The Broligarchs

I was up late last night reading Down and Out in Paris and London by George Orwell. Known mostly for his dystopian novel, 1984 I think both are still pretty relevant today. Maybe a little TOO relevant…

I had requested Down & Out months ago from the library (it is still popular! and profoundly racist! Caveat emptor!) and only received it recently. It was written in 1933 which is the same year that Hitler’s Nazi party came to power. It’s also the year that they created and started to sell the Volksempfanger, or as it is known in English: the People’s radio. When the Nazis came to power, not many people could afford a radio. After WWI Germany was devastated and inflation and unemployment rampant throughout the Weimar Republic years. Cleverly, Goebbels orchestrated the creation of a low-cost radio that ordinary Germans could afford. It was a smashing success: by 1941 some 65% of households owned one.

Sure, it had some shortcomings such as it had trouble with shortwave transmissions and it had trouble picking up weak signals but it was a small price to pay for its purpose: spreading the message of Aryan/Nazi ideals and nationalism through music, operas and plays. It also played soundbites of Hitler’s speeches and messaging set to music. Their genius was in the fact that the Nazi party didn’t have to play ads during films or manipulate the news (although they did that as well) in the hopes that Germans would buy a paper or pay to see a film. Instead, it was the ultimate communication tool: streaming their propaganda straight into people’s homes as entertainment. Their goal was to make “every national comrade a radio listener.” It worked.

The state of…
It’s not hard to think of social media as being the defining medium of the current era. A few Broligarchs own almost all of the SM sites and have essentially co-opted the communities we’ve created online. As someone who actually built a career as a Social Media Manager I knew it was absolutely possible to manipulate and advertise your way into the public’s heads but I think I lived in a dream world for a long time where I thought people would be logical and not believe the more outrageous things that floated around. Boy was I wrong.

First, they came for our grandparents: I spent a lot of time explaining to older folks that they should check their sources and verify before sharing content. Then they came for our parents: the 2016 US election was what really sent me over the edge. We had pizza gate fueled by support for QAnon and allowed to explode on 4-Chan and 8-Chan (and other platforms). Then it came to light that we were being manipulated with the Cambridge Analytica scandal. At this point I had been diagnosed and was struggling with my own personal future so I didn’t pay as much attention to it as I should have. The writing was on the wall: the world was becoming increasingly fractured, and we were being syphoned into our own silos by algorithms, which even the social media companies didn’t understand completely.

By January 6th, 2021 it was no longer possible to ignore the man behind the curtain. Social media had created these monstrous groups of people who truly believed some of the most outlandish conspiracy theories imaginable. Two years before the Broligarchs had testified before the US congress, promised better content review, and banned what they considered “bad actors.” The reality is though that what we were seeing was only self-preservation. They wrung their perfectly manicured hands and pretended to “do something” when nothing was really done. Trump was banned from twitter & facebook and life went on. But below the surface, all was not well. Trump started Truth social in retaliation for being banned from the big boy’s playpen, and anti-lockdown and anti-mask protests were signal-boosted by algorithms everywhere. Misinformation was rampant and it still is today.

”Most of the comments here are Russian bots” – Reddit every day
While Canadians are heading to the polls sometime this year, CSEC is warning that we very well could have election interference.

I think one of the things people don’t really understand about bad actors is that their intention is to destabilize. So in that respect, both the left and right are right: they’re both are being targeted. The goal of destabilizing a country is to see which side riots first, and they don’t care which one. Foreign interference is about stirring division, so whatever whips the commentariat into a frenzy is the thing they’ll focus on. They’re great at using AI to create emotional images with fake information to get their content shared far and wide. I’ve seen entire websites dedicated to propaganda articles and designed to look like a legitimate source when it’s just a content farm for social media to give fake news an air of authenticity. SM companies have done very little to manage the bad actors whether it is in comment sections or meme groups. Eyeballs and engagement mean more money for them, so why should they care?

The Gilded Age
I keep seeing comments & articles such as The Gilded Age is Back! and it isn’t difficult to argue with that take. Wealth disparity is larger than ever and I would argue that the US election was bought and sold with a little *wink wink* *nudge nudge* from the Broligarchs and other titans of business (and of course, our old Pal Russia).

It’s interesting to read Orwell’s Down & Out right now considering he was out there slumming it in Paris when there was high unemployment and poverty in between the two world wars. He wrote a book about it right as the Great Depression swept across Europe*. There are eerie similarities from the end of WWI and the Russian Revolution to today: a pandemic, hyperinflation and political strife leading to mass immigration. It would be hard to also look at the recent fall of the stock market and see the tariff threats (wax on, wax off) and not compare it to that era. But getting back to Europe a century ago: the US called in its loans with their banking collapse, the German banks couldn’t pay. This caused a domino effect to other countries such as Britain and France who also defaulted on their loans. This then lead to Smoot-Hawley (also a disaster)…and I think you can see why people think we are in a similar cycle now (I make no predictions myself).

Economic uncertainty seems to be a vacuum that people want a strongman to fill. The rise to fascism was of course guided quite readily by this uncertainty and leaders who were all too happy to break treaties and point fingers at groups they could blame. To be clear: Hitler made and broke many deals while many countries in Europe ignored it until Germany invaded Poland and it couldn’t be ignored anymore. Enter, “the war to end all wars.” I don’t think the takeaway here is that there is ever an exact replica of an era but also that there are always themes and we should ignore those themes at our own peril.

If you tell a lie long enough, it becomes truth
On September 30, 1939 – 6 years after the Germany people had access to the Volksempfanger – the radio waves in Germany announced a Polish attack. Naturally, Hitler took to the airwaves and announced that they would retaliate, and the invasion of Poland began. It didn’t matter that the attack was a lie: he who controls the medium, controls the message. The German people, for the most part, believed what they were told.

We need to take a long, hard look at ourselves and realize that these platforms we are addicted to our the modern day People’s Radio: we are isolated in our homes consuming infotainment where we now rarely see posts from our friends and communities who we actually follow, but we are instead fed meme rage bait and advertising. I know I am a broken record but enragement is engagement and the algorithms will feed you content based less on what/who you follow and more on what keeps you scrolling. By staying on these platforms you are simultaneously making money for Broligarchs AND training the algorithms to know how to keep you more addicted. I don’t use the word addicted lightly either: these spaces are designed to make you feel like you are engaging in a community while simultaneously making you feel unfulfilled and empty, while still craving the real human need for connection. Dopamine jolt after dopamine jolt feels good for awhile but once you get off of the merry-go-round and take a breath you know that it does make you feel awful deep down in your core.

The impact of social media cannot be understated, either. It’s slowly destroying democracy. Repetition of the most popular content is making blatant lies feel true and now with AI, these regurgitation machines can create photos that look so real that it adds legitimacy to posts from random people who we don’t even know but that are constantly served up to us as we scroll. Like, share, and comment is all that needs to be done with a few clicks to continue the wave of bullshit.

If you think I am just talking about one side of the political spectrum, you’d be wrong. I’ve managed to piss people off all along the continuum! GO ME! A rule of thumb that I have had for a while now is that if something feels extremely GOOD (I agree with it) or extremely BAD (it makes me angry) it is worth a deeper dive. Often, I discover that the meme or post is lacking in context, excludes important information or is a straight up lie. Because there is so much noise online most people will just reshare whatever feels right to them. But that’s not how you get informed or cut through the bullshit. Worse, people REALLY dislike when you challenge things because we are so polarized that it feels like a personal attack to some folks.

I divested from the Meta properties at the beginning of the year and quite frankly, it’s done me a world of good. I am still on Bluesky but I don’t have the app on my phone, so I have to go over to a desktop to consume it. Staying off my phone has helped me hop off of the 24-7 rage machine.

I was worried about missing the connection with friends but honestly, I am still very much connected to the people I want to stay in touch with. As a bonus my life has gotten MONUMENTALLY BETTER. Instead of a faucet of misery I carry around in my pocket to drown myself in over-stimulation, I’m trying to do other things. The disconnection from 600+ people has also been a huge boon to my mental state: I am reading a lot more, doing more personal writing, working on more art and watching more good shows. I find it easier to disentangle myself from the digital world because I am never fully enmeshed in it. As a result, I am a much calmer person.

But the best thing about not getting almost all of my news from social media is that I have to seek it out. It’s a little more difficult but worth it. A few things I have changed:

I went to political party websites: during the last provincial election I spent some time sifting through the party platforms and researching candidates. I will do the same for the upcoming federal election as well. I have very little interest in seeing attack ads online or sloganeering (#BlessThisAdBlocker).

I read the paper like an old person: I am not going to pretend like individual journalists don’t have their own bias but I have decided to stick with The Globe and Mail. Why? Well as Goldilocks said, “it is just right.” The Globe and Mail has me agreeing with it as much as it has me angry with it which means that it is doing its job. Also, anything owned by Postmedia (ie: most of Canada’s news) is owned by an American hedge fund. No thanks. I don’t need more conservative billionaires to tell me how to think (I am looking at you, Washington Post & LA Times). While I do love CBC for local stuff, it’s pretty beige for news. As for independent media I haven’t found one particularly unbiased source as they tend to skew super hard left or right. I do think The Walrus covers some great longread topics fairly neutrally as well.

No more Meta (or twitter but I killed that in 2018): no more facebook, no more Instagram and definitely no threads (ew). If you haven’t read The Chaos Machine, I definitely recommend it. It is basically a book on the real dangers of social media. This week a new book came out called Careless People written by an ex-employee at Meta. facebook is running around desperately trying to suppress coverage of it. Because that is a totally normal thing for people who haven’t done anything wrong to do, right?

No more google: I have moved 100% over to Firefox and use Duck-Duck-Go as my search engine (although I hear good things about Ecosia). I am in the process of moving my mail as well (but it is taking longer). I am sick of being tracked by google constantly. Search is so bad now that even if you put in the right parameters, you still get a page of ads. Want to buy from a specific store? SORRY! Best google can do is a list of dropshippers on amazon.

No more apple: whomp, whomp. This is more of an issue with their products going from top end to absolute garbage in the last 15 years. I also don’t like being tied down to an ecosystem so I am moving shortly to a Pixel phone with GrapheneOS (but that is a longer and more involved story).

Other entertainment: bye Netflix! Hello CBC Gem! Bye Spotify! Hello Quboz! I don’t want to pay companies who have shady business practices or who donate to things that go against my values. I sent an e-transfer to a creator I love last week and in return she hooked me up with a free substack subscription to her content. Substack is an absolute menace and I refuse to give them a penny of my cash (use ghost or beehiv, folks!).

Fundamentally, we get trapped into using platforms because competition gets pushed out and they lock us in. That was literally the goal of so many venture capitalist “disrupters” of the last decade. The capital kept pouring in and these companies would sell things at a loss so that no competition could get a foothold in that business. Uber and Lyft were both jousting to be the last one standing and when they were, the plan was to jack up prices and finally turn a profit. It’s bonkers! It’s the same playbook Walmart has used to grow its empire: open in small towns, decimate the local economy, be the last business for miles and make the entire community reliant on them for jobs and sundries (but not taxes, they never pay taxes).

Everything feels like it is narrowing into fewer options with a handful of owners. The White House has eliminated press passes for many media outlets, opting instead to only allow journalists who are sympathetic to the regime and who will be more likely to print their outlandish lies version of events. Even Pierre Poilievre’s team announced today that they would not be allowing journalists to travel the campaign trail with them, which is a break from what has historically happened (I will let you decide if their reasons are good ones).

Controlling the narrative has always been a goal of good PR but there is a line between convincing someone to see you in a favourable light and stifling opposing viewpoints to boost your own propaganda. I think the worse part of all of this is that we’ve done this to ourselves: we stay on platforms that we know harbour criminals and who do nothing to stop it. We go there knowing that misinformation is rampant and dissenting voices are suppressed. We know these companies have stoked violence and do little to stop harassment. These companies go against everything we stand for as people but yet we go and scroll for the memes, convincing ourselves that it is the only thing that keeps us connected because “everyone is there.”

At the Nuremberg trials famed Nazi Albert Speer said, “Hitler’s dictatorship differed in one fundamental point from all its predecessors in history. His was the first dictatorship in the present period of modern technical development, a dictatorship which made the complete use of all technical means for domination of its own country. Through technical devices like the radio and loudspeaker, 80 million people were deprived of independent thought. It was thereby possible to subject them to the will of one man.”

We say we want to save democracy but we can’t even stay off of twitter/Meta or cancel amazon Prime. It’s such an embarrassing low bar but yet, here we are. Enjoy your Volksempfanger.

* I cannot stop thinking about what happened to the men he wrote about in his book. What happened to them?