Stress Test for Democracy

How Social Media Undermine Social Peace

Marc Nottelmann-Feil

• Publisher: Books on Demand
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN:
  9783748148593
• eBook ISBN:
  9783748135159
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politica e relazioni internazionali
• Subtopic: Politica

Social media arrived in reality before anybody had given their effect on societal environments any thought. Based on a misapprehension of how humans interact as social beings, political processes today have been replaced by extensive networking, introducing new rules to how people form and shape opinions. Democracy as a form of government is weakening, while autocracy is on the rise.In his essay, Marc Nottelmann-Feil gives a matter-of-fact overview over developments everyone of us has already experienced for him- or herself. He illustrates why this revolution in human communications makes reconciling the interests of individuals, political groups and nations more difficult rather than easier.

What is truth, Mr Pilatus?

If the social media are a large-scale social-science experiment, Donald Trump is its first prominent result. It is still too early to evaluate his policy. So far, there is no proof that he will go down in history as a bad president. When asked during a presidential debate to name a positive trait of his rival Hilary Clinton, Trump replied approvingly: “She’s a fighter.” And he honestly meant it - that’s how he also sees himself and that’s how he acts. Trump’s policy will pulverise many things that have been crumbling for a long time. He doesn’t even make an effort to understand complicated issues. His approach is not to untie the Gordian knot, but to cut it.

An event that became historic already is the TV appearance of Kellyanne Conway, Counselor to the President, on February 22, 2017. Trump had claimed that the audience witnessing his inauguration had been the largest ever seen at such a ceremony, and White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer had come to his boss’s aid. In response, the media gleefully presented pictures of Obama’s inauguration, proving that his inauguration had drawn a much larger crowd than Trump’s inauguration. During an interview, Kellyanne Conway found herself in the awkward position of having to defend the obviously false statements made by both the White House Press Secretary and her senior boss. Driven into a corner by NBC reporter Chuck Todd, she said: “Don't be so overly dramatic about it, Chuck! What - You're saying it's a falsehood. And they're giving Sean Spicer, our press secretary, gave alternative facts to that”.

Although Trump opponents called them lies in their reactive tweets, alternative facts are not exactly lies, but a contradictio in adiecto. There’s something wrong here. There is never an alternative to facts: they’re either clear or unknown. But in the world through which Conway has been moving these past months - an election campaign run through the social media - her choice of words does make sense. Even among the traditional media, each used to present news with a slightly different take on the facts, the verification process was slow, with the truth lying somewhere in the middle. The social media have raised the number of people who are capable of contributing bits and pieces of information, speeding up the whole process to a point where the verification of facts lags hopelessly behind. This changes the approach to handling facts. Facts are no longer something that is verifiable and whose denial (too rarely) leads to eventual retribution, facts are what a sufficiently large number of people in the real world believes to be facts.

Factum in Latin means ‘that which was made”. In the social media, each swirl and eddy generates its own “facts”, and each major player can plant “facts” via Twitter. Makes you rub your eyes in amazement! Did this term really exist before 2010? When the former Europeans introduced the term factum into the German or English language, they no longer associated it with the deeds of emperor Augustus. By factum they now meant “that which was made by God”. It wasn’t until the advent of social media that Man started to create facts faster than God could falsify them. – Veni creator spiritus…

If we’re honest, we have been familiar with this kind of sham for a long time. For decades, we have been tolerating advertisements that brush up reality: “The best chocolate you ever tasted.” - “Pritt - the stickiest glue available.” - “For us, it’s the customer who counts”. - No one has ever bothered to verify these claims. We are used to continually hearing them and would never protest because they are untrue. That’s the nature of advertising. By design, it includes packaging on which the manufacturer promotes his product; the claims made there are somehow part of the manufacturer’s design scope. “Alternative facts” can be found everywhere in promotion. If a manufacturer were to be honest and print what he truly knows about a product on its packaging, he’d risk losing his sales. His colleagues would grin slyly and snicker at his lousy marketing move. In the Bible, prophet Amos raged against such methods, and Kant, too, was known to repudiate lies at all times. Advertising professionals will defend themselves by claiming that people apparently want to be lied to. After all, they buy products that were openly promoted with lies and deception. The objective of advertising is successful sales, and let’s be honest: aren’t the people living in the times of capitalism, with its sophisticated advertising methods, far better off than the people living in past centuries, who had a stronger sense of ethics? Truth has to be fast, only then will it be profitable! That is the reason why Kellyanne Conway was honestly surprised at the reporter’s insistent questioning. “Don't be so overly dramatic about it, Chuck. It’s alternative facts.”

ASSUMING WE ACCEPT this new concept of truth and define truth as something that a majority of people in the real world believe to be true. What is the difference between the old and the new process of establishing the truth?

An interesting definition of truth says: Truth is what will stand up in a court of law. Scientific research results are indeed accepted only when they pass examination by an expert committee. A newly discovered physical particle will be accepted by science only after it has been presented and discussed at science congresses and, where necessary, confirmed by successful duplication of the experiment. Processes to establish the truth are always slow going and need a particular social structure. Not everybody will make a good judge. – Something similar can be said of the political decision-making process. It is never completely isolated from some kind of social structure, and even in the broad range between authoritarian and liberal social structures, democratic decision-making does not involve everybody to equal parts in the decision-making process. Be it within the family, in a company, or at universities: perfect equality is not possible anywhere.

As I have mentioned already, Facebook assumes that its nodes are egalitarian. At best, the founder, ie the administrator, of a group, can remove users from a group, and has only few other special rights. Apart from that there is no weighting of the voices. A ranking within a group as we know it from daily life does not exist at all. Users are living their lives in a collective where they are less accountable, easier to scare, and have a restricted view of the world.

In contrast, Twitter is not a leveller, it is a game of monopoly written in Ruby programming language and seeking to attain power over public opinion. And since it is based on advertising, Twitter bears no relation whatsoever to the way real-life society is structured. Anybody is welcome to hunt for followers, and, in the manner of the Wild West, the hunting methods are not subject to any rules at all. Julius Caesar used to purchase votes in front of the Capitol; today, purchasing votes is a bit more circuitous. Donald Trump chose the path of the wealthy TV entertainer; Beppe Grillo (current following: 2.3 million) went along the same path with a lot of humour but without the wealth, because he hadn’t inherited any. Others use guile: the late Margot Honecker, deceased in 2016, is still twittering on Facebook. That’s a witty and revealing move, unmasking the system behind it. The first tweets from this account were sent while the real Margot Honecker was still alive, by the way. But who cares about identity theft in this medium! If someone tricks thousands of fans into following him and achieves undeserved media attention through his trickery - so what!

Quid est veritas? What is truth? A question that Pilatus once asked, shrugging his shoulders.

Humans and the Vision of Humanity in the Social Media

What type of politician are the social media going to breed? What person is so serene that they will be able to put up with the verbal Voodoo exercised by thousands of people behind his back in all those Facebook groups? Would any customer with normal sensitivities like to enter a bakery with the feeling that the shop assistant may have posted hate comments against him only half an hour ago? Only a couple of years ago, if politicians were seen on the street, people used to greet them, sometimes with a smile, even though they might disagree with their policy. What will happen nowadays? Do we really live in rough times, Mr Gauck, former President of the Federal Republic of Germany?⁵

The politicians of the future will have to be narcissists with a big ego. They will need to be impervious to the hate poured out over them. What concern of theirs are alternative truths? They’re only spreading a bad smell. You have to represent your brand, you have to unconditionally believe in it and make others believe in it: My perfume will envelop you in the fragrance of a spring meadow in the morning! Feel beautiful and loved with my perfume! If you buy into my truth, you’ll be a winner, everybody else will be a loser, let them rant and rave all they like!

Politicians of the future shouldn’t spend too much time pondering over things. No point in keeping the people’s long-term interest in sight. Rather, politicians will need to engineer opinions and analyse how to collect a lot of Likes in the short run. What’s the mechanism behind a pop song hitting the charts via Twitter and Facebook within two weeks, and how can that advertising method be applied for maximum impact in an election campaign? Hitler copied the drama of his staged political rallies from Richard Wagner, and Hollywood continued to uphold this staging tradition for a long time. The politicians of the future will copy their election campaign strategy from Psy and his smash hit Gangnam Style.

In terms of its vision of humanity, the fascism seen in Europe in the 1930s is merely the family’s ugly old great-aunt in relation to today’s policy-making via social-media. For too long, fascism may have been interpreted as a nostalgic aberration and relapse into irrational barbarism, while its alarmingly modern view of the world escaped notice. This failure to notice has come back to haunt us today, giving rise to an unexpectedly fast return of nationalism and defamation politics.

The fans of present-day hash tag movements are obviously not grim lictors protecting their caesar with their fasces (bundle of wooden rods) and axes. Hence, the term “fascism” is misleading, because it suggests the application of violence coming from the top of a state. But in the social media, it is the bottom that applies violence; a state of followers doesn’t need a caesar, it only needs an efficient marketing strategy. Generally speaking, a state of followers is an ochlocracy (“mob rule”) and its leaders dance along with the anonymous crowd, driven by public opinion rather than shaping it. The grisly feature that the new and the seemingly outdated have in common, though, is their contempt of individual human beings whose entire existence gets reduced to just a couple of parameters: “we”, “they”, “this crazy left-wing fascist” - that’s the kind of noise blaring from all corners of Facebook. Each of the speakers believes himself to be at the centre of a world ruled by some anonymous common sense.

SOCIAL MEDIA are as good or bad as their users. But since social media don’t set up any rules, everybody can turn them to unfair use, if they really want to. When people can push each other out of the way, when crude claims have more effect than informed arguments, when harsh, generalising language presses to the fore and manipulative tricks are suddenly a resounding success, it’s the honest people who lose out. Against this backdrop, what’s the point of all that academic education, the world of the intellect that over centuries has shaped our current ideal of humanity? Where’s the point in rule of law, religion, philosophy, this world’s many and rich cultures? Let’s quickly hold that up for ridicule! The world has always been one big Facebook! It is all about asserting oneself, no more and no less. Everything is no more than a fight for resources and greed for power! Or is it?

This concept turns any reference to Herbert Spencer, who already advocated white supremacy more than a hundred years ago, into nothing more than a footnote. Spencer considered the Anglo-Saxon nobleman as the apex of evolution, because he was sophisticated, ruled the world through his capital investments and succeeded in asserting himself over his fellow men. These are the exact same reasons why Donald Trump believes in the excellence of his genes.

Donald Trump is not alone with his social-Darwinist concept of humanity. By believing in the total reproducibility of humans through algorithms, the technicians of Silicon Valley are nurturing this idea, too. They pitch their reconstructed humans against each other in computer simulations and -lo and behold: - the matchstick figure with the best parameters always prevails.⁶

The creators of the social media must have been very confident of their assessment of human nature at the time they brought their rustic communication system to the world. They believed that each of us is an average consumer who can be described easily with a couple of variables. As a result, so they believe, it is easy to predict which way the game on the server will go. After all, technology is hard science, and society is an easy thing. It will somehow organise itself. Far from it!

The human being is the transcendent being. What I am trying to say with this is that whenever one believes to have found the answer to the question “What is the nature of human beings?”, humans will break the pattern. Human beings outpace any theory about human nature for a simple reason: self-reflexiveness doesn’t exist; no human being is capable of developing a completely objective view of him- or herself. Even though, based on a brilliant algorithm using all conceivable variables, I might have succeeded at predicting that I would drink tea the next morning, this prediction could be just the reason I went to choose coffee the next morning. It’s likely that we humans deliberately change our minds to escape from any form of limitation. Economists believing they can predict upcoming developments by applying lots of science undermine the significance of their prediction just by making it. There will always be those betting on a prediction and those betting against it for good measure. Both sides have already assumed a meta-position, meaning they are detached from the supposed rationality of the presented argument. - Isn’t it an irony of world-historic proportions that unpredictability began to reach record highs in exactly the moment when humanity imagined they could predict anything using algorithms?

THE THINKING IN SILICON VALLEY, is predominantly technocratic and joined by an ahistorical mindset. An ahistorically thinking person believes that the language he currently uses and describes his world with can in principle be extended to cover all dimensions of time and space. He believes himself in the possession of a language into which all of humanity’s thinking can be translated without anything getting lost in translation. To him, language is independent of culture and history.

I imagine a young person who has rapidly climbed the career ladder and is sitting in his car, driving to his workplace located in a drab office building. He is lost in thought, pondering a question going through his mind: What does happiness mean? - “Happiness means freedom. And freedom means that I can afford a nice car. That I’ve got the time to go on a nice holiday with my family. And that’s basically what all people want.” That’s it! Cheerfully, he approaches his marketing manager: „Hi, Fred! Listen, I’ve got this idea. Why don’t we jazz up our marketing campaign by building it around freedom?” „Cool idea. But what do you mean by freedom?” replies his marketing manager. The young man stops short. Should he tell his marketing manager right away? Cautiously, he makes a suggestion: “Let’smake an empirical survey!” - A couple of weeks later, pale students with questionnaires appear on marke...

Table of contents

• About the author
• Table of Contents
• Introduction
• Beware of E-Mails!
• The Arsonists
• The Structure of So-Called Conversations
• #ScrewtheEstablishment!
• Opinion-Forming in the Virtual Society
• From Clear-Cut Front Lines to Civil War
• Twitter - Leading Opinion Through Self- Advertising
• What is truth, Mr Pilatus?
• First-Aid Measures and Wrong Expectations
• Peace With Facebook & Co?
• On A Final Note
• Recommended Literature
• Copyright