Image of Donald Trump imposed on red white and blue stripes. The words 'miss me yet' appear over his head

The Quadra Project – Social Media P 4 of 4

Environmentalists have become acutely concerned about the physical state of our planet, but a related concern should be the psychological state that we occupy as human beings living in a milieu of digital information. This is an issue that has recently entered prominence because of a number of factors: the propaganda justifying Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the possible meddling of China and Russia in American and Canadian elections, and the pervasive effects of social media on the attitudes and behaviour of people who are exposed to and influenced by it. We can’t solve any problem, environmental or otherwise, if we are not connected to reality.

“The geopolitical battles of the 20th century,” proclaimed a recent edition of Adbusters magazine, “were over who controlled the oil, the minerals, the trading routes, the seas, skies and money flows. The geopolitical battles of the 21st century will be over who controls the information flows.” For evidence, just consider China with Xi Jinping, Philippines with Bongbong Marcos, Myanmar with General Hliang, Egypt with General el-Sisi, India with Narendra Modi, and Russia with Vladimir Putin. In the United States, Donald Trump generates so much news that his narcissistically perverted version of reality has created a pandemic of misinformation.

Social media is a concern of Yuval Noah Harari, a macro-historian and author of Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind. Like other thinkers who consider the major trends in human behaviour, he too is concerned about the influence of the digital world in which we are now immersed. Like the written word and its mass production by printing, and like the telegraph, radio and television, social media is inventing a different kind of human being. “By creating powerful influence machines to control billions of minds, the big tech companies are destroying the idea of a sovereign individual with free will.”

A composite of quotes from Adbusters summarizes the problem. “Every day, billions of dollars change hands and countless decisions are made on the basis of likes and dislikes, our friends and families, our relationships and conversations, our wishes and fears, our hopes and dreams. These scraps of data, each one harmless enough on its own, are carefully assembled, synthesized, traded and sold. Taken to its extreme, this process creates an enduring digital profile and lets companies know you better than you may know yourself. Your profile is then run through algorithms that can serve up increasingly extreme content, pounding our harmless preferences into hardened convictions. This enduring digital profile can be used against you—to persuade, to influence, to manipulate—completely without your knowledge.”

As a chilling example of how the “echo chamber” of extremism can work, Christopher Browning, in the New York Review of Books writes, “In the Trump presidency,” the objective functioning of news reporting had “effectively been privatized in the form of Fox News and Sean Hannity. Fox faithfully trumpets the ‘alternative facts’ of the Trump version of events, and in turn Trump frequently finds inspiration for his tweets and fantasy-filled statements from his daily monitoring of Fox commentators and his late-night phone calls to Hannity. The result is a ‘Trump bubble’ for his base to inhabit that is unrecognizable to viewers of PBS, CNN and MSNBC and readers of The Washington Post and The New York Times. The highly critical free media not only provide no effective check on Trump’s ability to be a serial liar without political penalty; on the contrary, they provide yet another enemy around which to mobilize the grievances and resentments of his base.”

The power of his information is focused more sharply by Fred Turbin, writing in Machine Politics: The Rise of the Internet and a New Age Authoritarianism. “What many people fail to understand is that Trump has mastered the politics of authenticity for a new media age. What mainstream analysts see as pathological weakness, Trump’s fans see as the man just being himself. What’s more, his anger, his rants, and his furious narcissism act out the feelings of people who believe they have been dispossessed by immigrants, women and people of colour. Trump is not only true to his own emotions. He is the personification of his supporter’s grievances. He is to his political base what Hitler was to many Germans, or Mussolini to Italians—the living embodiment of a nation.”

So the illusion completes itself by creating its own reality, and an authenticity is invented that does not exist. This does not mean that real problems do not exist. But the ones that exercise people are often not based on facts. And the more the attitudes are solidified into convictions, the less are they responsive to the evidence of facts. Or, as the 19 century philosopher, Friedrich Nietzsche, reminded us, “Convictions are more dangerous enemies of truth than lies.”

To return to Maria Ressa, her concern is that lies spread faster than truth, and that the information world of today is polluted by lies—toasters, she says, are more regulated than social media. If we are to survive the insidious manipulation of information, then we have an obligation to become citizens, not users. “Without facts, you can’t have truth. Without truth, you can’t have trust.” Valid elections, and thus the smooth functioning of societies, are based on the veracity of facts, truth and trust. They are worth protecting.

“We invent things, and thereafter they invent us,” as McLuhan so wisely noted. We need to understand how we are being invented by our inventions. The digital world of social media is revolutionizing our collective and individual psychology in ways that we had never anticipated. Our only option is to be conscious of its power, to recognize what it is doing to us, and thereby to escape its spell.

Ray Grigg for Sierra Quadra

Top image credit: Miss me yet? -Photo by Jon Tyson on Unsplash