Totalitarianism is a squishy thing, a radioactive term reserved for only the most destructive, dangerous form of governance. The totalitarianism we have seen in the past has been the province of states, of governments: Nazi Germany, Stalin's USSR. They use a combination of ideology and a police state to both subjugate their own citizens and mobilize them against the wider world.
Somewhat amusingly, Hannah Arendt, in The Origins of Totalitarianism, never actually gives a succinct definition for the concept she so thoroughly explains over the course of nearly 500 pages. Umberto Eco's Ur-Fascism essay, though, gives us a working definition of "a regime that subordinates every act of the individual to the state and to its ideology." Total domination of the life of an individual, then.
When I did my reporting trip around America in 2017, I found a country ripe for fascism. Fascism is another one of those squishy terms that you tend to know when you see, though Eco provides a solid framework for what to look for in that essay. What I saw and heard, talking to more than 400 people across the entire country, were sentiments that felt very much in line with Mussolini's fascism. This is something to fight against, of course, because it is a ruinous form of rule for anyone who isn't allowed to be a fascist (and for the fascists themselves, though they rarely understand that). But the kind of fascism I can see rising in America feels at the same time unlikely to slide into outright totalitarianism.
The raw material for fascism and totalitarianism is social atomization—the phenomenon by which people on a large scale feel alienated not just from the society in which they live, but their entire social, er, network. The real-life kind: family, friends, co-workers. This social atomization, Arendt writes, leads to the rise of the "mass man," the man for whom it is suddenly not just possible but preferable to offer utter, unwavering loyalty to a movement. Totalitarian movements, in particular, rely on masses that, per Arendt, "are not held together by a consciousness of common interest and lack that specific class articulateness which is expressed in determined, limited, and obtainable goal."
But while I don't think America will ever become a totalitarian state, we live in a world that is no longer governed solely by governments. Our online existences may use technology created and monitored by governments, but corporations are steadily swallowing greater and greater chunks of those existences. And not only is your online life being tracked by dozens of companies (at the very least), these companies are infiltrating our physical lives in ways that inch ever further towards domination.
So. Let's talk about Facebook.
What Facebook has become, some 16 years after its emergence from the ashes of Zuckerberg's Hot-or-Not ripoff FaceMash, is a totalitarian organization—just not the kind that we have normally associated with the term "totalitarianism." It is the starkest example I can see of what I'm going to call "corporate totalitarianism."
This is different from tech companies that simply supply technology that can be used to enforce the rule of a totalitarian state—Facebook's goal seems to be to replace the state, to become society itself.
Facebook wants to be everything to you. It wants control of your images. It wants control of your communication. It wants control of your money. It wants control of your education. It wants control of information. It wants to be in your home at all times. There is no corner of your life that will be free from Facebook, if they achieve their goal.
The ways in which Facebook achieves this goal are of course quite different from totalitarian states. Facebook doesn't have police, no matter how loudly right-wing Americans claim the site's Thought Police are censoring them; it does not rely on physical force. What Facebook does have is an algorithm, one that can demonstrably warp its users' perception of reality and affect the political landscape of the entire world.
YouTube's algorithm troubles have gotten a lot of much-deserved bad press. Facebook's algorithm, though, is perhaps more insidious. It has wreaked absolute havoc on the free press in a number of ways—by starving local news outlets of traffic and killing them by the hundreds, and providing the perfect environment for misinformation peddlers.
Facebook combines the terrifying reach of YouTube with the noxiousness of every unmoderated online forum and stokes a very old human instinct toward performative behavior. Worse, it is now an outlet—as are a number of other sites that feed upon "user-generated content" like videos and tweets and soforth—for all the worst impulses of humanity. To deal with this, Facebook relies on a severely underpaid underclass of laborers, which include both the people who use it and those who are contracted to moderate that use. The company replaces the terror used by totalitarian states with technology that simply will never let you go.
Facebook also has an intelligence-gathering apparatus that would make any totalitarian state positively sick with envy, thanks to its heretofore-unknown-to-human-history scale. Two billion people use Facebook, supplying it with a constant stream of information about themselves and the people they know. Unlike with state-based totalitarianism, all of these people opted in, of their own free will. Most of them probably don't know exactly what they're opting into, but there's still a level of consent you probably wouldn't find in even the least brutal dictatorships.
State-based totalitarianism, too, is limited by the size of the state. The goal may be to expand the state to include the entire world, but that goal must be achieved through conquest. That was part of the appeal, for totalitarian movements of the past: the possibility of death in glorious battle. Facebook doesn't need an army, just as it doesn't need a police force. What Facebook does have in common with state-based totalitarianism is its organizational structure.
It is, frankly, disconcerting to see how easily you can map Facebook's organizational features onto those of totalitarian movements:
The Propaganda: Facebook can do no wrong; its technology will solve all our problems, do away with all those little inefficiencies of life, and anyone who says differently is merely a Luddite, someone who stands in the way of progress. Data breaches? Having your digital life tracked, packaged, and resold a thousand times over? Insignificant. A small price to pay for the connectivity it offers. Facebook is simultaneously too ineffectual to bother breaking up or regulating, and too effectual not to throw billions of advertising dollars to; it is under constant threat of competition, but always has the superior product.*
The Masses: Facebook has used this propaganda to harness the masses of socially atomized people. I was going to say that Facebook's masses are more unaware of the part they play in Facebook's plans for global domination than some Germans were, but perhaps "apathy" better describes the Facebook masses' attitude. They simply don’t give a shit. Privacy is a lie, and they have nothing to hide anyway, and they’ve been giving away their information forever, so who cares?
The Fellow-Travelers: Those who not only believe in the tech evangelizing of the following groups but do some evangelizing themselves. Germany's Himmler, Arendt points out in Origins, "quite aptly defined the SS member as the new type of man who under no circumstances will ever do 'a thing for its own sake.'" The goal of totalitarianism is to remove from the individual any lingering desire for the things that make life livable, for spontaneity, for one’s own personal enjoyment. Think of the legions of Instagram Influencers who are incapable of doing any normal activity without also posting it, or who refuse to do anything that doesn’t “build their personal brand.” The "brand ambassadors" who will know, to the very second, the optimal time to post their #sponcon. They not only know the lingo—it is their vernacular.
The Front Organizations: All those tech industry associations that pump out positive papers on Facebook, all those politicians who ally themselves with tech companies, all those "partners" who use Facebook technology for schools or work.
The Party: Facebook employees. People who devote their time and talents to this company, even knowing all the havoc it has caused. This does not include the tens of thousands of contract workers the company uses to do most of the actual work required by a behemoth like Facebook and whose lives are sometimes irreparably damaged by the work they do. The ways in which these contractors are atomized, radicalized, and churned into the masses, and the ways in which the feckless party members talk about them, is truly chilling.
The Inner Circle: Facebook executives. Mark Zuckerberg isn't Hitler. He's not Stalin. But he absolutely knows the harm his organization is inflicting on the world, and either doesn't see it as harm, or views it as an acceptable toll on the company’s quest for world domination—as do Sheryl Sandberg and all the others complicit in Facebook's metastasis. They could stop this all right now by splitting up their own company, or shutting it down entirely, accepting that the human costs—like actual, literal genocide—are too high. Of course, like all totalitarian leaders, they never will, because there is no human cost high enough to deter them.
But why does Facebook want these things? Why does it need to metastasize into every part of the body public?
The biggest difference between corporate and state-based totalitarianism is that of methodology; again, Facebook does not itself use physical force or terror. A smaller but still vital difference is the ideology at their respective hearts: For Nazi Germany, it was the supremacy of the Aryan "race" (and the supposed inferiority of the Jewish people and others deemed untermenschen). For Stalin's USSR, it was an extremely warped version of communism.
For Facebook, it's capitalism.
Yeah, fine, what Facebook's propagandists will say is that the company's core mission is to connect people. Connection without thought, without intention, without boundaries. Connecting people who believe the Earth is flat, who believe black Americans are just naturally inclined to criminality, who believe the Rohingya should all be murdered, who believe in pedophile rings but seem to ignore actual cases of child rape, who believe vaccines are dangerous. Connection is the mission that is drilled into Facebook employees, and which many of them parrot or at least use to excuse the fact that they willingly work for a company that is having a decidedly negative effect on human civilization.
But the reason for this mission is... money. Lots of it. All of the money. The reason Facebook wants this level of control over your life is so that it can accumulate an absolutely preposterous amount of capital, concentrated in the hands of Facebook's shareholders and, most importantly, its executives. Capitalism powers the Facebook machine, and is the beating heart of this corporate totalitarianism.
Facebook isn't alone. You could probably use the same framework to talk about any number of other giant corporations—Amazon, in particular. Amazon at one point made half its revenue from Amazon Web Services, which power a huge chunk of the internet as we know it; its labor practices, if not its fundamental ethos, are even worse than Facebook's; and the company also wants to build a walled garden from which you never leave while also bugging your home. Same for Google, whose tendrils already coil around so much of our lives. Apple is a whole other mess. On a smaller scale, but notable for the bewildering cult of personality he's inspired, Elon Musk has found himself a truly bizarre number of undersocialized 19-year-old boys who will defend even the dumbest fucking idea I've ever heard.
Totalitarian states are a unique horror. By comparison, this corporate totalitarianism seems almost benign. Facebook is (probably) not going to throw you, personally, into a concentration camp, though the odds of its technology and data being used to throw you, personally, into a concentration camp increase with each passing day. Mark Zuckerberg is not going to order your liquidation, or intentionally starve millions of people—though, once again, the odds that a Facebook-funded company or technology will be used to accomplish both those things are, well... non-zero.
But Facebook does want to dominate the entirety of its users lives, all across the world; to remove all parts of life that are not in some way connected to the company and all those it owns. Every act of the individual, subordinated to Facebook and its drive for capital.
What Facebook will do, what it has been doing all along, despite its stated mission of connecting people, is accelerate the atomization we've already been experiencing as Americans as the company supplants every other civil institution. Everyone is lying to you. Everyone is a hypocrite. Society itself, outside of Facebook, is a lie. Trust no one, least of all yourself. And make sure to hit that "Like" button.
*Because it buys out or just outright steals from the competition.