(Graphic: John McCann/M&G)
The decision by the supreme court in Brazil to uphold a judgment to shut down X in the country is a significant challenge to the extraordinary planetary power of the tech companies. The ban was in response to the failure of Elon Musk’s X Corp, which owns X, to appoint a legal representative in Brazil, a requirement in Brazilian law. This followed the refusal of X Corp to follow a judicial order to block accounts spreading patently false information.
In The Twittering Machine, Richard Seymour argues that while the term “social media” is too entrenched to easily be put aside it should, at least, be called into question. He uses a much more accurate term, the “social industry”.
X, Facebook, Instagram and all the rest are, after all, businesses designed to extract our labour, writing, photographs, desire for connection, wit and capacity for collective sadism with the aim of capturing and selling our attention.
They are designed, at huge expense, and by highly educated and intelligent people, to capture our attention in a largely amoral way, luring us through algorithmic passages to ever more stimulating, and often extreme, content. Huge numbers of boys and young men have, for example, been seduced into alarming forms of misogyny.
Musk has tried to frame the decision by the supreme court in Brasília as a free speech issue. Mark Zuckerberg does the same when Facebook is challenged for enabling false claims and various kinds of prejudices.
In many countries there are legitimate issues pertaining to free speech and the social industry. Clampdowns by repressive states such as Zimbabwe, Iran and Russia are aimed at defending the authoritarian governments that run those states. The claim by the Chinese state that its alternatives to the US-controlled social industry are a defence of national autonomy is used to mask systemic state censorship and propaganda.
But Musk’s argument, and his presentation of himself as a “free speech absolutist”, is opportunistic and hypocritical. He has happily censored X for right-wing and authoritarian states such as India and Turkey.
Moreover, both X Corp and Meta shape and restrict access to user developed content in the interests of the US, the wider West and Israel. Many former US intelligence agents work in X Corp and Meta contributing to decision making about content sharing. Many former Israeli intelligence agents do the same at Meta and Google.
The circulation of untrue claims through the social industry is a serious problem that requires serious attention. However, periodic and carefully cultivated and targeted panics about fake news driven by organisations and intellectuals funded by Western governments only take on untrue claims by or in support of states to which the West is hostile. They do not target the US or Israel, both of which have frequently engaged in the production and legitimation of fake news.
Western aligned liberal opinion makers are not targeted when they make unevidenced claims, such as the repeated claim that the South African state was bribed by Iran to take Israel to the International Court of Justice.
There are other kinds of clear political biases. When the corporations that own and run the social industry altered their algorithms in 2018 following an escalation in the targeted panic about fake news, many leftwing publications suffered an immediate collapse in readership, sometimes as high as 70% or even 90%.
There is also the hugely serious problem of tech companies taking advertising revenue away from the media organisations that produce much of the content that they share. This has devastated newspapers and other forms of media run by editors and journalists for whom their work is often a vocation rather than just a route to corporate profit.
The social industry has many benefits. It enables easy connection between families, friends and people with shared interests and invaluable access to community for people who are isolated, alienated or stigmatised in their immediate embodied social experience. It can also enable collective support for challenges to powerful figures, such as the #MeToo Movement.
At the same time the regular surrender of time and attention to the social industry frequently results in anxiety and depression, particularly among young people, and more particularly among young women. It destroys our capacity for sustained and careful attention. Scrolling a phone for the next interesting video is very different to reading a complex book or newspaper article. Regular scrolling can train our eyes and brains to scan the text in a book down a vertical column in the middle of the page, looking for something exciting, instead of carefully moving our eyes horizontally, line by line and sentence by sentence.
The social industry also elicits dishonest forms of self-presentation, reinforces the ongoing shift towards the presentation and identification of the self as a brand, expands the reach of conspiracy theory, and encourages forms of collective sadism, such as the grotesque collective assault on Chidimma Adetshina. People animated by narcissist rage can easily incite a vicious mob with carefully calibrated dishonesty. Otherwise decent people can be drawn into vicious online mobbings and people acting with malicious intent can make untrue accusations in the name of socially valuable projects and principles.
The social industry also enables forms of sociality, such as political mobilisation at new velocities unbound by spatial constraints, that can be both progressive and reactionary. Both the Black Lives Matter protests and the recent racist riots in the United Kingdom were enabled by the social industry.
Claims about “Twitter revolutions”, such as the 2011 protests that brought down Hosni Mubarak’s regime in Egypt, were always overblown, but the social industry did play a role. While it can enable sudden mobilisations at scale it does not enable the sort of careful and sustained mobilisation, centred on shared and embodied practices of deliberation in face-to-face meetings, required to build the sustained popular democratic power required for deep change. Mubarak’s regime was swiftly and easily replaced by another authoritarian regime because people were insufficiently organised.
At a personal level one can choose to respond to all this in various ways. One strategy is to engage the social industry in an informed, thoughtful and deliberate way with the aim of avoiding or reducing complicity in their toxicity. Many people offer their time and labour to the social industry in ways that enrich the public sphere or are not harmful. But no matter how carefully considered all participation ultimately strengthens the power of the social industry.
Another strategy is a principled refusal to participate. This is not desirable or available to everyone or to every organisation though. For some people the social, personal or professional costs of absence are very high or even non-viable. Some forms of work are impossible without participation, and for some forms of progressive politics the benefits of participation outweigh the value of principled refusal.
While principled personal strategies are easily available to individual people or organisations the best responses are collective. One possibility is regulation to raise the costs of spreading patent untruths for the social industries. This would have to be handled very carefully to minimise the risk of such regulation being designed or used with authoritarian intent, but it is possible.
Another option is to heavily tax the corporations that own and run the social industry, corporations that are among the most profitable on the planet, and to use the money to subsidise public interest media. Again, great care would have to be taken to avoid the capture of such funding, and the projects it supports, by malign actors.
There is much to be learnt from the Australian model in which Google and Facebook have been forced to pay media organisations for the work that they share to accrue profit. This solution has many benefits, but we should not be naive or uncritical about the forms of media staffed by journalists and run by editors. There is plenty of superb and invaluable work, but the prejudices and biases of wider society are often, and at times relentlessly, reproduced.
Tech companies can also be pushed towards social ownership in full or in part. Just as Uber could be compelled to cede a significant degree of national ownership and control to a drivers’ union and Spotify to a musicians’ union Facebook could be regulated with the aim of ceding a meaningful degree of power to a media workers’ union, itself regulated to ensure democratic practices.
It is also possible to tax these kinds of corporations to support worker owned and managed alternatives with the ultimate aim of replacing the big tech companies with socially owned alternatives. This is not utopian. In Mexico the Rhizomatica cell phone network is community owned and managed.
There is no reason why democratic states, or multi-national organisations such as the United Nations, could not develop carefully regulated and managed alternatives.
There are no simple solutions to the pernicious aspects of the power of the social industry. All potential measures carry their own risks. But recognising that power and its damaging aspects, and discussing ways to respond, is a necessary first step towards confronting the power of the tech companies over our both intimate lives and the public sphere.
Richard Pithouse is a distinguished research fellow at the Global Centre for Advanced Studies in Dublin and New York, an international research scholar in the philosophy department at the University of Connecticut and a research associate in the philosophy department at the University of Johannesburg.