Bullet Points: Ideological Axe-Grinding

Liner notes on a couple book reviews

I have two bullet points to share before logging off to enjoy the holiday weekend

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(1) Yanis Varoufakis, please tone the criti-hype way down.

I recently reviewed Yanis Varoufakis’s new book, Technofeudalism: What Killed Capitalism, for Foreign Policy. (“Are we really toiling in Amazon’s fields?”) I was disappointed by this book.

I had high expectations for it. Varoufakis takes some pretty wild swings, trying to wrestle the current state of the global economic order into a shape that will fit his big-picture argument. Along the way, he asserts that Elon Musk wasn’t really part of the technofeudal ruling class until he bought Twitter, and also insists that the only possible way to rein in Big Tech is for the online masses to develop a new class consciousness as “digital serfs” and throw off our chains. He completely overlooks regulatory efforts like Europe’s Digital Markets Act and union drives among Amazon warehouse workers. It’s infuriating.

I argue in the review that we don’t need to reach back to a Marxist depiction of feudalism to make sense of the power of big tech. And we really don’t need to advance their marketing claims about the overwhelming persuasive power of their algorithms to shape minds and sell products.

From the review:

Varoufakis insists that there is simply no parallel to Amazon’s marketplace or Apple’s App Store under 20th-century capitalism, and that we must reach back to the feudal era to find an appropriate analog. But the rent-seeking he describes does not sound so alien to me. It sounds a lot like that forgotten 20th-century technology, the mall.

Malls charge rents to their vendors. They take a cut of sales. They create conditions that attract customers and keep them there, shopping and socializing, for longer. They display advertisements and hold community events. When the Mall of America opened in 1992, it was criticized not as a return to feudal domination, but as a prime example of the excesses of capitalist consumer culture.

Here’s a link if you’d like to read more.

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(2) Steven Brill and the ideology of an old-school newsman.

I also have a review out this week in Journal of Democracy, titled “Democracy After Truth.” The review covers two recently-published books — Steven Brill’s The Death of Truth and Renee DiResta’s Invisible Rulers.

The TL;DR version is that DiResta’s book is an excellent antidote to the many frustrating issues that plague Brill’s text. It’s clearly the better book. I highly recommend it. But “Bullet Points” is where I complain about stuff that bothers me, so that’s going to be my focus here.

Brill is an old-school newsman. His book is a call-to-arms, warning that the proper information order has been subverted by social media companies. Section 230 protection means they don’t have to care whether what they publish is true, and programmatic advertising means they have effectively robbed news organizations of the revenue streams the fourth estate requires to function.

I agree with most of his granular concerns, but found myself constantly frustrated by the ideological baggage that weighs down the book.

I cover these issues in the review, but want to add one point that was cut for space:

There’s a passage in Brill’s book where he singles out Democratic operative Tara McGowan for launching Courier Newsroom. Courier is a network of local “pro-democracy” digital news outlets intended to fill the void left by local news deserts, under the theory that providing civic information and countering misinformation will support underserved communities and also have positive downstream effects on democratic vote share. Courier isn’t going to solve the news crisis on its own. But it strikes me as one small part of a broader, patchwork, pragmatic solution.

Brill can’t stand Courier. It offends his sensibilities, because it is trying to fill the gaping holes in the news environment with a product that has partisan leanings. At one point he writes, "I probably agree with many of Courier Newsroom's political positions. To me, however, the integrity of the referee-like function of dispensing news and information is a value of a higher order than any political goal."

He says not a single word about Sinclair Broadcasting Group, which has bought up existing news outlets and replaced local reporting with “must-run” political diatribes by Trump’s former White House assistant communications director Boris Epshteyn. A 2019 study by Gregory J. Martin and Josh McCrain, published in the American Political Science Review, found that Sinclair station-ownership has a demonstrable impact on the ideological tone of local news coverage. McGowan’s Courier News was established to try to counteract Sinclair’s biased impacts. Instead of taking the existing partisan news landscape seriously, Brill just pretends as though the issue doesn’t exist.

What’s clear throughout the book is that Brill thinks there is a proper order to how American society is meant to conduct itself. Journalists uncover facts. They report these facts to the public, with neither ideology or prejudice (though this itself is quite plainly an ideology. Jay Rosen has been critiquing the “view from nowhere” since I was a grad student, and he’s been right all along.). Then the citizenry is supposed to hold public officials accountable for what they have done. The public, from 2016 onward, has not paid attention to proper journalistic outlets like they used to. And this, he reckons, is entirely the fault of the social media platforms. Truth is dying, Facebook and Google must have killed it.

I think there’s no question that Facebook and Google have been bad for institutional journalism. The journalism crisis is, first and foremost, a revenue crisis. Social media platforms scooped out all the major revenue streams that subsidized journalism, then shrugged and declared it to be somebody else’s problem. It keeps getting worse, and the current AI boom is predictably accelerating awful financial trends (I saw this coming a year and a half ago. So did everyone else. It was pretty damn obvious.)

But fixating on social media platforms as singular villains is also a dodge. The New York Times’s coverage decisions (“But her Emails!”) had about the same impact on the 2016 election as the social media companies’ lax disinformation enforcement policies. If we’re affixing blame, there is plenty to go ‘round. And when an old school newsman writes a book on the death of truth, we should pay attention both to the maladies that he highlights and the ones he obscures.

Brill, ultimately, is standing in defense of the Republic of Letters. He believes there is a right and proper social hierarchy, that the social media platforms have ruined it, and that it must be restored. He’s well-intentioned in his critique, but also too quick to blame Facebook and excuse the conservative political and media operatives who are actively seeking to undermine trust in journalism and liberal democracy.

Renee Diresta’s book, published just a week after Brill’s, provides remarkably more clear-eyed assessments of all the same events and issues. She’s unsparing in her criticism of the social media platforms, but equally adept at pointing out who, how, and why these platforms are mobilized for harm. It’s clarifying to read the books side-by-side, providing a perfect illustration of the ideological blindspots of old newsmen.

But if you’re just going to read one book on the current state of digital persuasion and propaganda, just save yourself the hassle and buy Invisible Rulers.

You can read my full review of both books here.

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That’s all from me. Have a great holiday weekend.