Don’t we shudder when we think that in a time of popular emotion all it takes is a word, just one word imprudently spoken without hatred by an honest man, to provoke so horrible a murder? EUGÈNE SUE, THE WANDERING JEW The most illuminating book ever written about social media was published in 1895. It is called La Psychologie des foules — or, in the English translation that appeared a year later, The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind. The book is a work of social science that reads like the work of a seer. “A crowd in the process of formation does not always imply the simultaneous presence of several individuals in one place. Thousands of separated individuals can, at a given moment, under the influence of certain violent emotions…. acquire the characteristic of a psychological crowd. Some chance event uniting them then suffices for their behavior to take on the special form of the acts of crowds.” The author of those sentences was Gustave Le Bon, and he was a kind of political Jules Verne or H.G. Wells. He foresaw many things — for example, that education is no impediment to participation in the crowd mind: “From the time they are part of a crowd, the ignorant and the learned become equally incapable of observation.” As he acidly noted, “a gathering of scholars and artists, by the sole fact that they are gathered together, does not render judgments on general subjects markedly different from those of an assembly of bricklayers or grocers.” And he foresaw, without an inkling of the enabling technology, the entire phenomenon of social media-induced conspiracy theories. QAnon, Pizzagate, criminal murders that are turned into political assassinations, the lie of a stolen presidential election, all the proliferating garbage of our twisted era — the wildfire spread of ideas with no value and no basis in fact — all these dark characteristics of our society are illuminated by what Le Bon intuited and described. I turned to Le Bon because I needed him. Some time ago I wrote a piece for the New York Times criticizing the anti-Biden stances taken by the Democratic Socialists of America and other progressives. My son, wiser in the ways of the web than me, assured me that the objects of my criticism would not take it lightly, and that he was preparing to defend me. I shrugged it off. After all, these were my comrades. My son was right, of course. Within minutes of the article’s appearance I was being battered on Twitter. This was not simply a matter of the shelter provided by anonymity or the ease with which one can retweet or “like” a negative tweet and bury its subject in invective. There was more at play here, I thought. The venom was spreading with a baffling and sickening rapidity. It was as if the act of reading a tweet caused an uncontrollable desire to spread it further. The fury of one person set off the fury of another, like a virus passing through the population, and there was no herd immunity. There was only a herd. The malice reached frightening proportions, and looking to understand the spread of this rage, its speed and its virulence, I turned back to Le Bon’s book. In the century after his book was published he was reviled and mocked — as he is more recently in So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed, Jon Ronson’s entertaining book on Twitter mobs — but on reading him again I discovered that when we remove our ideological blinkers (no easy task!) he has far more to say about historical and current developments than his outsider status would lead one to believe. 
Le Bon was born Nogent-le-Rorou, in France, in 1841 and died in the Parisian suburb of Marnes-la-Coquette in 1931. He wrote on a dizzying array of subjects. He studied medicine but never practiced it, so we find among his publications a treatise on illnesses of the genitourinary organs, a volume charmingly titled Apparent Deaths and Premature Burials, and a collection of slides for a conference on anatomy and histology. He was also the author of volumes on smoking, on Annamite — or ancient Indochinese — archaeology, on travels to Nepal, on equestrian-ism and its principles. But politics and society were the heart of his work, and the only part of lasting interest. Le Bon was very much a conservative of his time and place, with a profoundly pessimistic vision of the lifespan of civilizations in the spirit of Gobineau and the later Spengler. Which is to say, there is much in Le Bon to dislike. Hatred of socialism and democracy, of women’s rights and universal education, feature prominently in his writings. His stress on the concept of “nationality” and race, and his contempt for non-white races, are not at all hidden. All this explains his banishment to the sidelines of modern social thought. But Le Bon expresses a big idea that we must not ignore. His central and lasting intuition was that once a person becomes a member of a crowd, he ceases to exist as an individual. He is as if “hypnotized” and is “no longer conscious of his acts.” With the fading of the conscious personality as he joins the crowd, the unconscious personality predominates, “orient[ed] through suggestion and the contagion of feelings and ideas in the same direction” as those around him. “Isolated, he was perhaps a cultivated individual; in a crowd he becomes someone driven by instincts, consequently a barbarian.” Any act becomes possible. Le Bon’s ominous vision of the crowd was strongly influenced by two events he lived through: the Paris Commune of 1871 and the Boulangist movement of the late 1880s. The Paris Commune, the first working-class government in history, was established at the end of the Franco-Prussian War in 1871, in which Le Bon had served as head of the army’s ambulance corps, receiving the Légion d’Honneur for his services. The onerous conditions imposed on
There's nothing Artificial about our Intelligence