High on their own supply

Radicalization is normal now. What are the consequences when it happens to the oligarchs?

The new year began with violent attacks by two veterans who appeared to have self-radicalized; their personal struggles aside, they found the language and tactics with which to describe what they were feeling and to turn those feelings into violence against others in the toxic soup stewing online. They aren’t alone — and we’re not just talking about lonely, struggling men who’ve found themselves on the wrong side of neoliberalism.

The call is coming from inside the house

The sharp turn to the right of figures like Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg (and a whole host of Silicon Valley leaders) has come as a shock to many longtime fans, and even those who’ve simply long taken for granted a Democratic bias in tech. But what’s perhaps more disturbing has been their embrace of the language and ideas of conspiracy theorists — they’ve not just embraced MAGA politics (which might be easy enough to understand, if not accept and forgive, as simple self-interest) but they’ve adopted the conspiracist language of mis- and disinformation that plagues the platforms they run.

Musk calls himself “Kekius Maximus”; Zuckerberg summons up “masculine energy”; Peter Thiel appears to want to reopen the investigation into the John F. Kennedy assassination. Are they simply ginning up outrage to play to the crowd, making a dangerous deal with dark forces, playing with fire? Or are they redpilled, true believers, vanished down the rabbit hole they’ve dug?

The Rwanda playbook in Springfield, Ohio

We’ve long explored these questions here at The Ink, but for some more insight into the mechanics of hyperpoliticization today we reached out to professor of politics and social media expert Joshua Tucker. In many ways, Tucker tells Thor Benson, what we’re seeing — from partisan polarization to outright radicalization is nothing new. But he also suggests that self-radicalization, so often understood and described as something that happens to consumers of media, may indeed be a two-way street, and we’re seeing those responsible for distribution, who increasingly move in the same information environment, experiencing the same effects with grave consequences for us all as they define a new normal.

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We just had the anniversary of January 6th. When that happened, there were a lot of stories about how the people who ended up storming the Capitol weren’t people you would assume would be extremists.

It’s interesting because I think when you look at January 6th or Charlottesville or other things like this, what it really is is social media [becoming] this communications tool that allows people who might have views that are more extreme than the norm — that in a pre-social media era might be somewhat isolated physically, in terms of the people they come in contact with — social media opens up this window and allows people who are not geographically proximate to find one another and create these online communities. That, in turn, can facilitate collective action.

There are other arguments, too, about the kind of nature of conversation on social media in this attention-driven economy where you get currency online from people liking what you say. There have been arguments made that when you end up in these isolated communities online, the way that you can stand out in your isolated community is by being even more extreme. There’s this kind of logic pulling things further to the extremes based on the sort of currency with which people are rewarded for online speech in that regard.

Sometimes “rewarded” means monetary rewards if you’re monetizing this through advertisements or things you’re selling. Sometimes it’s in a psychic reward sense. The question becomes what has changed lately.

How has this changed in recent years with Musk controlling Twitter, people moving to Bluesky, and the growth of TikTok?