Category: Media

The Internet is an art project. So says Virginia Heffernan in Magic and Loss — a treatise on Internet culture that likens the World Wide Web to a communal humanist effort. This kind of thinking is useful to explain, in part, why we never seem to be able to stop trying to explain the web and what it is doing to us. The Internet reflects us more than we would like to believe and we have organized our platforms, and our associated judgements of those spaces, with aesthetics and feelings that are not web-specific, but specific to the way create, and have always created, a collective consciousness.

The magic of the web, as we think of it in everyday terms — the communicating, the efficiency, the ease — is a practical and often lifeless way to explain the Internet, that drains it of its personality and excitement. Heffernan delights in the low and high culture that exists simultaneously online, from retro or hectic designs and interfaces of chatrooms to the coolly minimalistic and decidedly luxe graphics of new apps. The loss part is a rumination on what we’ve given up as we’ve left the analog world. But Heffernan frames this as an inevitability of technological shift, something to be expected as we move from one era to another. Things are always lost in the fire, but that loss doesn’t necessarily detract from the magic that replaces it. Also, we haven’t lost as much as we think: we’ve just moved it to another arena.

The pendulum of anxiety for the web swings from worrying about ephemerality to worrying about its permanence. Things disappear quickly — like on Twitter, where Heffernan points out, we obsessively read content that is oftentimes poignant and precise. Or, things stay forever — like your search results, which will never be truly scrubbed of the embarrassing thing about you that you wish didn’t exist. Moving through the building blocks of the internet — design, text, images, videos, and music — Heffernan talks about each as they exist within our lives, as much as how they exist online.

Outside of Heffernan, there’s an easy example of this: Minimalism has progressed from a design aesthetic to a life aesthetic, with people eschewing clutter in favour of the right possessions. As Mirelle Bernstein wrote in the Atlantic in March, being able to embrace a minimalistic approach is a privilege of its own kind. Detailing Marie Kondo’s (Japanese author whose book The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up started a minimalist movement) advice to rid yourself of nostalgia, Bernstein notes that minimalism ignores a lot of the sentimentality we attach to items, especially when those items were hard to come by. She relates it to her and her parents’ experiences as immigrants: being able to throw out things you haven’t used in a while means you feel confident that you’ll be able to purchase and/or acquire those things when the time comes.

We can apply this to the Internet. In a world driven by search engine optimization, keywords, and advertising, your web efforts to make money need to be hidden. Anything conspicuous screams of desperation: click-baity content intended to drive traffic rather than quality. This too is a privilege. Existing on the web simply to exist is, in part, a luxury, signifying that you don’t need the attendant marketing push that so many others do. From a design perspective, the minimalist and ‘clean’ look aspires for a kind of simple elegance that aesthetics loaded with information, text, and animation,make tacky and complicated. Minimalism is a feeling — one of restraint and discipline — with an inherent judgement of superiority.

Social media functions in a similar way. Describing Beyonce’s social media presence, writer Jenna Wortham notes that Beyonce has been able to use social media to become more mysterious rather than less, an idea that is counterintuitive to the constant life-casting that many participate in online. However, this kind of self-restraint is particular to those who have an established personality and star power. People have to want to know about you for them to feel a lack of knowledge; absence only makes the heart grow fonder if the heart was hungry in the first place.

Since the web was created there have been anxieties about the anonymity of online interaction. People hide behind usernames and avatars. In the early days of AOL chat rooms and the more R-rated Chatroulette, such anonymizing aspects were suspected of covering a whole matter of sins. Today, existing online with such secrecy is a privilege, reserved for those unnaturally adept at concealing their tracks or completely abstaining from online activity. On October 3, a post on The New York Review of Books’ blog revealed the – allegedly – true identity of Elena Ferrante, an Italian writer who has managed to keep her identity a secret while becoming a beloved author. Most of her fan base does not want to know who Ferrante ‘really is’ and reacted with anger to the ‘outing.’ Ferrante had created a personal and deep connection with her readers that didn’t need to be bolstered by her identity or details of her life. In a crossover of a pre-digital age and the now wholly digital age, Ferrante kept her pen name in place by responding to (some) interview requests via email. As she stated in a 2014 interview, ‘I didn’t choose anonymity; the books are signed. Instead, I chose absence. More than 20 years ago I felt the burden of exposing myself in public. I wanted to detach myself from the finished story.’

Wortham echoes the sentiment behind this statement in her aforementioned piece on Beyonce. In thinking about online personalities, she sees the selective representation that Beyonce projects as an ‘illusion that feels intimate and real, a hologram self for us to interact with that, in theory, provides the actual Beyonce space to exist away from our prying eyes.’ Wortham notes that hierarchies and biases exist online, they’ve just been coded a different way. Social media has given room to create other selves, and perhaps, paradoxically, a way to preserve a sense of our true identity. It can be its own version of the pen name. While there have always been worries about the meretricious nature of social media as it applies to our personal lives, both Wortham and Heffernan seem to suggest that embracing, rather than fighting, this aspect can be more fulfilling. For Heffernan, it’s part of the delight — the mix of high and low — and the way we construct our culture and consciousness. For Wortham, it’s self-preservation: ‘We could instead use social media as a prism through which we can project only what we want others to see. We can save the rest for ourselves — our actual selves.’

Perhaps this is why we have worked to make certain online spaces look and feel a certain way. Lacking the physical markers we’ve come to associate with the experience we should expect, we’ve aestheticized spaces to evoke a first impression. Design serves a deeper purpose than just surface looks. From the classic air of the digital New York Times to the back-web of 4chan and Reddit, we have categorized the ‘type’ of people and conversations that happen online by the way these space look. While the mainstream revels in clean typeface, negative space, and intuitive navigation, those familiar with the web’s behind-the-scenes are comfortable delving into the messy threads filled with obvious bounding boxes, splashes of courier new, and self-direction.

A portion of this harkens back to the loss aspect that Heffernan explores. There’s something nostalgic in design that reminds us of Web 1.0 (pre social media). Heffernan weaves this throughout her narrative, revelling in the newness and excitement of the web and the sentimentally of what we’ve discarded, recalling hours-long phone conversations that were physically grounded by a telephone cord. But besides being able to move freely between the joys and yearnings that digitization creates in equal measure, the most impressive aspect of her book is that she so firmly conceives of the Internet as a cultural construct. Of course the web has aesthetic periods. It reflects any other time of our collective consciousness. Things move into and out of fashion within the web like anywhere else, and perhaps we are now finding different ways to express the things we mislaid with digitization. There’s a lot to be gained in conceding that the Internet is as much a humanist endeavour as a technological one — and much of what is gained mitigates the loss.

A lot has been made of Donald Trump’s online supporters—many of whom are part of a social media brigade of trolls posting offensive, oftentimes racist and sexist memes to Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. Hillary Clinton made these people—known collectively as the ‘alt-right’—the subject of a speech in which she attacked Trump’s association with the movement.

Trump is not the first political candidate to have a major online following. During the 2008 and 2012 GOP primaries, Ron Paul was famous for his Revolutionaries whose ubiquitous social media activity ensured that ‘End the Fed’ was a top post on even the most obscure and unpolitical YouTube videos. In 2016, Bernie Sanders’ mass of young, white men posting in support of single-payer healthcare and free college tuition became known as ‘Bernie Bros.’

Ron Paul, Bernie Sanders, and Donald Trump all mobilized sizeable and enthusiastic online followings. But, only Trump has been able to transform that support into tangible electoral success. Why?

In 2008, Ron Paul earned just over one million primary votes. He barely doubled that number in 2012 when he won (controversially) a majority of delegates in four states. During the 2016 primaries, Sanders undoubtedly generated more electoral success than Paul when he earned over 13 million votes and won 23 states. Still, neither of these men were able to clinch their respective nominations. On the other hand, Trump captured 14 million votes as well as the Republican nomination.

Trump has been able to inspire support, both online and offline, because his message is emotional rather than ideological. In contrast to Trump, Ron Paul had the least emotional and most ideological message of these three candidates. During debates he would rail against the Federal Reserve and fiat currency, even getting booed for suggesting the 9/11 terror attacks were a result of blowback from U.S. foreign policy. Ron Paul’s ideological campaigning was strong enough to make celebrities of two obscure economists when he urged his supporters to search out the works of Murray Rothbard and Ludwig von Mises to understand his economic policies.

Sanders preached a similarly ideological message, and, while it did contain emotional elements—the attacks against the 1%; appeals to Americans who were hurting from the economic collapse, who, unlike the major banks, received no bailouts—the message still came from Sanders’ years of studying socialist doctrine. From his time at a Marxist kibbutz in Israel, to his tenure as a member of the far-left Liberty Union Party of Vermont, Sanders honed his thinking around economic inequality and the power of democratic socialism.

From what we’ve seen of Trump, he has no ideology. The only author he ever cites as inspirational is himself as author of The Art of the Deal. The only book he claims to like more than his magnum opus is the Bible, which he has shown little evidence of having actually read (when asked his favourite verse Trump replied, ‘Well, I think many. I mean, when we get into the Bible, I think many, so many,’). Likewise, unlike Ron Paul and his supporters—who exalted the Constitution—Trump’s claims of constitutional support seem false: he stated that he would ‘protect Article I, Article II, Article XII.’ There is no Article XII of the Constitution.

These gaffes don’t shake Trump’s supporters, though. Had Ron Paul or Bernie Sanders made a similar mistake, it’s unlikely they could have survived. Their supporters were more dedicated to ideology than they were to the candidate. Paul’s Revolutionaries refused to support his slightly less libertarian son, Kentucky Senator Rand Paul, for president, and the Bernie Bros bristled at the idea of backing Hillary Clinton, who they saw as a Wall Street sell-out. Trump supporters have no ideological test for their candidate—and many of them don’t desire one. Trump has never required an ideological test for his supporters either. Instead, he appeals to the emotions of voters who feel left behind and ignored. Ron Paul and Bernie Sanders told voters if they learned enough they could change the system. Trump told voters they were allowed to be angry—angry at an economy that’s shifting jobs away from America’s heartland to China and Mexico—and that they were allowed to be fed up with politicians who promised workbooks of policies they would implement and then compromised behind closed doors after getting elected. Paul and Sanders gave voters instructions to use their brains; Trump gave them permission to listen to their hearts.

After Clinton’s speech about the alt-right, several leaders of its online movement held their own press conference to answer questions about their ideology. Peter Brimelow, an anti-immigration author and editor-in-chief of VDare.com; Richard Spencer, a white nationalist blogger and head of the National Policy Institute think tank; and Jared Taylor, a self-proclaimed ‘race realist’ and founder of American Renaissance magazine; told the press that, while they and their supporters want Trump to win, they don’t think he shares their racist convictions. It was a bizarre moment in the campaign. Trump has been labelled by the mainstream media as a bigot since he announced his candidacy and here were three of his supporters complaining that he wasn’t racist enough. But, they tempered their criticism by explaining they had no delusions about his lack of ideological devotion to their ideals. Instead, they were supporting him because Trump was an emotional lightning rod that drew white, working-class support. He may have stumbled onto some shared policies—deporting illegal immigrants and barring Muslims from entering the country—but ultimately it was more important that Trump win than he be a true believer. To them, Trump represented the test of a supposition: could a candidate win without appealing to minority voters and by criticizing multiculturalism and immigration? If Trump could accomplish this, it would not matter if he followed through on his promises. If Trump could pull off the election he would prove to the alt-right that there was an opening for its candidates. Trump would break a hole in the system wide enough for a new generation of ideologically rigorous alt-righters to climb through.

This promise of success is a major contributor to Trump’s support among lower-class, poorly educated Americans. Similarly to how the alt-right views Trump, residents of rural Appalachia and the former manufacturing strongholds of the Northeast (the areas Trump performed the strongest during the primaries) see in Trump a chance for salvation. These rural voters, like the alt-right online, have no meaningful representation in the political process. Due, in the case of working-class Americans, to their lack of economic agency, and in the case of the alt-right to their socially unacceptable political views, both groups see Trump as a bomb that can blow up the system and provide them an opening.

This has been Trump’s power all along. His real-world political success is the result of what he represents to his followers. Whether he is a crypto-racist for the alt-right or a strong and competent businessman who will turn the economic fortunes of working-class America around, Trump’s lack of adherence to any clear ideology is what has allowed him to gain his political foothold. Trump supporters aren’t supporting a specific economic plan or set of moral guidelines, they’re supporting a man who has spent his entire adult life selling himself as a brand. Trump isn’t a politician so much as he is a promise—a promise of success, of glitz, glamour, and greatness. And in this campaign he has become a promise to so many Americans that the America they lost—the America that once employed millions in the Rust Belt in manufacturing and Appalachia with mining jobs—could one day return. That America could be Great Again.

Paul and Sanders built online followings by promoting ideals that had to be studied and researched. They inadvertently created ideological purity tests for their supporters and themselves. If they didn’t stick to the checklist of acceptable beliefs they created for their followers, they would be abandoned. By abandoning ideology in favour of his personal brand, Trump built an ideological following online and generated real votes at the ballot box. On November 8, we will see how many Americans buy what Trump is selling.