You’re not going to like this essay. It’s going to make you feel guilty, angry, and afraid. Sorry (really), but we need to talk, and we need to talk now. About what kind of world, countries, and societies we want. What kind of people we want to be. You can be the judge of if anything I have to say hits home.

When I reflect on the Christchurch massacre, it makes me need to write about a thought I’ve been having for a long time now.

American newspapers think it’s enough to “not name the shooter” (while everyone from the BBC to Australian news understands that’s the least of the issues) — and not ask any deeper question. I’m never not disappointed by us, really. I think the real question is, sadly, this. A very great deal of the Christchurch massacre was made in America. Why? How much? We’ll come to that.

America’s latest export is hate. We are producing and exporting hate on an industrial scale, and sending it around the world now, permeating more advanced and peaceful societies than ours with it. Where it sparks violence, division, and destabilization. Our most famous and storied companies, like Facebook and Google, are now the bellwethers of a kind of algorithmic export of the worst parts of our own socioculture — hate, violence, supremacism, fascism. They are doing so, in turn, because they can: that is what our economy and culture and society all intersect to reward in outsized ways, through money, power, fame. Let me explain.

(And frankly, I should have written this essay long ago — but I didn’t. So when I ask: how much responsibility do we as Americans bear for the spread of global right wing extremism? — I’ll be the first to hold my hands up.)

Think about the Christchurch massacre for a moment. It wasn’t just the work of a crazed, lone gunman, as we so often minimize such things in America. It was the result of a man who was radicalized to the point of committing unthinkable violence, mass murder, violence on a scale that would have made the Nazis proud. But who and what was behind that radicalization? The grim truth is that it was made in America, my friends. Much of it. Enough of it.

The first and most obvious factor in the gunman’s radicalization was technology. All the platforms that venture capitalists and technologists once crowed about. YouTube, Facebook, maybe Reddit, and so on. The Christchurch shooter — terrorist? Nazi? Fascist? — shouted the name of a certain YouTube celebrity who’s become notorious for making anti-Semitic, fascist “jokes”. Are they jokes? Or are they hate speech? Why are YouTube celebrities making millions, allowed to broadcast to hundreds of millions — despite all that? Aren’t they just being rewarded for…hate?

Hey, boys will be boys. We dismiss it. We let it be dismissed. Some boys, apparently, will be murderous fascists. There the VC’s and technology CEOs are — not saying a word, embarrassed, afraid to admit it. They have never said a thing on this subject. Do they care? Why should they? And yet YouTube — Google — doesn’t just “allow” hate: it actively recommends it.

All these platforms are American. They are American institutions. They were invented by America, not just by lone genius American inventors, but by American systems. They are “owned” by Americans. And therefore their shocking irresponsibility and negligence is ours, too, my friends. Ours as a society. American ingenuity was once a thing that lit the world up, with films and lightbulbs and records. Today it is a thing that sets societies on fire with hate, that sparks extreme, sudden violence, in the name of…

Here’s a thought. The shooting in Christchurch was literally dedicated to a YouTube celebrity infamous for fascist sympathies. Think about that. A mass murder was literally dedicated to…a YouTube star. But YouTube is Google. Google is one of America’s most powerful, famous, and rich companies. The massacre in Christchurch was literally helped along by Google — and in a way, if we are smart enough to read the subtext, thanked by it by the shooter. What the? Isn’t there something just jaw-droppingly grotesque about that?

Here is the kind of country we are now. Our largest and richest companies literally are now the world’s foremost platforms for fascism, violence, and hate. Which literally incite and inspire mass murderers, who turn right around and thank them. Platforms like Facebook and YouTube, which is Google, which is one of America’s richest and most celebrated companies, are literally exporting hate every second of every day now — and so hate is now America’s biggest growth industry and export. YouTube celebs like the one the shooter thanked would probably be working in some video game store, if it weren’t for Youtube, which is Google…not driving a Ferrari…and inspiring mass murders. YouTube, in turn, pays them millions, so it can keep “growing.” Is that who we want to be?

We are allowing our most famous and powerful companies to export hate on an industrial scale to the world, and they do it more every day. They are arms dealers for the new wave of technofascism. They allow the spread of propaganda, easily, quickly, costlessly — but far worse than that, they allow it to be veiled in laughter, which can be said to be irony. They let neofascists joke and smile and laugh over the most depraved and vicious things. They literally pay their self-made celebrities millions of dollars to tell such jokes. That, too, is very American — the mega-celebrity, paid millions, no matter how dumb, toxic, awful, vindictive, or destructive they are.

You might at this point reasonably ask: “But why do they it, these platforms?” That brings me to my second factor, American-style capitalism. Extreme, predatory — don’t give a shit capitalism.

YouTube has long been known to be perfectly happy with all kinds of grotesque and horrific things on its platform. Just last month it was videos encouraging children to commit suicide. I don’t know if you heard about it in the States, but in Europe we certainly did. YouTube permits all kinds of genuine horrors, the latest of which, of course, is mass murders, again, literally carried out in the name its self-made celebrities. Why?

Because capitalism doesn’t care, my friends. Capitalism knows that the most profitable things of all are violence, sex, and drugs. Fascism is all three. A drug in the form of violence which gives a kind of libidinal, orgasmic thrill, based explicitly on theories of hypersexualized dominance and genetics and so on. I digress slightly. The simpler point is this: capitalism will never care enough to clean up its messes. Just as factories once employed little kids as slaves, just as meat packers once adulterated their products with all kinds of meat, so too today the monopoly platforms have zero incentive whatsoever to clean up their acts. Their incentives are precisely the opposite: the more grotesque and horrific stuff there is, the more people have to gawk and gawp at.

YouTube makes money by selling ads. It doesn’t care whatsoever what it has to do to sell them. Sensationalist content brings easy, rapid-fire clicks. Horrific content is the best kind of sensationalism. YouTube has no reason whatsoever to police its content. But YouTube is Google, my friends. Google is the world’s wealthiest company, or at least one of them. It is worth hundreds of billions of dollars, close to a trillion. It can’t afford to hire an army of digital policemen and women? It can’t afford to refuse a few dollars in profit? Heaven forbid — we need to have all the money — all of it!!

Of course Google won’t down profit, even if the cost is…helping along genuine real world massacres. It’s capitalist. It’s only legal and formal dictate is to maximize profits, relentlessly, at any cost. Just as the fossil fuel industry has maximized profits at the cost of the planet, so now Big Tech is maximizing profits at the expense of…what, precisely? Other countries’ stability. Safety. Peace. Democracy. Not just our own in America — that already went out the door long ago. Everyone else’s, now, too. The extreme hypercapitalist system which has produced the bizarre situation of one of the world’s wealthiest companies pimping the kind of sensationalist violence that mass murderers celebrate, all for a few more ad dollars — that’s all 100 percent made in America.

Let me pause to sum up a little. America is now spreading its own catastrophic extremist collapse around the globe. Capitalism is imploding into fascism elsewhere, too, now. And it is having catastrophic effects in saner and more peaceful countries than ours, like New Zealand, or Canada, or France, all places where fanatical white supremacist terrorists have been inspired by hate spread on American platforms. But that hate is only spread because capitalism makes a dollar every time it is, because American capitalism needs more profit, and will sell out everything from the planet to democracy to life itself for it.

So what responsibility do we have as Americans? Maybe we’re incompetent at managing our own country. Do we really want to be the kind of people whose ideology, whose way, capitalism, spreads hatred and violence all over the world — the kind that sparks genuine atrocity — just so that our megacorporations can make a few more bucks? Is that all we are? How long will they care for us — if they still do?

But money isn’t the only reason technoplatforms like YouTube — which is Google, remember, one of the world’s richest companies — don’t just allow “white supremacism” or “white nationalism”, aka fascism, but actively recommend it. Why would they recommend it? Have you ever wondered?

That brings me to my third factor, which is (our) culture. These algorithms are built by engineers. Engineers are people. The things people build reflect their own learned preferences and biases. If Google is building algorithms that literally recommend fascism, there can only really be one reason. Because there are fascists, aka white nationalists and white supremacists, building those algorithms — even if they don’t know they are, or think they are (and second, their bosses don’t care — what does that make them?)

I’m sure you’ve thought the same thing. Maybe you think to yourself, afterwards — no, that can’t be! But it must be. There is simply no other way. Imagine that Google engineers were all minority women, and transgender people from, say Bangladesh. Would they be building algorithms that recommend…American-style white supremacy? Of course not. They might be biased towards Bollywood movies. The only people that would build such algorithms are people who have such sympathies. (Their bosses look the other way, of course, for a few reasons. It’s troublesome to care. The algorithms make money by selling violence. And maybe they have such sympathies themselves.)

None of that should surprise us, though, because white nationalism is perfectly acceptable and legitimate in America. We might pretend it isn’t — but we’re fooling ourselves. The New York Times spent all of 2016 and 2017 writing sympathetic profiles of neighborhood Nazis — not the people at threat from fascism. Faux News hosts spew its logic every single night. It dominates cultural life to the point that the vast majority of cultural figures are all white, and mostly blue eyed. It dominates economics to the point that black wealth isn’t just a fraction of white wealth — it’s less than now than at the dawn of civil rights. White supremacism might be something we take great pains pretend is awful in America — but it’s something still as real and tangible, not to mention legitimate and acceptable, as apple pie.

Is it any surprise that YouTube coders, who are probably most a certain kind of American dude, are then writing algorithms which basically take that kind of a culture, a culture of soft supremacy, one where black kids are shot by cops all the time for no good reason, and repackage it…into math? Why should it be? The algorithms of American technology platforms essentially take America’s racist, bigoted, supremacist culture — and export it around the globe, in ways that even those coding it scarcely understand, and would probably deny bitterly, even when it couldn’t be clearer by now. (The alternative is worse: these companies are full of actual white supremacists, and they don’t care.)

But other countries aren’t like this. In Europe, wealth and power are shared much more equally. Culture is much more diverse. Supremacism and hatred and violence, especially, are much less tolerated. There are laws against hate speech. What American platforms are essentially doing is exporting America’s culture, it’s biases, it’s history, it’s intolerance, it’s divisions — in algorithmic form. Those algorithms then go on to destabilize societies, by inspiring mass murderers, by radicalizing young men into American style extremism, like in New Zealand this time. We are culturally Americanizing these countries — instead of becoming more like them, we are making them more like us. Nobody wins. Everybody loses.

Is this the kind of country we want to be — one that brings the world down to our failed level? We haven’t reckoned with our own demons as Americans. We are a badly wounded country, failing in nearly every regard. Should we be exporting our own violence and hatred, in algorithmic form, around the globe — sending our friends systems and cultures and mindsets which haven’t worked for us? Should we be letting our companies sell all that, just to make a buck? What do you think the world will make of such a country? Will they tolerate it for long? Will they respect and admire us for destabilizing them?

I could go on. Perhaps I should. Let me make one final point. There is one last way in which today’s wave of fascism is made in America: it’s history.

America is the original white supremacist society. It’s true that the Christchurch shooter was inspired by a French “philosopher”, but that French philosopher was only regurgitating ideas that were invented…in America. White genocide. The browns will replace us! We are becoming a minority! These panics have been there from America’s founding days. Do you know how Americans once justified slavery? By saying it was the slaves who would rape their wives and take their land. LOL — the poor slaves, I’d bet, just wanted to go home. It was early Americans who wanted to take land and women, not those poor Africans who were kidnapped. So do you see the thought still at work here all these centuries later? We will become a minority! (they will take our women!) They will replace us! (they will take our land!) The thinking hasn’t changed one bit.

Fascism was invented in America, my friends, not in Nazi Germany. The Nazis admired America’s race laws, it’s apartheid system, slavery, the whole shebang. They studied it — and learned from it. They modeled their laws to oppress Jews on America’s. America invented fascism — and today, we euphemistically call fascism “white supremacy” or “white nationalism”, which is a polite way, I suppose, to imagine an ignoramus, or an uneducated fool, instead of a scary, gun-toting Nazi. But there is precisely no difference between these two things — that is why Nazis came up with such elaborate, menacing costumes. 20th century “fascism” was 18th century “white nationalism” in drag.

White supremacy, white nationalism, these are things all invented in America. We are the world’s innovators and pioneers of them. The globe’s original white supremacist nation. The only rich nation, really, to have enslaved people en masse within its own borders. The only one to have remained an apartheid state through the 20th century, even after the Second World War. That’s not to say other countries weren’t, too. Sure they were. But they were rarely innovators and pioneers and as true believer as us — all things still very much reflected in our culture and society, in painfully real ways.

We are exporting that ugly history around the globe now. Before we ourselves have really conquered or transcended it. Our platforms, systems, companies, institutions are saying to the world — maybe with a wink and nod — “hey, it’s perfectly OK to hate black people, to hate Jews, to hate Muslims. You know what, if you wish mass violence on these people, that’s cool — haha, just a joke, right! Wink. Go ahead — incite violence, bellow hate speech, reward hatred and violence everywhere and every way you can. LOL!!” What else are they doing when they “recommend” extremist videos, articles, posts, and so on? They are doing it for money, because we are capitalists. They are doing it because they reflect the still existent biases and bigotries of a society which is still a mired in white supremacism, even though it pretends it isn’t. What should we call all that? Is there even a word for it?

We are taking the world backwards, my friends. Because the truth is that countries like New Zealand and Canada and France are all more advanced than us. But they are not immune to being infected by our social, economic, and cultural maladies. The price for them of using our tools is to be affected by our illnesses, too. How long do you think they will keep on using our tools? How long do you think they will consider all these things “innovations” — not socially destabilizing menaces? How long do you think they will consider us friends — not dangerous fools?

It’s true that America’s going backwards by the day. Americans seem powerless to change that — or maybe resigned to it. And yet there is an even bigger question. We are exporting American collapse. Technology and capitalism are intertwining to spreading our mistakes, our errors, our follies, the worst parts of our history and our culture, in algorithmic, around the globe, to sell our failed systems to the world — maybe those are the last things we have left to profit off of. But is that OK with us? Should it be? That the very things which collapsed our own society are now being spread globally?

Understand the trade we’re making. We’re hurting our friends with the same things that hurt us, because we have nothing left, except those things. We are selling friends who have always stood by us the lethal poisons which broke our spirits, minds, and bodies, which made us ill — just because we are broken and starving. But is that a moral thing to do? A wise one?

Please understand. When I say “the Christchurch massacre was made in America”, I don’t absolve the shooter of guilt or responsibility or guilt, or even those who helped him along elsewhere, like Australian fascists. Guilt and responsibility are not zero-sum. I extend them, expand them, is all. I think we share responsibility as a society, and guilt, too, for these terrible things. They are done using the tools we have built, to express the ideas we still celebrate, which are brought to life by our institutions and organizations, which reflect our history and our mistakes. We are exporting our collapse, my friends.

Would massacres like Christchurch exist without the things we have made, which we ourselves support and reward and use and celebrate, like Google and Facebook? Like capitalism and algorithms and digital insta-fame? Like the idea that your neighborhood Nazi can be a misguided but kind soul? Aren’t they just twisted mirrors of our problems, our history, our biases — our collapse? If so, then we too are culpable, aren’t we? We are a part of this problem of spreading global hate, my friends, because global hate is now our latest export. Are we brave and wise enough to admit it?

What kind of society do we want to be? One that exports our own collapse, our own ruin, our self-destruction? One that peddles hatred and violence to the world, so that there a few more billionaires, and the stock market is happy, and the economy “booms”? The choice, I suppose, is ours.

Umair

March 2019