HOW DO WE CHECK THE POWER OF SOCIAL MEDIA MOBS?
James Damore, the author of the notorious Google memo, has had his 15 minutes of fame. In six months, few of us will be able to remember his name. But Google will remember — not the company, but the search engine. For the rest of his life, every time he meets someone new or applies for a job, the first thing they will learn about him, and probably the only thing, is that he wrote a document that caused an internet uproar.
The internet did not invent the public relations disaster, or the summary firing to make said disaster go away. What the internet changed is the scale of the disasters, and the number of people who are vulnerable to them, and the cold implacable permanence of the wreckage they leave behind.
Try to imagine the Damore story happening 20 years ago. It’s nearly impossible, isn’t it? Take a company of similar scope and power to Google — Microsoft, say. Would any reporter in 1997 have cared that some Microsoft engineer had written a memo his co-workers considered sexist? Probably not. It was more likely a problem for Microsoft HR, or just angry water-cooler conversations.
Even if the reporter had cared, what editor would have run the story? On an executive, absolutely, but a random engineer who had no power over corporate policy? No one would have wasted precious, expensive column inches reporting it. And if for some reason they had, no other papers would have picked it up. Maybe the engineer would have been fired, maybe not, but he’d have gotten another job, having probably learned to be a little more careful about what he said to co-workers.
Compare to what has happened in the internet era: The memo became public, and the internet erupted against the author, quite publicly executing his economic and social prospects.
This kind of private coercion is not entirely new, of course. Community outrage cost plenty of people their jobs or their businesses in the old days. But those were local scandals. Rarely would notoriety follow someone who moved to another city.
Over time more and more people have suffered national stigma that outlasts their 15 minutes of fame. Cable news accelerated this. The internet transformed the degree of scrutiny, the extent of its reach and the shelf life of the scandal, so much as to make it different not just in degree, but in kind.
We now effectively live in the world’s biggest small town, replete with all the things that mid-century writers hated about small-town life: the constant gossip, the prying into your neighbor’s business, the small quarrels that blow up into lifelong feuds. We’ve replicated all of the worst features of those communities without any of the saving graces, like the mercy that one human being naturally offers another when you’re face to face and can see their suffering.
And, of course, you can’t move away. There’s only one internet, and we’re all stuck here for the rest of our lives.
I find myself in more and more conversations that sound as if we’re living in one of the later-stage Communist regimes. Not the ones that shot people, but the ones that discovered you didn’t need to shoot dissidents, as long as you could make them pariahs — no job, no apartment, no one willing to be seen talking to them in public.
The people I have these conversations with are terrified that something they say will inadvertently offend the self-appointed powers-that-be. They’re afraid that their email will be hacked, and stray snippets will make them the next one in the internet stocks. They’re worried that some opinion they hold now will unexpectedly be declared anathema, forcing them to issue a humiliating public recantation, or risk losing their friends and their livelihood.
Social media mobs are not, of course, as pervasive and terrifying as, say, Communist Party spies. But the Soviet Union is no more, and the mobs are very much with us, so it’s their power we need to think about.
That power keeps growing, as does the number of subjects they want to declare off-limits to discussion. And unless it is checked, where does it lead? To something depressingly like the old Communist states: a place where your true opinions about anything more important than tea cozies are only ever aired to a tiny circle of highly trusted friends; where all statements made to or by the people outside that circle are assumed by everyone to be lies; where almost every conversation is a guessing game that both sides lose. It is one element of Margaret Atwood’s “A Handmaid’s Tale” that does resonate today: Any two acquaintances must remain so mutually suspicious that they can discuss only the pleasant weather and their common fealty to the regime.
It’s some comfort that the social media mobs don’t have guns. But that raises the most troubling question of all: how to disarm them.