Anyone with an anti-American or vaguely left-wing worldview has probably begun noticing that the content warnings, automated suspensions, topic bans and other online speech suppression publicly justified by the need to censure Donald Trump and limit the spread of hoax Covid cures are now being broadly directed against expressions of socialist, feminist and anti-imperialist positions on Facebook, Twitter, Reddit and other platforms.
While continuing to curate a subreddit focused on the anal rape of women, Reddit has told gender critical feminists that their discussions are no longer welcome. Articles based on reputable, credible climate science are now tagged with the same “potential hoax” flags used for the bleach cures for autism and Covid. Even good natured joke posts like “fuck America” or “Americans deserve what’s coming to them” have resulted in Facebook bans for up to forty-eight hours. Pages like The Left Chapter, Michael Laxer’s hub of socialist organizing in Canada, have been removed from their members’ Facebook feeds by a supposedly automated decision for which there are no stated reasons and no right to appeal.
Criticisms of China’s WeChat platform grow increasingly hollow as we see our speech not merely shaped by algorithms but corralled into discourses acceptable to social media firms’ owners.
How did it come to this?
First and foremost, the self-identified left has internalized and more completely believes in what, until recently, were understood to be conservative values in the 1980s. As Brexit exposed, the free trade, investor rights and dependence on rightless foreign labour are now understood to be progressive values. Nasty conservatives want to re-erect barriers to neoliberal globalization because they are cruel and racist. Therefore, we must support the very treaties that helped to create neoliberal austerity in the first place, the logic seems to go.
Because of this, progressives understand late stage monopoly capitalism the same way the original progressives, Teddy Roosevelt’s crew, understood it in their day: universal public services should not be provided by the state but by regulated monopolies and oligopolies with state-appointed oversight boards and commissions. These boards and commissions’ job would be to guarantee minimum service standards to customers and minimum profits to investors.
The return to this system through the sale of highways, power utilities, auto insurance companies, communications utilities, etc., often by progressive governments, has caused many progressive folks to see nothing as intrinsically unjust about the social media monopolies sitting in private hands. In fact, given how unjustly they have been treated by regulated monopolies, like their local phone, electrical or cable company, many see the absolute autocratic dictatorship of a charismatic individual as preferable to the faceless, bureaucratic regulatory bodies that have failed to bridle the greed of regulated firms in any meaningful way.
Second, this internalization of essentially capitalist theories of justice as, in some way, socialism-adjacent has also been paralleled by a decline in the critical vocabulary of the putative left. In this case, the ability to identify a commons must precede any efforts to socialize one. Yet, when many progressives defended Twitter’s ban of Donald Trump, they often argued that the authority of Twitter to remove Trump’s account was absolute because the online space the platform had created was its own private property and not a common carrier, i.e. a part of the communications commons required to carry everyone’s messages without discrimination.
The fact that the organizing energy of folks opposed to the private, commercialized, conservative, manipulative and censored character large social media platforms have taken on has been almost entirely directed into creating alternative, cooperative digital commons is, on the one hand, heartening. Clearly, there is some residual of Antonio Gramsci in the effort to build socialist institutions outside the state. But the flip side of this, soberingly, is that negligible organizing energy has gone into amending the telecommunications legislation in countries around the world to make these commons at least more subject to public regulation and, ideally, expropriation and socialization. Instead, progressives have, again, naturalized a profoundly conservative and undemocratic state of affairs.
Third, and most importantly, there is an epistemological split in our society. Free traders and protectionists exist in parties across the political spectrum now. Advocates for big government and limited government, same deal. Increasing rates of permanent and temporary human migration, again, no longer divisive. Nor is public borrowing. What increasingly animates what Sam Kriss terms the “reverse identity parade” that electoral politics has increasingly become is how one makes knowledge.
Progressives make knowledge using scientific expertise. What I mean by that is that progressives make knowledge by assessing who the highest-ranked or most authoritative expert is according to their criteria and then unquestioningly believe what that person says, until such time as someone demonstrates themselves to be more authoritative. The personality cult around BC’s Chief Medical Health officer Bonnie Henry is a great example. Many physicians and epidemiologists have criticized Henry’s mask skepticism and claims about the safety of schools for exposure and transmission. Henry’s followers tend to defend her on the basis of her rank. Dissidents are wrong because they are lower than Henry with respect to political and titular rank. If one prefers the opinions of the Chief of Medicine at Royal Columbian Hospital to those of Henry, one is quickly branded as being “against science.” Because science has become synonymous with expertise: i.e. the credentials and state power one possesses on the basis of one’s putative knowledge.
Conservatives, on the other hand, make knowledge in an increasingly participatory way. “Do your research!” is a slogan now associated with the false belief that vaccines cause autism in children. Pioneered by Glenn Beck, conservative talkshows function as how-to demonstrations for organizing variegated data to produce a foregone conclusion. Because the right’s enemies are amoral supermen, number in the millions and effortlessly translate their intentions into real world events, an answer like “George Soros” or “Black Lives Matter” or “Antifa” can function to explain any event. In this way, modern remedial conspiracy theory is less “pin the tail on the donkey” and more the Aristocrats. The entire joke is filler and the punchline is both foreknown and unrelated.
Because of the horrifying amount of not merely false but seemingly deranged belief out there in the form of QAnon, Covfefe, anti-vaxx, bleach therapy, climate denial and young earth creationism. And because these beliefs are clearly winning the epistemological battle, new and more drastic measures must be taken to suppress them, the thinking goes. Because FoxNews is permitted to broadcast outrageous, lethal, society-crippling lies, with Newsmax and other crazier broadcasters nipping at their heels, progressives think that we must impose new and more stringent rules to ensure the veracity of what appears in TV and on social media.
Keep in mind the fact that no matter how developed or open minded we have become, most of the men still hesitate to disclose their sexual problem due to the attack of some physical disorders can consume this lowest measure to get themselves viagra soft tablet free from impotency. The biggest limiting factor that generic levitra no prescription restricts patient’s participation in seeking occupational therapy is financial issues and organizational problems. You will get the perfect satisfaction in time cialis 5mg uk amerikabulteni.com of making love with your love partner. Since the essential act tadalafil cheap india of an erection is blood hydraulic effects.And because efforts to bridle the power to lie of Fox and others have consistently failed in the Senate and Federal Communications Commission, centrists and progressives have become the chief apologists for the direct censorship powers wielded by Mark Zuckerberg and his ilk. The problem, in progressive minds, is that these CEOs have been too timid in their efforts to control the claims and ideology permitted on their media. The idea seems to be that in the absence of the state, the billionaires must step in.
This is a grave error.
Last year, I wrote an essay about the 1980s Doctor Who story Castrovalva. In the show, the villain, the Master, creates a pocket dimension and populates it with simulacra, giving the environment and the characters detailed invented personal histories. The hero of the story is the librarian Shardovan. Although he is one of the simulacra and the books are all forged by the same hand, he becomes a skeptic simply because he detects the logical inconsistencies within the official histories, first material inconsistences, then logical consistencies. The climax of the episode occurs when he confronts his creator and accuses him of not being who he claims to be.
A number of people have so focused on how this essay fits into the theory of identity I was developing at the time that this intervention was primarily an epistemological one.
Both good stories and accurate social science derive their quality from their ability to describe how human beings think, feel and react to one another. The author of the false history of Castrovalva would have faced a choice: either write stories that are self-consistent, in which events hit together and makes sense on their face or write stories that are consistent with observed human nature. One cannot do both without capturing the desire of the human soul to be free. No matter which way the stories were written, they would have struck a false note to any person endowed with basic empathy and critical thinking capacity.
It is my argument that FoxNews, Newsmax, Breitbart, Rebel Media and their ilk should elicit the same reaction from folks with remotely functioning critical thinking skills and basic empathy. If a person with a healthy sense of empathy and basic critical thinking capacity watches FoxNews for a week, they will know that the station is telling lies, even if they have access to no other news source. In fact, a person with these two basic things should, over time, be able to figure out what is actually happening by only watching Rupert Murdoch’s equivalent to the Jonestown loudspeaker.
That is because FoxNews and its allies are horribly inconsistent. Donald Trump both organized and did not organize the riot at the capital. The riot at the capital was both patriotic and unpatriotic. No officers were killed there. The officers who were killed were no big deal. No officer death is ever acceptable. Barack Obama is a communist. And an atheist. And a Muslim. Anthropogenic climate change is good. Anthropogenic climate change is not happening. The seas are not rising. The seas are rising because we threw too many rocks in the ocean. Robert Mueller is a traitor. Robert Mueller is Donald Trump’s best friend.
No person with functioning empathy and critical thinking skills is going to be susceptible to the kind of disinformation centrists and progressives think the new censorship will protect people from. And the reason this fear seems all the more real because critical thinking skills are on the decline everywhere. The progressive embrace of expertise is a mirror image of the right’s embrace of QAnon. And they share a cause: the kind of self, the kind of soul human beings were called-upon to construct during the Enlightenment is under attack. It is being remade.
Whether moving in progressive or conservative circles, not only do we see a decline in the practice of reasoning aloud in conversation. We see the normalization of the emotional reactions of people suffering clinical narcissism. It is expected that people learning that another person has special talents or knowledge they do not will be experienced as an attack. It is expected that not being seen as one ideally imagines oneself is an injury, an attack. We determine what viewpoint is correct by assessing who has the greatest emotional stake in being right and the status needed to force that recognition. We imagine the words said about us must be the same as the words said to us. As I wrote nine years ago in Age of Authenticity, these post-Enlightenment selves are larger, more porous and overlap others. For these selves, truth is located at the centre of the self, the place most walled-off from material reality. One’s epistemological foundations are to be found on an inward journey, not an outward one.
Combined with the reduction in teaching and the lack of cultural confidence in basic critical thinking and reasoning skills, a growing portion of our population will espouse belief in incoherent nonsense. Changing or reducing the supply of pre-fabricated nonsense will make little to no difference. That is because modern conservatism has an intellectual do-it-yourself-ism that easily enables folks to substitute their own homemade batshit crazy ideas, with the same base ingredients of racial animus and confusion.
That social trend can only be arrested by dealing with the problem of the consumer, not at the level of the producer.
If Breitbart or FoxNews had existed in the 1960s, most people who believe them today would not only have disbelieved them. They would have found them laughable, funny, absurd. Even the John Birch Society and Lyndon Larouche activists would have found their explanations unusable because of the conspiracy theories would not be self-consistent with their last retelling. Too many details would be missed or wrong. And Alex Jones and his crew, the belief that every piece of errant data is a false flag or a “crisis actor,” would likely be institutionalized under the more muscular mental hygiene statutes of the time.
A population this addle-minded cannot be protected from thinking crazy things by censorship. It can only be protected by rebuilding not just our capacities for empathy and logic but for the cultural institutions that have nurtured and reinforced these things. We must re-democratize civil society institutions. We must increase the amount of zero-barrier free education available to regular folks. We must renew our democratic institutions like the FCC and CRTC to convert social media into socialized common carriers. We need to reform our education systems to prioritize critical thinking and logic and understand the inculcation empathy part of that project, not oppositional to it. We must throw off orthodoxies, new and old, that seek to shut down our capacity to think aloud together.
