You’d think the online ecosystem, especially social media, would be a godsend for socialist mass movements. The ability to connect, inform, educate, agitate without the large financial and institutional barriers of print media and television is enticing on its surface. The utopian ideal of a connected and activated working class powered by social media is a distant dream considering what social media is now: a delivery system for ads.
We are inhabiting a space that claims to be about open expression and meaningful engagement with each other, but results in an alienating, anxiety-inducing system of social control and emotional poverty.
Welcome to the Deformed Poster’s State, a new 3 part series.
The worst part of this shit hellscape called online is that for all the nausea-inducing headaches it causes, very little of the content is actually good. Everything good I’ve learned online has been offset by something shitty that makes my eyes bleed. Our timelines are chock full of garbage and ads and clickbait and vapid peacocks shaving their pubes and it all just becomes too much sometimes. No one asked for this; they wanted the bizarre technocolor dreamcoat of flying through cyberspace with Keanu Reeves and Takeshi Kitano. Instead we got promoted tweets and fleshy, dead-eyed robots wearing suits getting married in cartoon recreations of Hobbiton.
NO ONE WANTED THIS.
ONLINE IS A FUCK.
BAN EVERYONE.
START FROM THE PRIMAL FORESTS AGAIN.
It’s not just that social media is run by capitalists. Everything is right now, that’s just an observation. We live in a society and so forth. The tension between using social media to build socialism and reality that the default gatekeeper in this scenario is a corporation, since they run everything already. They are the centers of American national culture, and we as socialists stands in direct contrast to their goals, which is turning us all into slurry for the ad farms.
The internet from its inception has always been a nearly completely capitalist space. It’s privatized even more so than public meatspace, since municipal broadband is outright banned or blocked in over 26 states. There is no city in America that outright bans public space (yet), an absurd concept, but it’s perfectly accepted to ban public online space. Social media is public in the way a mall is public: it’s free to enter but you don’t have any ownership of it, and they can kick you out whenever they feel like it. Americans have a mutilated sense of the public, with corporate consumerist spaces being their most regular interactions. Online spaces are little different.
The tension comes from people demanding a capitalist product, social media and the internet at large, behave in the same way public speech is protected (a negative right free from government intervention). Facebook is the government on its platform, a particularly non-democratic one, and it does not exist to create a stable and functioning environment for citizens. Its job is to sell ad space and to promote whatever content facilitates that. Everything else is irrelevant.
We are “free” to post whatever we want, as long as it sorta meets a vaguely worded Terms and Conditions, our account isn’t too small, there isn’t a report mob, and what we are posting defends the status quo without being too revolting. Also it can’t involve sex or copyrighted material. Ask any trans person who mentions the word “terf” and you’ll see a bevvy of stories of TERF report mobs getting content pulled down, trans accounts suspended, people being doxxed and harassed offline, the works.
The recent controversy du jour is that YouTube, a swarming hive of garbage, has failed to censure Steven Crowder, a right-wing “comedian” after years-long harassment and hate speech specifically aimed at Carlos Maza, a gay writer for Vox Media.
YouTube’s response on Twitter was an exercise in corporate-speak on how to acknowledge a problem that clearly violated their own policies that all users agree to, yet it didn’t, with the implication being because Crowder inexplicably has an audience of millions.
The joke is to think these companies ever had any control whatsoever, and a system built on capitalism will reflect its values. Context is obliterated, because computers are stupid and only know what they’re told. Trans content gets pulled because someone used the word “tr*nny” as either an example of self-deprecation or cultural reclaiming of derogatory terms.
This is the main paradox in expecting the good conscience of a tech company to voluntarily protect its user base: it won’t. It can’t. It doesn’t know how. Do not depend on the socially progressive sensibilities of these companies to protect you.
In their desire to maximize a user base, it’s better for their bottom line if they only trim the hedges of the most visible of bad behavior with any level of consistency. YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Snapchat, and Reddit have all grown their platforms on this uneasy tension of having to present an anti-harassment policy, but not being able to realistically enforce it. It’s not that they won’t (that’s also a reason), it’s that they can’t.
NO ONE IS WATCHING.
EVERYONE IS WATCHING.
NOBODY CARES.
EVERYBODY CARES.
They have simply lost control of the ability to moderate a multinational platform with hundreds of millions of users. Bot networks are difficult to identify and shut down. So it’s not just hate speech that proliferates, it’s dangerous radicalization that their algorithms will intensify. They cannot uphold the values they espouse, consistently apply the rules they wrote, or stop the radicalization of so many of their users to dangerous, destructive ideologies.
The feedback loop of what makes traffic is also what creates racist murderers, brain-damaged old people, obnoxious liberal posturing, sad teen brands, anxiety, suicide ideation, and an awful lot of money. They couldn’t stop it even if they wanted to; the shareholders would revolt. A thousand right-wing sites would lose their accounts. They’d be pummeled from every side by red-faced pundits claiming censorship, and the tech companies would fold. Because in America, “fairness” and “middle ground” mean becoming more conservative, not the other way around.
This is the inevitable result of a system that derives its health purely from engagement numbers and clicks. Anger, mostly at cartoons aimed at pre-teen girls and dumb superhero films, is the most powerful driver of engagement, combined with the positive reinforcement of immediate feedback, throw in a little venture capital, and you get a system that is practically designed to be unaccountable. No one is in charge and no one cares.
Slowly but surely, we find ourselves in an age where being offline is nearly impossible if you want to be engaged in any capacity. What a fucked system to need in order to be a part of the world. Tech literacy is a base necessity now, and with 78% of all residences having internet access, but only 65% of rural and low income housing does.
Before you bust out the Matt Bors comic, we know that Zero Balance is also online, no shit genius. That we use social media to promote our content, and that we track user metrics to determine what content is connecting with our audiences. A badge of honor for us is that we’ve never paid a single penny for advertising, and we’ve never had ads and never will. Applaud us for our posting cred. There is no irony in using social media to describe its faults, at least not one that I want to acknowledge because it would fuck up this entire series. I mean, unless there’s a spare printing press or a TV broadcasting station lying around, not sure what our options are.
WE ARE ALL
TERMINALLY ONLINE.
LOG OFF WHEN YOU’RE DEAD.
Social media and online connectivity are not really the problem, and never have been. They suck, they’re broken, they’re full of idiots, but so is the world outside. The capitalist sludge that coats every nook and cranny of the internet is. The fact it’s dependent on every expanding user bases with no clear ideas of how to prevent serious damage from happening, like the occasional murder spree because someone heard the Chuck E Cheese animatronics came alive at night and molested kids.
Everything is broken and no one is in control. There are whole teams of people dedicated to keeping you hooked on notification dopamine, so it’s no wonder people wither away online. What the fuck else are they going to do? Ponder how miserable and empty their lives are in front of a candle? Roll a hoop down a unpaved street with a stick? People deserve a better world than the one that Facebook has shown us: a decrepit techtopia of algorithmic misery.
We’re all just terminally online. It would be nice to live in a world where that wasn’t necessarily so. Ban me, you cowards, before I post again.
In Part 2 coming next Monday, Carl Wilhoyte looks at the automated alienation that social media produces with its algorithms and simulated political reality.
Carl Wilhoyte is the co-editor and co-founder of Zero Balance. His work has appeared in Street Fight Radio, District Sentinel, Abomination Magazine, Bourbon Penn, and Farmhouse Magazine.