The pitfalls of excessive digitisation are there for all to see. Today, abdication of moral imagination is pervasive across the world. The digital media is reprogramming us. As the other stands eliminated, we encounter nothing but ourself in the digital echo chamber.
The journey towards a digital world has led to algorithmic control of society. Social media is a market place, not a social good. AI expert Yvonne Hofstetter argues that we are all living in a “black box society” which is a society of secret control. She further maintains that the private companies are now engaged in what “only totalitarian countries normally do ~ namely, keeping consumers under complete electronic surveillance.”
As truth is inconvenient to many of the democratic regimes’ triumphalist victory laps, many democrats are waging wars on democracy. Digitisation has given way to information capitalism which has unleashed a tsunami of information threatening all facets of our live including politics. South Korean philosopher Byung-Chul Han, in his book, Infocracy: Digitization and Crisis of Democracy, says that infocracy is a new form of rule. The great danger today, Han argues, “lies in the prevailing illusion that we are free.”
We are actually not, as we are “continuously surveilled, directed and controlled.” Social media platforms were once touted as an enabler for disenfranchised citizens to participate in civic engagement and in fostering democratic ideals. Today, more and more analysts agree that modern media platforms are holding democracy hostage.
Rather than empowering, it has become a tool for mass surveillance, phishing, fake news and tribalism. What was hailed as vehicles for providing a voice to the voiceless are increasingly being used as a means for empowering disruptive voices, messages and ideologies like xenophobia and neoNazism. Social media platforms have become key allies of authoritarian leaders and elected autocrats. Political scientist Ronald Delbert squarely blames the social media for the “descent into neo-fascism.”
When the presidency of Brazil’s far-right leader Jair Bolsonaro was being inaugurated in January 2019, a group of his supporters cheered the new president with shouts of “Facebook, Facebook, Facebook!” Another section yelled “WhatsApp, WhatsApp, WhatsApp!” With lies, misinformation and trolls ruling the roost, the 21st century is fast becoming a neomedieval age turning democracy into what Cameroonian political theorist Achille Mbembe calls “necropolitics.”
He explains how with the rise of racist, fascist and supra-nationalist forces, democracy has begun to embrace its dark side, what he calls its “nocturnal body” enabling the states and institutions to determine who lives, who dies and who gets locked in a state of precarity. Thanks to infocracy, politics has become dangerously fractious, broken and dysfunctional.
Autocratic regimes appropriate and control the flow of information to further their interests and power. As University of Michigan professor Ivo D Dinov explains, “out are monarchs, patriarchs, matriarchs, bureaucrats, and even technocrats. In are the information-wizards who possess the technical skills, adopt agile and transformative politics, and have the ability to rapidly search, process and summarise vast amounts of dynamic and incongruent input.” Today politics has made false gods and false villains.
The greatest threat to the state, Aristotle said, is not faction but distraction. The digital media ecosystem has disempowered the public sphere which has undermined democratic discourse. Infocrats and practitioners of necropolitics have taken full advantage of the current age of abundant distraction. As Noam Chomsky says, “the key element of social control is the strategy of distraction.”
With fake news becoming truth-proof, conspiracy theories have a field day. Uncertainty, Byung-Chul Han contends, is linked to distrust in major institutions and leaders. Conspiracy theories promise “to satisfy psychological needs.” Han further says that people are kept in “good spirits with the help of fun, consumption and entertainment.”
These are hardly new traits. Juvenal, Roman satirical poet, had famously said that “the people that once bestowed commands, consulships, legions, and all else, now concerns itself no more, and longs eagerly for just two things: bread and circuses!” Aviv Ovadya of Harvard University warns that we are heading towards “the infopocalypse,” that is, “no one believing anything or everyone believing lies.”
Today the media no longer informs, much less enlightens.It poses a great challenge to democracy. According to a study, ChatGPT lies better than humans. Another myth was propagated that big data would save politics. The objective reporting and fact checking narratives are swamped in the deluge of unsubstantiated claims and patriotic trolling. It has a debilitating effect on democracy. Long ago, Hannah Arendt recognised the dangers to democracy from lies in her famous essays “Lying in Politics” and “Truth and Politics.” She said characteristically that “we can shout truth to power and it will never be heard, because truth and politics don’t stand on common ground.”
The crux of her argument was that truthfulness has never been among the political virtues, and lies have always been regarded as justifiable tools in political dealings. The smartphone has become a “mobile parliament with which one debates everywhere and at all hours.” As such, rather than becoming empowered citizens, we have become mere “consumer cattle,” to borrow a phrase from Han’s book. We are in our digital comfort zone. We are witnessing the end of discourse.
Explaining the expulsion of the other, Han says that when “only my reality, my experience, my vision and nothing else matters, the other disappears and, with him, the fundamental of public discourse.” End of political ideology, particularly lack of clarity of the left-right debates has weakened democracy. Commitment to ideology meant a yearning for a cause.
The exhaustion of utopia is another factor in this debilitation. Political ideologies have exhausted their capacity either to explain events or to inspire men and women to constructive action. What is worse, many democracies today don’t have neutral umpires and independent gatekeepers which have been replaced by craven individuals whose role is to ensure that only one side wins the contest. The info bubbles have transformed citizens into what ByungChul Han calls “submissive cattle”.
It only leads to democracies’ vulnerabilities. As American poet Archibald MacLeish says, at pivotal moments, poets can “invent the age” by “inventing the metaphor.” That moment is now.
(The writer is director Institute of Social Sciences Delhi)