ISIS was a franchise with a central hierarchical structure, not an autonomist collective. Its utopian fantasies were not cyber-utopian. It therefore exploited social media far more efficiently than the protest movements of 2011, without unconsciously mimicking or depending on the model of association found on the platforms. It harnessed the medium’s viral and swarming properties, using digital connections to encourage unpredictable acts of terror beyond its territorial grasp, as in Beirut and the Bataclan. But it didn’t rely on networks to outflank centralized power. Centralized power was already collapsing, and ISIS was building a new regime in its place, taxing a population of some seven or eight million subjects and controlling profitable oilfields. It was armed and disciplined, internally coercive and seeking ideological homogeneity. It tacitly recognized that the forms of association on the platform are not ‘horizontal’ but built around complex informational hierarchies that could be manipulated.
US counter-insurgency, confronting ISIS, was likewise opportunistic in its use of the medium. While the greatest emphasis was placed on coordinated aerial bombardment, racking up tens of thousands of bodies according to the US Military, the Obama administration began to talk cyberwar. This was already in vogue in the administration. It had used cyber-sabotage against North Korea’s nuclear weapons programme. It cooperated with Israeli intelligence in writing code for the Stuxnet worm – a viral attack that shut down Iran’s nuclear power facilities in Natanz. In 2015, State Department counterterrorism official Alberto Fernandez argued that the US, in a break from the ‘marketplace of ideas’ rhetoric, needed its own ‘troll army’ to combat ISIS.48 Later the same year, the US Air Force bombed a ‘command and control’ building discovered by combing ISIS’s social media streams and associated metadata. By 2016, they were vaunting their ability to use ‘cyberbombs’ to hack and disrupt ISIS computer networks.49 ISIS, for its part, allegedly responded by using the social industry to accumulate background information on a hundred US Military personnel and posting a ‘hit list’ for supporters to target. But in an example of the mise en abyme of online trolling, wherein one never knows for sure who the enemy is or what game they’re playing, the Associated Press later suggested that the threat was actually the work of Russian trolls. The logic of the online network thus superimposed itself on the more conventional logic of asymmetrical war.
ISIS’s territorial control was ended by factors extrinsic to its use of the social industry. Its brutality undercut its social basis and eroded the cooperation of notables in Iraqi, Syrian and Libyan territories that it held. Its early successes had come easily, in a lightning streak, conferring on it an image of divine omnipotence. The first serious military setbacks blew away that aura and recruitment slowed down dramatically. And, of course, its fantastical project of building a theocratic state while conducting an asymmetrical war with the powers that had already devastated Iraq, was in its own terms a huge overreach. It created more deadly enemies than its tens of thousands of recruits could fight. It’s difficult to believe their project was ever anything other than a grandiose delusion.
Yet the technological basis of ISIS’ international recruitment still left them with an added weakness. Most of their recruits, as the UN reported in 2017 after ISIS lost Raqqah, were either irreligious or knew nothing about the fundamentals of Islam. Still less did they grasp the elaborate political ideologies emanating from Islamist thinkers like Syed Qutb, the Egyptian theologian and Muslim Brotherhood member who so strongly influenced this strain of jihadism. They were largely young men, socially marginalized, economically and educationally disadvantaged, travelling to Syria or Iraq without really understanding what they were getting into. Many of them, the study suggested, were criminalized men seeking redemption. Another study by George Washington University found a recruit from Texas who moved to the Islamic State looking for a role as an English teacher.50 The ideological thinness of the attraction to ISIS among those reached by Twitterstorm and hashtag-hacking is likely to be part of the reason for the rapid outflow of recruits as the war turned harsher.
The Islamic State has fallen, with fighters controlling just 4 per cent of the territory they once did, but the organization known as ISIS remains. It is, among other things, a form of twenty-first-century fascism. Its use of the platforms shows us something about how new fascisms will work, in terms of their culture, communications and ideology.51 It is, to use Jonathan Beller’s phrase, a form of ‘fractal fascism’. If the spectacle is a social relationship mediated by images, what Guy Debord called the concentrated spectacle of Führer celebrity worship has given way in the social industry to the diffuse spectacle of commodity images.52 In the social industry, it’s one, two, three, many Führers.
From ISIS to the alt-right, new fascisms are emerging around microcelebrities, mini-patriarchs and the flow of homogenized messages. If classical fascism directed narcissistic libido investments into the image of the leader, as the embodiment of the people and its historical destiny, neo-fascism harvests the algorithmic accumulation of sentiment in the form of identification-by-Twitterstorm. If the image of the fascist mass was once best captured by the bird’s-eye view of aerial photography, it is now available in a much higher-resolution bird’s eye view as metrics. And if classical fascism built its organization through recruitment from social organizations, such as veterans’ clubs, germinal neo-fascism recruits from the loose associational practices of the platforms. The networked social movement has acquired jackboots.
VIII.
Is Donald Trump the future, or a transitional tremor? A great deal of alarm about the social industry has been concerned with its effects on electoral systems: the dark arts of the algorithm propelling ‘populists’ (or, according to taste, ‘authoritarians’) to power.
The world’s first ‘Twitter president’ is indeed a natural social industry star. And as a Twitter celebrity, he was constructing his political profile from his first real tweet in 2011, when he signalled his participation in an online campaign claiming that Obama was not born in the US and was not eligible to be president. He has proven to be excellent at riding the waves of aggregated sentiment, far more effective than his opponents. As a presidential campaigner, Trump used digital media to orchestrate mass media interest.53 The campaign’s tactic, according to one of his former digital strategists, was to keep saying ‘off the cuff’ apparently crazy things, that would compel the media to give him coverage. He succeeded, gaining 15 per cent more coverage than Clinton, despite the media being largely hostile to him.
Twitter also enabled him to shape the campaign as an exciting duel with his enemies. An analysis of Trump’s tweets during the election found that they effectively substituted for campaign position statements.54 Most of his tweets attacked the Washington establishment, blaming it for uncontrolled migration, terror and job losses, rather than advocating a policy position. He limited public access to his governing agenda. Clinton’s online campaign struggled, by contrast, to build hashtagged enthusiasm with #ImWithHer and such memes as the #pantsuit, soliciting the enthusiasm of upwardly mobile career women struggling against sexism. Some of her tactics downright failed, including a listicle identifying her with ‘your abuela’, where ‘abuela’ is the Spanish word for ‘grandmother’. Latin voters, far from being impressed, began to post criticisms of her support for militarized border controls with the hashtag #NotMyAbuela quickly going viral.
As President, encircled by a hostile media and Congress, subject to investigation and hamstrung by intelligence leaks, Trump used Twitter as a refuge of uncompromised sovereignty. There, he could announce policy, denounce his enemies, praise his own record and attack the legacy media (with the exception of the sunny, far-right morning show, Fox and Friends) as #fakenews and #fraudnews. It is clear that Trump has been able to use the platforms to consolidate a political base in a way that would not have been possible if the old set of relations between mass media and the liberal state remained intact.
Nonetheless, as with such figures
as Narendra Modi of India, Rodrigo Duterte of the Philippines and Jair Bolsonaro of Brazil, Trump has benefited mainly from the political weaknesses of his opponents. While Modi, Duterte, Bolsonaro and Trump have all used the social industry and messaging services effectively to bypass legacy media, they have each benefited from the (perceived and actual) corruption and stalemate of the political establishment.
In office, Trump has thus far mainly demonstrated the weakness of the nationalist right. On trade, despite repudiating the potentially lucrative Trans-Pacific Partnership, he has been unable to propose a serious alternative to the institutions of liberal globalization. On foreign policy, despite his public deference to Putin, he has largely acceded to the lines of action demanded by the Pentagon in Syria and North Korea, albeit that he has freed them to pursue that agenda in a more radical way than they were able to under Obama’s micromanagement. On his promised massive structural investment, he got nowhere. On his trade war with China, he has raised tariffs, but the total levels still remain historically low. Much of what he has achieved required the connivance of Congressional Republicans, such as the standard Republican tax cut for the rich, or the promotion of a hard-right Federalist Society judge to the Supreme Court. Unsurprisingly, by the summer of 2017, Trump’s ousted ally Steve Bannon lamented that the presidency the far right ‘fought for, and won, is over’.
The difficulty faced by the far right is that political success has outrun social and political organization. Historically, the far right has succeeded by building roots in thick networks of civic associations, from fraternal organizations in the US South to veteran and military clubs in Germany.55 It has, in this context, developed a ‘grass-roots’ paramilitary presence to control the streets. Such civic organization is far more patchy and thin today. The technological harvesting of sentiment can briefly aggregate electorally sufficient crowds, given a crisis of the establishment. But it is a poor substitute for the kind of organized and armed power that could actualize the YouTube coup that Naughton describes. And if this was the sole basis for fascism in the future, it is more than likely that the traditional governing centre would reassert its dominance. The latter’s entitled cry of protest in the face of failure – per Wilde, the rage of Caliban not seeing his own face in a glass – would, and will, give way to a hard-headed and resourceful campaign to stabilize the relationship of the medium to political power.
The fascist potential of the social industry doesn’t necessarily lie in its short-term electoral consequences, ominous and damaging as these may be. Rather, far more lethally, it may be indicated by the phenomenon fashionably known as ‘stochastic terror’.56 This concept, anonymously minted in 2011, refers to the way that communications can be used to incite random violence and terror. The violence, though statistically predictable within a given population, is individually unpredictable. The Twittering Machine is designed for just this kind of stochastic influencing. The use of algorithms to customize user experience depends on the idea that, statistically, x content will generate y number of z behaviours over a given population. Though someone must choose, in some way, to act on the stimulus, the machinery bypasses the question of individual responsibility by administering a data set.
Currently, part of the strategy of the rump ISIS group is to use social media campaigns to work on and put to motion existing reservoirs of sentiment, existing capacities for murder. Just as it once encouraged supporters to wave the ISIS flag, it now asks them to extend its physical reach and project violence into otherwise unreachable states. Most of the attacks are in Iraq and Afghanistan, where the jihadists have their own forces. But from stabbings in Marseille, Westminster and Edmonton (Canada), and vehicle attacks in New York, Nice, Barcelona, Ohio, Stockholm and London, to shootings in Toronto, Paris and Orlando, ISIS has claimed a global body count. It has used its hashtagged franchise model to motivate disparate, random attacks by lending them an appearance of global coherence, direction and belonging.
The networked far right, from its ‘gendertrolling’ MRA wing to its overt white supremacists, has generated its own share of ‘lone wolf’ desperadoes: far more, in the United States, than the jihadists. In the decade from 2008 to 2017, according to the Anti-Defamation League, 71 per cent of fatalities from individual terror attacks were caused by the far-right.57 The tactical repertoire ranges from disorganized and low-tech, such as the neo-Nazi James Fields’ vehicular assault on anti-fascist protesters in Charlottesville resulting in the death of Heather Heyer, to more planned armed assaults, such as the mass shootings at the Quebec City Mosque and the Tree of Life Synagogue. Media commentary has begun to argue that the internet is partly to blame.58 For example, the Quebec shooter Alexandre Bissonnette avidly consumed racist content from right-wing activist Ben Shapiro and neo-fascist Richard Spencer. Robert Bowers, who shot up the Tree of Life Synagogue during a Shabbat service, was an active user of the alt-right Twitter epigone, Gab. The so-called ‘MAGA bomber’, who tried to bomb George Soros, Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, had recently threatened a Twitter user with death: Twitter’s moderator had declined to take action, explaining that the tweet didn’t violate Twitter’s community standards.
Blaming social media activity for the actions of these murderers in any direct and individualized way would simply beg the convoluted question of cause and effect. To what extent, for example, was Alexandre Bissonnette a fan of Ben Shapiro’s content because he was already on the road to becoming a racist killer? How much did whatever he saw on Gab enable Robert Bowers’ belief that the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society, by helping settle refugees, was bringing ‘invaders’ that ‘kill our people’? In what way, if at all, did it tip him over the edge, leading him to declare: ‘I can’t sit by and watch my people get slaughtered. Screw your optics, I’m going in’? There could, by definition, be no answer to this. The effects of content in the social industry, as with advertising, are collectivizing: they are designed to work across a population.
We are, to some extent, working in the dark. At present, there is no single dominant far-right brand or franchise capable of aggregating and shaping these attacks as part of a global narrative. There is no armed right-wing hub of attraction able to draw a swarm of like-minded warriors: no fascist answer to Occupy. Fascism, in most cases, dares not speak its name. Fascist terror is ‘stochastic’ because fascism is still fractal: the armed shitstorm, a material possibility of the medium every bit as much as the meatspace troll, has yet to materialize. But these are early days for the networked fascism of the twenty-first century.
____________
iv The ‘red pill’ is a metaphor used by right-wing activists for the process of ideological conversion. Taken from the movie The Matrix, it ostensibly entails making people aware of harsh, painful realities. As in the movie, however, the real promise of the red pill is that it is both an escape from a depressing life and the beginning of an adventure.
CONCLUSION
WE ARE ALL SCRIPTURIENT
Writing is pre-eminently the technology of cyborgs
Donna Haraway
If anyone knew with what impatience and vexatiousness I pen down my Conceptions, they might be very well assured that I am not only free from, but incapable of the common disease of this Scripturient age
Henry More,
‘An Explanation of the Grand Mystery of Godliness’
I.
The chronophage is a monster that eats time. Squatting, insectoid, on top of the Corpus Clock in Cambridge, it mechanically turns the wheel, and snaps its jaws to consume each second. On the hour, a chain drops into a small wooden coffin in the back of the clock.
An industry that monetizes ‘time on device’ is a chronophage of a different order, with the tick of the clock replaced by the click of keys or the tap of thumbs on screen. A social machine that organizes and measures our scarce attention, assigning a numerical value to every scroll, pause, keystroke and click. A near-death experience, measuring out its approach by the second.
It make
s time itself a commodity, albeit a very unevenly distributed one. Every time we average life expectancies, we bracket the worlds of plunder and prey, the centuries of colonial and class history concentrated in the huge differences of life chances across the planet. What is universal is that time is scarce. There are only so many hours in a day, so many days in a year and so many years in a life. The fictional ‘average’ human being on the planet has seventy years, or approximately six hundred thousand hours. Four hundred thousand of those will be spent awake.
If a life is defined by what we attend to, then from this aerial view, screen time, watch time, and time on device are ways of quantifying the life consumed as raw material by the social industry and its sister industries in amusement, entertainment and news. The spread of smartphone ownership has expedited the colonization of more and more of life by these attention-seeking industries. They work themselves into the interstices of the bulks of time we spend at work, eating, going to the toilet, socializing or in transit, and gradually enlarge their share.
The time taken by the Twittering Machine expands every year, both individually and in aggregate. The average global internet user now spends 135 minutes per day on the social industry platforms.1 If spread uniformly over a life, this would amount to fifty thousand hours. Statista conservatively estimates that between 2010 and 2020, social industry users will have trebled from approximately one billion to three billion. This is in the context of an even larger share of life spent interacting with screens, much of it in computerized workplaces. For example, Americans spend eleven hours every day interacting with screens: most of their waking reality is a simulacrum. Such figures, of course, merely gesture with a hefty pinch of salt towards a scale, a quantity of decisions taken.
The Twittering Machine Page 20
