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This article is a preview from the Autumn 2019 edition of New Humanist

We are living through something unprecedented. An open-ended social experiment, funded by venture capital, supported by elements of the US military and security state. An industrialised system of writing. We’re writing more than ever before in human history. This is the basis for the world’s most profitable industry: the social industry.

The social industry was supposed to be a source of democratic empowerment. If we could all self-publish, each find our own audience, then the old hierarchies would be challenged. Industrial media giants would no longer enjoy ideological monopolies. State secrecy would be weakened. Networked crowds would easily outflank immobile, centralised forms of power. Even celebrity would be democratised. Anyone with a social media account has a public image and a public-relations strategy.

Yet how quickly cyber-utopianism became cyber-cynicism. At one stage, the tech giants gloried in their association with democratic uprisings in Tunisia and Egypt. Today, social media is far better known for incubating gleeful trolling sociopathy, “fake news”, misogyny and sadistic personal attacks. By 2017, a fifth of Twitter’s total value was reportedly down to Trump and his tweetstorms. From the hyped “Twitter Revolutions” to the first, equally hyped, “Twitter President”, it has been a hell of a comedown. In the ensuing tech-lash, the things we have learned about social media have been increasingly worrying, not just politically, but for users themselves. Study after study links the industry to increased depression, self-harm and suicide.

And why should we expect anything else? The social industry was not invented to free us, but to capture social life and turn it to profit. When Theodor Adorno wrote of the “culture industry”, arguing that culture was being universally commodified and homogenised, it was a vivid exaggeration. The social industry has gone much farther. It actually subjects social life to an invariant script, a written formula designed to foster and control user engagement. And the way that formula models social life reflects, as academic Alice Marwick’s research shows, the class outlook of wealthy men in northern California: competitive, hierarchical and status-hungry. It is no coincidence that life on social media, driven by a struggle for scarce attention, so often devolves into a war of all against all.

The social industry is a chronophage: it eats time. If life is defined by what we attend to then attention economies quantify life as raw material. That material is subject to absolute scarcity. It’s a sociological truism that people feel more pressed for time, more hurried, even where average working hours haven’t changed. This is partly because smartphones mean work penetrates easily into leisure hours. But the average global internet user now spends 135 minutes per day working on the social media platforms, perhaps more time than is spent meeting friends. Over a whole life, this would amount to 50,000 hours of work for the social industry. We might ask the minimal utopian question: what else could we be doing with that time?

The lure is that we can write whatever we like to anyone we like: friends, celebrities, jihadists, porn stars, politicians. We can find friends, build careers, pursue political agendas. But in the new economy of writing, we are no more in control than the Luddites were in control of the machines they smashed. We have access only on condition that we work, by feeding the machine with data about ourselves. The more we engage, the better it knows us, and the more accurately it can goad us into engaging more. Everything we see in our feeds is a somatic barrage of information designed to keep us working.

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This is a form of power never seen before, a technopolitical regime that defies our customary ways of explaining the world. It is a capitalist industry, combining production and consumption in a single flow, but it doesn’t offer a single product. At present, user experience is redolent of 24-hour news, the stock market, reality television and Neighbourhood Watch: but that will evolve. It enjoys the surveillance power of states, the ideological power of the mass media, and the commercial power of business empires. It bisects business and politics.

We, as users, are also in a new situation. We are neither consumers nor voters. We are unwaged labourers: digital “serfs”, as computer philosophy writer Jaron Lanier puts it. We don’t think about the work because we are “users”, much as heroin addicts are users. The guilty confessions of former social media bosses, from Sean Parker to Chamath Palihapitiya, confirm that the industry models its practices on addiction. The “like” button is cybercrack, a little hit of social validation. But storms of disapproval are also part of a volatile system of “variable rewards”. Like the behaviour of a mercurial lover, they keep us needy and guessing. And we are laboratory subjects. The platforms of the social industry are designed, like psychologist B. F. Skinner’s “operant conditioning chamber”, to control behaviour with rewards and punishments. As users, we submit to constant real-time surveillance and manipulation, the fruits of which can be put to work for advertising, academic research, electoral campaigns, or cyberwar.

Even as old powers like print media are disrupted by this, a new technopolitical regime is being created. This is exactly what traditional Washington, especially the Clinton and Obama administrations, hoped for: that the internet would modernise American capitalism and further globalise its power. Yet it also made trouble for the old Washington centre. It has created new vectors of cyberwar in which geopolitical opponents, hacktivists and jihadists have landed blows on Washington. It has degenerated the already deteriorating information ecologies on which democratic legitimacy depends. Whether or not “fake news” can be blamed for Trump’s success, its proliferation tells us something important about the social industry. The way it uses information doesn’t select for accuracy, but for impact: whatever keeps us attentive and industrious.

The subtle power of this industry is greater than any press empire. Not only are our devices individual; so are our data profiles. Whoever reaches us through social media is like a disembodied voice speaking directly into our ear. What distinguishes the social industry from ideologically driven print media is that it is, in principle, content-agnostic. It is gluttonous for all content, the technology ready to instantly commodify even the dark sides of social life. Livestreamed murders, rapes and suicides will be removed, but not before they have spawned surges of monetisable attention in the news media. Mark Zuckerberg quickly withdrew his affirmation that he had no problem with Holocaust denial on his platform, but he was telling an important truth.

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So why, then, have the far right done so well out of the social industry? If Trump is a moneyspinner for Twitter, YouTube is the new talk radio, having “red-pilled’ many activists and generated lucrative microcelebrity economies on the far right. Tommy Robinson and Alex Jones, until recently, “influenced” like beauty bloggers and cashed in accordingly. And the more success they enjoyed, the more valuable they were to the platforms.

Perhaps the key to the far right’s success is that the social industry has fused entertainment and politics more efficiently than any previous system. The technologies facilitate this cultural shift. The academic Zeynep Tufekci found that the far right benefits from the algorithms designed to keep people watching. The “up next” system guides users toward more “extreme content” – male rage, conspiracy theory, Holocaust revisionism. Here, “extreme content” is akin to “extreme sport”: an illicit thrill, delivered automatically and intimately, by a machine that knows us better than we know ourselves. It is not that YouTube prefers far-right content, any more than Google is partial to the “false flag” theories that its algorithms help promote. It is simply that infotainment is an efficient, low-cost means of orchestrating attention.

The social industry also thrives on the sort of volatile culture war that is congenial to reaction. Much is said about “identity politics” on social media, but the industry has its own internal identity politics. Everyone who engages has an identity, a self-image, on which they constantly labour. That involves getting caught up in constant surges of aggregated sentiment and attention. There is always a new enemy to berate, a new outrage to gyrate over. Through these outrages, communities are formed, usually in antagonism to others. Cultural differences become ossified, more like borders than weather fronts. In these storms, through which major cultural and social changes are filtered, the modern “alt-right” has congealed. It was #gamergate that catalysed a toxic stew of chauvinism, fear and resentment into the Men’s Rights Activists (MRA) movement. Just as it was #birthergate that catapulted Trump to the top.

While accelerating a crisis of knowledge, the industry makes cultural openings for a new form of fascist infotainment. Far-right clickbait insinuates itself into the gaps created by the economic crisis of journalism. Charismatic racist demagogues thrive on the social industry, while elected politicians are desublimated, showing themselves to be as petty and belligerent as everyone else. Conspiracist infotainment thrives on paranoia, which, amid a general breakdown in trust, is radicalised in the social industry: you never know if your interlocutor is a troll or a Russian sockpuppet. What we call conspiracy theory is often an attempt by citizens with few resources to work out, through ad hoc investigatory committees, what is real.

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Spitting from the social industry’s culture wars and conspiracist panics, like sparks from a furnace, are acts of senseless violence, from the MRA killer Alek Minassian in Toronto to the Islamophobe Darren Osborne in London. We have seen conspiracist vigilantes, like the heavily armed Edgar Maddison Welch, investigate “fake news” panics at gunpoint. We have seen trolling fascist “anons” from gamer message boards, like the killers at the Christchurch Mosque or the Poway Synagogue, train their memed, ironised cruelty on flesh and blood.

It may appear somewhat moralising, even scapegoating, to link the social industry to such violence. The “lone wolf” is not a recent invention. Yet we don’t in other cases expect internet tempests to remain online. The swarm logic of the social industry, its surges of attention and its method of aggregating crowds based on a momentary sentiment, have helped build political street movements. The gilets jaunes protest, however politically complex, is nothing if not the meatspace manifestation of an online shitstorm. Swarm logic has also been orchestrated to deliver political shocks, as with the Trump and Bolsonaro election campaigns, the Five Star Movement’s breakthrough in Italy, or the Brexit Party’s raid on Britain’s stalemated parliamentary system. It is therefore only natural, even mundane, to expect that a certain share of violently misogynistic MRA trolls and Crusader-fetishising cyber-Islamophobes incubated in the online culture wars will become violent. These are individual murderers. It can only be a matter of time before the shitstorm itself takes up arms.

The vogueish term for internet-inspired violence is “stochastic terror”. This treats online propaganda as being functionally equivalent to advertising. Like advertising, online exhortations against women or Muslims have a conditioning effect that, while individually unpredictable, can be predicted over a whole population. In any given population of Tommy Robinson fans, there is a probability of a certain number of Darren Osbornes. This sounds neat and tidy, but it doesn’t actually explain anything. Why, for example, does racist, misogynist or fascist propaganda have an audience in the first place? Why does some content produce violence, even without overtly calling for it, while other content doesn’t? Above all, the term doesn’t explain anything about the role of the medium.

The social industry is a cultural centrifuge, an accelerator, and an engine of new forms of politicisation. It plays a role in politicising the mental distress of those (typically white and male) users who find in the “red pill” an unbeatable antidepressant. It algorithmically connects the propaganda to its audiences, data point to data point, as a matter of course. The question is whether it also helps produce the kind of user who would be available for political violence.

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A surprising answer to this puzzle is furnished by J. M. Berger, a security intellectual and expert on the Islamic State. In an early analysis of ISIS’s social media strategies, Berger described how the group turned Twitter into a “carrier wave for millenarian contagion”. As an apocalyptic movement, ISIS needed to cultivate among its followers the animating apprehension of end times. It was not ISIS’s style to emphasise eschatological complexities, however. Rather, it sought to summon a community into existence, which would vividly experience this “apocalyptic time”. Apocalyptic time is characterised by a sense of temporal acceleration, social contagion and subjective immersion. Freak events appear to come, relentlessly and miraculously, from “nowhere”. “Everyone” seems to be gripped in the fever. Ordinary, secular experience drops out of sight. In apocalyptic time, the normal rules don’t apply. Extraordinary, violent action becomes thinkable.

This would have been the experience of ISIS followers on Twitter. During every jihadist advance they were blitzed with accelerated postings, news of spectacular, bold breakthroughs. They were drawn into communities discovered by cyber-jihadist tactics of memeing and hashtag-jacking. A flurry of content – first-person shooter footage, video games, battle segments, executions, and the iconic black flag fluttering over Arcadian scenes of peace and plenty – absorbed them into the apocalyptic dreamworld. Yet ISIS accounts were simply regimenting the ordinary experience of being on Twitter, the better to recruit a mobile theocratic army. They are only the most organised millenarian killers. Recent “lone wolves” incubated in the social industry are notable for the fact that their atrocities are intended as interventions in a perceived coming reckoning, whether it is #whitegenocide or the “incel uprising”. And the killers intend their acts to be final, expecting or courting death.

“Apocalyptic time” is the time of the social industry. Life on the platforms is continuously accelerating towards the latest climax, the latest showdown, new shocks that might engender unworldly confidence in miraculous possibility. Social contagion, and immersion in the feverish excitement of lifeworlds extruded from the secular order, is not a tactical invention of jihadists. It is the sum total of “trending topics”. It is the stuff of banality – but then, as philosopher Maurice Blanchot said, “the Apocalypse is disappointing.”

There is a pointed irony here. The social industry evolved from Pentagon conservatism and Silicon Valley libertarianism. It was guided to dominance by Washington liberalism, and heralded by the emancipatory politics of Occupy and the Arab Spring. Its offer is liberatory: in exchange for data, it promises new forms of participation, new ways of speaking up. And yet, as Philip Pullman would tell us, every tool has intentions of which the user knows nothing. What if the industry has instead given us new forms of murderous reaction? What if it has helped birth the fascist potential of the 21st century?

Richard Seymour is the author of "The Twittering Machine" (Indigo Press), published on 19 August