November 5, 2020 55
How the Awful Stuff Won
Tom S c o c c a
Antisocial: Online Extremists,
Techno- Utopians, and the Hijacking
of the American Conversation
by Andrew Marantz.
Viking, 380 pp., $28.00; $18.00 (paper)
Unfollow: A Memoir
of Loving and Leaving the
Westboro Baptist Church
by Megan Phelps- Roper.
Picador, 289 pp., $27.00; $18.00 (paper)
We all could have ignored the West-
boro Baptist Church, theoretically,
but the opportunity to be party to a
morality play seemed unusual and in-
teresting, back then. It was a sunny day
in 2014, just before the anniversary of
the September 11 attacks, and protest-
ers from the church had come all the
way from Topeka, Kansas, to demon-
strate on a street corner near my office
in Manhattan. They had stopped there
to protest my then employer, Gawker,
as part of a swing through New York
City designed to antagonize the media
so that the media would pay attention
to Westboro.
Everyone understood how the ma-
nipulation worked. Westboro was in de-
cline then. Its founder, Fred Phelps, had
died that spring, and the shock value
of its mission—waving “GOD HATES
FAGS” signs or taunting mourners at
military funerals—had long since worn
off. We might have kept working at our
desks, but some sense that reporting or
life required the witnessing of things
led a few colleagues and me down the
stairs and out to the street. The West-
boro people brandished offensive signs
and yelled, and counterprotesters tried
to countershock them. A man in skiv-
vies proudly made noise.
All of this was what Westboro
wanted, although in truth it was a lit-
tle sparse and desultory up close. I
snapped a picture, juxtaposing a West-
boro picket sign reading “THANK
GOD 4 9/11” with a lamppost flier
reading “Beautiful Nolita 1 BR Mott @
Prince $3200 for 10/1” and posted it to
Gawker with no headline.
Many things would happen in the
five and a half years after that. Gawker
Media would be bankrupted, not for
provoking the wrath of the Topekans’
angry God, but for having published
rude things about the vindictive and
very secular billionaire Peter Thiel.
Self- referential publicity stunts and
stupid, fleetingly apocalyptic online
conflict—the Internet counterpart of
Westboro’s pointless brawls—would
become the substance of politics, shap-
ing the application of real power in the
real world. The punchline to decades of
jokes about the worst imaginable presi-
dent would become president. From in-
side the content- making machinery of
2014, perched on the ledge of the ring
at the Twitter arena, it was possible to
feel a new future coming, shapeless and
terrible, yet it all seemed too dumb to
be real.
“Everything is the internet now,” the
New Yorker reporter Andrew Marantz
told a colleague in 2016, in a conversa-
tion he recounts in Antisocial: Online
Extremists, Techno- Utopians, and
the Hijacking of the American Con-
versation. He was trying to explain to
people within his normal, ostensibly
enlightened social and professional cir-
cle—people who didn’t believe Donald
Trump could possibly get elected—that
the existence of “awful stuff” on the In-
ternet, from the pickup- artist misogyny
of lonely men to the scientific racism of
organized xenophobes, could no longer
be downplayed as a separate and irrele-
vant reality. “The awful stuff,” he went
on, “might be winning.”
What does it mean for everything to
be the Internet? “The natural state of
the world is not connected,” the Face-
book executive Andrew Bosworth
wrote in a company memo in June of
that same year. Bosworth was telling
the people who worked under him why
it was that their company would not
waver from its program of worldwide
expansion and infiltration, even if it
meant people could be harmed.
“The ugly truth,” Bosworth wrote,
“is that we believe in connecting peo-
ple so deeply that anything that allows
us to connect more people more often
is *de facto* good.” This was before
the world would read reports of Face-
book’s part in pushing misinformation
and fomenting artificial conflict in
American elections, or in giving Myan-
mar’s military a platform to promote
genocide, but already it was clear that
Facebook had much to answer for, or
to try to avoid answering for. The word
“ugly” here only seemed pejorative;
it was really chosen to position Face-
book, under the conceptual scheme of
the title of Sergio Leone’s most famous
spaghetti western, outside the realm of
“the good” and “the bad” alike.
Bosworth’s memo did not try to
argue that the company’s unnatural
focus on connection was demonstra-
bly beneficial to humanity; it simply
told the Facebook employees that itwas beneficial to Facebook—that Face-
book’s success as a business was the re-
sult of growth and market dominance:
“Nothing makes Facebook as valuable
as having your friends on it, and no
product decisions have gotten as many
friends on as the ones made in growth.”
But good and bad still existed. Within
a few months of Bosworth’s memo and
Marantz’s warning, things got much
uglier, but also clearly much worse.
Under Trump, the online mode of
endless conflict for conflict’s sake be-
came the daily mode of governance, as
ever more wishful pundits kept waiting
in vain for Trump to claim, even rhetor-
ically, to be leading a united country.
The White House filled up with an ab-
surd collection of sideshow characters:
the British- Hungarian blowhard Se-
bastian Gorka, with phony credentials
and a real Fascist medal on his chest;
the secretary of state Mike Pompeo,
who dared a reporter to find Ukraine
on a map as if it were impossible; the
genuinely paranoid trade adviser Peter
Navar ro. Tucker C arlson, a frozen- food
heir who warned his viewers that con-
descending elites were scheming with
foreign invaders to take their coun-
try away, became the top- rated cable
news host in the country. A shifting
conspiracy theory driven by an online
poster known only as Q—claiming
that Trump was about to take down a
global ruling- class crime network—led
some of its believers to commit real-
world acts of violence and others to
win congressional primaries. Two mass
shooters, one each in New Zealand and
California, not only wrote manifestos
citing the same xenophobic theories
but also name- checked the contro-
versial YouTube star Pewdiepie. The
awful stuff—the unnatural stuff, by
Marantz’s estimation—won. Was there
a moral to be extracted from this? Or
even an explanation?It is hard to deny that, over the course
of the past quarter- century, the Inter-
net and then the devices and systems
built on top of it have done something
new and unsettling to the subjective ex-
perience of being human. In the face of
fires and floods and Arctic heat waves,
it has become untenable to deny that
in the same span of time something
has been damaged about the world in
which people live. The social, political,
and physical spheres have all entered a
figuratively or literally hotter and more
unstable state.
The online realm is no longer imag-
inable as a separate and frictionless al-
ternative to the older plane of existence
known, by disparaging retronym, as
“meatspace”—that physical realm also
called the “real world,” or, before that,
the “world.” There are fibers of cyber
running through the meat now, and
bloody juices spattered on the inside of
the screen. (The coronavirus has made
the two even more indistinguishable, as
people are forced to do the daily busi-
ness of life remotely, while conspira-
torial copy- pasted chain letters about
mask rules send crowds out into the
streets.)
Marantz was drawn to the site of the
collision between virtual and real as
it was happening, and tried to record
what he’d seen in Antisocial. He pro-
files the people who were building the
new systems, the moods and ideas that
flourished at their offices, and the other
people exploiting or being exploited by
the new opportunities. He trails self-
satisfied entrepreneurs to conferences
and around business headquarters as
they craft ever narrower- minded and
further- reaching information distri-
bution machinery; he tags along with
the demi- celebrities of the online right
wing as they navigate their rivalries
and insecurities and their dreams of
crushing the sphere of political liberal-
ism. His subjects are cynical and obtuse
at the same time, contemptuous toward
the past and present but vacuous about
the future they wish to bring on.
Meanwhile, one of the more horrible
people online, Megan Phelps- Roper,
the granddaughter of Fred Phelps and
a third- generation Westboro Baptist
provocateur, was trying to find a way
out of her part in the system. In Unfol-
low: A Memoir of Loving and Leaving
the Westboro Baptist Church, she de-
scribes a struggle not only to untangle
herself from twisted bonds of family
and faith but to establish a private self,
behind the weaponized media persona
she had grown up inflicting on the god-
less world. Phelps- Roper tells her life
story as she grows from a dutiful child
hate- picketer to a proud social media
combatant for the church, battering
the outside world with shock- memes
and bigoted certitude even as she be-
gins to reckon with private doubt and
shame about Westboro’s mission. At
last, frustrated by the church’s re-
pressive governance and drawn out
by generous online interlocutors, she
and her sister Grace flee from Topeka
to the Black Hills, where she begins
constructing a new life as a champion
of debate and discovery, launching a
public speaking and writing career to
present her own experience as proof ofTadashi Moriyama: iPhone Abyss, 2015Tadashi^ Moriyama