The Threat of Digital Authoritarianism

Speaker 1 [00:00:09] Hey fam, it’s me, Imara. Welcome to the TransLash Podcast, a show where we tell trans stories to save trans lives. Today, we’re tackling one of the darkest and one of the most impactful forces in this political moment, and that’s digital authoritarianism. From social media surveillance to coordinated harassment campaigns, authoritarian governments and bad actors, including those connected to our own government, are using technology and the internet as a tool of manipulation and control. With the likes of Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg growing ever more powerful and unconstrained, this is a threat that we need to be prepared for and to see clearly. This is especially true for trans people who already face censorship, deplatforming, and targeted abuse. So how do we get here? How are disinformation networks weaponized against our communities? And what can we do to fight back? To help us break it all down, I talked with information scientist and writer, Catherine Alejandra Cross.

Speaker 2 [00:01:11] What they believe is that the technology created by startups and by tech companies, everything from apps to particular pieces of physical technology, are now sufficiently sophisticated as to replace government of, by, and for the people.

Speaker 1 [00:01:31] But before we get to these critical conversations, let’s start out as always with some trans joy. Today’s episode touches on some disturbing undercurrents that will profoundly impact the next generation. So we wanted to celebrate someone who is helping nurture young people through these challenging times. Catherine Chin is a primary school teacher who brings their full self to the classroom, modeling authenticity and kindness for their students every day. As an educator, they champion inclusion, cultivate curiosity, and show the next generation the power of being unapologetically themselves. In a world that often underestimates the brilliance of trans and non -binary folks, Catherine is proof that our presence in every space, especially in education, makes a lasting difference. Here’s Catherine to tell us more.

Speaker 3 [00:02:42] We were reading a book last year called The Day the Crayons Quit, and it’s about these crayons that like wanted to stop working because they were, you know, the red crayon was always used to draw fire trucks and the blue crayon was always used to draw the sky and like things like that. It’s a book that opens a conversation for like, oh, well, what if you’re a blue crayon, but you don’t want to draw the sky? They were starting to relate that to their own identities. Like I’m a girl, but I like to play soccer at recess, or I’m a boy, but I have long hair. and then. Sometimes when you do have students that have trans identities, that conversation organically comes up and me having the experience to validate that for them was really special.

Speaker 1 [00:03:22] Catherine Chen, you are trans joy. There’s no better person to talk us through the ever-evolving intersection of technology and politics than Catherine Cross. Catherine is currently a PhD candidate in information science at the University of Washington, where she’s focused on studying the dynamics of online harassment and its solutions. Her writing on tech, society, and power has been featured in Wired, Rolling Stone, and Beyond, making her a critical voice on this topic. You can also find her covering social media and geopolitics. as a contributing writer for liberal currents. Catherine is also author of Log Off, by posting in politics almost Never Mix, where she explores how online culture shapes and sometimes distorts our political realities. I’m looking forward to getting her thoughts on digital authoritarianism, what it looks like in practice, who it harms, and what we can do about it. Catherine, thank you so much for joining us. It’s such a pleasure to be here, Amara. Thank you. First off, I’m wondering if you can just talk to us about an idea that may be contradictory to a lot of people. And that is the way in which we believe that the digital world that we live in and inhabit, a part of which, of course, is social media, that we all think is about us and that we control. And that is about us expressing ourselves and finding others like us and us even being able to live better lives through the products and the places that we can. find out about, and even engage in, how that’s actually antithetical to what these devices are about, rather than we controlling them. In many ways, the digital world is about controlling us.

Speaker 2 [00:05:14] I think that the answer to your question can be found within the question actually is that the reality is that social media, despite the name, is very much about you as an individual, right? It’s YouTube. It’s the for you feed. Everything is customized around you and your personal desires. You get the illusion of community and connection because how could you possibly be alone in a crowd, after all. How could you possibly be alone when you are connected to this great mass of people swirling around you every day as you look through your social media feeds, whether it’s on TikTok or Instagram or Facebook or Blue Sky or what have you. But in point of fact, you are curating an experience that is built predominantly around your own desires. And while that can sound liberating, it is also profoundly individualizing. And it is about sort of keeping you in a sort of nexus of profit generation for the companies that run these platforms, right? Keeping you scrolling as much as possible by letting you sort of curate your own dopamine hits. It’s less about building constructive community worthy of the name than about selling something to you. So that’s really how I sort of square the circle of that contradiction. Social media gives the illusion of collective action, but we are all atomized in our own carefully manicured walled gardens separated from one another by the way that we instantiate our own desires using the tools of social media. That is not a practice that is conducive to getting people to sort of submerge themselves in a greater whole, like a social movement, say, where you put your needs second before the needs of the larger group and the larger strategy being pursued, say, and instead you are induced very heavily to hyperfixate on that which pleases you, that you think personally is right for yourself.

Speaker 1 [00:07:37] Within that, I think that one of the things that people don’t realize that they’re being sold are ideas, right? One of the things that the atomization that you describe is not only that it’s been moved to sell products, but it also is moved to sell ideas and perspectives. For example, the number of people who talk about the way in which young men and their families were radicalized in the pandemic by indexing more online in social media and being drawn to QAnon. the way in which the algorithms work in terms of segmentation. If you’re a person who likes watching cat videos and you’re scrolling through 20 minutes of cat videos, at a certain point there can be a political message disguised as a conversation on a podcast, which because you’re already open mentally and in an entertainment mindset, your mind is actually more receptive to perhaps those. um, ideas that you would normally be receptive to, which is one of the pathways to radicalization. Can you just talk a little bit about the way in which they’re actually used to move ideas and to influence behavior in that way? Oh yeah.

Speaker 2 [00:08:48] It’s a very, very common issue that we’ve been seeing over the last decade, right? I think that at this point, you would have to be quite foolish indeed to deny that radicalization through the internet, through social media is not a major factor in our politics, not just in the US but across the world right now, that a lot of the sort of surge in right politics has been driven by that. But I think an interesting question that I often get asked is why did that happen with the political right and not so much with the political left? And that gets to also the heart of your question. What is happening is catering again to this profoundly individualistic bias. The far-right narratives that are succeeding, after all, if you think about the ones that are especially destructive and also very popular and motivating, tend to be driven by prejudice, hatred of disfavored groups and individuals, obviously trans people are very much in the dock right now with that in the US, but also abroad in the UK and Australia to a certain extent and so on. What that is being driven by is this individualistic sort of heroes narrative that people are induced into seeing themselves in. So the radicalization that happened during the pandemic, for instance, was a way in which some people were induced to take back, as they saw it, control of their lives against all of these powerful, impersonal, destructive forces that they saw as dominating their lives. After all, the pandemic uprooted and changed people’s lives, often for the worse, all over the world, they found themselves. of work, unable to go out, unable to see family, had to keep their kids home from school, and on top of all of that, fearing a deadly novel respiratory virus, right? It’s incredibly scary. Who wouldn’t be scared? Some people retreated into the darkest depths of fear of COVID itself, others retreated into blaming the government, right? And saying, well, it actually is their or it’s China’s fault, it’s somebody’s fault. that this is happening to me and I need to take a stand. And here are all these ready -made narratives now suddenly flooding into their social media feeds telling them, this is how you can be a hero, like in the movies, right? QAnon, which you mentioned, is nothing less than a massive augmented reality game where you are a protagonist, like in some kind of Tom Clancy novel or something. you really see the cinematic epistemology with which we were all reared, where we have these ready-made narratives, these heroic, tidy narratives, where a lone warrior or a lone noble individual stands up against an evil, oppressive state or the darkness of their age and comes out triumphant because they don’t believe what they’re told or they… fight for the truth against the powerful and so on and people wanted to see themselves in those profoundly individualistic heroic narratives and the right had those sort of ready-made but also were tapping into something that the internet and social media does very well which is you know you can use these tools to attack a person right you and a dozen of your friends can send death threats to a public health official. or a transgender person, right? Or to a politician, a liberal leftist politician that you dislike, that you’ve been told to blame for everything that’s happening in your life and so on. Right, and all of that is very easy and very congenial with a lot of the destructive aims of right-wing politics. Whereas most left-wing politics, although it obviously has its own antagonists and people that left-wingers might like to harass on social media and so on. That’s not really the point. The point is constructive. It’s to build and to become something new as a collective for the good of the whole. And right -wing politics with its built-in individualistic, rugged individualism focus is a better fit for a lot of these more destructive things that social media can do. So that’s definitely a huge part of how this all happened And then when you combine that with… algorithmic pipelines where we’ve seen like you click on like one conspiracy video and then you get served up more of the same and more of the same and more of the same. It quickly becomes a sort of exponential algorithmic growth cycle where you take a dip into the pool of radicalization and then find yourself listening to the only sound you can hear. Thanks for watching! which is info wars effectively, when you combine all of these things together, you start to get that radicalization pipeline. And when right-wing podcasters and whatnot are pushing a singular message, like for instance, uh, supporting Donald Trump or hating trans people, it really does get into the sociological water, as it were, that these people are all drinking from.

Speaker 1 [00:14:32] For example, I think I watched one video on Christian nationalism, and then I started to be served a whole bunch of sort of pro-Christian nationalist videos on Instagram, right? And I didn’t like it. I watched it, right? And so even if you are watching to expose yourself to something different, you get funneled into a pipeline that can push you into a certain direction. This atomization that you’re talking about, this dramatic idea of the hero versus the world, you know, very sort of Ayn Rand libertarian kind of ideas which are infused throughout sort of right-wing and Christian nationalist politics is a great way actually to move people towards the idea of authoritarianism, right? Because a part of what authoritarians want to do is to destroy the idea of community outside of the state. And what better way to do that than through a technology that actually atomizes people from the idea of connection, union, community, as a part of this larger project.

Speaker 2 [00:15:40] Yes, exactly. And it’s not just that the internet exists in its current form, although that is a huge part of the problem. It’s when you combine it with the slow and steady degradation of civil society that we have seen in Western countries, but especially in the US over the last 40 years, right? The decline of more traditional religious institutions, the decline of civil society organizations, town halls, community meetings.

Speaker 1 [00:16:10] Neighborhood sports leagues actually even like community sports leagues. Yes. There’s been a huge decline in like that as a point of community gathering.

Speaker 2 [00:16:18] Yes. And local news media in particular, right? Where once, you know, local newspapers could be hugely important. Now, many of them, those that still exist are consolidated under major press baronies and many others have gone out of business. And that was another way that people were connected to the places that they live. But now more politics, even in a country as huge as the U S with 330 million people is very national. And when that national politics is this endless, endless reactionary drumbeat, that seeps down into the furthest corners of this country. But what it also leads to, as I said, this decline in civil society, then combined with the atomizing effects of the internet where people go then to find community in the absence of all of this, is sort of creating this seedbed for reactionary politics.

Speaker 1 [00:17:15] Yeah. But I think that the point here is that it’s not just the internet. Cause people, when we say that people think of, well, the internet has been around since, you know, 1996 and we didn’t see necessarily the same decline. It really is the development of social and digital media. That’s mobile in your hands, right? That change. We’re really talking about the changes that have been unleashed on society since the development of the iPhone, right? We’re talking 2009. We’re talking in the last 12 years, essentially, where there’s been that dramatic. change in behavior and even in relationships. I mean, I’ll give an example. Right now, I live in a building and the building actually refuses to meet physically. People wanna do so only through the group chat and it has been terrible for a sense of community. I mean, people are far willing to say things they would never say to people in person and it’s actually a destructive force, right? And the only way that that’s possible is through the development of these mobile technologies.

Speaker 2 [00:18:15] Yes, and what I would say, even more specifically, is that this was about the shift from Web 1 .0 to 2 .0, which happened in the mid to late 2000s. We ha – So that was concomitant with the rise of mobile technologies that then put these emergent social media platforms into everyone’s hands, literally. But the internet as a whole changed dramatically, its entire sort of post .com bubble reformation. You think about when sites like YouTube, which came up in 2005, or Twitter, when they were founded and began to slowly but steadily take off, and by the time you had the turn of the decade at around 2010, then you began to see the internet look radically different than it had before. There were proto -social media platforms like MySpace or LiveJournal, but for those of us old enough to remember it, we can talk very floridly about what was different about those spaces. They were first of all, more personal. in a way that social media isn’t. And I know what I said earlier about customizing and curating feeds. I’ll get back to that in a second. It’s not the same thing as personalizing a space like a website. And that is what Myspace et al were meant to imitate is that this is sort of your networked landing page for you and your identity on the internet, which was itself imitating the early internet of everyone just having a personal website. or participating in a forum, it was the internet version of these smaller community organizations that I was describing earlier, right? That the internet used to be more cellular. It was made up of a bunch of small groups that were networked together. What Web 2 .0 did was de -incentivize people to go to those smaller places and instead join this sort of gestalt mass. where everyone was talking to or screaming at each other on the same platform and you could curate and customize your feed to seemingly have at least some control over the content you were served, but you could no longer customize your presence on the platform. You could no longer tweak or customize it to make it look like your own website. You had less control over how many people could see what you were saying. who could contact you and who couldn’t. In many ways, Facebook actually, it was sort of like the last vestige of that older model. And even that turned into the sort of, you know, everyone to everyone.

Speaker 1 [00:21:04] I mean, and also the whole thing is that by gathering everyone on these mass platforms with billions of people, right, with the algorithms and the rules determined by these centralized authorities, that’s a great way to manipulate people, right? It sets up the stage. It allows you to have a mass type of manipulation that you can’t have on any other type of platform, which then brings me to the next point, which is that who runs these platforms becomes even more important, right? So if we have this phenomenon that we’re describing, this mass gathering of billions of people, de -incentivization from learning about people through these smaller networks and being on these mass networks where the rules of the road are determined by others, it means that who’s setting those rules are important. And one of the things that we know about the people that run these platforms is that I think that they can be described as adhering to what we would now call digital authoritarian ideology. Can you just talk a little bit about the people now in control of these platforms and their kind of view of technology and how it intersects with politics? Cause that now means more now than ever.

Speaker 2 [00:22:24] Yeah, so there are a bunch of people, nearly all men, at the summit of the world of tech, either at the top of tech companies or venture capital, which is of course the slewest vent through which many of these companies and startups are funded, who are linked by what one can describe as a sort of weird, neo-reactionary, monarchist ideology where It’s sort of a deeply perverse and septic form of technocracy where they believe that men like Elon Musk, for instance, should be put in charge of everything because they supposedly know best and can and should run governments like businesses where these people are perceived as being extremely successful and extremely smart. and therefore they should become essentially unelected potentates ruling over us all. And you see in that an echo, yes, of sort of classic, even center -right ideology, the idea that government should be smaller, be lower taxes and less regulation and all the rest of it, but then taken to a great extreme, which we are now witnessing with Elon Musk’s so -called Doge in the US government operating This is sort of. quasi -governmental entity that he clearly has direct control over that is effectively obliterating and immiserating large parts of the government and the services that you and I pay for, right? And this is being done in the same way that he tried to do this with Twitter, much to Twitter’s ultimate detriment. And the larger ideology, which is also expressed by people such as Peter Thiel and venture capitalist Mark Anderson is one that is focused on this notion that democracy is an inefficient information processor, that it leads to all sorts of manifestly terrible outcomes and that the will of the people must be replaced with the will of some kind of techno king or emperor. because those individuals have proven themselves capable of administration and we’d all be better off just submitting to their will. Now, this is of course, utterly fatuous if ever there was anyone who failed upwards continuously because of being born with a silver spoon in their mouths, it is Elon Musk. But this mythology is pervasive. It is very popular. It intersects very deeply with, yes, anti -feminism, with white supremacism. many of these people. are resentful at the progress that has been made by various disfavored groups, by the poor, by people of color, by women and LGBTQ people, right? That generates this resentment, this backlash, again, and Edith Fuchs in right -wing politics that is as old as the cold, as my mother would say, but also that has now taken on this new form with this intersection with a kind of No libertarianism. an ideological strain that has been part of Silicon Valley from the very start. There are sort of two ideological parents for what has been known as the California ideology that infused big tech and still does to this day. One is a sort of leftist counterculture from the 60s, elements of the new left and the hippie movement. And the other is libertarianism, heavily inspired by Ayn Randian objectivism. and this idea that tech was a way to finally create this sort of self -directed network society that would obviate the need for government, right? What many of these people believe, whether you’re talking about Jeff Bezos or the ideologist Curtis Yavin, a far right techno ideologue who is much beloved by the set of men, Mm -hmm. Mm -hmm. What they believe. is that the technology created by startups and by tech companies, everything from apps to particular pieces of physical technology are now sufficiently sophisticated as to replace government of, by, and for the people. Simply put, right? And when you look at how they talk about AI and how they want to use a large language model driven AI, it is also premised on this belief. fire all of these workers, all these federal workers, and let AI do it. And we know best about how to use this technology to direct and govern your lives. You’ve seen some of these people who are certainly close to Elon Musk openly saying on social media, well, why do we need a postal service? We have Amazon, we have UPS, we have the ability to deliver things with drones. We don’t need a publicly funded postal service. That’s the ideology and they know that this is a political program that cannot win mass support in the present. The degree to which Trump won the election in 2024 by a narrow margin was not determined by people hopped up on this techno authoritarian ideology but people who, you know, the margin was made up of people who were misled into thinking that Trump would be on the economy, simply put. These people know that there is no constituency for eliminating the post office, eliminating social security, eliminating Medicare and Medicaid. These are not things that the public really want. So they know they have to do away with democracy. They have to erode it, corrode it, destroy it in order to get this done. And so that’s sort of the intersection between the sort of classic authoritarian ideology. and where tech comes into it. For them, tech is the magic wand that makes all of this work at long.

Speaker 1 [00:28:50] lost. And possible. And indeed this sort of broad vision possible. Lastly, I’m wondering what you make of the way that now this has all become explicit. If once upon a time these were things that only the billionaires said amongst themselves in the group chats that they have in the small Silicon Valley gatherings that they have where they talk about these issues and things and you know, do all sorts of things together. Um, It’s now out in the open. Like we clearly see the way in which Elon Musk is mobilizing these ideas to devastating effect. We see the swiftness with which Mark Zuckerberg says that essentially men need to rule more and need to have a greater role in the workplace. We need to eliminate DEI and being downright vindictive, um, in the workplace against trans people and women, for example. we see the way in which there are other people in the tech world and tech empire, right? Some of those powerful people on the planet, like Google and company like Google, saying, all right, well, the person in charge is renaming various geographic names that have been around for five, 600 years and we all comply, right? There’s a way in which this conversation, which was limited amongst themselves, is now on full on display. Can you talk a little bit about what you think that signals. where we’re headed, and just the degree of confidence and power that they have in themselves and their ability to bring about all of the things that you just described.

Speaker 2 [00:30:28] Yes, I think that certainly there’s an aspect of it that is very much confidence in power, but also do not underestimate the degree to which this is desperation. For many of these people, there was an understanding that this was probably the last best chance that they had to do this. The thing to know about Donald Trump as a social media president. is that he lucked into something that many politicians aspire to, and which is very useful in an age of social media in particular, and that is being a Rorschach inkblot. That he can be all things to all people who want to support him, where he can be seen as a, you know, reformer, anti -war, even sort of crypto -progressive, pro -tech, whatever. And for those with a lot of money and power and influence, he’s also a battering ram to be used to advance their aims. Every one of these people wants to be the last one to talk to Donald Trump, the mad king after all, in hopes of influencing him and manipulating his veto pen to their best interest. So they recognize that they were not gonna get an opportunity this golden again. if Trump lost in 2024, and they are trying to use it to its fullest extent. Now, that doesn’t mean that this is not going to cause a great deal of harm, potentially it already is, but it I think is best understood as a profound act of desperation on their part, but also as to why they have felt so confident confident about turning on, you know, so-called DEIA initiatives and so on, I think that there’s a few things going on there. One is that to be very blunt, 2020 was traumatizing for the executive class, right? In a couple of different ways, because like a flash of lightning on a dark night, it showed that masses of people could rise up in service. of a progressive cause, particularly, and shockingly for this country, one that affirmed the humanity of black people against some of the most organized and violent elements of the state. And that got into every part of American society. It got into corporate boardrooms, and the executive class was fearful of what was happening alongside that, which was employee organizing. the campuses of big tech in particular, and they’ve been very blatant about this. Mark Andreessen was interviewed by the New York Times and he said this extremely clearly. He said something to the effect of, oh, multiple tech CEOs have told me that their employees were practically going feral in 2020. They’re describing them as animals and saying that the labor organizing and the protests led by tech employees on behalf of Black Lives Matter, organizing around working from home during the pandemic. All of these things represented a sudden shift of labor power towards the worker. Even in these big tech companies that already pay their employees very well, right? Suddenly there was this upsurge towards workers organizing and mobilizing and compelling their corporate boards and their CEOs. to do certain things vis-a-vis the biggest issues of 2020. I don’t think you can overstate how traumatizing that was to these executives and was a very radicalizing force to them. So when you get to 2022 and what Elon Musk does at Twitter, it creates a permission structure for people like Mark Zuckerberg to follow along and say, well, I’ll also do mass layoffs to and scare the employees back into line. break their will to start breaking up this new cluster of labor power that is threatening to erode my power because remember what we were talking about earlier with this particular libertarian version of the California ideology right and you know you and I both mentioned Ayn Rand many of these people see themselves as John Galt and John Galt does not lead an that unionizes, right? The idea, people who work. for Google or Microsoft or Twitter should have any ability to collectively determine their own fate above and beyond whatever whim Elon Musk as his self-imagined god emperor should decree that day is the most horrifying thing imaginable to these people. And they saw taking over the US government knowing that Trump was amenable to that influence, that he could be easily led, used as a battering ram, used as a symbol, because he has this core of popularity among a third of the voting public, that this was their opportunity to try and roll back some of what was done over the last few years. There’s a stereotype on the left that the Biden administration was very conservative. Certainly, you know, this is not the slightest defense of. Biden administration’s policy in Israel-Palestine, but you have to remember that the economic policies of the Biden administration were a profound repudiation of a neoliberal consensus that had prevailed for 30 or some odd years, right, representing a significant transfer of wealth to workers, a significant increase in support for organized labor, and so on. and you can say, well, it wasn’t enough. the experience of the capitalist class in that moment, the executives, was to be terrified of this. And this is their backlash.

Speaker 1 [00:36:47] Yeah, it was, from their perspective, it was, you know, Karl Marx, you know, like from kind of their expectation. Well, we’ve covered a lot of ground during this conversation. There is more ground to cover and I hope and know that you will come back and that we will have you come back to talk about all the ways in the future that we may be able to respond to this. but I really think that this unpacking. is an essential part of our community, understanding what’s going on. And I just thank you so much for the clarity of your work and your insight and for coming on today. Thank you so much, Amara. Yes, it was an absolute pleasure. I’d love to come back. Stay tuned. That was scholar and writer Catherine Cross. Thank you for joining me on the Translash Podcast. Now listen all the way through to the end of the show for something extra. If you like what you heard, make sure to leave a comment on Spotify or a five -star review on Apple Podcast. You might just hear me read it out on the show. The Translash Podcast is produced by TransLash Media. The Translash team includes Oliver Ash -Kline and Aubrey Calloway. Xander Adams is our senior sound engineer and a contributing producer. The show gets to your ears with the help of our social media team, including Morgan Asprey. The music you heard was composed by Ben Draghi and also courtesy of ZZK Records. The TransLash Podcast is made possible by the support of foundations and listeners like you. What am I looking forward to this week over the next couple of days? Well, coming back to the United States. I have been in London for work this week and it’s been great. I went to graduate school here, so it is really good to be here, but will be good to go back to the United States.