Envisioning Real Dystopias
May 13 — We were already observing a wild week full of hoaxes, scams, disinformation, and anti-science conspiracies, when an unexpected package arrived in the mail. Inside was a small notebook with lined blank pages. The cover was vibrant and read: “Fully automated luxury gay space communism,” in reference to a meme from the mid-2010s that was typically used as a funny retort to those who were exaggerating “leftist utopias.”
There is a rich history of leftist academics writing manifestos about future utopias, where social, political, and racial hierarchies are abolished. There’s also a counter-history of conspiracist dystopias alleging communists are seeking to rule the world through coercive government. The failings of both of these worldviews is that they do not account for the messiness of human life and society. The truth is that even the best laid plans are laid to waste during implementation, be they governmental, scientific, technological or economic.
In this edition of Meme War Weekly, we look at how leftist utopias of justice, fairness, and equity are counter-posed with conspiracies and dystopias, such as “Googlag,” a phrase that posits google is purposefully censoring conservatives and the far right, or the more recent “plandemic,” a shallow anti-science and anti-government conspiracy theory that has captured the attention of internet users and reporters alike. These dystopias are often then amplified through “distributed amplification,” a strategy and phenomenon that relies on humans as opposed to “bots.”
Defining Utopias
The “Fully Automated Luxury Gay Space Communism” meme’s origin begins with philosophical theories on the “post-scarcity economy,” where the widescale adoptation of automation has enabled the production of essential goods and services and all basic needs are met. For example, in a post-scarcity economy, driverless vehicles greatly reduce labor in public transportation and trucking industries, leaving humans to pursue self-fulfillment and pleasure. Innovations that reduce the need for human labor will lead to a “post-work society,” where luxury goods are also more widely available because of automation.
Emerging out of queer-friendly online leftist spaces, adding the descriptors “gay” and “space” to propagandist-style imagery was a fun way to experiment with this optimistic, though impractical, political meme. Despite the whimsical revolutionary imagination of these images, theories of a post-work society have been refuted by scholars such as Lilly Irani, Mary Gray, and Siddharth Suri, where their research shows the impossibility of taking the human out of the production loop.
Among the right wing, liberal and leftist utopias are often incorrectly described and conflated. A fundamental misreading of left of center positions is often prime material for the growth of a parody meme, as is the case with the viral phrase “this is the future liberals want.” Based on a now-deleted tweet from an account associated with the 4chan message board /pol/, the phrase was coupled with an image of a woman in a niqab sitting alongside someone in drag on the subway and intended to shame both individuals and condemn urban diversity. As this tweet was discovered in leftist circles, it was met with satirical tweets and a string of funny response memes.
Defining Dystopias
While irony and parody satirize leftist political utopias, dystopias hit different. With the COVID-19 crises, the internet has become a battleground for those seeking to control the narrative and set media agendas. Right wing pundits, online influencers, and discredited scientists have forged a tactic coalition against the so called “mainstream media” and tech giants, a fight carried out in memes, coded messages, and blatant disinformation. The culture wars of the past decade have culminated in a full-scale polarization of the science on COVID-19, where long-standing conspiracy theories meet far right political agendas. Unlike the playful and unrealistic utopic memes of the left, the far right’s history of fatalistic dystopian visions of the future, where the US backslides into civil war, has created the prime conditions that allow the “plandemic” memes thrive.
For a set of those on the right committed to free speech absolutism, any attempts by the press or platforms to curb the spread of hate speech or misinformation are met with claims of censorship. Conservatives and the far right devised a set of interlocking conspiratorial accusations against the “liberal media,” “big tech,” and the “deep state,” who are aligning to silence right wing voices on social media.
This worldview has crystallized since 2016, but has noticeably intensified during the COVID-19 crisis over fears of an emergent “new world order” . The distribution of the 25-minute teaser for the Plandemic documentary is but the latest in a series of attempts to evade fact checks and is fueled by conspiratorial fervor, hyperpartisan politics, and deep disdain of major social media platforms. The Plandemic documentary will be released in the future but the teaser was a 25-minute clip of a discredited scientist and anti-vaccination activist claiming that a range of actors, including Dr. Fauci, Bill Gates, and the World Health Organization, are trying to control the world through vaccines. As a viral slogan, “the plandemic” keyword had already been used for months in reference to numerous conspiracy theories about a nefarious plot by the democrats to usher in communism or a “new world order.”
Every time social media companies make policies to control the spread of misinformation on their platforms, it creates new political opportunities for media manipulators to gain press attention. Much of this is centered around free speech absolutism and accusations that social media companies are “silencing conservative voices” while operating with impunity. Many on the right have drawn comparisons to information control in communist nations, calling big tech’s actions on harmful content the “Googlag” where conservative views are sent to rot. However, a conservative-led audit into bias on Facebook did not find evidence to support these claims Yet the narrative still remains.
Alongside Googlag, another dismal meme used amongst the online far right recalls a seminal piece of dystopian literature: “The Answer to 1984 is 1776.” This viral slogan was popularized in a book by Infowars’ Alex Jones, himself a large propagator of both Plandemic conspiracies and a sworn enemy of “Big Tech.” As Jones was widely deplatformed from most social media after instigating harassment of parents who lost children in the Sandy Hook mass shooting, this phrase took on new meaning amongst his followers.
In this dystopian future, “big tech” and the US government are bringing about a new age of social control designed to crush the human spirit, much as the oppressive government in Orwell’s 1984 crushed all resistance with militaristic speech controls. Infowars built its reputation on spurious predictions of various impending civil wars, and the intensity of Jones’ conspiratorial rhetoric increased during the COVID-19 crisis, including countless mentions of “the plandemic” across online communities that often share content from InfoWars. Many of the comments about “the plandemic” are not in reference to the documentary released last week, but rather to a dystopian conspiracy that interlaces many different fringe communities under one unified theory.
In our research, we look to extreme instances to help understand the ways in which fringe communities use social media to set media agendas and introduce new narratives. Platform companies have stumbled repeatedly when dealing with racist and misogynistic terrorism and the spread of related manifestos and videos. For example, Elliot Rodger, a mass shooter associated with the online “incel” community, was a prolific YouTuber and despite major platforms removing his disturbing video diaries, fan communities celebrating the killer continue to upload his videos and manifesto. This content has been notoriously difficult to fully suppress.
Relatedly, after the 2019 terror attacks in Christchurch New Zealand, in which a livestream of the shootings were broadcast on Facebook, Youtube faced an unprecedented dilemma, forced to automatically and manually remove 1.5 million re-uploads of the footage in a day. In instances like these, bad actors operating under the cloak of anonymity collectively overload content moderation systems and exploit unforeseen vulnerabilities. We refer to coordinated spreading of forbidden content as “distributed amplification” wherein large groups circumvent platform intervention by uploading copies, and in some cases, altering the content to evade algorithmic detection.
Biella Coleman documented this tactic in her study of Anonymous trolling Scientology, where a video of Tom Cruise became the fodder in a war between the protest ensemble of Anonymous and the Church of Scientology. More than just riding a wave of media attention from a public takedown, though, Coleman describes “The Streisand Effect” as “a well-known Internet phenomenon wherein an attempt to censor a piece of information has the inverse effect: more people want to see it in order to understand the motivation for the censorship, and thus it spreads much more widely than it would have if left alone.” Distributed amplification relies on reactive updates to platforms’ terms of service, coupled with inadequate enforcement of policies against online harms. Ultimately, each attempt at content moderation risks becoming a new opportunity for media manipulators to hijack media attention.
While our team observed this behavior amongst white supremacists to spread their ideology, conspiracy theorists are also using it to expand their audiences, especially among the online communities supporting The Plandemic documentary. On The Plandemic documentary’s website, they include instructions for downloading and uploading the long clip, without any warning that distributing this content could result in a content takedown or your personal account getting banned. By participating in the process of uploading and receiving a warning or suspension by platform companies, it confirms the theory that “big tech” is suppressing speech. Rather, what is really happening is enforcement of their terms of service.
Platforms reactively intervene when problematic content has already spread, and media manipulators modify their tactics in innovative ways by putting to use distributed networks and loosely-aligned factions. Fringe influencers become crucial distribution nodes, and junk news helps create the impression of veracity. When journalists step in to cover content takedowns it can further exacerbate the issue, but nevertheless their coverage is crucial for countering the health misinformation contained in the video.
In this case, the makers of The Plandemic video capitalized on a pre-existing dystopian narrative already circulating in fringe communities, knowing that a content takedown would trigger the Streisand effect and allow them to set media agendas. This tactic of distributed amplification shows how human actors, rather than bots or other artificial forms of signal boosting, are integral to disinformation campaigns.
But, if anyone asks, this is really the future that liberals want:
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Meme War Weekly is a newsletter addressing political messaging that comes from the wilds of the internet, produced by the Technology and Social Change Research Project at the Harvard Kennedy School’s Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy. Each week, we will look closely at the use of popular slogans and images and how they are shifting political conversations.
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