Antisocial, page 41
“Michael, I’ve been meaning to ask you about this Cathy O’Brien woman,” Mike’s mother said. “Is it true what she talks about?”
“I don’t know who that is, Mom, but it’s probably bullshit,” Mike said.
“The government put her under mind control, and the Clintons raped her when she was a child.”
“Bill and Hillary raped her?”
“That’s what she says.”
“Geez, Mom, where do you even find this stuff?”
“It’s all over the internet, Michael!”
Mike’s father watched this exchange with an equanimous smile, his arms folded on the table. Then, without segue, he turned to me. “I know you probably think I’m crazy,” he said. “I believe in Noah’s Ark, and I believe carbon isn’t gonna ruin the climate, and I believe we’ve never been to the moon—we’d be there if we’d been there. That’s just what I believe. Now that don’t make it true, but I can still believe it, right?” He looked around the table. “This could all be a dream, for all I know,” he continued. “But the food tastes good. We’re together. Michael brought his baby home for a visit. We could be slaves in North Korea, or worms sitting on a log, but we’re here instead.” He took a bite of pizza, his blue eyes sparkling.
Mike wasn’t listening; he was distracted by a video on his phone. “This is savage, dude,” he said. “This is actually uncomfortable to watch.” It was a video on the Cernovich Media Facebook page, which was managed by two employees in Florida and Washington State. “We split the profits, and I let them post whatever they want as long as the numbers are good,” he said. “I don’t even see what’s on there unless people start texting me about it, like now.” Hillary Clinton had just published a memoir about the 2016 campaign, and she was promoting it with a cross-country book tour. Laura Loomer was bird-dogging Clinton, selling the resulting footage to Cernovich Media. Tonight, while Clinton signed books in Brooklyn, her top aide, Huma Abedin, walked outside and immediately got #Loomered.
“When will you divorce Anthony Weiner?” Loomer, filming, shouted at Abedin. “Why are you protecting a man who was sexting underage girls?” Abedin kept walking, poker-faced, trying to ignore Loomer, who was just inches away from her on the narrow sidewalk.
“This is brutal,” Cernovich said. “She has no security or anything. I feel awful for her.” He meant Abedin. “But this is the future of media, bro, for better or worse. Everyone will be in everyone’s face like this.” His tone was world weary, almost forlorn, as if he were merely an objective spectator, not a media entrepreneur choosing to disseminate this footage for profit.
As we left the restaurant, Mike’s father shook my hand and grinned affably. “You can say I’m crazy in your book if you want to,” he said. “It don’t matter to me. Say what you believe. I’m not gonna read it anyway.”
* * *
—
Back when Milo Yiannopoulos was still too big to ignore, I emailed him to ask about an event he was putting together at the University of California, Berkeley. The event seemed to be falling apart, and I wanted to know whether he still planned to make the trip. “I’d be happy to consider having you embedded with us,” he responded, although I hadn’t suggested it. I repeated my question. He refused to answer it, and he wouldn’t let anyone on his staff answer it, either. Yiannopoulos had about a dozen employees, but when it came to any important task he trusted only himself. And no task was as important to him as media relations.
“Turns out I’ll be in NYC for 24 hours,” he wrote. “Why don’t we meet in person instead?”
We had breakfast at the Trump Soho Hotel. He wore the designer sunglasses of a lesser Kardashian, the bleached and artfully tousled hairdo of a K-pop star, and an outfit that landed somewhere between bouncer at a Reno pool party and admiral in the Franco-Prussian War. “I swear by Mariah Carey, these Berkeley administrators are being such cunts,” he said as he sat down. He whistled involuntarily when he talked, the result of a new and ill-fitting set of prosthetic teeth.
He told me that, while he was staying at the Trump Soho, he was also paying for a room at the Trump International Hotel, in D.C., in case he needed to schedule any last-minute meetings near the White House. At the time, Yiannopoulos’s bills were being paid by Robert Mercer, the far-right billionaire who had also been the biggest donor both to the Trump campaign and to Breitbart. Yiannopoulos constantly flaunted his unearned wealth on Instagram: Louis Vuitton luggage, Balmain boots, Perrier-Jouët champagne. “I’m probably being kicked off another social platform now, as we speak,” he said. “This is what it means to be dangerous, darling. This is how the system treats you. But we persevere, we persevere.”
I ordered. Yiannopoulos, texting, said, “I’ll have whatever he’s having, plus a side of bacon.”
The server brought us coffee, and I asked for soy milk on the side.
Yiannopoulos looked up. “You know, don’t you,” he said, “that the edgelords have coined a new term for geeky, bespectacled New York journalists who drink soy milk?” I did, and we said it in unison: “Soy boy.” Then Yiannopoulos picked up his coffee and sipped it through a straw.
“Just to be clear,” I said, “you’re using a straw to drink hot coffee, and you’re the one making fun of me?”
“These teeth were fucking expensive, I’m not staining them,” he said. “Besides, I’m fabulous, I do what I want.”
Yiannopoulos’s lifestyle was growing less fabulous by the day. He had risen to fame as the tech editor of Breitbart, but, after a video surfaced in which he made light of pederasty, he was pressured to leave Breitbart. A few months later, BuzzFeed published private emails revealing Yiannopoulos’s extensive flirtation with neo-Nazism, and Robert Mercer publicly disavowed him as well. Yiannopoulos was soon banned from Venmo and PayPal; he’d sold a book proposal to Simon & Schuster, but the book’s publication was later canceled;* he dissolved Milo Entertainment Inc. and laid off the staff. In late 2018, millions of dollars in debt, Yiannopoulos opened a Patreon account, attempting to crowdfund his “magnificent 2019 comeback.” The following day, he was banned from Patreon. A few months later, “on character grounds,” he was banned from the country of Australia.
* * *
—
After Charlottesville, many alt-right organizations were banished from most major social networks. Mike Enoch kept trying to open new Twitter accounts, and the company kept deleting them. A few Proud Boys were filmed beating up Antifa protesters in New York; after footage of the incident went viral, Gavin McInnes was banned from Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and Amazon. Laura Loomer was forbidden from using Lyft and Uber after complaining about an “Islamic immigrant driver”; after she was banned from Twitter for a different Islamophobic outburst, she handcuffed herself to the front door of the company’s New York headquarters, creating yet another cringeworthy video. Alex Jones was banned from all major platforms, decimating his revenue stream and forcing him to crash congressional hearings to get his name back in the headlines.
The Deplorables held fast to the dogma of free-speech absolutism, accusing tech executives of draconian censorship whenever they made a serious attempt to moderate the content on their networks. The prevailing sentiment among the Deplorables seemed to be that, short of yelling fire in a crowded theater, anyone should be able to say anything in any venue. But thinking before you speak is not repression, and censure is not censorship. The Constitution guarantees that Congress shall make no law abridging freedom of speech; it does not guarantee anyone’s right to threaten strangers in the public square, or to shout obscenities on TV, or to use a social media platform to agitate for the physical removal of your fellow citizens, or to promote racist ideas without being made to feel like a racist.
In the end, the Deplorables were not able to widen the Overton window so drastically that they could fit inside it. They did, however, score some even larger victories. They helped propel their man into the presidency. They helped normalize flagrant mendacity and open racism. In many circles—circles that currently extend as far as the White House—jocular contempt for women has been brought back into fashion, as have overt Islamophobia, raw nativism, and the theory of human biodiversity. As the late philosopher Richard Rorty presciently noted, the academic left spent decades trying to make nativism and bigotry unacceptable. But acceptability is merely a social norm, and, according to some anonymous accounts on social media, academic leftists are nothing more than cultural-Marxist traitors anyway.
The American popular vocabulary is in a period of deep dysfunction. Jordan Peterson—by some measures, the most popular public intellectual of this decade*—is not a white supremacist, but his rhetoric on the subject can be disturbingly fuzzy. He has been asked many times whether he is alt-right, and his standard answer is that he isn’t—not because the delusion of white superiority is a deep and abiding scourge that must be uprooted in order to save Western civilization from itself, but simply because “identity politics” is misguided, both when the left does it and when the right does it.* This is the sort of false equivalence that would have been staggering just a few years ago. Now it barely registers.
On the most popular cable-news network in the country, prime-time hosts often deliver racist messages that hardly qualify as dog whistles, so clear are they even to a casual listener. Questions that have rightly been considered closed for decades are now treated as open once again. “White nationalist, white supremacist, Western civilization—how did that language become offensive?” Steve King, a congressman from Iowa, said in an interview with The New York Times in January 2019. At some point, the broken American vocabulary will be replaced by a new one. But whatever comes next will bear the scars of the current disruption.
“The world does not speak,” Richard Rorty wrote. “Only we do.” If Rorty is right that a transition to a new moral vocabulary is analogous to a paradigm shift in science, then we could be in for a rough few years. Before Copernicus, most Europeans believed that the sun revolved around the Earth. After Copernicus, most Europeans came to believe the opposite. But the change was neither sudden nor tidy; people didn’t learn of the new astronomical findings in 1543 and accept them all at once. “Rather,” Rorty wrote, “after a hundred years of inconclusive muddle, the Europeans found themselves speaking in a way which took these interlocked theses for granted.” When Rorty made this argument, he was drawing on the philosopher Thomas Kuhn, who invented the concept of the paradigm shift. Kuhn argued that revolutions in human thought progress through five stages. It’s no accident that the word Kuhn used for the inconclusive-muddle stage—a stage that can last for decades, even centuries—was “crisis.”*
To change how we talk is to change who we are. More and more every day, how we talk is a function of how we talk on the internet. The bigoted propagandists of the alt-right are wrong about almost everything, but they are correct about this much: the United States of America was founded by white men, for white men. The problem with the bigots is not that they acknowledge this aspect of the country’s history; the problem is that they cling to it, doing their utmost to revive the horrors of the past, instead of taking up the more difficult task of piecing together the future. The bigots are not destined to win. Nor are they destined to lose. The ending is not yet written. The blithely optimistic view—the view that still infuses far too many op-eds and Silicon Valley pitch meetings and political stump speeches—is that the basic good sense of the American people will prevail, that the good stuff will spread, that if we just hold fast we will surely end up in the right place. But the vehicle doesn’t drive itself. Getting to the right place takes work. Copernicus was not the first astronomer to suggest that the Earth revolved around the sun. Aristarchus of Samos proposed the same idea in the third century B.C., but Aristotle convinced everyone that the idea was wrong. Overcoming Aristotle’s mistake took almost two thousand years, and even then it required a struggle.
The United States was founded on lofty theoretical principles and a reality of brutal conquest. The country went to war with itself over the question of whether all of its residents deserved to be treated as people, and then, long after the war ended, continued to answer that question in the negative. As immigration has proliferated in recent decades, so has a tide of xenophobia. The ideal of a true multiethnic democracy—a society rooted in pluralism and dignity and meaningful, lasting equality—is a noble and necessary goal, one that this country has never come close to reaching. “If we,” James Baldwin wrote, “do not falter in our duty now, we may be able, handful that we are, to end the racial nightmare, and achieve our country, and change the history of the world.” We must achieve our country; we will not be forgiven if we fail; and yet our success is hardly guaranteed. True multiethnic democracies are historically rare. They have tended to balkanize, or to descend into sustained conflict. If our union is to succeed at drawing itself closer to perfection, then we will first need a new set of questions, a new way of talking, a new way of thinking—a new moral, social, and political vocabulary.
Maybe one day Americans will find themselves speaking and acting in a way that takes real justice and solidarity for granted. Maybe. But the sun did not reach into the brains of Renaissance Europeans to make them accept the scientific truth of planetary motion, and the universe will not reach into our brains now to make us accept the moral truth of equality. The arc of history may bend in that direction, but the arc of history is not bent inexorably or automatically. It does not bend itself. We bend it.
Epilogue
It has become a tradition for big tech companies to release elaborate, self-referential jokes every April Fools’ Day. The point is to generate some free publicity, to make the company seem quirky and relatable; but it can also have the opposite effect, especially when the premise of the joke is Silicon Valley’s unprecedented power. A few years ago, Twitter announced that it would start charging for vowels. More recently, Amazon revealed voice-recognition software that could take commands from pets, and Google shared a mock-up of its new data-storage center on Mars. The companies hadn’t actually commissioned any of these projects, but they probably could, one day, if they wanted to. Get it?
In 2017, instead of a parody announcement, Reddit unveiled a genuine social experiment. It was called r/Place, and it was a blank square, a thousand pixels by a thousand pixels. In the beginning, all million pixels were white. Once it started, any Reddit user could change a single pixel, anywhere on the grid, to one of sixteen colors. The only restriction was speed: the algorithm allowed each redditor to alter just one pixel every five minutes. “That way, no one person can take over—it’s too slow,” Josh Wardle, the Reddit product manager in charge of r/Place, explained. “In order to do anything at scale, they’re gonna have to cooperate.”
The experiment had been live for about twenty minutes when I found Wardle in the common area, huddled over his laptop, frantically refreshing dozens of tabs. So far, the square was mostly blank, with a few stray dots blinking in and out of existence. But redditors were making plans and, in true Reddit fashion, clinging to those plans with cultish intensity. A new subreddit, r/TheBlueCorner, was conspiring to turn the whole square blue; r/RedCorner was vowing to make it red; already, they were on a war footing. Other groups planned elaborate messages, fractal patterns, and references to various memes. A broad coalition—leftists, Trump supporters, patriotic libertarians, prepolitical teenagers—decided to draw an American flag in the center of the square. They congregated at r/American FlaginPlace, where they hashed out the exact dimensions of the stars and stripes, and shared strategies for repelling potential invaders. Meanwhile, a group of nihilists at r/TheBlackVoid prepared to blot out whatever the other groups created. Some people just want to watch the world burn.
Wardle went to great lengths to show me that Place was a pure democracy—the algorithm was designed so that, once it went live, all he could do was watch, along with everyone else. Now, toggling compulsively from tab to tab, he seemed nervous. “The idea was ‘Let’s put up a very simple microcosm of the internet and just see what happens,’” he said. “Reddit itself is not the most complex idea. It’s sort of a blank canvas. The community takes that and does all sorts of creative things with it.”
“And some terrible things,” I said.
“I’m pretty confident,” he said. He paused. “I’d be lying if I said I was a hundred percent confident.” Already, one of the top comments on Place read, “I give this an hour until swastikas.” One of Wardle’s colleagues told me, “That was what kept Josh up at night. Before this went live, he was literally calculating, ‘OK, it takes a minimum of seventeen pixels to make a swastika—what if we open this up to the world, and the headline the next day is “Reddit: A Place to Draw Swastikas on the Internet”?’”
The upper-left corner turned a choppy, flickering purple as the “Blue Empire” and the “Red Empire” battled for dominance. A graffiti artist, or artists, wrote “9/11 was an inside job”; a few minutes later, the “was” turned into “wasn’t,” and the “an” became “anime.” Elsewhere, “Dick butt” became “Dick butter,” then “Dick buffet”; “Kill me” became “Kill men,” then the words disappeared entirely. And then the swastikas arrived—just a few of them, but enough to make Wardle raise the hood of his sweatshirt, retreat into an empty conference room, and shut the door, looking pallid.
In his office, Huffman met with Chris Slowe, Reddit’s first employee, who is now the chief technical officer.
“How is Place going?” Huffman asked.
“Pretty much as expected,” Slowe said. “A lot of memes, some Pokémon, and a barrage of dicks.”
“If there’s ever a Reddit musical, that wouldn’t be a bad title,” Huffman said.
