by JUSTIN E. H. SMITH
Social Media as the “False Representative Class”
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Because hate-clicks will do just as well as love-clicks in the game of virality, there is by now a steady stream of content produced by people who know that what they are doing is stupid, and who go ahead with it not in spite of that fact, but because of it. Laura Helmuth, the editor-in-chief of Scientific American, might well be dumb enough actually to believe that her magazine’s recent editorial, “Why the Term ‘JEDI’ Is Problematic for Describing Programs That Promote Justice, Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion”, is, as she wrote on Twitter, “SO GOOD”. I hope she is in fact that dumb, because the alternative is much more dispiriting still: that she knows full well this is cynical click-seeking, she knows people will share it and link to it only because it is such a gross desecration of everything Scientific American once represented, and because sharing and linking is good for business, whatever the affective and cognitive state of the sharer.
I try to keep my Substack somewhere out in the Kuiper Belt, if we wish to maintain the orbit analogy, yet I am continually reminded that it would be preferable, if exposure were the only goal, to set myself up as a heap of space-junk tightly hugging the Earth, circling visibly in the night sky. I write something about botanical expeditions in eighteenth-century Siberia, and I get 5,000 readers (thank you from the bottom of my heart, my loyal 5,000); I throw out some chum on whatever culture-war issue is keeping Twitter aflame at the moment, and I get 50,000. The numbers are consistent, and incontrovertible. So I promise you some fish guts today, my sharks, but you’re going to have to sit through a bit of long-winded and unmemeifiable point-making in order to get your reward.
The internet, obviously, runs on hate. Ordinarily we take this to mean that it incites people to argue pointlessly, to abandon the ordinary ethical norms governing disagreement, and so on. This sense of the claim is true, but another respect in which the internet is an engine of hate is the one I have just identified: that in click-seeking there is no incentive to weed out hate-clicking. I’ve argued before that all of this might be for the better, that by absorbing so much of humanity’s hatred, the engine may be sublimating it into something extremely unpleasant, but not literally violent. When it comes right down to it, I’d rather see the IDF trolling the ayatollahs than bombing Iranian civilians. I would myself much rather get impotent death threats than get killed.
What makes the sublimated form of violence produced by this engine seem more potent, sometimes, than the real thing, is the fact that the engine invites universal participation. This is the same thing, curiously, that has also at times made the internet appear as an engine of democracy and as a great hope for advancing towards the goal of rational, collective deliberation. What has prevented this ideal from taking hold, one might argue, is that the expansion of power to individuals through this new technology has not so much followed the path of greater democratic participation, as rather effecting a traduction downward, and as it were a privatization, of tyranny.
This in fact seems to be a common historical process, for which other instances may help us better to understand the generic problem. Every couple married in the Eastern Orthodox church, down to the lowliest goatherd, wears a crown as part of the ceremony, symbolically transferring the power and glory of the Byzantine emperor and empress down, momentarily, to these very common men and women. Traditions such as this date back to antiquity, but with the rise of capitalism we see many other important new ways in which previously noble or royal powers devolve down to the common people. What is that “wedding palace” in a Long Island strip mall but a devolution of royalty, however distorted its forms become in the passage downward?
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