The Whole World Is Now a Message Board
▻http://nymag.com/selectall/2017/04/the-whole-world-is-now-a-message-board.html
http://pixel.nymag.com/imgs/daily/intelligencer/2017/04/28/magazine/28-alt-right-pepe.w1200.h630.jpg Whatever else the alt-right is, it is a movement born and incubated on the internet, and it couldn’t have existed without that technology. Circulation, discussion, and debate are oxygen to political ideas. Commercial and social mechanisms like “the cost of owning a printing press” and “No one will invite you to parties if you openly praise Hitler” traditionally cut off extreme thinkers from mass circulation. Now, though, you can reproduce your ideas essentially infinitely, for prices so low as to be effectively free, and suffer no ill social effect. In fact, online, toxic ideas are more likely to get attention and social capital (plus, thanks to programmatic ad networks, real capital) that goes along with attention.
And there is a literal army of dissatisfied, disenchanted, mostly male young adults ripe for radicalization. The internet is host to what the writer and programmer David Auerbach calls “the first wide-scale collective gathering of those who are alienated, voiceless, and just plain unsocialized” — seeking freedom from the disappointments of the physical world in places where social interaction is decoupled from material and emotional signals they don’t understand or have access to. “There’s people that are, like, behind the counter at a Pizza Hut or whatever, and their intellect and their skills are not being used in the real world in a way that’s appealing to them,” the web-comic artist and longtime 4chan observer Dale Beran tells me. “The only interesting stuff that’s going on is the internet and video games.”
This was the sensibility galvanized in 2014 by — what else? — a depressed and frustrated man’s rambling, 9,000-word post falsely accusing his game-developer ex-girlfriend Zoë Quinn of exchanging sex for video-game reviews. Quinn came to stand in for all the women who were attempting to carve out roles in an industry where “three-dimensional female character” traditionally referred to modeling breast physics in a graphics engine. That Quinn was innocent of the charges against her was irrelevant. She had become a meme: an endlessly replicable, endlessly remixable referent, a shibboleth for the quasi-religious systems of internet culture. Memes do not make for a particularly compassionate politics. As Whitney Phillips, a professor at Mercer University who specializes in internet culture, explains, “When you’re engaging with a meme, you’re not engaging with a full narrative” — much less with the real person on the receiving end.
And so the keening wail of a rejected boyfriend became a dedicated and highly organized media campaign: Gamergate. Some Gamergaters harassed and insulted journalists and feminist critics of video games in attempts to silence them. The repetitive-task, button-pushing skills developed through years of gaming had paid off in a new, bigger game: ruining people’s lives.
Message-board culture does more than radicalize the disaffected; it also teaches them how to manipulate the attention economy. Message-board threads only superficially resemble real-world conversations; in fact, public online social interaction is built around competing with your peers for attention from the group as a whole. As Beran puts it to me, “There’s an evolutionary struggle” for ideas to be seen. If a post isn’t clever or catchy enough, “it just dies, and no one ever sees it. The best stuff, in a Darwinian struggle, gets to the top. That’s how memes are created.”
As the mainstream media increasingly takes its coverage cues (and its revenue sources) from a small handful of powerful social networks, the news becomes easier and easier for them to influence. The shitlords of the internet don’t create the conditions that lead to reaction, but they are more than happy to exploit them. And skilled at it, too.
