Riots, social media and ‘civilisational crisis’

Do you have a feeling of existential dread – like somehow things are falling apart – every time you go online?

For all the articles about what social media is doing to politics (and I’ve written quite a few of them) the creation of a background hum of constant crisis, of daily catastrophe, might be the defining essence of the modern information age.

That would explain a lot. Including the appeal and popularity of Donald Trump.

Elon Musk recently said that “simple incentives explain almost everything. A complex explanation is rarely needed”. That’s certainly correct when it comes to social media. I won’t go back over the old argument again, about how engagement-based ranking pushes emotive and dramatic content because it’s clickable. You all know that the incentive of social media is to keep you on there, amped up, buzzed, desperate for more.

(But it hasn’t stopped you from clicking, has it).

More significant is the deluge. There is so much information everywhere that trying to make sense of what’s going on it, what to believe, is almost impossible. I will often leave my digital browsing more confused and uncertain than when I started. There is no order or rhythm – it’s all just a cacophony of noise.

These two simple things are helping to create a feeling that everything is in constant flux; that we’re in a never ending crisis. ‘What the f- is going on with the world’ has become the most common conversation opener.

Even the format contributes to the sense of constant drama. Stories used to be ordered by the press. It wasn’t perfect, but it gave the reader the impression that some stories were obviously more significant and deserving than others. The small feature on page 7 of The Times is now its own entire page. With pictures. And a whole headline and sub-headline. Plus a unique and shareable URL! In the information age, everything is front-page, top-of-the-bulletin, breaking news. (This especially worries politicians. Small errors are magnified to look career-ending. It could be the reason everyone seems to resign all the time now. Everything is a crisis.)

The entire apparatus of the information age, and especially social media incentives, has set off a chain reaction. Years of algorithmically-pushed outrage has turned us into junkies. When there is nothing to be outraged about, we go out in search of it.  This is why people will self-immolate over a poorly worded tweet, even as climate change threatens the lives of millions of people. And so we all live on the edge, ready to be furious.  

But perhaps the greatest single technological change of the last 5 years is the dramatic decline in the cost of making, posting and hosting video footage. According to Sandvine, video is now responsible for 65 per cent of all internet traffic. Various studies show video content is growing fast on social platforms, and performs best on various metrics. Advertisers seem to agree that video is more engaging and emotive than photos and text, which means politicians and activists also think so, since they are essentially branches of advertising.  

Back in the 1960s, celebrity academic Marshall McLuhan predicted that the coming age of electronic communications would lead to the breakdown of established structures and identities. The consequence, he asserted, would be a return to a more tribal society. He was talking about television replacing the book: he had a theory that the written word, and by consequence the literate man, was calm, cool and rational. A reflection of the medium through which he received information. By contrast electronic information, and especially TV, was aural. It was sound and pictures, a more complete sensory experience. If literate man was rational, said McLuhan, then electronic man would be emotional, aural and tactile.  

It is no coincidence that the growing sense of unease tracks the dramatic rise of video. Video simply moves people in a different, more emotional way.

Over the past few months, you might have noticed the proliferation of videos which suggest that we are in a crisis. More than a crisis in fact. There is a giant clash of civilisation either looming, or already here.

In the US, these are typically videos of what appear to be vast numbers of young men (‘of military age’) streaming towards or over the US border. ‘An invasion’ says Donald Trump. Liberals scoff and mock, because it’s obviously not. But an invasion is kind of how it looks on the small screen, once you’ve seen it enough times, from enough angles, over months and months.

Or it’s videos of children watching drag shows, or angry venomous liberals. Over and over and over, piped across the land. And the message is clear. It’s a crisis. Everything is at stake.

This was already the case before someone tried to assassinate Donald Trump. Obviously, and quite understandably, this doubled the effect.

In the UK, of Muslim men rioting in Rochdale. Of Roma rioting in Harehills, Leeds. (And of course videos of the police apparently running away from the mob in Leeds, juxtaposed against police whacking Tommy Robinson supporters. ‘Two-tier policing!’).

Or in France, a video of a run-down part of Paris where lots of immigrants live, along with lines like ‘Paris has fallen’.

I could go on. If you have manoeuvred yourself into the right-wing, anti-immigration information eco-system, you will find that these videos circulate all day, every day. Some are new, some are old. They may be often lacking context or be cherry picked – but they are rarely ‘fake’ in the normal sense of the word.

And don’t think it is just the right doing this (although they are the main purveyors of the civilisational crisis idea). The left, certainly in the US, has been arguing that Trump himself represents an existential threat to US democracy. ‘If he wins, he’s never leaving’ said Rob De Niro recently.

The collective result of all this is a deep and uneasy feeling among a significant number of people, that our entire way of life is a threat – that it is being gradually chipped away – and the government, the police, and the media don’t care one bit. They are in complicit. And so all remains is to take to the streets and scream.

This feeling is no longer restricted to the fringes, the margins, the professional YouTube click chasers. You’ll see it everywhere online once you know where to look. Jordan Peterson, to Russell Brand, to Elon Musk to Andrew Tate.  We’ve reached the point where this cannot be just ignored or swiped away.  

It would be easy to say social media has manufactured this whole idea, and the ‘real’ world is actually a wonderful and harmonious place. That’s obviously not the case. Many countries in the West face difficult problems relating to segregated communities and integration; and there has been sudden, unprecedented increases in both legal and illegal immigration in many places. All happening at the same time as a dozen other problems, of crap public services, climate fears, cost-of-living, junk food everywhere, etc. Not to mention a loneliness epidemic. The idea of some looming grand battle benefits from being exciting and meaningful. Especially for vast numbers of young men whose lives feel empty, lost, without meaning or purpose. The fight for a civilisation is far more exciting than reading the ‘MSM’ and saying things are ‘complicated’.

There is zero doubt that genuinely far-right groups are trying to capitalise on recent events. Turning up at a mosque in Southport when the murderer had nothing to do with Islam is the clearest example of that.

But this is what is happening. Stories, often with quite different perpetrators and motives, are collected together, shared and re-shared: Muslims trashing a police station, Roma rioting in Harehills, the Southport murders, a soldier being stabbed, acid attacks. And they create a single narrative of crisis – one that is caused by large scale immigration which is destroying the West.

I suspect that if you are not very online, you would know that there are some thorny and difficult questions about immigration and integration.

But if you are very online right wing, you would know there is a crisis of civilisation, and everything is on the brink of collapse – and the people you disagree with are insane, have their head in the sand, are evil. Because all the evidence is there, in video after video, story after story.

I’m sure many of these rioters are absolutely adamant there is two-tier policing system at play. One of their most common lines now is that the police care more about people protesting knife crime than people committing knife crime. They watch video after social media video of young men walking around openly with machetes; juxtaposed directly against a protestor getting hit with a batton.

The established media has recently become perhaps the main target of attack, because large numbers of people believe that the established media is on the wrong side of this battle. They deny the evidence, in video after video, story after story. They refuse to take these difficult questions on. Which means they must be complicit somehow.

You Don’t Hate The Media Enough is now a common refrain among very online Republicans. (As I wrote here, social media has played a role in creating this too. The contrasting speed and freedom of social and mainstream media is creating an impression that the latter is conspiring, conniving, plotting.)

If the idea that the media and the authorities is the ‘enemy of the people’ starts taking root, things are seriously bad. I worry that’s exactly what is happening.

This all brings me to Donald Trump.

The incentive and logic of social media is to create a constant sense of panic and dread. Mainstream media – with its relative timidity, rules, and forced slowness – has accidentally made that worse. In short, it’s a crisis. An emergency. The normal rules do not apply.

A lot of liberals do not understand why anyone would consider voting for Trump, especially now he’s a convicted felon. I think for a least a decent chunk of voters a felony conviction and history of lies and deceit pales into comparison with the idea that your entire way of life is under threat. 

If you watch his rallies closely, that really is what this is all about.

The American way of life is under attack. It’s a crisis, a last chance. The barbarians are at the gates, they’re coming for you, but I am standing in their way.

In her masterpiece The Origins of Totalitarianism Hannah Arendt warned that if citizens float around like corks in a stormy sea, unsure of what to believe or trust, they will be susceptible to the charms of demagogues. When she wrote Origins in the 1950s, she never imagined the digital world, but I think she would recognise how an anchorless and bewildered post-identity mob would demand a tribal leader who could bring order to chaos, simplicity to complexity and a sense of belonging.

In Arendt’s analysis of the formation of totalitarianism, people always knew that the leader was lying. But it wasn’t seen as a bad thing. Not when the whole world was in chaos, and when people were floating around, unsure what to believe. People were ready to believe the worse about everything, and didn’t mind being deceived because they thought every statement was a lie anyhow. ‘Instead of deserting the leaders who had lied to them, they would protest that they had known all along that the statement was a lie and would admire the leaders for their superior tactical cleverness’.

I’m not suggesting Trump is leading the US into a Stalinesque regime. Rather than the mechanisms Arednt saw in the 1920s and 1930s are at play again – and it’s about more than hyper inflation or the great depression. It’s about the human psyche.

It doesn’t matter that my leader lies. Because everyone is lying anyway. My guy is just smarter.

That is the obvious endpoint of total information overload. The endless crisis, which become an existential threat. And the man for the job will always be the strong man who can deliver the old identities and certainties. That is why I suspect Trump will win in November.  Because Trump himself is the perfect candidate for the age of information – which is really the age of confusion.