Digitalization and the Crisis of Democracy

Byung-Chul Han

Translated by Daniel Steuer

polity
Originally published in German as Infokratie. Digitalisierung und die Krise der Demokratie © MSB Matthes
& Seitz Berlin Verlagsgesellschaft mbH, Berlin 2021. All rights reserved.
This English edition © Polity Press, 2022.
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Infocracy
The digitalization of the lifeworld progresses inexorably. It is radically
changing our perception, our relation to the world and our communal life.
The frenzy of communication and information is stupefying. The tsunami
of information is unleashing destructive forces. It has also taken hold of the
world of politics, creating massive fault lines and disruptions in democratic
processes. Democracy is degenerating into infocracy.
At the beginning of the democratic age, the book was the central medium.
The book was what the rational discourse of the Enlightenment was based
upon. The discursive public sphere, which is essential to democracy, was the
result of a reasoning, reading public. In his The Structural Transformation of the
Public Sphere, Jürgen Habermas points out that there is a close connection
between the book and a democratic public:
From a reading public that consisted mainly of burghers [Bürger] and
townspeople [Stadtbürger] and that was larger than the republic of
scholars … there emerged from the centre of the private sphere, so to
speak, a comparatively dense network of public communication.1
Without the printing press, there would have been no Enlightenment, no
culture drawing on reason and on reasoning. In a book-based culture, public
discourse is logically coherent: ‘In a culture dominated by print, public
discourse tends to be characterized by a coherent, orderly arrangement of
facts and ideas.’2
The political discourse of the nineteenth century, which was a book culture,
was far more expansive and complex than that of today. The famous public
debates between the Republican Abraham Lincoln and the Democrat
Stephen A. Douglas are a striking example. In one debate, in 1854, Douglas
first spoke for three hours. Lincoln was given three hours for his reply, after
which Douglas spoke for another hour. Both speakers discussed complex
political facts, and used equally complex formulations. The audience
exhibited extraordinary powers of concentration. For the audience,
participation in public discourse was a fixed element of social life.
Electronic mass media destroys the rational discourse created by the book
culture, producing a mediacracy. Electronic mass media has a particular
architectonic design. Because of its amphitheatrical structure, its recipients
are condemned to passivity. Habermas holds the mass media responsible for
the decay of the democratic public sphere. Unlike a reading public, a
television public is at risk of being disenfranchised:
the programs sent by the new media curtail the reactions of their
recipients in a peculiar way. They draw the eyes and ears of the public
under their spell but at the same time, by taking away its distance,
place it under ‘tutelage’, which is to say they deprive it of the
opportunity to say something and to disagree. The critical discussion of
a reading public tends to give way to ‘exchanges about tastes and
preferences’ between consumers…. The world fashioned by the mass
media is a public sphere in appearance only.3
In a mediacracy, politics submits to the logic of the mass media. The
principle of amusement determines how political matters are conveyed, and
undermines rationality. In his book Amusing Ourselves to Death, the American
media theorist Neil Postman shows how infotainment leads to the decay of
the power of judgement and plunges democracy into crisis. Democracy
becomes telecracy. The highest priority is to provide entertainment, and this
also becomes the priority in politics:
Efforts at gaining knowledge and being perceptive are removed by the
business of distraction. As a consequence, we see a rapid decline of the
human power of judgment. The business of distraction represents a
clear threat: it makes people immature, or keeps them in a state of
immaturity. And it corrodes the social foundation of democracy. We
amuse ourselves to death.4
The news begins to take on the form of the story. The distinction between
fiction and reality becomes blurred. Habermas also refers to infotainment’s
destructive effect on discourse: ‘News and reports and even editorial
opinions are dressed up with all the accoutrements of entertainment
literature.’5
The mediacracy is also a theatrocracy. Politics is reduced to a series of staged
events in the mass media. The election of an actor, Ronald Reagan, as
president of the United States was the high point for mediacracy. What
counts in televised debates is not the quality of the argument but the
performance. The speaking time for presidential candidates is severely limited.
They change the way they speak. The candidate with the better self-
presentation wins the election. Discourse degenerates into show business
and commercial slogans. Political substance becomes less and less
important. Politics is hollowed out, reduced to telecratic image-politics.
Television fragments discourse. Even the print media takes its cue from TV:
‘In the age of television, the paragraph is becoming the basic unit of news
in print media…. the time cannot be far off when awards will be given for
the best investigative sentence.’6 Even though radio is well suited to the use
of rational and complex language, it is not spared this process of
disintegration. Its language becomes fragmented and discontinuous. In
addition, the radio is under the thumb of the music industry. Its language is
‘largely aimed at invoking visceral response’ and becomes the ‘linguistic
analogue’ of rock music.7
The history of domination can be cast in terms of different screens. Plato’s
cave allegory describes an archaic screen. The cave is built like a theatre.
Behind the prisoners’ backs, the jugglers perform their ‘artistic tricks’, with
a fire casting the shadows of the jugglers’ objects and figurines against the
cave’s wall. The prisoners, who have been tied up since childhood, stare
only at the shadows and take them to be the sole reality. Plato’s archaic
screen illustrates the dominion of myth.
The so-called ‘telescreen’ plays a central role in Orwell’s totalitarian
surveillance state. It constantly shows propaganda. In front of it, the masses
perform rituals of submission, chanting in a state of collective excitement.
In private dwellings, the telescreen functions as a surveillance camera, and
includes a very sensitive microphone that registers even the quietest of
sounds. People live their lives believing that they are under constant
surveillance by the Thought Police. The telescreens cannot be switched off.
They are also biopolitical disciplinary apparatuses: every day, they deliver
an exercise class that serves the purpose of producing docile bodies.
In a telecracy, Big Brother’s surveillance screen is replaced with the
television screen. People are not surveilled but entertained. They are not
oppressed but turned into addicts. The Thought Police and the Ministry of
Truth become superfluous. Instead of pain and torture, the means of
domination are entertainment and amusement: ‘In 1984 … people are
controlled by inflicting pain. In Brave New World, they are controlled by
inflicting pleasure. In short, Orwell feared that what we hate will ruin us.
Huxley feared that what we love will ruin us.’8
In many respects, Huxley’s Brave New World is closer to our present times
than is Orwell’s surveillance state. It is a palliative society. Pain is frowned
upon, and intense feelings are repressed. Every wish and every need must be
immediately satisfied. People are stupefied by fun, consumption and
amusement. Their lives are dominated by the compulsion to be happy. The
state distributes a drug called ‘soma’ to increase the feeling of happiness
among the population. Instead of the telescreen, Huxley’s Brave New World
features cinemas providing ‘feeling pictures’, or ‘feelies’. They include a
‘scent organ’ and deliver a whole-body experience that numbs people. Like
soma, they are used as means of domination.
Today, telescreens and television screens have been replaced by
touchscreens. The smartphone is the new medium of domination. Under
the information regime, people are no longer passive spectators who
surrender to amusement. They are all active transmitters. They constantly
produce and consume information. Communication has become a form of
addiction and compulsion, and the frenzy of communication ensures that
people remain in a new state of immaturity. The information regime’s
formula for domination is: we communicate ourselves to death.
In The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, published in 1962,
Habermas was only able to discuss electronic mass media. Today, digital
media submits the public sphere to a radical structural change that would
necessitate a fundamental revision of Habermas’s thesis. In the age of
digital media, the discursive public sphere is threatened not by the
entertainment formats of mass media but by the viral spread and
proliferation of information, that is, by an infodemic.9 Digital media exhibits
a centrifugal force that fragments the public sphere. The amphitheatrical
structure of mass media gives way to the rhizomatic structure of digital media,
which does not have a centre. The public sphere disintegrates into private
spaces, and our attention is dispersed rather than directed towards issues
relevant to all of society.
If we are to gain a deeper understanding of infocracy, of the democratic
crisis under the information regime, we need a phenomenology of
information. The democratic crisis begins at the cognitive level. Information
is relevant only fleetingly. Because it lives off the ‘appeal of surprise’,
information lacks temporal stability, and because of its temporal instability, it
fragments our perception.10 It draws reality into a ‘permanent frenzy of
actuality’.11 It is not possible to linger on information. This makes the
cognitive system restless. The compulsion towards acceleration inherent in
information means that time-intensive cognitive practices such as knowledge,
experience and insight are pushed aside.
Because of its fleeting relevance, information pulverizes time. Time
disintegrates into a mere sequence of point-like presences. In this respect,
information differs from narration, which generates temporal continuity.
Today, time is fragmented on every level. The temporal architectures that support
and stabilize life and perception are increasingly being eroded. The
generally short-term nature of the information society is not conducive to
democracy. Discourse is characterized by a temporality that is incompatible
with accelerated, fragmented communication. Discourse is a time-intensive
practice.
Rationality is also time-intensive. Rational decisions require a long-term
perspective. They are based on reflections that extend beyond the present
moment into both past and future. This temporal expansion characterizes
rationality. In the information society, we simply do not have the time for
rational action. The compulsion of accelerated communication deprives us
of rationality. Under temporal pressure, we instead opt for intelligence.
Intelligence has a totally different temporality. Intelligent action aims at
short-term solutions and successes. Luhmann rightly remarks: ‘In an information
society it is no longer possible to speak of rational behaviour. At best it is
intelligent.’12
Discursive rationality is today under threat from affective communication.
We allow ourselves to be easily affected by fast sequences of information. It is
quicker to appeal to affect than to rationality. In affective communication, it
is not the better argument but the most exciting information that prevails.
Fake news is more interesting than fact. A single tweet containing fake news
or a fragment of decontextualized information may be more effective than a
reasoned argument.
Trump, the first Twitter president, fragmented his politics into tweets. His
politics is determined not by a vision but by viral information. Infocracy
promotes success-oriented, instrumental forms of action and leads to the
spread of opportunism. The American mathematician Cathy O’Neil
observes correctly that Trump acts like a perfectly opportunistic algorithm
that takes only the reactions of the audience into account.13 Temporally
stable convictions or principles are sacrificed in favour of quick and short-lived
power gains.
Psychometrics, also called psychographics, is a data-driven method for
establishing a personality profile. When it comes to predicting a person’s
behaviour, psychometric profiling outperforms even that person’s friends or
partner. Given sufficient data, it is even possible to generate information that
goes beyond what we believe we know about ourselves. A smartphone is a
psychometric recording device that we feed daily, even hourly, with data. It
makes possible the precise calculation of its user’s personality. All the
disciplinary regime had at its disposal was demographic information, which
made possible its biopolitics. The information regime, by contrast, has
access to psychographic information, which it uses for its psychopolitics.
Psychometrics is an ideal tool for psychopolitical marketing in politics. So-
called micro-targeting makes use of psychometric profiling. Voters are sent
personalized advertisements, based on their psychograms, via social media.
Like consumer behaviour, voting behaviour is subjected to unconscious
influences. Data-driven infocracy undermines the democratic process, which
requires autonomy and freedom of the will. After Donald Trump’s election
victory in 2016, the British data analysis company Cambridge Analytica
triumphantly declared: ‘We are thrilled that our revolutionary approach to
data-driven communications played such an integral part in President-elect
Donald Trump’s extraordinary win.’14
Micro-targeting does not inform voters about a party’s political programme.
Instead, voters receive manipulative electoral advertisements, and often fake
news, based on their psychograms. Thousands of variations of an
advertisement are tested for their efficiency. These psychometrically
optimized dark ads represent a danger to democracy. Everyone receives a
different message; the public is thus fragmented. Different groups receive
different, often even contradictory, information. Citizens no longer pay
attention to topics that are relevant to all of society. Instead, they are
disenfranchised, treated as voting cattle to be manipulated in order to get
politicians into power. Dark ads contribute to the division and polarization of
society and poison the discursive atmosphere. They are invisible to the
public and thereby unhinge one of the fundamental principles of
democracy: society’s self-observation.
Today, anyone with access to the internet can create their own
informational channels. Digital information technology reduces the
production costs for information to practically nil. A Twitter account or
YouTube channel can be created with a few movements of the hand. In the
age of mass media, by contrast, the production costs for information were
dramatically higher. Establishing a news channel is a laborious process.
Accordingly, a mass media society lacks the infrastructure necessary for the
mass production of fake news. Television may be a realm of illusion, but it
is not yet a factory for fake news. Telecratic mediacracy is based on show
and entertainment, not on false news and disinformation. The structural
conditions for the infocratic disruption of democracy arrive only with the
digital network.
Mediacracy reduces the electoral battle to a war over the most successful
performance in the mass media. Rather than engage in discourse, politicians
seek to put on an attractive show. Television, as the main medium of
mediacracy, functions as a political stage. In infocracy, by contrast, the
electoral battle degenerates into an information war. Twitter is not a mediacratic
stage but an infocratic arena. Trump is not interested in delivering a good
performance. He is leading a merciless information war.
Information wars are today waged using all conceivable technological and
psychological means. In the US and Canada, voters are deluged with false
news through automated phone messages. Armies of internet trolls
intervene in electoral battles by systematically distributing fake news and
conspiracy theories. Social bots – automated accounts on social media that
pretend to be real people – post, tweet, like and share. They disseminate
fake news and hate-filled comments; they rabble-rouse. In this way, citizens
are replaced with robots. At zero marginal cost, these robots create voices
(Stimmen) that produce a mood (Stimmung) and thus severely disfigure the
political debate. They artificially increase the numbers of followers for
certain accounts, thereby giving certain opinions the appearance of power.
The tweets and comments of these bots steer the climate of opinion on
social media in particular directions. Studies show that just a small number
of bots can turn the climate of opinion around. They may not directly
influence voter decisions, but they manipulate the environment in which the
decisions are made. Voters are influenced without being aware of it. When
politicians heed the mood on social media, political decisions are therefore
being indirectly influenced by social media bots. And if citizens interact
with opinion-manufacturing robots and allow themselves to be manipulated
by them, if actors whose backgrounds and motivations remain hidden
intervene in political debates, democracy is endangered. When an electoral
battle takes the form of an information war, it is not the better argument
but the more intelligent algorithm that prevails. In an infocracy, in this
information war, discourse has no place.
In an infocracy, information is a weapon. The website of the well-known
American right-wing radical and conspiracy theorist Alex Jones is tellingly
called Infowars. Jones is a prominent representative of infocracy. His crude
conspiracy theories and fake news reach an audience of millions, and those
millions believe him. He presents himself as an ‘infowarrior’ fighting against
the political establishment. Jones was among those who Donald Trump
explicitly thanked for helping him to election victory in 2016. Information
wars fought with fake news and conspiracy theories are symptomatic of a
state of democracy in which truth and truthfulness are no longer of any
importance. Democracy is disappearing into an impenetrable jungle of
information.
So-called memes play a central role in election battles fought as information
wars. Memes are comic drawings with short, provocative slogans, montaged
photographs or short videos that go viral on social media. Following Donald
Trump’s election victory, the Chicago Tribune quoted a user of the internet
forum 4chan: ‘We actually elected a meme as president.’15 CNN called the
election of 2020 a ‘meme election’. The electoral battle was ‘the great
meme war’. Some spoke of ‘memetic warfare’.
Memes are online media viruses that spread at high speed, reproduce and
mutate. The core information – the meme’s RNA, so to speak – is planted
in an infectious visual shell. Because memes aim primarily to trigger affects,
meme-based viral communication makes rational discourse more difficult.
The phenomenon of meme wars indicates that digital communication is
increasingly visual rather than textual. After all, it takes much less time to
take in an image than to read a text. Discourse and truth do not go viral.
Because images do not present arguments or provide justifications, the
increasing visualization of communication is an additional impediment to
democratic discourse.
Democracy is a slow and drawn-out process. It takes time. For this reason,
the viral spread of information, the infodemic, is particularly damaging to the
democratic process. Arguments and justifications cannot be packed into a
tweet or meme that spreads and multiplies with viral speed. The logical
coherence that characterizes discourse is alien to viral media. Information
follows its own logic, has its own temporality – it has its own dignity beyond
truth and lie. Fake news is first of all information. It produces its effect before the
process of verification has even begun. Information flies past the truth, and
truth can never catch up. Any attempt at fighting the infodemic with truth is
therefore doomed to fail. The infodemic is resistant to truth.
Notes
1. Jürgen Habermas, Strukturwandel der Öffentlichkeit: Untersuchungen zu
einer Kategorie der bürgerlichen Gesellschaft, Frankfurt am Main:
Suhrkamp, 1990, p. 13 (from the preface to the German edition of
1990, which is not contained in the English edition).
2. Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of
Show Business, London: Penguin, 2006 [1985], p. 51.
3. Jürgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An
Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society, Cambridge: Polity, 1992, p.
171.
4. Neil Postman, Wir amüsieren uns zu Tode: Urteilsbildung im Zeitalter der
Unterhaltungsindustrie, Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 1988, p. 2
(German publisher’s note).
5. Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, p. 170.
6. Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death, p. 112.
7. Ibid.
8. Ibid., p. xx.
9. As early as mid-February 2020, the director-general of the World
Health Organization, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, said: ‘We’re
not just fighting an epidemic; we’re fighting an infodemic.’ See
https://twitter.com/WHO/status.
10. Niklas Luhmann, ‘Entscheidungen in der
“Informationsgesellschaft”’, at
https://www.fen.ch/texte/gast_luhmann_informationsgesellschaft.
htm.
11. Robert Feustel, Am Anfang war die Information: Digitalisierung als
Religion, Berlin: Verbrecher, 2018, p. 150.
12. Luhmann, ‘Entscheidungen in der “Informationsgesellschaft”’.
13. See https://www.huffpost.com/entry/donald-trump-is-like-a-
biased-machine-learning-algorithm_b_11524300.
14. See https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/cambridge-
analytica-congratulates-president-elect-donald-trump-and-vice-
president-elect-mike-pence-300359987.html.
15. See https://www.chicagotribune.com/business/blue-sky/ct-meme-
president-4chan-trump-wp-bsi-20161112-story.html.