Machine-Brains and the "Coming Civil War"

A recent essay on Medium proposes that, regardless of the outcome of the next American election, the United States is heading towards civil war:

We find ourselves in a country where both sides can’t imagine their loss would be legitimate. If Biden loses, his supporters will blame GOP trickery and voter disenfranchisement. If Trump loses, his supporters will blame voter fraud and riots. It doesn’t matter that the first one of those is real and the second isn’t. We are heading toward a reckoning...

With an open Supreme Court seat and an election whose incumbent has already called it fraudulent, this is as bad a constitutional crisis as we have seen in a century and a half. You don’t have to take my word for it. The Transition Integrity Project, a group of more than 100 current and former senior political campaign leaders on both sides, simulated the election in a “wargame” in June. They tested four scenarios: a big Biden victory, a narrow Biden win, an indeterminate result like in 2000, and a narrow Trump victory. In all but the Biden blowout, the country descended into chaos. They write:

“We anticipate lawsuits, divergent media narratives, attempts to stop the counting of ballots, and protests drawing people from both sides. The potential for violent conflict is high, particularly since Trump encourages his supporters to take up arms.”

This is unlikely the first time you’ve heard this prediction, however. Many others (on both the left and the right) have suggested the US is heading towards some even more violent conflict than what has occurred with the many stand-offs around Black Lives Matter and the shooting of protestors. More so, as an emergency professional recently told me, many cities have been briefing emergency responders on the inevitability of wide-scale violence regardless of who wins the next election.

We’d be wrong, however, to place all the blame for this on the cyclical “you’re either with us or with the terrorists” rhetoric that accompanies every American presidential election. And while the current president has absolutely stoked fires of fear and hatred on all sides towards his own political gain, another almost invisible yet omnipresent mechanism has led the United States (and many other countries) to this place: social media.

The recent documentary The Social Dilemma touches on this problem (and it’s absolutely worth an hour and a half of your time), though it is hardly the first to point out that something particularly damaging has occurred to our perceptions of ourselves and others through its reinforcing algorithmic feeds. Kill All Normies by Angela Nagle, for example, likewise pointed out that a certain kind of self-perpetuating politics arose through sites like 4chan and Tumblr in which users were constantly fed only the sort of perspectives they sought out.

Because social media is designed to give you content the computer brains have discovered you react well to, you are constantly fed more of the same and less of what you’ve taught the computer brains you don’t like. Each time you “like” a post from a certain kind of person, you are shown more of those posts and less of the posts you’ve not “liked” (on Facebook, “hidden” or otherwise reacted negatively). After enough time, what you are shown becomes mostly the sort of things you enthusiastically agree with.

We call this being in “an echo chamber,” but something happens before you actually get to that point. In an echo chamber, sound reverberates: what is put in is amplified back. While social media absolutely does seem to amplify own opinions back to us, before this happens we experience what is called an epistemological bubble, an enclosed mental space where opposing or complicating ideas are excluded from the information we use to perceive and narrate our world.

This epistemological bubble is based on exclusion of information, but eventually you no longer notice that anything has been excluded at all because you don’t see it. Your entire world view feels complete and well-constructed, and then because others are echoing back this worldview (because they are shown only what they agree with), you receive enough affirmation to solidify that worldview.

In such a state, we forget that other people are also experiencing the exact same thing with entirely different feeds. If you’ve ever been on public transit and looked over someone’s shoulder at their smartphone while they scroll Facebook, you’ll have experienced this awkward (and sometimes very jarring) reality. Everyone experiences a different epistemological bubble and echo chamber, and yet each person also feels like their view of reality is complete and accurate.

One example of how this works that I think of often is how I have seen people say “all masculinity is toxic” or “all whites are racist” on my social feed (because it’s full of American social justice activists) and yet when I mention this to someone who has a different feed they’ll say “no one actually says that.” Similarly, because I am connected to a lot of environmental activists, I am sometimes utterly shocked when I encounter someone who doesn’t believe in climate change. That person, on the other hand, is shocked that anyone actually does believe in it, because their social media feeds them only other people who believe it doesn’t exist.

Expand this to Black Lives Matter and other justice movements and you start to see how these different bubbles start to rise to civil-war level differences of opinions. I’ve seen probably every video of police shooting Black people that has gone viral for the last 7 years. But a person the computer brain has decided doesn’t want to see those videos likely never has. Instead, they’ve likely seen many videos of police doing community service and helping distraught people or even saving defenseless people from criminals who are Black.

Another problem is that the social media feed reinforces identification. If you identity as pagan, or Christian, or Muslim, or Feminist, or Black, or Conservative, or Trans, your feed (through subtle input on your part—likes and shares, etc) shows you more content related to that identity, both positive and negative. Thus a Trans person will see many posts affirming their identity and many news stories about how some people don’t want them to use certain bathrooms or even how some Trans people have been killed. Feminist women will see lots of content from writers affirming equal rights and also stories about misogyny and male abuse of women. Christians will see lots of pro-Christian content and also stories about religious persecution of Christians.

That is, identity becomes reinforced through social media algorithms, both the positive parts of that identity and also the sense that this identity is under attack. This ultimately strengthens identification by giving the person a sense of being part of some larger group that is under attack by others and turns their beliefs about the world into fundamentalist certainties.

If you’ve studied nationalism at all, this probably sounds quite familiar. It’s the same process, but rather than nation as the identity it’s Christian, or white, or Black, or conservative, or liberal, or men, or women, or disabled, or leftist, etc. etc..

None of this is to say that certain groups aren’t being oppressed. But especially for those oppressed groups, this identity-reinforcement can have rather dangerous side effects, especially for mental health. A person who is not only gay but strongly identifies with being gay can find themselves feeling like everyone wants them dead after a short scroll on Facebook. The repetition of brutal police murder videos of Black people has the same effect for Black folk, and for trans people, every post about J.K. Rowling’s shitty tweets or crime novels can leave them feeling like they they are pariahs to society. A woman who sees mostly stories about abuse by men can come to believe that all men are abusive. While there is an initial truth in the stories and our interactions to them, the prominence of these stories through the epistemological bubble and echo chamber effect of social media greatly exaggerates this fear and terror.

This process was already solidified during the 2016 election campaigns, when many people’s social media feeds were full of posts shouting that those who didn’t vote for Hillary Clinton “wanted” to kill Trans people or Black people or women. On the other side was the rhetoric that not voting for Trump meant you wanted women to be raped by criminals and immigrants. Both of these statements were equally false, but I still know liberal-aligned people who insist that those who voted third party or not at all “have blood on their hands” and conservative-aligned people who believe Trump saved women from rape.

We’re seeing this all again now, but Facebook and Twitter have had four more years to better refine their algorithms to make us even more solidified in our identifications. We are more afraid of the other than we were before, more certain of the importance of our own identity categories (reminder: “Millenial” was created by marketers), and worst of all even less aware of what information is excluded from our perceptions.

In such a situation, civil war is probably inevitable. Far right people have social media feeds that tell them they are under threat from the far left, far left people have social media feeds that tell them they are under threat from the far right. Here it’s worth remembering two more things: first, that “left” and “right” are political terms which first referred to where you were sitting in a French assembly 200 years ago, not some sacred and ancient classification of ideas: and secondly, who is “far right” and who is “far left” is a nebulous concept (the far right thinks all liberals are far left, the far left thinks all conservatives are far right).

That is, civil war is probably inevitable because everyone is certain everyone on “the other side” wants to kill them. But objectively, they don’t. Some do, absolutely. But most—the vast majority likely—are just scared of what’s happening. And they’re being told by their social media feeds that they have enemies, and those enemies want to harm them, and they don’t know what has been excluded from their worldview.

But maybe civil war isn’t inevitable. To kill other people you have to think they are the enemy, and to think they are the enemy you have to deny their humanity. And to get to that point, you need to be fed a lot of propaganda about how they are less than you, or more evil than you, more violent or more ignorant or more privileged or more angry than you. And you also have to think that you are somehow more human than they are, that you are righteous, that you have been victimized not just by their actions but by their very existence.

To short circuit all of this, we need to insist on our own—and especially the other’s--humanity. And to do this, we’ll need to stop letting machines do our thinking for us, to stop letting them feed us only what we’ve taught them we want to consume. We have to find out what we have excluded from our worldviews, which may mean something very hard like talking to a neighbor, or something even harder like finally turning off the machine brains and thinking for ourselves.

Rhyd Wildermuth

Rhyd is a druid, a theorist, and an autonomous Marxist. He’s the director of publishing of Gods&Radicals Press. His next book, The Provisioner, will be released 1 November, and enrollment for his next course on Marxism from a pagan perspective is open now.