Online Radicalization and the Explanation of Violence

By Crispin Sartwell

     When Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris shot up Columbine High School, many commentators fixed blame on the video game Quake and the music of Marilyn Manson. These days, we explain acts of terror by talking about 'online radicalization.'

   The online power of ISIS is often treated as a kind of supernatural force: tweets and Facebook posts that apparently amount to mind-control at a distance. Attempts to drench the net in counter-propaganda, on the other hand, have been ineffectual; whatever brainwashing the Islamic State can accomplish on Instagram seems completely out of the reach of the State Department or the CIA.

     When we grapple with difficult or overwhelming events such as the killings in Paris and San Bernadino, we reach for almost any explanation. And in some ways the most satisfying explanations assign blame to some agent or force, so that if we could control that agent or force, we could control the events.

If first-person shooter games cause school shootings, then controlling video games would allow us to control the killing; the chaos and bewilderment induced by the event are quickly resolved, and there is something to be done. That's how we ended up addressing terrifying violence with warning labels on compact discs.

   If the terror in our streets is caused by online radicalization, then we can control the terrorism by controlling social media.

     'Social media' is alternately thought of as a free creative zone, as in its role in the Arab Spring, and as an unknowably vast mysterious realm in which terrifying forces might, for all we know, be breeding. It's like a different dimension, from which monsters might suddenly appear.

     Perhaps everyone is a little uncomfortable as this realm grows so vast and intersects with events in the physical world in more and more unpredictable ways. And perhaps people who did not grow up with social media, people of the generation that now runs the government, find this realm particularly mysterious and threatening. Anyone anywhere could be saying anything about anyone. Anyone could be communicating with anybody, planning God knows what.

     It's as though there is some set of magical formulae, incantations that allow you to control people's minds with words and images. ISIS deploys them somehow, but they are inaccessible to us. However, we think of the internet in many incompatible ways, and just as notorious as online radicalization is internet 'siloing'; we only listen to people who already agree with us. Sometimes it seems that no one has ever persuaded anyone of anything on the internet, except that ISIS can transform minds with a few swift keystrokes.

   The people who blamed Quake and Marilyn Manson for Columbine were people who didn't understand video games and pop music, as people who blame hip hop for urban violence are people to whom hip hop is incomprehensible. The unknown can take on the quality of a preternatural threat, and the internet is not only unknown, it is unknowable in its vastness and its encryption.

   Right now, I would suppose that social media is undergoing massive intelligence analysis, with the long-term goal of subduing the whole thing to the needs of governments. That, not boots on the ground, is our strategy against ISIS. The point, now, is for governments to know and control social media, a vast and perhaps ultimately futile task. But already, people are being detained all over the world, including in the United States, for Facebook posts. And if the kind of free flow of communication that we have come to depend on continues, I would be very surprised.

   So we are thinking about this supernaturally, and I would like to bring it down to earth a bit. Perhaps you have a Twitter account. Now, ask yourself, can you imagine a series of tweets that would get you to shoot up your office party or a nightclub? Perhaps the powerlessness of the CIA to change hearts and minds by tweeting should suggest to them that no tweet is capable of transforming people into or away from being killing machines.

     Rather than trying to seize control of all communication, perhaps we should ask ourselves about the conditions underlying the violence, conditions that make violent jihad attractive, that bring the almost-converted to the ISIS Twitter accounts in the first place. Or, for that matter, that get white suprematists, anti-abortion fanatics, or mentally ill people to start shooting, whether or not they are on social media with like-minded folk.

     Whatever the ideological or pathological occasion, the shootings themselves take on a repetitive or almost ritualistic flavor. The driving force might not be particular ideologies or pathologies - expressed on or off the net - but a hatred of the human that runs deeper. I don't think that there is any tweet that can make a terrorist, and I don't think that deleting all tweets would cure us of anything.

   Perhaps warning labels on Instagram can save us.

Crispin Sartwell teaches philosophy at Dickinson College in Carlisle, PA. His most recent book is How to Escape, a collection of essays.