One of the positive aspects of new information technologies is that we have free access to any special moment of our societies. Congressional hearings were usually not broadcasted live. You had to rely on journalists reports. It has changed and every second of every session can now be seen on YouTube. There are many nth-order effects linked to this. One of the most striking is the ability to witness the nakedness of the king on a regular basis. I was struck by the recent hearing of Ivy League presidents about how the calling for genocide of Jews was violating or not Universities codes of conduct:
This is painful to watch at many levels. The discussion is indeed complex because you don’t want to kill freedom of speech un a slight of hand (remember that in the USA the Nazi party has legal rights to demonstrate) neither condone explicit calls to murder. It is true that a yes or no answer is not at the level of such subtle discussions, but the replies by the head of universities is appalling. The irony of the double standard at play in the Ivy League is not lost on anyone. They were splitting hairs about microaggressions and things like dead-naming/misgendering but well an explicit call to genocide apparently doesn’t meet the same criterion for “hate speech”. The answers were visibly prepared - they all say the same exact thing - and at the same time they are completely out of touch with what those same heads of college have been practicing for years. This is not a bug but a feature of digital culture. It manifests itself at many levels.
The Lost Decoherence
There is this particular phenomenon of quantum mechanics: when you observe a a physical state you change it. It is called decoherence. From a theoretical point of view you move from a probability distribution to a specific value and the system behaves classically from there. To see the observation via social media of the society as having the same effect is maybe a long shot but it is not a totally inappropriate allegory either. Before social media, congressional hearings were synchronizing events of the society. Indeed, the hearings were reported by the press and processed by journalists before being delivered to the public. Just like the measurement in quantum physics. But with social media this measurement has disappeared so to say. So the system continues to evolve following quantum rules: as a superposition of many states. Just like a quantum bit that can be in a superposed state between 0 and 1. This is the famous Schrödinger’s cat that is half-dead and half-alive at the same time.
What does it means in concrete terms? Our society is no longer synchronizing at a regular pace. Short of a cataclysmic event, small tribes/circles will evolve in parallel. Vocabulary changes -words don’t mean the same thing across the board anymore- and also the sense of belonging. It is not without recalling what happened at the end of XIX° when European farmers were sent to cities to manpower plants. Suddenly “being a German” was invented. Few wars and revolutions later -including world wars and the spread of Marxism- a new world order emerged. The empires crumbled and the USA took the lead. It is very early to know what form will take the new transformation but we are talking about a phenomenon of a similar scale. Moving towards a digital society is not going to be an easy road.
Instagramility
As if it were not enough to have a society split between sheaves that barely understand each other, there is a global loss of internal coherence within a tribe. This is another direct effect of social media. The tribes are formed online with live, point to point, interactions. It means that you don’t have the equivalent of 1934 Nuremberg rallies or the demonstrations of the French Revolution. Those large gathering of people were used as forming mythologies of ideologies. In the virtual space there is no equivalent. It means that modern tribes lack rituals that anchor the identity into reality. There is a try to hack events in order to recover this: BLM or pro-Palestine demonstrations are good examples. The problem is that people gathering at those demonstrations have an “anti” agenda rather than a “pro” agenda. This is why pro-Israel demonstrations are of a different nature (whatever your stance on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict might be). This lack of touch with reality makes it easier to drift. That explains in part the response of the heads of the ivy-league that I was referring to at the beginning of this post. Now the present is almost all that matters. Internet never forgets, but no one really cares about what was said last week, or what sits on page 2 of Google search… So it is more a lack of standard than multiple standard that is at play here. Microaggressions are no longer the thing. The thing is changing and so the rules by which the social game is played are changing too. This is what I was talking about on
But is the second derivative null? In other words is the way things change also changing? It appears to me that it is the case. The cancel culture has been incorporated to our societies. Shame used to be a personal feeling. It was an internal reaction. Under the cancel culture rule shame is a tool at the hand of activists. Therefore, if you are not targeted by a group there is no shame. We are living in this bizarre era where people are producing apologies for anything and everything in particular ( ) but where no journalist nor politician can admit what went wrong during the COVID crisis… They have just moved on as if nothing had happened. The motto of our times is not “Don’t Look Up” it is rather “Never Look Back”. Shame is no longer linked to the recognition of a failure. It has acquired the status of a scapegoat mark. Shame is the digital version of the Gulag. Once you have been convicted by online activists you become like a plague or leprosy patient: no one wants to get too close to you and everything that you touch becomes tainted. Moreover, as there is no due process and no way to make the internet forget about it, you are basically cooked forever. It only applies to the targets identified by the internet swarms: as long as you are not at the epicenter you can get away with anything. Trump’s quote was prescient:
"I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody, and I wouldn't lose any voters, OK? It's, like, incredible."
The absence of standard is the new standard. More precisely we have entered a new age in which “vox populi, vox dei” is no longer an electoral statement. Social media are, for better or worse, incarnating vox populi. This incarnation is very different from previous instantiations of the vox populi: athenian agora, open editorials in the press, TV anchors on Broadcast channels etc. A major difference is that your Twitter is not my Twitter. We literally don’t see the same things anymore when accessing to the news.
The Poly-Monism
Unity is a strange concept in politics. We are constantly striving for it -just listen to electoral messages- but when it becomes too pronounced it becomes suffocating -think communism in its worst aspects. Calls for unity are great when you are running for office, when in charge they can quickly acquire authoritarian traits. One ring to rule them all as they say. The peculiarity of our times is that it looks like we have the worst of all worlds at once: as discussed previously unity is lost but it is only on the surface. Under the surface AI and tech is in fact producing those personalized social media feeds. You have won free speech on global stage -anyone can read this post- but lost free will in the process -the Time Lines are going to be the real arbiters of whether or not this post will be read. The building of the TLs is everything but unbiased yet TLs appear like they are a fact: AIs do not invent posts, but just ordering them (or selectively forget about others) influences your train of thoughts. If you think it is not that important think again. Think again at what happened during the COVID-crisis: we collectively went all nuts. Meanwhile there was a surprising uniformity across countries in their reactions to the crisis. Parts of the population live in different universes and at the same the society as a whole is remarkably uniform. The past is also a different society than the present. Following the industrial revolution the progresses were mostly technological, the evolution is now primarily societal. This is why everything looks upside down right now: the old standard are disappearing in front of our eyes and new standard haven’t yet emerged. Chaos is ruling the day.