Category: Digital Culture

Too Much Democracy Can Kill Democracy: Social Media as a WMD

democracy

It may be true that “democracy dies in darkness,” but it can also be wiped out in blinding light. If Donald Trump is reelected, it will have been 20 years after the launch of Facebook and 18 years after the launch of Twitter—less than one generation for the “greatest invention for democracy” to be the proximate cause of the death of democracy.

When I started writing this blog in 2012, the 5th of November was celebrated by internet defenders who seemed to think that Guy Fawkes of the English Powder Plot of 1605 was a rebel and a hero. This fallacy was based on conflating history with the graphic novel and movie V for Vendetta, whose tyranny-fighting protagonist wears a “Guy Fawkes” mask, which became the symbol of hackers calling themselves Anonymous. Then, by extension, the mask became a symbol of advocating John Perry Barlow’s idealistic notion of the morally superior, purely democratic internet against the anachronistic laws of “weary” republics.

Of course, the real Guido Fawkes had more in common with the January 6th insurrectionists than any champions of democracy. The intent of the Powder Plot, led by Robert Catesby, was to restore the authority of the Catholic Church, which would have killed the nascent progress of republicanism in England. In this light, the plot was one of many forebears to American Christian nationalists, eager to have Trump blow up the secular administrative state the same way Fawkes & Friends were supposed to blow up Parliament and the Protestant monarch in one move.

As often happens in history, the catastrophe of the Powder Plot was averted by individuals listening to their own better angels. Uncomfortable with killing any Catholic members of Parliament, the conspirators sent an anonymous letter to Lord Monteagle, who dutifully reported the plan. Thus, Fawkes was found in the cellar waiting for the signal to light the 36 barrels of gunpowder, which would have indeed blasted all of Parliament, King James I, and the king’s family into the River Thames. How this conflagration might have altered the course of American history—and, therefore, democracy in general, is impossible to know, but it is doubtful that the Puritan adventure beginning in 1620 would have transpired in the same way, if it happened at all.[1]

In contrast to gunpowder, social media is an insidious weapon that erodes the foundations of republicanism from the virtual cellar occupied by our lesser angels—steadily degrading not just truth, but the value of truth.[2] This was not every platform founder’s intent, of course. Jack Dorsey appears to have had a late-stage realization of the damage Twitter could cause, but it is not at all surprising that under the control of Elon Musk, the rebranded X does not even pretend to “beg forgiveness” for its manipulations of reality.

The architects of the American Constitution and leaders of the Federalist cause understood that direct democracy was synonymous with chaos. When they used the word democracy, it was almost pejorative, referring to a heedless mob that might swallow the pursuit of “ordered justice.” In short (and with the possible exception of Jefferson), they recognized that too much democracy would be fatal to sustainable democracy, but this is exactly what social media has fostered—a form of direct democracy undermining a collaborative understanding of the American experiment.

Even if Trump loses, the project of restoring the cultural foundations of the American Republic will be far from over. As author and journalist Sebastian Junger said at a conference I recently attended, the project is generational—one that must begin now to benefit our grandchildren. Hosted by the Hannah Arendt Center (HAC) at Bard College, Junger was one of several speakers who offered a critique of the Left from within the Left—exemplifying the kind of discussion I believe is essential, but which social media makes nearly impossible. In fact, Junger specifically blasted “the phones,” focusing primarily on their addictive qualities, but clearly in regard to platforms creating and exacerbating political divisions.

That discussion on the Left will only happen if Trump loses. If he wins, chaos will ensue followed by reactions to that chaos, and it will be hard not to shrug at, or even endorse, extreme reactions. After all, Trump promises violence and fascism, which will spark violent responses that are both natural and justified. But if that nightmare is not our fate, then the project of saving democracy from latent authoritarianism will require the work of Liberals and Conservatives, who must confront the fact that social media has been the indispensable catalyst in reshaping a concept of America that would tolerate, let alone almost elect, a manifestly dangerous individual to be President.

Sustaining any republic requires policy that fosters reasoned compromise behind the theater of politics, but thanks to the free soapboxes in every citizen’s hand, all policy is now political, and all politics are now performative. Social media softened the ground to create the ideal landscape for a populist charlatan to rise to power despite (or even because of) his open hostility for the Constitutional order. But Trump’s supporters are not alone in abandoning that faith.

Even before the revelations of 2016 that data gathered from modest online activity could be weaponized to engineer political outcomes around the world, it was clear that the narcissism inherent to using social platforms provoked acute, often poorly articulated, outrage—including responses to rumor and conspiracy with no foundation in fact. That folly is not unique to any ideology or political party because it is a psychological relationship to the medium itself that we are far from resolving.

Then, with the addition of powerful actors who control the data and algorithms, a significant, albeit hard to measure, number of world-shaping events have been triggered by what amounts to online pranks. Even the most ambitious and most powerful democracy ever invented has been punked to the edge of extinction by the dark arts of internet trolls. All those tech boosters who claimed there was a wall of separation between adolescent cyberspace and adult real life were simply wrong.

Social Media Platforms Are Narcissism Machines

By coincidence, I recently met one of the student fellows at HAC, who is visiting Bard from Ukraine and studying human rights. Noting that there will not be another election in her country unless and until they win the war with Russia, she referred to a frustration with her contemporaries, who as young Americans, do not intend to vote this week. I asked if those students offered reasons for their reluctance, and she told me the two main explanations that came to mind were 1) that the outcome didn’t really matter; or 2) that if the candidate they vote for “let’s them down,” they will feel guilty about having cast the vote.

The first sentiment that voting doesn’t matter is a familiar cynicism of youth. But what the second sentiment implies is a heightened degree of narcissism that I believe is fair to associate with the digital-native generations. The notion that any President could be perfect in the administration of that unfathomable office suggests first, a childlike innocence about human beings and the complexly dangerous world we occupy; and second, an arrogance that one’s own idea of “perfection” is well founded. This is an astoundingly naive way to evaluate the mere mortals we might elect to be President of the United States, though it is consistent with the kind of “purity-test” mentality that shapes the rhetoric of the digital-native generations.

The phenomenon is observable in real-time because social platforms are venues where political allies become irreconcilable antagonists the moment a member of the tribe dares to criticize the tribe’s thinking or conduct. The critic becomes the apostate, earning herself at least a virtual, if not a literal, stoning. Examples abound, but in this moment, I am thinking specifically of progressive activist Brianna Wu, who has the integrity to criticize the extremism, antisemitism, and ahistorical narratives animating many anti-Israel protestors and, consequently, is bombarded by personal attacks and death threats from people who consider themselves liberal or “progressive.”

Those responses, like many of the protests themselves, are narcissistic and performative. The American Liberal repeating the mantra “settler colonialism” is barely distinguishable from the Conservative who claims that Christianity is under attack in the U.S. There is no intellectual, let alone moral, difference between the Right’s generic attacks on DEI and the Left’s attacks on Jews in academia and in their private lives. But again, the common denominator is social media, designed and managed to stoke, promote, and reward righteous outrage, not discourse.

Unfortunately, social media draws everyone into its gutter. While I believe that a figure like Trump could never have obtained political power without the insane environment of these platforms, even rational opposition cannot afford to cede the alligator pit as a battlefield. Although Harris, other candidates, and brave Conservative apostates do not engage in the outlandish, incoherent, and fascistic messaging exhibited by Trump, merely fighting fire with fire on social platforms demands a juvenile and sad derivative of the discourse that wrote the nation into existence. It is a meager dividend from our investment in the “greatest tool for democracy ever invented.”

Waiting to find out whether Trump will be reelected is like waiting to learn whether the nation has Stage IV cancer. Everything is on hold while millions of Americans ask the same question, albeit from different perspectives:  are we at the brink of civil war? In this regard, there are not two sides. Specific policies notwithstanding, Harris means a continuation of the American experiment and the possibility that we can at least try to have difficult conversations on both the Left and Right. Trump means chaos and who the hell knows what comes next? If we manage to dodge the bullet, maybe, just maybe, we can admit that social media was the gun that fired it.

[1] Civil unrest would likely have ensued, but if Rome were indeed reinstated, it’s entirely possible that anti-Catholics like John Winthrop would have been executed rather than allowed to establish New England.

[2] It is not only Trumpians who are immune to counterfactuals in their world view, and although social media does not cause this human frailty, it does exacerbate it.

Image: N. Currier. (1846) Destruction of tea at Boston Harbor. , 1846. [New York: N. Currier] [Photograph] Retrieved from the Library of Congress, https://www.loc.gov/item/91795889/.

Did Big Tech Light the Dumpster Fire?

Big Tech

It is unoriginal to refer to Donald Trump as a useful idiot, but the question as to whose idiot invokes both plausible and fantastical theories combined with sundry lampoons on social media. That Trump is Putin’s lapdog, for example, remains a popular theme, but Gil Duran, writing for The New Republic, makes a solid case that Trumpism, and specifically the reinvention of J.D. Vance, is the playbook of Silicon Valley’s billionaire ideologues who avowedly hate democracy.

There’s a video clip I’ve scrolled by a few times recently in which Pete Buttigieg tells Bill Mahr’s audience that Silicon Valley’s pivot toward Trump is explained by the simple fact that “These are very rich men, and historically the Republican party benefits very rich men.” But as much as I admire Sec. Buttigieg’s intellect and style, I think Duran is closer to the mark when he describes men like Peter Thiel and Elon Musk as having plenty of money but now want all the power their money can buy. And not the kind of old-school power that merely influences policy to make them more money. Instead, the ambition of these tech oligarchs is ideological, arrogant, nutty, and possibly more dangerous than the hardline religious right with its fantasies of an American Christian theocracy.

“I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible….Since 1920, the vast increase in welfare beneficiaries and the extension of the franchise to women — two constituencies that are notoriously tough for libertarians — have rendered the notion of ‘capitalist democracy’ into an oxymoron.” – Peter Thiel, CATO Institute 2009 –

Duran, in his article published on July 22, describes the relationship between Thiel, Vance, and the “house philosopher” of Thiel’s inner circle, a software engineer and apparent kook named Curtis Yarvin. Yarvin advocates a techno-feudalist future, which Duran describes thus:

Among other things, it openly promotes dictatorships as superior to democracies and views nations like the United States as outdated software systems. Yarvin seeks to reengineer governments by breaking them up into smaller entities called “patchworks,” which would be controlled by tech corporations.

It’s the stuff of dystopian sci-fi movies and should be dismissed as raving but for the fact that Thiel et al. take this shit seriously—and Thiel is the money and force behind the metamorphosis of JD Vance from ordinary Republican into the automaton Veep nominee parroting “ideas” that are blatantly unconstitutional. In this light, then, should we read Vance’s outlandish, Trump-like provocations as part of the Pay Pal Mafia’s ground-softening campaign? Because if one sincerely believes in a plan to reengineer society into a corporatized “patchwork” as described above, one must first convince some of the population to get comfortable with creeping authoritarianism. Or perhaps it is sufficient to simply make enough people uncomfortable with republicanism—a disorder that I maintain social media has fostered across the political spectrum.

In 2012, writing about the technological singularity, I asked, “What if what’s really happening is that technologists with the power to design these life-altering systems have intellectually and spiritually moved beyond the idea that the human individual has much, if any, value?  In this case, it would be obvious that the rights of an artist, for example, would indeed look like a trifling glitch in the design that ought to be routed around like a bad line of code. After all, what right has the individual to assert his uniqueness in the march toward utopia?”

Let’s return to 2011/12, when Democrat, Republican, and Independent alike generally believed that social media companies, proclaiming themselves guardians of the speech and press rights, had provided the antidote to all corporate and government corruption. Google et al. preached the gospel that the “free flow of information” online would break the major media corporations’ “monopoly” control of news and cultural “content.” This populist notion fueled the anti-copyright/pro-piracy agenda, which should not be read as a story about copyright per se because the subtext of the gospel was that individuals with their pesky rights in their own work products were not going to stand in the way of a new world order. Silicon Valley wasn’t saying this overtly of course. On the surface, the message was egalitarian—a moral mandate to disrupt (i.e., “democratize”) everything, and this is still a key talking point in the PR about the alleged importance of Gen AI.

I have said it over and over—and I’ll say it until the internet breaks:  the major significance of Silicon Valley’s deceptions in beating back the anti-piracy bills SOPA/PIPA in early 2012 was that it signaled a new insidious form of corporate manipulation of American politics. And at Google scale. The industry and its acolytes at the EFF et al. weaponized the rhetoric of “democracy” (namely the speech right), not simply to lie about bipartisan legislation, but to assert the primacy of online platforms over the traditional institutions of government. The message was, “YOU did it! YOU saved the internet!” Of course it was all bullshit. And at Google scale.

We may ridicule Trumpians today for “doing their own research” to support wild conspiracy theories about vaccines etc., but let’s not forget that time when “liberals” sported or cheered for the “Guy Fawkes” mask from V for Vendetta as if that ahistorical symbolism somehow represented a new tech-enabled form of “speaking truth to power.” In reality, of course, all that “hacktivism” was simultaneously eroding faith in real participation in government while feeding Big Tech the data it needed to arrogate political power to its private club of Ayn Rand Übermenschen.

Recognition that social platforms were toxic, particularly after the election in 2016 of a president who lies with every word, led to a fleeting moment of navel-gazing  dubbed the “techlash.” Whistleblowers and Silicon Valley defectors came forward to affirm that social media induced harms were not a bug but a feature. “Profit over safety” was the general message Frances Haugen brought to Congress about Meta, and lest we forget, Mark Zuckerberg’s only answer was that Meta’s investments in “artificial intelligence” would fix everything.

I get that this begins to sound like conspiracy theory itself but for the fact that, as Duran reports in his extensive coverage, individuals like Thiel, Musk, Ray Kurzweil et al. have unwaveringly advocated strange and dystopian “visions” for the future of humanity. As this story in the Washington Spectator describes…

Dr. Timnit Gebru, a prominent AI researcher fired from Google in 2020 for speaking up against what she perceived as the company’s lack of proper ethical guardrails, has partnered with other researchers and philosophers to coin the (somewhat unwieldy) acronym “TESCREAL” to describe the overlapping emergent belief systems that characterize the contrarian, AI-centric worldviews challenging progressivism. It stands for: Transhumanism, Extropianism, Singularitarianism, Cosmism, Rationalism, Effective Altruism, and Longtermism.

Speaking as a secularist with a disdain for magical or spiritual thinking that borders on hostility, I admit to harboring an innate distrust of all isms. But uber-wealthy, smug tech-lord isms are acutely concerning because those are the beliefs of men who own or control the major modes of communication, which transform even criticism like this post or one of Duran’s articles into data that can be used to alter the course of history. Thus, when Vance insults Simone Biles or Trump is an asshole at the NABJ Conference, all the posts about those moments—even the outrage—feeds a dataset that can be used to keep unraveling core faith in the Republic. As useful idiots go, Trump has always been prêt-à-porter for any powerbroker who wants to ratfuck America. But the notion that Vance the Berserker, unrecognizable to his old friends, was forged in the crucible of Thiel’s world view makes too much sense to ignore.

SHIELD Act Passes in the Senate

SHIELD

It’s been nearly ten years since I first heard the term “revenge porn” and wrote a speculative post inspired by then Rep. Jackie Speier’s bill to make the act a federal crime. Much has transpired since then, including the obsolescence of the term “revenge porn” and the progress of generative artificial intelligence (GAI), which has already changed the nature of nonconsensual pornography. Legislation is in the works to address GAI used for this purpose, but in the meantime, the Senate on Wednesday finally passed the bill known as the Stopping Harmful Image Exploitation and Limiting Distribution, or SHIELD Act.

If SHIELD becomes law, the conduct of distributing intimate images without permission will be a federal crime with penalties that include fines and prison sentences. This is a game-changer, both pragmatically and culturally—fostering equitable remedies for victims and reasonable deterrents to at least some who might engage in the conduct. Further it signals a more mature relationship to digital life, leaving behind the rhetoric and handwringing that new liabilities for new harms conducted through online platforms will lead to rampant censorship of protected speech.

A decade ago, the phenomenon called “revenge porn” was still relatively new, and there was little general understanding about its potential for causing harm—or why the term itself was a misnomer. Initially, the “revenge” part referred to mostly men lashing out at ex-girlfriends or ex-wives by disclosing intimate images which had originally been shared in private. Distribution included web platforms that solicit and display “revenge porn” where the perpetrator could find a virtual fraternity of anger bros adding degrading, threatening, and rape-themed comments to the unlawfully displayed images. But the term was problematic from a legal standpoint.

Thanks substantially to the work of Dr. Mary Anne Franks and Danielle Keats-Citron, in their capacities as legal scholars and leaders of the Cyber Civil Rights Initiative, legislation at the state and federal level is focused on the act of nonconsensual disclosure, and not the motive per se. Because the motives for disclosing intimate images vary from immature “kicks” to sextortion, it was essential that the cause of action should not be limited solely to an intent to cause harm

SHIELD criminalizes nonconsensual disclosure, either with an intent to cause harm or if harm is caused unintentionally. This includes “…psychological, financial, or reputational harm, to the individual depicted.” As I say, a lot has changed over the last decade, and sadly, there is now a preponderance of evidence that nonconsensual distribution of intimate imagery (NDII) causes a spectrum of harmful results, including professional opportunity and relationship loss, psychological trauma, harassment, threats, physical violence, and suicide. In fact, Cyber Civil Rights Initiative has recently adopted the term Image-Based Sexual Abuse (IBSA) to properly frame the nature of so-called “revenge porn.”

A decade ago, legislation like Rep. Speier’s was met with the predictable criticism that it would sweep too broadly, cause undue censorship online and chill the speech right. In fact, anti-IBSA legislation survived First Amendment challenges in five of the now 49 states that have such laws. In 2022, when the Indiana State Supreme Court upheld that state’s law, Dr. Franks stated, “Indiana is the fifth state supreme court to uphold the constitutionality of criminal prohibitions of image-based sexual abuse. It should now be completely clear that there is no First Amendment right to disclose private, sexually explicit images of another person without consent.”

Since 2015, the theory that these laws were unconstitutional violations of the speech right has not only been tested at the state level, but the fervent belief that everything online is protected speech has waned considerably. Mitigating harm online, especially anything involving sexual abuse and minors, is one of the few subjects of bipartisan agreement these days. The fact that SHIELD passed the Senate this month suggests to me that it will become law by the end of the year. It will be an essential step in protecting the mostly women and girls who are targeted for IBSA.

Image source: