EDITORIAL: The Church of Social Media
“Sovereign is he who decides the exception.”
—Carl Schmidt
We are pitted against an industrial industry which fabricates our dreams for us and insinuates them through our culture and our language. How can we dream when our vocabulary of symbols has only the nuance of newspeak? These are spectres of desire and though marked for sale, remain unattainable.
Peter Grey—Apocalyptic Witchcraft
I woke this morning to several messages from friends who received variants of the same notification from Facebook:
According to their own press release, Facebook implemented “Preparations Ahead of Inauguration Day” that include the following:
We are blocking the creation of any new Facebook events happening in close proximity to locations including the White House, the US Capitol building and any of the state capitol buildings through Inauguration Day. Our operations center is also conducting a secondary review of all Facebook events related to the inauguration and removing ones that violate our policies. And, as we did in the lead up to and following the US presidential election, we are continuing to block event creation in the US by non-US based accounts and Pages.
We are also restricting some features for people in the US based on signals such as repeat violations of our policies. These restrictions include blocking these accounts from creating live videos or creating an event, Group or Page.
It was only a week ago that people—including many American leftists—were applauding Social Media bans on President Trump and people associated with the QAnon conspiracy, seeing this as a necessary step to fight a rising tide of what they see as fascism. And I take no pleasure (but I did laugh a little) that some who rather fiercely accused me of being pro-Trump and pro-fascist for suggesting social media companies now have too much power over speech have now also been banned until the inauguration or even indefinitely.
It isn’t just leftists of course who have been subject to this new ban. American libertarians, conservatives, liberals, and yes also rightist users of social media have all been subjected to these sudden restrictions, making this a truly broad-spectrum ban on political speech. The only things they all have in common is that they use Facebook from within the United States and have at some point written or shared something that the all-knowing algorithms have determined to be “extreme” speech.
For some—probably many—this seems like an acceptable situation. The stated point, after all, is to stop a potential political crisis in the capitol of the United States that might interrupt a “peaceful transition of power” between Trump and Biden. And Facebook promises that many of these bans are “just until after the inauguration,” a temporary pause on political speech until the potential emergency is over.
That is, Facebook has declared a “state of emergency,” an exception to the normal propagation of speech through their capitalist platform. States of Emergency (or exception) are normally the province of governments, allowing them to uphold Liberal Democratic values by putting them temporarily aside during moments of crisis. The United States after 11 September 2001, for instance, entered a State of Emergency, followed by the passing of a set of laws (The Patriot Act) which gave the government new powers to “protect” their citizens. France, Germany, and Belgium (among many others in Europe) have declared various States of Emergency in the last two decades as well, suspending some rights and restricting speech that could be seen as incitement to violence or terrorism.
So this is nothing unusual, except that it is a capitalist corporation with a monopoly over social media speech that has declared this emergency. Of course, they have done so in tandem with the US government, which has deployed 20,000 soldiers to Washington DC to safeguard the inauguration. And while there is of course the possibility that the Federal Government advised or even secretly pressured Facebook to take these actions, it’s just as likely Facebook did this of their own accord.
Facebook and Twitter are private corporations, but their scale is so immense that they function now more like public utilities (like cable or electricity services) than like private businesses. Other media companies have bowed to their power, with major news companies now relying more on social media than traditional television broadcasts to disseminate their content. Not using Facebook would mean virtual death to them, just as it would also mean virtual death to the millions of individual creators, writers, publishers, artists, and others who have no means of publicizing their work without Facebook.
But we know all of this. We’ve known for years that these corporate social media companies decide what will be disseminated and what will be silenced. And this is bigger than politics, bigger than the “crisis” of the US presidential inauguration, because it determines not just what we say and do, but what we think.
The last massive entity to have this much control over the shaping and production of human meaning was the Catholic Church in Europe. After the fall of the Roman Empire, churches became the primary site of meaning production for villages, towns, and cities wherever they were established. Managed by priests trained in the methods and propaganda of the central Church authority in Rome, churches shaped the cosmology and morality of the people through stories, passion plays, weekly masses, and religious proclamations in a relatively uniform way. Missionaries from strongholds then brought the “gospel” to Pagan and Heathen areas, often tearing down their old monuments, sacred trees, and groves with violence and erecting churches in their place.
By the early middle ages, the Church was the sole mediator of meaning throughout Europe. Heretics with aberrant beliefs were burned to protect the uniformity of meaning throughout the lands the Church controlled, and crusaders were rallied to spread the Church’s power to even further lands where other meanings still survived.
The Church became the center of the world, the core pillar of meaning production. It became impossible to speak of other possibilities, other gods or even of no gods, other ways of being in the world. Such speech would at best result in reprimands but more often in burnings, all to protect the stability of society against the chaos of unwanted ideas.
And we are here again, but now that the priests are invisible algorithms and the Holy Father has his seat in Menlo Park, not Rome. If this seems an extreme comparison, one needs only look again into history to see all the moments that the Pope possessed the power to confirm coronations or to disrupt them, to favor the ruler or to throw the full weight of their influence onto usurpers, and especially the power to excommunicate and thus silence anyone whose loyalties lay with those the Church opposed.
The answer is of course always just to leave social media, to stop using it or restrict it so much in your life that the strange repetitions of certain kinds of thought and complete absence of other kinds of thought does not affect your mental space. This answer is never satisfactory, of course, especially for small publishers, musicians, and others who do not have the wealth required to publicize and sell their work by other means. It is also not a satisfactory answer to those without the significant amount of technological education required to use the few independent alternatives to the Church of Social Media. And it is not a satisfactory answer for those who have no other access to information nor the skills to know where to look for it. And of course just leaving or restricting social media use does not affect the extraordinary amount of power Facebook and Twitter have accumulated, the power to track and shape the beliefs and politics of those who do still use it.
But I’m sorry. It’s the only answer I’ve got to this.
Rhyd Wildermuth
Rhyd is a druid, theorist, and writer. He is also the director of publishing for Gods&Radicals Press. Find most of his writing at Rhydwildermuth.com or on this site here.