Antisocial, page 24
CHAPTER TWENTY
“Meta Post Script”
On Election Day, I stood outside a small Methodist church in Greensboro, North Carolina, that was serving as a polling place. A man named Larry, an African American in his seventies, was passing out flyers promoting a candidate for district court judge. “I spent twenty-two years in the army,” he told me. “I saw Hawaii, New Zealand, Australia. I remember staring up at the Sydney Opera House, going, ‘If a country boy from Reidsville, North Carolina, can make it here, anything is possible.’”
He made amiable small talk with everyone who passed, including those wearing MAGA hats. “I know I don’t want that crazy man to be president, but I don’t have hate in my heart for anybody,” he said. Just before nightfall, a white man with a gray beard left the church. On his way to the parking lot, he stopped in front of Larry and delivered an unsolicited monologue about why he had just cast his vote for Trump. “Bill Clinton has an illegitimate mulatto child—you know that, don’t you?” the man said. “That’s fine. I’m OK with mixed people. But I’m just saying—why doesn’t he talk about it?” He alluded to George Wallace, and segregation, and the myriad pathologies he ascribed to “the inner city.” Larry looked at the pavement and didn’t say much. Eventually, the man got in his car and left.
“I’ve seen a lot in this state,” Larry said, his eyes still cast downward. “I’ve known people whose kin got lynched. In the last twenty years, or thirty, you didn’t hear people saying these things. These days, suddenly, they feel like they’re allowed to say it.”
* * *
—
Early the next morning, my wife and I stood in the security line at the Raleigh airport. She was three months pregnant, and, even though the CDC said it was an unnecessary precaution, she opted for a pat-down instead of an X-ray scan. “Congratulations,” the TSA agent said. “First one?”
My wife nodded. It was obvious that she’d been crying. The agent—black, fortyish, long braids—was, by airport standards, improbably kind. “What’s the matter, honey?” she asked.
“Oh, you know,” my wife said. “Just the world falling apart.”
“It’s not your job to worry about that,” she said, sweetly but firmly, her eyes locked on my wife’s eyes. “That baby is your world now. You got it?”
At the gate, two married couples wearing MAGA hats carried on a jubilant conversation while the rest of us sat in silence. When it was time to board, an attendant—white, fiftyish, press-on nails—scanned my boarding pass and asked, without glancing up, “How’re we doing today, sweetie?” I’m no good at pleasantries, but even I knew that this question had exactly one acceptable response: a brisk smile, a sunny word or two, then keep the line moving. I didn’t feel up to it. “Not great,” I said. “Not doing great today.”
Her hand, still holding my boarding pass, hovered in midair. She glanced up at me for the first time, as if assessing a potential threat or a glitch in the Matrix. There are few rules, even in a place as tightly regulated as an airport, about how to have a conversation. Instead, there are norms, which can be quaint, or outmoded, or oppressive, or a thin layer of protection against the abyss.
* * *
—
The previous week, in the New Yorker office, one of the web editors had shown me a mockup of what the site’s home page would look like as soon as the election result was announced. A bold, simple illustration—a smiling Hillary Clinton against a Stars and Stripes background—and two panegyric essays tracing the long arc from the nineteenth-century suffragists to the first female president.
I asked him to show me the other one.
“Which?” he said.
“The other version of the page,” I said. “If . . . for . . . the other result.” The contingency plan.
“Oh,” he said. “Yeah, we don’t have one.”
* * *
—
The morning after Election Day, David Remnick sent an email calling for a staffwide meeting. “I think we could all use a moment today to get together to talk about what to do next,” he wrote. “No matter what your politics, I know we can agree that this thing of ours, The New Yorker, has enormous potential, every day and every week, for good, for telling the truth, for thought, for resilience.”
We met in a thirty-eighth-floor conference room with plate-glass windows overlooking the rooftop gardens of Goldman Sachs, and the Hudson River, and the skyline of Jersey City. I took a seat with a view of the Colgate Clock, but my eyes weren’t focused on the time, or on anything in particular. In the ensuing days it would become commonplace to compare this feeling to a bad dream, but to me it felt less like a dream than like a sudden bout of illness, a stomach bug or a high fever—one of those disorienting days when time distends, when no arrangement of limbs can bring comfort, when the bad humor that was once somewhere out in the world, spreading ambiently from other people to other people, finally spreads to you, and you no longer have the luxury of ignoring it.
“I don’t presume to know where everyone in this room stands, but you all know where I stand,” Remnick said, rousing a few rueful chuckles. The previous night, as the returns came in, he’d written a blistering essay, which had since been published under the headline “An American Tragedy.” This turned out to be our contingency plan.
“However you feel right now, though,” he continued, “I hope you agree that we all have urgent work to do, and soon.” The job was the same as it had always been, he said: to think carefully and critically, to tell the truth, to hold the powerful to account. This seemed, in that moment, both entirely correct and entirely inadequate.
We left the conference room and lingered in the hallways, making desultory conversation or standing in awkward silence. These were the first hours of the hospital vibe; we were still learning the etiquette. “I can’t believe I’m about to close a piece about a fucking sarcophagus,” a colleague said. “It feels ridiculous now.” He was putting the finishing touches on a deft and perceptive story, in a forthcoming issue, about a team of archaeologists working to save endangered antiquities through digital scanning.
“Archaeology is still important,” I insisted. “Technology is still important. We can’t just ignore everything else in the world.” At that moment, I didn’t believe a word I was saying.
* * *
—
A web editor stopped by my office. “Wanna call up some of your alt-right guys, let them gloat a bit?” he said. “If you can stand it.” I realized that I had assumed, unconsciously, that I would never talk to any of them again. In the next moment, I understood that I was probably about to start talking to them quite a bit.
I called Cernovich. He didn’t gloat. “Today must be strange for you, huh?” he said.
It was the first time we’d talked since my piece about him was published.* The day the piece came out, he had tweeted about it several times, disclosing, among other things, his grudging respect for The New Yorker’s fact-checking process. (“Was on the phone for over an hour, multiple e-mails. They got biases/agenda, but not a hoax.”) He’d also written a piece about my piece. “There’s some snark in the article, but that’s the East Coast style,” he wrote on Danger & Play. “I go hard and have no issue with others doing the same.” Privately, he’d sent me an email with the subject heading “Meta post script,” to show me how much traffic he was driving to my piece through Twitter and “all other channels.”
We conducted our postmortem interview. “This election was a contest between PC culture and free-speech culture,” he said. “Most people know what it’s like for some smug, elite asshole to tell them, ‘You can’t say that, it’s racist, it’s bad.’ Well, a vote for Trump meant, ‘Fuck you, you don’t get to tell me what to say.’”
When the interview was over, Cernovich addressed me personally: “How’re you holding up, man?” It was a trivial gesture, maybe even an insulting one, given how much he’d done to bring us to this moment; to my surprise, though, I couldn’t help but find it almost touching.
“I’m fine,” I said. It was my first time as a reporter lying to a subject. I said a hurried good-bye and hung up the phone. I was willing to suffer any number of indignities for the sake of my work, but there was no way I was going to cry in front of Mike Cernovich.
* * *
—
I wrote the web piece. What else was I supposed to do? “One of the political-science clichés that hasn’t been rendered obsolete by this election is that of the Overton window,” I wrote. The alt-right had bent the window beyond recognition; their social media activism had “made it possible—made it conceivable—for Trump to be elected.”
I used Cernovich’s “smug, elite asshole” quote in my piece. It shouldn’t have mattered, in the scheme of things, but I cringed a bit when I clicked on the published version and saw that the copy desk, in accordance with New Yorker style, had changed “elite” to “élite.”
INTERLUDE
Trust Nothing
For a long time—for a period that predated the tech boom of the 1990s and that ended, or started to end, on November 8, 2016—the Big Swinging Brains agreed on a set of commonsense assumptions. The best stuff spreads. The cream rises to the top. New technologies will disrupt old hierarchies, and this disruption will ultimately redound to the good. This dogma was passed on to the inventors of social media, who swiftly inherited the earth. Techno-utopianism was the lingua franca of Silicon Valley. Anyone who didn’t learn it overtly learned it by osmosis. To defy it was to go voluntarily into a madhouse—was also, more practically, to alienate potential investors.
In June 2016, Andrew Bosworth, a longtime friend of Mark Zuckerberg’s and one of the top engineers at Facebook, wrote an internal memo about the prime directive underlying Facebook’s aggressive growth strategy. “We connect people,” Bosworth wrote. “Period.” He acknowledged that users could, and often did, exploit the platform’s openness in calamitous ways. “Maybe it costs a life by exposing someone to bullies,” Bosworth wrote. “Maybe someone dies in a terrorist attack coordinated on our tools. And still we connect people. The ugly truth is that we believe in connecting people so deeply that anything that allows us to connect more people more often is *de facto* good.” This was close to a textbook definition of Machiavellian techno-utopianism. And yet, at the time, it was seen as concordant with Silicon Valley’s dominant moral vocabulary—provocative, but not unthinkable.
Two days after Trump won, Mark Zuckerberg was interviewed onstage at a tech conference. “The idea that fake news on Facebook, of which it’s a very small amount of the content, influenced the election in any way, I think, is a pretty crazy idea,” he said. “Voters make decisions based on their lived experience.” This was a pretty crazy idea, and Zuckerberg spent the next two years attempting to walk it back.
Obviously, what people see on social media affects their “lived experience.” We know this, in part, because Facebook has done research on it. In 2012, without notice or permission, the company tweaked the feeds of nearly seven hundred thousand of its users, showing one group more “positive emotional content” and the other more “negative emotional content.” Two years later, Facebook’s researchers divulged the experiment and published the results in a scientific journal. The finding was clear: people with happier feeds seemed to become happier, and vice versa. The study’s authors called the phenomenon “massive-scale emotional contagion.” In the ensuing years, social media continued to grow in size and influence, putting ever more sophisticated tools in the hands of advertisers, spies, politicians, and propagandists. Most people went on acting as if none of this was a problem—as if users would soon build up an immunity to massive-scale contagion, or that benign beliefs would be contagious but malignant beliefs would not be. It was comforting to imagine this, but there was no good reason to believe it.
* * *
—
“We built Reddit around the principle of, ‘No editors. The people are the editors,’” Steve Huffman said. “That was the Y Combinator ethos, and it became our ethos. It wasn’t even remarkable at the time—just sort of assumed.” In the early days, Huffman and Ohanian sold T-shirts bearing one of their company’s slogans: “Freedom from the press.” Like all disrupters, they believed in unfiltered speech, the more of it the better. They didn’t give much thought to what might go wrong.
Over time, each subreddit became a community with its own distinct culture. By the end of 2014, there were more than half a million subreddits: r/Science, r/MaleFashionAdvice, r/Trees (for marijuana enthusiasts), r/MarijuanaEnthusiasts (for tree enthusiasts), r/MildlyInteresting (“for photos that are, you know, mildly interesting”). Each subreddit was run by volunteer moderators—frequent posters who understood the vibe that the community was trying to achieve, and who set guidelines to keep it from going too far astray. Reddit didn’t have nearly enough employees to monitor every part of its site. (Investors surely appreciated the company’s low-touch, decentralized model, which allowed it to rack up a huge amount of traffic with a relatively tiny payroll.) Unless they were inundated with reports of illegal activity, Reddit’s staff usually let the volunteer moderators enforce their own rules, or fail to enforce them.
The moderators could set incentives to promote wholesomeness, or novelty, or perversity—whatever they wanted, pretty much. On r/Aww, “a place for really cute pictures and videos,” there were rules to keep things cute (“No NSFW content,” “No ‘sad’ content,” “No harassment”). On r/ChangeMyView, one of the few corners of the internet where truly constructive debate flourished, moderators promised to take down every “rude/hostile comment” and “bad faith accusation.” But there were thousands of subreddits where the rules were more lax, and many of those communities turned toxic. “All sorts of weird things can happen online,” Huffman said. “Imagine I post a joke where the point is to be offensive—like, to imply, ‘This is something that a racist person would say’—but you misread the context and think, ‘Yeah, that racist guy has a good point.’” He thought that this dynamic could explain a lot of otherwise inexplicable internet behavior. Often, he said, “Someone keeps pushing a joke or a meme to see how far they can take it, and the answer turns out to be: pretty fucking far.”
In 2011, one popular subreddit—not in the top hundred, but big enough that the site’s administrators were well aware of it—was called r/Jailbait. It was devoted to sexually suggestive photos of young-looking women. This was profoundly creepy, but probably not illegal—its moderators swore that all the women in the photos were eighteen or older—and Reddit allowed the community to keep growing.
That September, Anderson Cooper described r/Jailbait on CNN. “It’s pretty amazing that a big corporation would have something like this, which reflects badly on it,” he said. Traffic to r/Jailbait quadrupled overnight. Later, after someone on the subreddit apparently shared a nude photo of a fourteen-year-old girl, the community was banned. And yet its founder, an infamous troll who went by Violentacrez, was allowed to stay on Reddit, as were some four hundred other subreddits he’d created—r/Jewmerica, r/ChokeABitch, and worse.
In 2012, a Gawker journalist revealed Violentacrez’s identity. He was Michael Brutsch, a forty-nine-year-old computer programmer living with his wife in a suburb of Dallas. A CNN reporter, interviewing Brutsch in Texas, asked him why he’d wrought so much destruction online. “Well, honestly,” Brutsch responded, “the biggest thrill I got was those meaningless internet points.”
* * *
—
Reddit’s CEO at the time was Yishan Wong, an engineer who had worked at PayPal and Facebook. In an internal memo to his staff, he implied that he’d banned r/Jailbait reluctantly, and only because it had violated U.S. law. “We stand for free speech,” he wrote. “We will not ban legal content even if we find it odious or if we personally condemn it.” Reddit’s goal, he continued, was to “become a universal platform for human discourse”; therefore, “it would not do if, in our youth, we decided to censor things simply because they were distasteful.” This implied a corollary question, although Wong didn’t raise it, perhaps because it didn’t occur to him: If a universal platform for human discourse were to be overrun with “jailbait,” grotesque misogyny, and Nazi propaganda, how would this affect human discourse?
Free-speech absolutism had been so central to Reddit’s ethos for so long that many redditors couldn’t let it go. Wong’s successor as CEO was Ellen Pao, a former venture capitalist. Early in her tenure, Reddit announced a crackdown on involuntary pornography: if you found a compromising photo of yourself circulating on the platform without your consent, you could report it and the company would remove it. This seemed like a straightforward business decision; but many redditors, constitutionally averse to gatekeeping of any kind, treated it as the first in an inevitable parade of horrors. “This rule is stupid and suppresses our rights,” wrote a redditor with the handle penisfuckermcgee.
A few months later, Reddit banned five of its most egregious communities, including r/FatPeopleHate and r/ShitNiggersSay. Again, many redditors were apoplectic (“We may as well take a one way ticket to North Korea”). Almost every day, abusive redditors called Pao a tyrant, an “Asian slut,” or worse. She resigned in July 2015. “The Internet started as a bastion for free expression,” she wrote in The Washington Post. “But that balancing act is getting harder. The trolls are winning.”*
In July 2015, six years after leaving Reddit, Steve Huffman returned as CEO. He’d started Reddit in the hope of disrupting the gatekeepers, or perhaps eliminating gatekeepers altogether. Now, reluctantly but inescapably, he’d become a gatekeeper himself. He still preferred a laissez-faire approach to content moderation, all things being equal, but his stance had grown less absolute over time. It’s one thing to be a civil libertarian in theory; it’s another thing to start a warehouse party, watch it devolve into feral anarchy, and do nothing to clean it up.
