Networked Hatred New Technology and the Rise of the Right Mark Davis

ESSAY Networked hatred New technology and the rise of the right Mark Davis EVERY ERA IS defined by its sustaining myths. Among ours is surely ‘disruption’. The book that seeded the mythology, Clayton Christensen’s The Innovator’s Dilemma (Harvard Business School Press, 1997), is only a little more than twenty years old, yet its ‘technological disruption’ thesis has become an article of faith for business and government, trafficked like narcotics from TEDx to trading floor to ministerial report. Established companies often fail, so the thesis argues, not because they make bad decisions but because they make good ones. They stick with ‘sustaining technologies’ because they are too successful to risk otherwise. Meanwhile, minnows with little to lose bring new technologies to market that initially may not be as good as seemingly entrenched ‘sustaining technologies’, but which are cheaper and more acces- sible: think mainframe computers versus PCs, high-res CDs versus low-res MP3s, SLR cameras versus phone cameras, encyclopaedia versus Wikipedia. This is how Apple became a music company, Amazon became the world’s biggest bookstore and Facebook became your news feed. But as with most mythologies there’s something a little too convenient about ‘disruption’. Christensen’s thesis emerged just as Silicon Valley venture capitalists – whose reverence for Christensen has helped make him a peren- nial keynote – were looking for new justifications for cutthroat business models and a rationale to gloss up Silicon Valley’s claims to ‘innovation’. Behind their glitzy mission statements, many tech companies are little more 116 GriffithReview64 than middlemen with a point-and-click front end: ‘intermediaries’ in tech speak, ‘aggregators’ of other people’s content that deliver product based on someone’s else’s property and/or labour to consumers, and then deliver those same consumers to advertisers. The ‘technological disruption’ mythology has provided cover for downsizing, lay-offs, the theft of intellectual property, the casualisation of labour and normalisation of precarity, the exploitation of free labour by users of digital platforms (as in when, say, Facebook users create content for free), the normalisation of totalitarian levels of surveillance, and what is no doubt the greatest misappropriation of personal information in human history. As the historian Jill Lepore showed in a devastating takedown in The New Yorker in 2013, Christensen’s thesis is based on dodgy premises. Yet the ‘disruption’ myth prospers. It sits all too comfortably alongside other myths of neoliberal times. As Christensen acknowledges, his theory reprises Joseph Schumpeter’s ‘creative destruction’ thesis, published in 1942 and since corralled by free-market ideologues to justify the wholesale destruction of jobs, industries and ways of life in the name of economic ‘efficiency’. Now, to be clear, I’m not suggesting technological disruption doesn’t happen. What I am questioning is the magical transformative powers attrib- uted to the process. The disruption myth ties our notions of progress to the concept of destruction. It does so under the technologically determin- ist assumption that such progress is inevitable and good, and skips past the possibility that as well as being liberating, technology can have devastating social impacts. What happens, then, when the thing being ‘disrupted’ is the fabric of civil society itself? IN MID 2018, I was walking through an Australian airport when I spotted several mini billboards for Facebook’s ‘Here Together’ campaign. ‘Fake news is not our friend’ said one. ‘Data misuse is not our friend’ said another. The campaign was launched in the wake of the Cambridge Analytica scandal, in which more than fifty million people had their Facebook data improperly shared with the right-wing polling company. This happened amid ongoing scandals about fake news and fake accounts on the platform. At the time I had just spent four weeks trawling the Facebook pages of eight Australian far-right groups to gather data for a research project. I’ll spare you the full MARK Davis: Networked hatred 117 details, but suffice to say that Australia’s Islamic population aren’t popular with the far right. Nor are refugees, feminists or environmentalists. As I read posts from the pages two trends stood out. The first was their pointed incivility. Not only were they uncivil, they revelled in their incivility. Their attacks on perceived opponents were not merely intended to rebut or disagree, but to undermine their credibility and delegitimate their humanity using any possible means. Incivility was being used in lieu of debate as a weapon to shut people down. Much of the material that I analysed met the formal criteria for hate speech. It was clearly intended to incite animosity and hatred against target groups, to intentionally inflict emotional distress, and to threaten or incite violence. It defamed entire groups and used slurs and insults in an attempt to marginalise and silence their perceived opponents. Many posts advocated strongarm tactics without due process to target minority groups. In these angry calls for the demolition of longstanding human rights conventions and the subversion of law to suit the interests of the dominant (white, male) group, a form of proto-fascism could be heard. The second trend is that Australian far-right Facebook pages increas- ingly model themselves on the US alt-right. Whereas old-school far-right groups stick to white nationalism, the sites I looked at mixed race, gender, sexuality and a smattering of science issues. This mirrors the way in which the US alt-right has built links between white supremacists and so-called ‘men’s rights’ groups as well as a growing emphasis on climate science among the far right in the US and Europe. Figures associated with the alt-right such as Milo Yiannopoulos, Lauren Southern, Steve Bannon and Gavin McInnes are revered on the Facebook pages I surveyed. News of their proposed Australian tours is greeted with glee and multiple repostings. Also common are alt-right memes such as ‘cultural Marxist’, ‘social justice warrior’, talk of ‘white decline’ and the idea that the ‘white race’ is being subject to a form of ‘genocide’, crowded out by minorities and multicultur- alism, a myth long nurtured by US white supremacist Bob Whitaker. There was considerable support for absolute ‘freedom of speech’, an alt-right meme that functions as cover for open racism and the public spread of hatred. These memes were often intermingled with imagery featuring alt-right mascot Pepe the Frog, Donald Trump, on occasion imaginatively mashed with images of Pauline Hanson or Sonia Kruger (celebrated for publicly questioning Islam). 118 GriffithReview64 The popularity of the sites was also notable. Between them they had over 400,000 followers. A much greater number of people are likely to have viewed the sites but not signed up. Most postings had been liked and/or shared hundreds of times, some thousands. These sites are part of a global trend towards the networked industriali- sation of hatred. Cambridge Analytica wanted those millions of Facebook profiles so they could target users with divisive messages to influence the 2016 Brexit vote and US election. According to Cambridge Analytica chief executive Alexander Nix, ‘It sounds a dreadful thing to say, but these are things that don’t necessarily need to be true as long as they’re believed.’ A leading entrepreneur of industrialised hatred is Steve Bannon, a former Cambridge Analytica board member, former Trump campaign adviser and then White House strategist, and before that editor of the right-wing Breitbart News. Bannon has lately become a globetrotting activist for white nationalism, offering advice to far-right figures such as Marine Le Pen and Viktor Orbán, and parties such as Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) and Italy’s the League and Five Star Movement, as part of a project to build support for his idea of a far-right populist ‘supergroup’ to win seats in the European Parliament. Fox News has positioned itself at the forefront of developing the hate business model, via the work of commentators such as Glenn Beck and Ann Coulter. In Australia, Sky News ‘after dark’ does similar work. The fostering of division has long been ingrained and normalised in tabloid news business models, as seen in a column by Andrew Bolt in August 2018 that singled out Jews, Chinese, Cambodians and Indians as part of a ‘tidal wave of immigrants that sweeps away what’s left of our national identity’. Platforms such as Facebook and Twitter are also complicit. Conflict creates clicks. A few weeks after the Facebook ‘Here Together’ campaign was over I checked the sites mentioned above again. All survived intact. THE HATE BUSINESS model uses incivility as a weapon to forestall public discussion about bigotry and to attack opponents. It is not enough to sow division; it must be done with unapologetic aggression and an open contempt for ideological enemies. The aim, ultimately, is to move norms of acceptable public discussion far to the right. When Lauren Southern touched down in Australia in July 2018, she disembarked wearing a T-shirt emblazoned with the alt-right meme ‘it’s okay to be white’, a statement first promoted by MARK Davis: Networked hatred 119 white supremacists on 4chan to ‘trigger’ progressives and to underpin the idea that whites are somehow under threat. The following month Australian parliamentarian Fraser Anning unapologetically gave his race-baiting first speech to parliament. Two months later Pauline Hanson tabled a motion that asked the Senate to acknowledge ‘anti-white racism and attacks on Western civilisation’ and that ‘It’s okay to be white’, which was supported by the Coalition government. It took less than a year for a meme concocted to sow racialised division to find its way from an internet bulletin board to a parliamentary vote in a major Western democracy.

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