Signifying Nothing

Political Imagination in the Age of the Posting Wars

We often gravitate toward dystopian literature because it lets us explore the dark potential of the future from the safety of the present. The best works in this genre, though, let us see facets of our lives that are already dehumanizing or barbaric, but taken as granted.

George Orwell’s 1984 is a “go-to” parable illustrating how a centralized authority can suppress information and language to subjugate the masses. But, as cultural critic Neil Postman posits in his 1985 work Amusing Ourselves to Death, our world bears more resemblance to the work of Aldous Huxley than that of Orwell.

Huxley’s 1937 novel Brave New World suggests that a sufficiently-advanced authoritarian society would have no need to suppress information. Instead, the powerful could exercise control by overloading people with distractions. If we have endless, hollow entertainment (helped along by mood-enhancing substances), we lose the ability to even see the bars of our own cages.

When Postman wrote in the mid-eighties, he suggested that we were already inundated with so much information that it was impossible to sift through it and pick out the few important bits of data in the endless stream. In his view, the technologies that defined free expression in over the preceding century had made the act of communication increasingly meaningless.

Of course, Postman wrote in an era before social media. Reading through his book, though, one gets the sense that the present state of The Discourse® would not surprise him. Even by 1985, “public discourse” had ceased to be a matter of exchanging ideas to separate truth from fiction. It had been reduced to just another spectacle.

Making Relevance Irrelevant

It’s tempting to view the birth of social media as a transformative moment. Platforms like Twitter and Facebook were something different from Web 1.0 innovations like chat rooms and forums. They offered a new degree of latitude for instant communication, letting us connect globally in real time and craft a digital identity that transcended the platform. However, we can trace social media’s lineage to a sequence of developments beginning in the mid-Nineteenth Century.

Word economy was a key factor at a time when information could only travel as fast as humans. That was no longer a concern, though, once transmitting information became as simple as interpreting a telegraph. The newfound ease of communication meant we could transmit any thought at any time…which is really part of the problem.

Postman draws on Henry David Thoreau’s early perception of the telegraph as a device with the potential to redefine what human discourse can-and should-be. He quotes directly from Thoreau’s 1854 work Walden, in which the author suggests that “We are in great haste to construct a magnetic telegraph from Maine to Texas; but Maine and Texas, it may be, have nothing important to communicate.”

The implication is that the fervor with which we interconnect ourselves for the purpose of communication would, inevitably, outstrip the volume of information that demands to be communicated. In the process, we would find ourselves filling the empty air with inanity; jabbering for the sake of jabbering. By the late-Twentieth Century, communication technologies fulfilled that prophecy, eventually coming to “make relevance irrelevant,” in Postman’s words.

The concept of the 24-hour news cycle was still young when Postman wrote Amusing Ourselves to Death. CNN was less than five years old in 1985; MSNBC and Fox News would not exist for another eleven years. Even then, he saw cable news as a perfect model illustrating the hollowing out of meaning. He claims that cable news “has no intention of suggesting that any story has (his italics) any implications, for that would require viewers to continue to think about it when it it’s done and therefore to obstruct their attending to the next story that waits panting in the wings.” The result is that we receive all information as equally dire and anxiety-inducing, yet meaningless at the same time. Each story washes over the viewer as static information, devoid of nuance or implication.

Postman describes this world in which all information exists in a vacuum, devoid of context, as one of “not coherence but discontinuity.” And, in such a media environment, “contradiction is useless as a test of truth or merit, because contradiction does not exist.”

Moving Into the Present

Broadband is now the medium, but it carries out the same function. The only difference is the accelerated pace of relay and response. Information once shunted along copper lines can now be beamed to us directly and travel faster than we can process and contextualize it. We overload ourselves with information, and as a result, we end up gorging on “content” that serves no purpose beyond occupying our attention.

Every time we open Twitter, we’re subsumed in the stream of raw data, bouncing off millions of other minds representing singular nodes in a massive interface. Every post is something new about which we can argue until we forget it three minutes later with the next refresh of the feed. In short, we’re not engaging in The Discourse; it is engaging in us, and it is setting the terms of our interactions.

The pace at which discourse changes on social media makes it impossible to have a meaningful, measured impression of the contours of a given topic before that topic changes. Regardless, we’re compelled to have a take on the latest controversy or outrage, even if we have nothing relevant or meaningful to say.

The effect is more pronounced on new social platforms, but there is nothing intrinsically “new” about it. And, as with modes of mass communication that came before like television, radio, and the telegraph, confusion of the narrative via social media redounds to the benefit of the holders of capital.

The Self-Generating Narrative

Photojournalist Frederic Remington was stationed in Cuba in 1897, assigned by newspaper magnate and yellow journalism purveyor William Randolph Hearst to cover the revolution underway there. Hearst had an eye on the lucrative business opportunities presented by a Cuba within the U.S. sphere of influence. As such, he sought to push for American intervention on the island. When Remington messaged his boss to inform him that the situation did not warrant U.S. entry into the war, Hearst is alleged to have cabled in response, “You furnish the pictures. I’ll furnish the war.”

Examples of communication media becoming a tool to distort truth don’t need to be as blatant as the invention of a narrative out of whole cloth to support boots-on-the-ground imperialism. If there is anything unique about social media as compared to earlier communication technologies, it’s that there’s no longer the need to direct a narrative. Given time, space, and millions of bored and anxious posters, a narrative will craft itself.

Social media is very effective at keeping the masses occupied with minutiae. Throughout the Trump years, for instance, millions of good liberals spent their days fixated on the dramas of the Mueller investigation and the day-to-day scandals that bled out of the White House. At the same time, millions of others fixed their attention on the latest Q drop, anxiously awaiting the day on which the adrenochrome harvesters would be rounded up. The throughline was the interactive element; you can be part of the intrigue; you can crack the code and uncover the truth. All you need to do is read the posts and follow the clues. Of course, these sideshows occur at the expense of material politics that could actually impact millions of peoples’ lives.

We have a situation in which people can pluck any information from the ether at will. This lets them create bespoke narratives about what is “really” happening in the world, rather than arriving at understanding through experience shared along class lines. At the same time, we can’t forge connections with people if we don’t share the same fundamental perception of reality. This makes it impossible to clarify class distinctions and foster the kind of solidarity that can affect change.

The result is that people lose sight of real, material politics, and substitute the symbolic and the abstract as politics. From there, it’s easy to fall down a wormhole in which any enemy-Russians or Reptilians-could be hiding around the corner. All the while, capital’s grip on power goes unchallenged.

The Posting Wars

There are plenty of opportunistic hucksters feeding The Discourse to build a personal brand. However, it’s reasonable to assume that most people who engage in political discourse on social media do so believing that it will, somehow, have a positive impact; that it will achieve some end. This perception is bolstered by the fact that key social movements in recent years have been organized, at least in part, across social media. The Occupy movement in 2011, Black Lives Matter in 2014, the summer 2020 uprisings after the killings of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor: all were launched online, but developed into global movements. The problem arises when we believe that posting has the same efficacy as organizing in physical space, and that the two are not just complimentary, but actually the same thing.

The impulse is understandable; social media lets us scream into the void. It’s cathartic, and even better…it’s easy. However, this is representative of the fact that our horizons of political possibility are so constrained in the present moment.

Offline avenues to channel political frustration and angst are few and far between. We experience general voicelessness in the workplace, in schools, in housing, and in the electoral realm. In short, we’ve been collectively robbed of our ability to imagine something beyond capitalism. This fact can lead us to substitute class-based, material politics for the aesthetic approach of “doing politics” through posting. Ultimately, this means that our political imagination becomes limited to what we can affect online. The horizon narrows to the realm of symbolic signals, with material conditions becoming immutable.

As mentioned before, posting offers the allure of a bespoke reality that we can create for ourselves. It allows us to imagine a space in which our vision for the world has already won. Leftists aren’t immune to this; in fact, it often leads us to overestimate the strength of the organized left, and underestimate how much work still needs to be done. It lets us pretend that flooding an elected official’s mentions with guillotine memes is a form of praxis, when in reality, it’s just a way to soothe the pain of our own powerlessness. By indulging this fantasy, we distract ourselves from the means to achieve actual power, which is doing the hard work of building a mass movement of working class people mobilized to contend with entrenched capital.

It’s true that any successful popular movement will necessitate leveraging online space. In the examples mentioned above, though, momentum only built when activists leveraged social media as a front in a broader struggle; a tool with which to organize people, not as the primary space in which to contest power. Twitter and other platforms are, the end of the day, environments in which we can too easily substitute likes and shares for the hard work of building political power.

The Limits of Political Imagination

Postman himself foresaw some of this. He predicted that computer technology, as well as the technocratic premise that any problem can be overcome with sufficient data, will have been “of great value to large-scale organizations but have solved very little of importance to most people and have created at least as many problems for them as they may have solved.”

Like capitalism itself, the development of communication technology was a progressive force in the world. However, the potential of those technologies will remain limited as long as they’re held in the thrall of capitalist realism. This leads us to Postman’s main failing: his lack of a solution to the problem which has festered in the 35 years since the book’s publication.

“Thus, there are near insurmountable difficulties for anyone who has written such a book as this, and who wishes to end it with some remedies for the affliction,” he says. “In the first place, not everyone believes a cure is needed, and in the second, there probably isn’t any.”

The first of those conclusions is true. There will, unavoidably, be self-identified liberals and conservatives who run apologia for the status quo. However, the latter conclusion only reflects a limitation of imagination.

The problem isn’t a natural human tendency toward nihilism and displacing our social being. Instead, it’s the absence of any kind of greater project that we can pursue in physical space. We tell ourselves that we can effect change through the channels left open to us within the neoliberal facade as a way to ease the pain. Ultimately, though, we have to reckon with the fact that we can’t simply post our way to a better world.

We must be clear, though, that the solution is not as simple as “logging off.” That kind of individuated approach is of no more use than advocating restricted screen time as a cure-all. We need to accept, and operate from, a deeper premise: that we can find meaning in physical space. That information does still have context. That we can affect material change if we organize and set ourselves to the task. The key is to have political imagination; to believe that meaningful change is possible, then identify a way to act on it.

It’s not something we can achieve in digital space. Finding our way out of this trap isn’t going to be something we can do by diving deeper into the realm of abstraction. Instead, it’s something we’ll have to seek in physical, or at least, augmented space, as we’ve found while attempting to organize via Zoom calls and Signal chats during the COVID-19 outbreak.

In the absence of any better, positive alternative, why would anyone bother logging off? The solution, then, is to create tangible politics in the physical space that are more compelling than the allure of the illusory, digital one.

It’s one thing if a person is restricted to online activity due to some limitation outside of their control. For others, though, action may take the form of a grassroots local campaign, or workplace organizing, or even food shares and mutual aid. However it manifests, we all have to find something on which we can lay a hand-no matter how small that object may be-and move it, if only to prove that it’s still possible.

Originally published at https://arguechat.substack.com.