Alt-governance
by Tom Sullivan
Still from V for Vendetta (2005).
The American right long embraced communism as the bogeyman driving its politics. Totalitarianism had to be met with radical individualism, free markets, drowning government in the bathtub. The state was the enemy, at least whenever its taxing powers sought to level society and limit the avarice of Randian ubermenschen. Then came the 1960s.
The pendulum swing that countered fascism with individualism began breaking down the old order rather than preserving it. In the fullness of time came the backlash enabled by technology conceived to oppose it
Fred Turner is a professor of Communications at Stanford who studies how media and technology mold culture. His Harpers essay, “Machine Politics – The rise of the internet and a new age of authoritarianism,” suggests what we now see as rising authoritarianism spreads on the digital wings of a mass media once thought to inoculate society from it.
It was not simply the collapse of the Weimar era in Germany that allowed Hitler’s rise. Mass media was also thought responsible. At the time, Turner recounts, newsreels, live radio broadcasts, and newspapers saturated German society, turning a highly educated society into a mass cult of personality. As the FDR administration prepared for war, it needed to unite the country, and needed mass media to do it. But leaders feared doing so might “transform Americans into just the kind of authoritarians they were trying to defeat.”
A Committee for National Morale sought ways instead to cultivate a democratic personality, writing in 1942 that “every personality can be a citadel of resistance to tyranny. In the co-ordination of the intelligences and wills of one hundred million ‘whole’ men and women lies the formula for an invincible American morale.” That concept, Turner argues, is the zeitgeist of the computer-enabled, social media platform. To democratize society, “take power away from politicians and put it in the hands of engineers.”
I cannot do justice to Turner’s essay in the time and space available here. One stunning “I never knew that” in his piece is the acronym behind the legendary WELL internet community: Whole Earth ’Lectronic Link (WELL). Early internet designers sought to facilitate interconnectedness the way the famous counterculture catalog had. “If the mass-media era had brought us Hitler and Stalin, they believed, the internet would bring us back our individuality. Finally, we could do away with hierarchy, bureaucracy, and totalitarianism. Finally, we could just be ourselves, together.”
Turner writes:
For Zuckerberg, as for much of the left today, the key to a more egalitarian society lies in the freeing of individual voices, the expression of different lived experiences, and the forming of social groups around shared identities. But Facebook has tried to enable this kind of society by creating privately owned, for-profit digital technologies. As Zuckerberg put it, echoing the goals of the Whole Earth Catalog fifty years before, “Our commitment is to continue improving our tools to give you the power to share your experience.” Engineers like Zuckerberg or, for that matter, Wiener, have little interest in party politics: if you want to change the world, you don’t lobby or vote; you build new technologies.
This view has proved enormously profitable across Silicon Valley. By justifying the belief that for-profit systems are the best way to improve public life, it has helped turn the expression of individual experience into raw material that can be mined, processed, and sold. The big social-media companies, which often began with a dream of making WELL-like virtual communities at scale, have now become radically commercialized and devoted to surveillance at every level. On the WELL, users listened to each other, trying to get a feel for what kinds of people they were and how they might work together. Now user data is optimized and retailed automatically, to advertisers and other media firms, in real time. Computers track conversations and extract patterns at light speed, rendering them profitable. In 2017, Facebook reported annual revenue of more than $40 billion.
Just as in any of hundreds of science-fiction flicks, that promise has gone wrong. The technology of radical individualism allowed alt-right figures such as Richard Spencer to “just be themselves” too, and in savvy, social-media-friendly ways. Spewing hate is their civil right. The movement styles itself as a 21st century version of the Free Speech Movement of 1964. Half a century ago, the left fought the military-industrial complex and state surveillance. The alt-right faces off against government itself in “a fantastical Minotaur” it calls the “deep state.” The sitting president attacks the FBI and the Department of Justice.
Pundits on the left are fond of reminding us of how Trump storms and fulminates, the White House itself unable to contain his petulance and rage. Those same pundits then marvel that around 40 percent of the American people still think he is doing a good job. What they fail to understand is that Trump has mastered the politics of authenticity for a new media age. What mainstream analysts see as psychological weakness, Trump’s fans see as the man just being himself. What’s more, his anger, his rants, and his furious narcissism act out the feelings of people who believe they have been dispossessed by immigrants, women, and people of color. Trump is not only true to his own emotions. He is the personification of his supporters’ grievances. He is to his political base what Hitler was to many Germans, or Mussolini to Italians—the living embodiment of the nation.
Where radical individualism once was supposed to save us from “the hierarchies of organizations,” today, Turner writes, they are all that stand between us and cult of personality.
“The new authoritarianism represented by Spencer and Trump is not only a product of who owns today’s media,” Turner suggests. “It’s also a product of the political vision that helped drive the creation of social media in the first place—a vision that distrusts public ownership and the political process while celebrating engineering as an alternative form of governance.”
Clearly, social media is a terrific organizing tool. But then there is that always-pernicious tendency of the profit motive to swamp all other social concerns. “There is no such thing as society,” Margaret Thatcher said in promoting a form of profit-driven radical individualism. Now profit-driven social media has turned the individual into a product and unleashed the darker angels rather than the better. I am seeing more friends dump Facebook accounts. But only to seek others. There may be a deep flaw in that logic. Politics is best not left to engineers and requires more face-to-face engagement.
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