There is no 'Them' - by Antonio García Martínez

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There is no 'Them'<br>On the politics of the Other<br>Antonio García Martínez<br>Dec 16, 2021

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The ‘Them’ marching off to work.

Beware of the other’s dream, because if you are caught in the other’s dream, you are fucked.<br>-Gilles Deleuze, ‘Qu’est-ce que l’acte de création?’

I recently spent a rushed weekend in Los Angeles, a city I was born in, once lived in, and which I (re)visit every chance I get. I’m one of those invitation collectors who’s actually a homebody and mostly dislikes travel, but will bundle invites as an excuse to visit a city and knock them all out.<br>Thus was I sitting at a very well-appointed and welcoming shabbat dinner table this past Friday. The specific host family and guests are not directly relevant, other than to mention these are extremely media savvy people who in fact make a living in The Spectacle (much as I do) and are by no means the ‘normies’ that techies often dismissively cite.<br>The conversation was wide-ranging and generally warm…until we got to the topic of technology, and I suddenly felt as I did in the late 90s when backpacking around Europe. Cut to scene at a youth hostel in Belfast or Brindisi, and I was the lone representative of a hegemonic entity that had defined and marked everyone’s lives, and I had a lot to answer for. In the case of backpacker me, it was the United States of America and its assumed depredations throughout the world; in the case of shabbat guest me, it was me as emissary (and, worse!, defender) of ‘Big Tech’ which has wrought so much turbulence in our lives.<br>In the same way that the hostel scenes possessed their own ironies that still gleam in distant memory—one Spanish dude who was letting me have it about evil America was literally wearing blue jeans and eating McDonald’s—this scene also had its odd juxtapositions: everyone at the table had not only made their names thanks to such society-threatening services as Twitter, but when they had sparked cancel-worthy controversies (as everyone in the public eye now inevitably does), tech provided them with the weapons to fight back against the legacy media that demanded they follow the elite party line. Without tech, the ‘Cathedral’ would have chewed them (and anyone else) up and spit them out.<br>Me: “But tech—Twitter and Substack and podcasts and all the rest of it—they’re like the AK-47, the mass-market tool of the oppressed against their oppressors, that can turn a band of insurgents into a threat even for hegemons,” I protested.<br>‘Them’: “But tech is making teen girls completely crazy. And then the techies have the gall to keep their kids from using it, because they know it makes their kids crazy,” replied the hostess.1<br>Me: “Look, if you’d asked a Bohemian peasant in 1618 if the printing press was a good idea—note, that’s the first year of the Thirty Years’ War, the bloodiest war in European history until WWII—they’d also say it was probably a horrible mistake. It wasn’t until the Enlightenment and antibiotics and human rights that the literacy trade worked out.”<br>And on and on it went.2

The technology industry, as viewed by outsiders, about to destroy all life on Earth.<br>The issue of the net impact of technology is something I’ve addressed ad nauseum before, and my final view is that of the (mis-told) story of Zhou Enlai when asked about the impact of the French Revolution: too early to tell. My suspicion is that, just like that pessimistic and hypothetical peasant in 1618, we’re similarly on the cusp of a radical shake-up in the reigning order. Gutenberg’s gadget gave us everything from the nation-state to constitutional democracy to encyclopedic and empirical notions of ‘truth’, all of which I think are about to be thrown out the window before arriving at some (hopefully) superior post-post-Enlightenment era.<br>What’s more interesting than yet another technology debate is the form of address used by my shabbat interlocutors: the ‘Them’ and the ‘They’. ‘Them’ is the object of the outsider’s suspicion and conspiratorial fear. ‘They’ have done something, in some coordinated and seemingly unstoppable way, even if the ‘They’ encompasses a vast cast of companies and characters. At its extreme, it’s the ‘They’ of QAnon people going on about the pedophile ring that rules the world behind the scenes. In less unhinged form, it’s a ‘Them’ that buckets someone like Tim Cook alongside the Y Combinator founder leading a three-person company. The former (as well as analogs like Jack Dorsey and Mark Zuckerberg) are the emblematic figureheads, even though (to my mind), the latter much better embody the soul of Silicon Valley. Either way, they’re on the ‘Them’ bus together.<br>Very occasionally there really is a sort of ‘Them’. There was a disorganized ‘Them’ inside Facebook trying to make the ads system make money before the IPO, creating the targeting, Newsfeed, and mobile attribution products that have powered the company’s...