You Are Here 2. The Root of All Memes Published on: Apr 27, 2020 License: Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC-BY 4.0) You Are Here 2. The Root of All Memes Very little sunlight makes it to the redwood forest floor. Even on clear days, but especially when it’s cloudy, a grayness suffuses. The grayness is dark but also green. It’s veiled but casts no shadow. It’s a quality of light but clings to your skin as a mist. In the grayness, in the greenness, mist melts into branch, and branch into trunk, and trunk into dirt. All pours onto the redwoods’ woven roots, as much above ground as below, tangled and tumbling off the sides of embankments, jutting up from fallen old growth, crisscrossing like veins across the trail. There’s a sense, in the forest, that what happens over there, beyond this tree line or gully, has everything to do with the here where you’re standing. Biologically, it does. Dense networks of fungi and roots link this tree to that tree to another and another with such efficiency, and such robust energetic exchange, that distinguishing one tree from the next becomes mere semantics. They are, in every way that matters, the same tree. What happens right here is what happens over there. Connection to the point of unity. The internet as we know it is designed to enable precisely the intertwine seen in the redwoods. Information seeping from here to there with ambient ease is the point; content flowing from amateurs to professionals then back again is the point; expression spanning the globe in previously unimaginable ways is the point. All the network enclosures that kept polluted deluges like the Satanic Panics relatively confined in the 1980s and 1990s have grown increasingly permeable as roots have fused with trunks have fused with branches have fused with mists. Our problem now is not that things have gone unexpectedly wrong. It’s that they’ve gone exactly as they were designed to go—with profound consequences for how much pollution is generated, where it travels, and whom it affects. This design is rooted in liberalism. “Liberal” in this sense does not necessarily mean “politically progressive” or “morally permissive,” as the term is often used in contemporary US politics. Instead, liberalism as a political philosophy extends all the way back to the Enlightenment of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries and back farther still to the scientific revolutions of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Claimed in different combinations by a broad range of political perspectives, liberalism enshrines individual freedoms like free speech, a free press, property rights, and civil liberties.1 Liberalism informs libertarianism, which places particular emphasis on personal autonomy, as well as neoliberalism, which places particular emphasis on free-market capitalism. 2 You Are Here 2. The Root of All Memes Online, liberalism is most clearly articulated through the maxim that “information wants to be free.” This sentiment reflects liberalism’s staunch defense of negative personal freedoms: freedom from external restriction.2 John Perry Barlow, cofounder of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, soaringly affirmed the negative freedoms of online spaces in his 1996 essay “A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace.” Barlow’s essay does exactly what its title suggests. It’s our internet, Barlow argued; the government can jump off a cliff. Barlow was hardly alone in his resistance to government intervention or his celebration of negative freedoms. As technology historian Steven Levy explains, freedom of information was foundational to the computer revolution of the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s,3 and science fiction writer Bruce Sterling proclaimed in 1993 that freedom to do as one wished was one of the main draws of the early internet.4 Unsurprisingly, libertarianism was a dominant political philosophy among early internet adopters. All these negative freedoms fundamentally shaped the digital landscape. First, freedom from censorship ensured that the maximum amount of information— regardless of how harmful, dehumanizing, or false—roared across the landscape. Freedom from regulation encouraged what journalism professor Meredith Broussard calls “technochauvinism,” the overall sense that if something can be done, that’s reason enough to do it.5 Build the website. Share the information. Thus spoke Mark Zuckerberg: move fast and break things.6 This origin story is only partial, of course, a history written by the victors. As technology reporter April Glaser chronicles, Barlow’s 1996 declaration was one of many network possibilities.7 Indigenous antiglobalization activists in Mexico, for example, were simultaneously building a very different sort of digital community. They may have shared some ideals with the likes of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, but their focus was on positive freedoms: empowering marginalized communities for the good of the collective, not merely protecting individual rights for the benefit of those individuals. Many leftist organizers followed the same path. Liberalism’s negative freedoms, however, were what attracted neoliberal entrepreneurs to the fledgling internet; communities to be cultivated became markets to be tapped. We have the forest we have because freedom from won. Those who moved fast and broke things, who found increasingly ingenious ways to ensure that information wouldn’t just be free but also profitable, didn’t think about the toxins their social 3 You Are Here 2. The Root of All Memes platforms might filter into the forest. Nor did they think about the toxins they themselves were spreading. In an impassioned 2019 acceptance speech for— appropriately enough—an Electronic Frontier Foundation award named after John Perry Barlow, sociologist danah boyd highlighted these toxins, particularly the industry’s normalized misogyny, racial exclusion, and tolerance of sexual predators. “These are the toxic logics that have infested the tech industry,” boyd stated. “And, as an industry obsessed with scale, these are the toxic logics that the tech industry has amplified and normalized.”8 Decision makers within the tech sector aren’t the only contributors to the internet’s polluted outcomes; the millions of its early adopters who structured their lives around the jubilant cry don’t ever tell me what to do also sidestepped the toxins they carried. Neither group thought about the ecological consequences of their actions, because they didn’t have to. They were positioned behind a set of deep memetic frames that kept them safe, happy, and utterly oblivious as pollution coursed through the forest’s roots. One of these frames was the white racial frame, which allowed participants to—among other things—heed Barlow’s utterly Cartesian proclamation that the internet is the “new home of Mind” and that cyberspace “is not where bodies live.”9 Any harassment directed at people of color, any hate speech, any harm, that wasn’t real, it was just the internet—an easy thing to say when you’re not the one being targeted. Another frame poisoning the forest was fetishized sight. As in our previous work, we use the term fetishization to label the tendency during online interaction to fixate on the object you’re looking at—just the GIF you’re sharing, just the post you’re reading, just the tweet you’re replying to—without considering the very real people represented in or producing or affected by those objects.10 When everything is flattened to pixels on the screen, it’s easy to forget the people standing behind those pixels, how being flattened might hurt them, and how our everyday actions might make that hurt worse. Fetishization, as we will see, is supercharged by the white racial frame, and the white racial frame is supercharged by fetishization. Tangled up with both frames is what came to be known as “internet culture.” A jumble of sites, memes, and aesthetics that exploded to prominence in the mid- to late aughts, this culture maintained close ties to the tech sector and was a product of liberalism through and through. Its emphasis on fun and funny negative freedoms—share that meme, troll that stranger, joke about Hitler, it’s your right—downplayed the 4 You Are Here 2. The Root of All Memes destructive, antidemocratic, and deeply polluted dimensions of fetishized sight. Its adherence to the white racial frame muted diverse ideas and experiences, erroneously claiming online spaces for white people, and in particular white men, whose centrality was taken as a given. The compounding myopias of content producers, platform designers, and everyday social media users—each tapping into the roots of all the others—normalized a deeply detached, deeply ironic rhetorical style that created space for white supremacist violence to flourish a half-decade later. It also silenced the alarms being raised by the people who didn’t just see the poisons bubbling up, but were themselves being poisoned, and who cried for help but were ignored—or were punished for their effort. The political and ethical failures at the heart of so-called internet culture makes tracing its roots uncomfortable. And we mean personally uncomfortable. The two of us were ourselves part of that culture, as were many of our friends and colleagues. We all bear responsibility, and all must face what boyd describes as a “great reckoning” for the toxicity we collectively helped normalize.11 This toxicity wasn’t restricted to our own insular circles. Instead it helped wedge open the Overton window—the norms of acceptable public discourse—just enough for bigots to shimmy through in 2016. Their deluge of hate, falsehood, and conspiracy theory ripped the walls right off. But first came the absurdist, loud, silly fun that flourished a decade before. The pollution cast off by all that fun percolated underground, intensifying with each passing year.