The Twittering Machine

by Richard Seymour

  The ‘networked individualism’ of the internet is both social and a machine. It binds social interactions to protocol. Information, far from wanting to be free, as Californian folk wisdom has it, desires control. It wants hierarchy and infallible instruction: the smack of firm leadership. How the protocols are designed reflects social and cultural values, in a way that is obscure to users. And these values have a distinctly antisocial thrust. Alice Marwick, an academic and former Microsoft researcher, has shown that the culture of the Northern California tech scene where the platforms are based is deeply committed to competition, hierarchy and social status.15 The most admired, cult-like figures among the largely affluent white men who predominate in the scene, are successful businessmen.

  In the 1990s, when the net was being built, the purview of Silicon Valley was essentially that of the Republican right-winger, Newt Gingrich. Gingrich lobbied hard for an internet run along ‘free market’ lines. The aim was that it would result in innovation driven by start-ups, tech geeks and bold venture-capitalist pioneers, and the techno-idealists lapped it up. So did the Clinton White House, an early evangelist for the globalization of the net. In practice, predictably, it resulted in an internet dominated by tech giants and Wall Street. When Marwick says that social media tools ‘materialize’ neo-liberal ideology, therefore, she’s describing the way in which the tech teaches users to think of themselves as the kinds of ‘entrepreneurs’ that tech geeks and Silicon Valley businessmen idealize. The Twittering Machine, organized as a competitive like-hunt, status-hungry and celebrity-obsessed, ideally suited to marketing and commerce, is the technical version of a social machine that preceded it: a stock market of status. This is one of the things that cultural critic Jonathan Beller is getting at when he calls the machinery of computational capital ‘formations of violence’.16 It is the abstract technical expression of unequal relationships produced by complex histories of political violence: racism and riots, class struggles and countercultures, mobsters and McCarthyism. This violence was coded into the machine; presupposed by it.

  The machinery produces, industrially, a social life bent around the imperatives of states and markets. As a technology, it is almost custom-designed for a post-democratic age, for the rule of technocracy and cruelty. To that extent, it builds on existing patterns. The ‘if . . . then’ logic of algorithms is not in itself a new machinery.17 It is used all the time in policymaking, often without the aid of computing: if the passenger has been to x country, then a further search will be carried out; if the applicant has savings, then unemployment benefits will be docked. Many forms of algorithmic control are too complex, thus far, to be handled entirely by machine: border controls and immigration law, for example. However, what big data enables is an extension and depth of control-by-protocol that has never before been seen. It enables the corporate clients of the platforms to algorithmically size up their targets and customize each user’s experience. It permits governments who use the data to scale their bureaucratic action down to the most minute level of analysis, thus improving their efficiency in everything from traffic control to aerial bombardment.

  Post-democracy was well advanced in most of Europe and North America well before the digital platforms appeared. As the political scientist Colin Crouch defines it, a post-democratic society is one that retains the institutions of mass democracy, but where these have negligible effects on policymaking.18 It reduces elections to a spectacle of stage-managed debates and poll-driven simulations of ‘voter demand’. Whereas mass democracy means that popular desires and interests have to be taken seriously, post-democracies are in the business of population management. Like cybernetic systems, post-democracies are far less interested in consent than in moderating the behaviour of elements within the system. Like the algorithmic protocols of the digital platforms, they hit below the intellect, working underneath the surface of persuasion, building realities into our everyday experience. It doesn’t negotiate with our wants, it shapes what we are capable of wanting. And, as the Italian anarchist Errico Malatesta once put it, ‘everything depends on what the people are capable of wanting.’19

  The underground persuasion of reality-shaping is what big tech does really well. It is quite different from what used to be called hegemony. Hegemony is a strategy of obtaining leadership of a broad civil society coalition to achieve political goals. It means building alliances with other groups by taking their interests and desires seriously, rather than just coercing them. It means offering moral leadership rather than simply material incentives. At their most successful, ruling groups are able to explain their own interests in terms of an ‘historic mission’ for the whole society. In the Cold War era, the struggle against communism was this sort of mission. While it surveilled and repressed communists, left-wing trade unionists and radical civil-rights activists, it also won broad popular consent.

  What the platforms have done is far more subterranean. The Twittering Machine proposes nothing, declares nothing good or bad, but works on the infrastructures of everyday life. It might be called a sub-hegemonic practice.

  IV.

  This is clearly an emerging form of techno-political regime. And it is not the participatory online democracy, or agora, that has been vaunted. But nor is it yet clear what that regime will look like in ten or twenty years’ time.

  As John Naughton has written, comparing the internet with the printing press, faced with world-changing technologies we always tend to overstate the short-term consequences and underestimate the long-term consequences. How could, for example, the early book readers have known that the technologies they wielded would inspire the Reformation, let alone forming an indispensable basis for the modern industrial nation-state? The spontaneous assumption might instead have been that the Catholic Church would be empowered. The first mass market created by print was in standardized indulgences.20

  The values that have shaped the creation of the Twittering Machine don’t necessarily determine its destiny. Skinner’s fantasy of a utopia without conflict or human authority broke down. The early hope of cybernetics, to design a system of control by means of organizing communication, turned into its opposite. It helped create, as Justin Joque put it, ‘a globally networked system so complex that no known model could ever describe it, let alone regulate it’.21 And by the same logic, the neo-liberal values that aligned Silicon Valley bosses with the Obama White House are not necessarily the same as the real ideological effects of the machine. We might say that if the machine has its conscious uses, it also has an unconscious. We feign omniscience at our peril. One of the pleasures of the ‘backlash’ style is to be a Cassandra, seeing it all so clearly, yet so impotently. ‘I told you so’ is a dubious consolation. What is more, hasty denunciations risk leaving us with the misapprehension of knowing what we’ve got ourselves into, while injecting an unhelpful nastiness, condescension and paranoia into the conversation. There has been a bonfire of digital vanities, bromides stacked upon platitudes, ‘digital democracy’, ‘the networked citizen’, ‘Twitter revolutionaries’ all going up in smoke. We, who stand in its glare, should be sceptical of provisional analyses being offered with too much certainty.

  We should nonetheless take seriously the fascist potential of the social industry, or its potential to intensify and accelerate proto-fascist tendencies already at work. The forms of fascism that we see in the twenty-first century may not resemble those of the past. The fascist movements of the interwar period were rooted in imperialist ideologies, popular militarism, paramilitary organizations and a world system run by colonial empires and menaced by socialist revolution. These circumstances will not return. The colonies are dead, most armies are professional and there isn’t an abundance of popular organization of any kind, let alone paramilitary organization. Nonetheless, liberal capitalism shows itself to be vulnerable, crisis-ridden and open to challenge by the racist, nationalist far right. And what, in such circumstances, are the cultural valences of the social industry that produces so much of our
social life now? Which tendencies would it select for, and which would it mute?

  There is something about the way in which we interact on the platforms which, whatever else it does, magnifies our mobbishness, our demand for conformity, our sadism, our crankish preoccupation with being right on all subjects. Ironically, this despotic rectitude is allied with exactly the kind of ‘swarm’ propensities that were once idealized as the basis for a new kind of grass-roots power. The ‘swarm’, which began as a metaphor for conscientious citizens holding power to account, might well become a metaphor for the twenty-first century version of fascist street gangs.

  The mistake would be to see this as someone else’s problem, a problem affecting only obvious villains like trolls, hackers and alt-right bullies. Take, instead, something as simple and everyday as the critique-by-quote tweet. Holding aloft a specimen of a really degenerate opinion, we mock it for having the quality of being an opinion, which is that it gets something wrong. Inviting others to join in, we treat disagreement, not as constitutive of any society, but as malevolence, idiocy or the cry of the loser. It is to be settled by group humiliation, sudden orchestrations of mob fury, the stiletto-stab of sadism. This is the context in which, Devorah Baum argues, it’s suddenly as if being wrong is the most intolerable thing in the world and being right is almost like a human right.22 The troll, the witch-hunter, the celebrity, the snowflake who can’t stand being disagreed with: this is all of us, every day. We are not all so, equally, but insofar as we are on the platforms, we are all involved.

  We are denizens, not citizens, of a machine that keeps us addicted, amid endless boring scrolling, with sudden volatile rages, excitements, adrenaline rushes of hate – charmingly euphemized as ‘variable rewards’. A machine that makes wannabe celebrities of all of us, enjoining us to worship those above us in the status ecology while in the same move harnessing our sadism and rage, and directing it with laser-like focus to the schmuck-of-the-day. A machine that reduces information to meaningless stimuli which it jet-sprays at us, much as Trump bombards us with exclamation marks and block capitals. A machine that habituates us to being the manipulable conduits of informational power. There is, in this, a fascist potential.

  V.

  It wasn’t supposed to be like this. The new platform technologies were supposed to be liberal, modern, participatory. The second wave of cyber-utopianism had been much like the first, headlined at the zenith of global power by a Democratic administration in Washington evangelizing for tech, for the globalization of the ‘free and open’ net built in Silicon Valley, and for the ‘new economy’ as a modernizing upgrade.

  If the Clinton administration sought to hardwire as the universal framework for online social interactions a very parochial and eccentric Californian culture of rich white men, the Obama administration wanted to bring tech into the White House. The digital giants were essential, both for Obama and Hillary Clinton’s State Department, to the modernizing of the government and the economy, and to achieving US foreign policy objectives. The White House met Google representatives more than once a week during Obama’s tenure, and he was the first president to host a Twitter ‘town hall’ meeting. Eric Schmidt of Google, Jack Dorsey of Twitter and Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook all supported Obama and had close ties to the White House.

  Clinton, in a major 2010 speech, attacked the usual enemies like hackers and repressive regimes, in defence of an ‘open’ internet. She milked the last dismal vestiges of Californian hippy idealism: alluding to the hoary old sentiment that ‘information wants to be free’, as the hippy entrepreneur and Silicon Valley legend Stewart Brand didn’t quite say.23 She also took to task, as enemies of openness, those countries who didn’t trust the global regulatory oversight of ICANN, an industry-aligned Californian non-profit. Championing an open net was, in addition to being congruent with Washington’s liberal self-image, both a projection of American power and a logical political alliance. Democrats had always been close to telecommunications capital. The wave of monopolization taking place in mass media, resulting in six corporations controlling approximately 90 per cent of the flow of information, had been helped along by Clinton’s 1996 Telecommunications Act.24 What is more, unlike the old economy giants allied with the Bush administration, such as Halliburton, these new economy giants were clean-cut, had no coal under their fingernails. They seemingly traded a mysterious substance – communication, the cloud – of which everyone was in favour, and which was pristine and high-status.

  However, it was also complicated. It was easy enough for the White House to gloat about free information if it inconvenienced Iran. It was easy for the State Department to lobby Twitter to hold off maintenance work during Iran’s Green Movement, telling them that a ‘Twitter revolution’ was happening.25 But when WikiLeaks shared a virtual library of classified State Department documents, the results were embarrassing. It was hardly mind-blowing that US diplomats fawned over dictators like Egypt’s Hosni Mubarak. But these revelations came as the regimes in Tunisia and Egypt were about to fall to popular revolutions. Similar movements would then appear in Bahrain, Algeria, Yemen, Libya, Syria and even Saudi Arabia.

  And suddenly information didn’t want to be free any more. Abruptly, the US had to conduct a series of foreign policy pivots. At first, it tried to defend the Egyptian dictatorship, with Vice President Joe Biden telling Tahrir Square protesters that Mubarak was no dictator but ‘an ally of ours’. This proved unavailing; it tacked briefly in the wake of the demand for electoral democracy before swerving behind a new, blood-bath-inaugurated coup led by General Sisi. The US supported the Saudi invasion of Bahrain and aerial assault on Yemen, crushing both of those uprisings. It used limited military force to intervene in the Libyan uprising and to pilot a pro-US leadership to power, with ultimately disastrous results.

  And amid its embarrassment and its perplexity, the administration sought to indict everyone associated with the WikiLeaks revelations. This, for the old Washington establishment, exemplified the bad, irresponsible side of the internet. It was the net as Assange or Pirate Party activists fantasized it could be: a stateless anarchy, without intellectual property rights. The fact that they made leaking ‘sexy’, as security experts put it, and that the enormously modish trolling group Anonymous had joined the war on secrecy, raised the stakes and demanded examples be set. Private Chelsea Manning, blamed for the leaks, was held in solitary confinement at a supermax prison and subject to what the UN special rapporteur on torture called cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment. The Justice Department demanded access to the Twitter accounts of WikiLeaks volunteers, dismissing privacy and free speech concerns as ‘absurd’.26

  It appeared, for a moment, as though the White House had misunderstood the real potential of the social industry, skewered by its own hype about ‘Twitter revolutions’ and the advantages of tech. Indeed, there was and is a tension here, and it revolved around the politics of information management. The security state’s ancient dream had been that it would monopolize the management of information.27 The cutting edge of encryption, storage and control should be in the gift of the National Security Agency. This twenty-first century Leviathan would have unique ‘back door’ access to any information system. That is not how the tech giants see it. For them, their monopoly over content and over the management of user information is part of a system of private property from which they profit. User information and data is itself valuable property, whose value diminishes if it is not secured.

  Washington thus found itself in a number of direct battles with the tech giants. Twitter fought the Justice Department on its demands for the account information of WikiLeaks volunteers, in a case brought jointly with the American Civil Liberties Union, which it ultimately lost.28 Yahoo fought the National Security Agency in a secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act court case over the latter’s demand for user account details under its PRISM program. Google resorted to internal encryption to evade surveillance when it was revealed that both the NSA and
GCHQ had wiretapped the firm’s communications. Apple fought the FBI to a standstill over encryption on its phones. The FBI wanted to force Apple to unlock an iPhone belonging to Rizwan Farook, one of the shooters in the San Bernardino massacre in December 2015. Apple resisted in the courts, and ultimately the FBI backed off when it used third-party software to hack the phone, revealing nothing of pertinence. FBI director James Comey complained that Apple allowed ‘people to hold themselves beyond the law’.29 This was revealing, suggesting that he expected there to be no area of life not potentially scrutable by the law. If the internet was nothing but an elaborate surveillance mechanism, the law should be the beneficiary. The American state had been a vigorous champion of tech, its property regime and its global commercial success. Yet their property claims were now disrupting the security state’s fantasy of omniscience.

  Washington nonetheless continued to champion the tech giants. Indeed, the government found that it was able to hijack the features of the social media platforms to extend its surveillance, building the biggest domestic spying programme in US history. It used Facebook to launch cyberwar programmes aimed at enemies, implanting malware and stealing files from personal hard drives. It was this attack on the security of the platform that led to an incensed Mark Zuckerberg calling the White House to complain about the lack of transparency in NSA programmes. He said that such secretive, counter-security measures not only put users at risk but would also incline them to ‘believe the worst’ – and, he implied, disconnect.30 The security state was threatening the informational property of the platforms. Despite such tensions, the platforms remained close to Washington. Theirs was not a battle over values, but a turf struggle over informational control. It was platforms like Google, Facebook and Twitter which, in the first place, had created this unprecedented surveillance, presenting ample legal and illegal ways for government agencies to exploit the resulting data.