The Downward Spiral

The Bugfuck Nuttification of America and How it Happened

While we can’t say that American political discourse has grown smarter, it sure has become a whole lot noisier. Both sides accuse the other of radicalization, and both sides are correct. Disputes between Democrats and Republicans are now a Manichaean war between Good and Evil.

Dirty tricks, smears, innuendo, and angry debates have always played a role in American elections. But we haven’t seen this kind of division and hysteria since the Civil War, and we all know how that turned out. What set Americans at each other’s throats — and how do we reverse it?

We might look back to the Vietnam-era protests and the tensions between hippies and squares. We could even explore the Suffragettes and the Civil Rights movement. But if you want my take (and since you’re reading my Substack, I presume you do) the madness started with the advent of a device you may be using to browse this article.

Today we're introducing three revolutionary products...

The first one is a widescreen iPod with touch controls. The second is a revolutionary mobile phone. And the third is a breakthrough Internet communications device…

These are not three separate devices. This is one device. And we are calling it iPhone.

Steve Jobs, Macworld 2007

For years rumors of an Apple phone swirled. Then, on January 9, 2007, Steve Jobs announced its impending release. When it finally arrived in June 2008, customers lined up outside Apple and AT&T stores to buy “the ultimate digital device.” Within 74 days after its release, Apple announced that it had sold 1 million iPhones.

Where Apple’s earlier Newton had relied on a stylus, the iPhone used a capacitative touch screen that let users type on a virtual keyboard using their fingertips. While an earlier Motorola “iTunes phone” let you load up to 100 songs, the iPhone’s whopping 4gb of storage (8gb for a $100 upcharge) let you load thousands of 128k MP3s from your iTunes library. And with the Safari browser, you could even browse the burgeoning World Wide Web.

On July 10, 2008, Apple announced the opening of its new iOS app store, with 500 apps on offer. By June 2009 iPhone users had 50,000 apps to choose from. But 2008 also saw Google release its Android mobile phone system. Jobs was livid, and launched multiple lawsuits against Google and competing phone makers like Motorola and Samsung. But ultimately Android wound up with a majority smartphone market share.

With iOS and Android, phone users had instant and continuous online access. They no longer had to turn on their desktop or open their laptop. They could stay informed of the news and events from their commuter train, their doctor’s office, or their toilet. And with the rise of a popular social media site, they could witness events happening in real time.

In March 2006 Jack Dorsey, Noah Glass, Biz Stone, and Evan Williams launched a new SMS services they called twttr. At first twttr was a side project that was mainly intended to promote their podcasting tool Odeo. Twttr used SMS messaging to communicate with the user’s friend group. Send your message to Twttr’s shortcode (40404) and Twttr would send that message to all your friends on Twttr.

At first signups were slow, but picked up quickly after the 2007 South X Southwest conference. By that time twttr was now known as Twitter and had moved from SMS to a web-based platform. But they still held to the 140-character SMS message limit, meaning you had around 25 words per Tweet.

With Twitter you could watch events unfold in real time from eyewitness reporters, complete with photos and videos. As smartphones became more sophisticated, photo and video quality improved. But not until 2017 would Twitter double its character limit, giving you a robust 280 characters to make your point.

This immediacy, combined with the tight word limits, meant that provocative and inflammatory Tweets would travel around the Twittersphere before a sober, reasoned comment got its first like. Within seconds after you posted a hot take, or an ice cold one, you could get the instant dopamine rush of approval or disapproval. (As Annie Lennox and Dave Stewart noted a couple years earlier, some of them want to abuse you and some of them want to be abused… ).

But dopamine isn’t just a brain chemical, it’s a powerful psychoactive. The rush you get from a fat hit of crack is dopamine-driven. So is gambling fever. And while smoking crack or gambling away your kid’s college fund carries some social stigma, arguing on Twitter brings you nothing but your favorite flavor of affirmation. While Twitter was an especially powerful dopamine pump, many mainstream media outlets were also learning that the Internet played by very different rules than print or broadcast media.

Marshall McLuhan

A hot medium is one that extends one single sense in "high definition." High definition is the state of being well filled with data. A photograph is, visually, "high definition." A cartoon is "low definition," simply because very little visual information is provided.

Telephone is a cool medium. or one of low definition, because the ear is given a meager amount of information. And speech is a cool medium of low definition, because so little is given and so much has to be filled in by the listener.

A hot medium does not leave so much to be filled in or completed by the audience. Hot media are, therefore, low in participation, and cool media are high in participation or completion by the audience. Naturally, therefore, a hot medium like radio has very different effects on the user from a cool medium like the telephone.

Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media. (1964) 29-30

McLuhan noted that hot mediums invariably lead to social disruption. Six decades after Johannes Gutenberg printed his first Bible, Martin Luther nailed his 95 theses to a church door. Sola scriptura could only work in a world with readily available access to printed Bibles and a largely literate population.

Richard Nixon’s five o’clock shadow lost him a televised debate and cost him the 1960 election. Eight years later televised images of dead and wounded Vietnam soldiers spurred protests that drove out LBJ and opened the floor for Nixon to take the Oval Office. Journalists could write romanticized tales of war and courage and politicians could give inspiring speeches. But those cool media couldn’t compete with color TV images beamed into American living rooms.

In many ways the Internet is the ultimate hot medium. An internet connection gives you instant access to reams upon reams of audio, video, and print data. With the opening of a new browser tab you can get information about your previously chosen information. You don’t need to use your imagination, you just have to click on the right links and everything you want is there before you.

Yet the Internet also functions like a cool medium. Users not only consume information, they also produce it. Once you sent letters to the editor, then waited to see if they would be printed. Today you can praise a good story or criticize a bad one within seconds after reading it — or without reading it at all! On the Internet all the world is a stage and we are simultaneously performers and audience.

This participation makes the data firehose even more seductive. Like Palmer Eldritch’s Chew-Z, the Internet can entrap both dealers and users in a world that’s more detailed and believable than the cool medium we call reality. And like Chew-Z, those hallucinations can quickly spiral out of control for all involved.

Many (yrs. truly included) have dismissed campaigns against “disinformation” as a thinly disguised ruse designed to gain control of the Internet. Those fears are well-founded, but they don’t tell the whole story. When you give people unlimited access to unlimited information, there’s no telling what might happen. But it’s a sure bet that somebody — or something — will try to seize control of the information stream.

According to a November 2022 study by statistics professors at Washington University St. Louis, between 25% and 68% of all Xitter traffic comes from bots. The Department of Homeland Security’s Cyber and Infrastructure Analysis team defines bots as

Programs that vary in size depending on their function, capability, and design; and can be used on social media platforms to do various useful and malicious tasks while simulating human behavior. These programs use artificial intelligence, big data analytics, and other programs or databases to imitate legitimate users posting content.

Bots can simulate engagement by clicking or liking profiles or posts. They can post messages which are then reposted by their fellow bots. They can flood channels with spam and nonsense, or post thousands of messages for or against a cause or a person. They never grow tired and they never go off the script and embarrass their programmers.

Spotting a bot may be harder than you would imagine. That means bots also serve as obfuscation. If you dislike the message, you can easily dismiss it as bot-driven propaganda: if you like it, you can repost it to your followers and they can follow suit. Alan Turing once searched for a machine whose mind was indistinguishable from a human. Today we have humans whose minds are indistinguishable from machines.

Algorithms also determine what we see on our social media feeds. To maximize engagement and customer satisfaction, the algorithm gives us posts that resemble material we have engaged with in the past. If we respond frequently to rage bait, the algorithm gives us more rage bait. If we regularly like posts that speak favorably of an actor or a politician, we’ll see more and more of those posts.

This results in virtual echo chambers. Users see only material that affirms their beliefs and reinforces their prejudices. This gives them the idea that their ideas are the default, and that those who think otherwise are either ignorant or actively evil. And there’s a good deal of evidence suggesting that from 2016 onward there were active efforts to push a particular agenda and to silence its critics and dissidents.

These efforts weren’t entirely misguided. As we’ve noted above, there’s abundant evidence that the Internet can serve as a socially disruptive force. But those who wish to redirect the information firehose will inevitably move it in their preferred direction. Assuming that politicians want a neutral stage is like believing that multinational corporations want a level playing field.

Wintermute and AM aside, no computer can spark mass insanity on its own. Every bot has a programmer and every algorithm has a creator. The Internet and the smartphone may have been necessary for our current state, but they were not sufficient. The madness was routed across networks, but it infected human beings. To understand how the computers drove us mad, we must look not to 1s and 0s but to flesh and blood.

Little Edie and Big Edie Bouvier-Beale, 1973. Still from Grey Gardens (1975)

As the Internet moved from colleges to homes and then to phones, a new tech aristocracy of Techbros came into being. Even after the Great Recession of 2008 the tech industry remained robust and tech jobs remained relatively plentiful. But the tech industry’s strength was matched by an increasingly soft academic market.

Once upon a time a PhD from an Ivy League school guaranteed a well-paid and tenured gig as a college professor. For the past two decades tenured positions have grown increasingly scarce. A PhD will now get you low-paid contract jobs teaching multiple classes. Save for a lucky few, today’s academics live in poverty and supplement their income with second and third jobs.

Underemployed intellectuals have always been a social tinderbox. As academic jobs grew scarcer and their pay lower, many academics were seduced by the promise of a cultural revolution. Once-fringe ideas became the academic gold standard, and those who failed to get with the program were blackballed by their peers. And, inevitably, the professors passed these ideas down to an audience of wide-eyed students.

As with the Internet, the college-educated found themselves in an echo chamber. Theirs were the beliefs held by Good People™. When those ideas were rejected by the electorate in 2016, it became increasingly clear whom the Bad People™ were. And it became even more clear that those Bad People had more power than they had ever imagined. Which, of course, meant that the Good People had less.

The GPs, most of whom were terminally online themselves, blamed the Internet for their woes. Like academia, mainstream media had seen better days. Many people now relied on their Facebook and Twitter feeds for information about the world. A 2019 PLOS One article determined that:

[Trump’s] unusual campaign shifted the direction of the GOP and the US right-wing toward the far-right of the political spectrum. An important factor behind this success was the campaign’s use of social media communication channels, especially Twitter…

The increased openness of parties moving their political discourse online has undoubted benefits for transparency and accountability. The concern is the opportunity this provides for an external group to target the online presence of a political party, and then start to dictate their political direction.

The ability of a minority group to rapidly generate a new political faction and take control of a major political party in this way can cause problems for democracy

Immediately many blamed Russian bots for putting Trump in the Oval Office. Government agencies pressured social media companies to remove “disinformation” and “misinformation.” A cottage industry of “fact checkers” helped Good People distinguish between acceptable and unacceptable beliefs. Things came to a head with the COVID-19 crisis, and by the end of 2020 the sitting President of the United States had been removed from social media as a threat to democracy and freedom.

Secure in their triumph, the Vaccinated Virtuous returned to their dead-end lives convinced that they had finally won. The Internet was now in safe hands and soon the Anti-Science Christofascists would be deplatformed, debanked, and destroyed. As for Trump, he was besieged by civil suits and criminal charges and would never be returning to plague the nation. It was only a matter of time before things returned to their proper place now that the Righteous had triumphed.

The big problem with echo chambers is they make you complacent. When you never see your cause criticized, you don’t know its weaknesses. When you never see your opponents praised, you don’t know their strengths. And when you reject all evidence outside the official sources, you have no way of knowing if those sources are wrong. Or if they are lying to you.

The big problem with dopamine-driven politics is it prioritizes the emotional rush over the facts. When your fix revolves around a hated enemy and a noble cause, you wind up going to all lengths to get your fix. And when reality intrudes on your crack high, you’re going to come up with all sorts of junkie excuses and explanations.

To explain Trump’s continuing popularity, many critics accused mainstream journalism of “sanewashing” Trump. As Jon Alsop explained in a Columbia Journalism Review article:

As applied to Trump, the idea is that major mainstream news outlets are routinely taking his incoherent, highly abnormal rants—be they on social media or at in-person events—and selectively quoting from them to emphasize lines that, in isolation, might sound coherent or normal, thus giving a misleading impression of the whole for people who didn’t read or watch the entire thing.

In her column, [Parker] Molloy called out CNN for sanitizing a Trump screed about tomorrow’s presidential debate and the New York Times for omitting an allusion to a conspiracy theory about vaccines and autism from its summary of a Trump pledge to tap Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to help make health policy; since then, she and others have applied the same analysis to coverage of Trump’s incoherent remarks—particularly around the costs of childcare and a proposed Elon Musk–led “efficiency commission”—at an economic forum in New York.

“This ‘sanewashing’ of Trump’s statements isn’t just poor journalism,” Molloy wrote. “It’s a form of misinformation that poses a threat to democracy.”

A 2017 study by Harvard Journalism professor Thomas Patterson found that 80% of Trump’s media coverage in his first 100 days was negative. The mutually hostile relationship between Trump and the “fake news” press was legendary. Yet many appear to believe that Trump won because the media didn’t work hard enough to discredit him. In the New Republic, Michael Tomasky complained:

Try this thought experiment. Imagine Trump coming down that escalator in 2015 with no right-wing media; no Fox News; an agenda still set, and mores still established, by staid old CBS News, the House of Murrow, and The New York Times.

That atmosphere would have denied an outrageous figure like Trump the oxygen he needed to survive and flourish. He just would not have been taken seriously at all.

In that world, ruled by a traditional mainstream media, Trump would have been seen by Republicans as a liability, and they would have done what they failed to do in real life—banded together to marginalize him.

The Right spent several years “trusting the plan” and following QAnon. Today we’re seeing a similar “BlueAnon” movement on the Left. The BlueAnons are convinced that Trump staged the Butler assassination attempt; that Trump and Elon Musk rigged the election using StarLink satellites; that Trump secretly had his late wife Ivana cremated so that he could burn incriminating documents.

After Trump’s victory, the anti-oppression hammer found lots and lots of nails. Trump won because Americans are too racist to vote for a Black candidate and too misogynist to vote for a woman. Trans activists insisted that if only Harris had been more vocal about her support of trans women in women’s prisons, bathrooms, and sports. Many dedicated anti-Trumpers bragged about cutting off friends and family members who had failed to express sufficient anger toward Orange Julius Caesar.

It’s nearly impossible to reason people out of opinions they didn’t reason themselves into. But throughout the mess, a few smart Democrats made an honest assessment of what went wrong and what role their own actions played in it.

Robert Reich

, a man with whom I rarely agree, hit the ball out of the park when he said:

Democrats must no longer do the bidding of big corporations and the wealthy. They must instead focus on winning back the working class.

They should demand paid family leave, Medicare for all, free public higher education, stronger unions, higher taxes on great wealth, and housing credits that will generate the biggest boom in residential home construction since World War II.

They should also demand that corporations share their profits with their workers.

They should call for limits on CEO pay, eliminate all stock buybacks (as was the SEC rule before 1982), and reject corporate welfare (subsidies and tax credit to particular companies and industries unrelated to the common good).

Democrats need to tell Americans why their pay has been lousy for decades and their jobs less secure: not because of immigrants, liberals, people of color, the “deep state,” or any other Trump Republican bogeyman, but because of the power of large corporations and the rich to rig the market and siphon off most of the economy’s gains.

Where the Old Left fought for worker’s rights and struggled to organize the working classes, today’s Left makes jokes about incest and missing teeth. That’s because today’s Left is largely comprised of aspiring aristocrats who are only a couple paychecks away from homelessness themselves. To join forces with the poor would anger the folks they emulate and remind them of their own precarious position. This classism has driven away many voters who saw the Democrats as the party of unions and working people. If the Left hopes to discover what may be unburdened by what has been, they must realize that they no longer have the luxury of self-delusion.

With Trump in office and a Republican rise to power, Right-leaning folks may find themselves resting on their laurels. They now have what feels like solid evidence that they were right all along and that the Left is inevitably headed into the dustbin of history. But the economic problems which helped feed the Great Neurosis remain with us. Our means of communication still make it easy for us to wrap ourselves in hugboxes and block out any dissenting voices. We are still susceptible to the madness, and if we do not learn from the past we will repeat it.