A black man goes undercover in the altright Theo E.J. Wilson
I took a cell phone
and accidentally made myself famous.
(Laughter)
I was just talking
about the things that I cared about,
but with the click of a button
and an incendiary viral video
I propelled myself into overnight stardom.
When I say overnight,
I mean I literally woke up
the next morning
with so many notifications on my phone,
I thought I slept
through a national tragedy.
(Laughter)
It was the craziest thing, guys,
but when it came to my influence
and my exposure,
I literally took a quantum leap.
So I made more videos
and the subject matter of my videos
was often the most divisive subject
in American life,
but it was the way that I articulated race
that made me somewhat
of a digital lightning rod.
See, being a survivor myself
of police brutality
and having lost a childhood friend,
Alonzo Ashley,
at the hands of the police,
I had a little something
to say about the topic.
You see, this was at the height
of the Black Lives Matter furor
and people seemed to be turning
to me to articulate their viewpoints,
and honestly, it was sort of overwhelming.
You see, the internet
has this interesting quality.
In one way, it totally
brought the world together,
and I remember being a kid
and all of this utopian propaganda
was being dumped on us
about how the World Wide Web
was going to span the reaches
of people across the globe.
But as it turns out, people are people.
(Laughter)
And this magical superhighway
also took the demons of our nature
and gave them Ferraris.
(Laughter)
You see, technology, y’all,
is a lot like money.
It just brings out what’s already
inside you and amplifies it.
And so I soon became familiar
with the phenomenon of the internet troll.
These guys seem to live
beneath the bridges
of said superhighway –
(Laughter)
And they also missed the memo about
the enlightenment of the internet age.
I remember being called
highly colorful racial slurs
by those who use
the anonymity of the internet
as a Klan hood.
And some of them
were pretty creative, actually,
but others were pretty wounding,
especially navigating
the post-traumatic world
of a police brutality survivor
in the height of Black Lives Matter,
with all of these people
being killed on my timeline.
To these trolls, I wasn’t a human.
I was an idea, an object,
a caricature.
Did I mention that this race stuff
can be kind of divisive?
You see, I’m an innately curious person
and as I drew my sword to engage
in epic battles in the comment section –
(Laughter)
I also began to notice
that a few of my trolls
actually had brains,
which made me even more curious
and what to understand them even further.
And although these supposed morons
engaged in what appeared
to be original thought,
I said to myself,
“Um, these guys are highly misinformed,
at least according to my knowledge.”
Where are these guys
getting these arguments from?
Like, was there some kind
of alternative universe
with alternative facts?
(Laughter)
(Applause)
Was history and gravity
optional over there?
I don’t know.
But I needed to know.
Like, I wanted to know.
And as it turns out, I had no idea
about digital echo chambers.
That same target marketing algorithm
that feeds you more
of the products you like to buy
also feeds you more
of the news that you like to hear.
I had been living in an online universe
that just reflected
my worldview back to me.
So my timeline was pretty liberal.
I had no Breitbart
or Infowars or Fox News.
No, no, I was all MSNBC
and The Daily Show,
CNN and theGrio, right?
Well, these trolls were hopping
the dimensional doorway
and I needed to figure out how.
(Laughter)
So what I decided to do
was trick the Facebook algorithm
into feeding me more news
that I didn’t necessarily agree with,
and this worked fine for a while,
but it wasn’t enough,
because my online footprint
already established the patterns
that I like to hear.
So with the anonymity of the internet,
I went undercover.
(Laughter)
I set up this ghost profile
and went crazy.
Now, on a practical level,
it was very simple,
but on an emotional level,
it was kind of daunting,
especially with the racist vitriol
that I had experienced.
But what I didn’t realize
is that my trolls were inoculating me,
thickening my skin,
making me immune to viewpoints
that I didn’t necessarily agree with,
and so I didn’t react to the same things
as I would have several months prior.
All right? So I pressed on.
Noticing that this stuff
also worked on YouTube,
I became Lucius25,
white supremacist lurker –
(Laughter)
And digitally I began to infiltrate
the infamous alt-right movement.
Now, my doppelgänger
was Edgar Rice Burroughs'
John Carter character –
(Laughter)
a sci-fi hero who was once
a Confederate soldier.
And to think, like, years ago,
I would have needed acting training
and, like, makeup and a fake ID.
Now I could just lurk.
And so I started
with a little Infowars,
went on into some American Renaissance,
National Vanguard Alliance,
and, you know, I started
commenting on videos,
talking bad about Al Sharpton
and Black Lives Matter.
I started bemoaning race baiters
like Eric Holder and Barack Obama
and just mirroring
the antiblack sentiments
that were thrown at me.
And to be honest,
it was kind of exhilarating.
(Laughter)
Like, I would literally spend days
clicking through my new racist profile –
(Laughter)
Goofing off at work in Aryan land.
It was something else.
(Laughter)
And so I then started
visiting some of the pages
of my former trolls,
and a lot of these guys
were just regular Joes,
a lot of outdoorsmen,
hunters, computer nerds,
some of them family guys
with videos of their families.
I mean, for all I know, some of y’all
could be in this room right now. Right?
(Laughter)
But when I went undercover,
I found a lovely plethora of characters,
luminaries like Milo Yiannopoulos,
Richard Spencer and David Duke.
All of these guys were
thought leaders in their own right,
but over time, the alt-right movement
ended up using their information
to fuel their momentum.
And I’m going to tell you what else
led to the momentum of the alt-right:
the left wing’s wholesale demonization
of everything white and male.
If you are a pale-skinned penis-haver,
you’re in league with Satan.
(Laughter)
Now, would you believe,
would you believe that some people
find that offensive?
And –
(Laughter)
And so, I mean, listen,
the fact is that millennials
get a lifetime of diet brand history.
I mean, America seems to be hellbent
on filling its textbooks
with CliffsNotes versions
of its dark past.
This severely, severely decontextualizes
race and the anger associated with it,
and that is fertile ground
for alt-facts to grow.
Add in the wild landscape of the internet
and it’s easy to sell
rebranded “Mein Kampf” ideas
to a generation who has been
failed by public schools.
A lot of these ideas, easily debunked.
Alt-facts have that quality.
However, one theme kept screaming at me
through the subtext of those arguments,
and that was,
why should I be hated
for who I cannot help but be?
Now, as a black man in America,
that resonated with me.
I have spent so much time
defending myself
against attempts to demonize me
and make me apologize for who I am,
trying to portray me
as something that I’m not,
some kind of thug or gangster,
a menace to society.
Unexpected compassion.
Wow.
Now, listen,
the historical source of the demonization
of black males and white males
is highly different,
and where you fall on this argument,
sadly, tends to be an accident of birth.
Now, you’re probably surprised
by this perspective,
and so was I.
Never in a billion years did I think
that I could have some kind of compassion
for people who hated my guts.
Now, mind you, not enough compassion
like I want to be friends.
I don’t have infinite olive branches
to extend to people
who, like, would not want
to see me on this planet. Right?
But just enough compassion to understand
how they got to where they are.
And to be honest,
there were a couple of fair points.
One of them was how liberals
have this wide acceptance for everybody
except for those with honestly held
conservative viewpoints.
(Laughter)
Heaven forbid you love God,
this country and mean it. Right?
And another thing that they talked about
was this fear that they had
of something that they labeled
as “white genocide,”
that diversity would be a force
that would wipe them out.
Now listen, I know what it is to fear
for the fate of your people.
Between crack, AIDS, gang violence,
mass incarceration,
gentrification, police shootings,
black people have more
than enough reasons to stay up at night.
But if nature is into diversity
and you are not,
you’re going to lose that fight, buddy.
(Laughter)
(Applause)
You see, nature doesn’t care
about your race. That’s man-made.
Nature just cares about healthy organisms,
and your precious ethnic features
are expendable to that aim.
So the moment that you let go
of that racist identity
and relatch onto humanity,
all your problems go away.
(Applause)
I’m going to tell you
what race ain’t about to die out:
the human race.
Join the party. The water’s great.
Until the water gets too hot,
but that’s another TED Talk.
(Laughter)
The point is that to get
to this point of understanding,
you have to let go of that fear
and embrace your curiosity,
and sadly, too many people
will not take that journey
to see the world from the other side.
And, I mean, let’s be honest,
that doesn’t just go for progressives,
but also to the right wing
and conservatives.
You know, as fair
as some of their points were,
they were still trapped
in their own echo chambers,
recycling old, outdated points of view,
never getting a diversity in perspective,
not making them well-rounded
in their worldview.
So they’re not hearing
certain anti-racist and political voices,
voices like Tim Wise
and Michelle Alexander, Dr. Joy DeGruy,
Boyce Watkins, Tariq Nasheed.
All of these voices have the answers
to the questions that they want,
but unfortunately they will not hear them
due to the power of these echo chambers.
We have got to break out
of these digital divides,
because as our technology advances,
the consequences of our tribalism
become more dangerous.
And this whole experience
taught me something:
our gadgets ain’t going to save us.
All these technological devices
are only mastery of the universe
out there, not the one in here.
And so that’s all IQ, not EQ.
That’s a dangerous imbalance.
Where do you get
the emotional intelligence,
the character development,
the virtues of patience,
forbearance, compassion,
you know, the things that make sure
that these devices, however advanced,
become a blessing and not a curse?
Seems to be me that humanity itself
needs an upgrade.
Now –
(Applause)
That’s a big task, understandably,
but I don’t believe
in any kind of unbeatable monster.
There was no giant out there
without perhaps a simple Achilles heel.
And what if I told you
that one of the best ways
to actually overcome this
is to have courageous conversations
with difficult people,
people who do not see the world
the same way that you see the world?
Oh yes, folks, conversations may be
indeed the key to that upgrade,
because remember,
language was the first form
of virtual reality.
It is literally a symbolic representation
of the physical world,
and through this device,
we change the physical world.
Keep in mind, conversations stop violence,
conversations start countries,
they build bridges,
and when the chips are down,
conversations are the last tools
that humans use
before they pick up their guns.
And I ain’t talking
about online safe conversations
from the security of your laptop.
No.
I’m talking about in-your-face
conversations with real, breathing people.
And for me, this looks
like running a community forum
called Shop Talk Live.
Now, in Shop Talk Live –
somebody’s been there, right?
In Shop Talk Live,
we have the conversations
that change lives.
We meet the community
right where they are,
and we’ve done everything
from divert gang violence in real time
to help find people jobs
to mentoring homeless youth.
And the reason why we needed to do this
is because there was a severe lack
of trust in the black community
due to the violence of the crack era.
And so we ended up taking
agency into our own hands,
solving our own problems,
not waiting for anybody else.
And the truth is,
from the mayor to the felon,
you’re going to find them
in that barber shop.
And so what we did was just
organize what was already going on.
And so what I started doing
was mining these alternative viewpoints
from these alternative digital universes,
dissecting them, breaking them down
into controversial talking points.
Then, with my cell phone,
I flipped the internet against itself
and began to broadcast
these live conversations
to my online followers.
This made them want to leave
the safety of their laptops
and meet us in person
to have real conversations
with real people in real life.
And we did this. Thank you.
(Applause)
Sometimes I sit back,
and I reflect on the paradox
of me just trying to solve the problems,
us trying to solve the problems
in our own communities –
we build bridges
to so many other communities,
from the LGBTQ community
to the Arab immigrant community
and even sat down with somebody
with a Confederate flag on their hat
and talked about the things
that actually matter.
It is time that we stop trying
to hack our way
around the human experience.
There is no way out of each other.
Stop trying to find one.
(Applause)
We have to understand something.
Human beings all want the same things
and we have to go through
each other to get these things.
These courageous conversations
are the way that these bridges are built.
It’s time that we start
seeing people as people
and not simply the ideas
that we project onto them or react to.
Human beings are not the barriers
but the gateways
to the very things that we want.
This is a collective
and conscious evolution.
My journey began with
a terribly popular cell phone video
and a fallen friend.
Your journey begins right about now.
Join the renaissance in human connection.
It is going to happen with or without you.
My suggestion: pick a topic,
and start a community dialogue
in your neck of the woods.
Meet folks back in real life.
And I’m going to tell you,
when you trick the algorithm
of your existence,
you will get some diversified experiences.
It is time to grow, people.
And when we do this, not if,
it will be clear
that the key to this upgrade
was always our inner world,
not some device that we create,
and the doorways
to this experience is now,
and will forever be, each other.
Thank you.
(Applause)