American Pravda by James O'Keefe

Author:James O'Keefe
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3
Publisher: St. Martin's Press
Published: 2017-11-20T05:00:00+00:00

Weaponized Autism

In the lead-up to the 2016 presidential election, our geek allies had a ton of nervous energy they hoped to put to good use. During elections past, all they could have done was to consume news or at best redistribute it. By 2016, they could help create it. Perhaps the most usefully creative of all sites was Reddit.

Although most Americans over thirty have not even heard of it, Reddit has quietly become the eighth most popular online destination in the United States. Its methodology is a mystery, and its internet-amped collection of memes and verbal mischief is incomprehensible to all but its legion of “redditors.” Despite those seeming limitations, Reddit is changing the culture.

What registered redditors do is post text and/or a direct link to an article and see if they can generate a community of users around their post. Other users vote the item up or down. Those posts that gather the most “up” votes ascend the page. Users can add their comments to the post, often playing off one another. Most conversations do not get much beyond commentary, some of it less enlightened than others, but our redditors wanted to do more than talk. Many found their voice on what is called a “subreddit,” an interest community on which people communicate with one another.

Specifically, it was on the subreddit “The_Donald” where the self-described “online mob of rabid self-organized supporters” became a genuine countercultural force. On a daily—no, hourly—basis, they gleefully subverted the cultural institutions the left holds dear. When, for instance, WikiLeaks dumped the John Podesta emails late in the campaign, the redditors scrambled through them like rats at the city dump looking for a choice morsel or two. If it took one rat a thousand hours to find everything worth finding, it would take a thousand rats just one hour. In today’s media, time is everything.

Among other self-descriptions, the redditors call themselves “weaponized autists” and “centipedes.” The social media geek who came up with the phrase “weaponized autism” meant no offense to the autistic. If anything, he was celebrating the hidden virtue of having a singular focus in a world of distractions.

One of the most accomplished autists, Charles Johnson of GotNews, admits to being “neuroatypical,” which is somewhere on the autism spectrum.1 Another borderline case was my mentor, Andrew Breitbart. He would tell me the internet “cured” his ADD because it put his wandering mind to good use navigating tabs and Twitter text boxes. His shortcoming was now a virtue.

The idea of the “centipede” suggests a hundred individual agents working together as one, feeding off each other, boosting each other’s spirits, occasionally correcting the redditor who takes a wrong turn. At their best, redditors can outperform any newsroom in America. They pore obsessively over publicly available data and connect dots. The internet, of course, makes all this possible. The fact that virtually every other newsroom is looking in another direction or not looking at all makes their job that much more satisfying.

In the lead-up

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