The Bluestocking, vol 58: Milo, May and the Facebook church

Happy Friday!

Just when you thought it was safe to go sit on your sofa . . . the Tory party is cracking again. Who knows if the plot will amount to anything (I feel like the fact it's being co-ordinated by Grant Shapps may save May's bacon), but it's definitely pre-ruined my weekend plans.

It's OK, though, it's not like we're in the middle of a huge international negotiation, or that the OBR is about to downgrade its economic forecasts.

Helen

Alt-White: How Breitbart smuggled white nationalism into the mainstream

The previous November, Yiannopoulos emailed Bannon with a bone to pick. Breitbart London reported that a London college student behind a popular social justice hashtag had threatened the anti-Islam activist Pamela Geller.

“The story is horseshit and we should never have published it,” Yiannopoulos wrote. “Reckless and stupid. … Strongly recommend we pull. it’s insanely defamatory. I spoke to pamela geller and even she said it was rubbish. We’re outright lying about this girl and surely we’re better than that. We can and should win by telling the truth.”

Six minutes later, Bannon wrote back to his tech editor in a fury. “Your [sic] full of shit. When I need your advice on anything I will ask. ... The tech site is a total clusterfuck---meaningless stories written by juveniles. You don’t have a clue how to build a company or what real content is. And you don’t have long to figure it out or your [sic] gone. … You are magenalia [sic].”

No, YOU are magenalia.

Sorry, but this story has almost too much WTF in it to comprehend. The Nazi passwords. The way tech men speak to each other like they are Brothers In Arms in a civil war re-enactment. The terrible karaoke. Steve Bannon's spelling. The fact Milo has a ghostwriter. The existence of a human called "Hunter Swogger". The Mercer billions funding a failed tech blogger to become a conduit for every white nationalist, resentful Silicon Valley bro and Clash of Civilisations-obsessed wingnut to swirl into a fetid stew that has infected public life.

If you want to understand the alt-right as a cosy establishment, and how it is propped up by people who would swear blind that they are not in sympathy with its values - but can't resist bitching to Milo about women and minorities who are getting too uppity - then read this. Then pick your jaw up and read it again.

Side Note: I literally unfollowed someone on Twitter for saying "you should have listened to us when we told you Milo was bad". It was one of those Twitter pieties: who should? who is "we"? There was a faint note that BuzzFeed was just telling people what they could have also got from talking to others in the tech scene. It really bothers me when this happens - and the person saying it this time was a journalist. Funnily enough, there is still a role in the world for EVIDENCE.

There was the same rash of piety over the fact that "everyone knew" Harvey Weinstein was a creep. Well, clearly, that wasn't doing a very effective job of stopping him being one, was it? But this is how cheaply we hold investigative journalism - one of the hardest, slowest, most fraught and most expensive things an organisation can do? That when something that confirms a suspicion is published, all some people want to do is demonstrate their insider knowledge? Give over.

Side Side Note: Here's Rebecca Traister on why the Weinstein allegations came out now. In passing, she recounts a bleak glimpse of Weinstein recently, looking frail, and it's easy to forget that the allegations against Bill Cosby and Roger Ailes only came when they were already fading. Donald Trump, the other Alpha Male recently accused of multiple sexual harassment allegations, is still in his pomp. This is about power, and it's not coincidental that the most powerful man in the world can breezily bulldoze past the testimony of multiple women. Let's not be complacent.

I Called Off My Wedding

As it turns out, calling off a wedding is the easiest and hardest thing a person can do. One hundred messages which begin, ‘I’m really sorry, but...’ The first 10 days I feel utterly shell-shocked and entirely humiliated. The next 10, I’m furious. Then three days of nothing until I see the branches in bloom, followed by sadness that spreads through me, into the soil.

PSA: If in doubt, always call off the wedding.

Is Facebook A Church?

In nearly every state he’s visited, Zuckerberg has attended religious services or met with religious leaders. In Texas, he drank coffee with pastors; in Minnesota, he ate Iftar dinner with Somalian refugees; in Charleston, he ate dinner with the entire cast of a walk-into-a-bar joke: “The reverend, rabbi, police chief, mayors, and heads of local nonprofits.” The next day, he visited Mother Emanuel AME, where white supremacist Dylann Roof killed eight parishioners and the church’s pastor in 2015.

Asked by a Facebook commenter last year if he was an atheist, Zuckerberg replied, “No. I was raised Jewish and then I went through a period where I questioned things, but now I believe religion is very important.” It was a telling way to put it. Publicly, at least, his interest in religion seems to be more sociological than existential. After attending services at Aimwell Baptist Church, in Mobile, he wrote on Facebook about “how the church provides an important social structure for the community.”

This has, generally, been the theme for the trip: How does this whole “community” thing work? And if you’re looking for an example of a powerful and enduring community that supersedes geographical territory, ethnic heritage, or class interest, religion offers a particularly fascinating case study. The Muslim Ummah united Arab tribes and non-Arabs in a universal community of believers. The Catholic Church was both a rival and a complement to state power, providing essential services and legitimizing the governance of kings and emperors, almost entirely through the force of shared values.

I can't get enough stories about Facebook, sorry. Even trying to conceptualise what it is at this point is difficult. So I like this analogy with a church - a belief system, a community organisation, a power base.

Chaser: John Herrman (call me) on Uber, Facebook and companies which are too big to regulate. "It’s very likely that any approach to regulating Facebook will look more like diplomacy than anything else — a cautious search for détente with an institution that ultimately gets to set its own laws, whether a government likes it or not."

Quick links:

"The reality is that for all the phones Apple sells and for all the people who buy them, the company is stuck in idea-quicksand, like Microsoft in the early 2000s." What if . . . Apple is bad?
- I wrote a piece about life admin recently, and this neatly delineates the difference between that and "emotional labour" as defined by Arlie Hoschchild (my <3). Both are unpaid, though, and thus - you guessed it - the burden of them falls more heavily on women.
- The FT's Uber game is a smart way to show people the hard decisions drivers have to make.
- Kazuo Ishiguro wrote for 9 and a half hours a day for four weeks and didn't answer any post or have anyone around to his house in order to write Remains of the Day. I can't decide if I'm envious or horrified.
- This gif is very soothing.

Guest gif: When it hasn't been your day, your week, your month, or even your year.

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