Facebooked

“This wasn’t Princeton. This was Ameristan. Facebooked to the molecular level. . . . One of their teachers at Princeton . . . had gone so far as to print up a wallet card for people to keep in front of them during conversations like this one. One side of the card was solid red, with no words or images, and was meant to be displayed outward as a nonverbal signal that you disagreed and that you weren’t going to be drawn into a fake argument. The other side, facing the user, was a list of little reminders as to what was really going on: 1. Speech is aggression. 2. Every utterance has a winner and a loser. 3. Curiosity is feigned. 4. Lying is performative. 5. Stupidity is power.”—Neal Stephenson, Fall: or, Dodge in Hell (2019)

The promise of Social Media Land was always, to some extent, an imperialistic dream. The geeks who created this online world were all, to a man, urban liberals who hoped the Internet would bring the light of civilization to Sameville, a mythological small town where everybody’s white and wrong. The enlightened minds of the multicultural metropolis were going to bring the true gospel of diversity and tolerance and freedom to the benighted citizens of Sameville. If these guys had a theme song, it would be a cover of Walter Donaldson’s Jazz Era classic “How Ya Gonna Keep ’em Down on the Farm (After They’ve Seen Paree)?” (1919) entitled “How Ya Gonna Keep ’em Down in Stupidlandia (After They’ve Seen Portlandia)?”

The dream came true. Well, sort of. When I was a kid, there were still people in my working-class neighborhood who believed that if you scared a pregnant woman, her baby would be born with a tail. Ignorance like this of shockingly medieval proportions was everywhere to be found. Few of my friends had a working twentieth-century knowledge of human anatomy, much less the natural world. But I’m happy to report that the Internet, and especially Wikipedia, has cleared up much of this ignorance. My children have access to far more accurate knowledge about things like how a woman gets pregnant than most of my friends did at their age. What’s more, to the best of my knowledge, none of their friends believe in babies with tails. To some extent, then, the Internet has indeed been a force of enlightenment in our world. But its enlightenment has been limited in scope, in part, because the geeks who dreamed of conquering small-town ignorance failed to anticipate how much online communities would in fact empower ignorance of all kinds.

These days, any simpleminded partisan with a political ax to grind can find an online community of like-minded whack-jobs who’ll happily Facebook-like every stupid thing he says. Communities of this kind aren’t just safe spaces for stupid; they’re boot camps for bullshit that provide budding ideologues with plenty of rhetorical ammunition (e.g., bogus stats, pre-fab arguments, etc.). Before long, what was once a more-or-less harmless, single-issue troll has morphed into something far more monstrous and formidable: a veritable Swiss-army knife of bullshit, a perfect storm of bad ideas, a walking Wikipedia of stupid. There are those who see this as a kind of progress, as a perfect example of the democratization of knowledge in the Information Age. But I think it’s more like giving nuclear weapons to a failed state run by coked-up child soldiers.

As is no doubt obvious to anyone who’s watched little children transform clouds into animals and dolls into siblings, we are a pattern-seeking species. Our imaginative capacity is one of those superpowers that’s made it possible for our species to triumph over powerful predators and subdue entire ecosystems. But like all superpowers, it comes at a cost. Though we see plenty of patterns that other animals can’t see, we also see plenty of patterns that simply aren’t there. This is especially true if you’re upset.

Angry people are incredibly easy to manipulate. Same is true of the self-righteous. The more “political” you become, the more you become a mere pawn in someone else’s chess game. Your ideas are no longer your own. They’re not even your friends’ ideas. They are, instead, prefabricated ideas, manufactured by spin-doctors, mad scientists of the spirit, who understand human nature better than most, and are practiced in the art of deception.

These master manipulators understand that the pleasures of politics may be ugly pleasures, but they’re pleasures nonetheless. Anger feels good. Self-righteousness feels good. But these pleasures come at a cost. Politics erodes your creativity far more than it erodes your humanity. Thinking prefabricated ideas all the time is sort of like moving into a prefabricated suburban row house. You get to choose the drapes, what color to paint the walls, little else. Rarely in my lifetime has tuning out completely, and shunning all news, been so tempting.

Oh Aristotle, stop snickering in the back row! Yes, yes, yes, I know! Man is indeed the political animal. But it’s equally true that the political too often brings out the animal in the man. And you, Edmund, for God’s sake, save your breath! I know what you’re gonna say: “All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing.” Of course there’s truth to what you say, much truth. But can you not conceive of a species of evil that’s akin to quicksand? Can you not see why Epicurus admonished his followers to shun politics?

Hiroo Onoda (1922-2014), a Japanese soldier who fought in the Second World War, refused to surrender in August 1945. After the war ended, Onoda held out on a remote, heavily-forested island in the Philippines for close to three decades. He raided the locals on a fairly regular basis, killing at least two or three dozen, and injuring well over a hundred. Although he was confronted with evidence that the war was over on numerous occasions, Onoda dismissed it all as fake news. What finally changed his mind? His former commander traveled all the way from Japan to informally relieve him from duty: in 1974, 29 years later. This is what our species is capable of, this is what we can do. Bear it in mind the next time you’re talking to an ideologue who seems thoroughly impervious to facts. Hirō Onoda wasn’t crazy, nor was he an idiot. If you’re too heavily invested in your politics, you could be him.

—John Faithful Hamer, Social Media Land (2020)