Chapter 2
We Are Giving Back to Our Community. Social Cooling. Act Promptly, Make Your God Happy.
We Are Giving Back to Our Community
Danny J. Hall was an Instagram early adopter. A software engineer himself, as well as a fine photographer, he was in the perfect position to see the appeal of a service that let a smartphone-user display photos instantly to a network of friends. And so, having got in at the jump, he was the owner of a pretty cool handle: @danny. At least he was until September 27, 2020 when he very suddenly was not. “Some rich kid in LA has my Instagram account,” Hall wrote on Twitter,
“because he got his friend who works at Facebook to steal it. . . . And nobody at Facebook or Instagram is doing anything about it.”
Hall, no noob to the concept of password protection, knew his handle was a valuable commodity and had taken all the right steps to protect it from phishing. But so far as he could tell, this was no ordinary theft. He received no notifications of a suspicious log-in or requests for two-factor authorization. As a last resort, his girlfriend sent the thief a DM from her own Instagram account. Writing with all the laconic confidence of a seasoned shitposter, the thief put the matter in plain language: “Hey i know your boyfriend had this @ . . . my friend works at facebook . . . therefore i now own it . . . if u need anything feel free to call thanks again.”
Hall’s girlfriend responded, “You have stolen his account and he’s lost all his pictures.” That was where their conversation ended.
After posting about the theft on Twitter, Hall eventually got his handle back. Whether the thief did in fact owe his success to an Inside Man at Facebook/Instagram has not been disclosed. The pertinent issue, however, is the swiftness with which something that had seemed to be in Hall's possession was to proved to be utterly out of his control, and the fact that the people Instagram who actually did have the power to return his account to him acted with the same level of accountability as that of the team that prosecuted Josef K.
A few months prior, the same principle had made itself evident on a global scale. On July 15, 2020, a seventeen-year-old from Tampa, Florida allegedly orchestrated what may well be the most consequential social media hack of all time. The mechanics of the hack, as reported in the news and in US government complaints, are pretty rudimentary. The seventeen-year-old vandal called up some employees at Twitter, tricked them into giving him credentials that allowed him to operate the account of any Twitter user, and then posted some variation on the theme "We are Giving Back to Our Community. We support Bitcoin and we believe you should too. All Bitcoin sent to our address below will be sent back to you doubled . . . ."
The perpetrator netted over $100,000 in BTC, and was arrested by the Justice Department within a couple of weeks. We should be thanking our lucky stars for adolescent fantasies of Lamborghinis and waterfront villas. In a sense, the fraudster was giving back to his community by showing just how vulnerable the system was: If he had possessed a different set of interests, and a smidge more imagination, he could likely have created a true global panic. Imagine if a coterie of influential people, from Bill Gates to Barack Obama to Kim Kardashian (all of whom had their Twitter accounts hacked), broadcast to their millions of followers that, for instance, there had been a successful chemical attack on United States water sources and clean water was suddenly a scarce commodity. Or that nuclear war as imminent. Or that a certain person or group of people had committed a crime, and mob violence against them was temporarily sanctioned. It is no exaggeration to say that a world war could begin this way.
Certainly cybersecurity experts are aware of the threat. “We should worry,” says Anthony Glees, a Security and Intelligence expert at the University of Buckingham, “if I were in Russian or Chinese or Iranian intelligence, I would be thinking about getting hold of somebody who works {at Twitter} to hire them.”
Bloomberg News reports that as many as 1,500 Twitter employees had the power to break into the hacked accounts. Twitter higher-ups so far have not released any information about exactly who got tricked. Even if they did know, nothing requires them to disclose such information to the millions of users whose data they own. Their policy seems to be to sweep the problem under the rug until the next time it happens. In some sense, there's not much they can do. The threat of theft from information stored on Twitter’s servers will only cease to exist when centralized social networks like Twitter cease to exist.
The day after the hack, Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey pledged greater transparency. “We’re going to be really transparent,” Dorsey said, “[and we will] own anything we made mistakes around and what we find.” But at the time of writing, Twitter has not indicated precisely how their employees were phished, leaving room for speculation that the hackers had someone on the inside. The company did, however, publish a blog post on July 30th, 2020, in which they state: “We know that we must work to regain your trust, and we will support all effort to bring the perpetrators to justice. We hope that our openness and transparency throughout this process, and the steps and work we will take to safeguard against other attack in the future, will be the start of making this right.”
That very week, on September 3rd, the account for the personal website of Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi was hacked. Just as in the previous breach, the hacker tweeted asking for donations of cryptocurrency. This time Twitter did not write a blog post explaining what happened. Nor did the company even mention the breach on their Twitter Support account. As of the time of writing, no explanation has been offered for how the breach occurred.
Social Cooling
To say all in one word, it will be found applicable, I think, without exception, to all establishments whatsoever, in which, within a space not too large to be covered or commanded by buildings, a number of persons are meant to be kept under inspection. No matter how different, or even opposite the purpose: whether it be that of punishing the incorrigible, guarding the insane, reforming the vicious, confining the suspected, employing the idle, maintaining the helpless, curring the sick, instructing the willing in any branch of industry, or training the rising race in the path of education: in a word, whether it be applied to the purposes of perpetual prisons in the room of death, or prisons for confinement before trial, or penitentiary-houses, or houses of correction, or work-houses, or manufactories, or mad-houses, or hospitals, or schools.
It is obvious that, in all these instances, the more constantly the persons to be inspected are under the eyes of the persons who should inspect them, the more perfectly will the purpose of the establishment have been attained. Ideal perfection, if that were the object, would require that each person should actually be in that predicament, during every instant of time. This being impossible, the next thing to be wished for is, that, at every instant, seeing reason to believe as much, and not being able to satisfy himself to the contrary, he should conceive himself to be so.
The above quotation comes from British utilitarian philosopher Jeremy Bentham's Panopticon, or The Inspection House. Bentham, having spent some time in the Russian Empire, was trying to synthesize the penal policies he had found there in order to create a system that answered the problem who guards the guards? The term panopticon was later made famous by the French theorist Michel Foucault, who expounded on it as a metaphor for modern society. Yet for anyone in 2020, Foucault's gloss on Bentham’s idea is hardly needed. It is immediately evident: the internet is the most perfect panopticon ever conceived.
The technology critic Tijmen Schep has branded this function of the internet as social cooling, referring to the "long-term negative side effects of living in a reputation economy." Obviously, Schep hit a nerve: The shared link on Y Combinator's Hacker News forum, a site for discussing all things tech, received the most comments of any post in the site's history. Finally, it would seem, there is a name for the silent killer. The Social Cooling homepage lists "A culture of conformity," "a culture of risk aversion," and "increased rigidity" as the top three markers of social cooling. Schep could easily add "a culture in which destroying someone's reputation is positively incentivized as a means of attaining some small scrap of power." But overall the site does an excellent job of concretely detailing a problem that is sometimes so obvious that we hardly notice it.
A devil's advocate might argue, for instance that social cooling is not only nothing new, but that there's nothing wrong with it. After all, a given person's status in society has always been distributed across the minds of all the people he or she knows, and the concept "if everyone hates you, then your life sucks" was true before the internet hypertrophied it.
The operative difference here can probably be summarized with two words: monoculture and advertising.
To begin with monoculture, let's take the classic example: if, as a high school student, I am not well equipped to rise to the top of the athletics status hierarchy, I can opt for the music hierarchy, the drama hierarchy, or even the ostensibly abandoning interest in all hierarchies with emo contempt hierarchy. Then of course in the wider world the list of hierarchies only multiplies. No single system determines an individual's place in the social hierarchy, and so there are various ways to thrive, according to individual strengths and weaknesses. There's room to be someone who gets a little choleric over the course of an argument, because the people who opt in to an argument with such a person don't mind terribly. There's room to be someone who has a negative outlook on life, because there are employers and communities where results are valued over outlook.
The culture becomes monolithic when the hierarchy is reduced to a single common denominator: price. That is, when every hierarchy is plotted on the same graph, where the x axis is a person's propensity toward a given trait, and the y axis is the monetary value that can be extracted from it. In this case the social world of the internet is less like high school and more like Monopoly. There are various ways to succeed at ascending the hierarchy, but the hierarchy is always measured in cash; and once you're out of the game, you're out.
It was this totalizing feature of the modern world that struck the philosopher Roberto Calasso when he described capitalism, in his early book The Ruin of Kasch as "the economic name for an immense upheaval in the brain, the supremacy achieved by exchange--hence by digitality--over all things." For Calasso, socialism is only the other side of the same coin. "In socialism," he writes, "which has the most inept goal--namely to place everything in the hands of man--there is no longer a dark extra-human discriminating factor, such as money. In its place there are new priests: spies." What better decription can there be the socially cooled internet? A place with a near religious emphasis on spying: on one's friends, on one's neighbors, and most importantly, on one's self.
Act Promptly, Make Your God Happy
In 2019, or even early 2020, it might have felt necessary to outline the ways in which Big Tech--most notably Facebook and Twitter--can and do control the flow of information. In November of 2020 it feels about as necessary as demonstrating that the sky is blue. Whether or not you agree with their decision-making, it cannot be plausibly argued, after the 2020 U.S. Presidential election, that Facebook and Twitter are anything but publishers, which bolster or suppress information according to the editorial stance of their content moderators. This is done both explicitly, in policies that flag certain content for removal and suspend accounts that share such content; and it is done secretly: one of revelations of the Twitter Bitcoin hack mentioned above is that Twitter's internal dev tools include options for blacklisting a given user's content to prevent it from "trending."
In some sense, there's nothing surprising about all this. Facebook and Twitter are businesses, and they're going to make whatever "content moderation" decisions protect their business interests. "You can't be neutral on a moving train,"as the left-wing historian Howard Zinn once said, and Facebook and Twitter, despite calling themselves platforms, are really more like the train cars hurtling its users across time and space. The real question is whether this train is on its way to some particular destination, or whether its tracks lead straight off a cliff.
That is to say, it's worth taking a wide-lens view of the situation, and wondering what happens when our shared sense of what is and is not permissable to say is determined by the feedback loop of social cooling and "content moderation." All societies in recorded history have organized themselves around taboos. And so it should be no shock that our society organizes itself around Facebook posts that cannot be posted, tweets that cannot be tweeted. But whereas before our taboos and our consciences were determined organically, or at least hierophantically, today they are in line with knowledge that it is revealed algorithmically.
That is, certain content on social media will be flagged automatically by a bot. But other content will be flagged by an equally lifeless automaton: the hive mind of a platform's users. Working together in a feedback loop, the bot and the hive mind form the contemporary conscience. Conscience, to break the word down into its component parts, is the thing we know with. A conscience is not absolute, a priori moral sensibility. It does not exist in a vacuum. It relies on the social, familial, and religious structures around us. The OED notes that its Latin eponym conscientia includes the connotations of “holding of knowledge in common, fact of being privy to a crime, complicity . . . .”
In his meditation on conscience in Unforbidden Pleasures, the psychoanalyst Adam Phillips proposes that conscience is the thing that actually obscures self-knowledge. For Phillips, following Freud, “the judged self can only be judged but not known . . . guilt hides itself in the guise of exposing it.” Going on to interpret conscience in Hamlet, specifically the well-known line “conscience does make cowards of us all,” Phillips reflects that conscience “can seduce us intro betraying ourselves . . . . [I]t is the part of the mind that makes us lose our minds; the moralist that prevents us from evolving a personal, more complex and subtle morality; that prevents us from finding, from experiment, what may be the limits of our being.”
Phillips is a kind of anti-Freudian Freudian, maybe even an anti-psychoanalytic psychoanalyst. A baby boomer who came of age in England while prosperity was on the up, while the prestige of psychoanalysis was coming down, he was faced with the fact—as much the case in 2020 as ever—that the sexual revolution did not lead, as an Orthodox Freudian might have expected, to any lessening of neurosis. Young people who are “free” of sexual taboos appear to be even more self-castigating and conscience-stricken as any Rat Man or Anna O.
A partial explanation might come to us via Bronze Age Sumer. In his monumental The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind, the neurologist Julian Janynes argues that consciousness, strictly speaking, only began to exist around 1,500 BC, at the fall of the Sumerian empire. Prior to that, any given human's decision-making faculty was strictly a function of the voices in his or her head: this voice might seem to issue from a king or a local god, or if the society were in a state of confusion, from many gods at once. Jaynes means this literally, and formulates a complex argument from his neurological studies of the brain's two hemispheres, and from literary studies outlining a shift in the way that writers record thinking and all its approximations in the ancient world. But the relevant thesis is that humans, no matter how dispassionate or rational we may appear to be, have a hard-wired mechanism for behaving in a way that's in line with the most powerful local authority figure. Musing on how it is that a Sumerian king might become a god in the eyes of the people, Jaynes writes that "the divine determinative is often given to these kings only late in their reigns, and then only in certain of their cities. This may mean that the voice of a particularly powerful king would have been heard in hallucination but only by a certain proportion of his people, only after he had reigned for some time, and only in certain places.” The implication is that under the right circumstances, and with a certain amount of repetition, what was once a human voice may operate as though it were the voice of a god. (This is not an ontological argument about the existence or non-existence of God or gods. Jaynes posits a deep structure in the human mind related to receiving what we have come to call revelations. But he does not tip his hand to whether he believes this capacity is ultimately biological, or ultimately something else.)
This probably sounds rather far-fetched. But there are lots of everyday examples. Think of the composer who somehow receives a score of music in his head and simply has to copy it down as it was given to him. Or of the captain of a ship, who has a little birdie tell her to steer a certain route. Or, to take two of the modern examples Jaynes hones in on, the schizophrenic who obeys the vagaries of his multipolar mind, or the hypnotized subject who obeys the directives of the hypnotist.
And what better hypnotic induction than the repetitive downward motion of the thumb, as it leads the mind from Instagram post to Instagram post, from Tik Tok to Tik Tok. This is not a fanciful simile. It is well-documented scientific hypothesis. MIT anthropologist Natasha Schüll has used the term machine zone to refer to the state of mind that can be reached by users of slot machines or other variable reward systems, such as social media, to tune out their natural surroundings. "Everything else falls away," in such cases, Schüll explains, "A sense of monetary value, time, space, even a sense of self is annihilated in the extreme form of this zone that you enter."As Atlantic journalist Alexis Madrigal described the process back in 2013:
The purest example of an onramp into the machine zone is clicking through photo albums on Facebook. There's nothing particularly rewarding or interesting about it. And yet, show me the Facebook user who hasn't spent hours and hours doing just that. Why? You can find the zone. Click. Photo. Click. Photo. Click. Photo. And perhaps, somewhere in there, you find something cool ("My friend knows my cousin.") or cute ("Kitten."). Great. Jackpot! Click. Photo. Click. Photo. Click. Photo.
We're in the habit of thinking of machines as inert, neutral objects. But even the simplest gadget has a philosophy coded into it, and perhaps even the simplest object has a spirit coded into it, too. We speak of certain landscapes as having certain vibes; we know from the historical record that certain places and instruments were considered sacred; why should it surprise us that that our machines invest the world around us with a particular something? This probably sounds a bit out there. But one thing is for sure. If there were indeed a method for bypassing, or superseding human rationality in order to instill certain ideas or opinions in the general population, the modern blitzkrieg of apps and alerts and notifications would be the perfect method. Discussing the breakdown of the era of hallucinated voices, Jaynes cites a tablet bearing an old Sumerian proverb, "Act promptly, make your god happy." His interpretation was that this was the ultimate law of keeping society in line. That is, "don't think: let there be no time space between hearing your bicameral voice and doing what it tells you."