The Alex Jones Effect

(This is a hastily written analysis of the somewhat recent banning and deplatforming of Alex Jones.  Please excuse possible grammatical and spelling errors. Thank you!)

Over the past few days I have listened to literally hours upon hours of commentary about the deplatrofming of Alex Jones, from the kneejerk reactions of the alt-right, to the occasionally lucid accounts by the old left all the way to the ridiculous overcompensating reactionaries of the supposed radical left.  As the technosphere was busy puking over itself as a result of the Jones affair, there was very little in terms of real analysis of what transpired.  Matt Taibbi of Rolling Stone came closest, but he somewhat conspicuously left out his analysis of the system that allows for the type of action taken by media conglomerates, Ben Shapiro had some interesting points, though he himself fell into the trap of self-preservation as the rest of the vlogo-bloggosphere, ‘if they came for Jones now, tomorrow they may come for me, then they’ll come for you.’  It’s as if the entire technobabble was oriented around the conspiratorial alt-right narrative popularized by Jones.  If the idea that the conspiracy of mass media is to shut down individual voices then this is the conspiracy par excellence.  In it, literally no one is safe, from a blogging grandmother to cute cat videos.  They all too could be taken down for having content that is ‘low quality’ or misconstrued as ‘hate speech’. The mental gymnastics and somewhat faulty or vague reasoning behind this IS the reason that we have vague language dominating public discourse.  When all critique and commentary around Jones’ takedown centers around setting up straw men to know them down via a series of entrenched beliefs, it is no wonder that the opposition counters with similar technique.  

But let’s be clear about one thing.  The Jones Effect is multifaceted.  Jones was in essence right when he claimed there was a conspiracy against him.  Where he was wrong, was where he claimed this conspiracy came from.  To Jones the conspiracy is ever-present, something that is a constant background of every interaction he has with everyone around him.  The conspiracy is always plotting to take him down.  My belief is that Jones’ paranoia in a way created the very conspiracy that took him down.  It is an old adage, but it is worthy of exploring.  It goes something like this, ‘when you notice the demons, they notice that you noticed, and they notice you.’  This is exactly how Ruby Ridge happened.  For those how don’t know the story of Ruby Ridge, it is a highly recommended read because it, along with Waco and Bohemian Grove among other 1990s events, is what got Alex Jones started in the conspiracy circles.  Ruby Ridge and Waco went down as carbon copies of Alex Jones.  The main actors believed in a conspiracy against them and took decisive action out of which the real conspiracy got created. The Jones Effect is therefore partly a simple self-fulfilling prophecy.  

Yet oddly enough, the Alex Jones Effect has a very real world consequence.  Apart from self-fulfilling prophecy, which mostly results in isolated and unconnected events, the Jones Effect has downright sinister implications, because it was through his deplatforming that we for the first time actually saw the conspiracy of media conglomerates and government colluding to silence individual voices.  What we got to see was a de facto transfer of power from governmental regulator bodies like the FCC to the uber-governmental monopolistic social media platforms Facebook, YouTube, Spotify, etc.   This collusion is very real and took literally decades to grow.  

Beginning in the 1980s and 1990s in the Silicon Valley, the tech giants of today were small fledgling groups of people who believed in the philosophy of virtuous selfishness courtesy of Ayn Rand. They wanted to create a new better world run by computers, backed by money from the banks and legitimized by the government that would write the laws to protect them.  Technology, they said, was a way to free the minds of the people and bring about real democracy, in which everyone who is connected to the network has equal say and participation rights, and it is above all a place in which individuals can fully realize themselves and pursue their God-given selfish desires.  This idea tied in very nicely with the dying American Dream, freedom and self-determination.  Technology gave the world an American ideology and made it into a home-spun common sense that was easy for everyone to follow. One could participate in it by shopping online, reading the newspaper or playing video games.  Over 30 years, the Silicon Valley technocrats set out to create a separate world in which they could play out their half-baked ideas about freedom and made it ubiquitous.  John Barlow’s  ‘A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace’ put it this way, ‘Governments of the Industrial World, you weary giants of flesh and steel, I come from Cyberspace, the new home of Mind. On behalf of the future, I ask you of the past to leave us alone. You are not welcome among us. You have no sovereignty where we gather’ Today, cyberspace and the networks reach out to every corner of human interaction.  What was meant to be a free society, instead became a battlefield of competing financial and ideological forces that carved out cyberspace into jurisdictions and geopolitical entities.  Cyberspace became as complex and opaque as the real world that the technocrats wanted to avoid and/or destroy. As time dragged on online, the mergers and acquisitions and hostile takeovers of various corporations, banks and NGOs, resulted in a few but powerful monopolies.  Early social media platforms like MySpace got eaten up by Facebook as more and more people gathered in larger and larger numbers on single sites.  Amazon ate up all competition beginning with book sellers like Borders and Books-a-Million down to mom and pop used book stores.  Eventually Amazon set its sights on the entire retail market and the results are in, empty shelves at local shops and downright closings of entire shops, the shuttering of once ubiquitous department stores like Kmart, and Macy’s, half empty Wallgreens, CVS, even WalMart is today a husk, drained of all but the most popular merchandise they know will sell off the floor. Jeff Bezos is now the richest man in the world, for the first time in what seems like eternity, surpassing the downright incoherent wealth of Bill Gates.

When Mark Zuckerberg went in front of congress to answer questions about selling user data to election campaigns and the Cambridge Analytica fiasco, he made it abundantly clear to us that it was he who was in fact in charge.  Later on Zuckerberg was heard to say that it was he who was now responsible for the content on his site, Facebook.  This did not relinquish his power, by doing so, he firmly grasped it in his hands.  He told every one of us that it was in fact he that could do whatever he wanted with whatever went through Facebook.  It was a clever move and Zuckerberg is anything if not clever.  

In a series of moves, the technocrats solidified their hold on power, monopolizing the markets in a way that can today be finally called totalitarian.  I cringe at the prospect of using the word ‘totalitarian’ as a description for what happened this year, but the Alex Jones affair points clearly in that direction.  The public discussion over ‘free speech’, ’hate speech’, the public utilities argument, all point out that Facebook is clearly more than a corporation.  It, like YouTube and Apple, effectively run public discourse.  They have set up the rules and the framework within which that same public discourse is held, we use their platforms to discuss the very idea of what ought to be done about these same platforms and if that is not totalitarian, I don’t know what is.

Let me give you an example.  In 1991, the computer engineer Loren Carpenter made a dramatic demonstration of the power of computer technology.  He invited hundreds of people to a large shed.  In their seats were small green and red paddles and in front a large screen.  As people picked up their paddles, they appeared as small dots on the screen.  Soon everybody realized what was going on.  Each person was being projected onto the large screen and was able to move independently.  Carpenter then projected the game Pong.  The room was split in two halves, where one half collectively controlled on paddle and the other half the second paddle.  After a few minutes of trial and error, the room was able to control each paddle and thus play the game effectively.  Years later, Carpenter commented on this demonstration claiming that it gave the players total freedom to do whatever they wanted while at the same time there arose an order to what was happening on screen.  He wanted to see what would happen if there was no inherent hierarchy within a system and to show it experimentally.  When pressed for an answer to what happened that day, he called it a ‘subconscious consensus.’  But here we come to a terrifying conclusion.  What Carpenter claimed was a system that allowed for total freedom, individual self-determination without hierarchy was in fact the opposite, because it was he who set up the game, the framework and the method within which each individual acted, producing instead a dramatic, visual representation of modern totality in which individuals play the game within an externally controlled matrix.  What makes this example even more sinister is that it was indeed a game, a form of entertainment, the players enjoyed themselves into believing they were free, while the real power was somewhere else.  

The question to be asked now is of course, is there a way out of this predicament? It’s hard to say, but his brings me to the final facet of the Alex Jones Effect.  It is maybe for the first time since 9/11 that the right and the left are in a way united, or at least agree on something.  Many commentators agree that Jones was entertaining, that he was a bully and generally a shitty person, but they also agree that the deplatforming of Jones was a bad idea.  It was bad because it sets a dangerous precedent for further censorship.  With vague wording that defined ‘fake news’ as ‘..blatantly misleading, low quality offensive or downright false information,’ it is no wonder that the left and the right are questioning who or what will come next.  I don’t believe that this is the right direction we ought to be heading however.  What the two sides are arguing about right now is the symptom of the Alex Jones affair and this is mostly due to the self-preservation theory I mentioned earlier.  Most right and left commentators want to stay on these platforms, because, you guessed it, that is where their money is coming from.  Do not look for deep analysis on any of those channels.  Instead think about the larger political implications of large monopolistic social media platforms setting up the framework and methods of our discourse on these very topics.  If that doesn’t scare you, then no Alex Jones conspiracy theory ever will.

Update: 6:26 pm

I realize that if we are to have something like an Alex Jones Effect, we should at least try to define it.  Here is my attempt.  

The Alex Jones Effect can be defined as type of conspiratorial, circular, and logical argument or enclosed system of logical outcomes in which an action or set of actions undertaken by an individual or a collective of individuals, result in a type of self-fulfilling prophecy that nonetheless point to a justification for those actions.

In other words, Alex Jones railed against a conspiracy of enemies bent on taking him down, which may have at the outset been fictional and non-existent, until through his continuous action he created those enemies who, via conspiracy, ended up taking him off their platforms.  Waco, Ruby Ridge, Oklahoma City Bombing, the death of Bill Cooper, all of these can be considered a type of the Alex Jones Effect.