Internet Imagination Running Amok

Memes and misinformation, provocations and politics.

A History of Fake Things on the Internet
by Walter J. Scheirer
Stanford, 264 pp., $28

“WE DON’T HAVE AS MUCH TO FEAR about fake things on the Internet as we might initially have assumed,” writes Walter Scheirer in his new book’s last chapter. The whole online misinformation thing is a bit overblown, he argues: Those concerned with the proliferation of falsehoods on the internet are alarmists, unable to recognize and appreciate how online misinformation fits within the long historical continuity of falsehoods, mischief, and pranks that stretches back into antiquity.

One suspects his technofuturist glasses may be a tad rose-tinted.

A Notre Dame computer scientist whose academic work largely focuses on questions relating to computer vision, Scheirer pulls the anecdotes and studies that inform his argument from his research and his experiences in the internet hacker culture of the 1990s. He strays from the book’s central theme quite often, and A History of Fake Things on the Internet winds up being more of a history of the early internet than a history of falsehoods.

Scheirer’s argument may not be focused—the entire chapter devoted to why people like looking at perverse and extreme things has nothing to do with internet fakery, for example—but his wide-ranging book is often fascinating and, even more often, provocative. He provides an insider’s view of the anonymous personalities and esoteric conflicts that took place in a part of the internet most of us were utterly oblivious to. The narrative he offers about early internet turf wars could serve as the basis for a film or prestige miniseries.

This hidden culture of weirdos and misfits, Scheirer argues, was the ancestor of today’s Redditors and 4channers. A significant chunk of his analysis focuses on textfiles—digital texts created by hackers that often served trollishly to mislead, obscure, or even harm through the spreading of computer viruses—which Scheirer compares to the modern meme. Hackers’ textfiles were often in-jokes, meant to cultivate a sense of superiority for those in the know by spreading misinformation mixed with just enough truth to dupe the ignorami.

To showcase how this early internet insider culture influenced today’s internet culture, Scheirer includes a 4chan meme featuring Pepe the Frog—the mascot of the very online wing of the far right—that tells a little story from the point of view of the COVID-19 virus and calls the people who “change[d] their entire lifestyles” because of the disease “cucks.” In Scheirer’s telling, this meme is not cause for concern but “a cathartic story juxtaposing frustration with the ongoing pandemic and attitudes toward contemporary gender relations.” It would be a mistake—a “superficial” and too-literal reading, Scheirer argues—to interpret the meme as harmful disinformation.

Scheirer concedes that this shitposting culture can become dangerous, on the rare occasions when “some people take drastic action based on obviously false information,” citing as an example the far-right militia-group plot to kidnap Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, which was prompted by falsehoods about COVID. Scheier adds that, in foiling the plot, “federal investigators allegedly antagonized the group’s members by reinforcing the conspiracy theories instead of steering them away from trouble.” He does not note that it is commonly believed on the far right that the Michigan plot was an entrapment scheme that served as the prototype for a larger-scale government conspiracy to discredit MAGA on January 6th—which suggests that the lines between online trolling, intentional mis- and disinformation, and offline danger are more tangled than Scheier seems to want to believe.

Another example that better fits with Scheirer’s history is that of the mass shooter who killed 51 people when he attacked two mosques in New Zealand in 2019. The shooter released a manifesto that is essentially a modern and very dangerous take on the textfiles of the ’90s. It is rife with in-jokes and trollish misdirects showcasing the shooter’s very savvy grasp of the online culture that radicalized him—he was not some outsider who misunderstood anti-Muslim humor, he was an insider, committing an act for his fellow insiders.

There are, contra Scheirer, countless other examples of physical, offline harm coming from the online disinformation swamp that Scheirer rather cheerfully writes off as imagination pushing back against the restraints of the “capitalist project [that] sought to deemphasize the role of the imagination in society.”

“Yet capitalism could not write the imagination out of existence—our inner lives are as active as ever,” writes Scheirer.

Setting aside the claim that capitalism is out to “deemphasize” imagination—except to say that not everyone will be convinced—let’s just think about how imagination has recently asserted itself in our politics. It gave birth to the Pizzagate conspiracy theory and the gunman at Comet Pizza; the 2020 election conspiracy theories and the threats against election officials across the country, not to mention the storming of the Capitol; COVID-19 conspiracy theories and the many dead who bought into them. These are just a few prominent examples from just the last few years of internet imagination running amok in American politics.

All of which is to say that imagination in and of itself isn’t a virtue; it’s how it is used that matters.