure of Thing-ness, but presumably better than nothing.
Understandably, given these circumstances, Twitter seemed like a godsend. Finally: a gold standard of Thing-ness. No longer would journalists have to rely on their personal judgment. Instead, Twitter’s algorithm could tell them objectively, drawing on a sample size of millions, what was a trend and what was not.*
But Twitter was never meant to be a gold standard.* People talked about Twitter as if it were a real-time heat map of the national conversation; yet the platform was not an objective reflection of the thoughts and opinions of all Americans, or even of the less than 20 percent of Americans who had active Twitter accounts. What Twitter actually reflected was engagement: which memes were, at any given moment, generating the most activating emotion. This meant that the platform overrepresented controversy, which wasn’t a novel problem. It also meant—and this part was new—that trolls and other macrotargeters could gin up pseudoscandals almost whenever they wanted. Both the techno-utopians who built the social networks and the gate-crashers who exploited them liked to assert that social media was a democratizing force. However, even when social media did give voice to the voiceless, the amplitude was never distributed equally. In a perfect democracy, each person gets one vote. In a world of trending topics and algorithmic feedback loops, equal representation isn’t just impossible; it’s not even the goal.
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In addition to his blog, Roosh operated a members-only message board, RooshVForum.com, where his hardcore fans could collaborate in semiprivate. Unlike Reddit, the forum had strict written rules (“No girls, homosexuals, or transsexuals”). Like Reddit, it employed the internet gamification tricks that were now so ubiquitous as to be almost imperceptible.
To join the forum, you had to choose a screen name (Tuthmosis, Handsome Creepy Eel) and a profile image (a flaming sword, a stock photo of Owen Wilson). If you posted a link or comment that your peers found useful, they could reward you with “reputation points”; the more points you accrued, the more medals and stars appeared on your profile. A user with just one star was labeled a “Recovering Beta”; three stars made you a “Wingman”; Roosh, with the maximum seven stars, was an “Innovative Casanova.” (Cernovich, who posted frequently on the forum as MikeCF, was an “International Playboy.”)
On October 7, 2013, Roosh instructed his followers to launch a new troll raid. Feminist bloggers often argued that women should not be stigmatized for their appearance. Roosh, on the contrary, felt that they should. “Find feminists/liberals who are pushing fat acceptance,” he wrote on the forum, “and then shame them on twitter using the hashtag #FatShamingWeek.” Dozens of Roosh’s minions started tweeting all at once. “The greatest tragedy: a fat girl who actually would be a 8 or 9 if she just would lose weight,” Quintus Curtius, a prolific manosphere blogger, tweeted, appending the hashtag. A nutritionist retweeted this a few seconds later. “I suspect if she knew what I represent, she wouldn’t have retweeted it,” Quintus gloated on the forum. “Too late now.”
The goal of the Twitter campaign was to shock the SJWs into action. It worked. “I’m sorry but if the men who started #FatShamingWeek could stand up, I’m gonna have to ask you to sit the fuck down, and stop being pigs,” one young woman tweeted. She disapproved of their behavior, and she was using social media to express that disapproval. She was also, whether she realized it or not, spreading their message by using their hashtag.
“You’re the one who needs to stand up and sit down,” Cernovich tweeted in response. “Those are called squats and you need to do some. #FatShamingWeek.”
A few hours later, on the forum, Roosh posted again: “It’s going viral on Twitter.”
Prominently displayed on Twitter’s landing page was a personalized, ever-changing list of “trending topics”—a few phrases and hashtags that were picking up a lot of momentum, according to a proprietary algorithm. The list was coveted real estate. If a meme was catching on with one or two clusters of people—misogynists and nutritionists, say—then an efficient way to expose it to the larger Twitter population was to get it trending. This increased the likelihood that it would be seen by millions of Twitter users, including journalists from every major publication, who could transmit the meme to the world.
Two days after Roosh V launched his troll raid, a headline appeared on BuzzFeed: “Some Terrible People on Twitter Have Decided That It’s ‘Fat Shaming Week.’” The badges at the top of the post (Trashy, Ew, Fail) made the writer’s disdain clear, but her article included no narrative or analysis; she simply summarized Roosh’s loathsome arguments, embedding fifteen tweets from his followers and linking to his blog. Other outlets ran similar pieces: “Fat Shaming Week Is Real, and It’s Despicable”; “#FatShamingWeek Is Taking Over Twitter and Proves People Have No Souls.” Roosh wrote a follow-up post on his blog, linking to each of the hit pieces and proudly citing the number of pageviews they’d brought in. “The exposure,” he wrote, “has exceeded our expectations.”
Trolls may be puerile, but they set an ingenious trap. By responding to their provocations, you risk amplifying their message. By ignoring them, you risk seeming complacent or complicit. The opposite of misinformation is correction, but corrections, for the most part, don’t change people’s minds. The opposite of normalization is outrage, but trolls use outrage as fuel. Trolls act in indescribably awful ways and then dare reporters to describe their actions dispassionately. But for reporters on the lurid ugliness beat, it’s often impossible to be evenhanded and truthful at the same time.
Oddly enough, Dr. Oz did end up inviting Roosh onto his show. “There are monsters that lurk in the shadows of the internet, shaming and bullying people for the way they look,” Oz said, as Roosh waited backstage. “It’s time for them to come out from behind their computer screens.” Roosh walked onstage and sat under the bright lights, and the studio audience had its moment of catharsis.
When the interview aired, Roosh wrote a blog post in which he sounded both plaintive and surprisingly naïve. “Of course I expected to be the ‘bad guy’ on the show, and knew they would ask me some pointed questions, but I could not anticipate how much of a massacre it would be,” he wrote. By the end of the post, though, he had regained his alpha-male bluster. “I guess in the end I’m not that different from Dr. Oz,” he wrote. “We have a different kind of jig we do in front of the camera, but in the end we’re still doing a jig.”
Within the manosphere, the consensus was that the Dr. Oz appearance had made Roosh look pathetic, but that it was a win for him nonetheless. “As much as I can’t stand Roosh, he’ll definitely grow in size for being on Dr. Oz,” wrote a commenter on a small site called SlutHate.com. The next game blogger to pivot toward the mainstream, the commenter predicted, would be Mike Cernovich: “I expect him to try and write some shocker articles to give his ‘gorilla alpha male’ ass some attention.”
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“Twitter is my drug,” Cernovich wrote—on Twitter, naturally—in 2014. “I can’t kill people. That’s illegal. I’ve had so much sex that beautiful women bore me. How can I get that rush? Twitter.” Blogging had started to feel like a closed loop, a way to build rapport with old fans but not a way to bring in new ones. Twitter, on the other hand, was a party where the VIP section included everyone who was anyone: billionaires, agenda-setting journalists, A-list celebrities, heads of state. Cernovich didn’t delude himself that the people behind the velvet rope were paying attention to him—not yet, anyway. But at least they were all in the same room.
One night, after a Gawker writer tweeted a joke that Cernovich misconstrued as an insult, Cernovich took to YouTube and challenged the writer to a boxing match. The writer didn’t respond, and the boxing match never happened; still, the video went viral, drawing more online attention to Cernovich and more traffic to his site. The brilliance of the boxing challenge, he thought, was that it brought all subtext to the surface. He could engage in nitpicky intellectual debates, but that would only impress the brahmins in New York and D.C.; far better, from a branding perspective, to show that he was a big strong guy with a hot girlfriend who knew how to fight. That would impress everyone, on a gut level, whether they admitted it or not. “To beat a person, you lower his or her social status,” he once wrote on Danger & Play. “Logic is pointless.”
He continued thinking about his career in terms of boxing metaphors. To get bigger, he would have to punch above his weight. He had about ten thousand followers on Twitter. What if he could pick a fight with a heavyweight—an A-list celebrity with a few hundred thousand followers, or a few million? Most of them would be too smart to respond to his provocations. But, as the PUA blogosphere had taught him, you couldn’t close if you didn’t make approaches.
He offered a “cash reward” for damaging information about Nick Denton, the publisher of Gawker Media. Cernovich tagged Denton in the tweet, hoping to start a public row, but neither Denton nor anyone else took the bait.
The actor and writer Lena Dunham, tweeting in support of GMO labeling, wrote, “We deserve to know the truth about our food.” Cernovich responded, “The truth about food is that you eat too much.” She ignored him.
In September 2015, Seth Rogen, a movie star with three and a half million followers, tweeted, “If you think there’s some conspiracy against white people, you are, I guarantee, a stupid white person.”
Cernovich, tagging Rogen, tweeted, “If you think Seth Rogen is edgy, you are, I guarantee, a giant fucking pussy.”
Two days later, Rogen responded. “I seem to have pissed you off,” he wrote.
Emboldened, Cernovich delivered another jab. “Sucks @SethRogen is having marriage problems,” he wrote. “Cuck life!”
“You seem so angry!” Rogen responded. “Do you need a nap?”
Cernovich jabbed again, in the same spot, in case his first insult had been too subtle. “Your wife won’t fuck you,” he wrote. “Hahahahahahahahahahahahahahahaha.”
Finally, Rogen retreated. “I’ll stop now,” he wrote. “Have a nice life.”
A month later, out of nowhere, Rogen’s wife entered the ring. “Well,” she tweeted in response to Cernovich, “she definitely would fuck you!”
Her post was intended to be sarcastic, but tone is notoriously hard to convey over the internet. Cernovich archived and screengrabbed the tweets quickly, before they could be deleted. Then he wrote a blog post: “Seth Rogen Got Cucked on Twitter by His Wife (Here’s How).” In the ensuing days, he gained thousands of new followers.
“You gotta think of your life as a story arc,” Cernovich said in a podcast interview around this time. He’d decided to embrace the role of the antihero. “Antiheroes are flawed human beings, but we’re doing the right thing,” he explained. “So when people try to attack us, the blows don’t land the way they do on most people.”
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Cernovich had met a woman named Shauna, and they’d moved in together in Santa Monica. She worked in ad sales at CraveOnline, a “male lifestyle publisher” based in L.A. In late 2014, she quit her job, and she and Cernovich spent 2015 traveling through Europe, Asia, and the Middle East. (He could do his job from anywhere with internet access.) He posted pictures of himself sipping espresso in a Paris café and floating in the Dead Sea.
Once, as he walked through a train station in Budapest, he noticed hundreds of Syrian émigrés pitching tents, waiting to be resettled elsewhere in Hungary. Based on the media coverage of the Syrian crisis, he thought he knew what to expect: squalor, amputees, wailing children. Instead, he saw men playing soccer and flirting with girls. “It hit me: these people aren’t refugees,” he said later. “It’s a hoax.”
He posted his photos from the train station on Facebook, where they were viewed hundreds of thousands of times—another viral success. “On assignment from Cernovich Media, I traveled to Budapest-Keleti Railway Terminal,” he wrote. “My original reporting blew the lid open on the media lies.” He estimated that “over 70%” of Syrian refugees were “able-bodied young men,” citing no evidence for the assertion and putting the word refugees in scare quotes.
Previously, he’d had a mental image of himself as a person who couldn’t do what professional journalists did. But that mental image was the first thing he needed to overcome. Why couldn’t he travel somewhere, take pictures, and write up what he saw? He could do it better than the traditional journalists, in fact, because he wasn’t afraid to tell the truth, even if it contradicted the Narrative. The mainstream outlets had big budgets, dozens of employees, and decades of brand equity, but their size was also a liability. Cernovich, acting as the owner and sole employee of Cernovich Media, could be more nimble, more authentic, more disruptive. By honing his viral marketing skills, he could get his stories directly to the people. In the age of social media, a one-man operation and a billion-dollar enterprise were both part of the same Media Matrix. Ultimately, everyone was spreading content the same way: posting links online and trying to get people to share them.
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In the United States, everyone was already preoccupied with a presidential election that was a year and a half away. Cernovich was dismissive at first. “No thinking man buys into this two-party political system,” he once wrote. Then Trump entered the race. “I said if a Republican acted like me and ran for office, it’d be a movement,” Cernovich tweeted in July 2015. “Donald Trump has proven me right. People are tired of pussies.”
He kept blogging about nutrition and self-help, but he also started tweeting about politics, as a test. Why limit yourself to a niche audience when you could diversify? He developed a style of political punditry that fit his online persona—less Fox News contributor than mixed-martial-arts commentator. “Ted Cruz is brilliant but his look is off,” Cernovich tweeted in 2015. “It’s the neck fat. Career killer.” Hillary Clinton was out of the question. Even before she entered the race, Cernovich tarred her with the worst insult he could imagine: “Hillary Clinton is an SJW.”
To Cernovich’s surprise, his audience loved his political content. So he followed their cues, tweeting and blogging more about politics. “Trump is winning,” he wrote in September 2015, linking to a Wikipedia article about Nietzsche’s theory of the transvaluation of values. In Trump, Cernovich recognized a fellow antihero. He wasn’t perfect, but he’d never claimed to be perfect. Politics was a blood sport, but Jeb Bush and the rest of the cuckservatives preferred to be polite and play by the old rules. Only Trump was willing to smash the Overton window. “What are Trump’s policies? I don’t particularly care,” Cernovich wrote on Danger & Play. “If Trump offends you,” he wrote in another post, “it’s because you live in a cucked world where no one speaks their minds.”
He and Shauna moved back to California. He was an American, and if his country was going to war over its political future then he wanted to be a part of it. The liberals and neocons on cable news kept talking about how the next president had to be Clinton or Bush or Rubio—anyone who wouldn’t challenge the Narrative on immigration or Islam or gender or race. “The media is against Donald Trump,” Cernovich tweeted. “Well guess who hates the media.” His implied answer was “almost everyone,” which turned out to be correct.
He started reading up on the mainstream pundits and columnists, and he couldn’t believe how many of them had similar backstories: Ivy League, nepotism, inherited wealth. No wonder they felt comfortable shilling for the establishment. “Look, if the experts decide tomorrow that we’re going to war with Russia, who’s gonna fight that war?” Cernovich said. “Jonah Goldberg and Ross Douthat? Fuck no. It’ll be guys I know from Kewanee.”*
The more boldly he spoke out against the media, the more his own brand as an alternative-media personality grew. “Why can’t I start a competitor to Vice?” he mused on Twitter. “Maybe I’ll start thinking about funding.” In the end, the red pill might not have been quite the right metaphor. His eyes were now open to the existence of the Media Matrix; and yet, even as he condemned it, he could feel himself getting sucked into it.
Finally he understood: this would be his legacy. This was how he would make himself too big to ignore. “Twitter/YouTube/Google really give people the power,” he tweeted. If he’d been born in another century, he might have been consigned to a life of valiant obscurity—a freethinking serf, never a leader. But he was alive in an era when anyone with the right set of skills could bend the arc of history. “I wake up every day full of passion and enthusiasm,” he wrote. “Conflict inspires me, and I am only getting started.”
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
Reductio
For much of 2016, I searched for an extremist meme peddler to write about. I wasn’t after just any old extremist; I wanted to find an epitome of the social media age, someone with an alarming amount of unmerited influence and a clear plan for helping the lunatic fringe become the lunatic mainstream. The specific flavor of lunacy was of secondary importance. After all, I never asked Emerson Spartz to convince me that his listicles were accurate—that bacon-wrapped onion rings really were perfect for appetizers, burgers, and life. We hardly talked about his content at all. Instead, he showed me how he made his memes go viral.
