What I found in the deepest reaches of the Internet and the lost art—and political potency—of true human connection.
ANDY KROLL for the TomDispatch
We wonder: Who are they? Where are they from? How do they make a living?
Lately, though, such passing encounters tend to leave me with a sense of
suspicion, a wariness tinged with grim curiosity. I think to myself: Is he or
she one of them?
By them, I mean one of the tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, of “people” I encountered during my many forays into the darkest recesses of the Internet.
Despite the staggering amount of time many of us spend online — more than six-and-a-half hours a day, according to recent research — we tend to haunt the same websites and social media platforms (Facebook, YouTube, CNN, Reddit, Google) again and again.
Not me, though. Over the past
five years, I’ve spent more hours than I wish to count exploring the
subterranean hideaways and uncensored gathering spaces for some of the most
unhinged communities on the Internet.
Where I went and who I didn't meet there
Call it an occupational hazard. Only recently, I published my first book, A Death on W Street: The Murder of Seth Rich and the Age of Conspiracy, an investigative political thriller that opens with the 2016 street murder of a 27-year-old who had worked for the Democratic National Committee.
In the absence of a culprit, Seth Rich’s killing got swept into the fast-flowing conspiratorial currents of that year’s presidential race, a contest that pitted an unabashed conspiracy theorist, Donald Trump, against a candidate, Hillary Clinton, who had been the subject of decades’ worth of elaborately sinister claims (with no basis in reality).
For my book, I set out to understand how a
senseless crime that took the life of a beloved but hardly famous mid-level
political staffer became a national and then international news story, a viral
phenomenon of ever more twisted conspiracy theories that reached millions and
all too soon became a piece of modern folklore.
To do so, I traced the arc of those Rich conspiracy theories back to their origins. In practical terms, that meant hundreds of late nights spent huddled over my desk, eyes fixed on my computer screen, clicking and scrolling my way through a seemingly endless trail of tweets, memes, posts, and videos.
The Internet is, in some ways, like an ancient city, its latest
incarnation resting atop the ruins of so many civilizations past. I came to
think of myself then as an online archeologist digging my way through the
digital eons, sifting through archived websites and seeking out long-vanished
posts in search of clues and answers.
Or maybe I was a waste handler, holding my nose as I picked through piles (or do I mean miles?) of toxic detritus that littered old versions of social media sites you’d know like Twitter and Reddit, and others you probably don’t, like 4chan, 8kun, and Telegram.
It was there that I
encountered so many of them, those faceless users, the ones I might
have passed on the street, who, with the promise of anonymity, had felt
unburdened to voice their unfiltered, often deeply disturbing selves. It was
all id, all the time.
Who were these people? I couldn’t help but wonder whether they
actually believed the stuff they wrote. Or was it all about the thrill of
saying it? In an unnervingly boundless online world, were they testing the
boundaries of the acceptable by one-upping each other with brazen displays of
racism, misogyny, or antisemitism (just to start down the list)?
Firing up my laptop and venturing into those noxious places was like entering an inside-out world impervious to logic and critical thinking. They had their own language — losers were “cucks,” loyal foot soldiers “pedes,” and Hillary Clinton was Hillary “Klanton” — and they operated with their own sets of elaborate but twisted rules and hierarchies.
After a few hours of
studying such “conversations,” a form of vertigo would set in, a spinning
sensation that made me get up from my desk and clear my head with a walk or a
conversation with a real human being.
Now that the book is published, I don’t spend much time in those disturbing online worlds. Still, every once in a while, I can’t help checking in — old habits die hard — despite the horrors I saw there while gathering material for my book.
What nags at me even now — in fact, it haunts me in some
way — is the knowledge that there were real people behind those toxic accounts.
The same people you might sit next to on a bus without having the slightest
suspicion of just how disturbed they were and what a disturbing world they were
helping create or elaborate. That knowledge still weighs on me.
Weapons of Mass Disinformation
A confession: on a few of those late nights spent in the online ruins, I caught myself starting to nod along with some of the wild-eyed nonsense I was reading.
Maybe I found a particular Reddit thread surprisingly convincing. Maybe the post in question had sprinkled a few verifiable facts amid the nonsense to make me think, Huh? Maybe my sixth cup of coffee and lack of sleep had so weakened my mental safeguards that madness itself began to seem at least faintly reasonable.
When I felt such heretical thoughts seep into my stream of consciousness, I took it as a sure sign that I should log off and go to bed.
Thinking back on those moments, I admit that the first feeling I
have is pure and utter embarrassment. I’m an investigative reporter. I make a
living dealing in facts, data, and vetted information. Heck, my first job in
journalism was as a full-time, trained fact-checker. I should be impervious to
the demented siren song of conspiracy theories, right?
The correct answer is indeed: right. And yet…
I realize now that, on those disturbing long nights at the computer, I was more than an avid journalistic explorer of online content. I had immersed myself — and immersion is what the Internet does best. It’s the gateway point to a seemingly infinite number of rabbit holes.
Who hasn’t
clicked on a Wikipedia entry about, say, the making of the atomic bomb only to
check the time, realize that two hours had slipped by, and you’re now watching
a YouTube video about the greatest comebacks in baseball history with no memory
of how you got here in the first place?
An analysis by the
Public Religion Research Institute — who believe that a secret cabal of
pedophile elites, including Tom Hanks and Oprah, run the world, or that the
Earth is indeed flat, or that the moon landing more than half a century ago was
faked, no matter what news broadcaster Walter Cronkite might have said at the time?
To be clear, I’m not suggesting that conspiracy theories weren’t a fixture of American life before the Internet came along. Quite the opposite: for as long as we humans have existed, we’ve dreamt up elaborate theories and fables to explain the inexplicable or, increasingly in our time, the otherwise all too explicable that we refuse to believe.
Some of the founders of this
country were unashamed conspiracy-mongers.
What those delirious late nights at the computer led me to believe, however, is
that tools for spreading such fantastical theories have never been more powerful
than they are today and they’ve entered our politics in an unnerving fashion
(as anyone paying attention to
the January 6, 2021, assault on the Capitol knows).
Put simply, we don’t stand a chance against the social media companies. Fueled by highly sophisticated algorithms that maximize “engagement” at all costs by feeding users ever more inflammatory content, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and the rest of them don’t simply entertain, inform, or “connect” us.
As New York Times reporter Max Fisher writes in
his book The Chaos Machine, “This technology exerts such a powerful
pull on our psychology and our identity, and is so pervasive in our lives, that
it changes how we think, behave, and relate to one another. The effect,
multiplied across billions of users, has been to change society itself.”
Spending so much time burrowing into such websites, I came away
with a deep sense of just how addictive they are. More than that, they rewire
your mind in real-time. I felt it myself. I fear that there’s no path out of
our strange, increasingly conspiratorial moment, filled with viral lies and
rampant disinformation, without rewriting the algorithms that increasingly
govern our lives.
The Lost Art of Saying Hello
Still, I’m under no illusion that Tweets and memes can adequately explain the schisms in American life and this country’s descent into a more embittered, polarized, us-versus-them cultural moment.
Nor can Donald
Trump, who is as much a product of the strange Internet world of conspiracies
as a cause of it. They are, in fact, the ever-more-virulent symptoms of a
country in which it’s not enough to disagree with your opponents. You also have
to demonize them as subhuman, criminal, and alien, while, in the process, doing
genuine harm to yourself.
In what still passes for the real world, how else to explain the prominence of conspiracy theories like QAnon or the current far-right trend of accusing someone, especially anyone who disagrees with you, of being a “groomer”?
Or how do you account for the existence of a seemingly inextinguishable belief now lurking in our world that one of the country’s prominent political families, the Clintons, are also prolific serial killers who have slaughtered dozens, if not hundreds of people?
Or the explosion of those
baseless claims I spent all that time exploring about the murdered Seth Rich,
claims that would haunt his family for years, denying them even the space to
grieve for their own son?
No amount of late-night online sleuthing was going to provide an
answer to the larger social ills afflicting this country. Indeed, the more time
I spent online, the greater the chasm appeared — so vast, in fact, that I began
to wonder whether it could ever be bridged. Nor is this a malady that can be
dealt with by politicians or governments, important as they are. It runs even
deeper than that.
When I think about the root causes of such societal drift, I return to a phrase I read in a 2021 study that described a “national friendship decline.”
According to that survey, “Americans report having fewer close friendships than they once did, talking to their friends less often, and relying less on their friends for personal support.”
The data wasn’t all grim. More than four in ten
respondents said that they had made a new friend during the pandemic. Still,
the lockdowns and self-isolation of these Covid years had exacerbated what the
survey’s authors called a
“loneliness epidemic.”
When I think about those endless Twitter rants and Reddit screeds I encountered, I envision lonely people hunched over their computers in empty apartments, posting and scrolling madly (sometimes in the most literal sense) deep into the night.
Loneliness and social isolation, of course, can’t explain away all the mad conspiratorial rants you find on the Internet, nor are they the sole cause of the brittle, increasingly dangerous state of American politics.
But it’s so much easier to resent and rage against a perceived enemy
if you’ve never met them or anyone like them, so much easier to cast the other
side as the out-group or the villain if you’ve never shared a meal or a coffee
or a phone call with them.
I mention that “loneliness epidemic” only to underscore my belief that healing the schism in our culture and politics will require something more difficult and yet simpler than major policy reforms or electing a new generation of officials.
Don’t get me wrong: both of those are needed, on both sides of the proverbial aisle. Today’s politics too often resemble a race to the bottom, as politicians rush to outflank their rivals and whip up their constituencies (often using social media to do it).
All the while, powerful
interest groups, their lobbyists, and a growing billionaire class shape (or
sink) the kinds of wholesale changes needed to reboot our political system.
Yet our problems run deeper than that — and the solutions can’t
be found in Washington, D.C.
One answer is finding ways to knit back together an unbearably
frayed nation. Neighborhood groups, book clubs, sports leagues, civic
associations, labor unions, religious groups, whatever it is, the surest way
out of this stubborn conflict must come through the simplest of gestures —
human connection. The lost art of saying hello.
Tech executives love to talk about the value of “connection” and
their goals of “connecting” the world. Almost two decades into the social media
era, we should know better than to believe those empty paeans used as cover for
the relentless pursuit of profits. Now more than ever, it’s time to step away
from those weapons of mass disinformation.
I don’t care much for New Year’s resolutions, but if I did, I
would say: let’s make 2023 the year of logging off. Get to know your neighbors
and colleagues. For my part, I’ll work on not thinking of those everyday
strangers, or even those tiny avatars on the Internet, as them.
Instead of fearing them, I’ll think I say hello.
