SPLINTERTEXTUALITY — THE LINK BETWEEN DIGITAL TECHNOLOGY AND POLITICS

Splintertextuality

Madhusudan Mukerjee

All this — and more — if I should tell –

Would never be believed –

Emily Dickinson

Every emergent technology alters socio-cultural and political equations. The radio made Hitler in less than forty years. The television, in its heyday, made Kennedy and Reagan. Print secured Indian independence and sparked the French Revolution. Nuclear science dropped the temperature of war between the two most powerful nations for forty-five years. The internet facilitated the ‘Arab Spring’. Digital technology, in its flat-screen hyper-interactivity, made Trump.

However, politics is about power — and the hands that rule the nation rock the revolution in its cradle. Technology forces the powers-that-be to use force to adapt it to their own agendas and restrict it for others. No technology could make politics impossible.

This essay analyzes the overarching effects of digitalization and how it transforms politics and the politician. It proceeds to see how the psychology of digital technology affects political developments. It shall propound a theory of Intertextuality to understand how the virtual complements real world popularity and power.

A.I. is the ablative offshoot of ‘overheated’ digital technology — an extension of our extensions. In conclusion, therefore, I look forward, considering the addition of new algorithms to A.I. and its outcomes.

The Tedium is the Presage

“…it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity…”

Charles Dickens

Tetrad: McLuhan’s metaphor of the rearview mirror and his cryptic claim that “if it works it’s obsolete”, shows us that to tire of one technology is a sign that a new one is emerging. A.I. is a sign that the digital, as we know it, is on the way out. With the benefit of hindsight, then, we shall examine what Digital technology has done to us.

According to McLuhan, in the posthumously published Laws of Media, each medium has a four-pronged effect:

i. Enhancement (an amplification of a sense or limb)

ii. Obsolescence (other media or aspects of culture pushed aside)

iii. Retrieval (of an older medium)

iv. Reversal (When the medium ‘overheats’, it reverses or transforms into an earlier medium) (Bogost 25–6).

We attempt to be like the media we create, feeling strangely compelled to first behave like our new media. We then attempt to do what the technology cannot. Thus, mechanical technologies led to the waltz in dance and Jazz in music (McLuhan 29) while electronic technology resulted in rave music and hip-hop in dance. Slow motion and ‘locking’ in street dance attempted to match high-speed still pictures taken by cameras. When we program robots to dance together, though, it shows a desire to revive old media through the transformation of new ones.

Mimetizing the Mainframe: We are currently in the stage of imitation. Digital technology is an exteriorization of the human nervous system, including our brains. We forget that, fundamentally, this technology is digital. It is run using a binary system — an all-or-nothing operation of zeroes and ones. This extreme dependence on binaries accelerates difference infinitely. A culture infected by digital media finds itself polarized as never before. This is visible in the Brexit mandate as well as the U.S. elections. A person who disagrees is now seen as an opponent to be reviled, abused and cajoled until she is proselytized or removed. Several public figures now abstain from social networking sites for fear of further invective by trolls. Trolling takes many forms, including terrorism, xenophobia and fundamentalism. This intolerance for — and augmentation of the perception of — difference, is a consequence of the binary nature underlying the digital.

The Rustic Globetrotter: As a cliché stretches into overuse, we become ‘anaesthetized’ to its effects. McLuhan’s coinage, “the global village” (McLuhan 101), has been so overdone that we ignore its more pertinent ramifications. As the globe compresses itself into village-like proportions, the village, with all its structures, hierarchies and socio-political patterns, magnifies over the globe. The internet imposes rural social structures on the world.

The village is not really the innocent and cohesive entity we imagine. It is often a microcosm of prejudices and divisions between clans, religions, and races. The Internet lets us associate more with people who share our biases, sit under our online tree vindicating our prejudices. We do not verify the veracity of our vilifications. Unlike in a real village where we would occasionally encounter our ‘other’, we can choose which millions to ignore. People connect “to the extent that their individual interests and choices coincide.” (Bakardjieva 286). In this collective of the erroneous we walk the streets believing that our hating brothers are with us, catalyzing degrees of violence we might not have displayed before.

Amplification without Amputation: As the brain and the body amplify across the world, an individual’s perception expands to fit it. All media do this to us and to explain McLuhan’s famous dictum with a simple example, when we drive a car, we begin to feel like our body is now the body of the car. We negotiate through crowds as if the proportions of the car are those of our own limbs, flinching before a collision. However, when we step out of a car, we don’t walk with a mental box around us. We never really step out of the digital world. Our phones and tablets keep our body/consciousness perpetually uploaded, staying amplified, unable to amputate the new technology for even a second. We carry a doppelganger attached to us like a shadow (McCutcheon 127).

Institutions and social groups are media. The social groups we are a part of (real or virtual) are amplifications of ourselves just as technologies are. Just as we have to expand our “pace and scale” (McLuhan 8) of perception to fit the car we need alter our perception, psyche and identity to fit the institutions or social networks we are members of. Today, an individual is a part of multiple online social and political groups and staying (wirelessly) plugged in allows the ‘body’ of that group to be the body of the individual at all times. We are perpetual shape changers. The trauma of multiple bodies is something the un-digital man was never used to. He had only one body and that was the one that was not his. His tribe, village was the uber-body that he lived and died in. The net makes an individual feel everywhere-at-once and she feels the trauma of every socket being pulled out, the joy of another one being plugged in, the combined weight of a million servers in her collective unconscious in a way Jung could never have imagined.

This dual perception of two simultaneous bodies is traumatic and stressful for a simple reason: individuals need to reinforce their affiliation to a group of real people by acquiring signifying patterns (of clothing, appearance, speech, mannerism) that iterate membership and repeat them often enough to remind one another of their membership. Similarly, on a larger scale, in the virtual world, people find themselves perpetually preoccupied with the necessity of discovering, imbibing and reinforcing (if not occasionally inventing) the multifarious signifiers necessary to feel like a part of different social networks simultaneously. The online social network, is intangible, global, abstract and amorphous. It is an unverifiable continuum that continually changes and therefore the networked mind needs a far greater effort to trace the nature of this new, unpredictable body-identity. This creates an anxiety, a spiked restlessness, and awakens a new edginess in the populace that, on account of being compelled to change so quickly and so often, becomes quickly dissatisfied with the things and events around them. The need for quicker changes in political action, then is an inevitable consequence.

Politicians and Power

“Let me have men about me that are fat”

Julius Caesar Act I Sc. II

The Secret: In a world of infinite sharing, the secret has become a rarity — an antique, an exotic creator of intrigue and an achievement to be marveled at. Live feeds of breaking news and deluges of rumours on social networks have amplified the overvaluation of the secret. More than ever, the politician who can keep secrets will stay in power. More than ever, now, the politician who lets out that a secret has been kept will be seen as a more capable and powerful figure than her competitors.

Screenification: Unfortunately the screen that we use is flat. This inhibits tactility while drowning us in multisensory interaction. Paradoxically, our senses, when exhausted by the stress of a new medium, desire an earlier experience but mediated by the new medium itself. Digital technology is intensely “cool” (participatory, interactive) (McLuhan25) but provides a glossy tactility, leaving the senses desperate for depth. The screen suddenly comes to life when filled with ‘hot’ content. In an environment saturated with interactive screens, cool content is now passé; ‘hot’ content makes the screen feel more tactile than it is; ‘hot’ Politicians with extremely expressive mannerisms and caricaturist responses now grab our attention.

Shock and Awe: The two-dimensional screen irks more when there is no digitally mediated image on it. The difference between a reflection and a photograph is that the first shows us an image of ourselves as it is; the latter shows us an image of us as the camera sees us. The eternal selfie of the blank screen (when a device is off) is irritating. We switch our screens on even without an ostensible purpose because in the age of hyper-interactive flatness, the reflection is more intolerable than the selfie. It combines a reflection with a photograph while giving us the joy of ‘doing’. The reflection bugs us because it lets us do nothing. We ‘debug’ by doing something. We take a selfie.

The change in our response to politicians, thus, becomes explicable. We only perceive the value of a politician if she can now match our desire to find hot content flung out from glass windows. The public figure who ‘stands out’ of our screens appears outstanding.

The accelerated perception of time has altered the traditional diachronic perspective of politics (the tendency to use history as evidence for future action) to a hyper-synchronic one. Political action changes to the production of a succession of master signifiers that people can identify as acts of power. With the ubiquity of the camera, the politician is reduced to a stage performer. The quote is now quotidian and the pose has turned prosaic. The bigger the surprise, the longer we look. Shocking, dramatic steps will impress more than conservative planning.

Forgetting is quicker than ever. Incessant feeds turn us into amnesiac gluttons, with each new piece of information obliterating the taste of the one before. The savvy politician has this figured out and thrives on blitzkrieg to push away past errors. In contrast, however, the web forgets nothing. Once a tweet always a tweet. Malicious intent hides behind every IP address and data can always be retrieved from a server if so desired. Hillary Clinton’s emails from even before 2014 were analyzed for possible legal transgressions in spite of having been deleted years ago (Zurcher 2016). When things remember better than brains, human memories become persistently picky.

Extensions of the Mind

‘…as if a magic lantern threw the nerves in patterns on a screen…’

T.S. Eliot

Psychoanalyzing the Supreme Mind: The topography of the web seems to fit a Psychoanalytic (Freudian) classification snugly. The Dark web is the unconscious of this uberverstand; firewalls and blocked sites are evidence of a collective super ego; we balance a global ego between these. These form, however without the pitfalls of biology — no oral/anal/phallic stages to overcome. The net has no oedipal resolution to grow through. Perhaps, then, the end of patriarchy is nigh.

The digital technologies we create supplement us — extensions of ourselves that makes us feel whole but simultaneously incomplete. This sustains a perennial sense of (a Lacanian) lack — of the “phantom” limb (Lindblom 118) — that was never there but feels present. Here, the limb extended is the mind.

Becoming: The self is more ‘the body without organs’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1092) than ever before. In extending into the internet, there is no sense of cohesion between its infinite parts. The sense of lack is amplified infinitely, making us Deleuzian ‘becoming’ selves, desiring-machines forever. The internet allows the self to be either in unrelenting jouissance (when online) or in desperate desire to reconnect with the amplified self (when offline). It is the virtual that makes us more human.

The digital makes politics easy because the politician doesn’t need to seek a lack to provide a fantasy for. The lack is engendered in the medium itself and its content has infinite fantasies to choose from. The savvy politician knows the one place that people will turn to for their jouissance — online.

The Bellman’s Map

Without the least vestige of land…

Lewis Carroll

The digital acre: All politics is about territory. The internet is a land without rulers, peopled by rulers without land — the only country without a clear constitution. The first settlers grabbed their stakes early. Some sold out or gave way to new rulers. The government may be responsible for a large part of technological innovations but the politician is usually the last to understand their full potency. The powerful creep in after Pages and Zuckerbergs have already acquired vast digital acres, trying to fathom how to negotiate power-structures different from the real world.

The politician who doesn’t know how to code is like a pre-modern king who didn’t know how to read. The church controlled rulers in medieval Europe because literacy enabled a superior understanding of space and time. The Brahmins in ancient India held sway over the most powerful of rulers by their knowledge of the written script. However, when radical transformation erupts, the sword is sometimes mightier than the pen. Besides, ideologues are usually content pulling strings from afar. After new wars are fought between real-world rulers and the oligarchs of the virtual, an uneasy calm will stand witness to unparalleled political upheavals. Constitutions will change to include virtual geographies. Politicians will either learn to code or learn to control those who do. Digital technology won’t make Politics impossible. Politics will find digital ways of staying possible.

The Intertext

As Derrida showed us, there is no outside-text. In a very non-Kristevan sense, we are drowned in a sea of signifiers. Imagine the ‘intertext’ — a billion signifiers around us dragging us around and being dragged by our actions. In physics, bodies of substantial mass tend to make a dent in space-time, forcing other objects to orbit them. The intertext is similar.

What makes a master signifier is the number of signifiers we attach to it. The more we talk about something the ‘heavier’ its signifier becomes, causing a depression, enticing other text to spin helplessly towards it. Thus, certain pieces of text (images, videos, words, etc.) become viral.

Speak in small circles and ‘talk’ becomes ‘gossip’. Heap it with tweets and, by the sheer mass of the signifier, the gossip becomes ‘scandal’. This explains why many celebrities don’t care much what is written about them as long as something is. Thus, texts from the real world overlap those of the web, turning a humble name into a master signifier.

A.I.

“I do not fear computers. I fear the lack of them.”

Isaac Asimov

The Robot as Simulacra: If the internet is a simulated landscape of the real world, what is most surprising is the people’s surprise at its simulated content. Fake news has left people deeply disturbed. Like in Carroll’s Sylvie and Bruno, it is easier to pretend that the world represents the map than vice versa.

Digital technology is in its infancy, still rewiring its neurons, a primate in the early history of its own biographical narrative. If humans were a chimp’s idea for making better chimps, robots are the human’s way of making better humans. As Asimov may have suggested, the computer disappears beneath the weight of A.I. A world without computers is not a world without A.I. The Neanderthal could not have imagined our skyscrapers and hovercrafts. A tentative, semi-dystopian preview of A.I.-effects could be ventured if we consider two foreseeable codifications:

(a) The religion algorithm: What we prefer not to see (even though history has shown otherwise) is that everything eventually gets coloured by religion. The possibility of somebody infecting our computers by religious code or governments forcing a god-program to robots is not remote. Already we speak of ethical treatment of robots and the rights of robots (Gunkel 327). Perhaps, at such a stage, digital technology could make politics impossible.

(b) Desire: Programming a digital machine to desire is another possible consequence. A robot’s desires shall not be polymorphously perverse, but intensely specific. Given the right to vote, one thing is certain: their choice of a human leader would favour that candidate who can ensure one thing — the preservation of the robot.

In Sum

It is impossible to say just what I mean

Prufrock, T.S. Eliot

Digital technology, by the nature of the medium, entails binary polarization in culture, politics and society. The trauma of having to constantly lead a double existence (real and virtual) leads to a restlessness and an accelerated perception that requires hyper-stimulation and change at quicker intervals. Shock and spectacle in politics, becomes integral to the success of a politician as people clamour for change. Governments resent their dependence on ‘those who know’. They either learn it themselves or begin to control them. A.I. would become more politically prominent programmed by religion and desire.

These perspectives coalesce into a clear answer to the question asked: Digital technologies cannot make politics impossible; the digitalization of politics runs parallel to the politicization of the digital.

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