The recent articulate thread in defense of free speech on Substack by VP of Communications Lulu Cheng Meservey, deservedly praised by some of this site’s upper echelon commentators, has given me hope that there will remain some little corner of the literary world in which I can continue toiling away, with near-total obscurity being my greatest challenge rather the coerced need to satisfy the shifting moral codes of the surveillance state. Though I have tried to the best of my abilities to steer my writing away from topics that are in the current news cycle, I do feel I have at least some duty to join the existing chorus of voices arrayed against censorship and other media activities (e.g. “cancellation”) that achieve the same goal of limiting the number of opinions only to those which help the ruling class to solidify its hold on power. Just about every modern censorship debate has to consider the right of marginal voices to continue speaking (including especially those that we don’t personally like), and, along these same lines, one of my particular concerns is with the large numbers of “marginal” or otherwise powerless individuals who support the elites’ efforts to streamline discourse in their favor. There is now a whole sector of the job market dedicated to employing those who aid the regime in this task, and it is worthwhile not only to discuss their role in this present quagmire, but to look back on recent historical developments and gauge just how bad things could become.
I am confident there is no real need to provide an additional introduction to the main parties to the current conflict, particularly as they will become interchangeable over time. Nor is a summary of their motivations difficult to find. However, it’s possible my own positions on this subject haven’t been clearly stated before, so here goes: whatever the content that is creating controversy at any given moment, forces of persuasion should be adequate to keep the population away from material that is legitimately dangerous for it to consume, and forces of coercion to this end should immediately be suspect. I have tried, but cannot think, of a single regime that broadly employed coercive censorship or other less direct chilling effects in order to conceal harsh truths about its malfeasance, and still managed to end up on what we term “the right side of history”. In situations where forcible limitation on expression is openly admitted to being used as a means of fighting mis- / disinformation, the censoring bodies should be able to reassure us, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that they are cracking down as a genuine act of altruism rather than, say, to simply prevent competition for the financial rewards of public airtime and public influence in general. Strangely, I have no examples of a current regime that has really been able to pass that sniff test, either, particularly as many of the loudest voices currently aboard the pro-censorship train are notorious liars, and many still have faced no limitation on their expression after their lies left decades’ worth of war, institutional torture, and other forms of superlative horror and misery in their wake. Such individuals should also never be trusted with tools used to defuse a “temporary emergency” situation, as we have seen the ease with which they will declare a more permanent and ambiguous crisis once a more limited objective is achieved.
Of course, the concept of the permanent crisis state has been the reality of the entire 21st century, while being a hallmark of every modern regime that felt its own citizenry were either an equal, or greater, threat than the external threats constantly being exaggerated or conjured from whole cloth. One of the most zealous and thorough of all such police states remains that of the former Deutsche Demokratische Republik / East Germany lorded over by the omniscient Ministerium für Staatssicherheit [more commonly known as ‘Stasi’] from 1950-1989. The longevity of the Stasi, the so-called “ shield and sword of the Party”, owed itself partially to its sheer strength in numbers: per research John C. Schmeidel, one in every 180 East German citizens was on the Stasi payroll as a non-uniformed surveillance agent – as an “IM” or Inoffizielle Mitarbeiter [‘informal colleague’] - compared with only 1 in every 596 or so citizens in the Soviet Russia that essentially provided the DDR with the “playbook” for this sort of thing. The high probability of any given friend or relation being an intelligence asset was one of the greatest “chillers” of free discourse imaginable, though more classical forms of censorship and cultural bans were still plentiful (the curious are advised to track down the Klaus Renft Combo’s surreptitious recording of an appearance before the DDR licensing committee, in which a ‘comrade Ruth Oelschlaegel’ tells the group in no uncertain terms “you no longer exist”).
Unsurprisingly, given its maintenance of a separate “cultural” surveillance division, the Stasi found a significant number of its recruits among the culturally savvy youth. Schmeidel notes, for example that “nine out of ten [IMs] were male and over twenty-five and under forty,”[i] which is not young by the standards of the modern U.S., but certainly skews young enough in a nation that had only recently been denuded of its youthful population via the most destructive war in human history. It is imperative that entrenched regimes choose a portion of the population energetic enough, and loud enough, to always find new registers of panic and fear with which to either convert or simply immobilize the skeptically minded. It is clear then that “the youth” would be the first choice for entrenched bureaucracy to shout down and keep tabs on its opponents, and that recruiters of such control systems are willing to gamble on youthful anxiety and uncertainty being a far more magnetizing force than the youthful urge to rebel. In her acclaimed book Stasiland, Anna Funder states that “in a society divided between ‘us’ and ‘them’, an ambitious young person might well want to be one of the group in the know, one of the unmolested […] why wouldn’t you opt for a peaceful life and a satisfying career?”[ii] Equally exploitable, and somehow compatible with this desire for acceptance, is the youthful desire to carve out a distinct identity. A former Stasi recruiter interviewed by Funder confesses that “informers got the feeling that, doing it, they were somebody […] somebody was listening to them for a couple hours a week, taking notes…they felt they had it over other people.”[iii]
While I do not have any contacts (that I know of) within the bewildering tangle of functionally overlapping federal “security” agencies in the U.S., I am more familiar than I ever want to be with the “content moderator,” a vast number of whom are in their early-mid 20s and have their personal motivations described extremely well by the quoted material above. Originally a somewhat respectable profession adjacent to “serious” law enforcement, and tasked with socially useful missions like curbing the use of online services for human trafficking or limiting the flow of child pornography, the bulk of the duties carried out under this title are now more closely aligned with what most casual observers would recognize as censorship: the majority of “moderated” content is that which has broken no existing laws relating to expression, yet is, shall we say, highly recommended for removal by State actors, thus calling into question the existence of the moderation-happy Big Tech firms (Facebook, YouTube, Twitter etc.) as a “private” enterprise. The day-to-day role of the content moderator is a mainly reactive one, reviewing digital content and postings on the major Big Tech platforms that have already been flagged as potentially offensive by the user base, and then choosing one of a limited number of options from there: ignore, delete, or escalate (to law enforcement agencies etc.) Repeat offenders, and also offenders who have not violated any rules of the platform itself, but have been deemed unsafe owing to real-world activities, are ultimately “de-platformed”, often to the visible, high-fiving delight of the moderator teams.
Many will burn out spectacularly at this role, but many will also learn the attitudes necessary to be carried over into jobs where the hands can get dirtier, and where much more “active” forms of surveillance or interrogation are put into play. It is for this reason – i.e. that the content moderator is perhaps the “larval” phase of some entity with much greater license to limit behaviors outside the realm of personal expression - that I maintain an interest in how their own psychological makeup coincides with or differs from that of past agents in the employ of repressive regimes. Certainly, the average Stasi man was closer to the beginning of a career than the end of it, and was also guided by the contradictory desires to both “belong” to a seemingly invincible establishment and to “be somebody special,” but plenty of differences can be brought into play, one of which is the actual aptitude that is brought to the job. Stasi recruiters or “case officers” would often spent years vetting the ideal IM, likely observing her or him at the various official youth athletic or intellectual clubs meant to instill unshakable devotion to the DDR, and at any rate would focus upon recruits who exhibited an intelligence that was highly adaptive (at least within the limits of prescribed DDR ideology).
By contrast, the types of individuals I have seen on the content moderator frontlines have shown much more in the way of millennial solipsism than some sort of deeply inculcated civic duty. Indeed, it almost seemed as if “offending content,” the very thing they were meant to be passionate about removing from public view, irritated them more for personal reasons (i.e., having to see it in one’s social media news feed meant too much additional scrolling time in order to get to the more amusing memes or trivial observations of the day). Many, I am sure, never even considered that what they were doing was beneficial to a fascistic alliance of monopolistic tech platforms and federal government, and were much more excited about being able to filter out noise so they could better talk about and bring attention to a more important topic: themselves.
These recruits’ presence in the moderation ranks was of course offset by a healthy number of True Believers, i.e. those motivated to do this job in order to project the false image that their ideological standpoint was either majority opinion or the only opinion held by the public. Though usually more dedicated, this group was also more likely to crack under pressure: their daily review sessions required viewing of not just content likely to disprove their status as an ideological super-majority, but also non-ideological content of a severely violent and cruel disposition (anything from taped drug cartel executions to child abuse to live streamings of suicide attempts). My brief but memorable time observing these individuals at work was marked by numerous “freakout”-level incidents: from throwing intense temper tantrums when the delivery man for the free cooler full of Kombucha drinks failed to arrive on time, to literally smearing their excrement around public restrooms, to having sudden tearful breakdowns (it was not for nothing that 24-hour, on-site psychiatric counseling was available to those employed in this role).
Let’s circle back to the issue of aptitude, as a major difference between the Stasi IM of yesterday and the modern-day Big Tech moderator is in overall intellectual capacity. The Stasi required particularly nuanced thinkers to properly infiltrate the cultural scenes that were expected to be hotbeds of non-conformist foment, and thus it was not unheard of for a noted author like Christa Wolf or an eclectic ‘punk poet’ like Sascha Anderson to work as IMs and to double-cross their own scene constituents. By comparison, the contemporary Big Tech moderator usually strikes me as being half-educated, and maintains a cultural diet that often supports a breathtakingly infantile outlook on life: a sobering thing to consider since these people’s decisions can permanently alter or destroy livelihoods (if not “lives” outright). The omnipresence of comic book superhero, fantasy world and Star Wars-themed memorabilia at moderators’ desks hints at a belief in a dualistic world of absolute good and evil; a simplistic us-vs.-them instinct that has always been easy for those with far greater knowledge of geopolitical strategy to exploit and abuse (with this evidence at hand, I no longer think that the motivational workplace posters of rainbow unicorns and other cuddly animals were meant to be viewed ironically, but as earnest providers of blanketing morale).
A bit more on that cultural diet: much as the favored East German IMs were initially groomed from the ranks of the well-propagandized, the youthful charges of the present censorship regime have visibly been sustained by products crafted with the assistance of the military-industrial complex (see David Swanson’s eyebrow-raising claim, in the linked column, that the original Iron Man script was rewritten by the U.S. military to show the titular hero as a heroic weapons dealer rather than as a heroic adversary of same). Indeed, the go-to resources and lists of dangerous entities and organizations are provided directly to content moderators by alphabet-soup federal agencies and by “reliable” news sources i.e. those whose coverage is crafted by the aforementioned merger of corporations (defense contractors, pharma giants etc.) and more federal agencies. These organizations, which have always benefited enormously from lack of critical thinking amongst the public, are truly blessed to have at their disposal an uncritical workforce eager to live out the comic book fantasy they themselves have influenced.
The incomplete profile roughly sketched out above is, on one hand, a herald of a possible brighter future, as it is difficult to imagine any sort of repressive “national security” edifice lasting long when it is comprised of people who bounce frantically from one socio-cultural phenomenon to another, and who lack the stomach or nerve for long-term engagements. On the other hand, the heady cocktail of self-assured moral purity, digital-age impatience and infantilism is not without its poisonous effects in the short term. Insecurity and a poor grasp on reality often contribute to disproportionately severe responses to targeted troublemakers, for one. Censors, community standards editors and “fact checkers” with such qualities have initiated more than enough “collateral damage” incidents, in which completely unrelated entities are swept up in the efforts to silence a single node on the network of unapproved thought. Take for example the Portland-based independent music distributor Soleilmoon, who, on the urging of the Southern Poverty Law Center, came under the microscope a few years ago for distributing records by the long-standing “neofolk” act Death In June: whether the Nazi-era imagery of DIJ was an earnest endorsement, or part of an esoteric program of allegory, has been a point of heated debate among underground music fans for decades now, with the fire generating that heat spreading much further outward in the wake of rightist-populist reassertions in 2016. The accusations leveled at Soleilmoon for promoting “hate music” also rippled outwards to a selection of Soleilmoon-distributed artists involved, at an activist level, with polar opposite views, e.g. the overtly leftist Nocturnal Emissions, and unfairly called upon them to answer for the beliefs of artists they had little or nothing to do with.
This is maybe a minor episode (if one closer to my own circles of influence) than others that could be discussed, but I do think it sufficiently illustrates an important point: with “collateral damage” and disproportionate response becoming an acceptable part of the process of purifying the expressive landscape, the moderators are more visibly becoming an authoritarian force merely focused on “winning” at any cost than on the adherence to any established ethical code. If the recipe for winning is to simply throw more and more resources at a problem, when the precise nature of that problem continues to shift, we end up with a situation very much like what Schmeidel describes:
The logical conclusion of a surveillance society is to implode, to vacuum itself into a huge organism watching itself. […] As the target palette broadened to include 100 percent of the population and every aspect of its life, the chronic failures and malfunctions uncovered would be those of the Party itself.[iv]
I believe that, if the recruitment of censors by Big Tech has not already reached such a saturation level, then that time is rapidly approaching. In little under a year, I watched an initial “wave” of some 40-odd individuals expand into at least ten times that number, necessitating round-the-clock shift work taking place on several floors of a newly minted Austin high rise building. I have no reason to believe that the furious pace of recruitment has slackened since this time, particularly given the number of people who have been caught casually running their mouths to Uber drivers or curious bar patrons about their contractually binding “secret” assignments. The near-constant absorption of new training groups and loss of disillusioned veteran employees is necessitated by the sheer mountain of data meant to be scaled by each individual over the course of a shift, numbering in the thousands of “tickets” or digital comments / images / videos determined to be harmful. It brings to mind the situation at the old Stasi headquarters in East Berlin’s Normannenstrasse, whose floors had to be structurally reinforced to hold all of the surveillance files collected. “What could not be reinforced, “ according to author David Large, was “the human capacity for making sense of this voluminous data […] by recording the tiniest details in the daily lives of millions of people, the Stasi soon began to drown in its own ‘intelligence’”.[v]
The time will come, I believe, when so many are employed in the field of digital thought policing, that the monitors will increasingly become the monitored, and will possibly sour on their mission: if not because of some sudden triggering of conscience, then certainly because of a re-kindled sense of their own self-preservation. Stasi lore is filled with instances in which IMs themselves fell under suspicion for being too good at their jobs and too poor at them alike, as well as recollections of surveillance assignments in which the target was assumed to be a “provocateur” meant to test the IM’s ideological consistency rather than being an actual suspect of anti-DDR subversion. Truly, paranoia is a fantastic self-replicator, and all of the above incidents were possible without communication now occurring with a speed and frequency that has never been achieved in human history.
It probably does not help that, again, the moral absolutism of many content-policing recruits is already a very paranoia-prone worldview, one driven by irrational fear of a “pure” evil and by a winner-takes-all struggle against it that will result either in an immutable paradise or an oppressive hell on earth. This sort of inflexibility regularly needs to put into the service of very flexible “community standards” whose content is sometimes revised multiple times in a month, in ways that often directly contradict prior updates to this canon of unacceptable thought. All of this brings to mind a poignant episode from the waning days of the DDR:
On January 17, 1988, as [Erich] Honecker and company were reviewing the annual parade in commemoration of the martyrdom of Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg, a group of protesters broke into the ranks of the Free German Youth marchers and unfurled banners bearing Luxemburg’s dictum: “True Freedom is Always the Freedom of the Non-Conformists!” Viewers of the parade were treated to the sight of Stasi agents beating and arresting citizens for brandishing a slogan penned by one of the martyrs being honored.[vi]
There is much relevance still in the words which led to those beatings and arrests, and, given the untenable situation described in this column, good reason to hope that the present round of fettered discourse is not eternal.
[i] Schmeidel, J.C. (2008). Stasi: Shield and Sword of the Party. Routledge: London / New York.
[ii] Funder, A. (2002). Stasiland: Stories from Behind the Berlin Wall. Harper Perennial: New York / London.
[iii] Ibid.
[iv] Schmeidel (2008).
[v] Large, D.C. (2000). Berlin. Basic Books: New York.
[vi] Ibid.