We traded privacy for belonging

Social media as disruptive tech

Tech CEOs talk about disrupting markets, but the concept of disruption has been detached from its social meaning: disruptive technologies change us, and our culture.

Josh Lauer first catalogs how the answering machine transformed our expectations for responsiveness, then steps forward to how the internet intensified the expectations for participation:

“The imperative to participate—as media users, content creators and curators, and members of virtual communities—has become a defining aspect of digital life… What sets participation in the contemporary digital era apart from preceding manifestations, however, is its omnipresent and compulsory qualities.”

We feel obligated to weigh in on “Social Media Events”. The “online disinhibition effect” means we reveal more about ourselves to people online than we would in person. Our increased participation has had follow-on effects: by training us to share everything, social media has evaporated our expectations for privacy and built a culture of sousveillance and surveillance.

“[W]e live in a culture (an economy, a technology infrastructure) that demands we speak on everything, that demands we post, we update, we share. “Say anything,” post something, or you are nothing.” — Audrey Watters

Pulling our private mindspaces into the public domain makes others feel entitled to know — and to judge — our every personal belief, thought, and act. Now that it’s socially acceptable to comment on anyone and anything, we can no longer have any expectation of privacy in public spaces since the smartphone panopticon could turn our private moments into someone else’s online content. We’ve even turned our personal spaces public by broadcasting our homes online.

But we’ve gone along with this cultural transformation because we’ve gotten something valuable out of this deal too: belonging.

Aesthetics let us find our tribes in crowded spaces

We send signals to establish belonging within our chosen groups. Everyone sends aesthetic signals, both to the general public (what car we drive, which brands we wear) and in specific scenarios with people in groups we care about (how we dress for a work conference, what we bring to a potluck). Signals stack; we can send more, or more intense signals to emphasize our group belonging and maintain or gain status*. Some signals are high level, establishing our place within the hierarchy of class or demonstrating our adherence to (or rejection of) gender norms, while others are specific to our subcultural groups, as wide as our political affiliation and as niche as our hobby club. We may interpret signals positively or negatively if they express a shared or conflicting value system, but many signals are neutral outside of a subcultural group.

Before the internet, we mostly signaled to people in our local community, people we worked with, and people we shared affinity groups and institutional affiliation with (church, school, hobbies). Social media arrived as our Third Places and communal activities were collapsing, when we needed new places and new ways to gather. Now, being close geographically isn’t a prerequisite for connection, so we coalesce into groups online, where the digital orality of the internet retribalizes us.

Many groups share the same social media platforms, but most platforms offer only a single feed per user, combining all their connections, rather than clearly delineated forums for each group to speak only to each other.* In these shared spaces, aesthetic signals help us identify others like ourselves, and help us demonstrate that we fit in with our chosen groups. To maintain or build status in our communities, we adopt our online tribe’s conventions: indicating pronouns in your profile signals you’re in the Left tribe; fascists use dog whistle phrases to subtly (or not) signal to other white supremacists. Aesthetics provide a uniform, signaling our belonging in a noisy space.

Social media makes the private domain public by turning our lives into aesthetic signals

Collectively, our society has shifted towards signs and abstractions for decades; now, social media allows us all to abstract ourselves. Corporate social platforms reduce us to a profile and our activity feed; other people construct and classify us based on a composite of our posts, interactions, and overall activity.

The internet amplifies and decontextualizes aesthetic signals. Offline, aesthetics emphasize tangible signals like clothing and possessions; online, the way we write, the articles (and memes) we share, and who we follow builds atop photos or videos of tangible signals from offline life. Social media broadens the range of potential signals to encompass our entire lives: what we post about, where we spend time, what we do online and off (pics or it didn’t happen). Corporate platforms encourage us to aestheticize formerly private endeavors, like reading, so they can become signals too. Our overall online activity — which platforms we use, which sources we read — becomes another abstracted signal; sharing a Fox News video sends the opposite signal as linking a Jacobin article. Speech itself has become a powerful aesthetic signal.

Every aspect of our lives has been aestheticized so it represents something instead of being taken at face value.

Social media’s conceptual expansion of aesthetics rewards ever more signaling with quantifiable affirmations of belonging. Media ecologist Andrey Mir writes (emphasis mine):

“Because of ‘the thirst for response’, which can be referred to as the Hegelian ‘struggle for recognition’, emancipated authors (all of us) get involved in self-actualization through others — through their likes, comments, shares and other forms of automated and accelerated social exchange.”

**Over the past twenty years, we’ve devalued privacy (in part) because it would limit our expanded opportunities to signal.**The self-creation offered by the internet means that not posting is akin to not existing online.

“Today, self-creation is no longer something some of us can do to set ourselves apart from the people we see as the masses, the crowd, or la foule. Instead, it has become something that all of us must do in order to maintain our financial and social position in a culture that sees reality as up for grabs, to garner the attention central to so much of our Internet-driven economic system. Our identities, who we “really” are, have become what we choose and commodify.”

— Tara Isabella Burton, Self Made

In place of privacy, our culture has embraced faux transparency, performative vulnerability, and self-creation through posting.

Binding aesthetics to ideology powers up signaling

Social media’s algorithmic homogenization distills out two distinct types of aesthetics: microaesthetics and ideological aesthetics. When algorithms do the pattern-matching for us, aesthetics don’t grow out of human shared meanings, but analysis of user engagement: what we think looks cool produces microaesthetics, and what elicits an emotional reaction produces ideological aesthetics.

Online microaesthetics are the fashion equivalent of memes, their ultimate function to Be Content. Microaesthetics are an RPG medium for meaningless self-expression; i****deological aesthetics, in contrast, mask a worldview. Microaesthetics are trends that get commodified immediately, never having the chance to develop real subcultures with values. Little more than consumerism, they turn over quickly, while ideological aesthetics have more staying power because they anchor to identity: they say something about who we are, to others and ourselves.

Ideological aesthetics start from seeds of reality, but because algorithms requirepatterns to function, they may manifest patterns out of noise, grouping people who might not have otherwise connected or elevating a handful of “loud” individuals. The Luddite explains:

“Around gender alone, there’s a proliferation of identity-based categories, like the manosphere, but also tradwives, incels, femcels, gooners, misogynist gamers, and so on. It’s not that The Algorithm invented these kinds of people, but they have now entered culture as identifiable categories, brought together and amplified by the pattern-finding abilities of the computer.”

Because aesthetic signals so powerfully direct attention, corporate algorithms reward us for posting content that fits into these coherent aesthetic groups. This drives convergence on shared visual symbols… and beliefs. By their nature, nuanced positions are harder to categorize, so more emphatic and distinct stances win algorithmically. Ideological aesthetics arise when high status individuals within an aesthetic group — often social media influencers, who may have been the locus of the original trend — promote values and specific beliefs. The Right has been exceptionally effective at funding a network of new media influencers promoting conservative priorities, and a variety of conservative-coded internet-driven aesthetics have developed in recent years, like tradwives and MAHA. In a culture where speech is an aesthetic signal, then ideologies can become signs too.

The panopticon enforces aesthetic — and ideological — expectations

Affiliation with the Other undermines in-group status

In Against Purity, Alexis Shotwell explains**(emphasis mine):

“Fear of contamination rests on the belief that something can impart its essence to us on contact.”

Jaya Saxena identifies ‘courtesy stigma’, described by Julia Serano in Sexed Up: “if you interact with someone or something associated with a marginalized group, “then others may view you as having been ‘tainted’ or ‘corrupted’ by those associations.”” The far-right uses terms of contagion to speak of ideas they dislike — “the woke mind virus” — because they believe exposure practically guarantees transformation.

We fear associating with the “wrong” people, which could harm our status in our chosen group. Aesthetic categorization lets us protect ourselves from ideological “contamination.” Assigning people to categories makes reality feel tidier and simpler; when we know exactly where to put a person, we feel we can predict their behavior.

**The internet trains us to aestheticize everything, then we politicize it.**We define what is “normal” and what is “political” based on who is in-group and who is out-group. Anything that is Other becomes political. Eric Levitz writes (emphasis mine):

“People generally apprehend the factional valence of an argument — which groups endorse it and which do not — before they ever give it independent consideration. And since every internet user is confronted with more information than they can critically process, they have a strong incentive to interpret an idea’s social desirability (which can be quickly ascertained) as indicative of its empirical validity (which takes time to assess).“

From the outside, our tribes construct an aesthetic profile of our Other, allowing us to recognize them (though our profile may not reflect the other group’s understanding of themselves, or even whether they consider themselves part of a group (e.g. the Right tends to group together leftists and liberals) — when we’ve invested our identities deeply in an ideological group, we assume that others have too). Guilt by association means we must broadcast which group we belong to, and excise any signal that could imply our association with the Other. As Naomi Klein writes in Doppelganger, “Once an issue is touched by ‘them,’ it seems to become oddly untouchable by almost everyone else.” We also demand ultra-clear signals of affiliation so we can feel safe we’re not being exposed.

Expressing our identity through aesthetics drives radicalization and polarization

Algorithmic reinforcement encourages us to focus on the similarities we have with people in our own tribe, and the differences between ourselves and people in other tribes. “On social media,” writes Mir, “the same features that provide an amazing service of self-actualization — rapid responsiveness, engagement, virality — simultaneously propel the extremization of expression.” As people seek more distinctive ways of demonstrating belonging and status, groups develop new signals, imposing aesthetic standards on once-neutral choices. Mir explains, “The ‘struggle for recognition’ amid increasing noise incentivizes extremes and radical views because they have a higher potential for response and, therefore, virality.”

We may first be drawn to groups by their aesthetics, then adopt their embedded values. (This way lies radicalization.) The tradwife aesthetic presents an appealing “soft-focus fantasy of safety, structure, and well-behaved children with braided hair and matching outfits,” observes Jo Piazza, but “once you see [it] as a form of branding with coded language, racial implications, and political alignment, it starts to look a lot less like a charming cottagecore dream and a lot more like soft propaganda in a dress.” Wellness content might seem like it’s just about feeling (and looking) good, but it’s an alt-right pathway for women into vaccine denialism and eugenics as the aesthetic’s encoded individualistic, ableist values reinforce hierarchical thinking that some people are better than others.

**Purity culture demands stricter aesthetic conformity to enforce the distinction between the in-group and the out-group.**Contradictory signals, even unintentional, can lower our status within our chosen group. This encourages us to go all-in on membership in one group, because we must pay closer and closer attention to signaling expectations.

The inability to express different facets of ourselves for different people on social media reinforces a single self-identity; as we identify more closely with an ideological group, that can eat away at looser, contextual identities that allowed us to coexist with people from different groups in local, offline spaces. We turn this expectation of committed tribal affinity outwards, too, assuming everyone falls neatly into a category — as Maalvika writes:

“We become excellent at sorting information into familiar categories but lose the capacity to sit with complexity, to create new frameworks, to tolerate the discomfort of things that don’t fit existing patterns.”

**Aesthetic purity constrains us to “normality” for our in-group, online and off, because smartphones and no concept of minding one’s own business mean we could always be recorded and our offline actions brought online.**The word ‘vegan’ became too weighted with ideological connotations, so corporations and food writers started using ‘plant-based’ instead — as Alicia Kennedy puts it: “A beef hot dog is apolitical; a veggie dog is not food but a political agenda.” Even if we might prefer the veggie dog, we might not want to signal whatever eating it would say about us.

With the integration of social media into our real lives, ideological aesthetics overtake the importance of traditional aesthetics, even subsume them, leaking back out into the real world and creating new physical aesthetics like “MAGA face” makeup and plastic surgery. The need to signal online changes how we act in real life, spawning the “debate me bro” culture of performative trolling designed to produce ideologically aesthetic content that the tribe can share to signal their buy-in — and individuals who make the content get the highest status boost.

Dan Williams argues that the evidence is against the algorithm driving American polarization and epistemic breakdown, because people largely self-select their information: “As social scientist Sacha Altay observes, people do not passively fall into rabbit holes; they “jump in and dig.”” I suspect it doesn’t matter so much whether people chase the rabbit or it’s handed to them; that social media polarizes us indirectly through the algorithm’s promotion of ideological aesthetics, driving intensity of association. We may remain in the same political party, but care about our political views more than we did in the past, or adopt more beliefs of the party line because we’re incentivized by our desire to belong. It is the social signaling opportunities provided by first social media and now group chats, not the algorithm itself, that intensify and rigidify beliefs.

We perform for the panopticon, but we also are the panopticon

In Superbloom, Nicholas Carr describes how the first media ecologist, Charles Horton Cooley, perceived communication media: “an instrument for regulating group behavior and belief. By means of its media a society promotes values and sets norms, allocates praise and censure, promulgates models of conduct and character, motivates and coordinates action, and establishes hierarchies and other structures of power and status.” Or in Cooley’s words:

“Association may not change nature, but it usually controls conduct.”

The digital orality of social media combines the rapidity of in-person exchanges with the reach of the printed word — as Mir describes it, “Digital speech is impulsive but not evanescent — it stays and involves others.” Social media allows us to broadcast beliefs that previously might have been private — but if our profiles aren’t locked down, people outside our tribe can see signals intended for our tribe. Social media’s real name policies, combined with lack of data protections and surveillance culture, mean that our online identities can easily become imposed onto our “real” lives, where institutions are primed to obey the status quo of political power. Our online spaces are becoming more and more important parts of our lives, yet the potential risks of ostracization, doxxing, and job loss in retaliation for minor transgressions loom large and make our online spaces feel dangerous emotionally. Social media thus provokes constant vigilance and teaches us to distrust others.

Cultures always share communal definitions of “rightness,” but purity culture enforces strict compliance to that code. Social media places all our actions under the collective panopticon, and we demand perfection from ourselves and others in our tribe. Communities reward enforcement of group norms but don’t punish rallying a mob in error, so there is little incentive to wait for explanation if someone seems to transgress, and little opportunity to debate the justice of the punishment. Our online tribe rallies behind us when we call out bad behavior — whether warranted or not — which reinforces policing of purity. The more harshly we collectively punish divergence, the more we individually follow expectations. Purity culture compresses behavior into an ouroboros of conformity, with an unbroken path between inbound and outbound signals.

Just as social media homogenized cultural outputs (think AirSpace), it has also homogenized our identity spaces. Social media instills a way of thinking and being that carries across our spaces. Demands for constant signaling turn leisure into labor, life into work. It infiltrates our sense of self and influences the ways we relate to others. Being perceived at all can feel dangerous, but we must be perceived to be accepted into our tribe. Posting has been made practically existential, but what we post is policed vigorously by our own tribe… and the authoritarian tribe in political power. Our internet identities became our real selves, so controlling what and how we post controls us. Ultimately, what social media disrupts is our very selves.