In the Jewish Bible or Old Testament, one of the most memorable stories is that of the Tower of Babel, a story of human hubris. The people of Babel used their vast wealth and power to build a great tower that symbolized their hegemony over the lands they ruled. They build the tower so high and, consequently, placed so much of the world under its sway that the Lord confounded the languages of the people and destroyed the tower, shattering Babel’s hegemony.
Today, the story is taking place in reverse. The world over, new forms of authoritarian rule are arising through an increasingly close alliance between social movements that hold ideas of liberty and equality in contempt and an increasingly powerful oligarchic billionaire class. Prominent in this billionaire class is Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook and he, like other media and communications oligarchs are making the construction of these new Towers of Babel possible by confounding the language of the people.
Our communities are becoming, as a consequence, increasingly separated by political alignment and identity. Political content and political debates increasingly dominate media that previously were focused on familial or aesthetic connections. While Facebook rewards people for performing all kinds of difference from one another, political difference often produces the greatest rewards. Of course, this is not limited to social media. Attempts by news organizations to draw audiences from across the political spectrum are all but over.
For many years, now, people have been saying that this is producing political “echo chambers,” except that this has entailed redefining what an echo chamber is. Supposedly, an echo chamber is one in which one says something and it echoes back verbatim, perfectly. Allegedly, in an echo chamber, one hears one’s own words, one’s own views repeated back.
Except that is not what echo chambers actually are, or were before the second decade of the twenty-first century. Echo chambers are actually the opposite. Echo chambers have long been used in music and other fields to make conventional sounds seem uncanny or incomprehensible. Sound is issued into the chamber from a voice or instrument and it begins a chaotic (in the mathematical sense), escalating process of echoing and reverberation with sound overlaying sound overlaying sound. After a few minutes, in a real echo chamber, there are no longer distinct words or sounds, just the complex interplay of increasingly distorted, unrecognizable echos.
An echo chamber, then, is the auditory equivalent of a funhouse mirrors at the carnival, except that the reflections iterate for so long and with such complexity that the reflections can barely be recognized as human.
Rather than producing ideological conformity and shared political analyses, forces like Fox and Facebook do not function so much as the hypothetical echo chambers of the present but like the literal echo chambers of the past. When we type words into Facebook threads, they transform from ideas to talking points to nonsense. And they grow increasingly nonsensical as they bounce off not just other people’s words but the words we have previously typed; in fact, they go beyond nonsensical; they become uncanny, familiar words distorted into something frightening and alien.
When we engage in the politics of small difference within a community bounded, if not by ideology, then, at least a set of shared political positions, one would assume that the combination of a shared critical vocabulary and shared aims would make debate possible. But the reverse is true. That is because “if-then” and comparative reasoning have been eviscerated by standpoint epistemology. An emerging consensus across, for want of a better word, ideological communities believes that truth-making and truth-seeking processes do not exist in the intersubjective space where our conversations reside. The truth is no longer the argument most participants in a debate, agree to, through the presentation of evidence and the practice of reason, because truth is no longer located in intersubjective space. The conversation is not the thing that produces truth; it is the place to which you report subjective truths already produced.
Conversation, then, tends to comprise competing claims of the validity of one’s subjective truth; this typically involves claiming membership in an identity group and then arguing that this identity group is the one vested with authority to report what is true. Among what I am increasingly tempted to call the “fake left,” this involves claims of membership in a marginalized or stigmatized identity group. An act of oppression calculus then takes place to review evidence not about the person’s argument but their claims of marginalization. Whether a person able to pass as white can make a claim to authority based on being a member of a racialized group must be adjudicated—it is here, ironically, the intersubjective truth-making does take place; the authority of the crowd is relevant but only insofar as it situates one’s identitarian credentials but not in whether one’s claim makes logical sense or is supported by evidence—and pronounced upon.
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Once one has won the argument as to the superior oppression calculus credentials, one may then report the truth. But truth, at this point, is increasingly presented not as an if-then syllogism but instead as a talking point or set thereof.
I have written about talking points before, a new speech style developed during the deregulation of 1980s neoliberalism to shield corporations from liability for increasingly frequent product recalls and industrial accidents. Following the Bhopal Union Carbide disaster that killed hundreds of thousands, the firm handling the file, Burson-Marsteller pioneered specialization in “crisis communications,” PR strategies designed to minimize the effects of corporate malfeasance.
Central to crisis communications is the use of “talking points.” Talking points are one or more mantras corporate representatives are taught to repeatedly intone during interviews with media. Their purpose is not to offer answers or inform listeners or viewers but instead to beat meaning out of conversations by repeating a slogan that appears, superficially, to relate to the matter under discussion but never to the question that has been asked. By breaking down conversational interchange, itself, corporate representatives could concurrently bore and confuse their audience, ultimately causing them to tune out because no sense was being made.
After all, the first rule of crisis communications is never to answer the question you have been asked but simply to present one’s talking points brazenly as a non-sequitur.
Talking points soon metastasized into electoral politics and were used to great effect by the apologists for neoliberalism to produce confusion and disengagement, the next best thing to actual consent of the governed. But either as part of Third Way popular front politics or simply because of the discourse environment, what passes for a left began to adopt talking points language but with no understanding of what it was for or what it could successfully do.
Of those on the putative left, organizations that identify as progressive are the most likely to believe in the use of talking points, believing that if one can reduce one’s ideas into a set of koan-like non-responses that roll off the tongue well, one is somehow meeting the right on its own field of battle, using its own weapons and can therefore win the day, not understanding that important Orwellian lesson that nonsense is not politically neutral; it serves the oppressor.
In this way, argument becomes impossible because an increasing portion of every conversation is both nonsensical and non-responsive. People are asked to “check their privilege,” as though there a privilege-check boy waiting them at some metaphorical coat-room, who could somehow relocate them closer to a subject position closer to ideal victimhood if tipped well enough. This is a talking point amongst talking points, impossible, non-responsive and designed to address solely the authority of the speaker, not the veracity of the argument.
And so the tower grows higher, Mark Zuckerberg standing atop it, its panopticon enabling the creation of a new kind of hegemony through the confounding of language itself.
