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Article source: Innovación para el Desarrollo Sostenible. © Gobierno del Estado de Guanajuato 2018. ISBN: 978-607-8164-04-2. © UNESCO 2018. Este documento está disponible en acceso abierto bajo la licencia Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 IGO (CC-BY-SA 3.0 IGO). (p. 479-489)
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Electronic-computer capitalism: Economy, Academia and Politics.
Gustavo Lins Ribeiro, Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana – Lerma / Universidade de Brasília.
[Part 3: Politics, Final Comments]
Politics
The effects of hyper-democratization of information production and dissemination may be positive, like I believed in 1998 when I wrote on the transnational-virtual imagined community and its witnessing at a distance and activism at a distance powers (Lins Ribeiro, 1998) or like Manuel Castells (2012) believed (2012) when he analyzed the networks of outrage and hope underneath movements such as the Arab Spring or Occupy Wall Street. But its effects may also be negative. Surveillance, by private or state agencies, can easily be performed on citizens around the world who use the network. Secrecy and intimacy are other notions changing before our eyes. In fact, the great exposure of personal information in the public-virtual-space is a symptom of the end of the validity of the bourgeois notions of privacy. Many are willing to post information (texts, photos or videos) on their families, affective and sexual lives, personal and professional accomplishments and aspirations to the virtual crowd. In view of how crucial the relationships between private and public spaces are for the understanding of what politics is, it is difficult to foresee how political practices will change in the near future.
Another negative effect is the concentration of economic and political power in the hands of a few huge global corporations such as Google and Facebook. Furthermore, much of the political polarization seen in many countries is related to this expansion of the capacity of intervention in the public virtual space and the polarization created by the algorithms in the social media that select opinions similar to those already cherished by users. This hinders exposure to other ideas and possible heterodox dialogues, encapsulating users in ideological bubbles.
In order for manipulation to stay unnoticed, it takes a so-called resonance effect—suggestions that are sufficiently customized to each individual. In this way, local trends are gradually reinforced by repetition, leading all the way to the “filter bubble” or “echo chamber effect”: in the end, all you might get is your own opinions reflected back at you. This causes social polarization, resulting in the formation of separate groups that no longer understand each other and find themselves increasingly at conflict with one another. In this way, personalized information can unintentionally destroy social cohesion (Helbing et al. 2017).
Psychological, social and political impacts can even be more dramatic. Amongst growing criticism of social media such as Facebook, some of the leaders of electronic-computer capitalism are making manifest how the network can destroy the social fabric as we know it. A former vice-president for user growth at Facebook said: “The short-term, dopamine-driven feedback loops that we have created are destroying how society works. No civil discourse, no cooperation, misinformation, mistruth” (Wong, 2017). She added that: “Your behaviors, you don’t realize it, but you are being programmed. (…) It was unintentional, but now you gotta decide how much you’re going to give up, how much of your intellectual independence” (idem). One of Facebook’s founding presidents also asserted that it “exploit[s] a vulnerability in human psychology” by creating a “social-validation feedback loop” (ibidem). Sherry Turkle, one of the most insightful analysts of the Internet, in her 2011 book, “Alone Together. Why we expect more from technology and less from each other,” states that “our new devices provide space for the emergence of a new state of the self, itself, split between the screen and the physical real, wired into existence through technology” (Turkle, 2011, p. 16). Her research with American teenagers revealed: “The technology has become like a phantom limb, it is so much part of them. These young people are among the first to grow up with an expectation of continuous connection: always on, and always on them. And they are among the first to grow up not necessarily thinking of simulation as second best. All of this makes them fluent with technology but brings a set of new insecurities. They nurture friendships on social-networking sites and then wonder if they are among friends. They are connected all day but are not sure if they have communicated. They become confused about companionship. (…) The simplification of relationship is no longer a source of complaint. It becomes what we want. These seem the gathering clouds of a perfect storm” (idem, p. 17).
At the same time, there are rather direct effects of the Internet, its robots, algorithms and big data, on formal electoral processes. Social bots, for instance, are a simulation of human agency, autonomous agents in social media that pretend to be Internet personas and reproduce conversations. According to Wikipedia they are capable to “generate messages (e.g. tweets) or in general advocate certain ideas, support campaigns, and public relations either by acting as a ‘follower’ or even as a fake account that gathers followers itself.” They are used to influence voters by means of social propaganda and post-truths thus creating the appearance that a certain issue, position or person receive a great amount of public support from the virtual crowd (see Lobo, 2017). The use of robots and trolls in the social media in order to manipulate politics, disseminate fake news and distrust, to polarize opinions and promote hate campaigns and anti-democratic agendas has been reported in more than 30 countries (Salas, 2017). There are also the “like farms,” automated bots or underpaid workers who make a large quantity of “likes” in certain Facebook pages or websites and artificially increase their popularity (see, for instance, Cristofaro, 2016). They are hired to simulate those pages or websites that are highly prestigious. The sociological and psychological forces underneath the efficacy of these strategies are so called herd-behavior (the tendency to thoughtlessly follow influencers or great numbers of people), and the propensity of actors to appreciate and believe in what they already believe and appreciate.
Recent electoral examples of social media role in major national campaigns include the last American presidential election (2016) and the Brexit campaign in the UK8. In the Trump campaign, Cambridge Analytica, a conservative London based firm, used psychometrics, a data-driven branch of psychology, to analyze personal data bought from different sources and surveys on social media and Facebook data to draw personalities’ profiles. This allowed it to distinguish between pro-Hillary Clinton and pro-Donald Trump voters and sort out the undecided ones (Grassegger and Krogerus, 2017). Campaigners could thus focus their online and offline efforts on the undecided voters, tailoring their messages to these people since they knew many of their personal characteristics and inclinations by using the data base analysis techniques. They could also send demeaning messages about Hillary Clinton to people inclined in voting for her. The use of similar techniques to influence electoral results is quickly spreading as the opening, in March 2017, of a joint venture of Cambridge Analytica in São Paulo, Brazil, testifies (Ducroquet, 2017).
Whether democracy will survive the erosion of a highly polarized civil society promoted by the social media and whether it will survive big data and artificial intelligence are major worries. The fear that decision-making power is transferred to prescient algorithms and systems raises the phantom that “we are being remotely controlled”, subject to big nudging and brainwashed, that thinking, freedom and democracy have been hacked (Helbing et al., 2017).
8 In a 2016 referendum, a majority of the UK electorate voted to leave the European Union.
How could creativity and thinking “out of the box” be possible under such conditions? Ultimately, a centralized system of technocratic behavioral and social control using a super-intelligent information system would result in a new form of dictatorship. Therefore, the top-down controlled society, which comes under the banner of “liberal paternalism,” is in principle nothing else than a totalitarian regime with a rosy cover (idem).
However, at least since the major anti-globalization struggle of Seattle 1999 when the indymedia first showed its face, there are attempts to counterbalance the media used by political hegemonic powers. The much commented use of the internet, of social media such as Twitter and Facebook, to mobilize activists in major contemporary political struggles – Occupy Wall Street, Indignados and Arab Spring, for instance – needs to have its impacts better understood. According to Paulo Gerbaudo (2017), in the past, the anti-globalization movement was located within a “cyber-autonomist” imaginary of having its own media while, lately the “cyber-populists” move to occupy the digital mainstream by using the available corporate media. Sascha Lobo (2017) points out to the “public counterspheres,” i.e., to the existence of autonomous and progressive media present on the Internet for decades. But he also comments that unfortunately there are two tendencies that converge and produce a turn. On the one hand, social networks privilege sensationalism, exacerbation and dramatization, and this generates a greater political and emotional polarization of society. In this way, the political sphere, which in democracy urgently needs to become more rational, becomes hyper-emotional. Political agitation becomes the natural state; halftones, contextualizations and relativizations lose ground or cease to exist. And on the other hand, this world of media agitation, this sensationalism of social networks, is much more functional to the right and to the extreme right than to the rest of the political forces. This is so because, admittedly after Trump’s triumph, no matter how rude or xenophobic it may seem, the right has understood much better how social networks work.
Final comments
The Gramscian conception of hegemony includes both coercion and consent in the exercise of power for the maintenance of a given social order. In this chapter, I focused more on how electronic-computer capitalism is influencing the economy, academia and politics by means of compliance with and adaptation to the innovations it introduces. Search engines, blogs, Facebook, emails and websites are the basis of ECC’s economic power and have impacted the politics of visibility, circulation and (re)production of knowledge. It has opened the possibility of heterodox forms of intellectual cooperation either by way of online massive innovation and cooperation, or allowing scholars outside hegemonic centers to establish their own networks of knowledge exchange and political alliance. In fact, changes are more profound than most would acknowledge, as there are changes in the (inter)subjective relationships crucial to the processes of learning, teaching and establishing hierarchies in academia. Writing and reading, the memory, attention span and the functioning of the mind are being transformed. The hyper-democratization of the virtual-public-space has given voice and legitimacy to previously politically peripheral actors, fostering extreme polarizations in an environment in which anti-intellectualism flourishes. Politics is entering a new era of manipulations and polarizations that potentially puts at risk notions of democracy understood as the possibility of reaching consensus by means of discursive strategies deployed in the real-public-space. Electoral processes are equally vulnerable to all sorts of manipulation by robots, algorithms or human operators. The Internet and the digital devices associated with it make up a “technology of intelligence” (Lévy, 1993) that is evolving to a degree in which certain uses of artificial intelligence (intelligent weapons and drones, for instance) are now regarded as a threat to humankind.
In the face of this rather complicated juncture, its tendencies and structural underpinnings, intellectual cooperation and innovation in the social sciences need to be highly imaginative and unafraid, once more, of speaking truth to power and seeking the right alliances with distinct social and political forces. There is too much at stake and complacent positions will only generate other layers of misunderstandings and mystifications.
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