The Consensus Cycle

Despite all evidence to the contrary, I remain committed to the belief that if I really focus and sit quietly holding a three-dimensional thought in my brain, I will eventually gain the power to rotate it on all sides; that is to say, I’ll be able to make tangible the real mess of nonverbal approximations that comprise most of my thoughts and spit out an actual sentence that explains what, or why, or how, something is, or has been, or should be.

I do this with the Internet…too much. I mean, that’s debatable, because I guess I do work both on the Internet and for the Internet, so I am always, as they say in my favorite kind of cyberhacker-specific action movies, “hacked into the mainframe!” Alex and I spoke about this awhile ago, probably in mid-August, trying to figure out what was up with this very strange series of tubes that we love and need but also kind of hate and reject every so often. And we talked about this idea of the “backlash cycle” or the “outrage cycle,” the popular and commonly-held assertion that the Internet’s editorial factions operate on a constant progression of contradictory opinions. Like, everyone loves Amy Schumer for a hot minute, and then they hate her. And then they hate her but they love to hate her. Hillary Clinton, I’m pretty sure, has already looped through three or four complete backlash cycles since the very first whisper of her 2016 presidential bid, and we’re still more than a year away from the election, god help us all. I mean, what else? There’s a million examples. Jon Ronson wrote a whole book about the emotion that motivates Internet-fueled backlashes and finger-pointing, which, lol, just read Choire’s review instead. There are backlash cycles in real life, of course — hey Susan Faludi what’s up — but I’m mostly interested in what kinds of opinions are most commonly or easily adopted ~online~ and why.

The Internet doesn’t run on contradiction. I think it’s actually the opposite: it’s not a backlash cycle, but a consensus cycle. The “them” at the root of a backlash wave — always someone else, never you — are the creations of whoever is trying to establish a shared opinion. Backlash cycles aren’t rooted in inflammation or antagonism or even the dreaded “healthy debate” that often comprises a “gotta hear both sides” kind of argument. They’re a symptom of people trying to agree.

The Internet consensus cycle follows a pretty predictable pattern: something is said or done, an opinion is floated and widely adopted, a counter-opinion emerges from the wild and is adopted by an overlapping group of people, the two opinions are conflated as an argument and the groups in question either engage directly or indirectly (tweets vs. essays, for example), a “backlash” is declared, and often but not always, given enough time, the original opinion resurfaces, completing the cycle. And this is all done in service of getting people to agree, not fight, about the same thing.

The Internet is becoming this funny kind of factory that is constantly trying to manufacture consensus. To continue this metaphor, it’s like an assembly line that produces a series of uniform and complimentary opinions. And when the Internet does what it does best — spit out a bunch of contradictory words and images through the screen of a person with a brain full of its own contradictory words and images — the result is usually…an opinion you can’t really predict! Maybe it’ll be an opinion that aligns with the majority of existing opinions, but even that is often a long shot. And so the goal seems to be to keep trying to prove, to some kind of Internet factory inspector, that a widely-held consensus on this one subject, be it cultural or political or whatever, is within reach. And watching a group of people try very, very hard to agree is almost as painful as watching a group of people try very, very hard to disagree, maybe more so.

I’m weirdly enough reminded of another metaphor for a different debate: remember Linda McCartney and her statement that if “slaughterhouses had glass walls, we’d all be vegetarians”? The same goes for consensus-making. Like, if you could just see what I’ve seen you would totally be on my side. The business of fighting about which talk show host deserves their desk or which politician is not-so-secretly a perv is not discord for its own sake; it’s an attempt to manufacture as many uniform opinions as possible for the sake of a lot of good things! Harmony, peace, etc. etc. It’s kind of nice if you start seeing it this way!! “Aw, everyone should just come together and agree on this one thing.”

The problem is, of course, people (always people, people ruin everything), and that their brains and opinions and thoughts are wildly unpredictable, and often rooted in very emotional or other silly such motivations that are not so easily shaken. People change their minds all the time; they just tend to do it privately (this, by my former boss Jen Dziura, is a very good essay on that topic), and in my experience, they tend to not be so forthcoming when a person or piece of information is the impetus for their changed opinion. As Jen writes, people think with emotion first, and then they use logic to support that emotional decision. So, the attempt to bring people around to your side only works if they are already inclined to join your opinion, and even then it might be years before they admit it.

I hate that saying about how the sausage gets made — sausage is gross — but I guess I have to use it here to say that, yeah, no one likes to think about how something disgusting becomes something digestible, or, more than that, how something disgusting becomes something palatable and preferred. I kind of suspect that the reason we cringe when faced with this consensus cycle is because it is gross to watch the process of consensus from even a slight distance. It’s painful, and strange, because our instincts are at odds: disagreements, in polite society, might as well be poison, and we’re pushed to just smooth things over by nodding and smiling as much as possible. But we also have those emotional flare-ups when someone challenges what we think is the only correct or logical stance on the issue at hand: Oh! goes the thought, they must not know what I know! Better tell them.

Consensus is a nice goal, and it’s a preferable thought to hold in my head that the people coming @ me with their attempts to convert my opinions to theirs are just doing so for the sake of harmony, inclusivity, all that good shit. But the process is ugly, and the Internet is just the glass slaughterhouse where you get to see exactly how those gross wheels turn.

Of course, however, if you disagree, feel free to let me know 🙂