Social networks and the Internet have increasingly ceased to be a space for meeting and discovering dissident discourses and have come to feel like a large shopping center in which both big brands and retailers offer us their products. influencers. A place where hate speech is rampant and it is becoming more difficult to imagine that diverse and collective Internet that we dreamed of decades ago. UNA Project They were among the first to realize this and in 2018 they emerged as a collective to analyze the new manifestations of fascism on the Internet. These investigations were put into his first book, Leia, Rihanna & Trump. How feminism has transformed pop culture and how machismo reacts with terror (Descontrol, 2018), when many people still did not pay attention to communication on-line, to the misogynistic cybercommunities or the role that Big Tech (the technological giants) like Facebook or Twitter had in all of this.
Today, scandals such as Cambridge Analytica or the assault on the Capitol have introduced words like “fachosphere” and “hate monetizer” into our vocabulary, and no one is aware that Elon Musk, owner of Twitter since 2022, to which he has renamed as X, does not only have on its agenda to occupy Mars. This is why in his new book, The virality of evil. Who broke the internet, who benefits and how are we going to fix it? (Descontrol, 2024), have not worried, in their own words, about talking about “the sexists of the Internet” or “the problem of our addiction to screens”, but rather about giving us reasons and tools to get down to work design new ways of inhabiting Big Tech while we build collective alternatives outside of these monopolies and their showcases of consumption and hatred.
We meet at a community center in the Sants neighborhood in Barcelona, respecting your anonymity, one day after the results of the elections in the United States were known and after a week of DANA.
What is the virality of evil?
If technology and the state of the Internet are presented as something inevitable, almost ineffable, the people who inhabit these spaces or the people who have power over them lose responsibility. For example, with Francesca’s papers something that we already knew was confirmed: that Facebook has supported and caused hatred to spread in many communities, body dysmorphia to spread among young girls and they have done all this with a vision and a commercial design to earn more money. It is a bet by a system, by some companies and by some people, who have decided to do business without thinking about the consequences and based on a speculative model that maintains that data has immense value, something that is increasingly being questioned.
Furthermore, the Big Tech companies that own the main platforms do not care about the consequences of this design, either through action, because they are actively right or far-right like Elon Musk, or through inaction. Due to inaction because those who design them are a minority who are rich people, university students, generally white, the vast majority men, who do not think about the effects of this design because they do not suffer the situations that a migrant or a person may experience. woman who talks about feminism in video games on her platforms.
What relationship do Big Tech have with communities? on-line of the phachosphere and the extreme right?
There is the direct relationship that we have just discussed, whether by action to disseminate its values or by omission, and the indirect connection that is the business model, which rewards those who favor its objective, which is to extract data and insert advertising. Then, on the one hand, those who can create more content will be more favored, and the youtubers The far-right are people who produce at an enormous speed because they make very low quality content, very little documented, with very little substance. In addition, they create content, such as video reactions, that generate very visceral responses among their fandom and the fandom On the contrary, it mobilizes many clicks, which mobilizes a lot of traffic and which in the end creates engagementengagement of your audience, and all of this is data and data is the currency by which the Internet works.
That’s why when we talk about hate monetizers we always put on the table that they are here more for monetization than for hate. I mean, a large part of these people are doing this because it compensates them financially, there are a lot of fachotubers They used to do other things, but we believe that if it stopped being a good business they wouldn’t necessarily stay doing this. This happens, again, because the platforms are designed like this, if they were designed differently it would not be like this.
There are a lot of ‘fachotubers’ who used to do other things, but we believe that if it stopped being a good business they wouldn’t necessarily stay doing this
How do you analyze the figure of the influencer and content creator? It is a topic about which much has been written, but for which you provide a novel approach.
They are an example of this ‘uberization’ phase of capitalism, of completely separating all working people and making them responsible for all expenses through outsourcing. We must demand that streamers and other content creators have labor rights and the worker-company relationship is recognized, but we also have to look beyond that. In the book, we defend radical demonetization because in the end this commercial Internet, and the precariousness of our time, has led to almost any human activity becoming a way of trying to make a living. Capitalism is now exploiting human feelings, extracting surplus value from our hobbies and our social relationships in the form of content or data.
It is also super interesting that so much influencers as youtubers either twitchers They believe that they are going to get rich or simply that they are going to be able to make a living from this, but the reality is that 95% of the people who are streaming on Twitch have 0 viewers. But when these people succeed, it is so quantifiable, so close, that they reinforce the stories of meritocracy and the American dream that they have carried with us all their lives.
In your book you include two concepts, “dogwhistle” and “radicalization funnel,” to explain how words and ideas travel on the Internet. How do they allow us to understand our role in contributing to the radicalization or bunkerization of people and debates?
The “radicalization funnel”, a concept that we have converted from marketing, describes the journey through which you accept the messages that come to you until you take sides with them and they become an intrinsic part of your identity. Not all people end up becoming radicalized, but they can act, even unconsciously, as a transmission belt for some ideas that are more extremist, for example, normalizing the dog whistling. These are messages that have been modified and loaded with new meanings in the deepest places of the radicalization funnel, such as forums or more bunkered niche networks. They have a certain ambiguity, which is why they allow us to detach ourselves from their most radical meaning if necessary and allow us to create a sensation. of community among those who can decode them. When we use these words, as MENA, we contribute to dragging both people and the debate towards increasingly extreme ideological positions.
We insist a lot that we must be careful with words; when we talk about the limits of humor, which we were mired in this conversation for years, politically incorrect, freedom of expression… We are talking from frameworks that are not ours and, therefore, it is those same more reactionary sectors that They are setting the agenda.
This commercial Internet, and the precariousness of our time, has led to almost any human activity becoming a way of trying to make a living
Following the results of the elections in the United States, do you share any analysis regarding the role of the Internet?
This is a little throwing stones at what we said in our first book, but one thing we have seen is that sometimes tremendous power is given to memes, “the memes that lifted Trump to the White House” we have read these days. The Democrats have also had a lot of celebrities making memes for them, campaigning for them, they have learned to make shitposting, They have learned a lot of things and it hasn’t worked for them. That is, it is not that they have not been decisive, but a politician does not become president because there is a meme that has gone viral. This helps, but in the end it is again a reflection of social trends and is a way of explaining reality to us.
Continuing with the current situation, how do you analyze the participation and viralization of hate monetizers and influencers in the DANA?
It’s still early, but we believe there are two issues here. On the one hand, the hyperfixation with hate monetizers that contributes to its virality. And, on the other hand, what we have been talking about, how content is created and the cheap creation of content from hate monetizers and influencers: something happens, I react to it. What happened now? A tragedy, well I react to tragedy because there is a media hyperfixation and I have to take advantage of it. A large part of the people who are there are doing promo and the extreme right is not that they are very good at doing promo, it’s just that it is what they normally do, because they don’t have to do anything else, because their agenda is not to propose alternatives but to maintain the established order. That’s what they do, screw up the situation to make it seem like they have more power and dominate the networks.
We have talked a lot about hyperfixation these days because if we pay so much attention to them, and we do, and we are constantly commenting on everything they do, we fall behind and lose the opportunity to think and propose alternatives from progressive and left-wing positions.
When we talk about the limits of humor, political incorrectness, freedom of expression… We are talking from frameworks that are not ours and therefore it is those same most reactionary sectors that are setting our agenda.
In your book you show the limitations of individual proposals such as “platform or mobile detox”; How do we recover the Internet?
If you want to change consumption patterns, and even more so against large monopolies, it has to be a collective and institutional effort. It is very good for you to say “I’m leaving my cell phone”, “I’m leaving Twitter” but our actions will have little impact if there are not many of us and they are not planned. The problem is that it is difficult to think about digital spaces from a collective perspective, especially after the arrival of smartphones.
We encourage social movements to think about whether they are interested in being in commercial networks, because we have the feeling that these issues are not addressed and groups end up having Twitter or Instagram out of inertia. But above all we invite you to begin to become aware, also on an individual level, that it is not something foreign that comes prefabricated but that we can and must begin to build alternatives and demand that institutions take measures against the large monopolistic platforms of Big Tech. In the short term it would be very nice, because the time is coming, for us to say, come on, we do all the backups Whatever we need, in a week we will leave Twitter and we will leave together.
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