Digital Fascism
I wonder if George Orwell had imagined that his ‘dystopian’ world in 1984 would actually become British society in 2016. Albeit in a slightly less violent manner, the thought police are always watching us as we post our ideas, views and feelings all over the internet. Rather than a band of authoritarian enforcement bruisers locking you in a room and torturing you, it’s the people you have on twitter and facebook who dish out the emotional lynching. The politicians talk about trolling as if it’s some acute symptom of the internet but the fact is we’re all doing it. Granted the majority of us not in such a hurtful way but we are all inflicting some level of emotional distress on our ‘friends’ with our corrections, counter-arguments and overstated opinions.
There’s a growing obsession online to invade every corner of our social media pages with our opinions and views. We all have the absolute belief that the way we see the world is the right way and that anyone else who doesn’t see it this way is a fool. The reason for such unwavering belief is the fact that we, as individuals, have access to such a vast library of information that with the click of a button, we can point out scores of articles that reinforce our ideas — no matter how distorted from reality they become. But the reason we are so obsessed with imposing our ideas on others requires more explanation.
The internet, for all of its democratizing power, has created deep divisions within our already fragmented society. This is because we tailor our web experience entirely to suit our own needs, following pages that we like, friending people who share our beliefs and seeing only what we choose to see. The tool that was supposed to give us the big picture has somewhat narrowed our field of view. This narrowing process has not only made the perimeter of our socio-cultural enclosures smaller, it has made us so much more ideologically aggressive. What appears to be a healthy circulation of information from all sides of the spectrum is in fact, a slow radicalization process, which nurses our intolerances where it should be challenging them. This naturally leads to complete contempt for the views of others, resulting in many long and often pointless arguments over social media platforms and the wider web.
Never are we more confident, more militant and more righteous than in our critique of the thoughts of others online. We are all policing the internet, degrading each other’s ideas and drawing distinctive ideological lines which sever the connections we once had with people before we knew they were pro-Brexit, pro-Israel or pro-Capitalism. We are creating a digital fascism for which there is no singular leader or power structure but ourselves. We are all guilty of this in some form or another.
This is very problematic for what social media was intended to be. A safe place for the sharing of feelings and building friendships has become a serious, judgmental and too often highly politicized affair. We should envy the people who can just carry on sharing their cat memes and posting pictures of their drunken kebab escapes because these people are becoming a minority. Even something so innocent as a meme can now be politicized and turned into a new form of control. Sharing is the key to social mobilization but for all the wrong reasons. We are not sharing so that we can find other like-minded people; we are sharing in our own vain self-interest. The measure of one’s ego can now be broken down into a number of likes.
The consequences of this digital regime will and already have proven to be far reaching, with divisions in the west having catastrophic consequences but as long as we get our daily dose of validation, vilification and literary manipulation, we will go on sharing, swiping and criticizing all the same.
