by Tobin Smith
It’s a conundrum. Tech ethics advocate, Time Well Spent co-creator, and ex-Googler Tristan Harris notes that the unstoppable growth and reach of big tech digital apps and platforms may very well be like the slow-but-oncoming march of climate change. However, he fails to point out that without the unlimited amounts of white tribal fear and hate video content—most prominently from Fox News—our social media feeds would be largely full of cute animal porn, smiling babies, sports, and funny memes instead of tribal fear and hate based white tribal identity porn.
But that didn’t happen. Why?
The answer is simple—it’s the money, stupid. There is not nearly the profit to be made in producing emotion activating content that makes people kinder, more loving, and more egalitarian as there is in producing white tribal activation content.
For instance, while News Corp. did own the National Geographic cable channel (until it was sold to Disney), the Fox News Channel is worth twenty times more value with just five times Nat G’s cable audience.
Message received: there is big media money to be made today sowing and harvesting tribal identity activation and hate amplification—forget the collateral damage.
There is also unimaginable political power that comes to ethnic nationalists and populists from producing binge-watchable fear and hate distributed on Facebook, YouTube, and other digital media platforms. In just one example, Brazil’s YouTube-watching obsession catapulted a little-known populist named Jair Bolsonaro from obscurity to the Brazilian presidency in less than twelve months. Mr. Bolsonaro ran no traditional political TV ads, he just produced hundreds of hours of fear-and-hate-based YouTube video porn.
Closer to home, the most recent data says the zip codes targeted via Facebook by Russia’s Internet Agency with white tribal fear and hate porn within key counties had significant influence, helping to convert 77,000 votes from Obama in 2012 to Trump in 2016. Those are the same votes that caused Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania’s Electoral College votes to go to another better-known tribal fear and hate populist who, with zero minutes of his life elected to anything, was sent to the most powerful office in the world.
Moreover, there’s no tribal happy dance or victory lap for the cute-animal viewer, and thus they get none of the most pleasurable and powerful brain juice released (serotonin) that white tribal identity porn addicts get watching Fox News. No happy dance of tribal superiority and victory over one’s tribal enemy also means no neurochemical release or behavioral addiction to the video content.
It’s a fact: no one gets an ego gratifying shot of self-esteem built from watching a baby deer and puppy play together. It makes you feel all warm and fuzzy and say, “Ahh how cute,” but in order to feed your ravenous self-esteem with the chemical booster shot it constantly seeks via tribal hate-based gratification, you must make the tribally identified person see and hear new scorching self-congratulatory evidence as to why they should hate and feel righteously superior to their tribal enemy.
In his recent presentation to tech nobility, Tristan Harris notes that problems such as “tech addiction, polarization, outrage-ification of culture, the rise in vanities [and] micro-celebrity culture” are all, in fact, symptoms of a larger disease. He called it: “The race to capture human attention by tech giants.”
His main point: in the race to own the bottom of our brain stem, the fear and hate based content that big tech retargets and delivers to billions of people worldwide is indeed making all of us “dumber, meaner, and more alienated from one another.”
Addiction to tribal hate and fear content is also symptomatic of a larger disease in America—the decaying of our social capital and poisoning of our meaningful and vitally important social and personal connections. Yet the data today also proves that in order to win the race to the brain stem of those conservative Americans, you need the type of content that most rapidly and powerfully activates their brain stem. So what is the video content they are most sensitive and reactive to? I know—it’s shocking: fear, hate, and victimized blame-shifting videos.
Ergo, that is exactly the content that the Fox Hate Channel produces and publishes. It’s not a bug in their system—it’s the primary feature. The business of making as many politically and culturally right-wing Americans as possible hate as many politically and culturally left-wing Americans as possible IS the business strategy that Fox News monetizes at $3 billion a year and growing. And tribalized video content from the liberal media is now slowly catching up to Fox News’s nuclear-grade white tribal identity porn, too (oh joy).
So yes, the math about the Fox Hate Channel is as simple as it is stunning: the more Fox News’s white tribal activation and the Foxhole spiral can get right wing Americans to hate their tribal Other, the more profit Fox News makes for the Murdoch family.
From reaching hundreds of thousands of Americans in the late ’90s with new glorious and virtue-signaling reasons to hating the left wing liberal apostates, Fox News’s right wing ego gratification content today now reaches at least 100 million Americans monthly via all kinds of digital devices and platforms. From losing nearly a billion dollars building their Liberal Death Star machine, the Murdoch family now earns a billion dollars or more per year from the Fox News Channel sowing white tribal identity fears and hatreds.
Tristan Harris captures one part of this very real crisis perfectly, I think, when he concludes on an episode of Recode Decode with Kara Swisher: “It’s sort of a civilizational moment when an intelligent species, us, we produce a technology where that technology can simulate the weaknesses of the creator. It’s almost like the puppet that we’ve created can actually simulate a version of its creator and know exactly what puppet strings to pull on the creator, so we’re all outraged.”
And then he adds: “Technology is holding the pen of history right now. Every major election, and the culture of a new generation, is being written by whom?”
I can tell you something you must understand now, too—we know who is writing the history for America’s white tribal identity clan—it’s the American Foxocracy. And all that tribal fear, hate, and blame porn is still produced exactly according to Fox News’s playbook of tribal warfare that I’ve shared with you in this book.
Mr. Harris is right, but I think there’s one major flaw—all that digital information technology doesn’t create the content that the big tech video distribution system vomits up twenty-four hours a day to exploit and profit from human nature’s most exploitable psychological weaknesses. It’s the American Foxocracy ecosystem, the $10 billion business of the white tribal identity activation, and the amplification content industry that knows exactly how to write, produce, and perform the emotional content that pull the primal and involuntary “puppet strings” of tribal fear, hate, resentment, and contempt for the tribal Other.
All that the big tech platform companies really understand is exactly how to digitally surveil, identify, target, and algorithmically exploit human emotion at enormous scale on their digital platforms. They execute this predation with content their user has voluntarily shown themselves to be the most likely to emotionally react to and consume. In the case of Fox News and the people who demonstrate via their views, likes, shares, and comments that they are the most vulnerable to having their attention hacked with white tribal identity content—the predation challenge is done. It’s game over. Big tech simply retargets and sends as much white tribal identity porn as humanly possible at unimaginable scale to as many of the people they know with one-hundred-percent certainty are the most vulnerable and easiest to emotionally manipulate on their digital platforms. Hard stop. It’s the easiest money they make every day.
Big tech is indeed leveraging and activating our innate tribal instincts—but without killer white tribal identity activation content or better said “tribal fear and identity activation digital bullets” manufactured and published by the American Foxocracy, they can’t “aim their digital trance gun” and exploit the hackable weaknesses embedded in innate human psychology of
proud conservatives.
Stated another way, big tech is the digital gun aimed right at your brain stem, but like gun enthusiasts always like to say, “It’s the bullets and the person pulling the trigger that kill people, not the gun.” Fox News people produce and broadcast the most powerful white tribal identity bullets in the world. Those emotionally lethal bullets allow the big tech platforms to, in turn, fire them into the brain stem of self-identified proud cultural and political conservatives in order to capture and monetize as much of their attention as possible.
But make no mistake—Fox News’s predatory white tribal activation and amplification porn content was already doing its predatory attention and monetization job very well, even before big tech’s surveillance capitalism was unleashed on the world in the early twenty-first century. Today, as the result of connecting two to three billion people around the world who all carry the same innate but latent tribal behavior virus, by injecting them with plutonium-grade, tribal-identity activation and validation pornography via their favorite digital device, the Fox News audience reach has been enlarged by thirty times in America since the early 2000s.
And let’s be clear—no matter your culture or country, where there is a Fox News wannabe aping the Fox News white tribal warfare playbook, there is YouTube, Facebook’s various apps and other digital platforms there to propagate and monetize tribal fear and hate—especially when it comes to ethnic nationalism.
Where does this madness end? Are we powerless to stop or at least slow down this emotional health plague? You may remember that as a society we used to run ads with doctors and celebrities smoking and looking gleeful and attractive. However, when the public data proved that smoking cigarettes was the leading cause of lung cancer and cardio vascular disease we did not ban cigarettes, but we banned the advertising on TV. We educated a generation on the health risk of smoking cigarettes.
And the anti-smoking campaign eventually worked. Why? Because the data also proved that the audiovisual power of TV was the single most powerful media when it came to making smoking cool and attractive outside the movie theater.
Well, my new friends, the data now proves without a doubt that there are very real and extensive mental and physical health risks that primarily come to older Americans who allow themselves to be sucked down into the rabbit hole of Fox News addiction and “Foxholeism.” In other words, there are very real negative consequences that come to a nation full of Foxholes. Many of them, after years in the degenerative digital tribal fear-and-hate Foxhole spiral, wind up so desocialized and estranged from their kids, their close family and important friends that they can no longer hold a civil and civilized agree-to-disagree conversation. They cannot participate in a discussion about their cultural beliefs and political ideology with someone who does not exactly share their world view.
So who is the “snowflake” now?
And of course, according to the right-wing polling Guru Frank Luntz, we now have 80 million or more Americans who report they are estranged from at least one close family or friend over politics. Help me here: if 80 million Americans are estranged from at least one person over politics, doesn’t that mean there are 80 million other Americans who are estranged from that first group?
All of which begs the questions:
What choices are we, as a society, going to make with regard to the easily proven corrosive pathologies attached to Fox News’s white tribal identity activation and radicalization content?
Where does Fox News’s disinformation and white tribal identity porn content fit in the deadly online spectrum of radicalized white tribal identity and far-right white nationalist extremism?
Is Fox News indeed a gateway drug that brings some of the most disaffected and insignificant-feeling men in their digital audience to seek more extreme online right-wing content (e.g. white nationalist radicalization content on 8Chan and Gab.com) so that they eventually feel even more extreme feelings of white tribal identity? Already on Fox News every night, the highest rated Fox News white tribal televangelists like Sean Hannity, Tucker Carlson, and Laura Ingraham mainstream the core white nationalist ideology of “white replacement theory” and “immigrants are invading the country that we know and love.”
And, of course, while Fox News tribal fear and hate televangelists’ use and normalize all the extreme white nationalist terms, and warn their largely white male audience that “the liberals’ goal is to turn the United States you know and love into one big liberal California socialist nation” etc. It’s the bully pulpit of the President of the United States that now out foxes Fox News when it comes to speaking and tweeting white nationalist propaganda.
If this book does nothing more than at least remove the shroud of denial or pretense that “Fox New is just infotainment for old white folks,” then perhaps we can at least start that important and needed conversation. That conversation, like the one we had about smoking long ago and the negative impact from out-of-control big tech that we are having today, is long overdue.
We all must learn and appreciate that falling down the proverbial rabbit hole of white tribal identity is a very long continuum. Clearly, in America today there are horrific outcomes for those in society who fall too deep down that white nationalist rabbit hole and reach the extreme bitter end where white tribal identity morphs into a white supremacy spiral.
We have a choice. We can let Fox News’ playbook of tribal warfare continue to tear apart the core fabric of American life in many millions of American families, or we can fight back.
If you want to fight back, come to www.StopTheFoxocracy.com and join the fight.
If you are a Foxhole that is estranged from the person(s) who gave you this book, come to www.FoxNewsRehab.com and learn how to re-engage with your loved ones. If you are the victim of estrangement to one or more Foxholes, come to www.FoxNewsRehab.com and learn how to begin the healing process.
But please—do something.
AFTERWORD
America is Better than This: It’s Time for the Fox News Reckoning to Fight Back Against Commercial Tribalized Partisanship
Always take sides. Neutrality helps the oppressor, never the victim. Silence encourages the tormentor, never the tormented.
—ELIE WIESEL
I imagine one of the reasons people cling so stubbornly to their hates is because they sense once hate is gone, they will be forced to deal with the pain.
—JAMES BALDWIN
Tribalism was an urge our Founding Fathers assumed we could overcome. And so it has become our greatest vulnerability.
—ANDREW SULLIVAN
Whew! I really hope you feel you’ve gained a new level of awareness about the untold secrets inside Fox News. I hope you now understand the immensely negative psychological impact that the commercial televised/streamed tribal identity pornography industry has on over two hundred million Americans every day.
If nothing else, you now know that you hold the power to inoculate yourself from the seduction and addiction to tribal-hate porn from Fox News or from any source. You also now know if you choose to go down the tribal fear and hate rabbit hole, my research and data say that voyage, without a very real intervention, will have very negative social and health consequences.
The conclusion I’ve come to after a year of research and after fourteen years of working within the Fox News tribal-hate-porn empire is thus pretty simple:
The production and digital redistribution of Fox News’s predatory, seductive, and addictive brand of right-wing tribal identity hate-and-resentment pornography to more than one hundred million Americans monthly serves only one purpose: to fertilize and monetize America’s already enormous toxic levels of tribal hate, polarization, and cultural warfare to harvest billions of dollars in profit.
Under the pretense and cover of its news division, the real business of Fox News is a morally and ethically incendiary conspiracy that weaponizes America against itself.
This leads me to the real question: Is Fox News tribal fear and hate po
rnography the kind of business you want to support? Do we as a country want to support a commercial enterprise that preys on and manipulates the personal anguish and resentments of the most emotionally vulnerable citizens in America just to monetize tribal hate, economic misery, and chronic loneliness?
When do we address America’s massive tribal-hate-porn industry and stop this insanity? I know one thing for sure: We can’t solve a problem if we don’t first acknowledge that it exists. For that reason alone, I hope that you now understand the outsized and highly toxic role played by the fast-growing, out-of-control, weaponized white tribal-identity-porn industry (led by Fox News) in America’s ever-increasing levels of tribal TV driven political and cultural estrangement.
The recent removal of Alex Jones’s InfoWars conspiracy pornography from digital platforms is a start in the fight against tribal hate porn. YouTube’s and Apple’s addition of a meter to show users how many hours a day they are watching their algorithmically selected video content is another positive step in the right direction.
We were guilty of ignorance pre-2008—nobody imagined or foresaw how algorithmically engaging and addictive massively pervasive social media digital platforms would create self-reinforcing negative feedback loops available on any device with Wi-Fi access.
But we have no excuse to ignore the powerful dark side of the American Foxocracy at this point.
The digital and self-reinforcing tribal-hate-validation feedback loop has enormous psychological and behavioral power over our entire society. In the least worst-case scenario, this self-reinforcing digital feedback loop is emotionally degenerative. In the worst-case scenario, this digital feedback loop empowers a twenty-first-century version of digital totalitarianism where a mass movement of disaffected, disengaged, cynical, and emotionally and isolated people come together through their association with an anti-democratic and illiberal mass movement.
