When the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention told Americans in January that they did not have to wear masks, Dr. S. Vincent Rajkumar, a professor at the Mayo Clinic and the editor of the Blood Cancer Journal, did not believe his ears.
But he remained silent until Zeynep Tufekci (pronounced ZAY-nep te-FEK-chee), a sociologist he met on Twitter, wrote that the CDC had blundered by saying that protective face masks should be worn by health workers, but not by normal people.
“Here I am, the editor of a magazine in a high-profile institution, and yet I did not have the guts to express that it just does not make sense,” said Dr. Rajkumar my. “Everyone should wear masks.”
Ms. Tufekci, an associate professor at the University of North Carolina’s School of Information and Library Science with no obvious qualifications in epidemiology, came out against the CDC recommendation on March 1. tweetstorm before expanding on her critique in an March 17 Op-Ed article for The New York Times.
The CDC changed its tune in April, advising all Americans over the age of 2 to wear masks to slow the spread of the coronavirus. Michael Basso, a senior health scientist at the agency who had been pushing internally to recommend masks, told me that Mrs Tufekci’s public criticism of the bureau was the ‘tipping point’.
In recent years, many public voices have gotten the big things wrong – election predictions, the effects of digital media on American politics, the risk of a pandemic. Ms. Tufekci, a 40-something who speaks a mile a minute with a light Turkish accent, has none of the trappings of the renowned academic as the professional pundit. But long before she became perhaps the only good amateur epidemiologist, she had quietly made a habit of being equal on the big things.
And the success of Mrs. Tufekci and others like her in seeing clearly in our stupid times represents a kind of revenge on the nerds, such as outsiders from American politics and from the pressure of Silicon Valley to put money and ideology together lie show what insiders do not do.
In 2011, she went against the present to say that the case for Twitter was to simplify a driver of broad social movements. In 2012, she warned media reports that her coverage of school leaps could inspire more. In 2013, she claimed that Facebook could ensure ethnic cleansing. In 2017, she warned that YouTube’s recommendation algorithm could be used as a tool of radicalization.
And when it comes to the pandemic, they sound the alarm early on, while also struggling to keep parks and beaches open.
“I was just struck by how right she has been,” said Julia Marcus, an epidemiologist of infection at Harvard Medical School.
I was envious of knowing how Ms. Tufekci had gotten so many things just in such a confusing time, so we talked last week about FaceTime. She told me that she shares her usual habit of having a childhood that she would not wish for anyone.
“A lot of things came together, which I’m glad I survived,” she said, sitting outside a brick house she rents for $ 2,300 a month in Chapel Hill, NC, where she raises her 11-year-old son as a Single parent. “But the way they got together was not super happy when it happened.”
These are, by their lights, the ingredients to see clearly:
-
Knowledge spanning disciplines and academic disciplines, on which she acted as a computer programmer who entered sociology.
-
A habit of complex, system-based thinking, which led to harsh criticism in the news media The Atlantic of America in the run-up to the pandemic.
Add these things to a skill in moving journalism and politics through some sort of game inside, and Mrs. Tufekci has had a remarkable influence. But it began, she says, with growing up in an unhappy home in Istanbul. She said her alcoholic mother threw her in the street in the early hours of the morning. She found some comfort in science fiction – Ursula K. Le Guin was a favorite – and in the optimistic, early internet.
In the mid-1990s, still a teenager, they moved out. She soon found a job nearby as a programmer for IBM. She was an office misfit, a casually dressed young woman under the suits, but she fell in love on the company’s internal bulletin board. She liked that a colleague in Japan did not know her age or gender when she asked a technical question.
She stumbled upon the source of her career when she discovered an email list, the Zapatista Solidarity Network, centered on Indian activists in southern Mexico who had taken up arms against neoliberalism in general and grounded privatization imposed by the North American Free Trade Agreement in particular. For Ms. Tufekci, the network provided a community of digital friends and intellectual sparring partners.
In 1998, she traveled to Chiapas, Mexico, and saw that the Zapatistas themselves were engaged in a traditional peasant uprising, the kind of thing that could have happened decades earlier. But now there was something new: the online global community around them. Perhaps because of a kind of egalitarian nerd ideology that served her well, she never sought to meet the charismatic leader of the rebels, known as Subcomandante Marcos.
“I have a thing that screws fame and charisma with your head,” she said. “I’ve made an enormous effort all my life to keep my mind up.”
Mrs Tufekci is the only person I have ever spoken to who believes that modern times began with Zapatista Solidarity. For them, it was a first spark of “bottom-up globalization” that they see as the shadow of the shining spread of capitalism. She claims that her theory has nothing to do with how the movement affected her personally.
She received a PhD. of the University of Texas at Austin studied what she calls “technosociology” and became obsessed with how digital media could change society in the Twitter-driven social movements of the late aughts – the Arab Spring, Occupy Wall Street, Gezi Park in their native Turkey.
While many American thinkers were wide-eyed about the revolutionary potential of social media, they developed a more complex view, one that they expressed when they sat to the left of Teddy Goff, the digital director of President Obama’s re-election campaign, sitting in South at Southwest Panel in Austin in 2012.
Mr Goff was enthusiastic about the campaign’s ability to send various messages to individual voters based on the digital data it had collected about them. Ms Tufekci quickly objected to the practice, saying that microtargeting would be more likely to be used to sow division.
More than four years later, after Donald J. Trump won the 2016 election, Mr. Goff sent Mrs. Tufekci a letter saying she was right.
“At a time when everyone was stupidly optimistic about the potential of the internet, they did not buy the hype,” he told me. “She was very cautious about seeing that there would be a deeper rot on the role of data-driven politics in our world.”
Ms. Tufekci’s views on tech were not uncommon among the small group of sociologists who focused on new technologies. But they delivered their skeptical take at a time when the social sciences and qualitative research had fallen out of fashion. The rise of digital was all about the numbers, and the Tech makers and their cheerleaders in academia were suspicious of anything that could not be quantified. Big data had yielded sociological observation.
Many tech journalists, fascinated by the internet-driven movements sweeping the world, were slow to figure out the ways in which they might fail, or how social media could be used against them. However, Ms Tufekci had “seen movement falter due to a lack of organizational depth and experience, of tools as a culture for collective decision-making, and long-term strategic action,” she wrote in her 2017 book, “Twitter and Teargas.”
That is, the same social-media espionage that hastened their rise sometimes left them “unable to participate in the tactics and decision-making that all movements must manage in order to survive,” she wrote.
That’s a lesson many social movements have learned since those days, and Black Lives Matter’s summer protests have locked up in some immediate political gains. Some in Silicon Valley take social science more seriously these days as well. Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey told me last fall that, if he had to do it all over again, he would have hired a social scientist to help design the service.
One of the things that Ms. Tufekci points out in this gloomy moment is her lack of irony or fatigue. She’s not a target prophet, after hanging on to a start on Internet optimism she shares with Craigslist founder Craig Newmark and a few others.
That optimism is part of what got her into the literature of pandemics. Ms Tufekci has taught epidemiology as a way to prepare her students for globalization and to make a point about human nature: Politicians and the news media often expect looting and crime as disasters, as they did when Hurricane Katrina in 2005 in New Orleans hit. But the reality on the ground has more to do with common acts of boldness and kindness, she thinks.
Public health officials seem to have an outward motive when they told citizens that masks were useless: They were trying to protect a run of protective gear that could not have made it available to health care workers. t were necessary. Tufekci’s trust in human nature has led her to believe that the government should trust citizens enough with them, instead of jeopardizing its credibility with recommendations that they later reverse.
“They did not trust us to tell the truth about masks,” she said. “We think of society as this Hobbesian thing, as opposed to the reality where most people are very friendly, most people are inclined to solidarity.”
Mrs. Tufekci’s new cause is ventilation; her car is The Atlantic, which gave her a contract after contributing to The Times as a freelancer for many years. Ironically, just as the Times’ opinion department was tearing itself apart over the charge that a senator’s views could endanger Protestants, the one writer who had certainly saved lives slipped out of a side chamber. Her March column on masks was one of the most influential The Times has published, though – or perhaps because – it unleashed the political edge that draws wide attention to an opinion piece.
Public health authorities are now listening to them. Two months after her article on Op-Ed, Dr. Rajkumar and Ms. Tufekci participated in a conference call with World Health Organization officials who were concerned that people who had gotten into the habit of wearing masks would think they were safe and start behaving recklessly.
“No, listen, I’m a sociologist, I know that’s not true,” Mrs. Tufekci told her.
Now I ask myself: what is she talking about right now? And what are the rest of us wrong about?
One area where they might be for the pack is the effects of social media on society. It’s a debate she considers to be carefully binary, disconnected from plausible solutions, with journalists engaging in the personal morals of technical heads like Mark Zuckerberg, as they assume the role of shopping center for the platforms that they cover.
“The real question is not whether Zuck does what I want or not,” she said. “The real question is why he decides what hate speech is.”
They also suggest that we can get it wrong if we focus on individuals – on CEOs, on social media activists like them. The likely response to a media environment that reinforces false reports and hate speech, she thinks, is the return of functional governments, along with the birth of a new framework, however incomplete, that will hold digital platforms accountable for what they host.
“It’s converted that I do this, it feels good,” she said. “But in the ideal world, people like me are a bit redundant, and we have these faceless, nameless experts and bureaucrats who tell us: this is what you need to do.”
