Weapons of mass distraction have given the world Brexit and Trump, what are we waiting for to act ?
Full disclosure: A self described politics junkie, I started out as a cub political reporter/intern at a Paris daily newspaper in the mid 90s before working for Sygma Corbis and Gamma in NYC in the late 90s-early 00s. For more on my background in media, my 2015 article.
Jan 2017 essay: We all live in tech-infused echochambers and it’s becoming democracy’s kryptonite, at our global peril: 2016 will probably be remembered as the year that so-called new media and its atomization effect truly came of age. The twin events, which none of the self-appointed punditocracy saw coming, Brexit and the election of Trump, have solid roots in the digital destruction and disruption of the Old Media Order. Both tectonic political earthquakes caught millions of citizens by surprise, who woke up realizing they had been living in comfortable echochambers of like-minded folk.
Almost 30 years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, it’s more apparent than ever that liberal democracy’s topsy turviness has at least twin roots:
1- the hubristic notion thought up by Fukuyama’s End of History thesis, that its status as the default mode of government was secured once Communism was “defeated”;
2- the Howard Beale-ization of what passes for “news” in America, coupled with smartphone-fuelled echochambers, which have become weapons of mass distraction. umair haque has made clear that there no longer is any American school of thought. It’s therefore astonishing that popular culture isn’t event correctly analyzed. Sidney Lumet’s warnings in the prodigiously prophetic Network (1976) seem all but forgotten, as are Elia Kazan’s A Face in The Crowd (1957).
It’s almost as if American network producers and broadcaster personalities either haven’t seen these films nor understood them. Furthermore we are dealing with the mechanization of media on the producing AND consuming side of the equation: algorithms now rule what news editors prioritize and what citizens read.
Let’s revisit these twin roots and how they accelerate hyper-accelerated media cycle as weapons of mass distraction.
1- Fukuyama has atoned for his hubris but it’s quite clear that liberal democracy has failed to maintain its status as an envied political system. China’s authoritarianism mixed with state-sponsored capitalism has gained adherents on all continents. The European Union’s newer members eg Hungary and Poland have struggled to keep their regimes entirely democratic and Europe now faces a test of wills. Russia’s Putin was quite adamant on the way forward in his 2005 speech that too many overlooked. All of his actions to sow chaos in Europe and America since then stem from his and his backers’ desire to avenge the 1990s. America’s role as the “indispensable nation”, cherished first and foremost by atlanticists from both DC political parties, has greatly suffered from the loss of credibility borne by the second Iraq war and from Trump’s assaults on truth. It’s concerning that America’s power structure has been unable to blunt Trump’s mass distractions, who are continually relayed by media executives and editors whose high regard for their mission too often prevent them from properly digesting what really happened between the media and Trump during the 2016 election. Chuck Todd is one of the rare voices in the media top tier to address media’s necessary change in context and circumstance in the Trumpian era.
2- There’s a nostalgia for a romanticized version of journalism that never really was. This is analyzed in a previous 2017 essay. Traditional print media monopolies, the noblest of the profession, were used to wielding immense power in their respective markets and this led to them being mostly asleep at the wheel as digitization ate away at their classifieds cash cows. Once proud and solid institutions such as Colorado’s Rocky Mountain News were gutted or simply disappeared. This erosion accelerated the Howard Beale-ization of what passes for television “news” in today’s America, where Fox and MSNBC/CNN cater to entrenched alternate realities. The “in flux” status of the news industry has been rocked even more by the power of the platforms (see previous essay “Digital feudalism and why a commons is key to unlocking the future”). Google and Facebook have essentially become everyone’s front page newspapers, without the sense of societal responsibility that newspapers developed over time. When consumed via notification-heavy smartphones, they are truly weapons of mass distraction. The dopamine highs they procure mask a profound lack of context and a keen observer such as Michelle Obama remarked in Feb 2018 that social media magnifies feelings of political and cultural division, underlining a need for people to get out of their online silos: “”Social media can do two things: it can bring us together or keep us isolated,” she said, noting that people hiding behind a computer screen are emboldened to make nasty remarks. “A life looking into your phone is not a life,” she said. “You have to break out of your silo.”
The echochambers’ weaponization by foreign agents should not deter the platforms from understanding that it is in their best interest as good citizens to act decisively before it’s too late. The advances of AI-fuelled fake voices/fake videos has the potential to shatter any sort of shared reality, making the already wounded democratic process even more fragile.
In this spirit, it’s necessary to reflect and collect ideas on how to build the future:
more links to previous essays:
