An AI prompt might suggest starting the note with a reference to these being ‘interesting times’. These are certainly eventful, fateful times, but how interesting? As opposed to simply being stupid and dangerous? Brittleness makes breaking more likely, one can be shocked by the shocking, but whether one should be surprised by it is a different matter. If there is a constant refrain by someone that, ‘On gaining power, I will do X and Y’, then is it surprising that, when a certain actor gains power, they indeed proceed to do X and Y? One cannot claim there have not been warnings.
Frames fail, concepts betray, left with a simplified Schmittian world of friends and enemies, the distinction is imposed and policed. Spaces for open thought, time for reflection, this all disappears in a wash of digital stupidity.
Recalling one of Mike Davis’ final pieces:
Does hegemony require a grand design? In a world where a thousand gilded oligarchs, billionaire sheikhs, and Silicon deities rule the human future, we should not be surprised to discover that greed breeds reptilian minds.
Once again, the dynamic repeats, albeit on a grander, more consequential and more harmful scale: a damaging and degrading dance of spectacle and reactivity. The shocker and the shockee, followed by the call to opine, one must react! And so one does. But reaction and reactivity do not make for good politics or clear thought. That should be well understood at this point, but it seems not to be. Instead of manning the barricades, it suffices to pull out the smartphone, and turn to X to denounce its owner. Well played, that will show them. Or perhaps not. Perhaps those with the platforms hold the neck and can squeeze when they so choose. These notes appear on Substack, but do so with a keen awareness that the practice is dependent on a corporate actor with different desires and worldviews. The more the contents of our world move onto and into the digital realm, the more that we are beholden to those atop the cloud. We forget this at our peril, a world of algorithms and autoplay will not be one of our choosing.
There is a line attributed to Bertolt Brecht: ‘The palace of culture is built with dog shit.’ Much the same could be said of the tech values underpinning the digital infrastructure that condition our conditions. Henry Farrell on Silicon Valley’s (mis)reading list:
The problems of the Silicon Valley canon, and increasingly of Silicon Valley itself, reflect the problems of a monoculture, in which people have converged on a particular definition of greatness built around engineering prowess and large-scale social disruption…
The engineer’s focus on simplifying and solving problems can be of great value, so long as it is leavened by a deep appreciation of the richness and complexity of the systems that it looks to transform. Without that, it is liable to result in disaster.
The logic of ‘disruption’ scales in a perverse manner, this is something Günther Anders spelled out in his 1959 paper, ‘Theses for the Atomic Age’:
The greater the possible effect of our actions, the less are we able to visualize it, to repent of it or to feel responsible for it; the wider the gap, the weaker the brake-mechanism.
The temptation is to present this as thoughtlessness, but it is much more active and activated than that. The present moment is one defined by brutal stupidity and the brutally stupid. This is not simply stupidity as a passive condition, but something active with agency, forceful and violent.
In 1937, Robert Musil gave a lecture, ‘On Stupidity’, the timing perhaps not accidental:
…a distinction must also be made between failing and incapacity, between occasional, or functional, and permanent, or constitutional, stupidity, between error and unreason. This is most important because of the way the conditions of life are today: so unintelligible, so difficult, so confused, that the occasional stupidities of the individual can easily lead to a constitutional stupidity of the body politic.
Stupidity spreads. If we create and participate in a (digital) culture that encourages and cultivates stupidity, then we should not be surprised when stupidity becomes prevalent. In a 1987 address, Neil Postman explained:
Stupidity is like sickness in that some of it we produce ourselves, like ulcers, and some of it is inflicted upon us, like smallpox…
He further observed:
Stupidity is a form of behavior. It is not something we have; it is something we do. … We can see stupidity, and we can hear it. And it is possible to reduce its presence by changing behavior.
The inverse is also true: it is possible to cultivate and expand the presence of stupidity through changing behaviour. And what we have discovered is that social media and other digital platforms are rather good at changing behaviour. At cultivating stupidity.
What much of Postman’s other work explored was how the technological context that shapes contemporary society actively works to impede and prevent more complex forms of thought and engagement. The digital is literally based on a binary view of the world, this is worth remembering.
Nicola Chiaromonte’s 1970 book included a chapter on ‘An Age of Bad Faith’:
Today, instead of the cult of ideologies we seem to have adopted a cult of the automobile, television, and machine-made prosperity in general. But this cult is based on a belief fomented by bad faith, the belief that material (industrial, technological, and scientific) advances go hand in hand with spiritual progress; or, to be more precise, that the one cannot be distinguished from the other…
Chiaromonte continued:
Yet it should be obvious that the automatism of the present world does moral man the greatest possible harm. It increases his physical power while increasing his capacity for aimless action, that is to say, his stupidity. At the same time his capacity for good becomes atrophied, since it is generally believed that man’s power over matter and his ability to acquire material possessions solve or cancel all other problems.
Institutions, collectivities, societies are shaped and reshaped by the constant iteration of choices and decisions. Many of these might separately be inconsequential, but they add up. Bad faith is like debt that accumulates.
Given how widely we rely on and celebrate technologies that encourage the banal and the kitsch, while actively eroding our capacity to engage in complex thought, should we really be so surprised or shocked that we find ourselves in a world of the brutally stupid and stupid brutality? As Postman observed, stupidity is a behaviour, and this creates the possibility of behaving in less stupid ways. The likelihood of doing so will remain low when in a state of reactivity, when simply reacting.
Robert Louis Stevenson supposedly said: ‘sooner or later everyone sits down to a banquet of consequences’. Get a napkin ready, this is going to be a long meal.