In a few lines I want to join together three ideas I’ve come across recently. Together I feel that they create a trap for us and a barrier to social change.
In a sentence, we challenge less at the same time as our challenges become less important and our opinions less freely chosen and less individual. Fewer meaningful challenges, less power in the challenge and less freedom of thought to offer a new challenge. All three aspects work together to push the sum total of opinions towards a fog of static.
The first idea is one from post-Marxism, via Žižek. It is that within Capitalism is built the mechanism of complaint and that that mechanism sustains the system even as it claims to rail against it. By allowing people to criticise consumerism or even the institutions of government, the system allows for people to assuage their consciences and then return to consuming.
Second it one from Henry David Theroux, via David Runciman’s excellent series “The History of Ideas”. Theroux said that complaining was not enough in a Democracy – we have to be prepared to say “no” to the majority when we have moral compunction to do so, even if Democracy is centred on the idea of majority representation. We have to say “no” and we have to make a stand. His suggestion was not to pay taxes, for example. But that wouldn’t work today. In the algorithmic bureaucracy, no-one can hear you complain. The computer says “no” and drops the mic.
Third comes from The Oxford Handbook of the Philosophy of Technology. Don Howard in “Whence and W(h)ither Technology Ethics describes how The eighteenth century revolutions brought in the industrial age, which demanded its “own form of reason, one repudiating the very notions of freedom and individualization in the name of which those revolutions were fought.”
Likewise, the main technology of consumer capitalism, the internet, has begun to undermine the notions of freedom upon which Capitalism purports to be built.
There is a trifecta of powerlessness here.
First, social media lets everyone complain. It also hooks us so that It is harder for us to spend time thinking Things rather than reacting. Our complaints are shallower, more emotional, more inflammatory, less likely to persuade or engage in debate. More complaints, lower quality, less chance of affecting change. You can add to this that a lot of online time is spent mindlessly browsing or doom scrolling, and that this time means less in-real-life engagement with politics or society. We spend less time thinking, because we spend more time swiping.
Second, by complaining, we can be content that we have not done nothing. The safety valve means we don’t need to protest or to refuse to pay taxes. An instagram post means we’ve done our bit. “Daddy, what did you do in the Great Social Media war?” Well, I tweeted in a cafe, ate a vegan sausage roll and bought an Apple Pencil so that I could write my next blog more mindfully. Fuck climate change AND I’m flying to a cultural holiday next week.”
Theroux would always have said this was insufficient. But now complaining is more pointless than ever. Individualism via social media has led to everyone having a voice. But with everyone shouting, no one is really heard and, more importantly, no one is really listening to complaints anymore. I wonder if anyone knows of a dataset looking at average protest attendances. I wouldn’t be helping that metric.
Then the coup-de-grace. The content we view is dragging us towards an average of aggregated opinion. Our opinions become the raw resources of technology at the same time that they converge on the other opinions in our milieu. We are the distribution, even if we are outliers.
The apotheosis of this averaging of outrage is the GPT. It predicts words based on past content and adds some randomness here and there. Based on past internet content. You are getting an average opinion from an algorithm that has as its training data the decidedly stale, white, male opinions of the internet. Fallow ground for revolution.
When you ask Chat GPT, you are asking for an answer based on what was. If what was helps add more content to the internet and that content feeds the next training set, we are even more down a cul-de-sac. For more on this, see Shannon Vallor’s book The AI Mirror.
If you got this far, thanks! I’d love to hear where I’m wrong, where I misinterpreted something or cherry-picked.