From gut feeling to policy: the lifecycle of hate
In the beginning there was hate
The right wing bigot has feelings. These feelings do not spring outside the cultural context in which the bigot exists. They are, for the most part, an outward expression of the overall culture in which they operate. There is a history spanning centuries to support the bigot’s feelings. However, unlike a regular person with similar feelings, the bigot is charismatic. They know how to express themselves in relatable ways. The bigot knows their way around sentimentality. This charisma, this relatability puts them in the spotlight. The bigot gets a platform. Now, they can share their emotions with an audience. The bigot becomes “a leader”, someone to emulate. They “speak through their heart”, they “say what everyone else is thinking”. Not feeling, oh no, the bigot masks their feelings through the same sentimental mechanism of the Enlightenment: it is through the pretence of thought and reason that the bigot feels. “I think that Muslims are dangerous”, the bigot says. What the bigot means is “I feel that Muslims are dangerous”. The bigot claims to be guided by “reason”. Their feelings are “factual”, resting on a foundation of “common sense”. “Common sense”, to quote bell hooks apt definition in Teaching Community, as the shared values of “the Imperialist, white supremacist, capitalist patriarchy”.
The right wing bigot perfects their main talking points, they discuss them on interviews, TV appearances, rallies, etc. Their hate as the basis of a public persona. Those who are charismatic enough even create their own jargon populated by “bad hombres”, “Blue lives” or “oikophobes”. The audience witnessing the creation and rise to fame of political stars. The influencers of hatred.
And the hate became chatter
The media outlets that are devoted to the expansion of hatred (sites like Breitbart in the US, GeenStijl in The Netherlands, the more popular MRA forums/blogs etc) are usually the first ones to report on the comings and goings of sentimental bigots. They devote endless posts to the bigot’s rhetoric and offer a platform for commenters to express themselves, usually creating a sense of “community” by sharing these emotions not only through relating to the charismatic bigot but by creating a sense of validation of these “shared emotions” among the commenters themselves.
In turn, once the sentimental bigot reaches wide recognition, the hatred they spread becomes talking points for the public. Mainstream media reports on them. They validate their importance, they give them a place and virality. The “opinion piece” industry (cheap to produce, relying on similar emotional grounds) thrives on these sentimental talking points. The opinion piece writer, like the sentimental political counterpart from where they picked their talking points, feels that something is wrong and they will tell the world why (perhaps nowhere is this more notable than in the profusion of transphobic and transmisogynist opinions published practically every day on British media). The right wing bigot made marginalised lives a matter of public debate. The opinion writer is just as happy to participate in the discussion in the name of “dialogue”. Through this mechanism, all oppression becomes a matter that can be debated through the lens of validated hatred rather than an issue of material consequences for those on the receiving end of this hate.
Simultaneously, the wider public picks on these talking points and makes them central topics of discussion on social media. On Twitter, Facebook, etc, the audience “relates” to the emotions expressed by the charismatic bigot. The bigot has put into words what they feel, given the audience jargon and supporting rhetoric. The bigot “speaks the language of the people”, expresses the “common sense” and their shared values and the people are just as happy to use the opportunity to express their own feelings. However, because regular social media users are not bound by the same scrutiny reserved for public figures, these discourses can take an even more extreme character. When the charismatic leader speaks of “bad hombres”, the usually anonymous social media user can instead, flesh the ideas out with further use of racial slurs. The rhetoric and associated jargon expand, feeding each other creating a “collective affect”. The shared hatred of the dominant culture.
And the chatter became data
The CEO of BrandsEye, a marketing firm that mines for opinion and sentiments on social media on behalf of brands, wrote in May (emphasis mine):
a new science has emerged — known as opinion mining — which uses the latest advances in artificial intelligence (AI) to mine public opinion for sentiment. This structured data is known as opinion data. By analysing online public opinion, governments and global organisations can now access a set of insights that can shape strategy and better measure the public’s experience of their policies, service and brands.
Much has been written about the use of “sentiment analysis software” by the Trump campaign or to fan the flames of the Leave camp during the lead up to the Brexit vote. Cambridge Analytical, the company owned by the right wing billionaire (and Trump supporter) Robert Mercer has been described as a corporation that “specialises in “election management strategies” and “messaging and information operations”, refined over 25 years in places like Afghanistan and Pakistan. In military circles this is known as “psyops” — psychological operations. (Mass propaganda that works by acting on people’s emotions.)”
Cambridge Analytical has perfected the use of Big Data for mining and dissecting voters’ emotions. To contextualise the scope of Cambridge Analytical’s reach, a quote from Carole Cadwalladr at The Guardian, “On its website, Cambridge Analytica makes the astonishing boast that it has psychological profiles based on 5,000 separate pieces of data on 220 million American voters — its USP is to use this data to understand people’s deepest emotions and then target them accordingly”. This data has been collected from freely available information on social media.
There has been an increasing outcry about curbing hate speech or abuse on social media, particularly on Twitter and Facebook. However, given the importance of this emotional data, it is worth asking if it would be in the companies’ best interests to remove the “emotional data points” that feed the vaults of corporations such as Cambridge Analytical. The value of this hateful rhetoric is in the political emotions they express. These emotions can be mined and analysed accordingly. The recurrence of this speech can point to patterns of normalisation, prevalence, number of occurrences, demographics, etc.
In this context, BrandsEye’s CEO, inadvertently offers a useful political insight: “Opinion data can allow researchers to predict what people are going to buy and understand the factors driving that behaviour.” Social media abusive or hateful speech can serve as a trial ground to gauge acceptance of the ideologies behind it. Not curbing the hateful or abusive rhetoric becomes a political decision that transcends individuals to become part of the structures of overall governance and politics. The emotional states of the rhizomatic assemblages become actionable data points.
And the data became normalised political discourse
The sentimental bigot now has a database that validates their feelings. X% of voters agree with these “issues”. These supposed “issues” are nothing more than appeals to emotional triggers with little support in material reality. “Muslims are dangerous”, “Black people abuse welfare because they are lazy”, etc. None of these statements hold any truth in regards to the reality of these groups, they are simply rooted in racist emotions that fall flat when confronted with evidence. But evidence is not required in sentimental appeals. The mere perception is enough to know. The charismatic bigot now speaks with the confidence of someone who knows voters and supporters have their backs and share these feelings. Entire campaigns can be run on the basis of these emotional discourses with very few (if any) policy proposals thrown in the mix.
As the bigoted politician grows in popularity, so do the hateful ideas that they preach. Ideas that were once the realm of fringe groups ostracised by the more mainstream sectors of society become normalised and accepted. Again, mainstream media aids in this normalisation by presenting these points as “discussions” and feeding the opinion piece industry or publishing fashion profiles of bigots, presenting them as “desirable” and appealing. What was once an ideology of hatred becomes a vehicle to launch political careers and, in turn, shift the overall political climate in a specific direction. Those who fancy themselves “in the centre” and a considerable sector of the left concede that “dialogue” with these bigots is necessary, further validating their ideas as points of “debate”. The sentimental bigot is now a mainstream staple, a leader.
And the political discourse became policy
Once these emotions, that in the lifecycle of hatred have now become mainstream are quantified, measured and placed within their appropriate taxonomies, they can be used as supportive statistical data. Fears of “the Other”, inflamed by the sentimental bigot become a valid reason to institute repressive measures. Increased militarisation, State violence, the removal of the social safety net, austerity, etc all of these and more are justified as “necessary” political developments even though they are based on “fears” and nothing more than emotional perceptions. Trump offered an example of how to turn affect in actionable policy this past week when, under claims of “safety and security”, he banned trans people from serving in the military in spite of all material evidence pointing to the contrary.
Here, again, Big Data plays another role in turning these bigoted emotions into actionable policy: it is through the use of applications like Palantir, the software owned by Trump’s ally Peter Thiel, that racial profiling plays a central role in “Predictive Policing”. In a video from 2013, Captain Sean Malinowski of LA Police Department describes that their goal is to stop crime before it happens, through the use of predictive policing. He states “we are playing probabilities and putting officers at the right place, at the right time”.
This militarised “predictive policing”, however, doesn’t happen in a vacuum. The surveillance operations deployed on communities are decided on racial and economic profiles. The “data” collected by these operations, in turn, feeds the taxonomies that have been predetermined for these racial and economic groups. There are no “predictive policing” operations deployed on Wall Street based on the probability of a next Bernie Madoff or the likelihood of a next Enron scandal. “Predictive policing” is deployed on groups that have been racially profiled since the times of the Trans Atlantic slavery when “American court officials gave police legal authority “to stop and detain any Negro (freed or enslaved) seen wandering in and around on the streets””
To quote Jacques Peretti: “Data merely becomes a new way of reinforcing old prejudices.”
In this life cycle of hate, what began with a sentimental appeal, a gut feeling expressed by the bigot with a platform ends up affecting the lives of millions across the globe. Mainstream media, social media, the opinion piece industry, the public at large: all shared their feelings on the topic, in turn making this life cycle possible. From gut feeling to law enforcement and the military industry. Emotions, at least the emotions of powerful people can indeed kill.
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