The Twittering Machine

by Richard Seymour

  And yet, perhaps the most chilling aspect of Minassian’s actions was the way he chose to announce his ‘rebellion’. His post, written in the stylized, ironic jargon of trolling, implied a frightening degree of detachment. If one didn’t know that the author was on the brink of mass murder, it would seem like a joke. It was as though the ironic folds had unravelled, revealing an ouroboros in which the ‘literal’ and ‘ironic’ existed on the same plane. He was a troll, in meatspace, and in the same move a vigilante murderer. His seriousness was couched in comic-book irony, much as Rodger’s ghoulish videos and manifesto had been performatively laden with comic-book braggadocio.

  Trolling irony was never what it appeared to be. Never detached, irony was just a container for ambivalence. The core of irony is almost always a passionate commitment which can’t be expressed in any other way. To ironize about it, to make fun of it, is to allow it to be expressed while also reproaching it. In the case of the incels, irony tips over into passion, without losing the sense of self-reproach, or self-hatred. Trolling, as a tactic in a universal, web-mediated war, has acquired its misogynist wing. One every bit as futile, impossibilist and potentially dangerous as its Daesh counterpart.

  ____________

  ii ‘Lulz’ is a trolling idiom: a corruption of ‘lol’, meaning ‘laugh out loud’.

  iii A form of bait-and-switch trolling where users access a link pointing to seemingly interesting content, only to be confronted with the music video of Rick Astley’s 1980s hit, ‘Never Gonna Give You Up’.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  WE ARE ALL LIARS

  Everywhere socialization is measured by the exposure to media messages. Whoever is underexposed to the media is desocialized or virtually asocial

  Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation

  A human being takes in far more information than he or she can put out. ‘Stupidity’ is a process or strategy by which a human . . . commits him- or herself to taking in no more information than she or he can put out

  Samuel Delany, Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand

  Not to lie about the future is impossible and one can lie about it at will

  Naum Gabo, The Realistic Manifesto

  I.

  Edgar Maddison Welch carries two guns, one of them an automatic assault rifle bigger than his arm. It’s an AR-15, a lethal weapon adored by the National Rifle Association, repeatedly used in several mass shootings. He has a third gun in his car, in case of trouble.

  A young man with dirty fair hair and a scraggly beard, he is a small-time screenwriter and bit-part actor with minor credits in a string of slasher horror movies. He has come, dressed in light blue jeans and t-shirt, to ‘self-investigate’ rumours of an elite paedophile ring. Internet stories say that Hillary Clinton and top-level Democrats are trafficking child sex slaves out of the Comet Ping Pong restaurant in Washington DC: the infamous ‘Pizzagate’.

  Staff and diners at the pizzeria are faced with an agitated, gun-toting man who may be about to kill them. They flee, in hectic panic. He fires some shots into the floor and begins stalking the restaurant looking for the tunnels through which the children are allegedly being hustled. A restaurant employee who has gone to get some pizza dough from the freezer in the alley, comes back in to find Welch turning the rifle on him. He turns and runs, escaping with his life. After about twenty minutes, satisfying himself that there are no underage children on the premises, Welch surrenders peacefully to the police surrounding the restaurant.1

  All of this takes place within half an hour on a December afternoon in 2016, and it is more ridiculous and compelling than any script Welch is ever likely to write. He is not the first to go to the restaurant to investigate these claims. Since these allegations went viral, the owners have been bombarded with death threats and abuse, and vigilantes have turned up to look around the premises and live-stream their investigations. But Welch, clearly anticipating the sort of scenario in which he might have to be Vin Diesel, goes in armed and ready to kill. He ends up with a four-year jail sentence.

  All of this derangement is apparently driven by a ‘fake news’ story, originating with far-right conspiracy websites and circulated on Facebook. There appear to be a surfeit of stories alleging Hillary Clinton’s involvement in child sex trafficking. Lt Gen. Michael Flynn, then Trump’s national security adviser, shared a similar tale, breathlessly tweeting about ‘Money Laundering, Sex Crimes w Children, etc. . . MUST READ!’

  It is not clear, could never be clear, whether the story is a deliberate troll or earnest lunacy. It may have been a dupe, or the true confession of someone who, as far-right conspiracy theorist Alex Jones once put it, smelled the body under the carpet. At this level, the difference between a fake story and a confession becomes moot. Nor is it possible to say whether, or why, people really believed it, or merely entertained it, or why either way they acted on it. Is it really a problem of ‘fake news’, or just another example of the paranoid vigilantism that has seen the rate of mass shootings in America soar, even as other violent crimes have plummeted?

  In the same month that Edgar Maddison Welch undertook his one-man vigilante operation in Washington, the Pakistani defence minister was gulled into threatening Israel with nuclear strikes. He had read a story about Israel contemplating a nuclear attack on their country in the event that Pakistani troops entered Syria. Pakistan, he reminded Israel, was ‘a nuclear state too’. The story was a fake, but it revealed something real nonetheless. The prospect of atomic genocide had been distilled for infotainment, only to expose a very real possibility already lurking in the global order.

  In Giorgio De Maria’s cult horror novel, The Twenty Days of Turin, high-minded city administrators are struggling to cope with the alienation of the dislocated migrants arriving in the city.2 A band of charming, fresh-faced youths, apparently idealistic and impossible to distrust, propose ‘the Library’. In the Library, they don’t want high-flown artifice; they want ‘popular’ literature: the confessional. In the Library, anyone can read anyone else’s personal diaries, confessions, complaints, cries from the heart. One woman wants a young man to help her with constipation and is ‘ready to give and give and give’. Another aches to satisfy ‘some kind of poetic desire’. Old scrapbooks, notepads and diaries are recovered and enlivened by the invention of a new kind of audience.

  Here is the Library as a kind of psychopharmacopoeia, an antidepressant, administering the suffering soul with writing. Appropriately, it is based in a wing of the sanatorium. For the blessing of an audience, some attention to their pains and yearning, citizens willingly give up their intimacy, their privacy, to the Library. Their confessions grow macabre, dark, malicious. Pages and pages of screeds are confected just to injure someone, or else disintegrate ‘into the depths of bottomless madness’. They go from celebrity to trolling. And slowly it becomes clear that they have birthed a malevolent force, a ‘collective psychosis’ resulting in nightly mass murders.

  The horror story of the Twittering Machine is told, cumulatively, in vignettes about ‘fake news’, in sustained augury about the ‘post-truth’ society being birthed, and in pithy denunciations of ‘echo chambers’ and ‘content silos’. But what if we are in the position of De Maria’s investigator, not knowing what we are faced with? There is a collective writing experiment, a descent into madness and violence. What force connects them is still, to us, an occult knowledge.

  II.

  Old media is not dying. The advertising-driven print and broadcast media will live, albeit smaller and much weaker than before. They are being inscribed within a new hierarchy of writing dominated by the digitus. And the characteristics of that new hierarchy are determined by the way that Silicon Valley venture capital has found its profit model.

  The social industry is one powerful faction within a wider platform economy: what Nick Srnicek calls Platform Capitalism.3 This sector began to arise after the dot-com bubble burst, when a glut of spare financial capital was invested in tech upstarts experim
enting with ways to make money. The ‘platform’ model, where the service is to connect businesses, customers and other businesses digitally, was a clear winner. As Srnicek documents, the logic of this platform connection is to make the processes of consumption and production more visible. Spotify, renting its musical product through a cloud-based streaming service, collects digital information from customers that enables far more precise marketing. General Electric, offering a cloud platform to allow industrial firms to connect production processes by sensor and chip all over the world, makes production systems legible in the form of electronic writing. This also permits a new form of rent-seeking. Instead of selling products, increasingly firms adopting the ‘platform’ structure just lease them as services. Rolls-Royce, rather than selling a jetliner engine, will now rent it out at an hourly rate.

  The social industry giants have created a new form of advertising platform. The flow of marketing revenue is being massively redirected from newspapers to Facebook and Google. World advertising revenues for the newspapers fell by more than $15 billion from 2013 to 2017. In the US, newspaper readership fell to its lowest level since the 1940s. In the UK, print circulation is heading for a cliff fall.4 British press barons are discussing the formation of a cartel to negotiate advertising revenues, as a result of losing out to the internet.5 The same decline befalls the broadcasters, where social media ad spending is projected to be larger than the entire global television advertising market by 2020. The new giants are Facebook and Google – and their respective services, Instagram and YouTube. These companies took 90 per cent of all new digital-advertising revenue in 2017. Most of it came from smartphone users.6 Were it not for the smartphone becoming ubiquitous around 2011, things would be different.

  Facebook beats a newspaper, hands down, precisely because it has nothing to do with journalism. Newspapers sell the attention of a cluster of demographics purchasing a fixed bundle of products. Their product is conditioned by factors extraneous to advertising, such as the ideological agenda of the owners, the professional ideology of journalists, and certain inherited cultural ideas of what a newspaper is and what ‘news values’ are. Facebook doesn’t care. It detaches the organization and distribution of content from that sort of editorial control. A piece of content originally procured for a Sunday newspaper, or a half-hour television news programme, is now an item in a flow of homogenized posts organized by algorithm. Facebook automatically selects for information what is impressive and seductive, rather than accurate or even meaningful. It degrades the ecology of information, while inflating it and adding a new volatility to it. And it radically accelerates the existing drive to infuse journalism with the imperatives of amusement and entertainment.

  For the advertisers, this results in much better data. Attention is organised by far more exact demographics, indexed to clicks, searches, shares, messages, views, reacts, scrolls, pauses: the complete digital package. Google has an even more comprehensive set of tools. It is not just the search engine which allows Google to see what people are up to online. They have the Google Chrome browser, their Gmail service, their DNS server, YouTube, website analytics, Google Translate, Google Reader, Google Maps and Google Earth. They can analyse messages, contacts, travel routes and the shops visited by users. They have a deal with Twitter, giving them access to all tweets. Users hand over immense amounts of raw material to the platforms every time they access the app.

  This new revenue system is transforming both the consumption and production of information, ripping it out of the control of Cold War-era broadcasters and print giants allied to the liberal state. Already in 2016, 62 per cent of Americans got some news on social media, and 44 per cent got their news regularly from Facebook.7 No other single company comes close. Those that are even remotely competitive are themselves advertising platforms. YouTube ranks second, with 10 per cent of American adults getting their news regularly from the video service, followed by Twitter with 9 per cent.8

  If the old news giants were advertising platforms in denial, Facebook is a media organization in denial. Neither Facebook nor Google invest in journalism. Indeed, they don’t invest much in any new production at all. Their profits are so high and their costs so low that the vast majority of their wealth is invested in liquid financial stocks or hoarded offshore. In 2016, it was reported that Google offshored $43 billion. Facebook uses the same tax-avoidance scheme. They are leaders of the pack among the top fifty American corporations hoarding $14 trillion offshore.9 Facebook, attempting to mollify old media monopolists losing out to Facebook without giving them a dime, has launched the ‘Facebook Journalism Project’. The project proposes a new partnership with publishers, from Bild and El País to Fox News and the Washington Post, to help them use the medium to get new subscribers.10 This merely maximizes the ability of a small number of old media survivors to attract a diminishing pool of revenues. Google, in a similarly minuscule gesture, has set up a journalism fellowship.

  Nonetheless, precisely because they have no responsibility to journalism, the social industry platforms are in a sense much purer media companies. When Mark Zuckerberg writes that ‘news and media are not the primary things people do on Facebook’, a claim he repeated to Congress in 2018, he is concealing something in plain sight.11 Facebook, Google, Twitter, YouTube, are nothing but media. They exist to generate information, as part of a cybernetic system of surveillance, control and extraction, without bias. Bias is about meaning, whereas social media platforms are fundamentally nihilistic.

  This agnosticism about content purifies an existing trend in the old media. While newspapers owned by Axel Springer, or Rupert Murdoch, or the allies of ruling parties like El País in Spain, all had ideological axes to grind, they were also advertising platforms. And that business model was tendentiously already agnostic about content, as long as attention backed up by purchasing power was secured. In fact, this is true of all commodities produced under capitalism: investors are in principle (never entirely in practice) indifferent to content provided it increases the return on investment. Mark Zuckerberg’s extreme agnosticism, to the extent that he openly declares that he has no problem with Holocaust denial appearing on Facebook if some users want that, is a pure distillation of this tendency.12 The fact that most of Facebook’s editorial work is delegated to proprietary algorithms – automated agnosticism, digital nihilism – doesn’t make it less of a media organization.

  Facebook’s old media competitors miss the mark by insisting, as the Guardian did in 2016, that Facebook covertly relies on old-fashioned ‘news values’.13 The paper’s story was based on leaked documents showing human intervention at various stages in its ‘trending news’ operation, ‘injecting’ some stories and ‘blacklisting’ some topics. As the documents suggested, Facebook’s criterion for determining a top ‘trending news’ topic was its prominence in broadcast and print news outlets. But the point about any ‘trending news’ system is that it is, like ‘trending topics’, an echo chamber. It magnifies attention to a story simply because it already has attention. Facebook’s editorial operation is a digital shrug at ‘news values’ which, exactly on that account, canalizes attention more efficiently.

  The widespread recognition that the social industry giants are media organizations, the primary source of news for hundreds of millions of people, with enormous public agenda-shaping power, is leading to new pressures on both Facebook and Google. In Spain, in 2014, an intellectual property law was passed forcing Google to pay for links and excerpts of content displayed on its Google News feed. Google reacted as any good monopolist would, by shutting down its service in that country.14 This was a message for countries considering similar ideas, as the UK currently is, under pressure from its newspaper industry.

  This is an extraordinary climatic shift. The old news industry, for decades, has told us that journalism is best served by private enterprise, free market competition and as little state intrusion as possible. Now they want the state to bail them out, but without as yet any seriou
s conversation about what publicly funded, public interest journalism should look like, and to whom and how it should be accountable.

  Rather than have this public conversation about what is happening with our degraded information ecologies, however, states are increasingly bringing the social industry giants to book over ‘fake news’.

  III.

  Donald Trump’s gleeful appropriation of the term ‘fake news’ ought to have been a red flag. It ought to have alerted us to the intrinsically authoritarian cadences of this language, and to the fact that it isn’t saying exactly what we’d like to think it is.

  In the United States, the term gained currency as part of an attempt to explain why the paragon of the Washington governing class, Hillary Clinton, lost to the far-right rank outsider Donald Trump. After all, Trump’s candidacy was supposed to assure a Clinton win; leaked Democratic Party strategy documents showed that they sought to encourage the Republicans to veer as far right as possible, in the hope of building a broad centre to rival them.15 The New York Times, a paper very much of the Democratic Party establishment, conducted an in-depth investigation into these ‘fake news’ stories that it said had warped the outcome. Its showcase example was a tweet that went viral, claiming that anti-Trump protesters gathering in Austin were being professionally bussed in. The claim was illustrated by a photograph of ranks of buses and coaches that, it turned out, were for participants in an unrelated conference. This false claim was shared 16,000 times on Twitter and 350,000 times on Facebook, and the rumour was endorsed by Trump.16