The company called facebook entered the global market in February 2004. The company twitter in July 2006. The company instagram in October 2010. Whatever the system’s forgers do, the complex we call antisocial media is less than 15 years old. In other words, it took off in a single generation. Before that, blogs existed for a brief historical moment, there were chats, there were messages… But even if we add half a generation more, the historical time is too short to claim that such a radical anthropological mutation has taken place that millions of first-world citizens—who used to be consciously and maturely in love with the “truth”—now suddenly leapt into the void and were transformed into infants swept along by rogue liars, so that the latter must have their heads cut off to save the former!…
Where did the mass-user of antisocial media come from? Out of nowhere? From Alpha Centauri? No. It emerged from 40, 50, or 60 years (depending on the society / state) of consumption / education by the traditional media: high-circulation print, radio and television channels—in other words, business conglomerates, professional agents of systematic alienation, disinformation, overload, forgery, especially since the 1990s. It came out of the meat-grinder that produces and reproduces the system’s ideological stability. It is not just one or even one-and-a-half generations raised on the one-way flow of illusions (and often vulgarization) from the top down, from the centers of ideological, moral, aesthetic plague of the bosses, their states and corporations, toward the subordinates. It is two or three such generations.
The bidirectional exchanges made possible in cyberspace (practically, from a political point of view, cyberspace is this: the digital, mechanical mediation of the connectedness of social subjects) “democratised” what had already become entrenched, legitimised it, reproduced it. And in that sense they multiplied the easiest, most digestible, emotive and spectacular aspects of what was actually “there” as social material from the mid-2000s onwards. What dominated was neither good taste, nor politeness, nor arguments, nor the thorough review of opposing arguments, nor the search for irrefutable evidence. After twenty solid years of neoliberalism and I-as-Capital, there were neither “good manners” nor intelligence. There was declared or undeclared war of all against all, hypomanias, fistfuls of pills, drugs, poses and fears. Dominant were impressions, punchlines, emotional blackmail, shallowness, channel-surfing as a way of life – along with psychological problems and panic attacks. Well, that was what both the entrepreneurs of antisocial media and their clients seized as an opportunity! The rot was productive in certain respects, a kind of “fertiliser” for the development of various surveillance and control technologies. It spread like wildfire through a field of dry grass; but the dry grass was social relations, understandings, behaviours, ethics, which, although already shaped by the mature Spectacle, were still trapped by the false modesty of one-way propaganda of historical media mediations. Once the gates finally opened, what had long been ripe began to pour out: the vanities, the insecurities, the ignorances, the egotisms, the convenient credulities, the prejudices, the superstitions, the grudges, the complexes, the free digital undressing/exhibition… and, inevitably, the question (at first) and the answers (soon—i.e. already) of control over all this material.
Now the censors arrive (always the henchmen of the powers-that-be) posing as saviors / redeemers; pretending they are ready to plunge their hands into the muck to dry it out (the dead fox’s mythical promise, by the way, with its long “hygienic” declaration: drain the swamp, which means “drain the swamp”…) and, of course, to haul the subordinates out of it. How? In the usual way: by decrees, bans and penalties. They are the same ones who saved the First-Worlders from the Armageddon of covid; from the Armageddon of jihadist terrorism; from the Armageddon of the energy crisis in the ’70s; from the Armageddon of the “Cold War” later on… They still have more missionary work ahead, because Armageddons never end. The salvation from the Armageddon of climate change is already under way, the Armageddon of conspiracy theories… And capitalism keeps going!
How sweet and humanitarian these salvations are, eh?
the above text was published as the second in a triad:
1. “Garbage-eating sets you free!”
3. “Censorship sets you free!”