Meta Mirror World

In Malka Older’s cyberpunk political thriller, Infomocracy, a corporate coalition party known as Liberty is trying to win the next global election by stoking the fires of nationalism, promising residents of its districts—known as ‘centenals’—that they’ll make <insert local ethno-linguistic group here> great again by invading their neighbours and reclaiming ancestral territory for various nations. Our heroes expose the plot, only to discover the real plan: there was never going to be any invasion, just the development of a completely separate information ecosystem for Liberty centenals that would convince their citizens that the annexations had already taken place. A complete alternate reality.

“What do you think is going to happen when people start figuring this out?” asks one of our heroes. “When people in Singapore hear that Liberty citizens in Malaysia think they’ve conquered them, when Turks learn that, in Greek Liberty centenals, Cyprus is entirely Greek, and vice versa?” 

The Liberty leader’s response is telling: “We find that the people who hate each other that much rarely view the same types of [information]…it seems terribly unlikely that they’ll ever know. In the meantime, everyone is happy, and the possibility for real aggression is being defused.”

As mad as this plan sounds, it’s the architecture of the information-world we now live in. I thought of this Infomocracy plot-beat when I read Casey Newton’s reporting about the extremist turn from Meta which all but licences transphobic and homophobic abuse on the platform: 

“Alex Schultz, the company’s chief marketing officer and highest-ranking gay executive, suggested in an internal post that people seeing their queer friends and family members abused on Facebook and Instagram could lead to increased support for LGBTQ rights.”

The possibility for real aggression is being defused, Schultz might say.

Of course, as is often the case with mercurial madmen with too much power, Mark Zuckerberg is making a fool of his underling, adopting ever more Trumpian rhetoric. After all, Zuckerberg is looking to push Meta platforms ever more deeply into the negaverse of conspiratorial disinformation that Naomi Klein calls “the Mirror World,” a “world uncannily like our own but quite obviously warped.” A safe space for people furious at the public visibility of sign-language or transgender people, where conspiracies run free and you can, at last, openly base your entire personality on being angry at having to press 1 for English. 

Like the Liberty leadership in Infomocracy, people like Schultz seem to think the Mirror World is tameable. A way of safely simulating politics and bleeding away its ugliness. But for others, including Zuckerberg, it’s not just a substitute for reality: it is reality. For all that one can snark, the defining feature of this Mirror World is that one’s emotional impulses reflect a deep, unquestionable truth. And you get to decide what the truth is. It is beyond catastrophic that the wealthiest men in the world are embracing this idea and reshaping whole platforms around it, but for all that this emotional Mirror World can seem to be a purely right-wing affectation, we’ve all been swimming in its silvered waters for years.

After all, the enthronement of the self and our unchecked id is the fundamental syntax of all social media.  

In 2006, Time announced that its Person of the Year was none other than You. “Yes, you. You control the Information Age. Welcome to your world,” its headline announced in a font that seemed ripped from an Apple ad of old. The graphic was a screen, made of reflective mylar, in the shape of a YouTube window, poorly reflecting the patrons of newsstands across the globe. 

It was meant as an optimistic promise, but it was, in fact, a warning. 

We often hear, even now, after everything that’s happened, the idea that social media is a ‘public square’ or ‘town square,’ but the metaphor was strained to the breaking-point from the beginning, even in the halcyon days of early YouTube or Twitter that some of my generation still pine for. 

Think for a long moment about what you do in an actual public space. When I hike with my wife and best friend, we conscientiously observe the rules of the trail: we don’t litter, we pick up litter we find and bag it, we don’t cut the switchbacks or go off the trail, we don’t light fires. In exchange, we take on a challenging nature walk and enjoy some beautiful wilderness, culminating in my Trail Mom backpack disgorging our snacks and tea as we sit along some mirror of a forest lake, or atop a rocky outcropping to take in a vista. 

But what happens when we're not all seeing the same hiking trail?  When our vision is kaleidoscopically refracted by algorithmic manipulation to reflect back at us the trail which most gratifies our worst impulses: a twee cottagecore trail in which all the women are dressed in TradWife fetish gear, a filthy postapocalyptic trail in which dark-skinned Bad Men lurk around every tree, a sylvan fortress kept intact only by brave black bloc warriors. Take your pick, pick your fantasy, whatever strokes your ego best.

The solipsism of social media rests on the false promise of everything being yours: your feed, your network, your friends, customisable and uniquely, ineffably you. If social media is all about you, then everything must bend to your desires; they become your polestar. In time, your desires are not just in charge; they’re everything. As if you’re inhabiting them like a second skin.

In How Emotions Work, sociologist Jackson Katz explores, among other things, why road rage happens. The long and short of it is that we treat a car as not just a possession, but an extension of our very bodies. We interpret the intrusion of someone cutting us off on the freeway as not merely an inconvenience, but a transgression upon our persons, like a stranger laying their hand on you to bar your way. He calls this ‘embodied loss.’

Years ago, I gave a talk about how this mentality helps explain why some queer gamers vituperate queer game designers for telling stories that portray LGBT people as messy and flawed. The obvious explanation of a thwarted ‘power fantasy’ seemed unsatisfying, as it did for explaining the bigoted toxicity of gaming culture more generally. Katz’s theory of embodied loss provided the missing piece. People were not simply indulging a fantasy, but fully inhabiting their online or virtual presence. Whether in a single-player game or a massively online extravaganza, we didn’t just play our avatars, we were our avatars.

That’s no less true on social media. Social media is sold to us in highly personalised terms that emphasise ownership but, like a car or an exosuit, it’s even more intimate than that. Your online presence is an extension of your being. Even in the deadening age of Web 2.0, where fully customisable profile pages—a la MySpace or Livejournal—are a distant memory, you still apprehend your social media page as personal property, and perhaps even some kind of expression of yourself. 

In that sense, we can say that the recent efforts of social media companies to cater to Trump and his MAGA cadre are just a deepening of what social media has always been, a promise to him, to his online fans, and most of all to themselves that this space defined by our personal preferences, shall reflect their preferences and no other. An alternate reality where everything they prefer to believe is, in fact, true and reinforced with an eternal fusillade of lies and lovebombing.

The way that these spaces work is through the enshrining of our feelings. After all, what is Mark Zuckerberg’s content-free yearning for “masculine energy” but a vibe? An emotion? The inconvenient intractability and insistence of facts, of contrary points of view, of other people simply existing, often works at crosspurposes with our ids. Part of becoming an adult is, of course, learning to navigate and deal with that. But social media does nothing to encourage such tendencies—and it is noteworthy that tech barons like Musk and Zuckerberg appear to be indulging in nothing so much as a stunted adolescence that they insist on inflicting on the rest of us as endless punishment for threatening the sanctity of their delusions.

What is more remarkable is how many others wish to join that particular Mirror World of eternal infancy. The decline in social trust is attributable at least in part to such indulgences; even as we’ve witnessed genuine institutional failures, there was also a collapse in trust driven by those who were shocked and outraged that, say, a public health institution could tell someone to wear a mask or get vaccinated. Or that an independent news media might ever suggest that their favourite president was wrong about something.

While such sentiments spread rapidly online, helping even the most maniacal people feel less alone in their mania, it’s tempting to think that we can somehow redirect that outrage against institutions in ways that are productive. People are already mad, we just need to win the virality game to get them mad at the right things, surely. But that neglects the allure of these perspectives in the first place: their selfishness.

That is what separates the left—defined broadly here to include liberals, progressives, and every schismatic flavour of leftist—from the right. When the left criticises certain institutions, it is for their perceived failure to help, to build something collective; when the right does it, it’s because those institutions are thwarting their personal ambitions. 

And yet, too often, that left-of-centre poster is someone who justifies spreading low-trust fear and dissension through recourse to their own feelings. Their despair justifies much. Who cares whether anyone “has faith” in the CDC? People are dying, and I feel desolated by that; the world needs to know, needs to hear my marginalised cries in the dark. The world has betrayed you, and you don't owe it anything—so turn your back on your neighbour, break that window, don't pay those taxes. They're all part of The System anyways, and The System has failed you. It’s my social media page, you can’t tell me what to do with it.

We lose so much when we indulge in social media’s solipsism because the dissolution of faith in load-bearing institutions, expertise, democracy itself, is antithetical to the collective visions we have. In that leftish variant on the Mirror World, our ability to express ourselves is paramount—and what we urgently feel in any given moment must be True.

Call it “low-trust leftism” or “low-trust liberalism,” the school of thought that says every public health agency in the world is colluding to “hide the pandemic” from us, or that vaccines do little to nothing to ameliorate COVID-19, or that you can’t trust your neighbours anymore because everyone behaved so poorly during the nadir of the pandemic (such an irony when this mindset involves a retreat into an anti-collective worldview). It’s a point of view sustained by social media that ensures how we feel at our lowest points—abandoned, alone, isolated, betrayed—becomes the overriding way of thinking about every and any institution of liberal democracy. Agencies, elected office, academia, the press. All of which are among the most vital tools we need to fight back in any strategy, hybrid or otherwise.

There is a reason that the meme of “FEMA doesn’t have enough money to help hurricane victims because we gave it all to Israel/Ukraine” does so much work to help the right, but not the left. We’re seeing the pattern replay itself in popular online responses to the epic tragedy of Los Angeles’ wildfires, but also to the onslaught of anti-trans agitation from the right, and Trump’s shock-and-awe executive orders: wailing despair on social media that people defend by saying they’re entitled to their feelings, as if driving random social media users closer to suicide is some inalienable right that comes from accessing the ‘public square’ of social media.

The enthronement of a therapeutic mindset on social media—where one’s feelings can never be wrong or inappropriate, where one is entitled to do as they please because their emotions are guiding them, where they are under no obligation to be responsible to or accommodate others and can have one episode after another in full view of the public, influencing them and eroding their wills—is the foundation of Zuckerberg’s world. The world where You are always Person of the Year, hero of your own story in which everyone else is an NPC who’s either with you or against you.

Much ink has already been spilled on Meta’s rolling storm of announcements, about their craven efforts to pander to the far-right by permitting a wide range of bigotries against queer and trans people, against women and immigrants, and even implementing tiny cruel gestures like removing trans and nonbinary flag themes from Facebook Messenger. But less has been said about the revealing way in which Meta tried to defend the anti-trans changes in particular, with Joel Kaplan, right-wing Republican and Meta’s new Chief Global Affairs Officer, saying: 

“We’re getting rid of a number of restrictions on topics like immigration, gender identity and gender that are the subject of frequent political discourse and debate. It’s not right that things can be said on TV or the floor of Congress, but not on our platforms.” 

A moment’s thought reveals this for the bonkers standard that it is. By such a standard the content of Radio Télévision Libre des Mille Collines would’ve been permissible on Facebook. Politicians all over the world say things that are irresponsible, violent, and inciting that should be vested with no inherent merit merely because of their office. But the standard of “frequent political discourse and debate,” suggesting that any old brainfart is worth spreading far and wide in a public space, is also a senseless one. It’s a bit like saying that because I can piss in my toilet at home, I should also be able to do so in a city reservoir.

But it exposes the unworkable heart of selfishness at the heart of the entire enterprise, and why these Infomocracy-style schemes to create Mirror Worlds for us to vent unlimited self-expression will always be doomed to failure. Our expression online ripples outwards to uncontrollably affect others. Whatever vision of the hiking trail you might be seeing through those alternate-reality goggles, we are in fact all sharing the same space—and if it burns down or is swept away in a mudslide or gets overrun by lanternflies, that affects all of us.

Whether the solipsism justified through a yearning for an ‘alternative facts’ universe where you’re no longer just a divorced militia-cosplayer who pays people to cheat for him in video games, or whether it’s through recourse to a politics of emotion that argues one’s individual right to vent trumps all else, it’s all mere expression until very suddenly it isn’t. And, in the end, the only people who have a chance of winning this game are the people who outright own the platforms.  

This is what is so dangerous about the signal sent by these changes at Meta, the declaration of open season on the groups so targeted, the permission structure for cruelty that transcends individual expression.

What has leaked out into our politics, courtesy of oligarchic enablers like Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg, is the solipsism that has always characterised social media. The fantasy that you, and only you, are the one person that matters in the whole world; the player surrounded by NPCs. There is much to fear from the far right’s Mirror World spiralling out of control and into our everyday lives. 

But the online left, including many liberals, have adopted this idiom of social media all too well—and, worse, seem to think that it’s the way forward for us, that we need to git gud at social media before it consumes us all. Nothing could be further from the truth.

I often think of how leftist gun nuts refuse to accept that they’re not in on the con, unlike their right-wing counterparts, whose individualistic frontier militia fantasies are routinely backed by the full faith and credit of police forces. For a leftist to believe that a privately owned rifle will secure the revolution is as foolish as the “Second Amendment protects the First” nonsense that right-wingers pretend to believe—but the latter get away with it because they’re backed by real collective and state power. 

In the same way, social media has always belonged to oligarchs who, with the return of Trump, have rushed to make their allegiances clear for reasons both pecuniary and ideological. Every activist who argued that the right was trying to ban TikTok because it was a place where the youth could organise freely has been made a fool of by the app’s in-kind donations to Trump in the form of its appeals and cloying gratitude to him for “saving” the app—even as he continues to pursue its divestment and sale.

Meanwhile Instagram is filtering political search results in a way that never happened in reverse, even at the height of Meta’s efforts to pretend to care about disinformation.

It’s the oligarchs’ Mirror World and we’re pretending to live in it. Even as we have a good laugh at Elon Musk spending $44 billion to own a website for the sole purpose of pretending people actually like him, it’s almost immaterial: his delusional need to do this coincided with his descent into far-right madness and now each of these helices wraps around the other in his administration of a decaying but still-influential platform that some people insist on pretending can bring positive change to the world.

As is often the case, even the masters of the Mirror World eventually lose themselves to it. It’s hard for me to understand how a progressive or leftist activist could think they’d fare any better. But they lack the money and access to turn their delusions into policies—they’re not in on the con.

So, how did our Infomocracy heroes solve their little problem with Liberty’s own little Mirror World, in the end? They shut it down.

Featured image is Narcissus, by Caravaggio