Breaking our Mirrors and Building Good Media

I was recently in an Uber, after a three hour Zoom, and while I was exhausted -the whole time I was locked in. I was tuned  into the driver’s monologue -this is usual for me. A gregarious display to maintain my near perfect rider rating. But this time, I had new tools in my arsenal: I listened to conspiracy theory after conspiracy theory in the Austin traffic with curiosity. I had just started reading the book “Doppelganger” by Naomi Klein by chance, but it immediately got me thinking. Klein shared about the ways that everything is a mirror, and that our politics today largely reflect that. The way the right and conspiracy-land has used exactly what the left has ignored, reflecting people’s fears and worries into unbelievable truths. So when I listened to each theory I thought ok, what is the fear?

Migrants mean a fear of livelihood and economic stability in a time of  struggle, the fear of vaccines are around health, and the belief in fake disasters are around fear of governments, and the ever shrinking power citizens have today in the midst of climate change, technology, and a weakening democracy. In the book Naomi describes the way she has gone into the mirror, learning more and more about her “double,” a conspiracy theorist named Naomi Wolf. In a similar vein I do the same. Not just in Uber rides but all around. I’m hungry for the mirror, largely because I worked in the left of the left, in social justice silos that often repeat narratives I know reflect their lack of communication with those on the other side of the double-sided glass pane.

And, this is where I first saw Naomi Klein, when I was working for Sunrise Movement, the leftist youth-led climate change organization, or in the mirror world the communists brainwashing children to promote the climate change hoax perpetrated by Bill Gates. And when I was there, I heard things that not only are grounded in actions we see today but are also reifications of the mirrors like the belief that everyone on the right is a racist, or wants to see them dead. That these people are both uneducated and also controlling the narrative as a part of a big plan. That there is no logic in their beliefs.

But when you enter into the mirror world, nothing could be further from the truth. Mostly, I now reflect on the fact that social and environmental policy are the most at risk for mirrors when we don’t address economics. These were my college majors and yet I’ve just begun to put the pieces together. As climate change and racial advocacy began having their moment, there was something that was ignored, economic policy. And as I’ve also written, movements like Sunrise were fraught with young people who rarely had economic challenges, and were usually college educated at elite institutions. And so the mirror of these people is exactly who has come up in the world.

White people without college degrees, and ostensibly lower incomes were the first but now polls are showing people of color without college degrees, men, and other groups polling high for Trump. These groups are often undereducated and that combined with economic insecurity makes them ripe for explanations that go beyond the fold. So in some ways the left was right, but they missed the mark. Progressivism is often the byproduct of higher education, but rarely does it come without the underlying economic benefits that higher education provides. 

It was this missed opportunity that led to the rise of right wing media influencers. Much like state media that promoted baseless theories to find a common enemy in times of strife in years past, social media does the same. But because technology is a magnifier, social media has led to even more extreme thinking and a disconnection from reality as a whole. 

The feed knows what kind of content will keep us hooked, and that is often content that reinforces our beliefs. It could also be content that is controversial, that drives engagement, and drives radicalization, division, and violence. The scary thing about the mirror world is that it's not only a social projection, it's also very real. These fears are capitalized by content creators, whose content is then fed to Americans across the nation, and is driving very real actions. This is what happened in the El Paso shooting, where a man, convinced of a conspiracy theory, on a conservative mirror of the site 4chan, shot up a Walmart in a largely Mexican area. 

The new series, God Save Texas, talks about this. I was excited to attend a screening with the directors here in Austin, and we ended on the topic of the shift we are seeing in groups affected by some but less of the hateful rhetoric of the mirror, towards the right. Why were these people voting against their interests? Why are more people going towards the right?

I might have found the answer in a mirror event. Weeks before I attended a presentation by Numbers USA, a right wing environmental group, whose rhetoric was used in the 2016 election by Donald Trump. The numbers in question are not about species of live oaks but immigrants. And the focus of the talk, sprawl, is also mentioned in the El Paso Shooter’s Manifesto, along with a chilling detail of the live rounds he used:

The manifesto’s argument is largely about corporations. It makes points about corporate interests and environmental harm. He even goes on to advocate for universal healthcare and universal basic income. The thought process is not necessarily anti-Mexican but rather that American consumerism is driven by immigrant labor, and the children of those immigrants are too educated. This is not necessarily true. It might once have been but today, most of that labor happens outside of the U.S in places like Bangladesh and Vietnam and so curbing immigration will not mean less water bottles are produced. Children of immigrants are also not sizably overeducated as to shift employment numbers significantly. It’s clear this text is driven from his challenges in finding a job with an associate’s degree, and concern for other Americans and the planet. It is wholly an economic argument turned into a racial one. He argues that if we had less people, there might be more resources to go around. That if we shrunk ourselves down to our smallest selves, the government and corporations just might be able see our humanity. We know however this will never happen because the lack of resources is artificial in question.

And sure enough, at the end of the manifesto I saw another word I knew- scarcity. This is the same word the presenter at NumbersUSA used. He said, “It's not like before, we live in scarcity now.” This is one of the biggest belief systems that drives people to point fingers and triggers but it's not true. While we live in a world of environmental scarcity, we don’t live in an economic one. Prices are artificially inflated  by companies, and the country has more than enough money to invest in the nation, if only it can get out of other ones. And so the answer here is again a mirror. It’s not them, it's us. 

As American companies began exporting production in response to strengthening labor rights, Americans became unemployed, sinking our manufacturing sector in places like the midwest. And as other countries continued developing, especially in the advent of remote work , even work needing a college degree made an exit. The culprit is corporate profiteering, globalization, and consumerism. We are harming our environment, but the answers don’t lie in any one group, but rather society as a whole. The new right is no longer frustrated at immigrants and the poor because they receive government aid, they want aid too. As life becomes unaffordable, Americans are demanding to be taken care of. Instead everything is becoming harder, and that’s how the mirror continues to grow, eating up those most desperate to its ideas. 

I went to South by Southwest with these ideas in mind. I was hoping to find organizations and individuals working to break the bind social media has us in, and bringing people together to see each other’s humanity. I’m still thinking about my favorite side event about a new film, Doppelgängers. Astutely named, the new film is a journey about a space researcher going into deep caves in Spain where astronauts are trained at. I went to a panel with the director and protagonist as well as the voice behind the soundtrack, Pussy Riot. The panel focused on the fact that the objective of the experiment was not met. The director hoped that once she was in the cave, her doppelgangers, two similarly looking women representing parts of her, would lead to a breakthrough where she could envision what an eco-feminist future in space might look like.

Once the doppelgängers left the caves, she instead had a breakdown. I wonder if this is why isolation can be challenging: When we have others around us, we can project versions of ourselves onto them, especially faults but also yearnings, hopes, and joys. When our mirrors leave we have to confront the self before we reach the alternate reality we seek to build. Our ability to comfortably point fingers across the aisle becomes a challenging self-inspection, possibly ending in panic. 

As Nadya Tolokonnikova, of Pussy Riot spoke, I began to think not just about the persecution she faced by the Russian state but also the increasing support for Russia in the right wing at home. I was shocked to learn a former colleague of mine, an anti-nuclear environmental activist from Orange County, California, had made the jump into the right-wing mirror. His channel had grown into the millions and he had become an open supporter and enthusiast of the Russian state, making regular trips to Moscow that I curiously watched on his Instagram, his face looking cold and red underneath a dark fur hat. His politics are not those of the establishment right but of the new right. One that acknowledges the mirror of America as the enemy. His 3 Million supporters understand this. They understand America has abandoned people like them, and that to be pro Russia, like Trump, is to be pro-American, even as it is anti-America. That is, the  America that we left off in the last essay: one composed of globalization, capitalism, and imperialism.

The America that invades nations, then spends its national budget taking lives away,  while doing the same at home, albeit spending no money in the process. From healthcare to inflation, America is largely abandoning its citizens and choosing instead to support the citizens of nations that align with its current political, economic, imperial, and militaristic interests. Instead of looking at itself, America has been pointing fingers. A desire to confront Democracy abroad and increase prosperity has led itself to a weakening democracy and prosperity at home.

At SXSW  I was curious to see if anyone had ideas on how to confront the reality of the situation. If any social media company was dreaming of a world where we as members of America, could confront ourselves and not one another. Because while it is easy to put all our fears, anxieties, and anger at those around us, it is harder to move through those emotions, in order to see reality as it is. But through is the only way forward. 

I started off the official festival by going to a session by Patreon. While it was promising it exists mainly as a paid funnel for people to grow their existing fanbases, or in this case go deeper into their silos. The panelists were harmless comedians and professionals, but some of the top creators are alt-right content creators like the Russian propagandist in question. That’s the challenge with social media and web2 broadly. Its algorithms and models seem to be trapped in a model of concentration, extremism, and growth. And when groups like Facebook or X censor or ban content like this, users often move to right-wing social media apps where their rhetoric becomes increasingly extreme. Additionally the censorship always reinforces the narrative that extremity is truth. And so the answer is not to build even more disparate realities through social media platforms but really hold current social media companies accountable, and create new ones where we can come together.

I veered into the last panel of one of the first days after frustratingly watching an AI system track ping pong balls- hoping to find some hope before the evening hullabaloo. I found it in a panel of a growing group of gen-z organizations working on curbing social media use, AI, and big tech. Design it For Us is a new and growing coalition of organizations holding big tech accountable. It focuses on shifting the business model that feeds off engagement, and it also talks about algorithmic accountability: This is the belief that the real world-actions that happen, like  suicides, violence, and other acts should be attributed to the algorithms that led the user to take the action in the first place. Members of Design it for Us have testified to congress, and looked Mark Zuckerberg in the face when data was released that showed platforms knew their algorithms were causing real world harm. In some ways I knew the tactics and methods for youth activism, but was excited at the bipartisan gains they were able to make in politics amidst the factioning. So that’s the work being done for web2 but could we build something else on web3? 

The book “Our Biggest Fight” also premiered at SXSW. This book is partially sponsored by Project Liberty, a nonprofit aimed at building an open internet. It has its own Decentralized Social Networking Protocol(DSNP), and aims to increase the financial benefits of the internet to the user, be transparent about its practices, and give users ownership and agency over their data. MeWe, is the first social network to run on the protocol. It is part of a growing group of organizations talking about a “Digital Social Identity” or online “Proof of Personhood(PoP).” It's a broad attempt at replicating the self online and allowing identity to be verifiable online everywhere. You might remember I was already “verified” with Worldcoin last summer. Recently they partnered with FWB, the web3 social club to create an exhibit called the Paradox of Personhood at Mexico City Art Week. I think the paradox for me is about the way the self has been leveraged for destruction on web2 and a fear that a full onboarding of the self into web3 would carry the same challenges. However it's also about defining who we are and what exactly makes us human. Are we our souls, our egos, our shadows, or all of the above?

I think if we own our data and how it's used, that's a start. It can give us control of exactly “who we are.” Then it's about being able to build relationships across differences, through technology. The only way to break our mirrors or shadow selves is through each other. By building relationships with those that have faced what we have and those who haven't we will begin to slowly undo the binds of political extremism. This is a move away from the concentration of the self that current algorithms provide, and is instead an undoing of the self. The more we lean into the fears, trauma, and anxieties contained within us, we begin to unwind  them and begin to hold each other.

Another session at SXSW gave me a good model. A woman shared a painful experience she’d been through, and the loneliness it brought. After finding out how common it was she built one of the top mental health apps, STIGMA. The project collected painful experiences from strangers and used recorded audio to connect them. In this way technology was able to use data to bind people not from identity but experience, and because it was highly emotional, it allowed trust to be built between strangers, making them feel less alone in the process.

I wonder what this could look like on an algorithm. As we hold algorithms accountable on web2, like humans, I hope to see some growth on web3.  What if we could use emotion to build connection: using both experiences we’ve had and haven’t, like the way I’ve explored films as a vehicle to drive empathy to those unlike us -could we build unity that way? 

Experience-based social media architecture could be a 1:1 model where we are given stories or narratives that match ours and then ones that don’t. I think by doing this we move past the divisiveness of identity politics while bringing us together. When it concerns proof of personhood, I believe we are not our socially-created identities. While it must be said that race, gender, class, and sexuality, among others, have very real effects in this current iteration of humanity, we don’t need to carry them into the next. I’m always surprised at the way we take these identities as fixed, when both in the past and across oceans, they are not. For me Proof of Personhood is about that emotional depth we carry. The way we have all experienced joy, pain, anger, grief, loss, and change. While often these experiences connect to and happen because of our social identities and realities, this is exactly why they can't be based on them. Because when we use that as a basis we also allow the divisions to decide who is deserving of humanity and who isn’t. This is the way I think we can bring each other first back to ourselves, and then back to each other.

Radha Agarwal, the founder of the popular dance movement, Daybreaker, gave an inspiring speech on one of the mornings. She didn’t dismiss the ways aspects of her social identity left her feeling disconnected as a child , but she spoke about her search for belonging, that she more fully details in her new book. After doing research across the world and across cultures from cities to remote villages in Africa and South America, she found four elements or directions that are crucial to belonging: connection to the ground/earth, connecting to a higher power, connection to our ancestors, and connection to purpose. As we build a new social media that allows our whole selves to be reflected online, including our blind spots, projections, and experiences of all kinds, I hope this can give us purpose. The act of service being that we get to share parts of ourselves with others across the world, helping them feel less alone in the process. There are other festivals like Burning Man, Summit Series, and Form, that are able to build these elements of connections, albeit temporarily. While they are often inaccessible I am looking towards them to figure out how we can take features of experience design and social architecture into web3.

So that’s where I’m at: We need to hold web2 accountable and join the movement of young people driving it, and be users, builders, dreamers, and architects of a new internet that allows for connection, not in the temporal social realities of the present, but through the baseline connection that all humans have. It’s about temporarily dissolving these created identities through technology, allowing us to feel less alone, more connected to those we can’t see ourselves in, and to feel we are building something greater than ourselves and driving humanity forward. It’s a tall order but reimagining futures always is, and it's the only one I feel good about.