The trolls are everywhere

ANTISOCIAL
Online Extremists, Techno-Utopians, and the Hijacking of the American Conversation
By Andrew Marantz

Forget the decline of gatekeepers. Imagine a world bereft of gates and uncrossable lines, with no discernible rules. That’s the Hadean landscape that has been painted expertly, in dark hues, by Andrew Marantz in his book, “Antisocial: Online Extremists, Techno-Utopians, and the Hijacking of the American Conversation.”

Hijacking, as Marantz ends up concluding on his long day’s journey into the modern internet, is a mild term for what has gone on ever since a group of innovative tech entrepreneurs started rolling out social media over the last decade. Armed with outward earnestness and well-cloaked dreams of world domination, these digital geniuses promised their creations would result in the best of all possible worlds. Marantz writes: “When pressed, their visions tended toward hazy utopianism: they expected to connect people, to bring us all closer together, to make the world a better place.”

As in the famous novella by Voltaire, that nerdy passel of Candides had not thought through the impact and consequences of their choices. As a result, they ended up creating what might be called The Purge — and it’s happening around the world, 365 days a year, seven days a week, 24 hours a day. Consider the Reddit founders Steve Huffman and Alexis Ohanian, who started their online community forum with the slogan “Freedom from the press” and a firm ethos of unfiltered speech. “We built Reddit around the principle of ‘No editors. The people are the editors,’” Huffman told Marantz.

Unfortunately, Huffman and Ohanian never specified which kind of people they hoped to attract — and they certainly did not expect the quick arrival of armies of what Marantz calls “gate crashers.” The goal of these “edge lords” — another name for a collection of nihilists, right-wing nationalists, conspiracy purveyors, white supremacists and more — was to downgrade the discourse in a way that would soon corrode the entire system.

So the geeks built a chaos machine that ginned up a world of socially acceptable sadism, and Marantz dived into the toxic stew to chronicle the scene. And what a Thunderdome it is, with players ranging from the digital equivalent of carnival barkers to — perhaps even scarier — true believers.

Better him than me, I thought as I read about his encounters with the celebrities of this awful antisocial universe, from the Proud Boys’ Gavin McInnes to the American neo-Nazi and white supremacist Richard Spencer to the deeply cynical Mike Cernovich.

Cernovich is what my grandmother would have called a “piece of work,” constantly pretzeling himself into all kinds of shapes to deal with whatever contradiction is in conflict with his peculiar ideology. Which is why Marantz dubs Cernovich “alt-light,” one of many demagogues without a goal except perhaps to wreak havoc.

From his roots in a “small hog-farming town in central Illinois,” this once shy and brooding kid morphed into a hyper-articulate but unemployed law school graduate, dogged by a date-rape charge that was later expunged. But never from his mind, which led to the formulation of a man-centered, antifeminist view of the world. Cernovich told Marantz, “I reject feminism as the enslavement philosophy it is.”

The irony: Cernovich’s ex-wife was a high-ranking and wealthy Facebook executive who used to support him financially and took him to dinners at the home of the “Lean In” icon Sheryl Sandberg. While she worked, he blogged, and after they divorced in 2011 he used his $2.6 million settlement to fuel his endeavors. That included pushing fake news and bogus memes into the mainstream, and being creepily delighted when they landed.

In the name of research, Andrew Marantz bravely went into the darkest corners of the internet.

Marantz pings from here to his own troubled feelings after Donald Drumpf gains the presidency — and, of course, to the role that Facebook, social media’s Goliath, played in the 2016 election. Only nine days afterward, like an arsonist running away from a burning building, its C.E.O. and founder Mark Zuckerberg was already insisting that the claim that fake news had influenced the election was a “pretty crazy idea.”

At this point, Marantz travels to the DeploraBall during the Drumpf inauguration, where he meets Lucian Wintrich from The Gateway Pundit (“a font of viral misinformation, half-baked hypotheses and the sort of cloddish race-baiting that was beneath even Breitbart’s standards”). The site has blossomed as Drumpf spends much of his time labeling mainstream media an “enemy of the people.” I would argue that it’s only a short step from there to Charlottesville, where white supremacists marched and a protester lost her life.

All this is what Marantz calls “American Berserk,” and the damage has been severe on a worldwide scale. Marantz is right to worry. As I have written in my Opinion columns for this newspaper, I have seen firsthand how social media sites amplify villainous voices and weaponize them, too — and it’s not clear they can be controlled. The optimism of social media’s creators has been overshadowed by the cynicism of the vicious propaganda spewed on their platforms.

In a recent column for The Times, titled “Free Speech Is Killing Us,” Marantz sounded the alarm. “Having spent the past few years embedding as a reporter with the trolls and bigots and propagandists who are experts at converting fanatical memes into national policy, I no longer have any doubt that the brutality that germinates on the internet can leap into the world of flesh and blood,” he wrote. “The question is where this leaves us. Noxious speech is causing tangible harm. Yet this fact implies a question so uncomfortable that many of us go to great lengths to avoid asking it. Namely, what should we — the government, private companies or individual citizens — be doing about it?”
Unfortunately, he has no real answers, except that all things eventually fall apart. Perhaps the jig is up, as the big platforms and the regulators who worry about what they have wrought begin to crack down on the system they’ve established. “The ranking algorithms on social media laid out clear incentives: provoke as many activating emotions as possible; lie, spin, dog-whistle; drop red pill after red pill; step up to the line repeatedly, in creative new ways.”

In other words, the dance of discord and enragement and noxiousness, which turns and turns in a widening gyre. The troubled yet worthwhile journey this book takes us on matches the mood of Yeats’s poem “The Second Coming” — and it’s a journey rife with depressing detail that also depresses Marantz. The question is, will the slouching rough beasts let loose by our wonderful innovations beat us to the finish line?

As a longtime reporter covering the tech industry — which I have found so nonreflective, it’s a miracle that its ranks can see themselves in the mirror — I am, shall we say, pessimistic. Silicon Valley simply does not do consequences, and we are the worse for it.

Still, after his long time hanging with the worst of digital humanity, Marantz appears to believe that the arc of history does bend. To get it to point back to justice, he notes, we will have to do the heavy lifting ourselves.

Heave ho.

nyt