Far-right memes are poisoning British politics

New Statesman​

2 days ago

Illustration by Sergio Ingravalle / Ikon Images
A black man harasses a white woman in a railway carriage, then a white man comes up and punches him. Christians passing through Jerusalem are spat on by Jews, who then boast of killing Jesus. A softly spoken British imam explains that Muslims must take over the West completely, or describes the proper way to stone a woman to death. Reset. Repeat.
Westminster has one kind of political conversation. It's to do with economics, the role of the state, legislation. Elsewhere a very different kind of talk is happening, the viral spread of well-produced vertical videos and mobile graphics designed to make people furious, destroy trust and ultimately upend liberal democracy. Almost always, conventional politics looks the other way. It must not.
These demonisation machines come from both the left and right – but mostly from the right – fashioned and circulated by hundreds of usually anonymous accounts with names like The West Rises, Radio Genoa, and Truth Will Prevail. It's part of the same 'conversation' that asserts a senior British politician is being pursued by rent boys he failed to pay off. It also allows for filming asylum hotels across Britain, a practice the police refer to as 'video auditing'.
This has been going on for years. But most people interested in conventional politics are resting happily in a fools' paradise. We comfort ourselves with the spaces in which well-informed adults debate moral and economic dilemmas. I think of it as the political imagination of James Stewart.
This is being blown apart by online hate and conspiracy. A new survey by the think tank British Future says the UK is a 'powder keg' of social tension with polarised communities, leaving us 'more fragmented, fragile and less resilient to internal and external threats… The very basis of our democracy is at risk.' James Ball, author of The Other Pandemic, a book on the rise of web-fuelled conspiracies, argues that to ask Louise Casey to do a national study on grooming gangs was a memorable puncturing of conventional politics.
For that moment, you could give the credit to Elon Musk after his denunciations of Keir Starmer and the British state for hiding and protecting paedophiles. Musk has just lost his CEO at X, Linda Yaccarino, which may or may not be related to his chatbot, the horribly named Grok, which repeatedly referenced white genocide in South Africa, praised Adolf Hitler, and referred to itself as MechaHitler.
As the Times reported, the senior tech people around Musk describe the fight for online political direction as 'the memetic battlefield'. Buy Twitter and turn it into X. Soon enough, you have changed the layout of that battlefield.
Subscribe to The New Statesman today from only £8.99 per month Subscribe
But it is a battlefield where conventional politics doesn't turn up. Downing Street and Tory high command remains obsessed by feeding Westminster journalists and trying to 'get' front page stories in newspapers. They're fighting drone swarms with muskets. Meanwhile, on immigration, crime and identity, the country is being driven hard towards the right.
I have written here recently about the likelihood of a Reform government coming next. Whether that happens or not, there are much more extreme possibilities ahead, including some kind of communal or race war. On bad days, it feels as if we may be living through the end times for civil democracy.
But at this point, I should ask: is the above overwrought? After all, we have had big changes in communication in the past and they have often spooked society. And most of the population is probably dodging the racist harangues, the fist-fights and the invitations to hate Jews or Muslims. They may be with the cat-and-cucumber videos, the line dancing and conspiracy theories about ancient civilisations, not to mention the soft porn.
Perhaps we are mature enough to screen out the bad stuff. Even if I'm poisoned by some online hatred, a short amble through the streets of the real world, surrounded by smiles and help, is often an effective remedy.
But then there is the 'stuff itself'. Yes, it's crafted to make us angry, but we'd be foolish to blame 'algorithms' for material which interacts with our fellow citizens' genuine fears for the future. If there wasn't a grain of anxiety already, these videos would slide across our imaginations leaving no trace.
We have been experiencing unprecedented levels of non-Christian migration and fertility decline across the West, at a time when many traditional communities are beaten-down and despairing. It would be surprising if there wasn't some kind of reaction, and, indeed, if 'invasion' videos shot in Leicester, Barcelona and East Germany did not essentially share the same narratives.
We should not be calm about this memetic war zone. The material I am talking about is, over time, highly effective. It's rhetorical heroin heading straight for the amygdala. You may think you are a rational liberal but, I promise you, after an hour or so of exposure to 'hate the African, hate the Jew, hate the lawyer, hate the Muslim' propaganda, you will be subtly different. After a while, you need an awful lot of time in the neighbourhood to walk it off.
Although we have lived through media revolutions before, their effects have often been dramatic. When Johannes Gutenberg brought to Europe the movable-type printing press, he also brought Luther's 95 Theses – eventually the catastrophic Thirty Years' War followed, killing an estimated eight million people. Nearer home, I cannot believe the violence and mutual hatreds of the so-called English Civil War would have been anything like as extreme without those early newspapers and broadsheets spreading fake news of atrocities – the reports of slaughters by Irish Catholics, for instance, helping provoke Cromwell's response. Early-20th century fascism, too, was made possible by the radio.
This is bigger. And it is only just beginning. Many of the early attention-hogging online memes were made, Ball reminded me, in the real world with technological wizardry, actors paid to play their part for confrontations in the park, and even aircraft interiors hired to make viral images of fighting passengers.
But AI allows amateurs to craft realistic narratives almost from scratch. As the software evolves and becomes more user-friendly, anyone will be able to take their paranoid fantasy and rub it into everyone else's brainpan. We know that the younger you are, the more online you are, and that our form of capitalism has robbed younger people of the chance to own property, and is increasingly robbing them of decent careers. They are being disinherited. Brace for their reaction.
And again, it is soft to blame evil outsiders. Just as the Remainer left tried to blame Brexit on Cambridge Analytica, the belief that today's corrupted conversation is largely the fault of Russian agents is too easy.
The West's enemies are working with what the West gives them. For the most malign actors, we go to the obvious culprits: the tech bros trying to reshape our politics. The influences on Musk and Peter Thiel are not St Petersburg trolls. They are men like Curtis Yarvin, a blogger turned premier public intellectual of the Trump age, who argues that democracy has failed and must be replaced by a semi-monarchy, and who once dabbled in ugly race science. His thought has been labelled the 'dark enlightenment'. In Silicon Valley's hands these ideas have accelerated fear and race-hatred across the West.
This is a complex picture with a tangle of different views. Screenwriter Jesse Armstrong threw himself into the writings and interviews of key figures, including Musk, Mark Zuckerberg and Sam Bankman-Fried for his satirical film Mountainhead. As some fictional titans are relaxing and joshing with one another in a mountaintop winter sports retreat, watching the world burn below them under the influence of extremist memes, they have the 'are we the evil ones?' conversation. One says that the answer wasn't to stop making movies: 'We are gonna show users as much shit as possible till they realise: nothing is that fucking serious. Everything is cool. Have your say, scream your worst, but fucking chill. Nothing means anything and everything is funny and cool.'
Armstrong tells me he was mimicking the affectation of nihilism that began in the chaotic, conspiratorial websites 4Chan and 8Chan, which developed the signature 'hey guys, it's all a provocation' trickster tone. But under the affectation of nihilism, Armstrong argues there is a strong ideology.
And here comes the lesson. Relative economic decline and mass migration do cause social tensions, and there are difficult discussions to be had about how we handle them. It is neither conspiratorial nor paranoid to say that the state has failed to control migration or to keep the streets properly safe.
But we should be in no doubt that we are under a sustained, intentional attack on liberal democracy which has already won victories while those allegedly in charge weren't looking. The battlefields are on the newsfeeds of voters' phones where conventional politics rarely even turns up.
This is because of institutional paralysis. No one in the British state dares to take on Trump and the tech provocateurs he protects. Further, as was confirmed by the recent 'reset' summit at Chequers, this government sees AI as the prime solution to most of its problems. It has gone full Tony Blair Institute: this new media revolution is unique in that the same technology disrupting the state is also the tech being embraced by the state as its saviour.
We have some useful (if outdated) regulation to protect children. But the chances of an effective British onslaught against misinformation and online hate are nudging zero.
There are lesser responses, however. We could rip up the contempt of court rules, injecting a dose of free speech as in countries with a civil law tradition. If jurors are thought capable of sending someone to prison for life, surely they should be believed capable of ignoring online voices? That would squash the idea of there being secret truths 'they' don't want you to know about.
Beyond that, the political class has to spend more time engaging on Instagram, TikTok and X, learning how to create memes, and never letting lies go unanswered. We need a frank, non-hysterical attitude to migration, community tensions and race in which the political class engages in a two-way conversation.
And the best answer of all: we break our gormless couch-potato addiction to the phones. Easier said, I find, than done.
[See also: Donald Trump can't escape Jeffrey Epstein]
Related