Like Apokálypsis
By Gabriel Marc Johnson
Good tragedy, Aristotle’s Poetics explains, alludes to the inevitable. Events that evoke fear or pity are best revealed when they, “…come on us by surprise, and when, at the same time, they follow a cause and effect”. Tragedy, then, is not only inevitable, but relative. Only those not paying sufficient attention find themselves surprised. The sufficiently conscious, though, suffer the horror of dull inevitability. The Trump volta of 2024 comes as the most inevitable surprise to those who didn’t vote for him. The quagmire American civil society has become, beginning in the Fox News era of the early 2000s, through the hyper-acceleration of the last 12 years, is due almost solely to social media, particularly Facebook. The beta ethics of Silicon Valley have found a richly congenial partner in those of the market, with its inherent short attention span. The result is an effectively crowd-sourced Fourth Estate, benefiting the distinct interest of a small circle of tech monopolies (dubbed, wincingly, the “PayPal Mafia”). All of this has created a situation where, even for a country with such virile a history as the United States, this will be the first time a sitting defendant on trial for multiple criminal charges will be elected, by a convincing popular and elector majority, to the office of the President. The fact that this doesn’t seem to matter much to the general public is the most tragic element of all: American voters seem, less and less, to mind what they want.
It’s clear that Facebook leadership wishes to obfuscate itself from the backlash and attendant criticism the election result generated. From a compound of its chairman, the North Shore of Kauai’s “Fortress of Solitude” perhaps, apparently two superyachts, Launchpad and Wingman, were ordered on a 12-day voyage from California to Tahiti in support of one of his hydrofoil safaris. Launchpad was recorded pulling into Papeete harbor on November 12th. The timing of an endeavor like this illustrates a callowness for a person of such wealth. (Not to mention the unconscionable music track he put together that same day with T-Pain, a perfect soundtrack to Armageddon). Facebook’s chairman then quickly congratulated the 47th President Elect on its new Twitter-like platform, and recently made his way to Mar-a-Lago for an audience with the new boss. A conspicuous change of tack, to be sure, from the erstwhile “Zuckerbuck” days of providing donations to support the integrity of the 2020 elections, which worked, of course. But the ensuing techno-political strife from that election blanked Facebook’s conscience of responsibility for the negative externalities this platform has burdened the country with. An ADHD-afflicted culture now skips to the shiny new gadgets Facebook’s parent company, Meta, is focused on developing, while Facebook proper reconciles with the massive social media market of Trump supporters.
If this is not starting to sound quixotically Sophoclean to you, you’re not paying sufficient attention. A hapless, insecure billionaire unaware and uninterested in the unintended consequences of his burgeoning innovation. An ambitious political neophyte with an instinct for the dramatic, voracious ego, and healthy appetite for revenge. A platform that rewards them both while polar-atomizing a drama-addicted society. The economist would say there’s a problem with the incentive structure of this arrangement. An agency problem, argues the political scientist. To a social psychologist, a problem with cognitive bias. A crisis of consciousness, the philosopher declares. Whichever concept you prefer to emphasize, the upshot is that democratic political processes can’t keep up with technology innovation operating in societies where free-market activity is the cultural touchstone. Governance must be fiercely competent in this situation.
Without a proper reckoning, all of the social media slash and burn of the last decade would be for naught, naught and tightly-funneled profit. The last 20 years of American politics and technology history needs to be understood holistically by all stakeholders. For the consequences now are much higher than they were the last time the world’s humans were confronted with technology that concentrated the acceleration of their experiences in such a way: the modernism era concluded by the Great War. A contemporary iterative war of this kind, representing commensurate technical scale and tension cultural updates naturally produce, clears the way for a new kind of world war, in fact. Not the third in a series fetishized over the last half century, but more like something one could conceptualize as World War [0] (index zero), with China and United States playing the roles of Germany and France, respectively.
The Millennial Spirit
Studies of zeitgeist restlessness from the Western world’s best artistic and analytical minds anticipated the current phenomenological malaise in inchoate form. The great David Foster Wallace in his magnum opus, Infinite Jest, left the reader (anachronistically) with an image of Don Gately, one of the few sympathetic characters to draw upon, cold, alone, and injured on a New England beach. Radiohead’s OK COMPUTER is a prescient elegy of the out-of-body millennium blues confronting an amorphous haboob of technology nebulizing on the horizon. Francis Fukuyama concluded his seminal End of History, and the Last Man with a warning of the combustible ennui victory in the Cold War struggle would bring. Sobered by a completed mission, Western spirits roam the landscape sniffing around for the next grand project like truffle hounds, a loose cannon of collective “megalothymia”, a term he coins. These days Fukuyama speaks of the “thin moral community” of liberal democracies, and its predilection to identity politics, which can “corrode the basis of liberal democracy itself”. The 2024 election showed us that identity politics has exhausted itself, and we’ve moved on to the next, undefined stage. The alacrity with which this phenomenon has run its course should frighten everyone.
Success, technology and competition, then, are the genes of tragedy. At bottom, policy success is a temporal ideal, ephemeral, fleeting, not ethically sufficient for the business of party politics. Functioning as a forum of reconciliation between the welters of social endeavors a society finds itself engaged in at any given point in time, politics and its affairs thereof is administered by political organizations in the form of parties, of course. All organizations need a mission, raison d’être, an exogenous function that affects value onto its environment. Parties call these missions platforms, which they draft every four years. If a party runs out of relevant ideas, or, paradoxically, is too successful in executing those ideas, they become vulnerable to hostile takeover, or mission creep, respectively.
The incompetence of George W. Bush bankrupted the Republican Party. Barrack Obama led his party so well for eight years that it decayed after he left Office. At which point, politically this country found itself hollowed out, on the right from obsolescence, and on the left from hyper- successful stewardship. Add to this the civil service brain drain brought about by tantalizing wages the tech world was offering new graduates. Not exactly a field of first round draft picks left over to fill government positions. The world is run by those who show up, as the cliché holds, and so politics must go on as a necessary part of this country’s macro-coordinating mechanism, with whoever shows up. So the Left carried on with sects of self-satisfied liberals, emboldened with assumed moral grants. This stoked single-issue interest groups financed by a growing pool of guilt wealth, nouveau tech wealth in particular. As liberal tech gained more and more momentum, the American Heartland felt it was being left behind, losing its channels of communication with the rest of the country, and therefore its identity, dignity and feeling of place in the world.
Insulting a person whose attention is sought but can’t be realized through available language is a common rhetorical tactic. When Trump cannonballed into the 2015 political arena insulting the coastal elite, brandishing a slogan lifted from the Reagan era, he immediately found an emotionally captive audience. His persona then went viral on the social media platforms ginned up by the coastal overachievers who were in large part a significant target of Middle America’s collective grievance he found himself representing. Liberal media institutions like the New York Times promoted Trump further by allowing themselves to be trolled in epically unsuccessful efforts to cancel him (in the spirit of revenue). Both political parties caught fire from social media, but the Republican house was empty; the Democrats’ was crowded, however, and order within broke down. Trump was electored the 45th President, and all of the aforementioned trends continued with click-bait verve.
Stung with the shame of irresponsible voting, the political left worked themselves into cells of single-issue mania, while the right continued their circus, basking in the attention the rest of the country was now forced to grant them. And then the pandemic. Americans aren’t very good at existing in a world without direct competition. The daily dose of this was heaved online and stripped of the interpersonal dimension. An already thin membrane of intellectual patience caved in to the pressure of the newsfeed swipe slot machine effect. Chatthread logic spilled out onto the streets as trust between one another and the three-dimensional world broke down, delighting and crystalizing those who engineered it.
Beta Ethics and the Solipsism of Privacy
It’s common for software products to be released before development completion in a practice known as beta testing. Open or closed, the goal of this activity is to simulate and monitor usability issues in a more natural operating environment, incorporating invaluable feedback into what could become a final, stable product version. As the cost of online infrastructure has gone down, however, it’s become more and more common for products to remain in perpetual beta, allowing tech companies to stay agile in response to market vicissitudes --variables of consumer taste, business competition, strategic goals, etc. This evolved from a startup culture rooted in a hacker, punk rock ethos of subversion.
The genesis of Facebook is now of common lore. Wiping away the sheen of entertainment that invariably deflects any real analysis in American culture, one accepts that the embryo of this social media organization was concocted using an irreverent posture towards responsible norms concerning privacy and intellectual property; the founder of Facebook played fast and loose with others’ data, their privacy, and ultimately, their intellectual property. Indeed, the inception story of most companies that go on to achieve considerable market dominance is, for the most part, pat--a melodramatic parlor game between entitled toffs. Biographer Walter Isaacson doesn’t flatter Bill Gates much. And Steve Jobs is commonly represented as a monomaniacal figure. Notwithstanding: Paul Allen never sued Gates over his bullied shares. Woz never sued Jobs. In contrast, Facebook’s story begins with nasty litigation. Its founder was disciplined, initially, for hacking other peoples’ photos to be used without their permission. Then the seed feature of the website that would become Facebook was purloined from classmates. Facebook/Meta has been the defendant in nearly 70 significant lawsuits in the two decades of its existence.
Lawsuits, then, can be considered part of Facebook’s perpetual beta testing model. Personal data coaxed from real people (or “dumb fucks”, as its founder once referred to them in a text message) is fuel material for prototype features of a tech machine, whose purpose is to maximize advertisement revenues. Thus the commoditization of personal information, with all the potential for manipulation this implies. America’s operating epistemology, and therefore ontology, have been wracked and warped by this transactional approach to such an intimate form of media. Now a hyperactive thread determines authenticity, one where normal social cues of communication are not available. Typing mean things at someone’s profile picture isn’t the same as a face-to-face confrontation. Topics an algorithm has bio-marked for maximum emotional effect drive fanatical engagement, particularly with the psychologically vulnerable. An artificial reality incentivizing the dramatic must be considered a devolution of culture.
Drama Addicts of an Ontological Meatgrinder
For the same reason “reality television” is an unintentional synecdoche, likewise can be said for “social network”. A social media is a more accurate representation of what Facebook is, an ersatz companion to reality, a Legoland for self-promotion and entertainment, not a source of serious information. Interviewing for an internship at the International Energy Agency in graduate school a decade ago, your correspondent sniffed when informed the job duties included maintaining and updating the Agency’s Facebook page. That’s not an appropriate forum for such serious business as energy policy, the thought was, and still is. The spirit of college kids talking like college kids is reflected in the website’s interface and features. (Meditate for a moment on how silly and narcotic the like button really is.) And it works perfectly for this, no objection there. But its adoption by adults became so widespread that American English, for example, now finds itself stuck in a sophomoric-speak doom loop, with such chalkboard scrapers as “like”, “amazing”; and “literally” meaning anything but. American politics now sounds like a drunken dorm room argument because of Facebook’s effect on discourse.
Your correspondent summarized Trump’s success in the 2016 Presidential Election thus: “Americans prefer drama over policy”. Online communication under social media has dumbed down, and since media has always reflected a society’s concerted language, offline literacy has degraded as a matter of transpiration. The dumber and more emotional Facebook has become, the more profitable, and recursively toxic it is to the outside world. Between the years of 2015 and the end of the pandemic, American civil society ran like a particularly bad reality television series, with a belligerence traditionally reserved for camera performance. For sensible people, the social movements of the political left and right appeared, quite often, indistinguishable. By way of example, an answer to the 2016 presidential question couldn’t, in person, be found at a Bernie Sanders rally at Hunter’s Point Park South. The buffoonery of Trump and one of his rallies always barred it from any real serious consideration.
Elections are big business, for themselves and for media companies--surprise, surprise. Social media platforms can now count social movements as significant revenue streams, as well as being leveraged as tools to engineer them in the first instance. Trump used Facebook to create a social movement that translated into political success. The platform’s tone of silliness and immaturity was perfect for such a Zanni presidential candidate and the political maturity of those he’s managed to endear himself to, successfully throbbing their collective nerve of insecurity and competition. Not unlike Nero manipulating the Acta Diurna to his advantage. The creation of an impenetrable polity of Trump supporters will be a topic of study for many years to come. Historically we know that movements based on obstinate impudence are charismatically dangerous.
Weaponized Egos
Facebook broke down analogue social networks so as to rebuild them as mediated entities. It interposed itself between social connections, monetized and disfigured them, and then reconstructed them under the brand of “community”. The resultant maturing of the tech industry created a new class of high salaried workers who preferred to gentrify coastal urban areas rather than live in the suburbs of previous generations. Coupled with the rattling decline of heavy industry, Middle America felt the pangs of abandonment. The same neurasthemia, or Americanitis, used to diagnose despondent farm wives of the Progressive Era gripped the Heartland in the 2010s. The Trump campaign began as a movement for those who were falling behind, psychologically, in an accelerating world. Again, the people who jilted them ran the technology that weaponized those grievances, as well as those of interest groups on the Left financed by tech guilt.
In healthy liberal democracies, business figures shouldn’t be allowed to scrape baron wealth from a population without commensurate political responsibility. For Capitalist Liberal Democratic Republics, such as the United States, wealth and politics are inextricably linked. Facebook is a tool that has subverted social epistemology, and thus affected the overall ontology of American culture, but whose management lacks the intellectual maturity, or the ostensible inclination to meet the issue beyond the framework of business logic and beta ethics. A “meatgrinder” is the extent of their intellectual investment in this macro phenomenon. Facebook hasn’t satisfactorily come to terms with its history as a source platform of truth for the deranged and the intellectually impatient, a Frankenstein fire it lacks the emotional intelligence to marshal. The issue is too nuanced for the Free Speech shield to handle alone. Facebook is largely responsible for clearing the field for Leviathans to grow. To be clear, the point isn’t what Facebook leadership is currently doing necessarily, but rather what it’s not doing, and hasn’t done in the face of uncertainty. They’ve yet to be taken to task for their negligence. We’ve entered a new stage of the human condition, where politics, technology, economics and psychology interact in stochastic ways; a Facebook reckoning will go a long way in making sense of it all. A sincere account is due.
Though, for penance in the meanwhile, Facebook will have to deal with being controlled by a product of its own creation. (Hopefully this irony wasn’t lost on the chairman during his recent trip to Mar-a-Lago.) A president with whimsical respect for democratic institutions bossing around the country’s most penetrative media organs. An ever concentrating class of overpaid technibrats who criminally leave politics to everyone else. The F-word must come to mind. Computer scientists enjoy speculating on the arrival of the incipient “superintelligence”. Looks like they’re getting it earlier than they expected, with Trump. Although, don’t worry, as the title suggests, this is not a complete apocalypse, for humanity and the Facebooks of history always find a way through. How, you ask? See ThyssenKrupp for the tragic details.
***