The novel was of course J.D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye, which had the unfortunate fate — as far as the huffing parents of 1951 were concerned — of being wildly popular and extensively taught in high schools (though some teachers were admittedly fired for assigning it). To date, it has sold more than 65 million copies. That it has never fallen out of favor should not surprise us: reading it is a matter of an afternoon, and it feels at points like reading one’s own teenage diary. The main character, Holden Caulfield, a 16-year-old scrawny virgin dropout in a deerstalker hat, is as queasily legible today as he ever was. In 2026, I would go so far as to say that his peculiar misanthropy, his wounded disaffection, his sentimental insincerity, is the internet’s house style.

Gen Z posters are all Salinger’s children. I suspect for a cohort with notoriously declining reading habits, Catcher is among the few “classics” they’ve touched. Its moral world is almost identical to the whinging of a Redditor: like them, Caulfield is confessional, digressive, accusatory, and self-pitying. His account of being booted out of prep school, then marauding around Manhattan in various states of desolation or drunkenness, is littered with “I means”, “and alls”, “or somethings”, and “I’m not kiddings”. He has a private taxonomy of “phonies”, and suspects, knows, that the world is rigged against him. He is a lone seer, a font of authenticity in a cruel and fake world. His delusions are now Gen Z’s.

The novel’s moral vocabulary maps clearly on to that of internet-native young people today: the worldview of TikTok, Twitter and Reddit — as well as darker, nicher places where true Holden chuds tend to congregate — is a bestiary of NPCs, normies, mids, soys, feds, goyslop and grifters. The politics and aesthetics of different corners of the internet vary wildly, but one theme is inextinguishable, whether it’s on an “Am I the Asshole” Reddit page or the comment section of a TikTok rant: the poster holds all the authenticity. Everyone else has sold out, or bought into social performance; everyone else is spiritually compromised. 

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In real life, this instinct is correct often enough: adults are grotesque, like the novel’s “perverts and morons” who cross-dress or spit water in each other’s faces, visible to Holden in the windows of the midtown hotel he runs away to after being kicked out of school. He’s also right that teachers often talk nonsense, expounding theories of the grown-up world which sound borderline fascist to teenaged ears; his history teacher Spencer bores him that “Life is a game, boy… that one plays according to the rules”. Seeing such aphorisms for the pap that they are doesn’t take extraordinary wisdom, but a dash of cynicism makes teenagers — and many of 2026’s failed-to-launch adults — feel like prophets. 

Adolescent eye-rolling is a shortcut to genuine insight, and many of the internet’s favorite voices are suspended in that sighing phase well into their forties. When Catcher’s Holden does it, we read it as the trademark of a developing mind: though he correctly diagnoses the status games of adults, the snobberies of the rich and the pretensions of the charming, we guess that when he’s older, when he’s well, he’ll learn to cope with these truths like the rest of us. But the internet feels no need to graduate beyond cynicism. 

Gen Z is the worst culprit: my generation — not just its blackpilled factions — is obsessed with exposing hierarchies or cabals, whether they relate to the sexual marketplace, the algorithm, Aipac, or nepo connections. We grew up in the shadow of 9/11, in the rubble of its attendant conspiracy theories; our first memorable news cycle involved a global financial crisis followed by years of political polarization, cynical electioneering and, when we were finally flying the nest, the crippling isolation of a pandemic. We were primed to crouch, to second-guess. Catcher, too, lies in the foothills of this paranoia. Everywhere Holden looks, phonies are “coming in the goddam window”; Hollywood, military men and parents are all agents conspiring against him. No wonder he looks so good for 75.

Today, the standard pose of the internet is pessimism packaged in irony. In 1951, this ennui was not yet the mass public style of teenagers. The novel’s swings between tear-streaked earnestness and knee-jerk deflection are the bread and butter of contemporary posting: Holden tells us he “feels depressed” or “went crazy”, then shows us something bitterly funny or gross. Even his red cap functions as a sort of edgelord avatar; it’s not his deerstalker but a “people-shooting hat”, he tells his dorm neighbor. Like an ironic gaming handle or meme-referencing profile picture, the hat is a costume of alienation. 

Holden’s great soft spot is the innocence of childhood, which he knows is slipping through his fingers as the adult world approaches. In some ways, the sentimentality of kids in Catcher is like the internet’s cat: the unknowing ball of tenderness that represents “me if you even care” is as sacred a symbol as the six-year-old boy Holden spots walking down Broadway with his parents, being ignored but mindlessly singing, in a sort of nursery rhyme, the Robert Burns poem that gives the novel its title. He says the sight “made me feel better. It made me feel not so depressed any more.” Salinger’s novel is about the uneasy transition between states of innocence and experience — the blank goodness of little children and the “phony” cynicism of adults. This, too, is why the internet loves cat videos: they are small oases in a land of division and gloom, talismans that keep out cheerless reality. You’ll notice I’m suggesting social media resembles the psyche of a fictional mentally ill teenager. This is deliberate.

Salinger once admitted that Catcher is about a “boyhood [that] was very much the same” as his own; “it was a great relief telling people about it”, he said. What he did not prophesy was that the feelings of his deeply unwell antihero would become a permanent cultural stance. Staring down the barrel of an impending depressive collapse, Holden insists he’s simply “going through a phase right now”. He cycles through a clutch of fantasies over a single weekend — he is a shot-up mob victim, a suave lounge lizard, a cabin-dwelling deaf-mute. Yet today, Caulfield’s volatile sense of self seems a little too familiar. These days, even fully fledged adulthood is pitched as a series of phases on an unending journey of growth and self-discovery.

Analogs of Holden can be found everywhere online — many twice his age. They, too, vault between aesthetic, ideological, political, wellness and spiritual phases. So did Salinger himself, a dabbler variously in Sufism, macrobiotics, Dianetics and Zen Buddhism (he was said to have brought reading lists on the subject to dates, which I’m afraid automatically limits my ability to like him personally). This is another of the novel’s great predictions: that more people would become experimental and unstable, trying on identities, cures and postures like Mr Benn in the costume shop. In Catcher it is impossible to imagine Holden settling into contented adult conformity; many modern readers might see his crisis not for the psychological collapse it is, but “the rational response to living under [insert complaint here: capitalism, the patriarchy, tyrannical colonialist curricula etc. etc.]”. 

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Because the novel is about a teenage boy, his preoccupations are timeless. He reads a magazine then worries that he might have “lousy hormones”; he worries about when he’ll lose his virginity, about whether his peers are outpacing him. He acts like an expert: “Girls. Jesus Christ. They can drive you crazy.” Really, like lots of dating gurus online, he knows naff all. Today he’d be fretting about low-T, cortisol, canthal tilts; he’d learn about sex not through the tall tales of his dorm-mates but from hardcore porn. In the novel he has a young prostitute sent to his hotel room: he feels aroused, scared, sentimental and disgusted. How like the porn-soaked discourse of the modern internet, where girls are mysterious and maddening, the cause of both rage and guilt. The difference is that in the novel, our sentimental screw-up is alone, and drives himself to lonely destruction. Today, whole forums would open up to counsel or compound his suffering. 

As in most spaces online, Catcher is not the testimony of a predator; he is more familiar and pathetic than that, a boy terrified by a sexual world he longs to be initiated into. Every time he sees “fuck you” graffitied on a wall, he longs to erase it. Once, at his little sister’s school, he does, so the children don’t “worry about it for a couple of days”. Really, he’s reacting to his own horror. He’s happiest in the company of his “kid sister”, or in a snowball fight. Like Zoomers today, exposed to the adult internet, he must feel he’s grown up too fast.

Catcher is not a period piece about mid-century adolescence; it’s more like a prehistory of the online male voice. Social media amplifies the loud and the self-obsessed, so its stars are necessarily teenagers, if only spiritually. “Phonies” are today’s NPCs; “hot-shots” are our nepo babies or chads. The swaggadocio of the streamer is Holden, holder of zero life experience, hoping to “wave a buck under [a] head-waiter’s nose… in New York, boy, money really talks”. But his real mission, before he is committed to an institution at the novel’s close, is to preserve innocence itself, catching children playing in his imaginary field of rye before they fall off a cliff. 

In 2026, equivalent solutions to internal decrepitude are everywhere on the internet: young men are called to save morality or humanity or the West. The prescribed morality varies but its ingredients are familiar: mending oneself is a civilizational mission and, like Holden’s child-saving fantasy, it counteracts perceived corruption — for example, of porn (among no-fappers), of seed oils (among clean-eaters) or of emasculating feminism (among redpill types). The instinct of many young men online is to transmute personal brokenness into evidence of a broken world: loneliness becomes decadence; mediocrity becomes victimhood of a conspiracy. In The Catcher in the Rye, that sort of thinking gets Holden sent away to the funny farm. In 2026, such delusions of grandeur are a mark of sanity.

This could be a metaphor for the internet; but it’s also the set-up for the horror movie Backrooms. Three things make the film notable. First, it’s phenomenally successful: it has just broken $300 million in global box-office takings. Second, its director is phenomenally young: Kane Parsons was 20 when the film was released in May. And third, Backrooms marks the moment that creepypasta crossed definitively into the entertainment mainstream.

What, you might be asking, is creepypasta? And can you eat it? Well, no. Creepypasta is sometimes used as a catch-all term for any horror story published online, but a more precise definition is that it’s a kind of horror story that could only exist online: a collaborative venture into the uncanny that deploys the structure of the internet to generate fear. Creepypastas grow on message boards and wikis, usually created in-character (with users posting as though the fictions they’re describing are real), and are expanded in videos and podcasts.

The term derives from “copypasta”, itself a corruption of the term “copy-paste” that emerged on the image board 4chan in 2006 to refer to blocks of text posted there (copied and pasted) by internet users. A year later, the word creepypasta emerged to specifically designate scary copypastas. That makes them sound like a 21st-century spin on the old chain letters — the ones that instructed you to forward this message to 10 other people, or suffer a horrible fate. But creepypastas have a power to disturb that goes far deeper.

They feed off the glitchy, uncertain way that information is reproduced online. Distortion might be the result of saving and reuploading a picture multiple times, or it might have been deliberately tampered with; or it might, if you’re feeling susceptible, be an authentic document of an unnatural event. Whole horror lores can even be spun out of innocuous bits of media which become sinister purely because they’ve been shorn of their context — like the photograph that inspired the Backrooms creepypasta.

In 2002, an old furniture store was being renovated; because it was 2002, someone decided to document the process on a blog, with photos of the cavernous, yellow-wallpapered space. And that was the end of that, until 2019, when a poster on 4chan put out a call for “disquieting images that just feel ‘off’”. Someone responded with one of the sickly pictures of the empty store, taken at a slightly odd angle: not scary, but definitely unheimlich. (It would be 2024 before the source of the picture was identified.)

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Someone else replied with a brief but vivid horror scenario that would set the terms for everything that the Backrooms mythos would become: “If you’re not careful and you noclip out of reality in the wrong areas, you’ll end up in the Backrooms, where it’s nothing but the stink of old moist carpet, the madness of mono-yellow, the endless background noise of fluorescent lights at maximum hum-buzz, and approximately six hundred million square miles of randomly segmented empty rooms to be trapped in. God save you if you hear something wandering around nearby, because it sure as hell has heard you.”

From this germ, a whole fictional universe proliferated across Reddit, wikis and Discord. There was even a split in the community between those who were interested in roleplaying and lore-building, and those who declared themselves “truebackrooms”, with an interest in the specific aesthetic that gave the Backrooms image its sinister charge. In 2022, Parsons began uploading his Backrooms series to YouTube — an incredibly accomplished “found footage” horror, which became the genesis of the Backrooms feature film.

One of the particularly unsettling aspects of the Backrooms creepypasta is the idea of “noclipping out of reality”. Noclipping is a concept taken from video games: when an error in the programming allows a character to pass through a seemingly solid object, they’re said to have “noclipped”. So while the concept of being lost in infinite backrooms is pretty horrific, there’s also the unpleasant implication that the real world has begun to behave like a video game. The physical and the digital bleed into each other in the Backrooms.

That’s also true with one of the other breakout creepypastas. Slenderman is a hauntingly tall, skinny and faceless figure who is said to control his victims’ minds. That is, he infects his target’s consciousness as a computer virus does. Like the Backrooms, Slenderman has a known origin: another image challenge, this time on the board Something Awful in 2009. A user called Victor Surge (real name Eric Knudsen) posted two pictures of children with an elongated, faceless form lurking in the background.

The first was captioned: “we didn’t want to go, we didn’t want to kill them, but its persistent silence and outstretched arms horrified and comforted us at the same time…” The caption on the second claimed it had been recovered from a library fire, and implied an authority cover-up. It also coined “the Slender Man”. This was explicit, deliberate storytelling using established horror and folklore tropes: with echoes of the Pied Piper, Beowulf’s giant monster Grendel and Jack Skellington from The Nightmare Before Christmas, Slenderman felt horribly familiar.

Consequently, he captured something in the collective imaginary: it was almost as though he had always already existed, and was just waiting to be named. (When I was a child in the Eighties, I had a recurring nightmare about a character who looked a lot like Slenderman.) Slenderman inspired a long-running YouTube mockumentary series called Marble Hornets; multiple alternate reality games using clues scattered across media and a character in the video game Minecraft. You can take questionnaires to learn if you have the “slender sickness”: headaches, nosebleeds and fatigue are all signs that Slenderman has fixed his malevolent attentions on you.

In 2014, Slenderman was also implicated in the attempted murder of a 12-year-old girl in Wisconsin by two of her friends who believed that they could become Slenderman’s proxies (and protect their families from him) by providing a sacrifice. The stabbing of Payton Isabella Leutner by Anissa Weier and Morgan Geyser generated, inevitably, an international moral panic, some of it justified: just how much were parents aware of the content their children might be consuming unsupervised in their devices? (YouTube, where Weier and Geyser absorbed much of their Slenderman media, did not launch YouTube Kids until 2015. When Weier and Geyser went on their tablets, there was no delineation between age-appropriate and inappropriate videos.)

Some of the coverage around the attempted murder, though, appeared to be under the impression that Slenderman really did have the occult powers of mind-control that Weier and Geyser had credited him with. Overheated commentators acted as though a demonic force had been unleashed into the brains of children by the internet. In reality, though, the two perpetrators were sadly vulnerable girls. Geyser had untreated early-onset schizophrenia with vivid delusions. Meanwhile, Weier had been bullied and isolated until she met Geyser: in her police interview, she explained her actions by saying she hadn’t wanted to lose the friendship.

Weier and Geyser, then, had noclipped out of reality. They were lost in the Backrooms of their shared fantasy. When they were arrested, they had been attempting to walk to “Slender Mansion”, the supposed home of Slenderman which they had decided was actually located in the Chequamegon-Nicolet National Forest. In footage of them after their arrests, they earnestly describe Slenderman’s abilities. Within their private game, Leutner had been reduced to the status of a non-playable character — a prop without her own inner life.

Each generation creates the monsters it needs, or perhaps the monsters it deserves: the horror genre is a kind of collective nightmare, where cultural anxieties are given grotesque form. In the 2000s, the idea of being stalked by a faceless humanoid who could manipulate your brain made instinctive sense to internet users: by placing yourself online, you created a digital version of your own psyche that could be rifled through by malicious anons, and abused. Slenderman stole children, and the internet seemed to be stealing them too.

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In the film Backrooms, the monster isn’t a character — it’s a place, and what happens to you when you’re in there. Our current contemporary nightmare isn’t the creature that stalks you. It’s the possibility of slipping into a parallel dimension and never being able to come back. Everything that exists in the Backrooms is an echo of something outside them, but distorted, like degraded digital copies, or AI hallucinations. The characters who enter the Backrooms are initially repulsed by their strangeness, but some end up seduced by them: the Backrooms feel more real than the real world.

For the director, who is young enough to have grown up fully online, this must be a very recognizable kind of horror. Like the Backrooms, the internet is a place designed to make you lose your bearings, as you click from link to link or scroll from post to post until you’re deep down a rabbit hole with no way of retracing your steps. It’s also a place where you can lose yourself, psychologically and morally: an infinite version of the Overlook Hotel in The Shining, where every corridor draws you deeper into your own corruption.

Maybe it’s not a coincidence that, as well as birthing creepypasta and myriad other forms of internet culture, 4chan and SomethingAwful have been the factories for some of the most heinous online tendencies. The writer Dale Beran (in his book It Came From Something Awful) describes these boards as incubators for the memeified far Right. 4chan in particular became characterized by a deep nihilism, where anything — from child pornography to suicide to school shootings — could be treated as a joke.

For most, this was edginess without intent. For others, it was a staging ground for real world violence: in multiple cases, mass shooters or murderers have announced their intentions or documented their crimes on 4chan. The distorted norms of the site meant that they expected, and sometimes received, applause for their acts. Maybe the fellow users cheering for killing were evil by nature. More likely, their absorption into the parallel world of message boards had fractured something in their sense of right and wrong.

Though it’s set in 1990 (and its characters consequently use no technology more advanced than a fixed-line telephone), Backrooms is probably the most accurate film about the internet ever made. It’s terrifying, not because its world is frighteningly alien, but because its world is frighteningly familiar: like the characters of the film, we are all constantly being seduced by what’s on the other side of the portal. The online realm is real, even if it doesn’t exist as space or matter. We’re all lost here, and the longer we stay, the more monstrous we become.

To many Right-wingers, including Trump himself, the edit was propaganda designed to portray him as a riot-inciting demagogue. To Trump haters, even if it’s not an accurate representation of what he said in that particular speech it’s a fair distillation of Trumpishness, and as such true in spirit. So who is right? It’s not even a debate about the facts, but about what the facts mean.

And this is precisely the larger issue at stake for the BBC, too: not so much whether, or in which direction, the BBC is “biased”, but whether we still have any faith in the possibility of neutral, authoritative arbiters of information as such. And if the answer is “no”, what does the future look like for our supposedly neutral and impartial national broadcaster?

The fallout from the leaked dossier which drew attention to the clip, along with evidence of other editorial bias at the BBC, has triggered the resignation of the Director-General, Tim Davie along with the CEO of BBC News, Deborah Furness. It has even drawn comment from the White House, with Trump threatening legal action against the corporation and his press secretary Karoline Leavitt calling it a “propaganda machine”.

Supporters of the BBC allege that the dossier is in fact a nefarious Right-wing plot to destroy the institution. Conversely, those same Right-wingers might retort that the fact these insinuations are mostly published by The Guardian supports the suspicion that the Beeb may only appear “neutral” to people whose idea of sensible centrism is Polly Toynbee. This aside, I think it’s fair to say there is an unmistakable progressive tilt to the issues listed in the dossier, and the imputation of Left-wing bias is not totally baseless. But the problem goes deeper than bias in one direction. It is structural.

If the BBC is struggling today, it’s because, for a growing number of political issues, there is no “neutral”. All three of the dossier’s flashpoints — Trump, Gaza and gender ideology — have this quality. Trump is an archetypal case, and nowhere more divisively than in how you interpret the events that occurred at the Capitol on January 6, 2021. For one camp, this was a peaceful turnout by patriots in defense of an election they believed stolen; to the other, it was an attempted insurrection. There’s no way both interpretations can be true.

The same goes for the conflict in Gaza, which – depending on your worldview – is either justified retaliation for an unprovoked act of mass terrorism, or genocide thinly legitimized by the actions of freedom fighters. Again, there’s no way both of these things can be true. The trans issue has the same Rorschach quality: either a person’s sex is determined by what they are, or it’s determined by what they say they are. They can’t both be true, and there’s no “both sides” compromise.

This isn’t happening because there’s something uniquely polarizing about contemporary politics. The decisive change is the internet. Avant-garde commentators such as Clay Shirky were predicting back in the 2000s that people could use the internet to do away with institutional gatekeepers, unleashing a new era of popular democracy and cultural dynamism. And this did sort of happen, but not quite in the way the utopians anticipated.

The BBC is (or was) a paradigmatic example of this kind of gatekeeper. It has always been both in the business of representing what’s out there, and also of seeking to shape it. From its foundation, its remit was always patrician: to “inform, educate, and entertain”, including through the provision of (aspirationally) impartial news. Karoline Leavitt was perhaps not wholly off-piste: a pithier term for a state-owned, taxpayer-funded media giant with this improving remit might well be “propaganda machine”, for all that (as for example during the Second World War) this duty has generally been discharged in cooperation with the British people. Especially after the war, the BBC came to occupy a role contiguous with the Church of England: as diffident but still mostly trustworthy repository and delivery-mechanism for such collective morals as post-imperial Britain was able still to agree on.

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Even if the rise of commercial radio and TV dented the BBC’s crown, it still stayed more or less in place — until the internet. Now, though, everything is different. The internet poses an existential threat not just to the BBC as a body, but more fundamentally to the worldview within which having a national broadcaster makes sense at all.

For one thing, internet politics has stripped geography from political debate, which is now divided much more by language than geography. This means Britain, the USA, Canada, Australia, and other Anglophone communities worldwide all inhabit functionally the same public square. How, in this context, should a national broadcaster judge what counts as national news? But more important still, the internet has done as Shirky promised and “disintermediated” journalism. That is: it’s significantly reduced the power of institutional gatekeepers.

The result has been cultural dynamism, after a fashion. But it’s also revealed that the post-structuralists were actually right about “truth” being to some extent an effect of institutional power. That is: when you don’t have a powerful single arbiter of The Narrative, what you end up with may not necessarily be more truth. You might just get a Babel of competing narratives. And like market traders hawking their wares on a busy square, the incentive structures of such an information economy tend to reward the loudest voices and simplest, most vivid offers.

Lest anyone be tempted to comfort themselves with the idea that this is only a problem for “low-information voters”, think again: what the philosopher Dan Williams calls “elite misinformation” is just as rampant, and studies have shown education level to have no effect on how susceptible people are to misinformation. By way of illustration, we need only remember the bizarre assertions that came and went, week by week, during Covid-19, while at every stage the chattering classes enjoined us to “follow the science”.

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Indeed it was Covid-19 that provided the inflection point in this trajectory, for the simple reason that lockdowns forced everyone online. If it feels since then that the world has gone mad, it’s not that social isolation sent us crazy. It’s that the internet ate reality. In the resulting cacophony, everyone now assembles themselves a bespoke version of reality, from a near-infinite supply of media channels, podcasts, influencers, and the like.

And because humans are mimetic — that is, we decide what we want based on what those around us want — these realities have begun to agglomerate in affinity groups. In turn, these clusters have begun to define themselves in opposition to one another, and to mount information-war maneuvers against one another. One notable result of these skirmishes, for example, is the progressive capture of Wikipedia, which was founded as a neutral, crowdsourced online encyclopedia but has become bitterly politicized.

This dissolution of “truth” into tribal trench warfare is now the basic structure of what we used to call “the public conversation”. Huge amounts of money, status, and political influence are already at stake in this new environment; one the BBC, which was designed as a one-to-many vehicle for transmitting respectable establishment consensus, is hopelessly ill-equipped to navigate. For as in each of the flashpoint issues in the Prescott dossier, what’s at stake is often not the facts, so much as what the facts mean. And, for a national broadcaster tasked with impartial reporting, this presents an often impossible dilemma. There’s often no way to report on an issue this bitterly contested without effectively picking a “side”, which is to say an interpretation of those facts, even if only in choosing what to omit. For example (according to Prescott’s dossier) the BBC’s transgender reporting routinely centered trans experience, but omitted the voices of detransitioners.

But what is the BBC to do? The internet replaced one-to-many with many-to-many communication, and institutional gatekeepers with platform plutocrats. Now Auntie is just one voice in an increasingly noisy attention economy, and everyone just dismisses competing interpretations as lies and propaganda. The Panorama furor itself is already grist to the same disorienting mill: former Sky political editor Adam Boulton said of the edited clip that at worst the BBC was guilty of “sharp practice”, and in any case it was justified because the edit was morally accurate even if it was factually misleading. So much so, in fact, that it was “fake news to suggest Donald Trump did not egg on what happened on 6 January”. For his part, Trump’s press secretary has now declared the entire BBC to be “fake news”.

There is, in other words, nowhere to stand that isn’t someone else’s fake news. Pity the poor Beeb: when you can now search up 10 conspiratorial interpretations of every factual report, from every conceivable angle, in the time it takes to boil the kettle, how long is anyone going to go on believing in impartiality as such? You can be sure that any effort to “correct” the perceived existing Left-liberal BBC bias would simply elicit fresh accusations of “fake news” and “bias” from somewhere else. Under the circumstances, I don’t entirely blame the Director General, Tim Davie, for throwing in the towel.

More than one thing can be true simultaneously. It is surely true that many will be delighted by the opportunity these events have afforded, to put the boot into the BBC. It’s surely also true that the institution’s well-documented middle-class staffing skew exposes its employees to the blind spots and groupthink of that social milieu, and that this is often visible in editorial decisions. But it’s also true that comparatively speaking, the BBC is fighting a heroic last stand for neutrality, against perhaps insuperable has arguably already held out longer than any of its commercial counterparts, and indeed such utopian digital enterprises as Wikipedia.

As well as noting its lapses into bias, then, we might also acknowledge how very much worse this already is, almost everywhere else. But this is faint praise. “It’s not as woke as Wikipedia” may not be enough to save the BBC, as an institution, from the sucking void of Choose Your Own Reality. If it isn’t, then flawed and middle-class and sometimes irritatingly sanctimonious as it is, I suspect we will all come to regret its passing.

The essay was published well before the Manson Family murders, before the Rolling Stones’ Altamont Speedway concert debacle, the Kent State shootings, the deaths of Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, and Jim Morrison — before any of the infamous totems of the death of the Sixties. Yet the picture Didion paints of an already decaying counter-culture is bleak: rather than discovering the kind of fluid, boundary-less utopia imagined in the new culture of psychedelic drugs, thousands of young people had squandered their minds and lives chasing a pseudo-enlightenment sold to them by gurus and cult figures — the most famous of course being Timothy Leary, who had traveled across the country inviting every American to “Turn on, tune in, and drop out”. Instead of precipitating a glorious era of mass enlightenment, LSD ended up creating a burned-out, drug-addled generation of lost children.

Considering Didion’s prophetic picture of that burned-out acid generation, it seems entirely possible that our own society stands on the edge of something similar, even if its own destructive ideals of utopian design have been institutional and technological, where the Sixties dream was countercultural. Beset by internet addiction, climate anxiety, depression, overwork, ADHD, and a general tendency towards distraction and retreat from the world, ours is a culture of burnout and exhaustion which looks like nothing so much as a recapitulation of the Sixties fallout, only with the internet as our new mind-altering drug of choice. Yet these eerie similarities are no accident.

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From the release of formerly clandestine information, in the Seventies, we know that LSD was introduced into America by concerted governmental programs in the early Fifties as part of Cold War MK-ULTRA operations, in an attempt to develop new forms of brainwashing and mind control. For years, the United States government experimented with psychedelic drugs on people in asylums, prisons, and clinics. The journalist Tom O’Neill, in his rather persuasive book CHAOS: Charles Manson, the C.I.A., and the Secret History of the Sixties (2019), has even gone so far as to suggest that Charles Manson himself may have been the product of deep-state testing, during his time in prison. Whether or not this is true, the fact remains that the drug which unleashed massive anti-societal, anti-institutional energies onto an unsuspecting American public was the product of a state experiment, an attempt to discover a new technology of power.

As the Sixties dream collapsed, these mass collective visions were channeled into more explicit cults, and into narrower, individualist ideas of therapeutic soothing. The Seventies saw the proliferation of guru-centered religious cults such as the Rajneesh Movement and Jim Jones’ People’s Temple — the latter infamous for its congregational mass suicide in 1978 in Guyana. The decade was also dominated by what came to be known as the New Age, a vague bricolage of spiritualist practices including Americanized popularizations of Zen and yoga; neo-pagan groups like Wiccans and the Church of Satan; even expanding middle-class interest in Freudian and Jungian psychotherapy. The emerging popular images of “spirituality” at the time — healing crystals, meditation retreats, soothing muzak — were all part of this new climate, stemming from the collapse of the commune movement, an emergent global recession, and increasing fragmentation into individualist anomie. This was the “Me Decade” which the great socialist critic Christopher Lasch detailed acutely in his 1979 book, The Culture of Narcissism.

For Lasch, the new therapeutic language of the Seventies had combined with the slow constriction of family life, an addictive obsession with professional sports, ingeniously distractive media, and a collapse in popular faith in institutions, to create an isolated and narcissistic culture losing all sense of shared vision or communal life. For all its potential value, the increasing middle-class obsession with therapy was ultimately only teaching people to further obsess over themselves: people were growing more and more concerned with tracking and transforming their own feelings and thought patterns, instead of turning outwards to the world, or confronting the need for real public, political transformation. The ever-unattainable ideal of “mental health” had effectively replaced the Christian doctrine of the salvation of the soul. In place of religion, or even those utopian visions of mass psychedelic enlightenment and countercultural communalism, the West now had a myriad of individual spiritual projects — all increasingly packaged, marketed, and thoroughly commodified.

Around the same time, Silicon Valley had begun to form. With the Advanced Research Projects Agency Network (ARPANET), California university researchers funded by the US Department of Defense had created a new mass packet-switched network, functionally connected by 1969. This ARPANET formed the foundation for what would later be the Internet. Given the name “Silicon Valley” by Dan Hoefler in 1971, that section of the San Francisco Bay Area played host to the world’s largest concentration of hardware and software developers, start-ups, and inventors of new computer technologies. With the introduction of the IBM Personal Computer in 1981, and the establishment of the official Silicon Valley Bank in 1983, the place became the epicenter of the coming digital revolution.

Silicon Valley had its own emergent culture, too — one which, as it turned out, had much to do with that death of the Sixties counterculture, and all those lost dreams of a boundaryless utopia. In an influential 1995 paper, University of Westminster media scholars Richard Barbrook and Andy Cameron gave this loose ethos a name: “The Californian Ideology.” This “bizarre fusion of the cultural bohemianism of San Francisco with the hi-tech industries of Silicon Valley… promiscuously combin[ing] the free-wheeling spirit of the hippies and the entrepreneurial zeal of the yuppies”, made up the set of liberatory ideals which had formed the ideological basis for these new networks, from its earliest days to 1990, when the British researcher Tim Berners-Lee from CERN had built the first web browser, along with the software behind the creation of the World Wide Web.

According to Barbrook and Cameron, the creators and theorists of the Internet had come to see an unlimited, untamed cyberspace as a chance to finally achieve the old utopian dream, following the collapse of the New Left movement and the burnout of the Californian counterculture. What the Sixties had failed to bring about at the level of consciousness might now be done through technology. But Barbrook and Cameron noticed something disturbing going on, namely a strong rightward drift, into fantasies of “perfect” markets and totally sovereign individuals, freed by the ultimate “democracy” of the internet from any societal responsibility. They reported that the new hi-tech and media industries were becoming rhetorically very important for the New Right, since “both capitalists and well-paid workers fear[ed] that the open acknowledgment of public funding of their companies would justify tax rises to pay for desperately needed spending on health care, environmental protection, housing, public transport and education.” They also wrote, despairingly, about how many people in this new “virtual class” had been “seduced by the libertarian rhetoric and technological enthusiasm of the New Right. Working for hi-tech and media companies, they would like to believe that the electronic marketplace can somehow solve America’s pressing social and economic problems without any sacrifices on their part.”

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Of course, this is a paradigm we’ve seen repeat itself many times over in the past decades. It’s fairly well accepted at this point that the 2024 US presidential election was at least partially clenched for Trump by the support of tech titans like Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg, and Peter Thiel, whose Orwellian corporation Palantir has already benefited immensely from working with the new government. Democratic socialists in America have argued for years that the sway tech companies can purchase in the government only further facilitates the transfer of federal money away from new infrastructure, or welfare for a struggling population, and into the coffers of these already exorbitantly overvalued and over-subsidized monopolies.

The parallels on the historical scale are also obvious if we look at the beginnings (and the end result) of the Californian Ideology. First introduced as a technology of control, with large-scale military investiture, psychedelic drugs and the counterculture which emerged from them took an entire generation from mass public defiance of conformism, and celebration of spiritual transcendence, into mass psychological crash-out, followed by a descent into narcissism and myopia. Via those inventors and businessmen of Silicon Valley who successfully globalized the Californian Ideology, a similar project was envisioned, only now at the institutional and technological level. It was no longer merely counter-cultural: it was the underlying impetus for the new technological regime itself. And it, too, had decades of concerted investment by the US military to thank for its sudden widespread effect.

Which brings us to the present moment, and what it shares with the death of that older utopian ideal. All pretensions towards the “democratizing” power of Web 2.0 social media died with the Arab Spring 15 years ago; since then these sites have only increased our political polarization and intra-group hatred. We’ve even begun to develop our own cult leaders and cultish language: consider accelerationists following the example of Nick Land, or new anti-democratic “philosophers” like Curtis Yarvin, along with an Internet filling up with doom-laden terms like “the longhouse” or “the cathedral” and, of course, “taking the red pill”. Transhumanism, Applied Rationalism, and Effective Altruism have established themselves in actual institutional centers, in affiliation with many companies in Silicon Valley today — yet all have shown the tell-tale signs of cult-like activity, from sexual grooming scandals to tales of obscene behavior to murky influence on the rich and powerful.

Then there’s the simple fact of mass emotional collapse, as overstimulation from internet addiction and portable devices only worsens. In 2010, the philosopher Byung-Chul Han characterized the primary disease of our time as “neuronal”, manifesting in pathologies like ADHD, depression, and burnout. In his remarkable book, The Burnout Society, Han traces the transformation of Western society from a “disciplinary” paradigm to an “achievement” paradigm. From a society based on coercion and force from above, we’ve shifted to a society in which each person becomes self-exploiting, suffering not from any threat of direct oppression from the Other, but from “an excess of positivity”. Consider all our brief media obsessions over fads like “quieting quitting”, “ghosting”, or the “Great Resignation”. In a world of entrepreneurs, personal brands, and internet avatars, the ruling feeling of the day is the constant threat of an immense narcissistic crash-out, an exhaustion which comes from having to aggressively and constantly be one’s own authentic self — and then to sell it. We’ve never been more stimulated, more overwhelmed by information, or more productive in our work. The result is a deepening sense of total existential exhaustion, not at all dissimilar to the post-Sixties burnout.

It’s impossible to know where any of this is really heading. Yet if we follow some of these analogues — keeping in mind that it’s hardly a perfect one-to-one map, only a sense of the way our massive societal upheavals tend to produce mass exhaustion — we may glimpse some of what’s in store for us. Consider the increasing evidence for the “Dead Internet” theory, the suspicion that maybe even a majority of the internet is, at this point, only dead bots interacting with other dead bots. We’re looking at a pandemic of tiredness, overstimulation, and overwork, and even that is accompanied by a loss of any last vestige of meaning or reality in the digital networks we’ve used to distract ourselves. In the next decade, we’ll likely see a rise in even more obvious cults and spurious new spiritual movements; huge increases in young people “tuning in, and dropping out” from mass communications technologies; the increased transition from mild “digital detoxes” to outright rejection of digital existence; and a rise in the establishment of primitivist communes.

The benefits of this new paradigm could be remarkable: a return to pragmatic grassroots socialist politics; an increase in DIY planting and repair-work; more communal living, perhaps cross-generationally; the return of something like a true counter-culture, or an artistic avant-garde; new, classically humanistic educational institutions, away from our ineffectual universities; even a larger return to sincere interest in the great world religions. If history is any guide, and we really are in for a massive post-utopian burnout at a level never seen before, then these are the very kinds of alternatives and experiments which we’ll have to embrace. Unless we want to live in a world where the destruction wrought by pseudo-utopian projects is simply replayed at the mass technological level, then we’ll be forced to find ways of connecting to each other which don’t rely solely on digital technology or existing institutions. We may indeed be in an escalating mess of mass emotional collapse — a crisis of exhaustion. Yet as Winston Churchill is supposed to have said (in a way which still rings quite true): “Never let a good crisis go to waste.”

“Helen McDougal” is the suspiciously normie name adopted by the founder and operator of Tattle, a message board that acts as a dark mirror to influencer culture. If the currency of influencer culture is likes, then the currency of Tattle is hate. The users of Tattle follow the objects of their attention every bit as avidly as a fan would — dissecting relationships, speculating about what’s going on behind the camera, and tracking influencers’ movements. The difference is that on Tattle, this is all animated by a fundamental loathing of the people they obsess over. It is the home of anti-fandom, of communities formed in antipathy.

According to Tattle’s own description, it’s a “commentary website on public business social media accounts” that allows “commentary and critiques of people that choose to monetize their personal life as a business and release it into the public domain”, but has a “zero-tolerance policy to any content that is abusive, hateful or harmful”. According to Tattle’s subjects, this is humbug: Tattle is a factory for libel and harassment, and its favorite targets (like its users) are women. Comments like “play dough arse”, “prime example of disordered eating” and “looks like a sofa” are the norm.

Last week, a libel judgment from the High Court in Belfast was published which confirmed the worst about Tattle. Originally issued in 2023, but subject to reporting restrictions until now, the judgment called Tattle “a site which has been set up to facilitate the deliberate infliction of hurt and harm on others. Its very nature is to allow anonymous trashing of people’s reputations and the people facilitating this are making money out of it… This is clearly a case of peddling untruths for profit.”

The couple who had sued Tattle, Neil and Donna Sands, were awarded £300,000 in damages. But perhaps even more gratifyingly, they were now able to reveal the true identity of “Helen McDougal” — not, in fact, an ordinary woman who wanted to blow the whistle on the corruption of influencers, but a man called Sebastian Bond. Bond is an influencer himself, promoting “healthy plant based recipes” under the name Nest and Glow. The next step for the Sands and other Tattle targets will be to identify individual posters and bring them to court in turn. Their ultimate aim would be to shut the site down, either by direct order or simply by making it too expensive to run.

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The layers here are certainly tastier than the cursed slop posing as food that Bond puts up on his Instagram account. The scourge of influencers turns out to be an influencer. The person behind the internet’s fiercest criticisms of fakes and phonies turns out to be a fake and phony of the first order. And the Tattle users, who take great delight in “doxxing” online personalities (that is, finding and releasing personal documents or information), are now anxiously checking their own opsec, fearful of having their cover blown.

Best of all, though, is the gender reveal. How better to cloak yourself in benignity than by pretending to be a woman? “Helen McDougal” gave automatic protection against charges of misogyny — yes, Tattle might be furiously engaged in the character assassination of any female in the public eye, but it was a female-founded site with majority female users! The latter statement is still true (probably), but there’s a different vibe to it now we know they were all acting in a space owned and controlled by a man.

Not that Tattle’s users ought to be surprised by this act of mendacity. One of the busiest topics on the site is “Gender Discussion” — “Where men & women are born, not worn”, as one poster puts it. The idea that a man would adopt a female persona for deceptive purposes should be very familiar to people who think like this. Tattle is one part of the internet that never got the #bekind memo, and as a result it settled, from early on, into a bracingly realist approach on trans issues.

Even though the site was founded only in 2018, it feels like a portal to an older, more anarchic version of the internet than the manicured lawns of the social networks. One of the first things you’ll notice if you look at Tattle is that it’s ugly. That’s not just in terms of its content, but aesthetically: Tattle is a wall of sans serif text. When threads read 1,000 posts, they’re automatically closed and the conversation has to migrate to a new thread. Navigating them requires much patient clicking to find out what people are talking about.

You might assume this is a fault with the site — shouldn’t a message board want to be accessible to the maximum number of potential users? Actually, I think it’s a feature. Tattle’s jankiness means it takes commitment to participate. The friction-free UX of Instagram, X or Bluesky means that anyone can join in; on Tattle, though, you have to learn the rules of engagement before you can be in the club. Membership is also restricted. According to posters on Reddit, it hasn’t been open to new signups for several years.

That makes Tattle a closed world subject to its own mores. Crucially, though, it’s a closed world that’s visible from the outside. If all the posters on Tattle wanted to do was trash-talk influencers, they could do that on WhatsApp: the appeal of Tattle is being able to do it where people, including the people they’re talking about, can see. On Tattle threads, you’ll routinely see a comment that imagines how the subject would feel if they were reading — or even better, relishing the fact that the subject has angrily acknowledged Tattle’s existence elsewhere.

That kind of behavior tells you a lot about Tattle’s complicated relationship to celebrity. “Of course it is a gossip site, so we’re not going to take the moral high ground,” said McDougal/Bond in a Q&A from before his outing. But the truth is that Tattle does consistently take the moral high ground: its justification for its existence is that influencers engage in unethical practices, and this ought to be exposed. And as far as it goes, there’s some truth to this.

Influencers do behave in sketchy ways — not flagging ads, promoting unethical products or lying about results — and neither regulators nor the platforms have the resources or appetite to keep up with this. Beyond the legally dubious, there are influencers who promote dangerous health crazes, who exploit their children or who manifest troubling behaviors that their audiences enable. Users of Tattle might also look at the coverage of their site in places like Mail Online (which called Bond the “king of trolls”) and point out that this is hardly an outlet with clean hands when it comes to publishing nasty commentary.

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An amateur influencer watchdog could fill a significant gap, if that was what truly Tattle was. Instead, Tattle is a machine for laundering resentment toward people who are good at engagement. “You want attention?” goes the implicit argument of a Tattle post. “Well, here’s some attention that you don’t get to control.” The best revenge of all? It elevates the posters themselves to micro-celebrities in the ecosystem of the site. They get all the pleasure of name-recognition, and all the satisfaction of shaping public opinion, while being able to keep their names safely detached from the lives they want to protect. As gratifying as the unmasking of Bond might be, it hasn’t so far seemed to herald the end of Tattle, or a demise of trolling culture overall.

In his Q&A as McDougal, Bond pointed out that “If Tattle ever did shut down, another site would pop up in seconds to fill the void and several others already exist.” He was telling the truth about that much, even if his entire identity was a fiction. Bitterness, cruelty and a desire to bond against an enemy are powerful human impulses. So is the urge to claw your way into the limelight — even if only pseudonymously, and even if you have to do it at the expense of the people who are already there.

No one cares as fiercely about fame as those who wish they had some of it, which is why it feels inevitable that the person behind Tattle would turn out to be a wannabe food blogger. But no one understands the brutality of fame as well as a hater, which is why it makes sense that Bond protected his privacy so carefully. The heart of Tattle was Bond’s understanding that loathing could bring people together. Now his name is public, Bond can finally become everything he envied and everything he feared.

But should this development be welcomed?

Back in the Sixties, an overly romanticised moment of revolutionary fervour when some intellectuals even garnered rock-star appeal (at least in French cafes), there was an open assault on language and its connection to how we understand the world. Spearheaded by great thinkers such as Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida, what was seen as the important marker of any shared civilisation — the language which sets us apart from more barbarous animals, as Aristotle mused — was no longer taken as given. The sentences people used were not simply learned, but the outcome of a fractious historical battle that would often normalise systems of oppression, subjugation and hidden forms of violence. In short, what was and was not said could both be boiled down to one single word: power.

As the politicisation of language has continued apace, addressing its inherent power has become a dominant preoccupation for all manner of social commentators. In short, if a claim’s legitimacy is really about the power to impose verifiable truths, everything that passes as truthful is ultimately a matter of perspective. It is no coincidence that the oft-cited phrase “one man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter” has become part of standard political fare

The problem with perspective, however, is that no two people ever experience the same event in an identical way. Moreover, even within “post-modernist” circles, there was some warning against a slide into a purely subjective abyss where the truthfulness of language risked losing all meaning. This was particularly acute when it came to the most emotive of all words: “violence”. Hannah Arendt, for instance, was at pains to argue that words needed to mean very specific things; so when we spoke of violence, we really meant physical violence and the very denial of one’s humanity. Likewise Frantz Fanon held that to speak of violence means speaking of some kind of “intention”.

Intention, however, is no less fraught. As terrorism experts have appreciated for quite some time, motivation is very difficult to prove. Should a person have training manuals for al-Qaeda, enough peroxide to blow up a shopping mall and just so happen to be communicating their hatred for the West, accusations of intention can draw upon laws of probability, as has been the case. But such cases are a rarity. So, as the widening security net during the War on Terror showed, once language becomes securitised and bad deeds linked to claims of extremism marked with intent, the trawler tends to reach wider and pull in those whose words could easily be read as simply ill-considered.

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Underwriting the securitisation of language tends to be a neat correlationism, which draws a clear line between what is said and what will be enacted. But for intention to work, should somebody say they want to burn down the house, it has to be assumed that they are indeed intending at some point in their lives to have that house burnt to the ground. Fantasy thus becomes the pre-emptive proof of a reality that should not be left to chance. Regarding the recent case of Julie Sweeney, then, her call to blow up a mosque was no doubt revealing of her rather unsavoury character, which would no doubt warrant a custodial sentence under pre-existing legislation. Yet whether we should call her a would-be mass killer is more open to debate.

It would be foolish to deny that speech can occasionally incite violence and words can undoubtedly be wounding. This needs to be accounted for and persons brought to task for harmful things they have said. But if we are dealing with perception — and recognise that perception matters both in the articulation of truth and whether our words will be believed — we also need to contend with what the comedian Chris Rock brilliantly called “selective outrage”. Whether we agree with what’s said or not, there is a perception in society today that the angry words of some are always presented as threatening and divisive, whereas others would be presented as the most reasoned, just and legitimate of all positions. This was pretty much the argument presented by the radical thinkers of the Sixties, but has mostly now been turned on its head.

Which brings us back to power. It’s worth stressing here that there has never been such a thing as a golden age of free speech. Just as culture has always been a battlefield (sorry to disappoint, but there’s nothing new about the culture wars), so language has always been policed. Our task, then, is to ask who is doing the policing, and in whose name does it serve. Alongside this, we need to be mindful of the climate in which the words are spoken. Or as a comedian might say: timing is everything.

In the post-9/11 environment and the mass acceleration of what Manuel Castells called “the information and communications revolutions”, three developments have made today’s climate notably fraught. Firstly, the fragmentation of societies into multiple identity-based groups enabled by social media has transformed the spoken-word landscape in ways that would have been inconceivable a few decades ago. Partly inspired by the Sixties’ notion that speech and thoughts should be freed from the moral entrapments of the suffocating nation state, many welcomed the internet as a means for democratising language. Yet, as we have found, there is nothing preferable to having everybody say whatever they want, whenever they choose to do so, to whomsoever may be listening. Indeed, if the famous post-colonial scholar Gayatri Chakravotri Spivak could rightly ask “Can the subaltern speak?” just before the dawn of the digital age, it is dubious whether that assertion holds today. Billons now speak of everything, to nobody in particular, all of the time.

Secondly, the culture of the internet has fuelled a marked shift in political contestation, which has notably resulted in a social culture that’s moved from victim-blaming to victim-claiming. The battle lines in politics today are all about who is the greatest victim of history. Trump even played to this when he told Americans for the first time “you are no longer great”, but assured them he could remedy that. Much of this sense of victimisation has absolutely depended upon a broadening of our understanding of violence, which has come to mean so much more than physical force. While this is to be welcomed — ask victims of domestic abuse about the violence of psychological terror — it has raised its problems of its own. After all, if everyone is a victim, who do we prioritise? Do white people, for example, have any right to use the language of victims of history?

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And thirdly for Castells, most challenging of all has been the many ways in which most people now simultaneously occupy two worlds and seem utterly incapable of reconciling them both. As we walk down physical streets with devices in our hands that already place them elsewhere, or politely order decaffeinated coffee while verbally assassinating somebody on social media, it seems we are caught in a schizophrenic bind.

The result, as so many of us know well, is the hyper-arousal of the human condition. Here we have a peculiar situation in which people can say whatever comes into their minds without any filter or hesitation, and what is received leads to an equation in which emotion is linked to some unequivocal truth. I am not suggesting emotions are irrelevant. But just because something is said or felt in the heat of a moment, doesn’t necessarily make it a universal truth.

And this has important repercussions for our understanding of violence. For today, just as we’re told that whatever we say can be understood by others as violence, so too are we told that “silence is violence”. You’re damned if you do and damned if you don’t.

Yet while the ability to silence voices remains a hallmark of totalitarian projects, I am suspicious that such a claim holds. Our problem, by contrast, is that we don’t know when to be silent, so that something meaningful may be said amid the digital circus. Even more disturbingly, if everything said or indeed everything unsaid now amounts to a potential act of violence, forming any judgements — political or moral — will surely become impossible. And who could live with such a burden?

The screens show a livestreamed video, 24/7, of what’s going on at the other end. You walk down a drizzly Dublin street in the afternoon and there, shimmering ahead of you on the pavement, is an eight-foot slice of New York in the morning sun. You can wave through this portal to a stranger, going about his or her day, 3,000 miles away. And he or she can wave back.

Imagine the possibilities. A kiss across the ocean. A connection between the new world and the old one. Think of it as a Colm Tóibín novel without all the boring old words. There’d be curiosity and laughter, glinting interactions between strangers amid the play of happenstance and the quotidian events of an ordinary day. We’d all revel in new possibilities of human connection.

Except, no, that wasn’t what happened; or, at least, it wasn’t all of what happened. “Portal to hell,” was what the New York Post called it: “Live Dublin-NYC video art installation already bringing out the worst in people with lewd displays.” It reported with a mixture of feigned dismay and barely repressed glee that “middle-finger exchanges and other lewd gestures are a common means of communication on both sides of the portal”.

The portal had only been open for a few hours when the Gardai had to forcibly remove a young woman who was “grinding her bum” on the screen on the Irish end of the connection. Drunken Dubliners have taken to waving swastikas or images of the burning towers of the World Trade Center at their American counterparts. In response, an American TikTokker flashed her breasts, claiming she wanted to show Dubliners her “two New York home-grown potatoes”.

Those of us for whom capitalising the word “Portal” immediately conjures the brilliant videogame about a laboratory experiment run by an insane computer will have sniffed trouble from the off. Likewise, those of us who have ever found ourselves in Dublin at pub kicking-out time. But even those who don’t have either of those reference points should have been able to see it coming. 

For isn’t the fate of the portals just a microcosm of the internet itself? The wired world seemed to promise a new era of global human connection, that would allow us to share the fruits of our knowledge, expand our communities, banish misunderstanding and widen our spheres of empathy. Instead, we turned 90% of it over to showing each-other our furry bits and used the rest of it to insult people we’d never even met, ambush innocent passers-by with Goatse or blue waffle, and ensure that death threats, rape threats and the music of Rick Astley spread at scale. And, yes, share a few cute pictures of cats. Thank heavens, at least, for those. Humanity is a many-splendoured thing.

These portals, on the other hand, can’t in any obvious way be used to siphon our personal information into the pockets of Mark Zuckerberg, derail democracy, hound people to death or reshape the world irrevocably in the interests of soulless capital. They can be regarded as a more benign and lower-stakes metonym for what the internet gave us; and, accordingly, the behaviours they brought out aren’t really going to do much harm.  

One can disapprove of much of the rowdiness — nobody’s going to defend the trolls waving swastikas — but doesn’t something in you respond, sneakingly, with a little leap of old-world pride that, home-grown potatoes aside, Dubliners are apparently proving so much ruder than New Yorkers? Here is a response that would be recognisable to Chaucer, Rabelais or the traditions of Commedia dell’Arte.

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It is also a teachable moment. Whenever we are tempted to imagine that some technological gizmo will transform human behaviour and usher in a new Age of Aquarius, we are brought rapidly down to earth. Technologies don’t change human behaviour: they simply amplify it. Pace the New York Post, “bringing out the worst in people” is just what technologies are going to do. We’re all still apes, with ape brains and ape instincts. When we see someone peering at us, our instincts may tell us to smile and wave — but more often, as with chimpanzees at the zoo, they tell us to fling something at the bars. 

We’d like to see the whole world as one big family, but Dunbar’s Number — saying we’re not neurologically equipped to handle a personal network of more than 150 people — means we struggle a little with the principle. We look through a magic portal, see some wazzock in cycle shorts in Manhattan, and instead of greeting him as a brother in humanity, there’s some part of us that thinks: “That’s a stranger, and a foreigner, and therefore funny, and what’s more he can’t get me from there: I should pull down my trousers and wave my bum at him.”

Here, then, is (mostly) amiable misrule. It’s lols. It’s craic. It manifests the unruliness, the corporeality, the boisterousness that’s the best of us as well as the most annoying of us. It’s just that boisterousness that derails utopian projects and reminds the self-serious and vainglorious that they belong in the mud with the rest of us. So here’s to grindy-bum girl.

St Valentine’s is, in Chaucer’s telling, the day when the birds all find their mates, aided by a personified Nature. But the modern Valentine’s Day is less a moment for finding a mate than for celebrating those who already have one. What, then, of those still single? There are plenty of articles offering advice for coping on Valentine’s Day, suggesting that for some, it’s not a feast of smug coupledom but an annual reminder of loneliness.

And today, it’s not smug couples but lonely singles who are on the rise. This is the first Valentine’s Day since the US Surgeon General issued a public-health advisory warning that loneliness has reached epidemic levels. But loneliness reaches beyond America: single-person households are now a marker of wealthy societies across the world, and the only city that beats London for solo homes is Stockholm.

In the face of rising loneliness, growing numbers are seeking help in finding a mate. Unlike Chaucer’s birds, though, they’re turning not to “the noble goddesse Nature” but to technology — especially “social” media, and the online dating sites that now introduce more couples than real-world social networks.

It’s a poisoned chalice. For using digital platforms to make social connections is like repurposing a train carriage as a static home: you can do it, but you’re hacking something constructed to do the exact opposite. Without exception, the draw of digital devices and platforms is not their social but their antisocial nature: their capacity to liberate us from immediate reality and social context, in favour of worlds more tailored to individual preference. And while this is enticing to many, it’s not cost-free.

The cost is perhaps easiest to understand via a visually striking innovation: Apple’s Vision Pro augmented reality goggles, which launched a week ago. This device, which looks like a space-age sleep mask, projects digitally-generated displays onto whatever the user is looking at in the real world. The displays are visible only to the user, and manipulated with gestures.

After the launch, viral videos swiftly appeared, depicting users appearing to use the goggles while seated in a self-driving car — or even, in one example, while “walking” a Boston Dynamics robotic dog. And while those videos were staged, the collective reaction to the world they portend has, rightly, been queasiness. For watching a Vision Pro user is unnerving. The user sees an augmented reality; everyone else sees someone with eyes covered, responding in inexplicable ways to stimuli only they experience.

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But Vision Pro is only the most recent and visually intrusive instance of a shift towards a culture in which custom realities take precedence over flesh-and-blood ones. For example, it’s long been normal, in the kind of well-off cities where one-person households are on the rise, for people to stride about talking apparently to no one. This behaviour was once associated with acute schizophrenia; today it’s more likely to mean that person is on a call, via a wireless headset. And if gesticulating at nothing or talking into thin air on the street is an extreme example of tech-enabled withdrawal from “IRL”, a less dramatic one is far more pervasive: smartphones.

These grant every user access to a tailored virtual world, complete with stimuli no one else can access, plus sentient others who talk back. And much as with Vision Pro or the AirPod phone call, the experience for those around them is exclusion. How do you reach someone who is withdrawing into a parallel world? The internet is (perhaps ironically) full of essays on how to talk to someone who won’t put their phone down. Evidence is mounting, too, that this collective retreat into individualised digital realities is corroding even established relationships: a third of married Americans report that their spouse is often on his or her phone when they would prefer to do something IRL as a couple.

How, in that context, is anyone supposed to form a new relationship? Evidently, people do — often, indeed, with the help of the internet. But while there are plenty of happy long-term couples who met online, studies suggest that these digitally-forged relationships are somewhat less stable and satisfying than those where couples met through friends. Even where it helps connect us, after a fashion, these connections seem often of a different nature — and sometimes less robust.

But what can anyone do? As each of us withdraws into our virtual worlds, so real-world socialising attenuates, and with it the scope for meeting people any other way.

Dating platforms take the risk out of flirting, while increasing the pool; and should the tech-enabled search for connection get too exhausting, we can use the same tech to step back from connection, thanks to the platforms that, for many, comprise a growing proportion of social interaction. No wonder the generation born since the internet became ubiquitous — Gen Z — is the loneliest in history, and are especially short on those “fringe friends” you see occasionally, and who, perhaps, might be the ones to introduce you to The One.

These technologies don’t so much mediate the real world, then, as colonise and replace it — while offering an illusion of liberation from the constraints of IRL. In this light, it’s perhaps easier to understand the dismay that greeted the “silent disco” which took place last week in Canterbury Cathedral. Defenders have pointed out that this is a long way from the first time alcohol has been served in a church, while concerts and other events often happen in these spaces. But it wasn’t the music, the booze, or even the dancing that prompted anger: it was the machine-mediated escape from reality. Christians rightly sensed that this rendered the silent disco a disturbing parody of another kind of communion, more commonly celebrated in the same space.

In my experience as a (now very) ex-raver, the core of the rave experience is paradoxical: a Dionysiac celebration of complete freedom to “be yourself” without inhibitions, but at the same time also to be part of something bigger: the crowd as a single, sweaty entity, fused by the beat. In this sense, there are parallels with older pagan religious events; but what distinguishes a rave from the great many ecstatic dance traditions is that it has no spiritual component at all, beyond what individuals ascribe to it for themselves. Its sole purpose is to provide a kind of unity-in-atomisation.

What holds the “congregation” together for this hedonistic rite of individuality is the music, overwhelmingly loud, enveloping everyone — the music, and the DJ. And here, the indissolubility of a rave from its enabling machinery comes into view: for a DJ is a kind of cyborg celebrant, whose power is equal parts human agency and tech scaffolding. A rave wouldn’t be the same without a live human on the decks; but without huge speakers, lights, atmospherics and so on, it wouldn’t really be a rave.

The silent disco takes this ritual fusion of man and machine still further. Now, it’s not just the DJ who can’t function without tech. At a silent disco, the same goes for the crowd: you aren’t enveloped by the beat, unless you don the special headset. Indeed, for someone without the kit, a “silent disco” looks as strange as a Vision Pro user, just at scale.

This also renders communicants at the disco even more atomised than the crowd at a rave. Whereas ravers are wrapped in sound, they can at least talk to one another, albeit at a yell. But those at the Silent Disco can’t communicate without breaking digital communion. If you want to hear another person speak, you have to remove the headphones, which means you’re no longer sharing the same sonic space as the dancers. Now, you’re just one of those outside the machine’s magic circle, watching people spasm in response to signals that aren’t there for you.

If a silent disco in the birthplace of English Christianity elicits revulsion where, say, a theatrical performance or concert does not, this is because it’s not just a secular use of a sacred space, but a parodic one: a caricature of Holy Communion in which salvation from solitude comes not through physically sharing in the body and blood of God, but via a headset that grants access to machine-mediated unity. From the perspective of a faith grounded in the incarnation of God as Man, it’s hard to think of a word that describes this with sufficient force except “blasphemy”.

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By Mary Harrington

That the Anglican leadership cannot see this is troubling, to say the least. But perhaps this isn’t so strange, coming from bishops who shrugged and acceded to “Zoom church” in 2020 with barely a murmur; and who, for months on end, mouthed words about incarnation before a “virtual” congregation. Nor, perhaps, should we be surprised that many who make up these congregations have not, since Covid, re-materialised.

Thus it seems we’re becoming lonelier in direct proportion to how fully we embrace the digital illusion. I doubt it’s a coincidence that the first location to declare loneliness a “public health emergency” is a California county that includes part of Silicon Valley. But when even leaders in a Church founded on a theology of indissoluble matter and spirit embrace our collective tech-mediated withdrawal, what hope is there for the rest of us against its allure?

I don’t think there is an easy answer. Nor do I claim any special ability: like most, I find putting the phone down a constant struggle. But while it’s perhaps cold comfort, on Valentine’s Day of all days, there is one positive here. If tech makes us lonely, and humans are fundamentally social animals, it stands to reason that those who survive this cultural pinch-point in good enough shape to form relationships and have kids won’t necessarily be the smartest, the richest, or the most sophisticated. Rather, they’ll be those who value the human yearning for connection, culture, and an IRL future enough to outweigh the allure of digital realities.

The future, then, belongs to those who can resist the digital siren-song. In other words: much as in Chaucer’s time, our human future belongs to Nature, and to God.

Wholly absent from the narrative, one assumes, would be allegations of data harvesting, electoral manipulation, politicised shadow-banning, hosting of terrorist footage, the exacerbation of ethnic and religious conflicts, and the significant worsening of mental health in adolescent girls. Nor, I suspect, would any celebratory montage feature this week’s congressional hearing on online child exploitation, during which a senator dramatically told founder Mark Zuckerberg “you have blood on your hands”. Last year, a Guardian investigation revealed that, despite historic efforts to stop it, Facebook is still a major site of child sex trafficking. Meanwhile Wall Street Journal investigators have separately revealed that the platform is building “communities devoted to child sexualisation” (surely the final nail in the coffin for misty-eyed uses of the word “community”). Attention-hungry algorithms are apparently identifying users interested in paedophilic content and pointing them towards more of the same; connecting those with an initial interest in pictures of young cheerleaders and gymnasts, and then making suggestions for more hardcore image sites and private groups.

Such an inglorious future could not have been foretold during Facebook’s birth on the Harvard campus in 2004 — and nor even was it evident in 2008, when the platform really started to take off. Controversial algorithmic changes were still in the company’s future, and had yet to unleash their epistemic and moral carnage. But it was at least clear from an early stage that something momentously compulsive was now upon us, and that there would be no going back. Henceforth, the population would be divided into two groups: those of us wandering around the world with immediate access to a real-time digital soap opera, in which we too could perform as characters if we liked; and those few souls who remained blissfully unaware and unaffected.

It was also clear from the start that the structure of the platform was making some users behave in ways unlike their ordinary public selves. Early on in my own social-media journey, I still remember the feeling of horror-struck bafflement at seeing a husband and wife I knew, clearly located in the same house at the time, performatively writing to each other with high affection via a public Facebook wall rather than texting or even calling out the words to one other across their shared physical space. “What are they doing?” I thought to myself, squirming with mortification on their behalf. Later on, I felt a similar sense of second-hand embarrassment when I saw a woman taking a selfie in a train station. For a few seconds, my brain could not comprehend the action at all: the awkwardly tilted head, the rigid arm, the weird rictus smile. I thought she might be having a stroke. Looking back now, my innocence seems quite touching.

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By Ian Martin

Via the most famous line from his play Huis Clos, Jean-Paul Sartre characterised hell as the chronic unease of being watched and judged by other people — real or intimated — and of projecting onto yourself the characteristics you imagine they see there. Effectively, Zuckerberg and colleagues built the Sartrean version of hell into Facebook’s business model, making every declaration or gesture there a form of public speaking. Whenever you write a post or comment, you do so with the knowledge that someone else, whom you are not directly addressing and perhaps do not even know, might be looking on. And even where, in actuality, nobody at all is paying you any attention, this sense of being overlooked never really goes away. This fact alone has profoundly changed the nature of much modern communication and yet is scarcely ever remarked upon.

Of course, it’s quite enjoyable when you are the one doing the eavesdropping. Though Facebook has always acted as if it is simply a positive tool for facilitating social harmony in pleasingly photogenic ways, part of its success undoubtedly lies in the stoking of darker emotions such as envy, spite and schadenfreude. Indeed, this layer has generated tonnes of extra business, as a whole raft of group chats have sprung into existence on associated messaging apps, created simply in order to criticise or mock outrageous behaviour occurring on the main stage. For every conversation or discussion playing out on social media in front of others, it is possible to generate another separate discussion, also on social media, which dissects the first (repeat ad infinitum). Not for nothing is Facebook’s parent company now called Meta.

Another presumably unplanned consequence of Facebook’s basic design is that it has always been a place where what you are not saying, but only implying, is often far more important than what you are actually saying. With the platform’s rise to cultural prominence in the 2000s came a whole new vocabulary, coined in order to pinpoint indirect speech acts online more precisely: virtue-signalling, vaguebooking, humblebragging and dogwhistling being good examples.

Sometimes it can be fun to try and work out what a particular poster is really trying to communicate, and to whom. Perhaps I’m cynical, but whenever I see an apparently casual and spontaneous “I’m feeling fabulous and my life is great now!” post, I assume it must be addressed to an ex. And in my experience, academics on Facebook are particularly good at not-so-subtly humblebragging for the benefit of their rivals, always finding themselves “honoured” to have received some bit of amazing student feedback which they then feel duty-bound to type out for readers word for word.

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As Carl Jung told us: “Projections change the world into the replica of one’s own unknown face.” Some people communicate into the online void picturing admiring and benevolent listeners; but others imagine precisely the opposite. The darker side of the Facebook structure arrives when you also imagine that your unseen observers are your harshest critics. Sometimes, of course, they are. In a relatively childish environment dominated by a few bullying types — say, in an adolescent girls’ school, or in a university — every photo, post or ”like” bestowed can come up for disapproving scrutiny. But even where your onlookers are imagined, deep anxiety can still bite. Most of us who use social media regularly have felt the pang of fear as a post remains unliked or relatively unacknowledged, with your sense of humiliation compounded by the idea that others must see this too. Given that most adults can barely handle the resulting feelings, it seems quite incredible that Zuckerberg’s company ever knowingly exposed children to the same thing.

Just as a year in a dog’s life counts for seven, 20 years in the life of a social media platform makes it positively antediluvian. These days, Facebook is the shambolic old aunty of the social media field, her feed a whiplash-inducing, visually unappealing mess of personal posts from friends, adverts and celebrity clickbait. Apparently having mentally discarded his embarrassing first child long ago, Zuckerberg himself is busy these days enthusing about the use of “Codec avatars” in future online communication. Roughly, once Meta can work out how to do it more cheaply and time-efficiently, you will be able to have your face and body minutely scanned to produce a photorealistic avatar in 3-D, that then makes it appear exactly as if you are in the room with the person you are speaking to. In an interview with Lex Fridman in which the prototype was demonstrated, Zuckerberg indicated that, once the technology is established, you should also be able to enhance the face of your avatar to make “you” more expressive or better-looking.

Though I’m doubtless out-of-touch, it seems to me that we don’t really want a future in which generations of yet more anxious people find further excuses to hide indoors, preferring to put on a fake mask to talk to someone in the next town or even the next room rather than to face them directly. And of course, any resulting communication via this method will still be potentially surveilled by third parties — be they tech firms or fellow users.

But whatever the true psychological risks eventually posed by this and other new communication technologies, you can guarantee that those in charge of the profits will downplay them until it’s already too late. According to Zuckerberg in the same interview, “you know the physical world is super important, but I actually think the real world is a combination of a physical world and the digital world”. What he didn’t say is that, as Sartre knew, the “real world” for human beings is partly constituted by our social relationships with one another. And so far, he has made a right old mess of those.

I was a bratty, bookish 15-year-old when it was published in 1996. A 1,000-page-plus novel bloated with endnotes that have their own footnotes was an irresistible challenge. David Foster Wallace was not an obscurantist in his own literary taste — he taught Stephen King and Thomas Harris at Illinois state university — but Infinite Jest is a book at bloody-minded war with its own bookness. With its maddening excess of information that you must hold in your hand as best you can, it feels more like trying to absorb the internet than reading a regular novel.

As well as being attention-repellent, it is also sometimes just repellent. There are scenes of comedically extreme horror: a woman dying after the handbag that holds her artificial heart is snatched from her, a man dying in his own filth while obsessively watching reruns of M*A*S*H, a dog dragged behind a car until all that’s left is a leash, a collar and a “nubbin”. Before livestreamed mass shootings and animal cruelty for clicks, Wallace knew that the grisly and grotesque was what the public wanted.

He did not see the future. But he saw the forces shaping the future, and understood the ways they would deform people in turn. 

In an aside, Wallace writes about how, with the introduction of the “Teleputer” (what we would call a laptop), video calls enjoyed huge popularity, followed by dramatic decline. Users quickly discover that being seen is enormously anxiety-inducing, partly because it means you must visibly be paying attention to the other party at all times, partly because you must also pay attention to how you look when making a call.

The answer to this anxiety is, first, “high definition masking” — a flattering composite of the user’s face digitally overlaid on the screen. Then comes actual masking — hyperreal rubber versions of the user’s face that can be quickly strapped on for calls. Eventually, in response to this “stressfully vain repulsion at their own videophonic appearance”, consumers revert to audio-only, which is now “culturally approved as a kind of chic integrity”. 

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Porn will destroy you

By Sarah Ditum

This divide between the real and the represented has been borne out by our experience of Zoom, Instagram and TikTok: filters are now so advanced that they can be applied to moving images, and you can digitally beautify yourself while livestreaming. Only instead of resorting to rubber masks, we remodel the flesh itself: “filter face” tweakments, intended to bring the human closer to the digital ideal, are on the rise. Wallace was right about the way pervasive exposure to our own image would break us. It’s just that the way we’ve responded is, somehow, even more dystopian than he imagined.

Infinite Jest’s near future is now our near past, and in 2008, Wallace killed himself after suffering decades of profound depression. By the middle of the next decade, his greatest novel had been recast as a byword for tedious white masculinity, the author himself cancelled. This was, at least in the biographical sense, deserved. In 1990, Wallace had met the poet Mary Karr. He was a resident in a halfway house, she was a volunteer, and he became obsessed with her. They dated, they broke up, then he assaulted and stalked her. In 2018, Karr tweeted that he had “tried to buy a gun. kicked me. climbed up the side of my house at night. followed my son age 5 home from school. had to change my number twice, and he still got it. months and months it went on.”

The novel includes multiple men in recovery steeping in the shame of their past violence, and it would be nice to imagine that this was Wallace examining his own conscience. On the other hand, it also includes a reciprocated love story between the large, lunkish, David-Foster-Wallace-ish character Don Gately, and the beautiful, idealised, Mary-Karr-ish Joelle van Dyne. Infinite Jest was, arguably, an implement of his ongoing harassment and should not be dishonestly mined for signs of redemption.

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Still, it is a very contemporary thing to demand moral purity in artists: the kind of impulse that, perhaps, comes from seeking simplicity when far too much knowing is possible. “What do we do with the art of monstrous men?” asked Claire Dederer, as though to be an audience is inevitably to be an accomplice. Good art can be made by people who’ve done bad things, and perhaps only a monstrous man can faithfully portray the outlines of his own monstrosity. Reading is not an act of worship, although one of the problems for Infinite Jest is that certain male readers have treated it as such. 

And so, Infinite Jest has plummeted from literary touchstone to confirmed red flag. In a viral tweet from 2020 listing “Top 7 Warning Signs In a Man’s Bookshelf”, the first item was “A dog-eared copy of Infinite Jest”. The “dog-eared” was important: it was the act of having read it, rather than posing as someone who might read it, that sounded the klaxon.

But unread copies could be equally alarming: when the actor Jason Segal bought Infinite Jest in preparation for playing Wallace in a film, he recalled that the female bookseller rolled her eyes and said: “Every guy I’ve ever dated has an unread copy on his bookshelf.” Nicole Cliffe made it number four on her catalogue of “Books that Literally All White Men Own”. 

I have never run into a “DFW guy” — they’re probably more of an American campus thing. But I ran into the “Philip Roth guy” at university and recognise the type: clammy, proprietorial, forcing his literary taste on girls in lieu of forcing himself. That I had read Infinite Jest felt vaguely embarrassing. All that effort, and it turned out the most high-status option would have been to not read it and then be glibly dismissive. 

It’s perversely appropriate that Infinite Jest ended up holding such a key place in the vocabulary of this irony-bound strand of performative feminism, because irony was one of the things that Wallace was both appalled and fascinated by. In a 1993 essay, he writes that “irony and ridicule are entertaining and effective, and that at the same time they are agents of a great despair and stasis in US culture.”

Infinite Jest isn’t above irony, but it often pits itself against irony. “It’s like there’s some rule that real stuff can only get mentioned if everybody rolls their eyes or laughs in a way that isn’t happy,” thinks one character. Another feels an “aftertaste of shame after revealing passion of any belief and type when with Americans, as if he had made flatulence instead of had revealed belief” (the weird syntax is because this character is Quebecois). When sincerity is untenable, it becomes easier to engage with symbols than things. 

Over and again in the novel, the “real” gets displaced by the representation, like the rubber faces that can replace flesh ones on video calls. One of the centrepiece scenes of Infinite Jest features a geopolitical strategy game called Eschaton — a kind of Risk, but played by teenagers with balls and rackets to stand for missiles. The game comes violently undone when the players start hitting each other and the referee can’t work out how to distinguish between the territory and the map. As for the M*A*S*H-obsessive, “crucial distinctions had collapsed” between the fiction and the real.

And maybe this is connected to the novel’s weirdly well-informed interest in transsexuality. The gender ideology that makes front-page news now was a niche interest in the Nineties, confined mostly to academic papers and message boards for transitioners. Wallace’s inclusion of a young, effeminate, gay, “gender-dysphoric” character and a middle-aged, masculine, straight crossdresser suggests a hefty familiarity with the sexology literature long before any of this had crossed into the mainstream — it’s effectively a thumbnail sketch of the influential theory, developed by Ray Blanchard in the Eighties and Nineties, that male transsexuality divides into “two types”, the autogynephiliac and the homosexual.

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But it also fits with the vision of an America where the signifiers that stand for “woman” hold more weight than the physical fact of femaleness. Gender as we experience it now — the idea of an “essence” or “true self” that renders the material body irrelevant — couldn’t have come to exist without the internet. Only when technology allowed people to present themselves as pure language, signifier unmoored from signified, did it become possible to believe that sex was malleable or unreal. Maybe transsexuality fascinated Wallace because he saw it as another way that humans confuse the symbol with the thing itself, the feminine with the female.

This summer, I started rereading Infinite Jest, mostly out of curiosity. It is, still, a very annoying book. But there’s something I didn’t understand about it in 1996 that I do now I’m older than Wallace was when he wrote it. He saw American culture as an exhausted force, trapped smirking in a hall of mirrors. And he saw that getting worse as screens extended their influence.

One of Wallace’s influences, Thomas Pynchon, wrote stories about the technology that made America possible: geographical surveys (Mason Dixon), the postal service (The Crying of Lot 49). Infinite Jest is about the technology that could undo a state: a kind of entertainment so compelling that it turns consumers utterly away from reality. It asks whether the real, or something like it, might be worth recovering. 

It is, still, a difficult book — and difficult in new ways. The wheedling presence of my phone is competition that Infinite Jest never had to contend with the first time around. The disturbing fact of Wallace’s own bad acts, too, was not available to me in the Nineties, and even if it had been it probably wouldn’t have struck me as a problem for the novel. But the difficulty is, and always has been, the point. Of course Infinite Jest could be shorter, lighter, less infuriating. But if it’s heavy, it’s because it’s weighing you back down in the physical world.

Called AITA for short, this enormously popular sub-Reddit — which celebrates its 10th anniversary this summer and now has more than nine million subscribers — describes itself as a “catharsis for the frustrated moral philosopher in all of us” and a “platform for moral judgement”. Its stated purpose is “to assign blame”. Anonymous posters describe the tortuous ins and outs of disputes with loved ones, friends or co-workers, soliciting judgement from strangers. Readers gleefully weigh in with “YTA” (you’re the asshole), “NTA” (not the asshole), “NAH” (no assholes here), or “ESH” (everyone sucks here). Those browsing are encouraged to upvote responses they like. As is probably obvious, the site is based in the US.

Most of the conflicts described on AITA are no less ferocious for being deeply trivial. As I write this, the stories at the top of the page include a man who told his wife on their wedding day that her make-up looked weird; someone who refuses to eat any food his cousin makes for him because she once tricked him into eating cottage cheese; and a husband who unfolded all the clothes his wife had just folded for him, because she hadn’t rolled them the way he likes it. (At the moment, the dominant verdicts are YTA, YTA, and YTA respectively.)

The site is sometimes touted as a tool for “conflict resolution”, partly on the basis that those who receive a YTA judgement sometimes come back to explain how much they have supposedly learnt from the process. As a profile of the site from 2020 put it: “It’s a place where accountability actually exists… It’s also a place for growth.” It’s really not, though. It’s a place where people get to feel good about themselves by judging and scolding others. It’s great fun, but nobody here is going to get a Nobel Peace Prize.

As with the current vogue for podcasts and programmes about relationship counselling, one motive for browsing AITA is the enjoyable glimpses it provides into the fantastic dysfunction and pettiness of other people’s relationships. Where else could you read about a woman being passive-aggressive because her sister refused to get the “family tattoo”? Or about a man intentionally ruining his wife’s favourite Garth Brooks’s song because she didn’t like his preferred rap music (“I pointed out that the song That Summer is about an old woman taking advantage of a 19-year-old virgin”)? Or how about a woman telling her future sister-in-law that the she had inadvertently chosen a song about genocide as her first wedding dance (“Carrie was livid, screaming that the whole family would think she was a white supremacist”)?

A lot of the commentators seem intent on getting revenge for their own past emotional scars by castigating anyone who vaguely resembles a real-life foe of theirs. Whether the majority verdict on a post is YTA, NTA, or ESH, there is always an asshole around somewhere, upon which to project one’s situation and so get cathartically self-righteous. Harassed wives queue up to snark at hopeless-sounding husbands with just a little bit too much enthusiasm. Those who must secretly think of themselves as perpetual doormats respond to tales of freeloading friends with DIATRIBES IN CAPS. People with mummy issues take the side of daddy, and vice versa. “No Assholes Here” is everyone’s least favourite and most anti-climactic verdict.

And as for the motives of those offering up their own behaviour to scrutiny — for many of them, it’s apparently a desire for vindication rather than for self-improvement or reconciliation. (One imagines many a fight escalating rapidly with the fateful words “I asked Reddit who the asshole is, and they said it’s you!”) Skilful authors know how to craft innocent-sounding narratives putting their antagonists firmly in the wrong. The outcome is resounding validation from commentators, to whom the thought of unreliable or partial narration hardly seems to occur. Less adept and more hapless posters can seem almost masochistic in their inability to tell a sympathetic story about themselves, and get treated brutally as a result. (Ironically, these are probably the more honest and reliable contributors, though they receive no credit for it.)

Villainous stereotypes change from era to era. We used to have cads, bounders and knaves, and now we have assholes. But what exactly is the difference? Looking at AITA on its own, it’s tricky to pin down a systematic profile for the modern-day asshole. The term seems to be used there as a generalised synonym for wrongdoing. Males and females alike are dismissed with a YTA, and for no particularly distinctive reason that I can discern.

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Away from the site, though, it is hard to escape the conclusion that the stereotype of an asshole is a mostly male-associated one. These days, society always seems to be finding new ways for men, in particular, to be assholes — whether it’s by mansplaining, manspreading, staring at women on the tube, or bantering in an off-colour way. (Indeed, the founder of AITA, Marc Beaulac, has said he started the site as a way to work out whether he was mansplaining to some female coworkers.)

Philosopher Aaron James, author of the improbably titled book Assholes: A Theory, agrees: “assholes are mainly men”, he says, and are “overwhelmingly distributed among only one-half of the human population”. He defines an asshole, somewhat over-technically, as a person who “(1) allows himself to enjoy special advantages and does so systematically; (2) does this out of an entrenched sense of entitlement; and (3) is immunised by his sense of entitlement against the complaints of other people”. (This is not, we are told, the same as being “a jerk, a boor, a cad, a schmuck, or a mere ass” — though these too all sound distinctly male-coded).

James’s explanation of why more men than women are assholes, in his sense, is that our culture is “gendered” — by which he means that men but not women tend to be encouraged by society to act in overly entitled obnoxious ways. This is a familiar enough feminist complaint, aimed not at combatting seriously anti-social or violent male behaviour, but at policing relatively small-scale behavioural infractions, or at least perceived ones. The implication, often taken on board by cue-responsive liberal men like James, is that men could do better if they tried. I’m not so sure it’s that simple, though.

An alternative explanation is that — to put it bluntly — the whole thing is a bit of a set-up. The bar for what counts as pro-social, non-assholish behaviour is now placed at a point where more men are more likely to fail than women, for reasons they can’t particularly help. To take just a few examples: from one perspective, mansplaining is the favouring of knowledge-driven, fact-filled conversations, which many men tend to do in single-sex company anyway. Manspreading is accommodating the shape of the male pelvis, and avoiding crushing your testicles when sitting down. Staring at women on the tube is, at least sometimes, a harmless attempt to flirt with the opposite sex — which, moreover, we had better hope young men don’t stop doing altogether, if only to save our pensions. Acting “out of an entrenched sense of entitlement”, as James might put it, is — at least sometimes  — confidently owning and prioritising your own projects and decisions, defending them from criticism, and not collapsing in a gibbering wreck of self-flagellation and apologies, as per the present feminised ideal.

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In the 18th and 19th centuries, bounders and cads — that is, lower-class social climbers — could exist as comprehensible social types, only because the default moral ideal was the well-bred “gentleman”. With the welcome loss of the gentleman as an archetype also came the loss of cads and bounders as social possibilities for men. Such categories make no real sense in the modern world any more, unless they are characters being played on-screen by Hugh Grant.

Analogously, my suspicion is that, when “being an asshole” isn’t just being used as a generalised shorthand for irritating behaviour, it gets its particular male-associated flavour because the opposing moral ideal is feminine, understood in a particularly boring, passive, and self-abnegating way. The suffocating wave of “kindness” and “inclusivity” that has washed over many institutions in the past decade has left many ordinary male behaviours stranded on the shore.

If I’m right, then this is bad news for men. But actually, it’s bad news for everyone. Excessive passivity and self-abnegation are not particularly good for women either. There’s a sense in which it is totally healthy to think your personal projects and decisions are more important than other people’s — they are yours, after all. Thinking this way doesn’t automatically make you a solipsistic asshole. It would be a strange and self-defeating attitude to constantly treat everyone else’s interests as exactly equal to yours, and nobody should do it, male or female.

What counts as “entitled” behaviour, then, perhaps ought to be recalibrated back to something more obviously dysfunctional. Maybe we could even allow both men and women, if they so wish, to mansplain, manspread, and stare at each other on the Tube. In life if not on Reddit, sometimes it’s ok to aim for YTA.

The online abyss, with its proliferation of the repugnant, the vile and the downright perverse, makes the vast oceans my grandfather navigated appear almost quaint. Still, he grasped what would prove to be an essential truth of the internet: inhumanity is overlooked in the distribution of awards. In our digital era, attention goes to the most shocking, the most outrageous, the most hurtful.

Like many disaffected young men, I spent a phase of my life drawn to the grimmest corners of the internet, frequenting shock sites such as Ogrish. I would stay up late into the night, the glow of my screen illuminating images of brutal violence, the aftermath of bombings and scenes of torture — much of it related to the various global conflicts occurring in the early 2000s. This was, perhaps, a misguided attempt to understand the depths of human suffering. But does the internet merely reflect our inherent depravity, or does it make it more extreme?

I recently spoke to Monica Garnsey, the executive producer of  a harrowing BBC documentary which some of her colleagues described as among the worst assignments of their careers. These were veteran reporters who had seen the horrors of war zones, yet the subject they were uniquely disturbed by was an online underbelly: a monkey-torturing ring. What bothered them was that, unlike soldiers, or even individuals with abhorrent sexual desires, many who revelled in these gruesome videos displayed an unsettling lack of guilt. These videos showed innocent animals subjected to unspeakable cruelty at the viewer’s request, with other individuals who sought out the clips admitting they also took pleasure in it; for some, it was just a way of “passing the time”. They spoke of it as an intriguing hobby, a release valve for pent-up anger, or even, in some twisted cases, as entertainment. One of the primary sadists recalled stumbling upon a torture video and “chuckling to myself”.

Though much of the actual torture was taking place in Indonesia, the videos were mostly being watched by people in America. Propping up this twisted subculture are “torture-media influencers” — individuals who monetise the abuse of stars like Mini, a monkey whose popularity made her too valuable to kill, despite the complaints of torture aficionados who had grown weary of her starring role. (“Mini is so over,” some would post.)

The business model of these “torture-media influencers” was sickeningly straightforward, selling videos on a pay-per-view basis. But the internet doesn’t actually make it easy to make money; the financial gain was relatively minor. After expenses, even the top purveyors were earning only a few hundred dollars through private sales of more explicit films. There are plenty of easier ways to make that amount of money. These influencers must derive some satisfaction from their work.

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The majority of this disturbing content is circulated on platforms such as YouTube, where unsuspecting viewers stumble upon it; it’s a site with resources, and one that most people believe to be relatively well-regulated. Indeed, its content moderators are required to watch anything from acts of suicide and murder to incidents of child abuse. The depraved content that slips through the net is actually only the tip of the iceberg.

The job is known to be traumatic. In 2018, a lawsuit was filed against Facebook and its associated companies alleging that the companies failed to protect their content moderators from the psychological impacts linked to reviewing disturbing images. The case was settled in 2020, with Facebook agreeing to pay $52 million to thousands of American workers. Might it be possible that some derive perverse pleasure from this line of work? Since we know that there are people who pay to watch this content, surely there’s a possibility that some people want to watch it and get paid. Most, though, claim to do it out of necessity. And it’s a growing field of employment, especially in regions where employment opportunities might be scarce.

These content moderators are real-life incarnations of Alex from A Clockwork Orange, a juvenile delinquent “reformed” into utter brokenness through non-stop involuntary exposure to violent films. It reminds me of my grandfather. He joined the military with intentions that were less than noble — to avoid jail time — but what he did, in the name of service, left him psychologically broken. Is the internet as corrupting a force as war: a system that rewards depravity and punishes those charged with maintaining order?

Mike McCartney, a former gang member now known as the “Torture King”, is an incontrovertible piece of evidence that the internet actually inspires abuse. He knew nothing about monkey torture until he stumbled upon a video on YouTube. He found it amusing. And it served as a gateway drug. The very worst monkey torture content is shared on private, and therefore unmoderated, channels. The Torture King sought out out likeminded people on Telegram, where the abuse is both normalised and escalated to unimaginable levels, with members conspiring and voting on cruel methods of torture. He started selling and trading torture videos, deriving a meagre profit, starkly disproportionate to the risks he took, including a potential seven-year prison sentence.

In some ways, this is an extreme case of a broader pattern, whereby people pursue validation and clout on social media at any cost, even when it involves catering to their basest impulses. The founder of Ape’s Cage, known as Mr Ape, told the BBC investigation that he felt affection for the monkeys, particularly Mini, whom he hoped would make it out of the ordeal alive (she did). Like several other torture fans, he even justified his actions by claiming he was trying to expose others involved in the trade. Perhaps he was just trying to avoid the consequences of his actions, but he wouldn’t be the first man to profess one set of beliefs when alone and online, and quite another when offline and in the company of others. The internet encourages psychological compartmentalisation, as well as the feeling that you can escape reality. But let us be clear: these depraved men were the instigators, not the liberators.

Can anyone take them on? Earlier this month, Meta, the conglomerate that owns Facebook and Instagram, established a task force dedicated to curbing the distribution and sale of child sexual abuse material on its platforms — a problem further exacerbated by ceaseless improvements in deepfake technology. This move was a response to a damning report by the Stanford Internet Observatory that unveiled a network of accounts peddling self-generated explicit material, primarily through Instagram’s direct messaging feature. A key point in the researchers’ findings was that the site was enabling buyers and sellers to find each other, thanks to the effectiveness of its algorithm.

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But are these sites giving people what they want, or making people want it? Perhaps it’s both. They are designed to keep users hooked because that’s their business model. They promote and amplify our darkest desires; they whet our appetite for more. TikTok has, for instance, faced criticism for contributing to the radicalisation of individuals by leading them down conspiracy theory rabbit holes.

And this then has resonance in the real world. What we see on the internet can directly impact our faith in reality — in other people. As an insider from the BBC documentary expressed: “What you realise is that anyone — the person in front of you in line, the person next to you on the street — could be a monkey torturer.” In a society where trust is already fragile, the danger is profound: bombard us with the worst aspects of human nature, and we view each other as suspects. We retreat into isolation, further eroding our faith in others. In other words the internet, in feeding our darkest desires, fans the flames of societal fragmentation.

The omnipresence of depravity has other consequences. It can numb us; or it can inspire a terrible guilt, akin to my grandfather’s, about our inability to prevent inhumanity. It leads to dehumanisation, and political apathy: if humans are terrible, what’s the point of trying to make society better?

But perhaps we can draw comfort from the fact that, while depravity generates a lot of views, so too does the fight against it. The BBC investigation into monkey torture is, in many ways, a successor to NBC’s television programme To Catch a Predator, affectionately known as TCAP. In the early days of social media, the show capitalised on the commonality of child predators, setting up intricate traps to catch these maladjusted individuals in the act. It was immensely popular. The programme paraded the perverts before the public eye, drawing attention to the staggering number lurking online. It featured the shy and morbidly obese Peter Sciacca, who went by the username “Don Ceech” and met his lonely demise in 2021 after serving time in prison. The trouble is, this sort of voyeurism is also problematic. Was Sciacca vulnerable? Marginalised? Exploited by the internet, just as he used it to exploit others? Exploited by the TV show, which turned his emptiness and alienation into a spectacle for others to consume, deepening his isolation, escalating their propensity for depravity?

We do have to take some responsiblity. The internet is, after all, a reflection of us — a mirror to our collective consciousness. But that digital mirror also allows us to detach consequences from action and to leave empathy behind. And it is this, arguably, that poses a far greater threat to our societal fabric than the individual acts of depravity. So even as those sickos are brought to justice, we ought to ask ourselves: what would we do, if we thought we could get away with it?

At first glance, this group — made up of internet-savvy provocateurs, anonymous contributors, eccentric celebrities, and some vestigial “alt-Right” figureheads — still seems to be supporting Donald Trump, their once and future president. In 2016, they viewed him as a figure of entertainment, a political outsider who was wittily disruptive and assumed the status of a fantastical, Warhammer-esque “God-Emperor”. The portly University of Chicago graduate William Thomas Clark, also known as “Kantbot”, was among those who fervently amplified this narrative, riding a small wave of internet virality after he was filmed shrieking about Trump “completing the system of German idealism”.

Though pollsters and political scientists continue to debate the extent to which this group swayed the outcome of the election, there’s little doubt that their online activities played a role in shaping the larger narrative. Their memes and posts, known for their unique blend of political cynicism, irreverence and humour, served to attract some undecided voters and further embolden Trump supporters. Twitter user @Ricky_Vaughn99, one of the most prominent and vitriolic voices within this community, expressed a keen insight into the fiery populist movements emerging on both the Left and Right. “There is definitely anger among the youth,” he told me in 2016. “The Bernie people are angry. The #BlackLivesMatter people are angry.” (Vaughn, it bears noting, was later outed as Douglass Mackey and convicted by a federal jury of depriving individuals of their constitutional right to vote for his role in a conspiracy that used memes to convince black voters to vote via text, which is not possible.)

Trump, a master of obtaining free publicity in his own right, benefited immensely from the countless articles scrutinising the role of the alt-Right in his campaign — articles of which I wrote more than my fair share. However, it was only after the election, as the alt-Right splintered into factions such as the “Post-Left”, the “Based Right” and a partly tongue-in-cheek, partly earnest “racist Right”, that the complexity of the Online Right’s influence began to fully reveal itself.

Into this arena steps Ron DeSantis, an exceedingly unexciting and well-qualified gentleman known for his relentless pursuit of upper-middle-class excellence. Whether it was leading his Yale baseball team in batting average, graduating with honours from Harvard Law School, or earning a Bronze Star and other military medals in Iraq, DeSantis has consistently demonstrated an unwavering dedication to lining his CV. And now, he’s aiming to add the support of the Online Right to it.

As befits such a plodding overachiever, DeSantis’s approach has been methodical and overt. His systematic attempts to usurp Trump’s dominance in this arena reveal his characteristic ambition, yet also underscore a glaring deficiency in political charisma. Despite his obvious intellect, DeSantis’s rigid demeanour and unusually high-pitched voice can seem off-putting to those accustomed to Trump’s brash and theatrical style.

In a move that couldn’t be more emblematic of his ham-fisted efforts to capture the Online Right, DeSantis chose to formally announce his candidacy in a glitch-ridden Twitter Spaces session, alongside none other than Elon Musk, a veritable rock star within these circles. Despite technical difficulties and a less-than-stellar audience count of around 150,000 listeners, DeSantis pressed on, evidently reading his campaign announcement off a script. Immediately afterwards, DeSantis’s campaign released a video featuring Musk so prominently that one might have mistaken him for DeSantis’s running mate.

Elsewhere, DeSantis’s campaign seems to have actively courted Seth Dillon, the head of the Right-leaning satire site, The Babylon Bee. In return, apparently, the Bee has been churning out pro-DeSantis content in support of his ongoing dispute with Disney, and even purging those who publicly clash with DeSantis’s associates. Only last week, for instance, Gavin Mario Wax, a pro-Trump Bee staffer, was unceremoniously fired by Dillon for a brusque tweet directed at Christina Pushaw, DeSantis’s top media advisor. The spat culminated in Dillon telling Wax — via Twitter, of course, because this is how HR business is transacted today — to remove his association with The Bee from his Twitter bio, triggering a fiery response from its readers, particularly those loyal to Trump.

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As DeSantis wrestled with these issues, Trump, who had seemed adrift on the meme and comedy performance fronts for months, found his groove again with a lively CNN Town Hall. Trump delighted the audience with memorably nasty lines, showing a return to form that contrasted starkly with his opponent’s struggles. Later, on the day of DeSantis’s fraught Twitter Spaces event, Trump’s team did not miss the opportunity to land a body blow: they shared a bizarre fan-made parody of the event, which was doctored to include figures such as Hitler, George Soros, and the devil. And the jabs didn’t end there. Donald Trump Jr. later posted an AI-generated video featuring DeSantis superimposed onto Steve Carell’s character from The Office.

Not everyone in the Online Right was forthcoming with applause, however. For instance, prominent figurehead @LindyMan, a lawyer named Paul Skallas, misses the charm of the 2016 meme war. In a now-deleted tweet, he mourned the loss of “crude photoshops”, deeming the recent onslaught of Trump memes “too much” and comparing their appearance to “encountering a neanderthal on the street”. Despite this, a number of high-profile Online Right figures have told me that Trump still maintains an edge as a captivating figure. But even so, the tenor of the meme landscape has undoubtedly evolved since 2016. Back then, the goal was conversion; today, the aim seems to be to galvanise an existing base.

By this metric, Trump’s recent performance is certainly better than it was following his 2020 loss, though not quite at its 2016 peak. DeSantis, meanwhile, merely provides meme material, à la Jeb Bush, through a persona that lends itself to ridicule. His technical debacle during the Twitter Spaces event didn’t help his cause either. The stark contrast between the two candidates only fed the popular alpha/beta dichotomy that fuels many Online Right memes.

Even the proxy battles, such as the Babylon Bee incident, have taken an eccentric turn. An otherwise unremarkable Twitter scrap between Claremont fellow Dave Reaboi, a DeSantis supporter, and Trump-backing pundit Scott Greer led to an amusing ad hominem exchange over physical stature, age and marital status. This might seem absurd and pointless, yet it aligns with the dynamics of an online arena that amplifies and distorts, especially during political primaries.

These online dust-ups, all too easily dismissed as mere noise, play a critical role in shaping the narrative of a primary election. As thousands of them unfold in real time, they offer raw material for the media to dissect and amplify, drawing attention away from policy issues and focusing instead on personality clashes and personal drama. This can have a significant distorting effect, as perceptions of the candidates end up being influenced as much by these disputes as by their actual policy positions or leadership abilities — two areas in which DeSantis, at least on paper, would seem to hold an edge over Trump. Some Online Right posters have told me they hate seeing their cohort descend into this sort of linguistic violence, but this is precisely what happens during a political dogfight: a political poster can choose to either see the show — and thus risk losing the war for attention — or weigh in and gain followers by being the show.

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In such a scenario, how can DeSantis hope to win? At present, his primary tactic seems to be to harvest online discourse and then turn off the internet — with the result that his attempts to sell himself to the Online Right come across as an application for admission to Harvard rather than genuine engagement. It’s as though the group’s highly memeable and mockable concerns — lax policing, black-on-white and black-on-black crime, corporate and public school diversity programming, transgender rights, unsafe lockdowns and hastily released vaccines — have been diluted in his new strategic approach, which merely involves attempting to address these concerns through legislation.

In other words, DeSantis, a decidedly offline figure, is attempting to serve up a beggar’s banquet of Online Right issues. The problem is that this offering feels disingenuous to the intended consumer. It’s akin to a diner at a restaurant, peering down at the plate of food they’ve ordered from DeSantis’s meme-inspired menu. A friend notices their hesitation and asks: “Is there a problem?” The diner responds: “This is what I ordered, but now that I see it, I realise it was a bad choice.” It’s as if there’s a growing sense of buyer’s remorse with regard to the dullness of DeSantis, or a shock that he is either cynically or selflessly attempting to turn their smoke-filled chatroom banter into a cohesive political platform.

From this perspective, the overarching lesson is that the best and most viral memes cannot be forced into existence through market research (a lesson Hillary Clinton’s social media team learnt all too well). They are an improvisational performance that one can neither script nor control. And, for the time being, despite his age and political scars, Trump remains the most adroit improviser in the Republican field. As we hurtle towards the 2024 election, this tale of two meme strategies will continue to unfold. For now, though, “The Donald” still appears to be winning the war.

Armstrong started mining the rest of her life. Dooce pivoted to offering carefully-scripted “unvarnished realities” on parenthood, marriage, and Armstrong’s struggles with depression. The market in the early 2000s was far less crowded than it was even a decade later, allowing a cornball line like this to land in a way it probably wouldn’t today: “I am here to tell you that there is no possible way to have an 8-pound creature GUMMING your tender nipple without the slightest bit of discomfort……the only way to describe it to a man is to suggest that he lay out his naked penis on a chopping block, place a manual stapler on the sacred helmet head, and bang in a couple hundred staples.” Off the back of insights such as these, Armstrong gained a monthly readership of 8.5 million fans, raking in anywhere from $30,000 to $50,000 a month at her peak. In 2011, Forbes ranked her 26th on its list of most the influential women in all media. Federated Media, the entity responsible for managing advertisements on her blog, celebrated Armstrong as one of their most prosperous bloggers, a top performer who generated over $1 million a year in ad revenue.

The same year, Armstrong contributed a foreword to Mom Blogging for Dummies, writing: “Some women who do what I do reject this label altogether because they consider the term mommy to be belittling. I understand this complaint, but I’m quite proud to be a member of this movement, this revolution of women determining their own destinies.” Hers is a cautionary tale, however, for those of us who write and consume content for a living.

Armstrong’s fame and online presence had greatly receded by the time she committed suicide at home earlier this year. In The Valedictorian of Being Dead, published in 2019, she details a life spent battling depression — on ten occasions, she went into a medically-induced coma, simulating brain death, in an attempt to alleviate her symptoms. Somewhere between introducing a guide to making money from nonstop mommy blogging and declaring mommy blogging dead, Armstrong came to recognise — or decided to admit — the negative impact her work was having on her mental health. In the foreword, she writes with a sense of pride, “I don’t get to go on vacation.” In The Valedictorian of Being Dead, she expressed her longing for an escape “the hamster wheel of my day-to-day existence”:

“I knew I just couldn’t do it anymore when I was trying to get my kids into the car to play a word game while driving to a ranch in the mountains. This would be the third of three posts I was to write for an automotive brand about quality time with my kids in the car … Marlo did not want to participate in yet another ruse, and I had to bribe and threaten and cajole to get her in that car. Right as she opened her door, she looked up at me through tears and begged, ‘Please, Mom, don’t make me do this.’”

Armstrong’s transition from viewing her work as a fulfilling occupation to a trap reflects the paradoxical reality of life as a content creator: the same facts, framed differently as market conditions changed, transformed from a testament of her dedication to a cry for relief. But it also speaks to a universal experience of life lived in the digital age. Her journey — from a person who wrote about her life on the internet for fun to an entrepreneur supporting not only her family but also employees with her blog revenues — illustrates the tremendous opportunity of the dotcom boom. But it also reveals the precarity inherent in what was then a burgeoning marketplace of intimate stories that would, as one critic observed later, gradually evolve into a “personal-essay industrial complex”.

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Armstrong was praised for offering humour, heart, and what some perceived as unflinching honesty. Long-time editor of The Rumpus, Lyz Lenz, likened her to the Hunter S. Thompson of domestic life — “a wild, weird gonzo journalist of domesticity and dog poop”. She had a knack for transforming ordinary experiences into amusing anecdotes, comparing her sick toddler to a “drunken blues singer whose wife done kicked him out of the house” — an utterance that would be described as “problematic” today — or injecting making a trip to the gynaecologist sound less horrific with a quip: “Somewhere there has to be a Garfield comic that talks about how Mondays aren’t bad enough already, and here you have to go and throw an enlarged ovary into his soup?”

Armstrong describes her blog as a “therapeutic outlet”, initially to process her postpartum depression. The carefully-composed, yet candid-sounding revelations of her struggles — often leavened with a bit of circa-2000s gross-out comedy — fostered a sense of virtual community among readers, who developed a strong attachment to, and a sense of entitlement over, Armstrong, their “queen mother”. This was a world where people were becoming ever more isolated — “bowling alone”, as Harvard professor Robert Putnam put it. These sad folk, existing at the murky “IRL/URL border”, turned to screens to soothe existential hurt and validate what were gradually becoming identities.

But the challenges of sustaining a profitable blogging business in an ever-evolving digital economy started to fracture the authentic voice that had once resonated with readers. Ad revenue declined. The need to shoehorn sponsored content into her blog posts became more pressing. Instead of writing about experiences, Armstrong had to manufacture them, experiences to fit the expectations of brand partnerships. The connection between the real Armstrong and the commercialised version of herself that the audience saw became increasingly flimsy.

So when Armstrong announced she was getting a divorce, her loyal readership felt betrayed. Here was an unwelcome reminder that her carefully-told story of a perfect family life was nothing more than fiction. Parasocial followers commented, “If you’ve read a blogger for years, you feel like you know them…the saddest thing I’ve read today“, “they’ve always seemed like a good couple”, and even the ironic “I wish you could have privacy“. Such intimate reactions echo those experienced by uber-public figures such as J.K. Rowling, whose stance on gender ideology has alienated fans who were clearly identifying far too strongly with her books, and now by Taylor Swift, whose fans are obsessively calling for her to dump her supposedly “problematic” new boyfriend. In any case, the story Armstrong was telling no longer fit what the marketplace desired; it had been corrupted by the complexities of a real life. And that led to the difficult realisation that she was, as she told Vox in 2019, an outdated product.

As many in the sales and marketing world can attest, the process of constantly reinventing yourself to meet external expectations can be a maddening endeavour — there is no escape, only yourself and your content, and if people aren’t buying, it’s hell on Earth. The hardest thing about her obsolescence, Armstrong writes in The Valedictorian of Being Dead, is that “writing was therapeutic”. And yet, no one forced her to stop writing; it’s just that fewer people wanted to read her. She could have kept writing without monetising it — many of us keep private journals, even in 2023 — yet she seemed to conflate writing with being read. So, what was it that she feels was therapeutic: writing, or creating a fictionalised version of her life that other people bought into?

I have argued before that blogging — indeed, many forms of social media — allows people to unhealthily distort themselves for profit. This isn’t therapeutic, despite Armstrong’s repeated claims to the contrary; in fact, as my own therapist has pointed out, reminding everyone around you that your creative work is “therapeutic” is a sure-fire sign that it probably isn’t. When personal reinvention for commercial success becomes the norm, it’s easy to lose sight of your own needs, while focused on catering to an audience’s demands. There is a vast difference between performing wellness for an audience and actually achieving it.

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The relentless cycle of selling and repackaging the self not only creates a dizzying array of personas to uphold but also lays the foundation for an existential crisis when the demand for one’s curated identity dwindles. In the final years of her life, Armstrong was already posthumously known; writing on Instagram to a fraction of her former audience, her past was better-known than her present. Many of today’s top posters, podcasters, and pundits will have the same experience. Countless people have invested themselves in the game of personal content creation — making moves that will invariably lead to diminishing returns, until they have no moves left to make.

Intriguingly, those most drawn to this lifestyle — and to social media in general — seem to be those seeking an escape from their present realities. Consider Armstrong’s aforementioned quip about her gynaecologist visit — the lame Garfield joke about her enlarged ovary. Clearly, this is a heavily filtered version of her experience in the doctor’s room, designed for the consumption of her audience. While the joke may have elicited a polite laugh, it detracts from the genuine fear anyone would feel at a medical diagnosis.

Armstrong saw herself as being in the business of making herself better. But did she write about it for herself, or for her audience? Even her final autobiographical work, The Valedictorian of Being Dead, was ultimately designed for consumption. So the question remains: who was she really trying to influence?

A similar case can surely be made for war and social media. In an essay written before the Ukraine war, I argued that the conjunction of social media with high quality drone footage from the wars in Syria and Karabakh had created a fusion of online enthusiasts with technology, so that “Drone, camera and social media sharer thus become a single, integrated weapon system, a hybrid semi-autonomous proxy as useful and as cheap to operate as the expendable proxies fighting on the ground”. The Syrian war, like the Spanish Civil War before World War Two, can be considered an armed rehearsal for the Ukraine war, a rough draft of processes and technologies that would later reach their full, terrible potential. And nowhere is this more apparent than in the conjunction of brutal drone footage with social media, and of mass deaths with vigorous online fandoms.

With over 100,000 battlefield dead on each side so far, the Ukraine war is already the bloodiest war in Europe since World War Two. But by one grim milestone, the conflict surely surpasses any war in history: it must hold the record for the greatest number of individual human deaths captured on camera. Through the ubiquity on both sides of cheap consumer drones, used for battlefield reconnaissance and target acquisition, the trenches of eastern Ukraine are surveilled to a hitherto unimaginable extent. And by rigging the drones to drop grenades with pinpoint accuracy — a tactic initially pioneered by Isis in the conflicts in Syria and Iraq — both sides can hunt down, chase and kill individual soldiers with the ease of a video game, sharing the HD video footage for their rival supporters.

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The effects on the soldiers themselves are easy to imagine. The knowledge that your every move is being watched by an inescapable whining sky robot waiting to kill you is pure horror. But it is the effect on those sharing the footage that is surely most remarkable. The nature of the clips is unlike anything ever seen from any previous war: hovering a short distance above the victim, the drone’s footage is unbearably intimate: in his final seconds of life, the target looks up at the camera — at you, straight into your eyes. You look down at him: you are the drone. It creates the illusion you have been granted the power of life and death, skimming over the muddy trenches of eastern Ukraine like the angel of death. There is something obscene and terrible in being granted access to these final, miserable moments of human life, a nagging sense that this is something that ought not be seen, let alone enjoyed.

And yet to follow the Ukraine war on a platform like Twitter means your feed is interspersed with the lovingly zoomed-in deaths, shared with crass jokes by Western enthusiasts, of human beings, perhaps unwilling conscripts. Niche online communities like Reddit’s DronedOrc share videos with names such as “Drone drops grenades on orc without pants”, or, “Grenade dropped on orc makes its helmet pop”, for the enjoyment of its subscribers. Scrolling Twitter brings up posts such as “18+ The drone operator drove the orc to suicide,” in which a lone Russian soldier, cornered by a drone, shoots himself. “Last seconds of an orc’s life after catching a grenade from the drone in his rat hole,” gloats another. To fully erode the distinction between themselves and the drone, distant internet consumers of the Ukraine war can even donate 3D-printed fins for their grenades via Twitter, inscribed with their own message, like “Hope this hurts XO.”

Brutal as they are, these videos tell you little about the Ukraine war: one contextless video of a human dying in an anonymous ditch is much the same as another, for all it tells you about the conflict’s progress or outcome. The only difference is for online connoisseurs of individual deaths — praying, pleading, helpless, resigned, crawling away in a trail of blood. This online subculture, a fringe subsection of those following the war, serves no analytical function whatsoever. Instead, it more closely resembles crowds in Roman arenas gawping at the deaths of the condemned: they too, after all, were viewed as criminals, beyond the bounds of human sympathy. The propaganda value of these videos, for the Ukrainian cause, is surely doubtful. For the avoidance of doubt — or rather, to avoid being accused of pro-Russian sympathies by enthusiasts of this strange and awful new content — I want Ukraine to win the war. I understand that to do that, the Ukrainians will have to kill and keep killing thousands of Russian soldiers: that’s what war is. But I don’t particularly need or want to see each individual death. The fact that many apparently do tells you little about Ukraine, but much about human nature and the still-dimly understood nature of social media.

Perhaps, then, conflict and the creation and destruction of enemies is what social media is actually for. In its first heady days at the beginning of the century, the internet’s Arab Spring, the prevailing narrative was that social media was born to bring people together, technology and the human need for connection fusing to progress humanity’s upward arc. Yet anyone who uses social media observes the precise opposite: there is a natural tendency for the medium to produce enemies, often from the slenderest of causes. The most popular content on Twitter by far is that which focuses on the destruction and humiliation of political foes: careers are built from it, fortunes made. There is a curious lacuna in the anthropology of the internet on this easily observable process, one anyone who uses the internet swims in every day without a second thought. The uproar that Musk’s ownership of Twitter has caused among liberals, though never explicitly articulated, is the product of precisely this dynamic. If social media were not primarily a weapon, they would not fear that it is now in the wrong hands, ready to be turned against those accustomed to wielding it.

If war and social media are now inextricably intertwined, fused by the gut satisfaction of watching and sharing clips of your enemies being destroyed, then the peculiarities of America’s own internal conflict are explained. Both sides of the cold civil war hate each other with gut passion, yet open conflict is — except for periods of heightened tension like elections or the BLM protests — unusually rare. In Syria a few years ago, I met an American volunteer who had been driven to the country’s distant battlefield, on the side of the Kurdish YPG, through engagement with America’s own 2016 political ferment. After the Isis war was over, he went back home, taking part in Seattle’s CHAZ experiment, before being jailed for making a social media “call to arms” against Republicans. For him, perhaps the virtual and the real, Syria and America had become too uncomfortably merged: like the Capitol protestors on the other side, who confused Trump’s media-wrought simulacrum of a coup with objective reality, by making the implicit explicit, he moved too soon.

Instead, each side sublimates its hatred for the other in random acts of violence, carried out by unstable proxies, to be pored over, shared and discussed on social media. American conservatives can watch and share footage of IRL proxies such as Kyle Rittenhouse kill and wound their political enemies, and turn him into a hero of their cause, rewarded, as is the nature of American conservatism, with all manner of lucrative sponsorship deals. Had the fatal tussle’s outcome been different, American liberals would no doubt have rewarded their own virtual paladins. In doing so, their desire to take up arms themselves abates: the virtual simulacrum relieves the urge.

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Even the most random of America’s deaths by shooting, vastly outpacing Syria’s current death toll, are immediately and obsessively analysed for clues as to which, if any side of America’s civil conflict the killer can be attributed — is he a Hispanic White Nationalist, perhaps, or a radicalised transsexual? The deaths that do not feed this war of interpretation are meaningless, and quickly ignored: it is only the online narratives into which they can be forced that give the killings purpose. Twitter is alive, pulsing with palpable energy, in the immediate aftermath of each atrocity, as each side waits and hopes the blame can be conclusively pinned on their online foes. Like Baudrillard’s Gulf War, America’s civil war is both real and not, a conflict in which, as Baudrillard argued, “the virtual has overtaken the actual” and where “we are already all strategic hostages”, trapped in an internet battlefield, “the screen on which we are virtually bombarded every day”.

Published just before the Ukraine War began, Radical War by the academics Matthew Ford and Andrew Hoskins warned that the fusion of smartphone technology and modern warfare meant that “war is principally about managing the attention of populations and different audiences” in a “media spectacle” where “it is not possible to locate these emergent forms of warfare within existing models of representation and ways of seeing the world”. The smartphone and the drone camera have changed war entirely, “replacing the rifle as the weapon of choice for those engaged in mass participation in war” and “collapsing the boundary between those who observe war and those who engage in it”.

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But the Ukraine war has collapsed the boundaries further still: you too can now donate to kill a Russian soldier, and watch and share his death, all from the smartphone nestled in your hand. Similarly, it is impossible to use the internet in 2023 without being, in some way, a participant in America’s cold civil war: just as Americans regroup themselves into opposing lines, waiting for the great culmination which may never come, the still largely virtual conflict’s contours shape almost every thought expressed online. It is a constant, almost impossible task to force yourself not to care about the latest skirmish in America’s culture war: the path of least resistance, across the world, is simply to embrace the dying hegemon’s last compelling cultural product.

Trapped in the internet, we are all of us participants, willing or not, in a great, globe-spanning war without end. As it has with every new technology, war has brought out the latent power of the internet and social media, hardened them and fashioned them into weapons of terrible power, whose true potential we are only beginning to understand. Only now are they coming together, like the Titanic and the iceberg, in their fatal, predestined embrace.

It was only a matter of time before the American media delivered a story of a millennial forced to choose between pure posting and real politics. And with the past two decades as our guide, their decision was inevitable: they would choose the post. Emperor Nero was alleged to have fiddled while Rome burned, but a millennial poster would today logged onto Twitter, “shitposting” his way through the cancellation of everything prior generations might have held dear.

On 19 January, the Chicago Reader revealed that 36-year-old Pericles “Perry” Abbasi — a campaign attorney, who was running for office in Chicago’s 25th police district with the backing of the Fraternal Order of Police — had a history of posting bizarre and unseemly content on social media. In a leaked screenshot from a group chat, he had written that “the horrible black diet” was the reason for “13/50”, referencing a common internet meme about Black Americans’ percentage of the population (13%) and supposed share of violent crime they commit (50%).

Abbasi denied these accusations of bigotry. He claimed he didn’t remember everything he was alleged to have written (without necessarily denying his authorship, either), while also offering a second more general defence of his behaviour: this was the internet, he argued, and if he thought of something funny, he’d immediately post it. If this meant writing a tweet about how a relationship with a 36-year-old woman led him to conclude that child porn sentencing is far too long, then so be it. If it meant “making up insane things to stir shit up”, then it meant just that. Abbasi admitted he couldn’t even remember what he posted 48 hours ago; it was all just a blur of posting, retweets, engagement, and likes. He has posted nearly 104,000 times over the past four years, averaging roughly 70 tweets per day (one can also assume he retweeted hundreds of replies each day). In a sense, Abbasi was telling the truth: he was lost in the sauce, living from post to post.

Many of Abbasi’s clients were less than impressed by this. The original report in the Chicago Reader was quickly amended to insert various statements from political figures whose campaigns had him, each stating his comments were unacceptable. But Abbasi doubled down, posting a series of tweets about how being cancelled “was a choice”, that he was an “alpha male” and thus above apologising for things out of principle, and that Osama Bin Laden himself taught us that people will always prefer a “strong horse” to a “weak horse.” Then, he received a “like” on one of his tweets from Elon Musk and declared that the era of his cancellation had ended.

At first glance, this appears to be a fairly mundane story. Political candidates and semi-public figures have their improprieties revealed in the press all the time, and careless millennial posters have been ruining their careers for years, as people who remember the case of publicist Justine Sacco know. The story of Pericles Abbasi, however, deserves a second look. It shows a crash between two different worlds, and reveals what happens when millennial online culture collides with reality.

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Abbasi’s field of work — being an attorney for political organisations and campaigns, where he had begun to make inroads with Right-leaning groups such as the Fraternal Order of Police despite earlier support for Black Lives Matter — is based on trust and professional reputation. But the Chicago Reader revelation put his other reputation at risk: his reputation in the online world of “posting”, where he was among the most prolific posters on social media — perhaps the most prolific, as far as sheer volume of content production is concerned. In this world, online micro-celebrities fight with each other tooth and claw for likes, attention, followers, and social position inside a myriad of private group chats and social circles on Twitter.

Abbasi thus faced not one but two risks of reputational loss. He could either jeopardise his standing as an attorney entrusted with major real estate transactions and real-world political campaigns, where he is implicitly trusted not to embarrass his employers in public — or his standing as a preeminent poster. Abbasi chose the latter, which begs the question: why exactly would anyone choose to protect his standing — his “clout” — online, over his real-world career, for which he devoted years of his life? It is impossible to imagine scandalous figures from decades past, a rogue’s gallery ranging from Ted Kennedy to Silvio Berlusconi, risking so much for so very little — for a handful of likes, shares, and retweets.

There is little proof that Abbasi was motivated by some sort of genuine racist belief. He has in the past shared strong views in support of civil rights and, in his pre-shitposting days, cautioned a more intimate circle of colleagues about heaping too much scorn on BLM protestors. If Abbasi ever entertained a racist thought, I suspect he would just have forgotten it 24 hours later; lost in the endless stream of posting and “doing a bit” as he played some sort of role or character online. Abbasi, for instance, is engaged to woman, has also devoted a good many tweets to jokes about logging onto Grindr, a gay hook-up app, for the purpose of “outing” cheating husbands or “something I’m doing for a Nathan Fielder type show I’m developing”. Clearly, his tweets have little grounding in reality.

All of this ties into a curious fact about the sort of online culture that Abbasi is a part of: it is openly, almost to the point of being parodic, a form of “youth culture”, where the rules do not matter and where the norms of ordinary adult society are scorned. But time is a cruel thing: what might seem irreverent or radical at the age of 20 takes on a whole other sheen at 35. When Trump famously descended that escalator and inaugurated his campaign, an entire online “alt-Right” or “dissident Right” subculture clung to him like limpets, constantly stressing the “vitalist” and “youth” pretensions of his movement.

But that was eight years ago. During that time, many former members of these subcultures found partners and started families, leading them to naturally drift away as they assumed the responsibilities of the adult world. But others such as Abbasi remain there, stuck like Peter Pan in a permanent, virtual Neverland.

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The Abbasi story is interesting, then, because here was someone who had punched his ticket out of this overproduced netherworld of millennial losers: he had a good career, good education, good skills, and a good client base for law practice. He cultivated political patrons; he is preparing to get married. Yet there he is, posting under his own name at a prodigious rate others in his generation wouldn’t attempt to match unless masked by anonymity; posting his life away.

Historians and cultural theorists have argued that civilisations have collective “death drives” — fuelled by an oppressive atmosphere of decline and decay — and here is a new variation, the “posting drive”. Abbasi, who is continuing to run for office in Chicago now that he has secured the coveted endorsement of some New York-based “dissident podcasters”, is willing to go down with the ship, so irony-poisoned from years of hard posting that the pain of drowning will be nothing short of sweet relief from his need to respond to likes and notifications.

He is not the first such millennial to go out this way, nor will he be the last — as many in his entire generational cohort, along with the ageing, weakening American empire that subsidises its narcissistic waste, seem likely to follow suit in due course. There are alternatives to running a nation-state to failure, such as serious involvement in real politics, but are those as fun as Elon Musk liking your tweets? I think not.

***

An earlier version of this article wrongly stated that Pericles Abbasi retweeted a photoshopped image of himself over police officer Derek Chauvin. This was incorrect: Abbasi tweeted a photo of himself next to another of George Floyd.

Are people right to worry? Or, to pose the question in a slightly different way, is there really a political future for “white nationalism”? Thankfully, a very recent online controversy sheds a (fairly embarrassing) light on both of these questions. As we shall see, it is indeed true that the internet is filled with politically conscious “racists”, and that the idea of “white nationalism” seems more popular than ever among a certain segment of America’s millennials and Zoomers. But it is equally apparent that racism simply isn’t what it used to be. Far from being dangerous rebels, we instead find yet another tribe of “lost penguins“; radical political orphans without a party or a patronage machine willing to take care of them, and with no will or ability to build one on their own. To understand why, we must turn to a very modern fairy-tale: the tale of the legendary Waffle House Valkyrie.

The “Waffle House Valkyrie” is the nickname of the protagonist of a recently viral video, depicting a late night brawl at (where else?) a Waffle House. A black woman is filmed raising her chair as if to throw it at a white woman behind the counter, who gestures mockingly as though inviting the black woman to throw the chair at her. The chair is duly thrown, and the woman behind the counter deftly and gracefully deflects it before grabbing it out of the air.

To normal people, this was just another amusing viral video. But in certain corners of the internet, it was, at least for a short while, transformed into something more. To these people, the woman in question became a “shield-maiden”, a “Valkyrie”, and an “Aryan wife”, supposedly standing up for white people against the random criminality of America’s black citizens. Like previous virally famous women on the internet — such as the Crimean prosecutor Natalia Poklonskaya — a good deal of fan art was created in a short time, as well as a good helping of memes.

To take an example, the British online personality Carl Benjamin (better known by his nom-de-guerre, Sargon of Akkad) reposted a picture of the Waffle House employee with glowing eyes and the caption “Stand alone if you must, but you must stand”. The subtext here isn’t particularly subtle, and many of the comments made explicit what Benjamin himself only alluded to — this was an example of White America finally taking a stand against its unruly minorities. Finally, the white man (or woman, as the case happened to be) was fighting back.

All this hype lasted until the star of the show — the Valkyrie herself — posted a video in which she told her side of what had happened that night. At this point, everything started going wrong. The woman in question spoke like a member of southern Louisiana’s lowly white working class. Enthusiasm turned into disgust, and even in some cases rage. When people found out the woman had a black boyfriend, the jig was up, and it became open season for everyone who wanted to vent their hatred for the “ghetto trash”, “garbage”, “hoodrats”, and “negroidified whites”. “Millions must die”, one anonymous account quipped, and those “millions” of people whose lives would be snuffed out to set America straight again would include many or most white people, for they were simply too far gone to be saved.

The parasocial attachment of an online “movement” to this clip, hailing a woman as a saviour for the white race before viciously turning on her, is telling — because we in the West have been here before. The most famous example of this cultural and political whiplash occurred on election night in Britain in late 2019. After the British working class rejected the Labour Party and the “Marxist” radicals who had come to set large parts of its agenda, social media was filled with the exact same hatred towards the very people whom the haters were ostensibly there to “defend”. Many who had earlier professed a deep respect for “the working class” spent the election night viciously denouncing those workers as “gammon”, “racists”, “ignorant”, and of being “ungrateful” in not understanding that these radicals were only trying to help them.

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While the people around Jeremy Corbyn formed something like an actual political movement, by contrast, the American “white nationalist” or “dissident Right” sphere describes an entirely online phenomenon, one that is mostly in the business of selling podcast subscriptions and dietary supplements. And yet, the problem facing the white nationalist or “racist” Right is the same as the one recently faced by the “pro-working class” or “communist” Left. It’s not just that there’s not a whole lot of real-world buy-in for the belief system being sold, though this is of course true. The deeper issue has to do with the sellers, not the reluctant buyers, of the radical ideology on offer. The radicals on the Right, just as the radicals on the Left, consist almost entirely of deeply dissatisfied people who stayed in education and “did everything right”, but for whom success has never materialised.

Ever since identity politics took over Western campuses, there has been a brisk trade in think-pieces by stodgy conservative thinkers warning of a coming (white) “backlash” that would have potentially very destructive effects for marginalised people and minorities of all kinds. Well, the backlash is actually here, and it is indeed far less threatening than people made it out to be. Expectations of campus politics generating some sort of broad-based mass movement — of ordinary whites goose-stepping in tandem through the main streets of Anytown, USA — turned out to be widely off the mark. Instead, the backlash to self-absorbed middle-class identity politics turned out to be simply another kind of self-absorbed middle-class identity politics, perpetrated by the losers of the former, while retaining more or less the exact same form and syntax. And why shouldn’t it? The true losers of mainstream identity politics and the perpetrators of this kind of politics on the prestige campuses of Western universities have much, much more in common than either side would like to admit.

Identity politics has jokingly been called “oppression Olympics”, as various identity and affinity groups desperately try to upstage each other in order to win favour (and institutional representation, government money, and NGO sinecures). They have to compete, because the job and housing markets for graduates and soi-disant “elites” are now so terrible that the world increasingly resembles a game of musical chairs: for one person to prosper, another one has to be deprived. Here, the dissident Right’s response has mostly been to form their own Olympic team of professional grievance-mongers; using everything from racial IQ statistics to crime rates to historical examples such as the slave revolt on Haiti to prove that Whites (which they now usually capitalise, mirroring the mainstream preoccupation with capitalising the word Black) are indeed the most put-upon and victimised people on this earth. The future of politics is here, in other words, and it looks an awful lot like yesterday.

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One should not bend the stick too far when arguing that the new online dissident Right is almost a carbon copy of the now defunct populist Left. While the ideology, the tenor, and the class background of these two movements is almost identical, the dissident Right is by all accounts a far feebler political force with no place to call home.

During at least a short period, the populist Left was in control of large parts of the Labour Party, and were a credible threat to the neoliberal establishment in the US through candidate Bernie Sanders. By contrast, the dissident Right controls no parts of any party apparatus, and in many ways directly opposes the direction of the Republican Party, to which they are in theory supposed to be affiliated. A term such as the “multiracial working class” being the future of the GOP is not the product of some self-styled Marxist pundit, but rather of Steve Bannon. That this term is complete anathema to the wishes of the dissident online Right, who by and large despise any mention of a solidaristic politics that doesn’t explicitly favour them, has in no way prevented it from being further popularised by influential senators such as Josh Hawley and Marco Rubio. It has also been adopted by institutions and publications with far more clout and access to the halls of power than the rag-tag band of people who (at least for a short moment) found an inspiring example of an “Aryan shield-maiden” behind the counter at a Louisiana Waffle House.

After the spectacle of communists who hate and fear the workers, we now are treated with another spectacle: white nationalists who openly fear and loathe a plurality or even a majority of their fellow white countrymen. And though it is droll to say that history repeats itself first as tragedy and then as farce, political observers will come to agree that this latest generation of dissident radicals presents a far greater source of humour than it does an actual political threat. Nobody needs them politically or economically, and indeed nobody is offering to step up to take care of them or help them even as they suffer — this is the plight of the modern radical today.

The most recent prominent victim of his own employer’s search function is Twitter’s former Head of Trust and Safety, Yoel Roth, a man with the sort of hubristic job title that almost guarantees its owner’s involvement in a scandal sooner or later. Apparently settling old scores, this week new boss Elon Musk picked up on a tweet of Roth’s from 12 years ago as well as an extract from his PhD thesis, and used both to try to insinuate a sinister connection with Twitter’s prior failure to eliminate child sexual exploitation from the site.

Generally speaking, the revelation of supposed malfeasance by some internet sleuth has an archetypal drama that never gets old. There’s a shiver of pleasure at the spectacle of an unmasking, as well as a feeling of suppressed gratitude that it’s happening to someone else and not you. The age of the quoted text doesn’t matter, nor what its author was trying to say to whom, nor when, nor why. As an observer, you get the social world’s permission not to care about these things in the slightest because nobody else seems to care about them either.

Most often, such acts of excavation are the domain of vengeful Madame Defarge-types on the Left, seeking to do away with enemies and rivals by launching accusations of sexism, ableism, transphobia, and so on. But social conservatives are now also in on the game, and their current weapons of choice are accusations of “grooming”, paedophilia, and other conspiracies of the sexually deviant, mostly aimed at those in the LGBT world, loosely construed. Roth is a gay man, and this is the discourse into which his tweets and PhD extracts have been assimilated by some on the Right. He is now reported as having been forced to flee his home due to threats.

But to a sober eye, the extracts highlighted by Musk establish nothing like what has been implied. The first was a tweet of Roth’s asking a question — “Can high school students ever meaningfully consent to sex with their teachers?” — and linking to a Salon article discussing a teacher being charged for having sex with an 18-year-old student, despite the legal age of consent in the US state concerned being 16. Asking spicy-sounding ethical questions like this, and then giving anticlimactically vague answers — as does the article in question — is a staple of moral and legal philosophical prose, and hardly a reliable guide to nefarious authorial intentions.

Roth’s thesis extract looks even more boring. After acknowledging that the gay social media platform Grindr “may well be too lewd and too hook-up-oriented to be a safe and age-appropriate resource for teenagers”, he apparently tries to deal responsibly with the fact that teenagers are on there anyway by insisting that the platform continue to be held legally liable, and that it “craft safety strategies” with which to “safely connect queer young adults”. In other words, this is a perfectly standard approach to real-world problems, acknowledging that a social duty to protect the vulnerable persists even where individuals cannot be stopped from doing things that put them in harm’s way.

The real story is that conservatives were already angry with Roth for something else entirely. Earlier this month, he pinged Republican radars via his appearance in the so-called Twitter Files. The emerging picture seems to confirm what many disaffected users have long suspected — that, in the pre-Musk regime, senior employees such as Roth controlled which bits of information and which people could or could not be visible on the platform, in relatively arbitrary ways, though mostly skewed towards Democrat interests. For those already frustrated with what they see as excessively ideological moderation practices used covertly to support questionable politics, previous partisan tweets of Roth’s quickly established him as a promising candidate for this month’s two-minute hate, and the search function did the rest.

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Whether or not Twitter moderation has been biased and censorious in the past (it has), establishing the raiding of PhD theses and other juvenilia as a precedent in the sexual culture wars spells trouble for LGBT people in general. For what conservatives caught up in the ecstasy of denunciation may be missing is that these days, entire academic disciplines are structured to produce people who look to the untutored eye like sexual deviants but in fact are not. In some academic fields, it’s practically mandatory to argue that traditional sexual norms are problematic in some way and probably should be dismantled.

That isn’t indicative of Pasolini-style levels of rampant debauchery in the academy, so much as of the fact that many academics are socially awkward geeks, hoping that by pontificating edgily about sex they might look cool. In writing incomprehensible paragraphs about non-standard sexual practices, they get to pose simultaneously as political dissidents, freedom fighters, social justice activists, and deep philosophical thinkers, bravely dismantling the status quo, one mention of an orgy or fetish at a time. Others are simply doing it because, over time, disciplinary norms in this direction have mindlessly developed, and now it’s as good a way as any to attract attention in the jobs market. We should read most taboo-busting academic arguments not as confessions but as performances — often carried out by relatively junior and pedestrian strivers, trying to play the career game in a highly competitive market, and who have no time for sex, even assuming they could get any. Read against relevant comparators, Roth’s thesis extracts about Grindr seem unusually responsible and moderate.

Conservatives are also wrong that the impetus towards sexual taboo-busting within institutions is coming from LGBT people in particular, let alone that it’s mostly coming from LGBT people intent on corrupting minors. It’s true that social experiments like Drag Queen Story Hour in libraries or extremely graphic sex education in schools are often initiated in the name of the mythical “LGBT community”, but that’s not to say that most of them like it. In practice, it’s just as often heterosexual missionary-types doing the organising, enthusiastically seeking out what they consider to be progressive causes for the purposes of guilt expiation and social media likes.

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The fact is that most of the material fuelling so-called groomer discourse is coming not from appetites for illicit sex, but for social approval, and from straight people as much as anyone else. Though it’s true that most instigators would describe themselves as queer, it should also be remembered that this is a category that anyone at all can access, as long as they say the magic words “I’m queer”.

This is not to say that there is nothing to see here — quite the opposite. As radical feminists point out, the ravages of the extremes of male sexuality upon women and children become invisible once filed under positive-sounding headings such as “sexual dissidence” and “freedom to be yourself”. There doesn’t have to be any conspiracy here for it to be true that queer culture puts women and children at risk, albeit mostly inadvertently rather than on purpose. There are plenty of examples already in the public domain of bad male actors profiting from the dismantling of traditional ways of separating the sexes, for instance. And there will be many more in future, unless responsible progressives stop believing in fairy tales about male sexuality — or even just admit that, as in Red Riding Hood, wolves can sometimes dress up in grandmother’s clothing.

I see no real sign of any dawning realism, though. Instead, both sides seem locked in a terrible dynamic: the more lurid the accusations from the Right about grooming and the moral corruption of children, the more the Left splutter about how such accusations could only be motivated by racism, homophobia, or transphobia. Meanwhile, the latter’s myopic refusal to acknowledge a more complicated picture than “all criticism is bigotry” further empowers predators to take advantage of weakened safeguarding structures — whereupon their cases will be seamlessly recycled into the Right’s rhetoric, as further evidence that LGBT people are basically a problem for a sane society. And if they can’t get real cases of predation? Well, as the Roth case demonstrates, many are prepared to just make them up.

***

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Johnson admitted in an apology, made after emails that confirmed his long-denied use of performance-enhancing drugs, that he spent thousands of dollars a month on steroids. The aim was to endow himself with a physique that implied the extreme fitness that he was attempting to sell to others. But that fitness was illusory: one powerlifter who knew him recently mocked his 455-pound deadlift, a decent number for a novice lifter or a teen boy but unimpressive for someone spending as much on steroids as the Liver King.

The Liver King’s story is a microcosm of the ever-evolving Right-wing manosphere, which emerged from self-help roots in the early 2000s to attain a quasi-political, quasi-spiritual status, alongside the ascendancy of Donald Trump. The most obvious Trump train rider in the manosphere was former advice blogger and accused rapist Mike Cernovich, who published the political book MAGA Mindset as a follow-up to his Gorilla Mindset self-help text, between blogging about topics such as grip strength when choking a woman during sex. Liver King never became explicitly political the way Cernovich did, but his message was a streamlined and extremely dumbed-down version of the MAGA-adjacent ideology being preached by anon fitness influencers such as Raw Egg Nationalist — whose alignment with Tucker Carlson led to appearances in a documentary, The End of Men, as well as on Fox News.

For all these men, there is some kind of secret — an ancient secret, in the case of the Liver King — that gullible, inward-looking initiates must uncover, via various steps. The navel-gazing nature of all this recalls the fitness fads, cults, and other New-Age quests for meaning of the Seventies that cultural critic Tom Wolfe labelled America’s “Third Great Awakening”.

The previous two awakenings concerned the revival of Protestant spirituality in the mid-18th and early-19th centuries; all three were spurred by a sense of social disorder. First, New England Congregationalists strayed from the true light of the lord that led them to the New World. Second, newly Independent Americans found themselves facing down the settlement of the frontier with little assistance from their laissez-faire government. And in the Seventies, hippies and flower children found themselves grappling with the violent disappointments of popular protests, while a bloated, bureaucratic state struggled to bring about even a stalemate in Vietnam.

Throughout these three centuries, but with increasing velocity and urgency from the Sixties onward, the personal began to substitute for the political. Now, as Malcom Kyeyune recently noted, we are in uncharted territory: now, with “proliferating numbers of belief systems and fringe political narratives on the Web”, the political is personal. In other words, the “personal” — abetted by the technologies like social media that centre the user, indeed making them the narcissistic centres of their virtual worlds — has completely subsumed the “political”; everything everywhere is personal and filtered through some sort of Freudian superego that functions as a “self-marketing machine”, with the rest of life merely incidental. Online, various quasi-faiths and crude scientism are offering people personal uplift combined with the promise to fix their little communities, the only parts worth saving, the parts open to the elect.

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Though influencers such as the Liver King, Raw Egg Nationalist, and Bronze Age Pervert are new to the scene, relatively speaking, nothing about their appeal is novel (even though certain practices, such as directing red light on the testicles to stimulate testosterone production, are only now technologically possible). They themselves emphasise this: their appeals harken back to past practices, times when “men were men”, even if they cannot agree when exactly that was. Hesiod’s age of gold? A Twenties naval port, with nattily-attired “wolves” awaiting the hearty “rough trade” from the high seas, sure to appear whenever the “fleet’s in?” A seedy Forties YMCA, where the bodybuilding demimonde has gathered to “slonk” raw eggs before proceeding to grease up and commence lifting in jockstraps? Regardless of the time of the last real men, it was very different from our present fallen, failed, and low-testosterone state of existence.

Calls for the rebirth of masculinity echo throughout recorded history, issued by everyone from the aforementioned Hesiod to Japanese author and extreme nationalist Yukio Mishima (a favourite of this current round of fitness-cum-politics influencers). The “Third Great Awakening” of the Seventies ended with the emergence of religious groups such as the Promise Keepers, an Evangelical movement seeking to call men back to “courageous leadership” and “marital” fidelity. Meanwhile, in secular literature, the breakdown of masculinity and paternal authority was addressed in Robert Bly’s influential 1990 book Iron John: A Book About Men — a text which inspired any number of subsequent manosphere efforts, including Tom Matlack’s “The Good Men Project”  (a website that launched the careers of everyone from Hugo Schwyzer and Harris “Dr. Nerdlove” O’Malley to yours truly) and even the pickup artistry of Neil Strauss and Mystery (Iron John, like Robert Greene’s works on power and seduction, found itself on many “PUA” reading lists).

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I mention my personal involvement here — the personal is political, after all — because I’ve followed the manosphere’s trajectory since the early 2000s. I’ve also spent decades strength training and eating raw meat and raw eggs, as well as interviewing and writing about some of the world’s leading strength coaches and athletes. These activities would suggest, on the surface, that I am sympathetic to the cause of egg-slonkers, bronze-age warrior worshippers and bodybuilding aesthetes. Far from it: I see their Liver King-style marketing as sophomoric, the sort of thing I’ve attacked in print whenever possible.

My interest in strength stems solely from viewing it as preferable to incapacity. The enjoyment I’ve derived from weight training arises, to quote venerable strength coach Mark Rippetoe, who I recently interviewed, from “completing a task you couldn’t do previously”. And yet, throughout my career as a journalist covering sports and fitness, I have been asked what I have learned from figures such as Raw Egg Nationalist. When I interviewed the paleo diet influencer John Durant, during the early days of the alt-Right’s emergence as a media phenomenon, he assumed I shared his belief that eating raw or rare meat is a radical political act. I do see it as political, but only in the sense that I stand with politicians who support regenerative grazing practices and increasing access to meat for poor and undernourished children; meat is merely a means, not an end. I’d gladly eat something less primal, including biologically identical lab-grown meat, if such a thing could ever be manufactured cheaply and at scale.

That’s not to say that these fitness influencers don’t offer some useful advice. All popular gurus and spiritual leaders do. Eating organ meats, getting adequate sleep, spending time in the sun, and even taking some pride in one’s body — an edifice that is both temple and tomb — are not bad practices in and of themselves. However, this advice is chained to a lot of gobbledygook, from bizarre, hero-worshiping misreadings of history to faux-scientific racism. The noted dissident author Zero HP Lovecraft, for instance, once used a voice changer to record a podcast in which he argues that the different races are different species.

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The importance of Bronze Age Pervert

By Murtaza Hussein

It is almost impossible to say how influential these figures are; on the one hand, they will claim that they directly created the Trump phenomenon, but on the other, they will joke that they’re just “frogs” who “shitpost online”, unlike the “facefags” (people whose identities are public) who genuinely care about things. Bronze Age Pervert, whose book Bronze Age Mindset is the sort of amusing Nietzschean pastiche one might expect from a PhD student having a spot of fun, is known to be read by congressional staffers; and yet, he huffily complained about City Journal allowing Kyeyune to publish an article that’s mildly critical of him. Like the Liver King, these figures take zero responsibility for the failures and shortcomings of their acolytes — but unlike him, most of them will never be seen at all, so what difference does it make?

Here, then, is the great weakness that stems from the evolution of “the personal is political” into “the political is personal”: far from allowing the development of strong convictions, the new creed is so malleable as to be meaningless. If one argues that the job of the Republican Party is to win elections and reward its constituencies, those on the Right who preach that “the political is personal” won’t help. Why would they bother? Most are already arguing that the nation or the world has collapsed, which is far easier than facilitating real political change, which would require moving the GOP to the centre.

Things are fairly hopeless, according to the manosphere. Yet if pressed, the Liver Kings and Bronze Age Perverts won’t turn on, tune in, and drop out like millenarian hippies bound for the commune; they’ll hang around, continuing to offer advice on how to infuse the self into politics and vice versa. They and many of their followers — some of whom left the Left by way of the so-called “post-Left” — would gleefully ridicule such “personal-political” posturing were it to issue from gender identitarians or committed anti-racists. Zero HP Lovecraft, however, says the quiet part out loud (in the same podcast in which he compares white and black people to wolves and coyotes): if one side is doing racism, then we will do racism as well.

This is the grave danger behind the very online Right’s turn towards “the political is personal”: at the back of the ironic fitness, the talk of physiognomy, and the IQ-test silliness, there lurks an us-versus-them mentality. And it’s a mentality that allows the manosphere to gleefully join the progressive Left in bidding farewell to any of the remaining civil norms that facilitate debate and compromise. It will do nothing to break the sclerotic gridlock in the body politic — and nothing, ironically, for the young men of America who are actually trying to get stronger.

***

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I’ve thought a lot about it in recent weeks, as various prolific tweeters struggled visibly with the strain Elon Musk is putting on their psyches. For those habituated to viewing every gesture in moralised terms, the coming of a Republican-endorsing, vaccine-undermining overlord such as Musk poses an urgent dilemma. How best to respond? Or more accurately: how best to be seen to respond?

Long-term Twitter addict Stephen Fry has left for alternative provider Mastodon, spelling out “GOODBYE” in Scrabble letters before deactivating his account. Further down the Twitter food chain, others are also performatively announcing imminent departures and urging others to do the same. Perhaps inspired by Remembrance Day, elegiac posts are being offered in memory of more innocent times when people were good and Twitter was like a village — full of quirky enthusiasms, restaurant recommendations, and photos of dogs. Of course, possibly like most villages, it was also full of porn, racism, and bullying, but nobody seems to recollect that.

More tenacious types are expressing their objections to Musk through heavy-handed mockery of him, like rebellious schoolboys ribbing their headmaster. Still others are explaining laboriously why they won’t, after all, be leaving Twitter. Of course they despise Musk — that goes without saying — but equally, their Twitter “communities” need them. And in any case, they can’t quite grasp how Mastodon works, and they’re damned if they are going to give up their 4,796 hard-won followers and start all over again.

In the Financial Times, meanwhile, Janan Ganesh explained “the real reason to get off Twitter”: namely, it’s too full of low-status losers being ironic and twee. Over time, he argued, exposure to this contagious atmosphere tends to affect the characters even of powerful people, sapping them of aspiration and making them look diminished in the eyes of onlookers. Ganesh himself escaped ages ago, and advises others to do the same.

It seems to me that Ganesh’s former Twitter experience probably says more about the self-ironising middle-class intellectual bubbles he was in at the time than any universal experience on the platform. But this is hardly the point. He is certainly right that whatever sort of atmosphere the Twitter algorithms are currently providing for you, it’s bound to be contagious — that is nearly the whole point of social media. But equally, this and a few other core facts about the platform’s structure present a unique prospect to the average user that is, in my view, under-explored.

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Elon Musk must destroy Twitter

By Aris Roussinos

For all its undoubted flaws — in fact, perhaps because of them — Twitter has long offered its users an unparalleled opportunity to become a stronger, more resilient, more psychologically acute person. I think of the platform as a testing ground for the soul’s development; a crucible in which self-aware types can purge themselves of their baser metals. The advent of Musk won’t change this opportunity, and in fact his coming onboard may well increase it. If genuinely interested in moral self-improvement, those angsting over cosmetic guilt-by-association with Musk should stop worrying about it, and simply plunge further in.

In the old days, to improve yourself you had to get out into the world in order to start your hero’s journey — or, at the very least, read a George Eliot novel. These days you can just log on as HotRiotGrrl52031 and begin a modern knight’s quest all of your own. For a start, Twitter allows you to observe the psychological lures, thickets, and snares that tend to entrap others. Watching others navigate the platform is a bit like watching the protagonist in The Pilgrim’s Progress: will he escape the Slough of Despond, the Hill of Arguing Furiously with Strangers, or the Pit of Humblebragging?

Social media occupies a weird intermediate space between talking out loud and composing an email — casual enough that authors can be stunningly uninhibited, but also much less ephemeral, leaving a record for others to scrutinise and endlessly regurgitate long after you’ve forgotten what the hell you were ever talking about. The ubiquity of the smartphone — particularly during all-day drinking sessions and all-night existential crises — offers a constant temptation to tweet your most urgent-seeming thoughts into the void, without a firm idea about who you are really addressing. Is it your followers? Your boss? Your crush? God? Your Mum?

Meanwhile, the deracinated, truncated text scrolling before your eyeballs, shorn of detailed information about the author or their context, can make you equally confused about who or what it is you are reading. Into this epistemic vacuum can easily rush credulity — as can fantasy and projection. Unconsciously disavowed, your own inner fear, guilt, envy, and shame can get placed by an external source: a celebrity you hate, say, or that annoying dickhead you ended up arguing with for three days about Brexit between trips to Tesco.

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Of course, to notice these things properly in others — and God forbid, in yourself — you need to keep your wits about you. The late philosopher of language Paul Grice assumed that, in order to work out what other speakers mean by their words, you should work out “the purpose or direction of the talk exchange in which you are engaged”. He also apparently thought that by far the most common purpose of speaking or writing was to have “a maximally effective exchange of information”. He thought we should interpret others accordingly, as aspiring truth-tellers, operating in good faith.

Had Grice been on Twitter, he would have surely revised his theory. For many users, informational exchange is only the incidental pretext to more important things like self-aggrandisement, covert attacks on imagined enemies, and consolidation of social power. In terms of psychological richness, then, Twitter-watching offers a panoply of fascinating characters to rival anything Dickens, Austen, or Eliot could come up with. There are aggressors advertising victimhood; grifters advertising blogs about anti-grifting; fragile souls being grandiose; cruel people preaching kindness. There is also an absolute tsunami of empty sentimentality over other people’s pets, partners, and kids — dead, nearly dead, or just plain cute. The Taoist-style challenge for the observer is simply to notice these things as they are, rather than to get caught up emotionally or wilfully in any of them. Try again. Fail again. Fail better. It’s also pointless judging anybody else for what, after all, are just human traits to which we are nearly all subject. And that’s hard too.

Difficult as these challenges are, they pale into insignificance once the watcher becomes an active participant and starts tweeting herself. Pretty much all of Kipling’s If applies here, with a few extra stanzas for luck about switching your phone off at night and muting replies. Here is the real test of your mettle. Here be the real dragons, though once again they are mostly dragons you conjure up yourself.

In my experience, fuelled either by actual engagement from strangers or by the lack of it, the imagined gaze of the public will accompany your every tentative remark, joke, or diatribe. If you imagine a pitilessly critical gaze, then that’s what you will feel and respond to. Ditto if you imagine a warm and admiring one. Either way, this can send you mad if you let it. We’ve all seen the phenomenon of initial moderates becoming more and more extreme in their online performances, depending on what they believe they are loved or hated for by others.

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Real feminists don't need strongmen

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And never mind your imaginary critics — past a certain point of visibility and follower count, the real ones can drive you stark staring bonkers as well. I speak from personal experience, of course. I first joined Twitter in 2015, encouraged by prevailing academic culture to seek what is known grandiosely in the trade as “impact” for my research. My tweets, and the horribly repressed blog posts about fiction I wrote to accompany them, made about as much impact as a raindrop would on the surface of the sun. Back then, any engagement whatsoever would do. At least someone out there knew I was alive.

Since then, it’s been quite the journey to my 96K followers, and I no longer have to worry about lack of engagement. But if you think that along the way I’ve never sneered defensively, mocked maliciously, flounced off touchily, or posted ill-advisedly when drunk or premenstrual, you’d be dead wrong. As Carl Jung might have said, it’s essential not to let your ego get too close to your Twitter analytics — and yet so very hard to do.

Inevitably, your online persona will become a site of projection for others: idealisation or denigration or both, sometimes from the very same tweeter, on different days or even hours. The only way to cope with the potential for interaction with your own weaknesses is to constantly remind yourself that they are not really talking to you — and, for that matter, you are not really talking to them. The intended audience is always somewhere else. None of this is personal.

These, then, are just a few of the condensed life lessons available to you when you log on. Should you succeed in learning them well, you will be a modern-day superhero, able to keep your dignity and sangfroid online when all about are losing theirs. Of course, hardly anyone around you will recognise this fact about you, each being caught up in their own personal dramas. But that’s Twitter, and indeed life, for you.

Anyone who builds a career out of watching such material, whether it’s for the purposes of documenting it, reporting on it, or inquiring into its wider causes and meanings, ought to have some thoughts on the moral ambiguities intrinsic to it. In his memoir, Unreasonable Behaviour, first published in 1990, the British war photographer Don McCullin explains how he was drawn to war by a sense of adventure and the belief that by documenting its horrors he could stir the conscience of those who could put an end to them.

But he soon came to doubt that conviction and to question the true nature of his motives: “If war had become so hateful to me, why did I not keep away?” Reflecting on his long and celebrated career, he can’t repress the nagging suspicion that war photographers are nothing more than glorified profiteers, coldly trading on other people’s unspeakable suffering and grief. “Yet, I ask myself, what has all my looking and probing done for these people, or for anyone?… What have I done with my life?”

Reading Unreasonable Behaviour today is a jarring experience, not just because of its raw honesty, but also because of the contrast it invites between McCullin’s temperament and his peers who now cover war and conflict. McCullin is ambivalent, self-reproachful, measured and stoic, whereas his successors tend to be self-righteous, ideological and fragile. When McCullin was asked about Covid, at the height of the pandemic, the then-84-year old contemptuously snorted: “I couldn’t give a sod about it.”

There are certainly no Don McCullins in the extremism profession today, where stupefying levels of self-aggrandisement are matched only by a stupefying absence of any self-awareness. Consider Vidhya Ramalingam, founder and CEO of a counter-extremism company called Moonshot. Referring to the Eradicate Hate Global Summit held in Pittsburgh last month, Ramalingam insisted that its purpose was “to stop an epidemic of violence that has cost us so many lives… We are the group that are going to stop this”.

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Don't fall for the Isis Matchmaker

By Simon Cottee

The self-promotion and self-regard on display here is really quite breathtaking. So, too, is the sense of unreality. How, you might ask, does Team Ramalingam plan to go about the task of stopping America’s epidemic of violence? By speaking at plush conferences about “novel forms of safeguarding”? By supporting workshops on the intersection between gaming and extremism? By posting insufferably smug tweets about men “taking responsibility” for male-dominated power structures?

Of course, all of this raises a bigger question: what is the point of the extremism profession? Ramalingam would say its overriding purpose is to make the world a better place; that it’s only by properly understanding how extremism works that we can identify effective solutions for combating it. Yet if you take even a cursory glance at the extremism profession it becomes glaringly obvious that the driving imperative behind it is not to eradicate extremism, but to hunt down, if not outright invent, new forms of it in order to drum up business from all the internet-scraping, report-writing, and digital counter-messaging that the industry trades on.

This explains why so many industry-insiders have embraced the concepts of hate speech and the related notion of “online harms”, and it’s why some extremism experts have heartily endorsed the notion that violent extremism has become “mainstream” in American culture and society. They have done so not necessarily because they are committed to radical activism, although some certainly are, but because the alarmist, progressive vision of a society saturated in mutual hatred affords so many opportunities for the extremism profession to engorge itself on.

The result is a curious, if mutually beneficial and lucrative, alignment, where the concerns of Left-leaning activists are leveraged and repackaged for profit by hard-nosed extremism hucksters who are now suddenly awakened to the lethal menace of Tucker Carlson, Jordan Peterson and Andrew Tate. At the same time, the radical activists have embraced the language of violent extremism — “mass radicalisation”, extremist “eco-systems”, dangerousness, vulnerability — to impugn their political enemies on the Right and to legitimise their social banishment through censorship.

Another curious aspect of this alignment is how readily so many extremism experts and scholars have embraced the infantilising trauma discourse of radical activists. This is a subject I address in my new book on the seductions and repulsions of violent online spectacles. If you spend all your time watching this stuff, out of choice, as many extremism experts do, you will inevitably run up against the suspicion that you might secretly enjoy it or have been irreparably desensitised by it.

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America needs to calm down

By Simon Cottee

Nobody in the extremism profession would ever dare confess to harbouring such feelings — and if they were to voice them they would be ostracised as a degenerate voyeur or sociopath. Instead, many claim to have been traumatised by what they have seen. And while I have no doubt that some have been psychologically or spiritually damaged by over-exposure, the invocation of trauma serves to deflect or neutralise any deeper inquiry into the murky business of tracking extremist material on the internet and the complex motives and emotions that it involves.

War, as many illustrious war correspondents have testified, can be a warping experience. In his memoir about covering the war in Bosnia in the early Nineties, Anthony Loyd remarked that although war didn’t fundamentally change his already black-pilled perspective on the world, it did serve to reinforce his “views about the pointlessness of existence, the basic brutality of human life and the godlessness of the universe”. For Christopher Hedges, the feeling was far more visceral and dramatic. Recalling a ruck he’d gotten into with an airline clerk on the way back from a particularly harrowing trip to El Salvador, where he’d been covering the war there between 1983 and 1988, he wrote: “Blood streamed down his face and mine. I refused to wipe the dried stains off my cheeks on the flight to Madrid, and I carry a scar on my face from where he thrust his pen into my cheek. War’s sickness had become mine.”

Similarly revealing is an anecdote told by Rukmini Callimachi, the New York Times journalist who made her name reporting on Isis, in which she describes hearing someone repeatedly banging on her apartment door late at night. She called the cops, fearing it might be an Isis operative paying her a menacing visit. (It was actually someone from the local water company.) Callimachi tells the story with humour, but the moral behind it is a serious one: to be exposed to carnage and chaos, all of the time and without let up, can seriously derange one’s perception, judgment and sense of proportion.

The best reporters are acutely aware of this danger and try, as best they can, to inoculate against it. Loyd, by his own admission, failed miserably on that front. Not only did the war in Bosnia wrench open the lid on the darker side of his mind; it also blew a gaping hole in his sense of professional detachment and made him contemptuous of the “complacency of Western societies”.

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Why ISIS love to kill

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This hints at a greater paradox that extremism professionals would do well to consider: that through over-exposure to the very worst places of the internet, they succumb to the very radicalisation dynamics that they’re trying to expose and hinder. When mainstream journalists think that MAGA is an armed insurgency or declare that, as one headline put it in Foreign Policy, “White Supremacists Want a Dirty Bomb”, or believe that a red dress or “ok” sign is a fascist dog-whistle, it becomes impossible to deny that some kind of warping has occurred. By staring too intently into the twilight world of online megadeath, mayhem and tribal hatred, they inevitably project this gruesome and fringe demiworld onto the real world that the rest of us inhabit. As the terrorism scholar Peter Neumann has observed:

“If people end up spending too much of their time in virtual communities, the online forums come to function like one of Edwin Sutherland’s “criminogenic environments”, in which deviant and extreme behaviours are learned and absorbed and in which extreme ideas come to seem normal because of constant interaction with people who hold similar—and similarly extreme—views… As a result, people acquire a skewed sense of reality…”

The irony, which seems lost on the extremism reporters and experts, is that this dynamic applies as much to them as to the extremists they spend all of their time “infiltrating”. Don McCullin knew all about the dangers of getting too close to his subject and, along with other like-minded war reporters, he has much to teach us about the ambiguities of their profession and their own conflicted relationship to it. The new generation of hate eradicators and extremism experts would no doubt benefit from reading them — although such are the exigencies of saving the world that they probably don’t have the time.

The world is wearily familiar by now with the overheated and extremely public style in which America conducts its internal disputes, and Joe Biden’s speech for the American midterm elections last week was no exception.

Flanked by soldiers, Biden stood against the backdrop of Independence Hall in Philadelphia, where the US Constitution was written. The building was lit in ominous red. This “sacred ground”, the President said, was “where we set in motion the most extraordinary experiment of self-government the world has ever known with three simple words: “We, the People.” And, he intimated, this was now profoundly under threat thanks to “Donald Trump and the MAGA Republicans”, who “represent an extremism that threatens the very foundations of our republic”.

The remainder of the speech re-invoked American democracy while suggesting that Biden’s political opponents were a threat not to his presidency but to all of that 200-year-old project. Both sides claimed the speech as evidence that the other side is the real threat to American democracy.

Or perhaps the real threat is me? This, at least, is the implication of a recent article in US conservative journal National Review, which noted that I’ve suggested more than once lately that I think Caesarism may be the least worst option for future Western politics, and accused me of shilling for authoritarianism. Well, yes and no. I do think liberal democracy is probably doomed. But this isn’t the fault of either Left of Right, so much as deep structural reasons.

What if, in fact, the threat to democracy is real, but the battle is already lost? What if, in fact, the West stopped trying to form democratic citizens some time ago? And what if this is a problem not just in America, but across the entire democratic world?

A couple of years ago, Adam Garfinkle made this case, in an essay examining the decline in “deep literacy” following the arrival of the internet. Delving into the interlocking histories of print, Christianity and democracy, the author argued that all three of these combined to create a particular type of subject well-suited to democratic governance. And, he suggests, the principal means by which such democratic subjects were shaped was long-form reading.

Long-form reading builds up an interlinked base of knowledge, held in long-term memory, that you can use to think with. But sustained engagement with long-form text also creates the capacity for abstract thinking, inner life as such, and a shared belief in objective standards and the value of deliberation.

Even today, there are striking overlaps between worldwide literacy and nations that embrace some form of democracy – which correlate strongly with the prevalence of Christian belief. All three coalesced in the founding of America, the new home for a polity whose emergence was bound up with the Christian Reformation that followed the arrival of the printing press.

Today, though, a nation founded in the convergence of Christianity, literacy, and democracy sees Christianity in rapid decline, as is the case across the West. Garfinkle argues that literacy is not far behind: for while on the face of it we’re reading and writing more than ever, in another sense we’re losing the central, print-era capacity for “deep reading”. In its place, prolonged engagement with scrolling, intertextual and interactive reading rewards us for losing unitary focus, and trains us not to concentrate but filter torrents of information via rapid-fire skipping across multiple sources. The result is a shift toward “continuous partial attention”.

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If “deep reading” produced democracy as its governing political form, what can we expect to see associated with its networked digital successor? As Garfinkle sees it, this would probably be toward “a less abstract, re-personalized form of social and political authority concentrated in a ‘great’ authoritarian leader”.

We may already be seeing this borne out. On this side of the pond, research by the think tank UK Onward revealed support for democratic norms falling with every generation, but then plunging sharply among those under 44. Notably, Onward’s data also show that after an authoritarian spike across the board, that coincided with Covid, every demographic has returned to more or less their previous dislike of strongman leadership — again, except those under 44.

And these trends are not just observable in Britain. Most young Western people are more authoritarian than their elders. Nor is this purely a case of young Right-wingers agitating for less immigration; young Left-wingers are also willing to steamroller democracy.

UK Onward identified always-online culture as a key factor in the longing for strongman politics. This would account for the inflection point around my generation (early 40s). I was 18 when my household went online; every generation younger than me has grown up in an increasingly digital culture. And if post-literacy is the technological and cultural water we all swim in now, this accounts for a number of emerging cultural and political phenomena.

It goes some way, for example, toward explaining declining youth support for the print-era ideal of “freedom of speech”, and in parallel the increasing youth support for censorship. Freedom of speech as an ideal was predicated on the scarcity of information; today, though, information is superabundant. And when you’ve grown up with personal experience of just how foul people can be online, you might well value the role of content moderators. So, today, the battleground is over who and what gets noticed – and who gets to set the parameters.

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We can also kiss goodbye to the “marketplace of ideas”. This might have seemed plausible when everyone aspired to long-form, deliberative, rationalism and a broadly shared moral framework. When these are things of the past, we all absorb disaggregated, de-contextualised snippets of information at speed, our reading material rewards us for not concentrating long enough to think something through, and we can see everyone else thinking in real time on our screens?

Well, it turns out that this makes “the marketplace of ideas” much more volatile, infectious, and politicised, and accordingly less willing to notice politically inconvenient facts. That is, less a vector for collective truth-seeking than an accelerant for conspiracy fantasy, purity spirals and unhinged meme wars. And this is chipping away at faith in the capacity of debate to make anything better.

In its place we find a growing tendency for political change to be driven by campaigning bodies that aim not to win by debating, but to do so by setting the parameters within which democratic political debate is able to take place. Whether it’s creating guidelines, writing school curricula, influencing legislation or shaping international standards or treaties, such activity takes place, by definition, prior to democratic deliberation.

Probably the case most familiar to British readers will be the Brexit debate over whether it was acceptable for the UK’s immigration policy to be set in Brussels, but other examples are legion. A lot of what’s said about “the deep state” is baroque conspiracy fantasy, but the phrase contains a kernel of truth: the political issues voters are able to influence via the polling booth are pre-set, in a process that’s increasingly obviously itself a political battleground, and one that’s largely insulated from democratic accountability.

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And this hints at more profound implication of Garfinkle’s argument. Mass democracy implies a capacity for long-form thinking, along with faith in freedom of speech, the marketplace of ideas, and the power of electoral politics to effect change. If these are all faltering, for structural reasons, what future is there for the central political ideal of the print era?

Those who have encountered the “Dark Brandon” meme, in which Joe Biden is approvingly depicted by his own supporters as a semi-supernatural authoritarian, might be tempted to point to this as evidence that the youth are itching for something a bit more, erm, forceful than their parents’ feeble polling-booth-based efforts. There is also the obvious and growing problem democratic polities have with mustering the “losers’ consent” which enables the losing political teams to accept a democratic result.

Biden characterised reluctance to accept the result of a vote as a unique property of his enemies. But it’s discernible across the political spectrum – and not just in the US. Alongside the short-lived Trumpist riot at Washington’s Capitol two Januaries ago, for example, we might note the multi-year elite rearguard action against the Brexit referendum result, and the progressive #Resistance against Donald Trump.

If I’m right, this will continue to get worse wherever networked reading is replacing the deep print-era kind. As this happens, we should expect tensions to grow, too, between generations with wildly divergent worldviews. This gulf also has a material component and complex downstream implications. This week, 10 Downing Street welcomed its fourth Tory premier in six years, every one of whom was chosen by Tory Party members skewed toward that older section of the British population that still mostly believes in democratic politics. And first move by the latest incumbent in this slippery seat has been to pile yet more debt on younger taxpayers – the group that increasingly doesn’t. Something will, eventually, give.

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It’s my sincere wish that our democratic ships will find a way to right themselves. But my fear is that they won’t. More than Trumpists, censorious students, anti-racists or whichever other group you view as political enemies, to my eye it’s the end of the print era that is the greatest threat to “democracy”. And the time to have done anything about it was around 30 years ago, when the first commercial ISPs launched.

Too late now. I suspect it’ll be a while yet before we see definitively what liberal democracy morphs into under digital conditions. But whether its aesthetics owe more to the Red or Blue Tribe, or to something else altogether, I predict the following: post-democracy will retain democracy-like rituals, but actual politics will happen well upstream of voting. And where such regimes exercise power directly, this will be couched in impersonal procedure that impedes direct accountability even as it enables more frankly authoritarian policies. In truth, the contours of this order are already visible: think of international treaties on emissions, Covid lockdowns across Europe, or Justin Trudeau ending the truckers’ protest by freezing protesters’ bank accounts.

So, am I hankering for authoritarianism? Truth be told, I’d be delighted to have the old political settlement back. But wishing won’t make it so. Accusing me of trying to conjure this shift into existence is like accusing someone who points out an oncoming tsunami of making it up because they really love swimming.

And if I’m right, it won’t matter how devoted older conservatives are to the print era’s flagship political form. If we just aren’t making the kind of people who founded that system, the system will become something new. And then, to paraphrase one of the great Left-wing authoritarians of the last century, Leon Trotsky: you may not be interested in Caesarism, but Caesarism will be interested in you.

In 2021, it seemed that every major technology executive took a stance on the metaverse, a new concept for the internet. Mark Zuckerberg went so far as to change his company’s name from “Facebook” to “Meta” and massively reorient its research spending towards a 3D virtual reality future. And yet, the concept of the metaverse remained notoriously inchoate.

Matthew Ball’s new book, The Metaverse: And How it Will Revolutionize Everything, is an admirably clear and thorough introduction to what the metaverse is, what technologies will build it, and why we are heading there. What it isn’t, especially, is persuasive. If you came in sceptical that the metaverse is the future, you’ll find little to change your mind. Ball’s description of the kinds of thing you will do in the metaverse sounds very similar to what you would expect a virtual reality booster to say: entertainment! games! interactive education! socialising!

What this fails to convey is what the future will feel like. The engineers and entrepreneurs building the metaverse are understandably excited. They know we are on the cusp of something profound. But by putting the focus on the technology and on the obvious, but trivial, use-cases, they sell themselves short.

You can’t derive the meaning of the internet by explaining how “the TCP/IP protocol” works. Similarly, while hardware challenges will greatly shape the metaverse, understanding them better does not convey how it will reshape society.

For that, we can turn to science fiction. Early in Ball’s book, he provides a gloss on Neil Stephenson’s vision of the metaverse in his 1992 classic, Snow Crash: “A persistent virtual world that reached, interacted with, and affected nearly every part of human existence… a place for labor and leisure, for self-actualisation as well as physical exhaustion, for art alongside commerce.”

If you just encountered this definition in the wild, out of context, you would be forgiven for thinking that it was just talking about the internet. Because the metaverse is actually just the next stage of the internet we have today, made possible by some important breakthroughs. In simple terms, it’s an internet you can make a life in.

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To understand what this means, think about the evolution of the internet so far, helpfully summed up in the transition from the world wide web (Web 1) to the social internet (Web 2) to the metaverse (Web 3). To get on the world wide web, you used a modem to dial up on a computer with a hefty cathode-ray-tube monitor (mine was in our family’s humid basement). You conversed and played games with people whose “real” identities were a mystery, and whose virtual identities were often ephemeral, tied to specific message boards or multiplayer games. Everything was free because information on the internet wanted to be: pictures, music, video clips, pirated movies, all shared with peer-to-peer networks like Napster or BitTorrent.

The world wide web, in other words, was a series of exciting destinations, which you surfed, one site after another, by memory, hyperlink, or bookmark. The internet was a place — a place to goof off, explore new ideas, chat with friends, and otherwise escape the monotony of everyday life. And when you were done, you left. You “went offline”, which was the default condition because being “online” meant sitting on the family computer in the basement hogging the phone line.

At least, that was true for most of us. But from the beginning, there were those who found that they could be themselves online, that their online life was more real and true than the one they had offline. Intellectually curious teens in rural communities, would-be artists working dead-end jobs, gay kids in the Deep South — all of them preferred the “social virtual reality” of multiplayer roleplaying games, chatrooms, and internet communities to what awaited them in “the real world”. They weren’t outliers or nerds. They were pioneers.

Fast forward to Web 2. You logged on from a computer, as likely now to be a laptop with wifi as a desktop, and then from your smartphone. By this point, the internet went everywhere you did. And the internet mattered, because it wasn’t a destination you visited like a tourist. The internet became something you were on. Your life was somehow entangled across a small number of platforms that were increasingly personalised, and where you shared your real identity because you wanted to connect with real people.

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The important thing social media did was create a “killer app” for the internet, for everyone. Not everybody played video games or had niche hobbies or craved the convenience of online shopping. But everyone cared about their friends and family and experienced Fear Of Missing Out (FOMO) on their social scene.

So whereas in Web 1 users had their offline and online worlds, in the Web 2 era, the two dimensions increasingly merged. Instagram might be fake, but the plastic surgery women get to improve their pictures is very real.

But even as the internet today shapes and channels how we socialise, communicate, learn, work, and entertain ourselves, there’s still, for most of us, something unreal about the goods it can deliver. The internet is where we spend much of our time, but with a logic and a rhythm determined by which platform we are on. We code-switch depending on whether we’re using Twitter or LinkedIn or a video game or email. For anything that really matters, where power or property is concerned, the internet still seems like a dream.

And now, we’re on the cusp of Web 3. The metaverse is just our name for the final evolution of the internet, where the borders between “the real world” and the digital dissolve. The real world will still be out there, but now it will have to compete with other appealing realities. And it’s not clear that those lacking “reality privilege” — who wake up not to a spacious, light-filled apartment but to trailer homes or cramped high-rises — will prefer “meatspace” anymore. In fact, if you know where to look, it’s already clear that they don’t.

As I’ve been attempting to chronicle in an essay series at The New Atlantis entitled “Reality: A Post-Mortem”, the many worlds of the metaverse are not first and foremost alluring VR environments, but bespoke alternate realities made possible by a sheer abundance of information, stories, and people willing to play along. An internet is coming where every community will have the tools to build compelling narrative worlds of their own, big enough to live inside.

The ability to dwell in a virtual world isn’t the product of sophisticated computer renderings but of the human mind. Whether you’re absorbed with massive multiplayer games like Minecraft or Fortnite or prefer discourse-themed video games like Twitter or The New York Times, there will be a compelling reality for you. Want to live in a world where Donald Trump is secretly plotting with the military to arrest a ring of Democrat pedophile lizard people? You can go there today. Believe wokeism is destroying common sense and liberal institutions? Welcome to the Intellectual Dark Web! Fantasising about what how freakin’ awesome it would have been if Ruth Bader Ginsburg had had superpowers? She-Hulk is streaming now on Disney+.

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But while the proliferation of alternate realities is plain to see, in what sense is this a metaverse, characterised by the clashing and commingling of these realities? On the one hand, both online and off, our public life is increasingly defined by where and when alternative realities meet. On January 6, you had a mix of MAGA protestors, Alt-Right trolls, and die-hard QAnon believers live-streaming on Twitch as they stormed the Capitol. These streams were then turned into raw data for liberal online volunteer groups with names like “Deep State Dogs” to trawl through and identify insurrectionists to the FBI.

But the existing methods will pale in comparison to what emerges when payment rails, world-building, crypto-property, and other metaversal infrastructure are up-and-running, as Ball shows. For whatever reality appeals to you most, you will have the tools to invest your time and money, build a community and institutions, produce or purchase valuable property, and otherwise live a life that seems meaningful to you. Whether or not this life is in 3D virtual reality, the meaning and the value of it will be irreducibly entangled with the metaverse.

And that’s why Ball’s book is so important. Beneath the hype and the gizmos lies a revolution in human consciousness. “Where your treasure is, there will your heart be also” — in the metaverse.

In the years since, the novelist once dismissed as a gutter pulp sci-fi weirdo has steadily climbed the ladder of posthumous literary reputation. The case for Dick’s genius has never rested on his dystopian vision of technology, which he shared in common with masters like HG Wells and Stanislaw Lem, and with hundreds of sci-fi writers since. Good science fiction — as opposed to fantasy novels set on other planets — is defined by a quasi-philosophical examination of interactions between men and machines and other products of modern science. It is part novel and part thought-experiment, centered on our idea of the human.

What made Dick a literary genius, then, was not any special talent for predicting hand-held personal devices or atom bombs the size of a shoe which might have led him to a job in Apple’s marketing department. His gift was for what might be called predictive psychology — how the altered worlds he imagined, whether futuristic or merely divergent from existing historical continuums, would feel to the people who inhabited them. Dick’s answer was, very often: “Not good.”

Dick’s dystopian-psychological approach marks him less as a conventional science fiction writer than as a member of the California anti-utopian school of the Sixties, whose best-known members include Robert Stone, Thomas Pynchon, Ken Kesey, Joan Didion and Hunter Thompson. Seen from this angle, Dick was perhaps the most powerfully and sweepingly paranoid of a group of writers whose stock-in-trade was conspiracy and paranoia, the hallmarks of a society marked — at that moment, and this one — by violent street crime, drug-induced psychosis, and visionary promises gone terribly wrong. Of his anti-utopian peers, Dick’s sci-fi genre background made him the only one who had any particular feel for the proposition that technology was inseparable from, and would therefore inevitably alter, our idea of the human.

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Technology was and is perhaps the most Californian aspect of the American mythos. The idea that the universal constants of human nature were at war with the mutilating demands of technology-driven systems was a very Sixties Californian conceit, to which Dick’s fellow anti-utopians each adhered in their own way: In Kesey’s showdown between man and the castrating nanny-state; in Didion’s emphasis on the vanishing virtue of self-reliance; in Pynchon’s degenerate Ivy League Puritanism; in Thompson’s drug-addled primitivism; and in Stone’s Catholic idea of devotion to a God that might somehow salve the wounds of the survivors once the great American adventure goes bust.

What Dick saw, and what his fellow anti-utopians did not, was that human psychology and technology are not separate actors, and that whatever emerged from the other side of the future would be different to the human thing that entered it.

* * *

Seeing and describing how large numbers of people will perceive reality before anyone else does requires imagining states of consciousness that, in the moment, seem deeply strange. It is no accident that the greatest of works of speculative psychology were written by revolutionaries whose outlook was often bleak to the point of despair. The negative tone of these works often led future generations to describe their authors as conservatives, though artistically and psychologically speaking, they are radicals. Or rather, in their rejection of the dominant order, they are radicals and reactionaries at the same time.

The anti-utopian tradition emerged in earnest in 19th-century Russia. The Russian pioneers of the genre were superior to their rivals in England and elsewhere because the latter’s visions were constrained by attachments to a settled society, which one can argue never really existed in Russia — and because the ideas of revolution and violent reaction have always been so closely allied in the Russian psyche. Fyodor’s Dostoyevsky’s Notes From Underground struck many of its initial readers as a kind of artless mental vomit, before revealing itself as a Rosetta Stone for the century of Adolf Hitler and Lee Harvey Oswald. Yevgeny Zamyatin’s We is probably the greatest of at least a dozen weirdly prophetic novels written in the years immediately after the Bolshevik Revolution. In We, Zamyatin predicted what a surveillance society run by engineers would feel like to its inhabitants with a nauseating accuracy that did not become fully apparent until the rise of the modern tech surveillance complex.

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The Dick novel that directly predicted our information-addicted, socially-networked 21st-century society, A Scanner Darkly, was both a prophecy of future psychological states and a half-veiled memoir of Dick’s own experiences in the California drug culture. Published in 1977, the book was a detective noir set in a druggy future in which large portions of the population appear to spend their lives scheming and snitching on each other to feed their addictions to a drug called Substance D — the “D” standing for Death, of course.

A Scanner Darkly, a reference to the line in Corinthians in which men at first see God “as in a glass, darkly”, is Dick’s rawest book and the one that reads least like science fiction. The book’s protagonist is simultaneously a narcotics agent known to his peers as Fred and a Substance D addict named Bob Arctor. Fred/Arctor lives in a house — his former marital abode — with two fellow addicts, and is in love with another addict named Donna, who comes to visit him there. Donna helps Arctor obtain Substance D, which he consumes, while Fred uses Donna to attempt to climb higher on the drug distribution ladder. At the end of the novel, Donna turns out to be a drug agent, who is spying on Bob Arctor.

What’s so striking about the book is not Dick’s heartfelt, if futuristically bent, portrayal of the evils of Sixties drug culture. For that, read Stone, who was a master of connecting the physical, mental and moral corruption of drug dealing and dependency, and the fantasies those pursuits inevitably engender to the deeper corruption of man’s nature.

What Dick uniquely captured was something else: The degenerative effects of the split-screen existence of a human brain ceaselessly spying on and doubting and implicating itself while at the same time being spied on by others, all of whom are embedded within machine systems that record everything for reasons that humans cannot understand. Over the course of this machine-and-chemical fed process of human self-contradiction and self-destruction, of which Fred/Arctor is only intermittently aware, we see his thoughts and perceptions being short-circuited and reduced to gibberish.

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Drug-induced paranoia aside, the psychology of Dick’s addicts and narcs is as good a description as exists of the spreading incoherence of today’s information ecosystem, which none of us are able to fully see or understand. As a thought experiment, it doesn’t matter that Dick chose a drug rather than the stories we tell about ourselves and our world. It’s not the technology; it’s the psychology. What Dick saw was that the process of splitting ourselves in two — into subject and narc — was a brutal assault on the idea of being human and would make thoughts and communication impossible.

“What does a scanner see?” Arctor wonders, after examining the surveillance apparatus that has been planted, with his knowledge, in his own home. “I mean, really see? Into the head? Down into the heart? Does a passive infra-red holographic scanner like they used to use, or a cube-type holo-scanner like they use these days, the latest thing, see into me – into us – clearly or darkly? I hope it does, see clearly,” Arctor continues, “because I can’t any longer these days see into myself. I see only murk. Murk outside; murk inside. I hope, for everyone’s sake, the scanners do better.” They don’t.

* * *

Jeremy Bentham’s panopticon, which the English philosopher sketched out in a series of letters between 1786 and 1788 while visiting  the Mogilev district of the Russian Empire, was an architectural system of control in which all inmates of an institution could be made visible to a single guard. Bentham’s utopian-utilitarian idea was widely applied in Victorian England to a range of public and private spaces including prisons, asylums, hospitals, factories and even schools. The unique horror of the Benthamite set-up was not the power imbalance inherent in places like prisons and factories, whose existence is obvious to guards and prisoners alike. It was the attempt to eliminate privacy, which is a necessary precondition for being human.

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Over the last decade, Bentham’s architecture of unfreedom has been replaced by the architecture of machines. This has created a new social reality where everyone is at once inmate and guard; a panopticon where nothing is private and no one is free. The invisible operations of the machines and programmes we use every day to buy books or food or communicate, which are linked to each other and to the surveillance operations of large government agencies in a single net, induces in most sentient beings a kind of free-floating paranoia of the type that destroys the inhabitants of A Scanner Darkly. On the one hand, everyone knows that everyone is being watched. On the other, it is necessary to deny that knowledge in order to appear to be functioning normally.

One of the most unpleasant characteristics of the weird split-screen mentality of our times is how people must routinely speak against themselves — deny what they see, hear, feel and believe  — in order to maintain the appearance of sanity. It is now routine, for example, to hear Americans on the Left and the Right deride their political opponents for believing in far-reaching conspiracy theories — while in the next breath revealing their own.

No doubt both sides are at least half right. During lockdowns, it became normal for public officials in Western countries to issue draconian edicts in the name of “science” for the supposed good of large numbers of people, only to violate those edicts themselves. The meaning of “science”, it turned out, had nothing to do with the “common good”, or with demonstrating a theory through evidence; it was “one rule for me and another for thee”.

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The flagrant doublespeak that is nurtured in the surveillance societies of the West, which have sprung up around us unnoticed, is characteristic of totalitarian societies and mental asylums. The difference is that both totalitarian societies and asylums allow for nonthreatening zones of privacy in order to make life easier for the guards. What we live in today is something else, a set of mirrors into which we are encouraged to look so that our reflections can be distorted and then returned to us. As Bob Arctor puts it, reflecting on the words of Corinthians: “it is not through glass but reflected back by a glass. And that reflection that returns to you: it is you, it is your face, but it isn’t.”

Powerful people in Western societies have lately become convinced of their ability to accomplish great feats of moral and social engineering by controlling these mirrors, altering our reflections and selling them back to us, while undermining our ability to think coherently. The mirrors are not meant to help anyone think; they are systems of control. They are mechanisms of profit, which foster dependence. They are used to mete out punishment, and spy on us.

What’s alarming is that the people who delight in their mastery of these devices seem not to have thought very hard about the damage they are doing to the people who shoot up, a category that includes those who shoot up schools and malls. None of them seem to calculate what creating a miasma of nonsensical conspiracy theories will do to the psyches of their own children, who will inherit “the murk”. They appear to believe that people with minds that have been permanently broken by their gibberish machines will make the perfect workers on their farm. Let’s see how that turns out for them.

“The most affecting gore thriller of all and, in a broader view, among the most effective horror films ever made… The girl watches as her unconscious boyfriend is cut into fillets by a chainsaw. As the afternoon wears into night, more of the youngsters are stalked and murdered … What is remarkable … is that its outrageous horrors seem entirely real.”

The remarkable thing about Isis execution videos, of course, is that the outrageous horrors staged in them are entirely real. You can point to the strategic logic behind the videos, if you want. You can say that they serve an instrumental purpose, that terrifying violence works, that it pushes people away, while drawing others in. But you also have to acknowledge the total insanity of the videos. They are insane. The violence is terrible, graphic, excessive and real. Despite (or because of?) this, large numbers of people have watched them. What prompted them to do so and what impact, if any, did the videos have on them?

In my efforts to find out I spent three months in 2017 closely tracking four popular internet shock-sites. During this period, I watched scores of appalling videos and read thousands of comments that forum-members had made in response to them, focusing on jihadi execution videos. I collected thousands of member-posts that spoke to or touched on the issue of motive, and I interviewed several prolific gore enthusiasts who had shared and commented on jihadi execution videos. I also interviewed the sites’ founders to ask them about the voluminous amounts of jihadi content on their sites and what they thought about this.

Gore fans are naturally defensive about their specialist interest, as well they might be. It is one thing to watch an actor scream and squirm in a scene of simulated torture, but quite another to watch a real person scream and squirm at the hands of a real torturer. We all recognise this elemental distinction, and we all recognise the line we cross when we watch real, as opposed to fictional, victimisation on camera. Gore fans live over on the other side of that line.

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For gore fans, the Holy Grail is snuff: that is, real-life murderous violence on camera, the more monstrous the better. As one war-porn obsessive explained to the journalist Olga Craig, referring to the beheading video of Kenneth Bigley: “This is no horror movie. If it is titillation I feel, then it is because this is happening to a real person. The fear is real, the brutality is real, the blood is real, it is all real.” This same gore fan confided that he had watched the Bigley execution video at least half a dozen times. “I suppose you could say it is one of my favourites,” he clarified. Whereas most people would go out of their way to avoid watching this kind of thing and would question whether they had any right to watch it were they to come across it, gore fans go out of their way to locate it at its very worst.

In an interview with The Daily Telegraph, the parents of Daniel Pearl, who was beheaded on camera in 2002, spoke of their anguish in knowing that the video of their son’s murder was on the internet and would likely be on there forever. “We could never, ever watch our beloved son’s murder,” Judea Pearl, the father of Daniel, said. “What sort of depraved person would want to?” This nicely distils the conventional or “normie” view, which is that only a freak, deviant, odd-ball, voyeur or pervert would want to watch a real person being butchered to death. Gore fans vigorously dispute this portrayal by insisting on the normalcy of their preoccupations and the hypocrisy of their condemners. From the perspective of gore watchers, it is perfectly comprehensible for someone to want to watch the total insanity of an Isis video.

***

“I’m pretty sure I’ve literally seen every single Isis video out there, man,” Donnie told me when I first spoke to him. I met Donnie on “Watch People Die”, the notorious forum on Reddit that was banned in March 2019 for violating the site’s rules on glorifying violence. The ban was a result of several posters uploading the video of the Christchurch massacre, where Brenton Tarrant murdered 51 Muslims at two mosques in New Zealand on 15 March, 2019; Tarrant, using a GoPro Camera, live-streamed part of his rampage on Facebook.

Donnie is a 25-year-old political science graduate from the south-east of England. He was intense, smart and swore profusely. “It’s gotten to the point where I’d go on Watch People Die and if it says Isis I’ve probably seen it already and if it’s a beheading, I’m like, it’s boring because like I’ve seen so many beheadings.” Donnie, who is a non-Muslim and has never been religious, said that he had watched so many Isis videos that “you get to the stage where you can basically start reciting a couple of their nasheeds, like ‘Salil al- Sawarim’, that’s a big one”. Donnie said that he visited Watch People Die “at least every other day”.

Donnie recalled that the first gore video he watched was the beheading of Kenneth Bigley. This, he said, “was way back, in the early war in Iraq”. (The video was released in October 2004). Donnie must have been around 13 then. He heard about it on the evening news, and then straight after started to search for it on the internet. “It was like really shit and recorded on like a wobbly camera phone, you know, it was really bad quality but I just remember it being super shocking, you know, I was literally like, ‘oh my god, like what the fuck?’”

I asked Donnie what he found appealing about Isis videos. He paused and then said:

“One, they’re really high quality, they’re high production value. If you’re watching videos like that anyway, you get used to watching shit videos on like grainy screens and everything like that. Second, they’re interesting, because this is actually happening, it’s current and, it’s kind of like a story that follows on, if that makes sense? Third, it’s a reality-check in a way, like I’m lucky enough to live in the UK and, you know, I’m a white male and stuff, I don’t have to deal with these fucking issues.”

“They’re doing it,” Donnie continued, referring to the act of killing, “in really intricate ways as well, like have you seen the cage burning video, the drowning video? I nodded. Donnie went on: “Take that video where they chain everyone up and then just slash their necks, they’re in a sort of slaughterhouse, abattoir type thing.” I told Donnie that I knew of the video, but had refused to watch it. The Atlantic’s Graeme Wood described it as “the worst thing I have ever seen”.

“Oh man,” Donnie said, “it was like one of the best fucking videos I’ve ever seen.” I asked what he meant. “I’m comparing it to other videos of that nature, but it was one of the best,” Donnie clarified. “Purely because there was a lot of content, if that makes sense? Like, for example, you get one video and they’ve beheaded a guy and you’re, like, okay that’s a beheading, whereas not only was that like really, really fucked up, it was something that I really get empathy from. Kind of like, I can really put myself into someone’s shoes.”

This response baffled me. I didn’t understand what he meant about empathy and it wasn’t clear whose shoes he was imagining himself standing in — the Isis slashers or those of their victims. I told Donnie that I wasn’t sure what he meant. “Like it feels incredibly real,” he explained. “Well, when I was younger I used to have a lot of morbid dreams of dying or bleeding out and stuff like that and it creates like an adrenal response, if that makes sense? The shock value doesn’t come from the fact that his throat’s been slit, it’s from imagining if I was there, if that was happening to me.” In Donnie’s telling, as I understood it, watching Isis gore was a way of trying to imagine his own death. Later on in our conversation, he said that one of the main reasons he watched Isis videos, and gore in general, was to do with what he called “the philosophy of death”. “That’s a huge thing,” he said. “You know, like what does it feel like to die, what does it look like to die?”

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I was curious to know what Donnie thought of Isis. He’d absorbed huge quantities of the group’s propaganda. Had that altered his view of the group, I asked him? He was emphatic: “Unless you’re a sympathiser there’s only one other view you can have of Isis, which is they’re a bunch of cunts tarnishing the name of their religion.” Yet the sheer extravagant cuntiness of Isis didn’t seem to put him off from wanting to watch the group’s atrocity propaganda. I mentioned this apparent paradox, which prompted him to reflect on why he thought it was useful to watch real online gore: “Desensitisation is power, somewhat. If anything ever happens in real life, I’m not just gonna sit there… Because I’m not shocked, I’m not frozen, I’m not fearful.” This sounded like an ex post facto rationalisation to me, although I couldn’t be sure. I followed up on Donnie’s reference to desensitisation. “I can watch a [gore] video now and not be fazed at all, or even bored,” he said.

Throughout our several interviews it became clear that watching Isis atrocity videos for Donnie was as much about prurient curiosity and thrill-seeking as empathetic transportation into the shoes of a doomed person. Donnie said that Isis videos improved markedly after the demise of Jihadi John in late 2015. (He was killed in a US drone strike on November 12, 2015.) This, he said, was when “they started getting intricate”. One mass-beheading video, which involved explosives instead of knives, struck him as being “really inventive”.

This sounded tone-deaf, if not indeed outright callous. Real individuals — with families, commitments, ambitions and whole lives ahead of them — were horribly murdered, and here Donnie is discoursing on the video’s envelope-pushing innovativeness. At one point, Donnie said, in one of his many digressions, that Isis videos were so well filmed that “it’s easy to distance yourself from it”. I wondered if the demonic creativity that Donnie refers to here served to create a yet further layer of distance for him from the human horror in the foreground of the video. Perhaps, it made it seem less real and more movie-like. Or perhaps the staged atrocity in the video was so preposterously monstrous that Donnie just couldn’t absorb it on a human level. It’s also possible that there’s just a streak of callousness in Donnie and that, like most people, he’s selective in his empathy.

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Donnie didn’t use the term “thrill-seeking”, but instead spoke of “the cringe”, which he described as a sort of somatic recoil — in Susan Sontag phrasing, “the pleasure of flinching”. “It’s your body reacting. It’s not just your brain saying, ‘oh, this is fucked up’. Your body is literally reacting to what is happening and you don’t get that in movies, you don’t get that on television… I don’t know, it’s just an adrenal response basically and it’s so fucking intense and there’s loads of things that go through your head.” I think what Donnie is sharply conveying here is what Mathias Clasen calls the “primary and irreducible appeal of horror”, which is “the pleasure of experiencing strong and rich emotions in a safe context”.

When Donnie watches gore videos, it’s the cringe — the visceral throb, jolt, shiver, the “ick” — he’s looking for. But why would he go looking for such a fundamentally aversive feeling? “Death is a morbid thing in itself and having that kind of thing in your face is like the closest you can get to experiencing that without actually dying,” Donnie explained. He returned to the Bigley video, the first filmed execution he ever saw. “I couldn’t stop thinking about it for days. Like, oh my god, imagine being that guy.” The cringe, it seems, was the price Donnie paid for indulging his curiosity about violent death; but it was also something he found, after a while, to be emotionally exhilarating all by itself. For Donnie, gore seemed to engage his gut as much as his mind.

Gore enthusiasts and the philosophical defenders of morbid curiosity insist that death is ultimately life-affirming, and that we can only truly appreciate our existence when we recognise its inescapable fragility and temporality. Well, watching Isis videos didn’t make me appreciate life more — it did, however, give me a sharper appreciation of how cheap and meaningless lives are to murderous zealots. Above all, it intensified my sense of how evil and shameless human beings can be. I would not classify this as trauma, in the clinical sense, but instead see it as a kind of moral unease. And there is no treatment for moral unease, because this is the stuff of life in all its richness and dark complexity.

Simon Cottee’s new book, Watching Murder: ISIS, Death Videos and Radicalization, is published by Routledge,

If I’m right in thinking that none of these real-life horror stories has yet been adapted for the screen, then I’m surprised, because the scam, the fraud, the grift, the hoax, the long con, has become a cultural obsession. In the space of three months, Netflix alone has given us The Tinder Swindler, Inventing Anna, The Dropout, Bad Vegan, and Trust No One. False identities and weaponised charm are at the heart of the BBC dramas The Serpent and Chloe. There are hit podcasts about fiendish deception, too: Tortoise’s Sweet Bobby and the BBC’s The Missing Cryptoqueen. These stories have some of the attraction of the paranoid thriller, except that most of them are true and the victims aren’t nearly paranoid enough.

Popular culture has always magnified and marketed our fears — the Bomb, terrorism, technology out of control — and it’s not hard to see why we are currently preoccupied by deception. The 2008 crisis revealed that the global financial system was a Ponzi scheme built on the repackaging of mortgage debt, and almost nobody went to jail for it. Since then, a number of ballyhooed tech start-ups and cryptocurrencies have turned out to be built on sand. Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes — the subject of The Dropout, a book, a documentary, a podcast series and the forthcoming Adam McKay movie Bad Blood — is only the most extreme example of a slick entrepreneur who exploited hype and greed to pull in vast sums of money for digital snake oil.

In the world of politics, we have seen an American president whose entire career was a series of escalating lies and a Russian president whose name has become synonymous with disinformation, while the sphere of online political commentary buzzes with unreliable narrators. We have also become more comfortable with amateur psychology. I don’t remember this much talk about sociopaths, narcissists and toxic fantasists a decade ago. I don’t remember gaslighting.

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Pulling all these strands together is the internet, whose initially exciting promise of the freedom to build a new identity online has, perhaps inevitably, led us into a Kafkaesque maze of scammers, fantasists and catfishers. We haven’t all been fooled into transferring our life savings into a fake account but we all know that it could happen because we’re constantly bombarded with fraud warnings and phishing emails. According to Which?, UK account-holders lost around £2.3bn to scams in the financial year 2020-21. So-called “romance frauds”, the cruellest of the lot, stole £100m in 2021. The prospect of being scammed isn’t an exotic possibility, like being eaten by a shark; it’s one careless click away.

Traditionally, there are three ways to tell the story of a con. In a movie like The Sting or Hustlers, the viewer is embedded with the scammers, who are usually charming rogues relieving gangsters and corporations of their ill-gotten gains. As a genre, it overlaps with the heist movie: you can applaud their chutzpah and artistry guilt-free. The new movie Operation Mincemeat, like Ben Affleck’s Argo, depicts an ornate ruse targeted at a tyrannical regime in order to save lives. Who could object to a story about scamming Hitler?

Conversely, a movie such as The Spanish Prisoner plants us in the clammy hands of the person being scammed. There is always that stomach-emptying, blood-freezing trapdoor moment when the victim finds out that their charismatic new friend’s “office” is empty and their “company” no more than a letterhead. In the third category, The Talented Mr Ripley supplies the paradoxical double pleasure of identifying with both scammer and scammed. You find yourself simultaneously rooting for both Ripley and his pursuers: catch the bastard, but not quite yet.

The fresh ingredient in the current wave of griftervision is the internet, presented here as a machine for lying. Only The Serpent is set in a different era — Charles Sobhraj murdered at least 20 tourists in southeast Asia in the Seventies — and involves crimes that would have been impossible to cover up in the age of social media updates and CCTV. Then again, you can imagine how a modern-day Sobhraj would adapt to the online age, sculpting new identities on digital platforms rather than razoring passports. That’s how Erin Doherty’s imposter Becky (aka Sasha) infiltrates Bristol’s bourgeois elite in Chloe. The show ultimately cops out by having her uncover crimes far worse than pretending to be a posh gallerist with demented dress sense — the people she is deceiving are the real rotters — but the details of her process are compelling. All the information she needs to inveigle her way into their lives (and by extension yours or mine) is freely available online.

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Like Tom Ripley, or Aubrey Plaza’s Instagram-addicted character in the black comedy Ingrid Goes West, Becky is a frustrated outsider who uses her wits to penetrate a bubble of smug privilege. Her imposture is a form of class warfare. Scam stories are misleadingly easy to savour when they target the vacuous, obnoxious rich rather than vulnerable pensioners in small towns. “Stories about blatant con-artists,” writes Jia Tolentino in her essay The Story of a Generation in Seven Scams, “allow us to have the scam both ways: we get the pleasure of seeing the scammer exposed and humiliated, but also the retrospective, vicarious thrill of watching the scammer take people for a ride.”

Tolentino awards the title of quintessential millennial scam to the Fyre festival: “the most gleefully covered disaster of 2017”. Promoter Billy McFarland, who attempted to organise a luxury festival in four months despite never having so much as attended a festival, is an appalling dolt but he was fleecing the kind of people who would consider blowing $400,000 on a VIP beach house at the behest of an Instagram influencer, so that made it funny. The Bahamian workers who got stiffed received far less attention in a story that became the Coachella of schadenfreude, the Instagram Altamont.

The story of Anna Delvey, played by Julia Garner in Inventing Anna, has a similar soak-the-rich quality. Delvey was an art-school dropout who blagged her way into the high life by posing as a German heiress. In reality, though, the victims of scams often have neither money nor power. The Missing Cryptoqueen cuts between the glamorous antics of Dr Ruja Ignatova, architect of a pyramid scheme based on the bogus cryptocurrency OneCoin, and the ordinary lives she has ruined. The series drives home the human cost of her multi-billion-dollar grift by ending on some of her victims in Uganda. The best scam narratives are as concerned with the victims as they are enthralled by the swindlers.

Money is at least a comprehensible motive for ripping a hole in somebody’s life. Sweet Bobby unravels how a successful young woman ensnared her cousin in a catfishing scam which lasted eight years and involved more than 60 fictional characters, but never why. The culprit, Simran Bhogal, seems to regard it as a consensual game, a fantasy to pass the time. She comes across as tetchy and aggrieved by the suggestion that she’s the bad guy. The successful scammer combines delusional self-belief with nihilistic contempt for the suckers, yet when they are exposed it often feels as if there is really nothing there. You rip off the mask and the face is blank.

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Why the trolls are winning

By Andrew Doyle

If the only information available about modern dating were from TV, movies and podcasts, nobody would dare do it. Catfish: The TV Show, inspired by the 2010 movie about online deception, is now in its eighth season. Simon Leviev, the villain in The Tindler Swindler, was an Israeli conman who used the money he’d tricked out of one woman to convince the next woman that he was a wealthy playboy, and so on to the tune of $10m. Like “Bobby” in Sweet Bobby and Anthony Strangis in Bad Vegan, Leviev crafted an elaborate narrative, buttressed with phoney digital evidence and dramatic twists involving pernicious foe. Strangis built an even more ambitious alternative reality around his mark, the vegan restaurateur Sarma Melngailis. “I feel close to former cult members because we understand one another,” Melngailis said recently. Theranos, OneCoin and LuLaRoe, the fashion line-cum-pyramid scheme covered in the documentary LuLaRich, have also been compared to cults. The object of the scammer is to inspire belief and silence doubts.

Such stories won’t be the last. In the most generous reading, they are useful cautionary tales, like very expensive fraud warnings, which equip us to deal with the next German heiress or Israeli diamond dealer who comes along and asks us for a bridging loan. “I want this stuff to be useful, not merely fodder for people’s creepy entertainment,” Melngailis said.

It’s a nice thought but in practice these stories often inspire victim-blaming rather than empathy. By anatomising the plot after the fact, they invite viewers both to marvel at the reality-bending audacity of these charismatic devils and fully believe that they would not have fallen for it. Why someone would maintain an eight-year relationship with a person they’d never met can seem as inexplicable as why someone would pay £160,000 to a company that they had no history with, or invest in a cryptocurrency that doesn’t work, but it happens. Being vulnerable and credulous is not a rare condition. So I worry that this kind of entertainment breeds suspicion and paranoia, but I worry more that it is justified.

Kang and Yglesias both consider the possibility that “misinformation” and “disinformation” are misleading frameworks for making sense of the world today. Indeed, Yglesias argues that the “misinformation panic could, over time, make discerning the actual truth harder”. This is because “misinformation” talk seems to lead inexorably to the suppression and censoring of dissent.

But Yglesias’s title — “The ‘misinformation problem’ seems like misinformation” — hints at a more paradoxical possibility: what if these concepts are the result of a deliberate and coordinated attempt to mislead the public?

In an earlier critique of the “misinformation” and “disinformation” framework, cited by Kang, tech journalist Joe Bernstein argued that the broad acceptance of these ideas reflects the rising influence of what he calls “Big Disinfo”: “a new field of knowledge production that emerged during the Trump years at the juncture of media, academia and policy research.” Its ostensibly neutral agenda offers ideological cover for centrist and liberal politicians by aligning them with values like objectivity, science, and truth, while defaming their opponents as conspiracy theorists.

Bernstein argues that Big Disinfo covertly serves the interests of the major tech platforms themselves, whose profit model relies on digital ads. This might seem counterintuitive, since the misinformation panic helped generate the “techlash” that tarnished Silicon Valley’s previously benign reputation among liberals and centrists. But the notion that online content is highly effective at changing people’s views is crucial to the sales pitch companies such as Meta (formerly Facebook) make to advertisers and investors. Hence, for Bernstein, the tech industry’s embrace of Big Disinfo’s claims is “a superficial strategy to avoid deeper questions” — and also valorises tech platforms as guardians of the information ecosystem.

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Alongside journalists like Bernstein, Yglesias, and Kang, some academics are beginning to question the prevalent account of misinformation. Social Engineering, a new book by communications scholars Robert Gehl and Sean Lawson, helpfully reorients the discussion about these issues by offering deeper historical context and a new conceptual framework.

Terms like “misinformation”, “disinformation”, and “fake news”, Gehl and Lawson argue, fail “to grasp the complexity of manipulative communication” because they “reduce everything to a stark true/false binary” and thus disregard “the blurry lines between fact and falsehood”. Moreover, these terms imply a radical discontinuity between pre and post-internet worlds: they cast the former as a halcyon realm of clear, accurate, truthful communications, overseen by benevolent eminences like Walter Cronkite, while depicting the latter as a cesspit of lies and delusions. Bernstein parodies this view: “In the beginning, there were ABC, NBC, and CBS, and they were good”. This short-sighted perspective disregards the widespread concerns about propaganda that prevailed when network TV was at the height of its influence, which recent anxieties often echo.

The alternative terminology Gehl and Lawson propose is “social engineering”, a term that, as they show, has a two-stage history. The first widespread use of this phrase began in the early 20th century. Progressive reformers began to envision the possibility of employing mass communications technologies to reshape thought and behaviour on a vast scale. Their vision informed the coevolution of state propaganda and private-sector public relations, advertising, and marketing. Initially an optimistic project of benevolent technocratic rule, mass social engineering fell into intellectual disrepute by the late 20th century, although industries such as advertising and PR never abandoned its basic premises.

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In the Seventies and Eighties — the same era when the older, top-down project of social engineering was being discredited as elitist and paternalistic — a new, bottom-up understanding of the same concept took hold among a loose cadre of hackers and “phone phreaks”. As Gehl and Lawson document, these communications outlaws developed an array of personalised techniques, such as impersonating clients and obtaining data under false pretences, to gain illicit access to technological systems belonging to phone companies, banks, government agencies, and other entities.

Applying the term “social engineering” to these sorts of tricks may seem grandiose, but Gehl and Lawson argue that they are continuous with the older technocratic enterprise: both types of social engineers “hide their true purposes, use sociotechnical knowledge to control others, and seek to manipulate others into doing things”.

The “hacker social engineers” of the past few decades have an easier time proving the efficacy of their techniques than mass social engineers, not least because their aims are typically more modest and practical. Consider an infamous incident from the 2016 election, part of the larger sequence of events that prompted the misinformation panic. The phishing scheme targeting Hillary Clinton’s campaign chairman, John Podesta — a classic act of hacker social engineering — was a success in that it achieved the limited practical goal of gaining access to his email account. Conversely, the attempts by the Trump campaign and its allies at mass social engineering (including via the publication of Podesta’s hacked emails) had no clear effect on the outcome of the 2016 election. There were too many other causal factors at work.

It’s not surprising, given the demonstrable successes of hacker social engineers at manipulating thought and behaviour, that larger entities have attempted to scale up their personalised techniques. This is how Gehl and Lawson recontextualise two of the most notorious alleged cases of “misinformation” from the 2016 period: the political consulting firm Cambridge Analytica and Russia’s Internet Research Agency. The first claimed, dubiously, to be able to perform “psychographic microtargeting” of voters based on data obtained under false pretences; the second deployed hacker techniques (like phishing) as well as paid trolls and fake accounts. Both “demonstrated the same ambitions of the older mass social engineers, but… also used the more targeted interpersonal techniques developed by hackers”.

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Gehl and Lawson coin a term for these contemporary efforts that fuse mass social engineering with more personalised hacker methods: “masspersonal social engineering”. Although the aim of their book is to document the emergence of masspersonal social engineering, they concede that it’s unclear whether it has influenced thought and behaviour enough to, for instance, alter the results of elections. However, they caution that “future masspersonal social engineering may better implement the successful model of interpersonal hacker social engineering on a large scale”.

But they follow this warning with a more intriguing observation: many “sociotechnical developments that did not have particularly great immediate effects… are now recognised as having been vitally important despite (or perhaps because of) their failures.” One way to interpret this is that while the direct impacts of Russian hackers, Cambridge Analytica, and “fake news” have been modest, they have had a major indirect effect. They furnished the pretext for the misinformation panic, which offered embattled corporate media outlets, centrist politicians, and tech platforms a way of restoring their reputations and asserting more direct control over the information sphere.

As Gehl and Lawson note, “those in power are the ones in a position to wield the… capacities of social engineers”. This is why, historically, “publicity, propaganda, public relations, and consent engineering all have deep ties to the national security state”. In the face of inchoate populist tumult, declaring war against “misinformation” has enabled establishment institutions to shift legitimate anxieties about the manipulative use of media technologies towards upstart entities that, however unscrupulous, cannot claim anything like the influence of state-aligned media organisations or, for that matter, the tech platforms themselves.

Behind all talk of “misinformation” and “disinformation” is the tacit assumption that these terms designate exceptions to an otherwise pristine media landscape. Gehl and Lawson’s alternative framework points to the messier reality: a contest between “social engineers” (many of them only aspirational) operating at a variety of different scales and targeting populations, individuals, and everything in between. The misinformation panic, which has obscured this reality over the past half decade, is itself one of the most effective social engineering campaigns of our time.

Meta (formerly Facebook) and Microsoft (having recently purchased online gaming giant Activision) are enthusiastically talking up the “metaverse” — a world of virtual reality-enhanced social interactions that will be more real than reality. It will capture the nuances of offline interaction in massively fulfilling virtual experiences and then monetise them. With JPMorgan and Goldman Sachs declaring it a trillion-dollar market, the metaverse, if it succeeds, will be a constant presence in our lives.

If this is, as some say, a chilling vision of the future, it’s not for the Huxleyesque reasons usually given. If the worry is that people will be drawn away from real life into an online world provided by high-tech devices, that horse has already bolted. Meta’s talk of an “immersive” metaverse belies the fact that we are already well and deeply immersed in online life.

“Self-expression” and “meaning” are already so heavily intertwined with online activity that adding a headset isn’t going to make a  difference, even if the prospect of thousands of loud, angry Twitter users being more immersed is terrifying.

While the metaverse will further the internet’s shift away from text and photos toward VR and video, it is not a revolution, or at least not the one Meta portrays. In the metaverse, people will do things together, share their experiences, and fight with each other, just as they currently do.

The new parts of the metaverse are commercial. Compared with online life today, there will be more things to buy and more money to be made. Personalised avatars, virtual pets, online concerts and shows, digital real estate, and fashion made of pixels instead of fabric: Meta, Microsoft, Verizon, and other giants all hope to serve as brokers for all these, in much the same way Amazon is the middleman and guarantor for its Marketplace transactions. If America were not still so squeamish about sex, one could add teledildonics to the list.

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Ukraine is winning the online war

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For those inclined to doubt that people will pay for a pair of metaverse trainers, recall that virtual goods in games like World of Warcraft and Pokemon are sold and traded for significant amounts of real-world cash. In the wildly popular Roblox online world, pre-teens eagerly programme and share games, virtual clothes, and virtual houses to earn an imaginary currency, Robux, with a real-world exchange rate set by the Roblox parent company.

Some gamers have invested thousands to purchase spaceships for the online game Star Citizen, even though the game has yet to be released — the virtual spaceships are themselves funding development of the game. And we now have “Decentraland”, a 3D virtual world in which you can own “land” and “objects” in the same way one can offline, thanks to the blockchain technology of NFTs, which immutably declares who owns what.

So far, virtual goods in games have been confined to their online universes — you could spend $7,000 on a World of Warcraft elf, but you couldn’t take it out of the game. NFTs remove that limitation, allowing one to proudly declare ownership of a virtual hat across the entire metaverse. This Brave New World may not be more immersive than the current internet, but it will be more acquisitive, more possessive, and more status-conscious.

Viral competition has already proven to be a moneymaker: at one point, Facebook drew 30% of its revenue from Zynga’s Farmville and its clones, games that exploited social competition to encourage users to pay for virtual crops. Roblox and Decentraland are blueprints for how Meta and Microsoft hope to turn the whole world into Farmville. Just as the internet monetised personal information to better target advertising, the metaverse will monetise online interaction by having your friends do the advertising to you. Who wants to be the last on their virtual block to have a virtual mansion?

The result will be the monetisation of identity, something already visible in the burgeoning industries of paying for instruction on how to be patriotic, how to be anti-racist, how to be Christian, how to be eco-conscious. The metaverse seeks to make money off of less-loaded aspects of identity by fostering intra-group solidarity through purchases. As sociologist Erving Goffman wrote, “To be a given kind of person, then, is not merely to possess the required attributes, but also to sustain the standards of conduct and appearance that one’s social grouping attaches thereto.”

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In the metaverse, everyone can potentially be a seller and advertiser in addition to a buyer, yet the power will chiefly lie with the companies. They will exert significant influence over group standards of conduct and will have a greater ability to steer those standards in profitable directions. (The metaverse will also offer malicious actors far greater ability to pervert those standards, but that is a whole different can of worms.) In the run-up to the 2020 election, Meta (then Facebook) restricted all its users from forwarding private messages to more than five people.

The goal, evidently, was to stop “harmful” content, probably political, from exploding across tight in-groups within Facebook’s user population. Such blanket restrictions are indeed effective by their very nature, but imagine what they would mean in the metaverse: private online groupings could be prohibited by their hosting platform (Meta or Microsoft, say) from sharing particular content, encouraged to share more innocuous content, or simply barred from interacting in certain ways.

Yet group affiliations are strong, and aggrieved groups have a way of sticking together against the powers that be. Online life, above all, offers one the chance to pick their tribe, their gang, their comrades. Offline we are limited geographically in our affiliations, but online, you can scour the world for your crowd. The explosion of conspiracy theories, extremism, and a general distrust of any elite opinion is not a consequence of individual bad actors online, but the simple ability, brought to us by the internet, to find people who share and reinforce our opinion, no matter what that opinion may be. The metaverse will supercharge these trends. Where people formerly congregated in Facebook groups, Reddit groups, or blog chats, they will now find cozy virtual spaces in which they can be welcomed.

Offline life will not be more “real” than the metaverse, merely less affirming. There will be even less need to congregate with those who disagree with you in the slightest if, by going online, one can not only exchange words with identically-minded individuals, but can gain all the reassuring benefits of human interaction with them.

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There’s a cost to pay as well. The price of group homogeneity in any regard (ideological, cultural, demographic) is a far greater rejection of deviation. Urbanisation and immigration may have caused melting-pot tendencies in the last century, but the metaverse offers previously unthinkable possibilities for undoing the heterogeneity of modern life, separating us out into monocultural strata in which every hobbyist subculture, every sub-Marxist movement, and every sexual fetish can easily find mutual affirmation. Individuality will dissolve into the unified mindset of one’s chosen monocultures. Once having joined a stratum, members will naturally play down their differences in favour of their commonalities, to the point that they forget those differences.

The result will not be a melting-pot but a disconnected patchwork. Conformity will no longer be a meaningful concept because we will be able to conform to anything. You can pick whatever social norms you’d like to follow, but having chosen them you will follow them to the utmost. No group will feel big enough to be confident of its dominance; each group will police its boundaries rigidly, forming a kaleidoscope of what anthropologist Mary Douglas defined as latent groups. Each will feel threatened by some number of others, just as the Left and the Right are both equally convinced today that the other is winning.

In the metaverse, we will not be alone. But some of us will wish we could be.

Over the past few days, the very brave and very blonde Ukrainian MP Kira Rudik has been tweeting various pictures of herself posing with an AK47. She began last Friday:

https://twitter.com/kiraincongress/status/1497264543428448260

What is striking about the photos is not that Rudik posted them: she is a people’s representative in a time of war — it’s exactly the sort of thing she should be posting. What’s so interesting, and smart, is how she did it. Rudik does not pose in a uniform, or even in camouflage fatigues. She does not salute or lift the AK triumphantly; in fact, the way she holds it makes it clear that she’s not used to holding a weapon of any sort. The photo is taken not in a base or even in an office, but clearly in the living room of her home, just by a window that looks out onto a small patio.

The final touch though — and it’s a genius one — is that she doesn’t have shoes on; instead she stands barefoot, her toes painted a delicate pink.

In one sense, this all seems irretrievably amateurish — but that’s the point. Of the many things the internet craves, authenticity is sacrosanct. And this is a model of the genre. The tweet is designed to do two things: first, to show that Ukrainians will stand and fight for their homeland; and second, to humanise those whom we are told will be doing the fighting. And it does this by showing them to be the most ordinary of people; people standing in their bare feet, vulnerable and ordinary — just like civilians across the world. As such, they stand in total contrast to the stormtroopers invading their lands. It’s pink toenails versus mud-encrusted jackboots; smiling mothers versus bearded Chechens — all shorthand for the battle playing out between Ukraine and Russia.

It’s taken us a long time to get here. It was mid-2014, when I was in occupied eastern Ukraine, that I first realised that 21st-century warfare had finally come to the 21st century. Both the Afghanistan and Iraq wars may have been already fought, but they were, in their peak, largely 20th-century conflicts, fought out before the arrival of social media and the advent of the user-generated content Web 2.0.

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Back then, Russia was the only social media player in the conflict. The Ukrainians were outgunned on the ground and online. Back then, in the occupied east people told me that Kyiv was run by Nazis and hated everything Russian. Back then, I watched the Kremlin flood social media and Russian-language TV with endless narratives about Kyiv’s desire to kill Russian speakers. Back then, the Ukrainians offered little by way of response.

But boy have they learned. Yesterday, I spoke to Peter Lerner, former Head of the Israel Defence Force (IDF) social media unit, who headed up its online operations during 2014’s Operation Protective Edge. He was in no doubt as to who is winning this info battle. “The game plan from the beginning has been two languages: English and Ukrainian and to a lesser volume Russian for PsyOps needs,” he told me. “Their comms goal appears to be rallying international and public support. All of their official accounts are synchronised — the same messages, nuanced and amplifying each other. ‘#Ukraine’ has been the number one trending hashtag since Thursday.” He continued: “And beyond the odd sporadic effort, there is very little social media personification beyond the president.”

Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy has become vital to Ukraine’s war effort on the ground and the star of its online battle. In a powerful 33-second video clip, filmed last week as he stood in a central Kyiv Street flanked by four other politicians, he announced he was not going anywhere. The clip was striking as an address from a state leader. It was unadorned by formality or rhetorical flourish, and it was designed to paint Zelenskyy as two things simultaneously: leader of his nation and (literal) man in the street.

Now contrast these images to those relentlessly broadcast of his enemy, Vladimir Putin, who sits far from the frontline, and therefore from danger, isolated not only from the battlefield but from those around him. Like a proper supervillain he sits alone, insistent on keeping everyone at least ten feet away from him. It’s Ukraine’s very own Jewish James Bond versus an ageing Blofeld with anger management issues and a Botox habit. There’s only ever going to be one winner in the popular imagination — and the court of Twitter.

This is the new grammar of statesmanship for the social media age and it’s about being brief, edgy and demotic. Our public sphere is curated by Big Tech platforms that are algorithmically geared toward virality; and what goes viral are not long speeches about having a dream or fighting people on beaches but short and arresting words and images. Gone are the lofty phrases and verbal curlicues; gone are the digressions on policy. What you say needs to work on a short YouTube or Instagram or Twitter clip — and it will ideally be easily remembered.

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This, then, is the central battle playing out. Lerner is shocked at how bad the Russian response has been. “This is all very strange,” he continues, “just like their perceived lack of battlefield accomplishments.” Lerner wonders if there is a rift in the government between Putin and those around him more reluctant to go to war, pointing to the recent fraught exchange between Putin and his head of intelligence who urges him to give Russia’s “Western partners” one more chance.

In the meantime, Russian State channel RT posts away as if in a different reality. “Video sequence of the development of Russia’s offensive in all directions in accordance with the operation plan,” it tweeted, with footage of armoured vehicles moving bovinely across dirt tracks and over bridges. Of the actual realities of the war on the ground: not a trace.

It may well be, as Lerner speculates, that the Kremlin knows that the world doesn’t accept its case for war and sees little point in trying to push it. If so, the focus will now be on internal comms and shoring up Russian support. But one of the first things Lerner told me years ago when we first met was this: if you leave a void in online information wars, you cede it to the enemy. Russia has done exactly that — and Ukraine is reaping the rewards.

And it’s reaping them globally. I can’t think of a single country in the world with Ukraine’s soft power right now. Even Elon Musk got involved after Ukraine’s Minister of Digital Transformation Mykhailo Fedorov urged him to support the country with his Starlink services, which not only provide higher internet speeds but, as internet delivered by satellite, would continue to provide coverage even were the Russians to cut off cables in Ukraine. “While you try to colonise Mars — Russia try to occupy Ukraine! While your rockets successfully land from space — Russian rockets attack Ukrainian civil people! We ask you to provide Ukraine with Starlink stations,” Fedorov tweeted at Musk. Ten hours later Musk replied. “Starlink service is now active in Ukraine… more terminals en route.”

In the background, the same narratives and counter-narratives that I have been studying for five years continue to dominate. Last week, when hostilities broke out, a video went viral. It carried a purported audio exchange as a Russian boat approached Snake Island on the Ukrainian coast and demanded the soldiers stationed there to surrender. “This is a Russian military warship. I suggest you lay down your weapons and surrender to avoid bloodshed and needless casualties. Otherwise, you will be bombed.” the Russian officer says. A Ukrainian soldier responds: “Russian warship, go fuck yourself.”

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Those were the final words heard from the island. Zelenskyy later announced that the warship had then killed all 13 Ukrainian defenders. The internet trilled with talk of the brave Ukrainian martyrs. Now, however, it appears the soldiers are in fact alive and being held prisoner by the Russians.

Honest mistake or Ukrainian influence operation? If it were the latter, it worked: Snake Island galvanised Ukraine’s online army and cowed Russia’s. Perhaps the truth will come out, but then again maybe it won’t. Either way, it reordered reality online for a while, which was the point. It was another Ukrainian victory.

This is the nature of modern conflict, and it’s the way that all wars will be fought now — on the ground and online. The revolution may not be televised, but it will be meme’d.

Take the debates surrounding the trucker protests in Ottawa. The mainstream press, by and large, has attempted to assimilate the protests into categories familiar from the Trump years.

According to Politico, “far-Right” truckers, some of them sporting “Confederate and Nazi flags”, have “wreaked havoc on Canadian cities”. In the Guardian, one writer warned that the “siege of Ottawa” was an “astroturfed movement funded by a global network of highly organised far-Right groups and amplified by Facebook’s misinformation machine.” Slate, after dropping the trigger words “militia”, “hate”, “extremist”, and “Nazi”, called the protests an “armed occupation of a G-7 capital”. All linked the truckers with the domestic threat posed by Fox News, the Republican Party, and the American far-Right.

Critics of the establishment have responded with their own counter-narrative, aimed at portraying the truckers in a sympathetic light while focusing attention on the tyrannical response of the Canadian government. After Justin Trudeau invoked the Emergency Powers Act, Tucker Carlson labelled Canada a “dictatorship” and warned that similar measures would soon be coming to the United States. Over the weekend, as Ottawa police attempted to clear the city centre, Twitter was filled with viral videos of police violence against the protestors, juxtaposed with old quotes from progressive leaders praising the BLM protests of summer 2020, intended to highlight their hypocrisy.

These narratives have a recognisable logic, which holds whether the underlying event is the truckers or the Capitol riot. They are tribal, pitting a virtuous “us” against a malevolent “them”. They are curated to provoke fear of, and rage against, the out-group, often through “empathic triggers” that highlight aggression against the in-group. They are also, in a loose sense, conspiratorial, running together phenomena that have no logical connection except within the pattern of the narrative.

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This is easy to recognise in Right-wing conspiracies about the 2020 election, but establishment media indulges in something similar. When CNN leads a story about Joe Rogan’s use of the n-word with a line about a man carrying “a Confederate flag inside the US Capitol rotunda”, the purpose is to train readers to create an emotional connection between the podcast host and white supremacist domestic terrorism, when none exists in reality.

The war between these tribal narratives, according to media theorist John Robb, is the defining feature of US politics today. He argues that a combination of establishment failures — the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the Global Financial Crisis — and the information explosion ushered in by the internet have annihilated the legitimacy of the old narratives that used to hold Western states and societies together, nationalism being the most prominent one.

But humans are tribal and narrative creatures — take one story away and we will invent another one. Today, our most compelling narratives — the ones that provide us with the sense of “fictive kinship” formerly provided by membership in a nation, religion, or ethnic group — are political narratives defined by enmity.

This development, claims Robb, is largely the product of social media, where we are presented with more information than we can possibly pay attention to, let alone understand. We make sense of it by picking patterns out of the noise. These patterns, however, are social phenomena. And as the pioneers of clickbait discovered a decade ago, we are especially drawn to content that provokes a strong empathic response — generally something shocking or outrageous, though our specific triggers will depend on which pattern we are curating. Over time, we come to identify with those who respond to the same triggers and assimilate them to the same pattern. Our tribe is the collective of people outraged by the same things that outrage us.

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The importance of repression

By Park Macdougald

The clearest example of how this works in the real world is the response to the video of Derek Chauvin killing George Floyd. The video was shocking and vivid. In a previous media environment, however, it would have had its emotional impact blunted by layers of context, expert commentary, and he-said-she-said quotes from local police and the Floyd family. Instead, the video was immediately assimilated to patterns such as “systemic racism”, provoking mass rage and mobilisation against not only Chauvin or the Minneapolis police department but the United States as a whole. Video of the ensuing protests set in motion a similar dynamic on the Right, as users curating patterns about “BLM rioters” and “antifa terrorists” circulated vivid footage of lootings, arsons, and assaults, often framed to induce outrage at the Left-wing politicians and journalists who were vocally supporting the protests.

Robb developed his framework as a way of understanding how digital politics and social media were bleeding over into the real world during the Trump administration. Trump himself, of course, had ridden a wave of social media enthusiasm into the White House, and his election prompted many of his more elite, media-savvy opponents to self-organise into the #resistance, which identified and amplified every real and imagined outrage of his presidency (including conspiracy theories about Russiagate).

Robb dubbed the open-source network supporting Trump ‘the #insurgency’. Unlike ‘the resistance’, which operated in the open and tried to compel government and corporate action through moral coercion and appeals to expert consensus, the #insurgency was largely anonymous. It sought to confuse and disorient its opponents, often through jokes and targeted harassment, and to prevent the emergence of consensus around resistance narratives.

For Robb, however, 2020 kicked the tribalisation of American politics into overdrive. First came the pandemic, which damaged an already fraying social fabric and forced Americans to spend more time online than ever before. The death of George Floyd then served as a huge empathic trigger for the Left, not only sparking mass popular mobilisation but also inducing a moribund Democratic Party establishment and many mainstream institutions to officially endorse Left-wing patterns such as “white supremacy”. The Right, in turn, began to tribalise in earnest after November 2020, uniting around patterns of conspiracy — surrounding the 2020 election, vaccines, the Covid-19 pandemic, Big Tech censorship — promoted by Trump and his allies.

The final accelerant, in Robb’s telling, was the Capitol riot. The assault on the Capitol proved for the Left that Trump and his supporters — including the Republican Party and virtually all of its voters — were not merely racists but existential threats to the republic, whose suppression was crucial to ensure the survival of democracy. Perhaps more importantly, the Capitol riot prompted the major tech companies to openly align with the Left, disconnecting Trump — then the sitting president — from their networks under the guise of preventing further violence. Given the control of these companies over not only political discourse but also much of the infrastructure of modern life, this alignment, for Robb, amounted to a declaration of corporate sovereignty over the U.S. political system.

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Today Robb sees, on the one hand, a corporate and political establishment aligned around enforcing curated, Left-wing patterns as the de facto consensus view of reality — one that combines a technocratic emphasis on “facts” and “science” with a tribal moral narrative about the existential threat posed by racists and white supremacists, constantly reinforced by curated, emotionally charged stories that fit the pattern. On the other hand is an emerging tribal Right — though this tribe can more easily accommodate cranks and dissidents of all political persuasions — organised around a curated pattern of elite conspiracy, drawing its strength from any and all establishment failures and from attempts to censor or suppress its narrative. The victory of the former would represent what Robb calls “networked fascism”, or the alignment of government and corporate power behind a single approved narrative. The victory of the latter would lead to dissensus, disunion, and nihilism.

Robb’s framework provides a useful, if alarming, way of looking at contemporary debates over “misinformation” and online “hate”. Whether or not one buys his ominous warnings about “networked fascism”, his diagnosis of the tribal dynamics of social media — our tendency to assimilate information into politicised patterns, and to respond to empathy triggers that fit our pattern with rage and loathing directed at our tribal out-group — is an important reminder about the ways in which we are constantly emotionally manipulated by social media, often in ways we don’t recognise. And it should make us sceptical of both top-down attempts to enforce a consensus interpretation of reality — which is usually messy and offers few clear moral lessons — and of any bottom-up patterns that posit, as an explanation for all the phenomena that trigger us, some unified conspiracy or plan.

For individuals, too, Robb’s work is a warning about how easily the architecture of social media can be weaponised to make us hate our fellow citizens. Indeed, it is precisely when we don’t experience the emotion as “hate”, but rather as justified outrage against the enemies of everything righteous and holy, that we should be most suspicious.