Vanity Fair title: Don’t blame Putin for America’s social-media stupidity
Vanity Fair subtitle: We imagine ourselves lab rats in a big, gray box forced to endure the machinations of other, more powerful people: Putin, Dorsey, Zuckerberg, Mueller. What happened to individual agency?
“At moments like this, we should recall Yakov Bok. For those who may have forgotten, Bok is the protagonist of Bernard Malamud’s 1966 novel, The Fixer. He is a tragic figure—a Jew in Kiev at the end of the Russian Empire falsely accused of ritual murder. Every cosmic force in the universe is arrayed against him: the state; the mob; the ancient anti-Semitism of the limping, sclerotic imperium; even his wife, who has recently left him for another man. None of this is newsworthy. What’s remarkable is what happens to Bok, in jail, while he waits—interminably, under the harshest of conditions—to be indicted. It is there, in his cell, that Bok discovers the source of all freedom, which is thought, the great, unconquerable interior he inhabits, an interior more or less similar to the billions of other interiors inhabited by other human beings. It is there that Bok, the hapless handyman, returns to—fixes—himself: They can take everything away from him, but they cannot strip him of the ideas in his head. His ideas shall set him free.
I think about Bok constantly these days, and not because I am especially fond of Malamud, although I am. I think about him while listening to the endless patterings of pundits and Democrats and sundry newsmakers rattling on about Russia. Yes, we should be worried about the Kremlin and its many disinformation campaigns, and, to be on the safe side, we should assume our president is a patsy and an idiot, or an idiot-patsy, and we should be concerned that the last adult standing in the room, James Mattis, is no longer pinch-hitting for, you know, America.
But none of these things would matter that much if most Americans, like Bok, simply reclaimed their agency. When we talk these days about Russia, we talk about it, like so much else, with an air of inevitability, as if these things—bots, fake news, our partisan rancor—happen to us. We imagine ourselves lab rats in a big, gray box forced to endure the machinations of other, more powerful people. The Mueller investigation, viewed through this unhappy prism, is not simply about unearthing the facts, or righting a wrong, or making sure Russian intelligence isn’t choosing our commander in chief. It is about imposing a kind of parental authority.
We forget what social media is. It is a series of decisions we make about whether to log on, and how long to stay, and whether to read or peruse or like or share or comment. It is about the nature of our comments. It doesn’t happen to us. We are not magically conditioned by it. We choose, often stupidly, to take part and, worse yet, believe. The people who chose to believe in Pizzagate were stupid. (To be fair to Trumpland, so were the people who thought that millennial-middle-finger brouhaha in SoHo, posted earlier this month, was real.)
How many times has some finger-wagging scold reminded us of all the tech titans who won’t give their children iPhones or let them have their own Instagrams, as if to say: These people are peddling dope, and they know it. Maybe. I enjoy the occasional Facebook rumble probably for all the wrong reasons (to make other people feel bad, to assert my toxic masculinity). But I don’t believe anything I believe or like can be blamed, ultimately, on some evil hoodie tapping away in Siberia. I blame my stupidities on me. The progressive—smirking, well intentioned, myopic—will offer up lots of blather about false consciousness or privilege or how you can’t expect the unwashed masses to fend for themselves out there.
Please. We forget what the tech titans know and are doing their best to make us forget—that we are not lab rats, that we retain a consciousness, an interior. We have philosophy, literature, mathematics, and we have the capacity for introspection and abstruse inquiry. It is true that we are mostly idiots now, we know almost nothing, we confuse “information” and “knowledge,” we think an education is for getting a job and not elevating a soul, so it may be safer, smarter—it may make for better policy—to impose restrictions on the things we say to or share with each other. If you, too, believe that Democrats are not only wrong about taxes but also traffic in small children, then you plus a laptop plus reliable Wi-Fi are probably a threat to the national security.
But we shouldn’t pretend Russia is to blame for that. We remain the captain of our own, hollowed-out ship. This was the freedom that poor, luckless Yakov Bok, he who came from a village and had no money or hope or formal education, stumbled on only after being locked up. Bok relishes his freedom, derives all of his strength and meaning from it. At the end of the novel, as he is being led to trial, he must wade through a sea of Jew haters, and he can smell the billowing violence—but it doesn’t matter. What matters is he is free, even if he is not, and his dignity remains intact.
Of course, if he were an existentialist or just better attuned to the whims and plunderings of contemporary America, he would know better. He would grasp just how awful this freedom can be. In this country, too many of us have learned freedom by rote. We celebrate it. We sing songs, wave flags, march, salute, well up, pay tribute, recall all the tribulations of the Americans who came before. But we are loath to embrace it, because contained deep inside our freedom is agency—ownership—and that means it does not really matter what Vladimir Putin does. He is a would-be puppet master, but his puppets are not wooden. They are us.”
Source: https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2018/12/dont-blame-putin-for-america-social-media-stupidity
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