How the Internet Is Threatening Our Freedom
Facts no longer matter in the digital world—which means Trump can get away with anything.By ANDREW KEEN May 18, 2016
In 2004, it was only Howard Dean who screamed; today, we’re all screaming—in a nonstop nightmare of viral lies, propaganda and misinformation.
Since Dean’s famous yelp went instantly viral during the 2004 primary season—and almost just as instantly, it seemed, sank his campaign—pundits have been declaring every presidential election to be an “Internet election,” one whose outcome has been supposedly shaped by the “viral memes” of bloggers and social media activists. And, every four years, these pundits have been wrong. The Internet has been a part of, but hasn’t exactly dominated, the debate in past campaigns.
This year, however, is different. Finally, the Internet election is upon us. But it’s not quite what Silicon Valley boosters predicted. On the contrary, rather than demonstrating the empowering glory of the Information Age—when citizens should have access to more information about candidates and issues than ever before—what we are seeing is the rise of the Misinformation Age. I warned about this in my 2007 book, Cult of the Amateur. What’s gone viral this time, again and again, is bad information put out by legions of online amateurs; voters can no longer distinguish between what’s true and not, and this trend is corrupting our democracy. We have entered what The Guardian’s Jonathan Freedland calls the “era of post-truth politics,” and its leading light (or black hole, if you will) is Donald J. Trump.
Much of this informational fog has its origins in digital technology. Michael P. Lynch, a University of Connecticut philosopher and author of this year’s The Internet of Us: Knowing More and Understanding Less in the Age of Big Data, sees the Internet data avalanche as muddying our ability to distinguish between truth and falsity. “Googling is like being in a room with a million shouting voices,” he writes. “It is only natural that we’ll hear those voices that are most similar to our own, shouting what we already believe, and as a result Google can find you confirmation for almost anything, no matter how absurd.”
Or as digital critic Eli Pariser has suggested, on the Internet truth has become personalized rather than universal; like Lynch, he believes that through echo-chamber search engines such as Google and social networks like Facebook, we are led to believe that whatever we think is true actually is true.
Trump, a master manipulator of viral media—a professional amateur, if you like—has led the way in exploiting this trend. Lynch argues that Trump’s ability to contradict himself without any cost to his credibility—on everything from gun control, Syrian refugees and health care to abortion rights, taxing the rich and the use of torture—reflects an epistemological malaise in which our culture is “disintermediating” experts. When everything is as true as anything else, Lynch suggests, then the power of contradiction eclipses the power of truth. And Trump is very good at contradiction.
Without supplying evidence—which he rarely bothers about—Trump claims that the father of “Lying Ted” Cruz was involved with Lee Harvey Oswald in the JFK assassination; 29 percent of his supporters believe global warming is a lie, 56 percent say autism is caused by vaccines and 40 percent believe it’s “definitely true” that President Obama is hiding important information about his earlier life. When challenged, Trump often just doubles down on his original charge—again without evidence.
It’s not just Trump, of course, and it’s not just the GOP. Bernie Sanders’ online “sexist mob” has been bullying supporters of Hillary Clinton so viciously that Pulitzer Prize-winning New Yorker columnist Emily Nussbaum tweeted: “Man, the Feel The Bern crew (as opposed to Bern himself) is such a drag. Say anything pro-Hil & they yell ‘bitch’ & ‘psycho.’ V idealistic!”
The problem of a populace totally at sea in a vast ocean of bad information, with no anchor of truth, may go even deeper. In The Shallows, Nicholas Carr warns that the Internet was restructuring our brains so that we skim only the informational surface of things. Douglas Rushkoff says social media is imprisoning us in the perpetual present of the “now,” thereby shrinking our understanding of the world to whatever is happening at this very second.
So it’s not as if we haven’t been warned. And yet nothing has quite prepared us for the pea soup of nonsense that has engulfed our politics. The campaign’s intolerance, ignorance, parochialism, nativism and lies reflect a broader truth about the digital revolution: It’s anything but democratizing or empowering.
***
Perhaps we reached some kind of awful tipping point in this trend on May 5, when to celebrate Cinco de Mayo, a festival commemorating a 19th century Mexican military victory over French forces, Trump had himself photographed eating a taco bowl at his New York City office. Publishing the photograph on the Internet,the presumptive Republican 2016 nominee directly messaged his 16 million “friends” and “followers” on Twitter and Facebook as follows:
Donald J. Trump @realDonaldTrump May 5
Happy #CincoDeMayo! The best taco bowls are made in Trump Tower Grill. I love Hispanics!
Trump’s Internet statement was, of course, an absurd lie. To begin, the Trump Tower Grill doesn’t appear to actually serve taco bowls—which is probably fortunate, given the poorly reviewed quality of the food there. The more corrosive untruth, of course, was Trump’s “love” of “Hispanics”—an ethnic group he has consistently accused of being rapists, criminals and drug dealers.
“I’m going to do great with Hispanics,” he promised Fox News, speaking about a community of people of whom 87 percent view him unfavorably. “I mean, I’m going to do fantastically because I’m bringing jobs back to America.”
The science-fiction writer William Gibson, one of the few “futurists” who actually gets the future, reads Trump’s lies in strictly Machiavellian terms. “Trump tells misinformed people what he knows they already believe, and thus ‘he speaks the truth,’” Gibson tweeted.
The truth, then, according to Gibson—or at least, Trump’s truth—is that the real estate mogul lies to confirm a particular truth to his political constituency. So the scheming Trump can both hate and love Hispanics, Gibson suggests. Simultaneously.
Eat your heart out George Orwell, Arthur Koestler, Milan Kundera and every author of laughter and forgetting.
Trump himself might be as much a victim as a villain of this bizarre spectacle. I suspect that even the coiffured mogul—in all his solipsistic pomp—is himself a prisoner of our new digital architecture.
***
Much has been made of the post-ideological nature of this election, particularly about Trump as a candidate who escapes traditional industrial left-right categories. This is achievable only in the Internet age, when our politics and our society have become disaggregated and traditional agendas have been shattered. Back in 2012, I published Digital Vertigo: How Social Media is Dividing, Diminishing and Disorientating Us. Writing in homage to Alfred Hitchcock’s disorientating movie Vertigo, I suggest that social media is actually atomizing and alienating us. Social media is anything but social, I argue. It is fragmenting us—transforming everyone into isolated individuals staring longingly at our screens.
But the main reason why 2016 is the first real Internet election is that the presumptive nominee of one of the two major parties, Trump, is the first real Internet candidate. I’m not sure if he gets the Internet; but it definitely gets him.
He’s the selfie-candidate in our networked age of the selfie—the me in all his viral memes.
The universe revolves around him, and to him his virality is plainly a measure of his worth. After one Democratic strategist argued that Trump’s taco tweet was akin to an Iranian ayatollah posting a photo of himself eating matzo ball soup “and claiming he loves Jews,” the candidate responded by pointing to how many retweets he’d gotten. “That’s a terrible thing that a guy can say that,” Trump responded on Fox television. “As of yesterday, I had 59,000 retweets. … That’s almost got to be some kind of record. People loved it.”
People loved it is, of course, Trump’s way of saying I loved it. He loved and loves the attention, the thousands of retweets and likes, the endless real-time controversy, the self-aggrandizing virtuous circle of the whole absurd thing. And that attracts voters to him. Trump’s style is his substance.
Arguments to the contrary by people in high places don’t seem to matter. “We are in serious times, and this is a really serious job,” Barack Obama said in a not-so veiled swipe at Trump. “This is not entertainment. This is not a reality show. This is a contest for the presidency of the United States.”
But I’m afraid that politics as a real-time, networked reality show is actually a very serious business. As the Anglo-Russian TV producer Peter Pomerantsev notes in Nothing Is True and Everything Is Possible, his chilling portrayal of Putin’s Russia, 21st century authoritarianism relies on the architecture of a reality show. By spewing a constant stream of lies, propaganda and misinformation, Pomerantsev warns, Putin’s media-industrial dictatorship has destroyed the idea of truth. When everything is possible, he says, then the only impossibility is democracy.
Trump, of course, isn’t Putin and his Internet-based reality show is much more sophisticated (what Silicon Valley boosters would call “distributed”) than Putin’s centralized model. And yet their similarities aren’t entirely coincidental. No wonder they seem to like each other.
Is there any way out of this fog of misinformation, propaganda and lies? Perhaps. Rather than switching off our computers, our focus should be rebuilding the ideals of both community and truth in our age of radical personalization.
This won’t be done through some soft, self-congratulatory communitarianism. Rather than Trump or the Internet, we—you and I and every other citizen—are the real problem. Escaping today’s echo-chamber culture means acknowledging our parochial political culture. Nicholas Kristof, for example, confesses his own liberal intolerance without falling into the postmodern swamp of relativism.
But that means that not only do we need a new political conversation, we need new politicians who are willing to confront the challenge of the post-truth age. If truth and trustworthiness have become political scarcities in this networked society, then that raises their value. The hope is that honest politicians can build their identities around these values.
Digital media, for all its myriad flaws, is also part of the answer. Our networked age does offer the raw materials—both the reliably curated newspapers and crowd-sourced information resources—to allow citizens to distinguish between truth and lies, if they want to. Some post-truth leaders like Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan are aggressively trying to censor independent newspapers and the Internet. Many fear a President Trump would do the same. The value of good-quality curated content, both online and offline, has never been higher. Perhaps that will create a market for it.
Read more:
http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2016/05/2016-election-internet-campaign-facts-digital-new-media-213899#ixzz499qnKQ00 Follow us: @politico on Twitter | Politico on Facebook
