Other examples unearthed by the Times were far more morbid. Clinton was paying pollsters to skew results. Her campaign was planning a ‘radiological attack’ to stop voting. Her strategist John Podesta partook of occult rituals. Her opponents tended to die in suspicious circumstances. ‘Fake news’, so the argument went, had undermined the consensus necessary for effective government. As Martin Baron, executive editor of the Washington Post, complained: ‘If you have a society where people can’t agree on basic facts, how do you have a functioning democracy?’17
The problem here is that this wasn’t simply about disagreement as to the ‘basic facts’. Disagreement about ‘basic facts’ is a condition of a functioning democracy. A fact is just a measurement, and there is always some legitimate disagreement over the relevance of the measurement, the tools used to make it, the authority of the people doing the measuring, and so on. There are no facts without values, so only in a police state can there be a factual consensus. The would-be arbiters of ‘basic facts’ once assured readers that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction, enabling the loss of hundreds of thousands of lives. No, the problem was deeper. These beliefs were, to differing degrees, suggestive of conspiracist paranoia. The kinds of people prepared to believe such stories were not only far from Clinton’s core demographic; they were not even rooted in the sort of epistemological presuppositions that would be susceptible to a liberal press ‘fact check’.
There is also little evidence that ‘fake news’ had much effect in 2016, and attempts to blame belief in ‘fake news’ stories risk shuffling cause and effect. For example, a study by researchers at Ohio State University looked at the correlation between belief in ‘fake news’ stories and defection from the Democratic ticket in 2016.18 It, quite ingeniously, controlled for alternative factors such as age, education, gender, race and ideological orientation. Remarkably, though, it omitted to control for the impact of Clinton’s policies, statements or campaigning strategies. While establishing a weak correlation between belief in a fake news story and likelihood to defect, it was still unable to say whether this was a cause of defection or an effect of other factors causing defection. These other factors might include the effects of the credit crunch, the record of the Democratic Party in its rust-belt constituencies, and the disintegration of the political legitimacy of the party establishments.19
There is a further difficulty posed by the way in which Clinton was damaged by true claims, which Trump was able to put to work. Among the leaked emails from Hillary Clinton’s campaign, for example, was one discussing Clinton’s speeches to Wall Street, wherein she is supposed to have said ‘you need both a public and a private position’. In another, Democratic National Committee chair Donna Brazile said of the Democratic primary debates that she had received questions in advance from CNN. Another story, allegedly spread by Russian troll farms to depress black voter turnout, was that Clinton had once dubbed young black men ‘superpredators’.20 This was also true. Trump’s claim that she lied repeatedly and pathologically about her alleged heroics in Bosnia was also true.21
If the term ‘fake news’ is widely used by the Right, including such conspiracy theorists as Alex Jones, this suggests it is semantically loaded. Indeed, Trump’s appropriation of the term prompted a momentary fumbling for fine distinctions. The BBC suggested that ‘unverified’ was not the same as ‘fake’: fake news was untrue, whereas unverified news had not yet been proven to be true or false. The problem with such Jesuitical distinctions is that all ‘fake news’ is ‘unverified’ until someone proves it is ‘fake’. When Trump used the term, he was using it to describe media organizations publishing a document concerning his alleged relationships with the Russian state that, they admitted, they couldn’t verify. Moreover, this definition of ‘fake news’ would cover many stories critical of Trump. For example, the Washington Post alleged that Russian hackers had ‘penetrated’ the US electricity grid during the election, and that a range of left-of-Clinton websites were part of a Russian disinformation campaign. Both stories, aggressively promoted by the Post, were later humiliatingly edited, their central claims withdrawn.22
Those bewailing ‘fake news’, overwhelmingly journalists from the legacy media, are also missing the real scoop. ‘Fake news’ is old news. After all, exactly when was the era of unalloyed truth-telling? It is child’s play to list a century of official hoaxes, from Germany’s ‘corpse factory’, to the Gulf of Tonkin incident, to Kuwaiti babies being ripped from incubators, to weapons of mass destruction capable of being unleashed within forty-five minutes.23 The availability of old media for state management is well documented, from the CIA’s extensive operations in American newsrooms during ‘Operation Mockingbird’ to MI5’s vetting of BBC journalists (and the BBC’s covering up of this fact). Equally well documented is its involvement in what journalist Nick Davies called ‘churnalism’: the recycling of press releases as news. These include not just the usual run of celebrity fare or commercial propaganda, but also false stories from right-wing organizations like the anti-immigrant Migration Watch or the anti-Muslim Gatestone Institute.24
To this extent, ‘fake news’ is a culmination and fusion of existing trends in the media: propaganda, churnalism and infotainment. The genre of faked celebrity deaths builds on a form of ‘soft news’ that emerged out of the fusion of entertainment and twenty-four-hour news. Alex Jones’s far-right conspiracy website, Infowars, builds on talk radio’s tradition of right-wing rage, conspiracy-as-infotainment and ‘home shopping’. Much of what is classified as ‘fake news’ is just satire taken literally. For example, the satirical claim that the US would house a quarter of a million Syrian refugees at the Standing Rock Reservation was repeated in earnest by Sean Hannity of Fox News, and Donald Trump.25 In other cases, the old media concocts a false news story out of random detritus found on the internet. The Toronto Sun’s false story claiming that asylum seekers being temporarily housed at the Radisson Hotel Toronto East had ‘slaughtered goats’ in the bathrooms, was based entirely on unverified reviews left on the TripAdvisor website.26
Nonetheless, ‘fake news’ has galvanized governments to act against Facebook, as part of the general attempt to invigilate liberal states against the populist menace. And Facebook’s reticence has been noted as a black mark on its corporate character. In July 2018, for example, the head of Facebook’s News Feed, John Hegeman, was asked by CNN to explain why Alex Jones’s Infowars site was hosted. If Facebook was dedicated to eradicating fake news, why did it tolerate a site that disseminated nonsense rumours that the victims of the Sandy Hook massacre were ‘crisis actors’? Hegeman insisted that Facebook was simply a place ‘where different people can have a voice’. The baser truth is that Facebook profited from allowing advertisers to target people who liked the Infowars page.27 Facebook ultimately caved, only after Spotify and iTunes banned Infowars the following month. The result, illustrating how much value the platforms had added to the conspiracy site, was to cut its audience immediately in half.
In 2017, Facebook launched a ‘war on fake news’.28 Having at first resisted attempts to hold it responsible for political events in 2016, the company struck a collaboration with the rumour-checking site Snopes, FactCheck.org, ABC News, and PolitiFact. Zuckerberg admitted that the problem was integral to the online attention economy: ‘fake news sites are on the rise due to the profits which can be made from web advertising’.29 Subsequently, following Zuckerberg’s appearance before Congress, the company released a mini-documentary pledging to join the ‘fight against misinformation’.30 It would use AI and machine-learning tools to devalue ‘fake news’ so that it appeared in fewer feeds and thus had less effect. Predictably, the Trump-supporting Right claimed that Facebook’s partners all had a record of ‘left-wing’ bias.
Twitter, which has been more resistant to this sort of policing operation, initially refused to join the ‘war on fake news’, sticking to its ‘free speech’ line. Twitter founder Jack Dorsey declared that Jones would contin
ue to be welcome on the platform. If Jones ‘spread unsubstantiated rumours’, this was best dealt with by fact-checking journalists (acting at no cost to Twitter). The answer to bad speech was more good speech. This was either naive or sly. Hardly anyone is susceptible to ‘fact-checking’, particularly when it comes high-handedly and coercively from a self-appointed authority.31 Fact-checking is never as exciting as the ‘facts’ being checked, and it can have the perverse effect of driving certain stories up the ranks of the attention economy. Dorsey ultimately caved, too, but the social industry companies remain committed to minimizing the loss of content. By algorithmically orchestrating feeds with the aid of machine-learning, they hope to reduce the political pressure on them to ban users. In an effort to circumvent hate-speech restrictions, some alt-right activists flounced off to a right-wing wannabe Twitter, ‘Gab’, which gained almost half a million users within two years. But the majority of activists simply adapted their content and stayed put.
The Twittering Machine, in purifying existing tendencies towards informational nihilism in the media, has clarified that the truth value of information is not the same as its economic value. But ‘fake news’ is not, strictly, the issue. Insofar as outright fakery happens, it is easy to understand. People lie about their political opponents, or spread misinformation about celebrities, for obvious reasons. But the ‘fake news’ trope is like a conspiracy theory in that it asserts a huge epistemological gap between the knowledgeable elect, and a mass of deluded ‘sheeple’. It is always assumed that someone, somewhere, knowingly concocted a lie that others are simply deceived by. But if a story is believed by tens or hundreds of thousands of people, it may have been believed by its original author.
And that’s the hard question. Why did so many people want what Infowars was giving them? There are, of course, such things as conspiracies, political murders, occult rituals, terrorist false flags and sex slaves. These things are part of the world we live in. But growing numbers of people seem to want networks of conspiracy to do the work of shorthand political sociology, explaining how their lives got so bad, and how official politics became so remote and oppressive. They seem to want to believe that, rather than representing business as usual, today’s centrist state managers are malign outsiders usurping a legitimate system. What accounts for this extraordinary hunger for paranoid tales of subversive evil?
IV.
We face a crisis of knowing. According to the explanation offered by theorists of a ‘post-truth’ society, this is a legacy of postmodernist dogma that also seeps into and informs today’s insurgent right.
The argument about ‘fake news’ is thus further limned by a folk history of intellectual decline. According to this view, if false beliefs now gain acceptance, this is because the canons of Western reason have fallen into disuse.
This view arises in part because of the new political potency of the uneducated and unqualified. For the philosopher Steve Fuller, one of the red flags signalling the triumph of the post-truth situation was the defeat of Hillary Clinton, ‘perhaps the most qualified person ever to run for the presidency’, by the wildly unqualified Donald Trump.32 Michiko Kakutani, the esteemed journalist, likewise excoriates the Trump administration’s appointment of ‘unqualified judges and agency heads’, as though the problem with the far right was their (often very real) incompetence.33 As though a competent far-right administration would not represent a far more assured doom. This reflects the spontaneous ideology of professionals, for whom education, qualifications and ‘credentials’ are the condition of good governance.34
To treat political contests as elaborate job interviews implies a consensus: we already know what the job is, and only need to work out who can do it best. And if, rather than a struggle over competing interests and visions, an election is a meritocratic selection process, then Clinton’s defeat can only be an injustice: popular sexism and unreason getting in the way of a logical career progression. From this perspective, democracy looks like lousy quality control. Indeed, the New York Times has reported survey evidence showing that it is political centrists who are most likely to overtly disapprove of democracy – especially in the United States.35 Unsurprisingly, both Brexit and the Trump victory have generated a flurry of ‘scandalous’ liberal think pieces asking whether democracy is such a good idea after all. As though the problem with the far right was too much democracy.
However, a claque of journalists and academics spearheaded by Michiko Kakutani argue that the crisis of knowing is a legacy of the ‘postmodernist’ assault on knowledge and the Enlightenment. The idea turns up everywhere. Philosopher Daniel Dennett complains that ‘what the postmodernists did was truly evil’. The journalist Peter Pomerantsev, in a mini-documentary for BBC Newsnight, attributes the rise of politicians like Trump to postmodernism.36 The theory that postmodernism has promoted a pernicious subjectivism which relativizes truth to such an extreme degree that it provides cover to right-wing science-deniers, is ubiquitous.37
‘Postmodernism’, however, turns out to be an elusive, slippery opponent. No one seems to be entirely sure what it is. For example, Kakutani cites without apparent irony a preening comment made by the American alt-rightist Mike Cernovich in an interview with the New Yorker.38 ‘Look,’ Cernovich explained, ‘I read postmodernist theory in college. If everything is a narrative, then we need alternatives to the dominant narrative. I don’t seem like a guy who reads Lacan, do I?’ Cernovich may have read a little Lacan at college, but he is as likely to have understood him as Trump is to have ghostwritten Finnegans Wake. Lacan, a clinical psychoanalyst in the Freudian tradition, was as classically modernist as it was possible to be, and in no way aligned to the view that ‘everything is a narrative’. In this context, ‘postmodernist’ appears to mean ‘snooty French intellectual’. Yet Kakutani cites Cernovich’s clueless aside as an example of ‘the populist Right’s appropriation of postmodernist arguments’.
The ostensible core of this appropriation is the denial of ‘objective reality’. According to the thumbnail sketch of postmodernity offered by Kakutani and her co-thinkers, Foucault and Derrida can be blamed for this scandalous treason against reality. For British journalist Matthew D’Ancona, they were typical of the sorts of postmodern intellectuals who treated ‘everything’ as a ‘social construct’, thus engendering an extreme relativism.39 According to philosopher Lee McIntyre, Derrida interpreted ‘everything’ as a text.40 For Kakutani, the assault on reality independent of human perception has the insidious effect of demolishing ‘rational, autonomous individuals’, leading to the unwholesome claim that ‘each of us is shaped, consciously or unconsciously, by a particular time and culture’.41 This argument would be appealing to those for whom Foucault and Derrida were unpleasant set texts at university. Among generic complaints about the oppressive abstruseness of their prose, it is reassuring to discover from third-hand distillations that it all boils down to the affirmation that ‘everything is, like, a narrative or a social construct or something’.
Yet the argument disintegrates on examination. Neither Foucault nor Derrida had much to say about social construction, or the status of objective reality, or even postmodernity. The idea that people are shaped ‘by a particular time and culture’ is an Enlightenment, materialist hypothesis. Indeed, it is also just common sense. So is the motif of ‘construction’ which, Ian Hacking argues, can be traced to Immanuel Kant.42 To say that something is ‘socially constructed’ is to say that it wasn’t handed down by a deity, but was built by humans: another Enlightenment idea. The way the term is often used today, to refer to how we partially ‘construct’ objects in the world by how we name them and talk about them, owes itself to the structuralist linguistics of Ferdinand de Saussure, who was about as postmodernist as a gramophone. The belief in ‘objective reality’ independent of human perception is not so much Enlightenment as pre-Enlightenment, traceable as much to Augustine of Hippo as to Kant. Scepticism about a reality independent of perception is really scepticism about the e
xistence of unobservable entities, which is what in another context would be known as atheism. The atheist critique of religious belief often amounts to the claim that the theory is underdetermined by the data, so you may as well believe in a flying spaghetti monster. Beyond this, the fug about Enlightenment and ‘postmodernism’ is riddled with basic category errors, where these authors tend to juggle perfectly distinct concepts – language, objective reality and truth – as though they were equivalent.
Unfortunately, behind this scarecrow ‘postmodernism’ that is being waggled at us, there also lurks a fundamental misapprehension of the Right. The latter are disconcertingly instrumental in their approach to the facts. They are alert to the performative dimension of speech, the way in which statements make things happen. From Bolsonaro to Brexiteers, they show a keen appreciation of how information can be made to work. As Karl Rove put it, ‘we create our own reality’.43 But, a few intellectual outliers notwithstanding, Trump and his supporters do not claim that truth doesn’t exist, and that everything is narrative. They may disdain the truth claims of established experts, but they do not claim that there is no truth to be had. Far from it; the alt-right frequently claims to uphold reason, logic and facts against the ‘snowflakes’ of the Left, for whom feelings are said to be incorrigible. The meme, ‘Not An Argument’, popularized by the alt-right activist Stefan Molyneux, encodes a popular right-wing response to, for example, statements such as ‘Trump is a racist’.
Moreover, like the 9/11 Truth movement, they are frequently distinguished by a touching faith in the existence of a discoverable and mind-blowing truth. From ‘jet fuel doesn’t melt steel beams’ to ‘Hillary traffics sex slaves’, we are as far as can be from the terrain of epistemological relativism. Conspiracy theory covers the majority of the right-wing discourse called ‘fake news’. And it is, if anything, a kind of epistemological absolutism, admitting of only one kind of truth: the clickbait kind of truth, the kind that says ‘This One Weird Thing about the World Trade Center will Shock You’. It is also a kind of theodicy, an attempt to expose a ‘hidden truth’ that explains evil and suffering. But it is also an attempt to explain it away, to dispose of a complex problem by externalizing it: whether it is the Antichrist, Freemasons, the ‘yellow peril’, communists or Jews who are to blame, it is always an outsider sabotaging what would otherwise be a peaceful and just society. The telos of the clickbait economy is not postmodernism, but fascist kitsch.
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