Some of our actions, such as taking airplanes to distant locations, directly cause climate change. But we participate less directly in many other activities and institutions that cause global heating and other harms. How can we avoid or limit this complicity?
Facebook, Twitter, and yellow journalism
I no longer participate in Facebook or Twitter, because I don’t want to be complicit in their spreading of falsehoods. A.J. Liebling said, in the New Yorker, in 1960, that “freedom of the press is guaranteed only to those who own one.” Twitter and Facebook are like newspapers (the “press” Liebling was referring to). They have a much larger reach than any newspaper, almost 3 billion for Facebook, and 450 million for Twitter. Unlike newspapers, they deny responsibility for the content they publish, because it is generated by their users. But this denial is disingenuous when their bans, controls, and algorithms determine which posts each user sees. They make money by showing ads to their users. They make money when their users view ads along with other (user-generated) content, so they have an incentive to present content that will cause users to read and post more. One of the best ways of doing this is to get users angry about some issue.
Social media’s ability to provoke users is enabled by a key difference between newspapers and Facebook and Twitter: the social-media services’ algorithms tailor content individually for each user. Items are shown to users not necessarily based on their interests, but rather based on the likelihood that the items will cause users to click on them and generate more ad revenue.
In some ways, Facebook and Twitter are like the New York World and New York Journal, newspapers published in the 1890s by Joseph Pulitzer and William Randolph Hearst. These were the quintessential yellow-journalism papers, which exaggerated news events, and highlighted scandal-mongering and sensationalism, to increase circulation. They tended to focus on sensational accounts of crimes, sports, and scandal. Their journalistic methods were questionable: they relied heavily on unnamed or paid sources, faked interviews, misleading headlines, and pseudoscience. They used these devices to compete for circulation, at 2 cents per copy. These are akin to the tactics used by Facebook and Twitter to increase their ad revenue.
I don’t want to support Facebook and Twitter. They do more harm than good. Their propagation of untruths and their use as organizing hubs for whackos touting preposterous conspiracy theories outweigh their value in connecting people for legitimate discourse. I’ve moved to Mastodon, a non-profit, distributed service with a neutral content algorithm, but the user base, and consequently the community there, are much smaller.
Degrees of Complicity
The first definition of “complicity” in my Oxford English Dictionary is “the being an accomplice; partnership in an evil action.” But how deeply does one have to be involved, in order to be complicit in something? Does it require that one actually facilitate the evil action, or just acquiesce? The point of complicity is that one is at least somewhat responsible for the evil actions in which one is complicit. This responsibility is the touchstone of complicity. There’s a spectrum of complicity, from directly supporting something bad, to participating in an organization or movement that somehow provides indirect support.
When I participate in Facebook or Twitter, either by posting, or just visiting the sites, I am being served ads, which provides revenue for the sites. When I eat meat that I have purchased, I provide revenue for the animal agriculture system, which provides bad living conditions for animals and contributes substantially to climate disruption. I’m complicit because I take actions that provide revenue sustaining the system. I am therefore partially responsible for the system. This is a direct, active complicity.
Am I complicit in the actions of the US because I’m a citizen of that country and live there? My intuition says “yes,” because I influence how the US behaves through voting and political action. But am I not forced to participate? What are my alternatives⏤give up my citizenship and leave the country? Am I complicit in US policies that I don’t support? I remember traveling in Europe during the Trump years and feeling like everyone was judging me by my country’s bad choices.
Another example of semi-passive complicity is religion. If I were a Catholic, I’d probably want to remain in the church in spite of any disagreements I might have with church policies and positions, such as the church’s opposition to abortion. This is very similar to my wanting to stay in the U.S. for personal reasons, even though I don’t support all of its policies. And work provides yet another example. For decades I worked as a computer programmer for big New York banks, mostly building payment systems. I helped Chase and Citibank succeed. There are a host of policies and actions those banks take that I do not support, for example, their funding of fossil-fuel projects. Should I have refused to work for them? Even though I needed the work?
Am I complicit in racism, just by being white? I’m not actively doing or choosing anything which makes the situation worse, but I have obtained unearned advantages from being white. This is a borderline case, but I’m probably somewhat complicit in racism, even though I try hard not to engage in racist behavior.
Another example of passive complicity is economic. I was brought up in a middle-class home and was well educated. As a result, I have multiple options for earning a good living doing work that I enjoy⏤legal work or computer programming. A child growing up in a poor area of Los Angeles would have to strive and struggle for years to get into either of those professions, though doing so was relatively easy for me. And for an average Somalian child, whose family has a tiny fraction of the economic resources of a poor Los Angeles family, the goal of a professional career is completely out of bounds. I have unfair advantages stemming from my luck in being born where and when I was born. I am complicit in a system with an unfairly high level of economic inequality.
There’s a gradation, from active to passive complicity. I deserve to feel a bit guilty the few times I eat meat, because I know I am contributing to climate disruption and the unhappiness of animals. I would feel guilty if I participated in Facebook and Twitter. For these active complicities, I weigh the benefits I or the world get against the harms done and decide what to do. I bear the responsibility for my decision.
But what can I do to avoid the more passive forms of complicity in systems I don’t like? Disaffiliating with the US might absolve me of complicity in the nation’s policies and actions, but it would be a huge disruption in my life. And, as I argue in my book Earthling, I might be doing more good by living here and influencing policies in the US than I would by living in Europe, where the environmental policies and separation of church and state are more to my liking.
Perhaps a Buddhist monk could avoid being complicit--she doesn’t participate in the economic system and mostly lives a life that avoids doing harm. If she lived in Tibet, that would avoid most of the bad-country complicity: Tibet contributes little to global heating and other environmental harms, and isn’t aggressive toward other countries. She wouldn’t have to worry about the policies of her church, because there is no centralized Buddhist church that might be doing harm. The Buddhists think that, by perfecting their spiritual selves through meditation, they are doing maximal good in the world. I might disagree with this, but I acknowledge they do little harm. However, I want to have some effect on the world. I want to do some good, not just not do bad.
Most of us can’t avoid being complicit in a lot of wrongs. The most we can do is to consider how our actions and decisions affect others, and to try to take some action to reverse the conditions, like racism and poverty, that give us unfair advantages over others. We can also speak out against actions we disagree with when we’re part of the group performing the action.