Little Big Men

By Kevin D. Williamson

Friday, June 04, 2021

 

What would you give to change the world?

 

Would you give your life? Your reputation? Your wealth?

 

No?

 

How about 50 bucks? How about a “like” on Twitter?

 

Some people give their lives. A political assassination, for example, is a world-changing event that has since ancient times been within the reach of a motivated private individual, and historically, the easiest way to pull off a successful assassination has been to plan on getting caught or killed. An escape after a sniper attack like Lee Harvey Oswald’s succeeds only one time in a thousand. Most of the world-shaking assassinations and assassination attempts — Abraham Lincoln, James Garfield, William McKinley, Ronald Reagan, Pope John Paul II, Indira Gandhi — have been more publicity-oriented. John Wilkes Boothe gave a full-on theatrical performance. Charles J. Guiteau chose a particular revolver with which to assassinate President Garfield because he thought it would look handsome in a museum. Leon Czolgosz planned to make a public martyr of himself to the anarchist cause. Mehmet Ali Ağca fancied himself a man of History, as did Sirhan Sirhan. Valerie Solanas desperately hungered after her 15 minutes of fame. John Hinckley Jr. wanted his name on the assassination of Ronald Reagan, believing that it would impress Jodie Foster. And so on.

 

None of them got away with it. None of them wanted to.

 

More mundane forms of terrorism and nonpolitical mass murders may not make you as famous as assassinating a head of state, but they work in the same transactional way: You can achieve the outcome you want — as long as you are willing to trade your life for it. The crucial ingredient that made 9/11 possible — and Columbine, too — was willingness. Fortunately, the kind of willingness that made 9/11 possible is not a common commodity: Its scarcity, and not the good work of the TSA, is the main reason why we have not had more such attacks. The kind of willingness that made Columbine possible is a little more common, as the headlines indicate.

 

You have to be willing to pay the price. But the price can change. It is changing.

 

Social media in particular, and modern globalized technological society more generally, lower many kinds of transaction costs for individuals and small groups of people, amplifying their power and their influence tremendously. The work that used to take a team of music producers and publicity agents, or a 20th-century newspaper’s enormous physical plant and large editorial and distribution staffs, or the considerable resources of a Hollywood studio — or a covert-operations agency — can now be undertaken in many cases by one person or a small group of people working with very little in the way of institutional backing or resources. A person with a singular vision — whether he is a musician, a philanthropist, an online saboteur, or a school shooter — can go radically farther on his own today than he could have in the past.

 

Old Adam remains the depraved creature he always has been, but his reach is longer.

 

This goes beyond outright violence, of course. A generation ago, if you wanted to manipulate financial markets, then you would have had to put real money at risk — a substantial sum of it. In our time, so-called meme stocks — see the 3,000 percent run-up in the price of AMC shares — can be manipulated by relatively small, loosely organized groups of people operating under a variety of motives. Some of them will make a killing, but many of them will lose money, though probably a trivial amount in most cases. As of this writing, the circulating supply of Dogecoin, a joke cryptocurrency, is $50 billion, more than enough to buy Twitter and almost enough to buy Honda. When a bunch of Reddit users decided they wanted to give a beating to some hedge funds that had big short positions on GameStop shares, they were able to do so without very many of them paying a very high individual cost. Spending twenty bucks to help pants Wall Street? The deal of a century, for some people.

 

Beyond amplifying the power of individuals, the Internet helps motivated people to exploit the power that can be had from recruiting a tiny slice of a large population. Fewer than 1 percent of U.S. households subscribe to the Washington Post, but that still puts the newspaper’s readership at more than 1 million. If your business can make a sale to 1 percent of U.S. consumers, or 1 percent of Chinese or Indian consumers, then you have a big business. And if you can get 1 percent of Twitter users to endorse your cause — even in the most low-cost fashion, with a like or a retweet — then you have an army of millions, or at least the illusion of one, which is enough to buffalo the New York Times or Disney or the University of Chicago. Getting a relatively small share of independent stock investors to rally behind your meme stock or joke currency can mobilize billions of dollars, if only temporarily. That’s real power — When a Wall Street swell derided the meme-stock guys as “retarded,” they replied with a variation on John Maynard Keynes: “We can stay retarded longer than you can stay solvent.”

 

Before Bitcoin, it was a great deal more difficult to extort a major corporation or a government. It is not as though the desire wasn’t there before; the right tool wasn’t. In 1975, you couldn’t go kicking in the door at IBM or Chrysler and expect to walk out with millions of dollars in your pockets, like a Wild West–stagecoach robber or the local mafia-protection-racket goon shaking down a Brooklyn liquor store. Today, technology has made that possible. In that sense, we have reverted to a high-tech version of the Wild West–stagecoach robbery or the early 20th-century bank robbery. And it is likely that the successful means of combating this crime will look a lot like a high-tech version of the kind of extrajudicial rough justice that settled the West. Wyatt Earp did not spend a lot of time reading the Cowboys their rights.

 

Disinformation and propaganda similarly once required a larger investment. There’s a funny story about a bunch of young Communists (at Columbia, I think) in the days of the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact, who spent an evening covering the campus with leaflets denouncing FDR as a warmonger for his hawkish posture toward Nazi Germany, only to be obliged to spend the wee hours replacing those pacifist tracts with new leaflets demanding immediate war on Germany after receiving news of Hitler’s invasion of the Soviet Union. There was a price to pay, both financial (mimeographs, fax machines, etc.) and social. In our time, you can avoid the social cost if you are willing to forgo personal benefit: A vicious anonymous troll might be perfectly respectable in his personal and professional life, but Steve Bannon is always going to be Steve Bannon.

 

Now, as QAnon demonstrates, you can even join a cult without leaving the comfort of your own home — or the social security of your anonymity.

 

None of this is to say that a short squeeze or a meme currency is the moral equivalent of terrorism. The interesting issue here is structural: In important ways, political movements and financial bubbles are coming to resemble one another. It is not so much that they behave like Internet memes as that they are actually embedded in Internet memes. The coming generation of political leaders — left, right, anarchist, jihadist, whatever — will not have careers that look a lot like William F. Buckley’s or Noam Chomsky’s, or even Ben Shapiro’s: Their careers are going to look a lot more like those of Lil Nas X or Chiara Ferragni.

 

Which is to say, their careers will evolve in a way that is relatively free from the moderating and improving influence of mediating institutions. In the 1990s, the evangelists of the new digital culture celebrated disintermediation as a democratizing force that would liberate citizens from such archaic entities as hidebound newspapers and narrow-minded political parties, allowing for a more authentically free flow of information and ideas — and of political power. And so it has, producing some wonderful things and many atrocious ones. We need mediating institutions, because human beings are capable of extraordinarily evil things and very much prone to banal evil and petty corruption — and easily seduced by the crude stimulation of mere novelty. The meme investors and the tiki-torch Nazis marched in through the same door, and WeRateDogs is served in the same dish as Russian disinformation.

 

The Internet has knocked down a lot of walls and opened a lot of doors. It is perhaps time to rebuild a few of those walls and close a few of those doors.