Right-wing algorithms: what’s left of the left?

The reality behind the screen of your smartphone, tablet or notebook is more interesting than it seems.

The thought experiment by which Maxwell apparently disproved the second law of thermodynamics is well known.

“In the thought experiment, a demon controls a door between two chambers containing a gas. As individual gas molecules (or atoms) approach the door, the demon rapidly opens and closes the door to allow only fast-moving molecules to pass in one direction and only slow-moving molecules to pass in the other. Since the kinetic temperature of a gas depends on the velocities of its constituent molecules, the demon's actions cause one chamber to heat up and the other to cool down. This would decrease the total entropy of the system, apparently without applying any work, thus violating the second law of thermodynamics.” Source: Wikipedia

About Maxwell's demon, see also the following video.

This thought experiment was also used to explain the increasing disorder in the information world due to the demon's need to erase more and more information that was inevitably recorded and stored during his activity.

“In 1982, the American physicist Charles Bennett put the pieces of the puzzle together. He realized that Maxwell’s demon was at core an information-processing machine: It needed to record and store information about individual particles in order to decide when to open and close the door. Periodically it would need to erase this information. According to Landauer’s erasure principle, the rise in entropy from the erasure would more than compensate for the decrease in entropy caused by the sorting of the particles. “You need to pay,” said Gonzalo Manzano, a physicist at the Institute for Quantum Optics and Quantum Information in Vienna. The demon’s need to make room for more information inexorably led to a net increase in disorder.” Source: Quanta Magazine

Given the results they produce, we can say that the algorithms of social networks like Facebook work more or less the same way as Maxwell's demon: they scour oceans of data produced by users to create and boost bubbles according to their preferences. This is done both to maximize the number of clicks that a given piece of content will receive and to guarantee the economic return from ads associated with each specific piece of content.

But in the case of Facebook, what exists is a veritable legion of pairs of Maxwell's demons working tirelessly behind the screens of every computer, notebook, tablet and smartphone logged into Facebook. Each pair of these demons works in a similar way: one of them identifies each piece of data produced by the social network user, leading them to the respective information bubble; the other adds to the bubble the advertising add that is most likely to earn a click.

The greater the number and diversity of Facebook users, the greater the number of pairs of virtual Maxwell's demons that are replicated and put to work by the platform's algorithm. It is because of this characteristic that Facebook can be used efficiently not only to increase the profits of its advertisers but also to measure and, in a certain way, guide or push public opinion in a certain direction.

The Cambridge Analytica scandal has satisfactorily proven that Facebook is a powerful electoral tool. The genocide in Myanmar, the invasions of the US Congress and the buildings of the three branches of government in Brasília, and several other recent outbreaks of political violence have demonstrated that Facebook's destructive political power does not only have virtual and electoral effects. On this subject, see also The Chaos Machine.

And here we come to the point that seems most crucial to me. But before going into it, I would like to make a brief digression on political theory based on the work of Norberto Bobbio. Since the French Revolution, politics has been dominated by the polarization between right and left. The fact that these two poles have undergone mutations over time is not so important, because they continue to be an important reference both for the analysis of the political field and for the disputes within it.

“Despite the fact that the dyad is followed and contested in various ways – and more frequently, but always with the same arguments, in these recent times of general confusion – the expressions ‘right’ and ‘left’ continue to be widely used in political language. All those who use them do not give the impression of using thoughtless words, as they are very well understood.

In recent years, among political analysts and among political actors themselves, much of the political discourse has revolved around the question: ‘Where is the left going?’ Debates on the theme of ‘the future of the left’ or ‘the rebirth of the right’ have become increasingly frequent, to the point that they have become repetitive and boring.” (Direita e Esquerda, Norberto Bobbio, Unesp, São Paulo, 2001, p. 79)

Bobbio published his reflections on the dyad in 1994, two decades before the Cambridge Analytica scandal (2014). Much has changed since then. And these changes have become more dramatic as the political arena has migrated almost entirely to the virtual world, becoming hostage in the real world to the dynamics created by the algorithms of internet platforms.

In the political sphere, the actions of Maxwell's virtual demons not only redefine the “left” and the “right”, they have the power to remove from the political arena important issues that the two poles could or should discuss and negotiate: interest rates in Brazil; the majority against participating in the war in Ukraine in Europe; reduction of defense spending in the US. Instead of discussing real issues that affect the daily lives of people in all countries, the political scenario constructed on the internet by Maxwell's virtual demons depoliticizes politics, forcing the “left” and the “right” to debate over politically less important or completely irrelevant issues.

Social media algorithms are weapons of mass destruction for the left. They analyze and boost or confine and suppress political speech in a specific way that is extremely beneficial to the right. The growth of the “new right” is not accidental. It is programmed and occurs mainly because the left has allowed itself to be deceived by Maxwell’s virtual demons, believing that fighting for space on the internet has become more important than organizing people in their neighborhoods and putting them on the streets.

The analog world we lived in when the PT (left-wing party) was created in Brazil was very different. But some of the things we see today also existed in it.

In the mid-1980s, when I was at the Osasco Law School, I and my friends started to create a newspaper called “The Bathroom Door”. This name was chosen on purpose, because at the bathroom door people would write in secret what they didn’t have the courage to say in public. The paranoia that existed during the final phase of a Brazilian military dictatorship turned the bathroom door into a political bulletin board, and we decided to put it all out there.

The newspaper caused a stir at the Law School. No one was really prepared for discussions about the crisis caused by the dismissal of some professors, open complaints about the amount charged to students, and, of course, short literary texts ridiculing some disciplines. When the school's management decided to create a newspaper to combat “The Bathroom Door,” things got even funnier, because on the same day we published an extra edition of our newspaper criticizing the school's newspaper (and we used the Law School's own infrastructure to do this without the management knowing).

But what happened the following year was even more surprising. The group I was part of won the election for the Academic Board, and I immediately began to produce two newspapers: the Academic Board's newspaper (with an aggressive political platform and moderate and bureaucratic language) and “The Bathroom Door” (a newspaper that used aggressive language in defense of the aggressive political platform). In a short time we monopolized the opinion published in the Faculty of Law, creating an immense information bubble.

Some people hated one newspaper and liked the other, but the overwhelming majority of students favored an aggressive political platform (including those who thought it was moderate because of the language used in the Academic Board newspaper). This became a source of political power and was used to do things that until then had been taboo at the Osasco Law School, such as: a pay strike against the increase in tuition fees, a request for political support from students in the City Council, the issuing of UNE (acronym for the National Union of Brazilian Students, an institution banned and criminalized during the military dictatorship) student ID cards, the filing of a successful lawsuit against the Law School to prevent defaulting students from being punished, and orchestrated demonstrations against bad teachers (one of them was fired and the other resigned because when they entered a room to teach, all the students left).

The taste of revolution is delicious, although it is illusory and short-lived. This history, forgotten for decades, is part of my life and whenever I see things about information manipulation, information bubbles, Fake News, political movements created out of thin air and driven by information outlets “more or less committed to factual truth”, I laugh out loud. This is exactly what we did in the mid-1980s when the world was not computerized and dominated by Maxwell’s virtual demons that empower internet platforms and programmatically weaken the left.

In the past, it took much more creativity and determination to do politics. But no one needed to make money in a lazy way like these smart-asses and maniacs from the extreme right (and from the left too) who call themselves influencers. And I must say that the taste of the revolution they imagine creating is not delicious, because it has the nauseating smell of gunpowder and carnage like what happened in Myanmar and almost happened in Brasília. Well... at the time we also had to deal with the problem of surveillance (and threats of aggression from fascists) in a country that was being shaken by the end of a military dictatorship, but the solution was always ironic and sarcastic.

Despite being faster and much more flooded with informational garbage, the current world created by algorithms is not very different from the one that existed in the 1980s: it is just more artificial, less cheerful and devoid of real vitality. But you know, there is always a hacker around the corner wanting to revolutionize everything and gain notoriety. In the 1980s I was a hacker from the analog world. Therefore, I salute the new hackers even though the Brazilian left has not produced any of them to date. The only one who benefited it (the hacker from Araraquara) quickly joined the right and fell into disgrace without anyone from the left coming to his defense.

To win the hearts and minds of the population, the left does not need influencers, memes, and the production of funny or angry TikTok videos. But I will not say here what it needs, because it is not my place to do so.