Book Review: The Net Delusion
In the third chapter of his excellent The Net Delusion Evgeny Morozov points to the influx of frivolous entertainment as a force supplanting political will. For evidence Morozov directs us to the former East Germany, geographically unique in the Eastern bloc for bulging out into the West and consequently being able to receive Western television. Western broadcasts directed East utilized two methods to undermine the communist system: the first, news would stir outrage by highlighting the official lies and secondly the lifestyles of material plenty depicted in its dramas would draw a stark contrast to the scarcity experienced by its intended audience. The communist party tried in vain at first to prevent it’s citizens from watching shows like Dallas, Miami Vice and Bonanza, but then gave up when it became apparent that those tuning in were less dissatisfied with the communist system, than those in the so called Valley of the Clueless - regions in the country’s East unable to receive Western broadcasts.[!
This argument forms part of Morozov’s core thesis which refutes the underlying belief shared by Washington policy wonks of every stripe and Silicon Valley CEOs - that more information meant more freedom and consequently more democracy. The chapter title “Orwell’s favourite Lolcat” is very much of its moment, published in 30 August 2011. Yet just two weeks later the Occupy Wall Street protests began, and while their aims were vague, they were were a registration of dissatisfaction, an expression of raw political will.
It is easy to forgive Morozov, born in the Belarusian Soviet Socialist Republic, as he mourns the loss of the once powerful political dissident movement in the former Eastern bloc, bought off with torrented Hollywood films and state funded channels beaming television like “The Tit’s Show” where “A horny and slightly overweight man travels around Moscow’s nightclubs searching for the perfect pair of breasts”. Yet as Morozov constantly points out the world has changed since the cold war, the fusty Regan-era policy wonks can’t rely on the lessons now redundant in a world where dictatorships (North Korea aside) no longer exist in an information vacuum. But has he not also understood that protests movements have not changed also? If people’s political will was so easily sedated with lolcats how was it possible to explain the Tea Party, Occupy Wall Street or the Maidan protests in the formerly Soviet Ukraine?
What has become apparent in the intervening years, in a world where the president of the United States has himself become an expression of political dissatisfaction that Morozov thought had long since evaporated, is that the narrative of dissatisfaction and outrage has become more compelling than any drama. That instead of movements fragmented into individuals sedated by the most frivolous entertainment we have seen social media transform itself from a platform of frivolity to one that manufactured outrage. The greatest but by no means only innovator in this space was Facebook.
If you cast your mind back to the Facebook of ten years ago, remember how it appeared - banal, quaint and localised to the people you knew. In many ways it was like a small-town in which you had lived your whole life, you knew the people and they knew you, they were their usual affable real-world selves and daily happenings largely insulated from world affairs. In 2007 the platform itself was only three years old, a year before they had introduced the news feed and that year they were introducing the innocuous-seeming, eternally positive Like button. This laid the groundwork for prioritising popularity in newsfeeds, a feature released in 2009. This last feature meant that stories could gain momentum not just locally within one’s friendship group, but across the entire Facebook network which grew sixfold from 197 million uses in the beginning of 2009 to 1.276 billion in 2014, then onward to 1.86 billion by the end of 2016. Stories local to your individual community of friends could not survive stories weighted in your feed about sensational global events. Like a town that had metastasised into a sprawling metropolis, Facebook moved faster and faster, local communities were broken apart, absorbed in the relentless maelstrom of frenetic global media traffic, the quiet main street where you wave to your friend has been transformed into some horrendous high-modernist vision of gleaming skyscrapers and super-highways.
These frivolities that Morozov was so afraid of blunting the masses’ resolve were still there, now knighted as “memes”, but their lifecycle were always so quick, limited to a mere flash, they held audience’s attention for only a moment. Far more compelling were narratives of outrage. It is no coincidence that protest movements in the richest country in the world grew, not when at the moment of greatest catastrophe at 2008 GFC but in sync with Facebook’s news algorithm. The brilliance of Zuckerberg’s vision was that he realised people stayed longer on Facebook, not when sedated and happy with memes but when they were pissed off.