An appropriate frame for these Twitter observations is Yasha Levine’s new book on the history of the Internet, Surveillance Valley: The Secret Military History of the Internet, which Caitlin referenced in an earlier column. There are several good podcast interviews with Levine while he was making the rounds promoting his new tome, and each has its virtues. There’s This is Hell, Radio War Nerd, and Behind the Headlines for starters, but I think Levine was most forthcoming and insightful on Media Roots.
Levine’s argument, which is based in a close reading of the history of the Internet’s construction, is that it was set up for surveillance. What we have come to regard as our right and freedom is looking at the internet through the wrong end of the telescope. Our ability to access information freely is the by-product, not the goal, of a series of technological advances that were funded and developed in order to give the government, the armed forces, and law enforcement agencies, a more enhanced an accurate facility to survey populations, be more effective during wartime, and have a greater capacity to manage and control the population in terms of domestic dissent and potential upheaval.
From this perspective, it should come as no surprise that Twitter is trimming the wings of its followers. It sounds from Caitlin’s description as though they’ve developed an algorithm which is meant to detect followers who are less than enthusiastic or active, and who therefore might not notice if the targeted feed was casually removed. That the algorithm sometimes errs and Caitlin gets protest messages from those who have been surrepitiously removed from her followers list, seems the most parsimonious explanation for the phenomenon. If true, it is a form of censorship or control. But since the internet was created to control, should we be surprised or aggrieved?
We felt that Twitter was our friend, a friend who was helping us to connect to other friends and people we’d like to think of, however fantastically, as our friends. In exchange for giving us this feeling of faux friendship and easily digested conversational bits to support that fantasy, we get in exchange circumcision, if the topics of our tweets stray too far from the accepted narrative (and advertising targeted to the content of our feed). Is this a good deal?
I’ll be cheering Caitlin on in her battle with the Twitter lords. Will she be able to figure out a way to up her followers by fooling the algorithm, mobilizing her supporters, or shaming the censors? Through the process, brand awareness for those affected will likely shift, to a thoroughgoing suspicion not only of Twitter, but of many other social, informational, and news portals. I hope that awareness expands to the framing of Twitter, which seems in danger of becoming the functional equivalent of Newspeak, an Orwellian thought-limiting abridgement to reduce the meaning of language as well as the number of words.
Just because the Internet was developed to have enhanced surveillance capabilities, doesn’t mean it has to stay that way or be used that way. In China, the world’s worst contravener of internet freedoms, Internet usage is a privilege, not a right. Free, unrestricted, no consequences internet access isn’t even a notion. If you try to post a comment on an article and it goes against the grain, it won’t be published. Not only are Twitter, Facebook, and unrestricted Google Searches not allowed, the tracking of your Internet history and commentary carries with it the risk of a reeducation camp sentence should you run afoul, and punishments like job loss to your relations should you be sufficiently offensive. It’s really impossible to imagine how draconian the thought control apparatus is outside of a Chinese context. And it’s getting worse. But you can get a bit of a sense of it from the reaction of the CCP authorities to the recent ascension of Xi Jinping (see the linked article).
China doesn’t just reduce the expansion of your followers to a trickle, it deletes your whole account. And it does so with abandon. Preemptively. And this is kind of a new kind of terror. For those who live a significant part of their lives in the social media world, the deletion of their account separates them — often permanently and irreparably — from the souls they connected with only via the handles used to identify them on the platform. It’s a kind of cyber-death, or virtual solitary confinement.
Listening to Levine on the Media Roots podcast, it’s not surprising that China should not only block Twitter, Facebook, etc., but develop their own versions of same. If these are tools of government spying, why would China want the U.S.A. to be surveilling its citizens? (Not to mention the revenue streams these surveillance tools are accompanied by. Overseas-listed Chinese internet firms have a combined market capitalization of over one trillion dollars, and three of China’s richest people are internet moguls.)
As part of the globalization process, our civilizations become more enmeshed with each other, as they geographically abut each other in closer and closer proximity (if you allow that changes in mass transportation and communication are the functional equivalent of a change in geography). i would argue that this phenomenon calls for us to be closer to the people and the cultures around us, in this case to use our geographical tools to express solidarity. Russia has recently been characterized as a draconian foe which must be sanctioned, castigated, impugned, and confronted militarily, for a variety of reasons, not the least of which is their authoritarian government. But a close look on the ground shows their culture and government to be roughly as free as ours. Let’s partner with them so that we can increase the numbers of citizens looking for alternatives to increased government control and surveillance.
