Strongman Leaders, Strongman Tech
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At the risk of dramatically oversimplifying the state of the world, two trends dominate our current geopolitical era: the rise of authoritarian leaders, and the ever-rising power of global technology firms.
Authoritarians and Big Tech are immensely valuable to one another. The rage, outrage, and cults of personality cultivated by today’s strongmen, for instance, have driven engagement and ad sales on tech platforms. The platforms, meanwhile, have given autocrats precise demographic information and unprecedented surveillance capabilities, as well as powerful tools for spreading disinformation and propaganda.
Just as striking as how symbiotic the forces of authoritarianism and information technology are, however, is how similar they are. To acquire and maintain power, strongman leaders and tech platforms seek to extract value from the activity of their followers.1 They deploy eerily similar techniques to do so: capturing the attention of these followers, distracting and deceiving them, manipulating their behavior, harnessing their emotions, warping their understanding of reality, and making them doubt whether there is such a thing as “truth.”2
Strongman leaders and tech platforms often rise to power through legitimate means, frequently describing their movements with a “revolutionary narrative” and presenting themselves as simultaneously populist and savior.3 Then they use the tools of incumbency to protect their power. They surveil citizens and consumers. They threaten and undermine challengers. They entrench themselves until their presence feels inevitable and participation in society requires accepting their terms and conditions.4
As technology philosopher Jaron Lanier writes of tech companies in Who Owns the Future?, both strongman leaders and tech platforms claim to be returning power to the people. But their real goal is to concentrate power in different hands.5
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From Trump to Bolsonaro to Modi to Erdoğan, some of the world’s biggest democracies are run by or at risk of falling to demagogues who view democratic norms and the rule of law with contempt. They see role models in other strongmen like Putin, Orbán, and Xi, admiring their ability to exercise total control while exploiting state resources for personal gain.
In The Road to Unfreedom, the historian Timothy Snyder uses Putin’s Russia as a case study for how strongmen consolidate power by practicing what Snyder calls the “politics of eternity.” This political narrative “places one nation at the center of a cyclical story of victimhood. Time is no longer a line into the future, but a circle that endlessly returns the same threats from the past.”6
By constantly manufacturing crises and threats, Putin creates the sense that Russia is constantly under attack. By shamelessly prolonging his rule, he makes Russia’s future seem inseparable from his own. Thus, in the narrative Putin has constructed, he is the country’s future. For ordinary Russians, over time “the future dissolves in the frustrations of the present, and eternity becomes daily life,” Snyder writes.7 It is the authoritarian version of the infinite scroll.8
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It’s often said that when you use a free digital service like Gmail or YouTube, you’re not the consumer—you’re the product.9 In The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, the author and scholar Shoshana Zuboff argues that’s not quite right. In her telling, you’re not the product of big technology companies as much as their raw material (“human natural resources,” as she puts it).10
They have a lot of raw material to work with. Every month, more than 3.5 billion people—some 45 percent of all human beings on Earth—use Facebook or one of its “core products,” such as WhatsApp and Instagram.11 Ninety-two percent of the world’s internet searches happen on Google.12 In America, four out of every five households subscribe to Amazon Prime.13 More than half of U.S. adults “say they get news from social media ‘often’ or ‘sometimes,’” with 36 percent getting news on Facebook “regularly.”14 In July, the U.S. Surgeon General issued a warning about “health misinformation,” citing a study that “found that false news stories were 70 percent more likely to be shared on social media than true stories.”15
That’s a lot of clicking, reading, scrolling, subscribing, and sharing. And every aspect of it—what you keep watching and what you swipe past, what you buy and what you add to your cart without completing the purchase—is tracked, monitored, influenced, exploited, and sold to the highest bidder.16 The more tech companies know about you, the more data they can extract from you, the more intimately they understand you, and the more effective they are at influencing your behavior. It’s a lucrative business: By the end of 2020, the combined market capitalization of the Big Five (Apple, Amazon, Alphabet, Facebook, and Microsoft) had reached $7.5 trillion—larger than the GDP of every country in the world except the United States and China.17
As Zuboff and Jaron Lanier point out, the digital manipulation that has proven so profitable has nothing to do with you as an individual person.18 Just as a strongman leader sees individual people (other than himself) as indistinguishable means to an end, to a tech company and its algorithms a person is simply a source of data. Despite their promises to “connect the world”19 and “[empower] people to express themselves,”20 they care little about people as individuals. They care a lot about people as a commodity—as a source of raw behavior.21
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Had the transformation to what Zuboff calls “surveillance capitalism” happened overnight, one hopes there would have been outrage. Protests. Boycotts. New laws and regulations. But like a liberal democracy that slides almost imperceptibly into illiberalism as norms and institutions erode, the invasion of digital technology into every aspect of our lives happened subtly. Before the convenience of one-click ordering and the thrill of on-demand entertainment had worn off, we’d become seduced by declarations of “disruption”22 and accustomed to constant surveillance by private, inscrutable actors who had hired some of the smartest minds in the world to monetize our behavior.
Zuboff calls the state of being after an invasive new technology has made its way into our lives “digital dispossession.”23 The process by which it happens—the “dispossession cycle,” in her words—has four stages: “incursion, habituation, adaptation, and redirection.”24 It’s the first two stages of the dispossession cycle that most closely reflect the rise of the strongman leader.
Consider Google Street View. As Zuboff describes it, to get people used to a technology like this, Google starts by making “a unilateral incursion into undefended space.”25 Before Google cars with rooftop-mounted cameras begin driving down the street taking pictures of everything and everyone they see and making it all freely accessible on the internet, you have no reason to guard against such a possibility. By the time you realize that you need to “defend” the street, or at least defend some modicum of privacy while taking a walk or sitting on your porch, the incursion has already happened.
Then comes habituation. “People habituate to the incursion with some combination of agreement, helplessness, and resignation,” Zuboff writes. “The sense of astonishment and outrage dissipates. The incursion itself, once unthinkable, slowly worms its way into the ordinary. Worse still, it gradually comes to seem inevitable.”26 You become habituated to Street View—maybe you’re fascinated by it, or you begin to rely on it, or you accept it with a shrug, or you assume it doesn’t matter what you think because there’s nothing you can do about it. The end result is the same: You start to believe Google Street View was inevitable.
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This is the key parallel between strongman leaders and strongman tech: the manufactured sense of inevitability. The way they see it, and the way they need us to see it, the strongman entity is the future. They trust that eventually we’ll come to accept that the future is not determined by us, as individuals, but rather by the leader or the technology.
In the case of the leader, it might be propaganda, disenfranchisement, corruption, or even state violence that steals our freedom to pursue an autonomous future. For the tech platform, it is the algorithm—the code that knows things about us that we don’t know about ourselves—that manipulates our behavior, driving compulsive engagement while depriving us of agency.
The strongman needs us to give in, embracing the political dominance of the leader or the market dominance of the platform, or simply to give up, accepting the loss of control and autonomy as inevitable. Yet as authoritarianism expert Ruth Ben-Ghiat writes in Strongmen, there is “a truth that the autocrat goes to lengths to conceal: he is no one without his followers.”27
Strongman leaders and strongman tech platforms may see people as a commodity, but unlike grain or gold, people can resist. For those living under authoritarian rule, Ben-Ghiat writes, “acts of resistance have been a path to the recovery of the self and the reaffirmation of dignity, empathy, and solidarity—all qualities the strongman seeks to destroy in his people.”28
Of all the parallels between the strongman leaders and strongman tech companies seeking to control the twenty-first century, this may be the most meaningful: It is possible to resist.
In this case, “followers” doesn’t just mean supporters or users; it means everyone impacted by the leader or the technology.
Whether you spend an evening raging at a Trump rally or raging at your Facebook news feed, you’re liable to start wondering, Who knows what’s really true? Does anyone know what really happened?
“revolutionary narrative”: Jaron Lanier, Who Owns the Future? (Penguin: 2014) (191). “Leaders who come to power by elections rather than coups are more likely to avoid ejection from office and less likely to face punishment.” Ruth Ben-Ghiat, Strongmen: Mussolini to the Present (W. W. Norton & Company: 2020) (49).
“The reason people click ‘yes’ [on tech user agreements] is not that they understand what they’re doing, but that it is the only viable option other than boycotting a company in general, which is getting harder to do. It’s yet another example of the way digital modernity resembles soft blackmail” (Lanier, 298).
“In our digital revolution, we might depose an old sort of dysfunctional center of power only to erect a new one that is equally dysfunctional” (Lanier, 191).
Timothy Snyder, The Road to Unfreedom: Russia, Europe, America (Vintage: 2018) (8).
Snyder, 15.
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2020/jan/31/infinite-scroll-life-under-instagram; https://www.cjr.org/first_person/the-infinite-scroll.php
https://lifehacker.com/if-youre-not-paying-for-it-youre-the-product-5697167
“Knowledge, authority, and power rest with surveillance capital, for which we are merely ‘human natural resources.’” Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the new Frontier of Power (Profile: 2019) (100).
https://www.census.gov/popclock/world; https://www.statista.com/statistics/264810/number-of-monthly-active-facebook-users-worldwide/
https://www.oberlo.com/blog/google-search-statistics
https://www.digitalcommerce360.com/2019/07/11/82-of-us-households-have-a-amazon-prime-membership/
https://www.pewresearch.org/journalism/2021/01/12/news-use-across-social-media-platforms-in-2020/
https://www.hhs.gov/sites/default/files/surgeon-general-misinformation-advisory.pdf
“[S]pying on you is, for the moment, the official primary business of the information economy” (Lanier, 191).
https://marker.medium.com/the-5-biggest-tech-companies-are-now-worth-more-than-japans-gdp-9d56bcbe6db6; https://www.worldometers.info/gdp/gdp-by-country/
“The most precious and protected data… are statistical correlations that are used by algorithms but are rarely seen or understood by people.” (Lanier, 105).
https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-26326844 (Facebook)
https://investor.snap.com/about-snap/default.aspx (Snapchat)
“We are the source of the coveted commodity; our experience is the target of extraction” (Zuboff, 132).
https://newrepublic.com/article/143004/rise-thought-leader-how-superrich-funded-new-class-intellectual; https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2014/10/the-disruption-myth/379348/
Zuboff, 100.
Zuboff, 137-138.
Zuboff, 138.
Zuboff, 139. Emphasis added.
Ben-Ghiat, 13.
Ben-Ghiat, 197.