gracchusdixit

Now that Donald Trump has slunk away to nurse his paranoid grievances in that bastion of bad taste called Mar-a-Lago, not to mention having been impeached for an unprecedented second time, many Americans are asking themselves:  How did we ever allow such a self-absorbed and criminally incompetent sociopath to become President of the United States?

Looking for answers, some harken back the “Southern Strategy” of Richard Nixon, which turned the Republican Party into a political arm of the Ku Klux Klan.  Others hold Ronald Reagan responsible, for using his slick charm to trick so many Americans into thinking that government is an existential evil.   Still others point the finger at one-time Speaker of the House of Representatives Newt Gingrich, who shut down the federal government (twice, no less) rather than spend a single penny on those he deemed to be shiftless wards of the welfare state.  Each of these answers contains a germ of truth.  

The greater truth, however, is that the societal insanity which saddled us with Donald Trump started long before the Republican Party began lurching toward its present lunacy.   Indeed, it can be said to have begun on October 22, 1454.  

It was then, more than five centuries ago, that the pages of the first known copy of the now-famous “Gutenberg Bible” were peeled off the gooey, ink-slathered surface of a new invention, the printing press, in Mainz, Germany.  Before that momentous event, books had been produced entirely by hand, making them rare and incomprehensibly costly.  For millennia, the knowledge they contained had been the exclusive province of monks and monarchs, patriarchs and princes.  The invention of the printing press changed all that.  

Almost immediately, the new medium was heralded as a beacon of hope, offering up the possibility that knowledge might henceforth be shared more democratically.  Much of this hope was realized.  When the great Bible rolled off Gutenberg’s press in Mainz, only seven percent of Europeans could read anything, let alone the Latin text of his masterwork.  A century later, literacy had more than doubled; it has been climbing ever since.

It didn’t take long, however, for this revolutionary new medium to produce consequences that were anything but hopeful.  That millions could suddenly hold a copy of the Bible in their own hands and read it for themselves, was, on one level, liberating; on another, it proved to be catastrophic.  The work of towering intellects like Augustine and Ambrose, Ockham and Aquinas, was cast aside by half-literate non-entities who claimed to have a personal relationship with the Almighty, simply because they could read “the word of God” on a printed page.  In one of the great ironies of history, the medium that did more than any other to expand human knowledge also spawned a poisonous brew of ignorance, arrogance, and intolerance.

This lethal combination planted the seeds of the Protestant Reformation and the Catholic Counter-Reformation, inflicting centuries of misery on those deemed “heretics” by each side.  It led to the Thirty Years War, which turned Central Europe into an abattoir.  It sparked the English Civil War, which pitted fanatical Puritans against their country’s anointed king and established church.  And eventually, it fueled the terrors and tumult of the American and French Revolutions.

During much of this time, Europe and North America were neck-deep in what today would be called “fake news”.  Malicious pamphleteers churned out a slurry of scandal sheets, peddling every false and scurrilous rumor they could find or fabricate.  In the coffee houses of London, the cafés of Paris, and the malodorous taverns of the American colonies, credulous “readers” were deluged by conspiracy theories of all kinds.  That Charles I lost his head on the block, that Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette lost theirs on the guillotine, that Britain’s American colonies decided (absurdly, given the triviality of their complaints) that it was necessary “for one people to dissolve the political bonds that connected them with another,” were owed in no small part to the printing press.

Scandal-mongering and conspiracy theories were nothing new, of course.  The ancient Egyptians, Greeks, and Romans all reveled in them.  What made the difference this time was that they appeared in a medium that had once been reserved for the privileged and the powerful.  This gave even the most outrageous rumors, slanders, and innuendoes an air of authority they did not deserve.  The medium itself, more than its message, was the principal cause of the trouble. 

It wasn’t until 1964 that this phenomenon was analyzed in depth, by a Canadian scholar named Marshall McLuhan.  McLuhan proposed a theory of communication summed up in the now-famous phrase, “the medium is the message”.  By this, he meant that the structure of a communications medium—the way it works and acts upon the mind—is far more important than the content it conveys.  Perhaps the best-known example he used to illustrate his point was that of the common light bulb.  This ubiquitous medium transmits no information at all; it merely transmits raw energy in the form of light.  Yet its very existence changes behavior dramatically.  Although McLuhan died before the first personal computer or the internet saw the light of day, he would not have been surprised by what followed.  In particular, he would not have been surprised by the transformative, and corrosive, effects of social media.

It is no exaggeration to say that Donald Trump might never have been elected except for the influence of Twitter and Facebook, Instagram and YouTube.  Thus, many members of the political and journalistic nomenklatura are calling for editorial restrictions to be imposed on these social media behemoths.  These calls, though well-intended, miss the point, because they misperceive the problem. The problem is not the “fake news” peddled on social media platforms.   The problem is the medium itself.  

Social media platforms are designed, not to communicate verifiable facts—let alone truth—but to magnify and manipulate the self-regard of those who use them.  The entire algorithmic architecture of “likes,” “friends,” “retweets,” and “hashtags” is Pavlovian in the worst possible way.  It insulates social media users from rational disagreement or constructive criticism.   It creates a psychological distortion field akin to the mirrors in a fun-house, in which a person sees his own image reflected and repeated endlessly.   Social media users may  think they are engaged in meaningful conversations; in reality, they are talking to themselves, and the “selves” they are talking to have been managed and manufactured.

The original prospect touted by the secretive billionaires who control this revolutionary new medium was the creation of a global community that would bring humankind together by shattering the boundaries that separate us.   The truth is that social media divide and isolate us, by creating separately tailored universes, grounded in largely artificial realities.   This process, carried to its logical and monstrous extreme, has the power to gin up the virtual equivalent of a murderous mob.  On January 6th, 2021, we saw the virtual become real, as a deluded gang of Trump supporters descended upon the Capitol of the United States and came very close to ending our democracy.

This was not the unintended or unforeseen consequence of an otherwise beneficent medium.  The sleep-inducing platitudes muttered by social media moguls like Mark Zuckerberg are not harmless bromides, merely intended to tout their services and boost their stock prices.  They are outright lies, which have the most serious social and political consequences.  Johannes Gutenberg’s printing press may have produced unintended consequences, but it gave us one of the most magnificent books in history as well as centuries of learning and knowledge.   Facebook, Twitter, and the rest have given us little more than illusions and menace.   They deserve more than regulation.  If they will not mend their ways, they deserve extermination.