What's Woke? #3: Toxic Femininity & Surveillance Capitalism
The old feminist promise of a new ethic of care has become twisted, technocratic, and increasingly dystopian
Note to readers: This post is part of a series and best understood in that context. You can read Part 1, which explains what I mean by “Wokeism,” and Part 2, which focuses on progressive elitism and the pro-choice movement, here and here.
One admittedly idiosyncratic reason I hate Wokeism so much is that the culture it’s generated reminds me so strongly of what it felt like to grow up in a dysfunctional family, orbiting around a highly controlling and narcissistic Mom. On an all-too-deep level, I know what it’s like to live in a social environment in which self-censorship, preference falsification, narrative conformity, and fitting yourself into a prescribed box is the norm. That’s what it was like in my family of origin. And that’s what our new Woke culture expects and (depending where you work or attend school) may demand under threat of enforcement by some DEI or Title IX bureaucrat.
Consequently, I experience Woke culture as suffocating and feel a need to push back (although I try to do so in a reasonable, rather than purely reactive way). The psychoemotional manipulations and sense of lurking threat that power and sustain it are just way too familiar. (One might even say “triggering,” lol.) For me, to refuse to conform to Woke diktats is to insist on the basic right to think my own thoughts, experience my own feelings, and breathe freely in the process. And since I’ve literally worked for decades to get to a place where that feels not only possible but normal, I’m not about to give it up without a fight now.
The positive flipside to this sense of embattled resistance is that I don’t feel any animosity towards the Woke or Woke-adjacent as a whole. To be sure, there are exceptions: Certain individuals and groups regularly behave in such deceitful, mean, and/or dangerous ways that yes, for sure, I’m hostile to them. But the average person who’s simply swept up in this newly powerful political and cultural movement? Not at all. On the contrary, I’m 100% certain that the vast majority are good people who are caught up in a bad trend — a situation that is, without doubt, an all-too-common part of the human experience. (For the record, I hold the same view of those on the Trumpian right.)
Hell, if I were growing up today rather than back in the 1960s-70s, I’d probably have a phase as a passionately Woke teenager or young adult, too. After all, if you care about social justice and have no better way of understanding the evident f-ckery of the society around you (something our educational system now seems quite dedicated to ensuring), it makes perfect sense that you’d default to Wokeism, at least for awhile. That doesn’t make you a bad or messed-up person (although there’s plenty of evidence that Wokeism undermines mental health). On the contrary, you may be more compassionate and idealistic than most. The fact that you’ve been deluded into believing a shallow, unhealthy, and counterproductive ideology doesn’t change that at all. It just makes the whole situation even more wastefully sad.
Just as every individual family member is part of a bigger psychoemotional and intergenerational family system, so too is each person caught up in some popular ideology part of a bigger sociocultural and historical dynamic. And just as it’s hard for children and youth to gain a good perspective on their families of origin until they’re older, so too it’s difficult for any of us to have a solid handle on what’s happening in our society when it’s in the midst of such rapid, unprecedented, and wrenching change.
Our natural default is to interpret the world in ways that conform to familiar patterns developed in the past. That’s why it’s hard for us to change the emotional and behavioral patterns we developed in childhood — although it can be done, it’s not easy. Similarly, it’s hard to navigate the world when our old conceptual maps no longer provide a solid representation of a suddenly shifting social terrain. There’s an understandable tendency to stick stubbornly with an outdated set of coordinates and ignore or attack anything that might challenge them. Alternatively, we may jump on some new ideological bandwagon that promises to satisfy our longing for certainty and then adamantly refuse to question it. Or we may simply feel lost and overwhelmed, unable to find direction in an indecipherable social order. In that case, there’s often a desire to shut down and withdraw from a world that doesn’t seem to make sense or provide meaning.
Conversely, the more that we’re ready, willing, and able to question and reconsider our old conceptual maps or newly acquired ideologies, the more likely it is that we’ll develop the sense of orientation needed to navigate the world well. Of course, there’s no one perfect way to interpret reality; the universe is much too complex and the human mind much too limited for that. Nonetheless, there are always substantially better or worse options available. The relevant question is: How do we make the best choices?
In today’s context, developing a better understanding of what’s happening in society and discerning more positive ways of dealing with it definitely requires breaking free of the dominant narratives that the political establishment, corporate media, big tech companies, and other powerful forces are systematically pushing on us. Carving out a more independent zone of thought, however, isn’t easy in our new age of what Prof. Shoshana Zuboff incisively calls “Surveillance Capitalism.” On the contrary, countering the powerful pull of the sanctioned narrative requires no small degree of determination. It’s become much more difficult — and often risky — to break ranks with your peer group on a whole array of political and cultural issues. This new conformity isn’t simply the result of individual failings, however. Rather, it’s part and parcel of a sweeping set of political, economic, and technological changes that are truly difficult to navigate and understand.
The Woke Tsunami
From early childhood through middle adulthood, my sense of how to speak, behave, and even think around my Mom was so finely attuned and deeply internalized that meeting her preferences at all times was quite easy. It happened automatically. I didn’t need to think about it for a split second. It felt natural and self-evidently correct to say and do certain things and not others. I instinctively understood which questions were OK to ask and which shouldn’t even be contemplated. I sensed when to speak up and when to keep quiet. I knew which stories were welcome and which were forbidden. And there was always some unarticulated but powerful sense that carefully coloring within those lines was both necessary and good.
The interpersonal dynamics operating in today’s newly Wokeified Blue State culture are very similar. Everyone knows what conversational territory is OK to venture into and what’s a no-go zone. Most of us try to stay on the safe side, tiptoeing around tripwires and avoiding landmines. But since the sanctioned terrain is always shifting (can we talk about the lab leak now? and what about crime?), this can be tricky. Consequently, at the first sign of potential trouble, many people’s brains simply shut down. It’s like a switch has been flipped. The suddenly vacated look in their eyes communicates: It’s time to change the subject and move on. None of this requires strategizing, let alone duplicity. By this time, it’s become naturalized and automatic.
It’s not that everyone in Blue State America has truly become Woke — far from it. Rather, it’s like this because what’s commonly (at least by its critics) referred to as “Wokeism” represents a cluster of ideological commitments that has been aggressively pushed on multiple fronts including the Democratic Party, K-12 schools, colleges and universities, the art world, the medical establishment, corporate HR offices, professional associations, the philanthropic and nonprofit sectors, and the legacy media (NPR, The New York Times, CNN, etc.). These institutional players are powerful. And most have long been disproportionately staffed by progressives. Consequently, a combination of trust, loyalty, self-interest, and fear conspire to make the vast majority of Blue Staters fall unquestioningly into line with whatever they say.
And rather weirdly when you think about it, these disparate sectors follow the same Wokeified party line with an astonishing degree of consistency. Like many others who don’t buy it, I’ve been trying to figure out why so many of America’s leading institutions jumped on the Woke bandwagon so quickly. The best short answer I’ve come up with so far is that it’s best explained by 1) rapid technological change and 2) underlying societal rot.
On the one hand, there was the newfound ubiquity of smartphones and social media, and the ongoing refinement of addictive, manipulative, and socially polarizing big-tech algorithms. On the other hand, the cultural, political, and socioeconomic foundations of American society have been weakening for decades. In this context, Wokeism offered progressives a seemingly compelling pseudo-explanation of why America is so unequal, unhealthy, and unhappy (realities that the Internet helped make more widely evident), along with a set of pseudo-ethical ways to respond to this dismal reality (“do the work,” “be an ally,” etc.)
For some progressive elites, Woke ideology provided a convenient means of deflecting attention and passing the buck: Don’t blame the neoliberal uniparty, the financialization of the economy, and America’s endless war-mongering for how f-cked up everything is! Interrogate your own internalized racism, sexism, and transphobia instead! For some seeking advancement in progressive-dominated professions, it offered a good way to self-promote and/or take down competitors. (The concept of “elite overproduction” is instructive in this regard.) And for many left-leaning people who aren’t the least bit Machiavellian, Wokeism was simply the best explanation they had for the many problems they were now seeing in their newsfeeds and perhaps (depending on circumstances) their own lives every day.
Quickly, this combination of self-serving convenience and idealistic cluelessness generated the critical mass necessary for Wokeism to become politically and culturally dominant in progressive enclaves. Again, that doesn’t mean that most of Blue State America sincerely went Woke. It did, however, capitulate to Woke dominance quite easily. Internet algorithms toppled the tottering edifice of New Deal liberalism like a strong wind hitting a hollowed-out house of cards.
That said, there are still plenty of non- or anti-Woke types around in Blue circles: Old-school normie Democrats, left-liberals who are serious about liberalism, anti-technocratic post-hippie types, stalwart second-wave feminists, socially conservative Blacks and Latinos, and so on. Numerically, in fact, they represent the majority. But the alternative values and perspectives such groups represent have become marginalized. Since they don’t control elite institutions, they can’t command political and cultural clout.
The Lost Past
The successive societal shock waves of the past seven years — Trump, #MeToo, Covid, George Floyd, #BLM, January 6th, Ukraine, etc. — have produced a dislocating sense of collective amnesia. Even I find myself struggling to remember: Was there really ever any other way to live? Is my sense that a whole way of life has been lost a delusion — or has everything really changed?
For example, it’s become hard to remember what it felt like to live in a world where progressives fiercely championed freedom of speech and conservatives sought to corral and control it. I used to be proud to be a “card-carrying member of the ACLU.” No longer (although happily, I now feel the same way about FIRE). On an abstract level, I know that the progressive pro-free speech position used to be utterly normal. But in my bones, on the level of embodied experience, it’s impossible to access what it felt like to live in that now-lost progressive culture. A sense of freedom that used to be taken for granted has been stamped out. And even the collective memory of what it meant and why we cared about it has faded to the point of irrelevance.
There’s a feeling of being so enmeshed in the Zeitgeist that even the relatively recent past looks like a strange, distant, and even unrecognizable land. The powerful sensibilities and demands of the present moment are all-encompassing yet evanescent. What happened to last week’s crisis? It’s hard to remember unless the feelings of shock and outrage it initially generated continue to be hyped in our ever-churning 24/7 news cycle. Otherwise, it’s so quickly overtaken by the next seemingly quasi-apocalyptic event that its significance — which had felt so monumental just a few days or weeks earlier — fades off the radar entirely.
How do you navigate a culture in which everyone is supposed to follow the same script on a slew of hot-button issues when there’s such a rapid-fire succession of crisis after crisis after crisis that you can’t keep them straight? The answer is simple: You internalize a basic narrative template that applies overarchingly to an ever-changing array of specific events and fit everything into that familiar script. If you want to be more specific and au courant, just listen to NPR or some other approved media outlet and repeat the talking points issued there with the proper emotional inflection. (They’re very good at signaling not only what to think, but how to feel.) And if you’re not sure how to stay safely on message, just try to look properly on board and keep as tactfully quiet as possible.
Gender Wars
In her brilliant short book, Kill All Normies: Online Culture Wars from 4Chan and Tumblr to Trump and the Alt-Right, Angela Nagle documents how two warring subcultures — one on the “masculinist” right and one on the “feminist” left — were incubated online during the early 2000s on the then-obscure platforms of 4Chan and Tumblr. Consequently, during the mid-2010s, both gained traction “in real life.” First, the “critical social justice” (or Woke) movement started expanding rapidly on college campuses. Then, after the shock of the 2016 Presidential election, progressives raised the alarm against the “alt-right.” Soon, the entire country was pulled into an intensely polarized and highly gendered dynamic that had previously been confined to niche subcultural and/or activist forums.
“Mainstream newsreading audiences were baffled,” Nagel recounts, “when Facebook revealed it was offering over 50 gender options for its members to choose from in 2014, around the same time the campus wars over safe spaces, trigger warnings, no-platforming and gender pronouns emerged”:
But the social media corporation was merely taking its cue from online subcultures that had been emerging for years before, and the youth politcial subcultures that had created them and emerged out of them. The main preoccuptions of this new culture…were gender fluidity and providing a safe space to explore other concerns like mental ill-health, physical disability, race, cultural identity and ‘intersectionality’ (p. 69).
Nagel goes on to characterize what we now call Wokeism as “a culture of fragility and victimhood mixed with a vicious culture of group attacks, group shaming, and attempts to destroy the reputations and lives of others” (p. 75). After incubating online (particularly on the social media platform, Tumblr), this subculture started to gain traction and expand in off-line spaces, particularly college and university campuses:
Trigger warnings had to be issued in order to avoid the unexpectedly high number of young women who had never gone to war claiming to have post-traumatic stress disorder. They claimed to be ‘triggered’ by mention of anything distressing, a claim with no scientific basis and including everything from great works of classical literature to expressions of pretty mainstream opinion, like the idea that there are only two genders (p. 78).
As this quote suggests, this new movement skewed female, both in terms of sensibility and demographics. On campus, a “new generation of campus feminists” whose views on sex, gender, and sexuality aligned with those of the extraordinarily influential Judith Butler emerged as the impassioned vanguard.
Meanwhile, over on the “masculinist” right, everything was becoming “nastier still.” Even mainstream forums such as Twitter and YouTube faced “a deluge of the worst racial slurs imaginable, vicious commentary about women and ethnic minorities, and fantasies of violence against them.” After Trump was elected in 2016, anyone who dared criticize him publicly (including conservatives) was subject to a relentless barrage of threatening attacks online. Again, this was only possible due to recently developed technologies, which enabled the alt-right “to send thousands of the most obsessed, unhinged and angry people on the Internet after someone if they dare to speak against the President or his prominent alt-light and alt-right fans” (pp. 118-119). Not surprisingly, this new “masculinist” right was not only virulently anti-feminist but gleefully misogynist.
The often frightening nastiness of the online right not only further radicalized the Woke left, but helped make its claims of victimhood and oppression appear legitimate to many. It’s instructive to remember that pretty much every journalist was deeply engaged with Twitter before Elon Musk took it over, following the trending topics and often participating in its endless conflicts. Consequently, every media outlet had substantial exposure to this alt-right online army. Many journalists were viciously targeted by it, with women being hit with sexist abuse, Jews with anti-Semitism, Blacks with racism, etc.
Presumably, these online dynamics made many journalists and others who witnessed them much more sympathetic to Woke claims that American society was foundationally structured by sexism, racism, and transphobia than they might have otherwise been. The charge that a burgeoning right-wing movement was rallying around Trump and that it posed an immediate danger to “marginalized folks” and the threat of “fascism” more generally appeared comparatively credible within the confines of the Twitterverse. Soon, legacy media outlets were relentlessly issuing dire warnings about America’s rising tide of misogyny, transphobia, white supremacy, and fascism.
This Wokeified media blitz was reinforced by many members of the influential “professional-managerial class” (PMC), including professors, doctors, scientists, business execs, nonprofit leaders, and so on. Some leaned culturally left enough to begin with that when Wokeism hit, they embraced the new ideas coming down the pike as the cutting edge of youth-driven “progress” with no sense of cognitive dissonance. Others were already committed to ideological currents that funneled into Wokeism in simplified form (queer theory, fourth-wave feminism, etc.) Most, however, simply went along with it because they were confused, cowed, didn’t care, found it expedient, or didn’t know what else to do.
Toxic Femininity
The resultant proliferation of Woke and Woke-adjacent perspectives produced a new type of progressive culture that’s remarkably split along gendered lines. In Blue State America, everything associated with masculinity — both the good, the bad, and the ugly — has been indiscriminately tarred with the “toxic” label. Meanwhile, girls and women have been valorized in weird and confusing ways. On the one hand, progressives are proud to proclaim that “the future is female.” On the other, it’s taboo to assert the reality of biological sex (one must play along with the claim it’s “assigned at birth”) and considered beyond reactionary to ask for a basic definition of what a “woman” is (as such questions are deemed dangerously “transphobic”).
As turnabout is fair play, it’s reasonable to describe this newly Wokeified culture as imbued with a certain strain of “toxic femininity.” The old free speech culture (which, again, used to be part of the liberal left) that valorized open, rational, and often fierce debate over contested political issues has been rejected as harmful and even dangerous. In the name of being kind, caring, and sensitive to the most vulnerable — all traditionally “feminine” traits — progressives are expected to refrain from asking even the most basic, obvious, and logical questions about all sorts of highly consequential issues (e.g., the real-world consequences of denying the reality of biological sex in sports, prisons, and domestic violence shelters.) And not only that: Remaining properly within the bounds of this new orthodoxy requires censoring your own mind to avoid thinking such thoughts at all — as, presumably, even to ask yourself silently whether BLM wasn’t actually a scam organization or what it really means to insist that “trans women are women” could only indicate your own shamefully internalized white supremacy and transphobia.
Of course, if you’re not up to the task of policing your own thoughts properly, your friendly enforcers of snitch culture are ready, willing, and able to do it for you. For the good of all, both the volunteer and professional enforcers of right-think stand ready to “call out” those who stray and make sure they’re held properly “accountable” for any ostensible “harms.” The well-known fact that such disciplining is unpredictable, erratic, and arbitrary creates a tremendous incentive for those subject to such surveillance to enroll in yet another “training” to try and remain safely aligned with the ever-shifting “right side of history.” For example, did you know that you should no longer say “crazy,” but use the word “surprising” or “wild” instead? No less an authority than Stanford University says so! Because, after all, every decent person wants to avoid using “ableist language that trivializes the experiences of people living with mental health conditions” — right?
Such dynamics can be described as “toxically feminine” in that they take what are in fact extremely important and much-needed traditionally feminine values — kindness, sensitivity, caring, and so on — and twists them into something that’s quite the opposite. Any sensibility that regularly pressures people to conform unquestioningly to its dictates and rigorously practice self-censorship isn’t kind at all. On the contrary, it’s deeply unfeeling and even cruel. By the same token, a culture that promotes and rewards surveilling, reporting, prosecuting, convicting, and punishing others with no rules in place designed to protect freedom and preserve fairness is anything but caring. No. In reality, it’s deceitful, dangerous, and morally disgusting.
To add insult to injury, all this oppressive group conformity and thought control is supposedly being deployed in the name of “social justice.” As if a society whose working and middle classes are decimated, political institutions dysfunctional, and leaders clueless and/or corrupt is really going to positively transform thanks to ever more insane language policing! It would be a sick joke were it not such a powerful and consequential dynamic.
Woke culture has proven so destructive that even well-established progressive activist leaders have publicly denounced it. While they of course would never describe it as toxically feminine, the patterns of psycho-emotional manipulation and bullying described very much fit the bill. “To be honest with you, this is the biggest problem on the left over the last six years,” one executive director of a prominent DC-based progressive advocacy group confessed to lefty reporter Ryan Grim. “This is so big. And it’s like abuse in the family — it’s the elephant in the room that no one wants to talk about.” (As was the case with most of the EDs interviewed, this was shared “on the condition of anonymity, for fear of angering staff or donors.“)
“I got to a point like three years ago where I had a crisis of faith, like, I don’t even know, most of these spaces on the left are just not — they’re not healthy. Like all these people are just not — they’re not doing well,” another anonymous “senior leader” said.
“The dynamic, the toxic dynamic of whatever you want to call it — callout culture, cancel culture, whatever — is creating this really intense thing, and no one is able to acknowledge it, no one’s able to talk about it, no one’s able to say how bad it is.”
The environment has pushed expectations far beyond what workplaces previously offered to employees. “A lot of staff that work for me, they expect the organization to be all the things: a movement, OK, get out the vote, OK, healing, OK, take care of you when you’re sick, OK. It’s all the things,” said one executive director. “Can you get your love and healing at home, please? But I can’t say that, they would crucify me.”
One now-departed ED told Grim that during his last nine months on the job, he spent “90-95 percent” of his time on “internal strife.” Another who sounds like he’s soon out the door concurred: “All my ED [executive director] friends, everybody’s going through some shit, nobody’s immune.”
“It’s not just the nonprofit world, though, let’s be clear,” Loretta Ross, an author, activist, and founder of a “reproductive justice collective” recounted:
'“I started a for-profit consulting firm last year with three other partners, because every C-suite that’s trying to be progressive is undergoing the same kind of callout culture. And so it’s happening societywide.” Business, she said, is booming, but the implications have been especially pronounced within progressive institutions, given their explicit embrace of progressive values.
“We used to want to make the world a better place,” another progressive leader told Grim. “Now we just make our organizations more miserable to work at.” But — anything to further the righteous cause of “love and healing,” right? Yes, “toxic femininity” describes the twisted interpersonal dynamics of this “Mean Girl”-inflected culture pretty damn well.
Surveilliance Capitalism
Wokesters like to imagine that they’re dedicated to “abolishing capitalism.” In fact, however, they’ve helped grow the global market for DEI bureaucrats to $9.3 billion (projected to reach $15.4 billion by 2026), ensure that elite universities like Yale employ the equivalent of one administrator for every undergraduate student, and expand the U.S. “sex reassignment surgery market” by 11 percent during 2020-21 to reach $1.9 billion (with a continued compounding annual growth rate of 11.23% projected through 2030). Beyond such boons to particular market sectors, Wokeism also has a much deeper and quite special relationship with what Zuboff (2019) memorably deemed our new age of “surveillance capitalism.”
Zuboff describes surveillance capitalism as an “unprecedented economic logic” developed by big tech companies such as Google during the 2010s. Every time we’re online or within range of Internet-connected devices such as Alexa, Ring, or Nest, surveillance capitalists are secretly scooping up every bit of data they can glean by tracking, monitoring, recording, and listening to our daily activities. These data are valuable because they can be “turned into computational products that predict your behavior” and sold to “businesses determined to know what we will do next” in order to market goods and services to us more successfully.
Even worse, this high-tech web of undetectable surveillance isn’t used simply to project what our preferences and behaviors would be were we simply left to our own devices. No, that would be far too unpredictable. Consequently, surveillance capitalists have developed powerful tools designed to “modify and direct” our emotions, thoughts, and behaviors:
For example, by 2013, Facebook had learned how to engineer subliminal cues on its pages to shape users’ real-world actions and feelings. Later, these methods were combined with real-time emotional analyses, allowing marketers to cue behavior at the moment of maximum vulnerability. These inventions were celebrated for being both effective and undetectable. Cambridge Analytica later demonstrated that the same methods could be employed to shape political rather than commercial behavior.
Zuboff convincingly argues that the development of surveillance capitalism inaugurated a new historical epoch, one that’s fundamentally different from the preceding age of industrial capitalism. Whereas the old order “depended upon the exploitation and control of nature, with catastrophic consequences that we only now recognize,” the new one “depends instead on the exploitation and control of human nature.” Effectively, the core dynamics of capitalism have shifted from mining the earth for natural resources to manipulating our minds for commercial purposes. Powered by transformative new technological capacities, it’s built “to reshape our natures for the sake of its success” (p. 470).
As such, surveillance capitalism constitutes “a stark break with the legacies and ideals of the liberal order”:
Self-determination and autonomous moral judgment, generally regarded as the bulwark of civilization, are recast as a threat to collective well-being. Social pressure, well-known to psychologists for its dangerous production of obedience and conformity, is elevated to the highest good as the means to extinguish the unpredictable influences of autonomous thought and moral judgment (p. 444).
Here, we see the logical congruence between surveillance capitalism and Wokeism. Both excel at psycho-emotional manipulation. Both generate groupthink dynamics and herd-like behavior. Both have a built-in hostility to freedom of speech. Both encourage self-censorship. Both are fundamentally antithetical to liberal democratic values of all stripes, including but not limited to those of the old-school, non-Woke progressive variety. And on a metaphorical level, both could be said to be running more on the new toxically feminine dynamics of covert relational aggression than on the old toxically masculine model of overt hierarchical domination.
To be clear, this isn’t to suggest that Wokeism caused the rise of surveillance capitalism. On the contrary, the most powerful dynamics run precisely the other way. As many political analysts have pointed out, core ideological contributors to Wokeism date back to the 1990s, including queer theory, critical legal studies, and third-wave feminism. The roots of these intellectual movements, in turn, can be traced back to the New Left of the 1960s-70s or even further. Despite this long historical pedigree, however, Wokeism didn’t really take off until the Internet had become such an inextricable part of everyday life that what happened in cyberspace started to reframe and re-engineer reality. Such a widely unpopular movement could never have become as powerful as it did unless it synched with the structural logic of surveillance capitalism, which was gaining power and momentum at precisely the same time.
Wokeism & “Disinformation”
Recent revelations regarding what Michael Shellenberger calls the “Censorship-Industrial Complex” demonstrate that surveillance capitalism is similarly supporting the growth of a new public-private-nonprofit partnership designed to control political information and narratives. Matt Taibbi brought much of this information to light with his investigation of the “Twitter Files,” a huge trove of data including internal emails, DMs, Slack chats, etc. detailing the company’s day-to-day operations prior to its takeover by Musk. As Taibbi explained to the House Judiciary Committee last month:
We learned Twitter, Facebook, Google, and other companies developed a formal system for taking in moderation “requests” from every corner of government: the FBI, DHS, HHS, DOD, the Global Engagement Center at State, even the CIA. For every government agency scanning Twitter, there were perhaps 20 quasi-private entities doing the same, including Stanford’s Election Integrity Project, Newsguard, the Global Disinformation Index, and others, many taxpayer-funded.
A focus of this growing network is making lists of people whose opinions, beliefs, associations, or sympathies are deemed to be misinformation, disinformation, or malinformation. The latter term is just a euphemism for “true but inconvenient.” Plain and simple, the making of such lists is a form of digital McCarthyism. Ordinary Americans are not just being reported to Twitter for “deamplification” or de-platforming, but to firms like PayPal, digital advertisers like Xandr, and crowdfunding sites like GoFundMe. These companies can and do refuse service to law-abiding people and businesses whose only crime is falling afoul of a faceless, unaccountable, algorithmic judge.
Unsurprisingly, this analysis and the data that supports it has been studiously ignored by The New York Times and other legacy media outlets. Also unsurprisingly, this self-styled disinformation-prevention network regularly employs Woke language and sensibilities to help legitimate and advance its goal of securing elite control over political information, knowledge, and discourse. Consequently, Blue Staters who still trust such sources tend to assume that this self-styled battle against “disinformation” is both necessary and virtuous. Supporting it loyally without asking too many questions (let alone bothering to find out what the Twitter Files and related documents actually reveal) is widely taken-for-granted as an unambiguous good and/or not worth worrying about in Blue State culture.
This is a mistake. As Jacob Siegel, a former Army intelligence officer who’s now a senior editor at Tablet, explains in an important article published on that site less than a month ago:
What is coming into being is a new form of government and social organization that is as different from mid-twentieth century liberal democracy as the early American republic was from the British monarchism that it grew out of and eventually supplanted. A state organized on the principle that it exists to protect the sovereign rights of individuals is being replaced by a digital leviathan that wields power through opaque algorithms and the manipulation of digital swarms.
“If the underlying philosophy of the war against disinformation can be expressed in a single claim,” he continues, “it is this: You cannot be trusted with your own mind.”
Like Zuboff, Siegal believes that what’s at stake is not only the future of liberal democracy but of the nature of human being itself. At first, this sounds like ridiculous hyperbole. But when you start to think about just how quickly the advent of smartphones and social media revolutionized everyday life, warnings that we may be on a fast track towards losing ways of life that we’ve always taken as natural and unchangeable are worth taking seriously. This is even more true when you consider that the extant machinery of surveillance capitalism and the censorship-industrial complex may soon be fueled by the exponentially expanding capabilities of AI.
Seen within the context of our new digitally-driven world, the biggest threat posed by Wokeism may be that it’s not only diverting attention away from what may prove to be devastating developments, but legitimating them as good in Blue State America and the many powerful institutions it controls. Turning this situation around will require reigniting a widely shared aspiration to realize the best of what used to be regarded as both the masculine and the feminine virtues. A commitment to being kind, caring, and sensitive can and should co-exist with being rational, courageous, and when necessary, a warrior. Such positive human capacities are universal. But they’re also quite challenging to cultivate, even in the best of circumstances — let alone when they’re constantly being countered by the pull of powerful Internet algorithms.
You should be famous—you’re brilliant!
late hit, but chiming in to say this is such a good essay.