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 , 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 , , 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’, ‘’, 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 and the public spread of hatred. These memes were often intermingled with imagery featuring alt-right mascot , 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 . Bannon has lately become a globetrotting activist for white national- ism, offering advice to far-right figures such as 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 to ‘trigger’ progressives and to underpin the idea that whites are somehow under threat. The following month Australian parliamentarian 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. The electoral harvest of the new incivility can be seen in the Brexit vote and the rise of UKIP, the 2017 electoral success of AfD in Germany, the impact of Marine Le Pen’s Front National in the 2017 French presidential elections, and the 2018 formation of a populist government in Italy comprised of ministers from the League and Five Star Movement. It can be seen, too, in the return to prominence of Pauline Hanson’s One Nation Party in Australia, Donald Trump’s 2016 electoral victory and presidency, and the persistent use of Indigenous peoples, Muslims and asylum seekers as political scapegoats in Australia. It can also be seen in the return of ‘strongman’ politics: Duterte in the Philippines, Erdo˘gan in Turkey, Orbán in Hungary, Putin in Russia, Trump in the US. All fomented social division to gain power, and have since waged war on ‘elites’ and attacked and diminished democratic institutions. This industrialisation of hate exploits two revolutions. The first is the centrality of economic and human mobility to modern life and the anxiet- ies it has created at a time of uncertainty, precarity and hardship for many. Growing public resentment at the failures of economic globalisation has created an audience ripe for harvest by the machinery of the culture wars. The second is the relative openness of the internet. Just as Bill Gates famously commented in the early optimistic days of the internet that it offered a ‘frictionless’ environment for commerce, so it was no less available as a ‘frictionless’ environment for the circulation of hate. The far-right site was one of the earliest online communities, even if, amid the hype for the economic and democratic possibilities of online communities, no one paid much attention at the time. As traditional intermediaries and the ‘managerial class’ that presided over old-time civic culture – editors, publish- ers, journalists, academics, civic leaders – were bypassed, and as the traditional 120 GriffithReview64 journalism business model was weakened by the loss of print advertising revenues and the growing domination of click-based online models, so new space was created for figures such as Bannon, quick to understand the new media dynamics and leverage them to build audiences for publications such as Breitbart News with a business model based on division. This hate-based business model enacts a sobering version of Christensen’s theories. Democracy is being ‘disrupted’. Low-quality, easily trafficked disinformation produced cheaply by ‘new entrants’ is crowding out higher- quality information produced by established incumbents (journalists, civic leaders, academics), who accumulated power through older technologies and institutions (print media, broadcast television, the university). The old expensive-to-maintain public sphere, supported by comprehensive education systems, robust journalism and informed critique, is giving way to a cheap- to-run, ‘near good’ public sphere corralled in privatised platforms. But there is no magic attached to this process, only the malodorous waft of divisiveness, hatred and encroaching authoritarianism.

IT IS IRONIC that those promoting this new, weaponised incivility so often style themselves as defenders of ‘the West’. Figures who have spent politi- cal careers denying climate science happily occupy the boardroom chairs of multi-billion-dollar organisations set up to promote ‘Western civilisation’, apparently oblivious to the fact that one of the signal achievements of said civilisation is scientific rationalism. Far-right organisations, including those behind the Facebook pages I looked at, happily defend the belief that ‘the West is best’ without apparently understanding that cosmopolitanism – the idea that we are all ultimately ‘world citizens’ – is a fundamental tenet of Western thought. In making a fetish of ‘the West’, the reactionary right enact knee-jerk, culture-wars tribalism with little engagement with the civic and scientific principles, founded in Enlightenment thought, that are fundamental to what they are defending. But reactionary conservatives aren’t the only ones arguing that the only way to repair Western civilisation and revitalise its institutions is to rediscover its essence. Moderate commentators have also noted the recent resurgence of incivility and racist populism, gazed at their navels, glanced at the collective moral compass and concluded that ‘we should do better’. Debate has become polarised? We should increase civility! Some people disbelieve Mark Davis: Networked hatred 121 climate science? We should communicate science more clearly! Hate is on the rise? More tolerance! A minor industry has grown up around the idea that by rediscovering Enlightenment truths humanity can revive the wellsprings of democratic culture. The title of US conservative Jonah Goldberg’s recent book says it all: Suicide of the West: How the Rebirth of Tribalism, Populism, and Identity Politics is Destroying American Democracy (Crown, 2018). According to Steven Pinker’s Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress (Viking, 2018), Enlightenment thought has provided a genuine basis for measurable progress. But like reactionary conservatives, born-again Enlightenment enthusiasts tend to offer a reductive account of Enlightenment. Both books have sparked controversy because, driven by a desire for quick prescriptions, they oversimplify their topic. There can be no quick fix for the present crises of democracy because the terms of division are built into the complex history of Western Enlightenment itself. Democracy is susceptible to disruption because, like Christensen’s incumbent companies reliant on outdated ‘sustaining technologies’, Western liberalism has not responded adequately to the changing dynamics of the information-saturated, multiracial, globalised world. To understand how democracy might be repaired is to have to grapple with these internal complexities and contradictions. On the one hand, modern conceptions of democracy, the ‘public’ and civil society derive from Enlightenment thought. Civility is an idea that goes back to the ancient Greeks who, with their idea of the polis, understood civil society as a function of the state. Early Enlightenment thinkers followed the Greek definition, but by the nineteenth century, in the hands of thinkers such as Hegel and de Tocqueville, civil society and the state began to be understood as separate things. Along the way, Enlightenment thinkers including Locke, Rousseau, Mill, Montesquieu, Smith, Voltaire and Wollstonecraft, to name a few, set out the philosophi- cal basis for the democratic framework in which civil society operates. This includes concepts such as universal and inalienable natural rights versus divine rights (such as the divine rights of monarchs), the separation of church and state, the social contract, freedom of worship, the ‘will of the people’, freedom of opinion, the fourth estate, tolerance and cosmopolitanism. The belief that these advances constituted an epochal step forward is summed up in Immanuel Kant’s famous essay ‘What is Enlightenment?’, published in 1784. Enlightenment, Kant argued, represents ‘man’s emergence from his 122 GriffithReview64 self-incurred immaturity’ into a state where free citizens, untethered from subservience to dogma, are free to engage in the ‘public use of one’s reason in all matters’. Versions of these ideas underwrite everyday concepts such as human rights, common law, freedom of speech, scientific method, universal franchise, a rules-based international order, and the ‘public sphere’, where, as Jürgen Habermas argued in The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, citizens could engage in free and open ‘rational-critical debate’. But here the problems begin. The first is to do with intellectual incum- bency. Campaigns to ‘rediscover Enlightenment’ are doomed to fail, in part because they come from an intellectual class that lacks sufficient social purchase to engender change. Thirty years of culture wars and increasingly strident populism have undermined the authority of intellectual ‘elites’. Forty years of neoliberalism has in many places undermined those sectors of the media, the public service, public broadcasting, the arts sector and the universities that sustained intellectual cultures. Indeed, the whole point of neoliberalism is to cut out the managerial classes, the ‘planners’, and replace them with market forces. In short, the material and cultural conditions and the knowledge economies that made ‘expert culture’ central to Western modernity are radically changed. The sidelining of expert culture is part of a profound reorganisation of the Western knowledge ecology that is presently destabilising long- established hierarchies that date back to the Enlightenment. For example, the divide between public and private, long questioned by feminists, is materi- ally destabilised by social media and by the surveillance and data-acquisition strategies that go with the technology. What then, is a ‘public sphere’? The sheer proliferation of information and its ready availability online changes the way people interact with knowledge. As the media theorist Mark Andrejevic argued in Infoglut (Routledge, 2013), amplifying a point made long ago by Max Weber, the difficulty of assessing all available evidence on a given topic makes adjudication impossible. One result of this is a default to conspiracy theories and a tendency, exacerbated by failing trust in institutions and expert accounts, for authoritative knowledge to be trumped by ‘direct experience’ and ‘gut instinct’. In addition to this, a growing body of knowledge remains secret, hidden in proprietary black-box processes run by algorithms and AI, such that decision-making processes of public consequence are hidden. Mark Davis: Networked hatred 123

A second problem is that many currently pressing social problems, from science denial to far-right nationalism, derive from tensions within Enlightenment itself. Enlightenment, generally spoken of in the singu- lar, was always in reality plural and fraught with internal contradictions, many of them never resolved. Today’s crises of civility are located at the cusp of these contradictions. Enlightenment thinkers championed ideas of universality and social emancipation but excluded women; Enlightenment rationalism also provided tools for the hierarchical classification of races. Enlightenment thinkers championed cosmopolitanism but underestimated the degree to which many people preferred to maintain a sense of local and national belonging. The Enlightenment formulated the idea of tolerance, starting with religious tolerance, but presumed Western centrality. The Enlightenment valorisation of scientific rationalism as a replacement for religiosity paradoxically granted science the status of a de facto religion. Enlightenment rationalism stood shoulder to shoulder with industrialisa- tion and helped pave the road to the Anthropocene. Taken to extremes, Enlightenment rationalism, as its Frankfurt School critics argued after World War II, led to the industrialised destruction of human life that was the Holocaust. The unresolved dilemmas of Enlightenment have sparked unending debate, and as ideas such as rationalism, universalism, cosmopolitanism and tolerance have fallen out of favour, questioned from left and right, this has created openings for those who see opportunity in crisis. In the hands of the resurgent far right, this takes the shape of a return to racialised particularism and xenophobic nationalism over the causes of cosmopolitanism and ‘global- ism’. The false religiosity accorded to science has provided an opening for climate science denialists to aggressively and falsely accuse environmental- ists of religious fervour. Along the way, old demons have been dredged up and long-forgotten anti-Enlightenment figures who embrace pre-modern notions of social hierarchy have found new champions. An example of this is the Italian fascist thinker Julius Evola, an unreserved racist, misogynist and monarchist whose theories influenced Mussolini and provided a basis for Italian fascist race theory. Evola has recently been cited by Steve Bannon, who decried Evola’s racism but praised his traditionalism, a philosophy devel- oped by the French metaphysician René Guénon who believed that equality and progress are dangerous illusions. Evola’s admirers include Aleksandr 124 GriffithReview64

Dugin, Putin’s ultra-nationalist court ideologist and an advocate of revolu- tionary fascism who has provided a philosophical framework for Russian expansionism. Another Evola admirer is Richard Spencer, the US white nationalist who founded the alt-right and who led white supremacists in the 2017 Charlottesville rally in which a protester was killed. Evola is name checked in Allum Bokhari and Milo Yiannopoulos’s tract, ‘An Establishment Conservative’s Guide to the Alt-Right’ (2016), published in Breitbart News under Bannon’s watch. Evola is also on the reading list of the neo-Nazi Golden Dawn Party in Greece.

RIGHT NOW, THE story of the new incivility is only partway told. The reactionary right has not yet achieved its aims, and in Australia is currently on the defensive. But the struggle over the future of democracy is global and the forces of reaction are playing a long game. Power is gradually being ceded away from liberal democratic norms towards populism and proto-fascism. Should this trend continue then the prospects for freedom, social justice and the environmental viability of the planet are bleak. Those on the left who for a long time have derided liberalism and been deeply suspicious of the Enlightenment culture that produced it, are thus forced to make a difficult decision: what to defend? In the 1930s, when Evola and Mussolini were tilling the soil of Italian fascism, the Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci famously wrote from his prison cell: ‘The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear.’ Morbid symptoms of our moment of interregnum are everywhere now. Refugees of failed modernity roam the seas in leaky boats, hunt for gaps in fences on European borders, form caravans to walk the ‘route of death’ through Mexico in the hope of getting to the US, rot in the asylum centres of Manus and Christmas Island, take indentured jobs sweeping floors in the penthouses of Singapore or walk girders on the construction sites of Abu Dhabi, searching for the wealth, freedom and security that Enlightenment did not give them. They are met, when they get to those borders, with the forces of a new counter-Enlightenment: concrete walls and razor wire, white nationalism, militarised policing, curtailed human rights. Other refugees are within: casualties of deindustrialisation, casualisation and the winding back of welfare, who make up a new precariat. Mark Davis: Networked hatred 125

Young people have felt the effects of this most brutally. Too often denied meaningful careers and kicked off the wealth-accumulation ladder, many hear the siren call of 4chan or are drawn to figures such as anti- ‘social justice warrior’ celebrity psychologist , with his paeans against feminism and bestselling tips on how young men can recover their masculinity; or to reactionary activists like Lauren Southern, whose racist pitch to disaffected youth is summed up by the title of her book: Barbarians: How Baby Boomers, Immigrants, and Islam Screwed My Generation (Rebel News Network, 2016). Intellectual refugees are everywhere also. A displaced managerial elite searches for relevance: journalists with their Twitter accounts, academics with their online opinion pieces, public intel- lectuals declaiming at festivals and in the ‘serious’ media. As the refugees of modernity spread out from its decaying outposts, so the logic of inter- regnum becomes almost irresistible. The trouble with this logic is that people tend to fixate on what is ending rather than grapple with sparking new beginnings. Displaced progressive intellectuals, in particular, like conservatives, routinely complain that the world is about to end, but unlike conservatives are frozen into inaction rather than galvanised into action. For those who believe in democracy there is press- ing work to do. Enlightenment ideals of rationalism, civility, universalism, cosmopolitanism and the social contract must necessarily inform any rebirth. But new conditions of possibility mean that to succeed they can’t be simply a redux of enlightenments past. One issue is leadership. Traditional knowledge hierarchies have flattened and the ‘intermediaries’ who acted as knowledge gatekeepers have in many cases been bypassed or ‘disintermediated’. There are as yet no emancipatory leaders for the age of disintermediated knowledge because leadership has itself been disintermediated out. For want of messiahs, it is incumbent on those who possess educational, cultural and intellectual resources to understand their new roles as toolmakers of ideas, talking across rather than down, embedded at every social and cultural level, who can bring a variety of skills to civic culture and start telling new, productive stories about how democracy works in an age of dystopic disruption. Imagining such a democracy will no doubt require a rethink of the oppositions that structure our world. It is essential, now, to think commonality without universality, citizenship beyond public versus private, growth and profits without inequal- ity and externalities, nationalism without chauvinist particularism, and to 126 GriffithReview64 think cosmopolitanism and particularism, and collectivity and individuality, in tandem. That is, to refashion Enlightenment oppositions for new times. First, though, a more practical reckoning is no doubt required. The underlying issue with democracy is that national and global social contracts have failed to deliver. The democratic connections between work, freedom, citizenship, rights and fairness have been lost, jettisoned in the name of liberalising markets and making labour more flexible with a promised pay-off that for many never came. Privilege has replaced citizenship as the arbiter of human destiny. There can be no revitalised democracy without skewing economics away from the rich, emptying their apologists from parliamentary hallways and offices, scrapping the divisive politics of scape- goating, acting on planetary health and remembering what mutuality and social generosity look like. Without the dynamics of inclusion and trust that derive from a healthy social contract, why would anyone bother with civility?

For references, see griffithreview.com

Mark Davis teaches and researches in the School of Culture and Communication at the University of Melbourne.

Minerva Access is the Institutional Repository of The University of Melbourne

Author/s: Davis, M

Title: Networked hatred: new technology and the rise of the right

Date: 2019

Citation: Davis, M. (2019). Networked hatred: new technology and the rise of the right. Griffith Review, pp.83-94. Griffith Review.

Persistent Link: http://hdl.handle.net/11343/242026

File Description: Published version