How We Are All Going to Die Laughing
The other day, I was looking at a post made by one of my favorite internet comic artists. The guy used to be something I’d read in the army newspapers, next to the adds for cheap TVs at the post exchange, but these days it’s mostly a facebook feed I occasionally read. The artist and writer behind “PVT Murphy” (though these days Murphy’s a sergeant, I’m aging after all it seems) was annoyed at Facebook showing him a shopping page offering what amounted to white nationalist (US neonazi, if you prefer) paraphernalia.
Now, I pointed out that this was what the robot had concluded he wanted to see, and honestly none of us should be surprised by this. Military members lean right, and in the age of Trump this means that radicalization is around every corner- though for the record it always has been. In some insidious ways with a cancer of racists and bigots among our ranks, sure, I know because being gay I was targeted by a few myself, but also in more subtle ways.
I once watched a man scream at some Iraqis who were emptying a waste bin nearby, screaming that they didn’t get him, because he’d been the target of an IED attack two hours prior. Those men had no way in hell of having anything to do with it, but the guy that hit us got away free and the trash guys looked like someone he could defiantly vent his feelings of helplessness and victimhood upon in a vain effort to reclaim his power. I’m not condoning it, I’m just saying that sometimes the path to prejudice isn’t paved with propaganda and privilege.
I have every faith in the artist who draws PVT Murphy himself, but if you attract the attention of a lot of white supremacists, then probably the robot is going to conclude that you might want to look at some of the things that all the people who like your posts are looking at. Hence the shop page that offered a wall pinup of a templar knight preparing to smite the saracen to defend (white) Christendom with a few crass remarks about Islam written on it.
Now I explained, in truncated terms, how the robot made this call. The artist wasn’t excited about this explanation, and in fairness no one is excited about the black mirror showing them something ugly, it’s almost like an automated attack. But the machine was really just trying to be helpful. It wasn’t programmed to be sensitive to racial issues, and certainly the people who took out the add didn’t take that into their considerations. It identified a pattern and arranged the delivery of data that conformed with its instructions based upon the data input.
Now, some right wing dude decided to join in this discussion to point out that the robot didn’t know what it was talking about, included the terms “lib” and “snowflake” in his post, and suggested that if the robot had any idea who he was it wouldn’t keep showing him liberal content- after all he always used the laugh react on it. I pointed out this part as well, but I’d like to go into a deeper analysis for this discourse.
The right, and perhaps a lot of people using the reacts on facebook, has decided that you can use the laugh react to express a dismissive chuckle to the words of others. I think this has several sweeping, problematic implications.
First, the people using the internet are using it to each other, and are either unaware of the robots they share the internet with or ignorant regarding how they function. The robots do not interpret Laugh as a dismissive gesture. The data they gather from this is that you were paying attention to something and decided to put a reaction on it. The Laugh react is not a downvote on reddit, the robot, innocent little helperbot it was made to be, assumes you are amused by the thing you clicked on, and so endeavors to further tickle your funny bone. In short, it’s your good-natured wholesome friend who doesn’t understand the difference between you laughing with liberals and laughing at us. It thinks we’re all friends.
This leads to the second problem. If you are a conservative and you do not care to be bothered with leftist posts, then using the laugh react doesn’t help you at all. It further engages you with the content that annoys you. The stuff that caused you to try and put on your dismissive “ha ha tawdry communist drivel” mid-atlantic aristocrat voice is going to keep appearing. If you’re the sort given to conspiracy theories (and you are my bro, you still hate Hillary for the pizza thing), you might draw the conclusion that you are being targeted by leftist internet operatives, spamming your feed with leftist propaganda.
The truth is you’re spamming yourself with leftist content because your socially clueless helpful robot pal is gonna go out and find more things for you to laugh at. You’re not special or important enough for leftist internet operatives to target your facebook feed with propaganda attacks, and you have damned yourself to an experience on facebook in which you are bombarded with annoying or even blood-boiling content. All of this guidance, by the way, is equally applicable to left leaning users of the laugh react as a dismissive gesture.
What this does is contribute to people’s paranoia. It makes them believe that an enemy that doesn’t exist is trying to get into their heads. It fills their electronic lives with incendiary content that makes them angry and it encourages them further to continue to have generally unproductive electric arguments with people that they disagree with, leaving them exhausted by a brain full of cortisol.
Personally, I think the Left’s electric sin is more to do with our frankly superior witticisms (sorry Right, you invented and stuck to Nobama, you’re just not witty) and the craving so many of us seem to have for delivering that sick burn one-liner so cutting and succinct that it stops the conservative dead in his rhetorical tracks seems to consume online political discourse on the left almost as aggressively as call-out culture does when arguing among our own.
In the effort to sell us more things by pandering to our professed passions, the capitalist internet has created an electric rage engine that wraps you into one heated argument after another among people who are not listening to one another and who are learning to disengage from hard discussions. This last part is so dangerous to our democracy.
To be clear, I’m not lamenting the death of compromise specifically. There can be no compromise on the income gap, healthcre, free elections, or the rights of people who are darker in skin than I. But the electric rage engine makes it difficult to even have conversations about these things in the real world, and if you’re not talking to the people you disagree with face to face in the here and now, your chances of finding compromise are precisely zero percent, nevermind actually changing their views.
Have you noticed yourself having conversations with people that could just be copy pasted almost word for word off the tumblr where they “informed” themselves about this topic? I’ll bet that you have. Or else, more dangerously, you have begun to avoid having such conversations at all with people. Have you ever been in a discussion turned friendly debate with your friend and realized after a few moments that the debate isn’t suddenly so friendly? I’m willing to bet it’s been a while, so much so that you might even be shocked if it happens.
People like to go on about how fraught the holidays can be because of how politically charged family dinners can be, but I can’t remember such an experience within the past ten years. No throw down arguments, no discussions about the merits of one tax policy or another- we can’t even seem to discuss weighty matters with people who are blood kin anymore unless we already know they agree with our own views- and thanks to the electric rage engine, we can know, in precis, what their views are and what we think about them as a result long before we ever think about what to put in our covered dish. The opportunity for someone stepping into a landmine social or foreign policy issue at family and social gatherings has been eliminated, and with it the ability of the dinner table to serve as a place for families to reach consensus by resolving their arguments. We don’t talk politics with people who disagree with us in the real world anymore, we all just avoid it and spit our venom on the internet, achieving nothing but our mounting unhappiness and dislike for one another.
I have a young colleague at work, maybe 25, who demonstrated the ability to just promptly end a discussion last week. Now it was a nonsense discussion and in fairness the participants had gotten into trolling him for kicks, saying a blue shirt was green on purpose or some other nonsense, I don’t remember the particulars. But what I do remember vividly was the ease and efficiency with which he was able to simply end the discussion, how disengagement came so very naturally to him. I despise the phrase “agree to disagree” because it means that the argument hasn’t been resolved, but it is at least a sign that there was actual thought going on between participants. No such gesture here. My colleague put down the conversation and simply went back to his work with all the ease with which you might put down your phone when you decided you were done arguing with someone, and the ability to do this in realspace chilled me to the bone.
Moreover, there is a certain epistemological nihilism that has arisen among us, suggesting that no one can truly know anything because the sources of information, with whatever omissions or biases they may possess, are a matter of consumerist choice rather than objective fact. We can’t agree on what is real anymore because if you dislike someone’s account of events, you can simply get someone else to present a more palatable story and declare the other people liars.
If you don’t like what you read on NBC, you can simply tune to Fox to hear it told in a way that you choose to consume, often playing to your appetite for validation rather than your need for actionable information. We like feeling right, and the consumerist information economy has identified that as a means to get our attention long enough to upload some ads along with our news video of choice.
If the very identity of a person can be expressed by a computer algorithm and 4 or 5 hundred clicks across news articles, think pieces, and shopping pages, how easy will it be for the people who do understand how the machines work to begin influencing who we are?
In closing, I think every single one of us is developing a progressively more toxic relationship with the internet, particularly when it comes to political discourse, and I think that if we aren’t especially careful our ability to simply shut down and switch off, while healthy on the web, is going to begin invading our lives in the waking world in insidious ways that will hurt our ability to function as a cohesive society. I think that the marketing robots and the very act of making a profile and posting to it things that are important to you are dangerous influences on our sense of identity, and that by wrapping our sense of identity in the ideas and products that we consume in such a contrived, calculated fashion that we are restricting our ability to be flexible in our thinking, making us less able to get along with one another.
I’ve been on a soft departure from Facebook for a good while now, making it my loose rule to stick to messenger and instagram because I like indulging my vanity but for the most part I want to be interacting with people directly and not selling myself for likes when I use these things. Real attention from real people is much much better.
In 2020, I invite you to join me in kicking facebook or your own social media vice altogether and bringing our political lives and our debates back into the real world so that we can practice and re-acquire the skills of persuasion and discussion; not as a cynic call to begin trying to convert every conservative we can find, but for the sake of a political discourse that serves as less of a battleground with immovable ideological fortresses and more of a crucible in which the useless can be burned away and useful consensus and meaningful, mind changing-discussions can be had once again. We cannot afford to keep unsubscribing from one another if our democracy is to survive. (<- leftist witticism addiction in demonstration)
