The ‘Bigtech’ and the end of democracy
by Agustín Laje
The use of force is not the principle of the vitality of power but of its desperation. Force is always a last resort; after her, there is nothing. For this reason, the notion of hegemony explains much better the vitality of power. Antonio Gramsci defined the State as “hegemony armored with coercion”. What he meant by this was that it is the hegemonic processes, understood as cultural domination, that stabilize power. Coercion, on the other hand, operates where consensus is not enough. Thus, the perfect power is not the one that lashes, but rather the one that caresses.
What is happening with the digital world – which has been our world for a long time – could be analyzed according to this general idea. Network censorship is not new; rather, an escalation of censorship especially directed, for ideological reasons, against right-wing accounts and profiles has been enduring for some time. They are not my assumptions: it is what Mark Zuckerberg admitted, without hesitation, some years ago in the North American Senate. Basically, that the Silicon Valley elites are “progressive”, and that this is the reason for the ideological war against dissidents.
The right has done its job well. Isolated from the traditional media, she knew how to take refuge in the networks
But the systematicity of censorship is an effect. Its cause is found in the systematicity of resistance. Foucault already said that “where there is power there is resistance.” Now resistance can tickle or it can really make power uncomfortable. Censorship is the result of discomfort; When power censors, it displays its strength but, in that same act of demonstrating power, it also reveals its weakness. And your weakness is being challenged; in being forced to drop his democratic mask to reveal his repressive mechanisms. That’s why approval of Trump grew from 47% to 51% after Twitter’s censorship (according to Rasmussen), and why Twitter shares plummeted on the stock market.
If the right wing is censored, it is because it has done its job well. Isolated from the traditional media, the right-wing knew how to take refuge in the networks. From there he raised his cultural battle. Almost like digital guerrilla warfare. The weakness of the organizational structures was offset by virtually infinite ingenuity. Siege of memes; countless viral videos; counter-information, digital counter-culture; alternative newspapers; hilarious debates; accounts followed by millions of people hungry for opinions unmarked by political correctness. The left was widely bypassed online, while still clinging to the usual newspapers, which gather dust in cafes, and less and less watched TV.
But all this wants to end soon. The owners of the system will not allow the progressive hegemony to continue to be besieged. Trump was a failure of the system; the right is a system failure. They must nip this in the bud. The Internet wanted to be the arrival point of democracy, and that’s how it was sold for three decades. Finally, it will end up being the origin of the perfect dictatorship, which is not that of the Mexican PRI, but that of the total privatization of public space and the total publicity of private life through perpetual and ubiquitous surveillance.
The removal of Donald Trump’s social media accounts marks this event, which is the unveiling of the perfect dictatorship of digital. Because the elimination of the online existence implies, politically, the elimination of the offline existence. You don’t have to kill anyone, like they did with Kennedy. Politics in our network society is, as Manuel Castells noted a few years ago, media politics and, more specifically, digital politics. What does this mean? That politics outside of digital platforms has died; that it is impossible to do politics without existing digitally; that killing someone digitally is equivalent to killing them politically.
We will have to continue fighting in the hegemonic networks, which is where the undecided audience is
The event is Trump, but this will potentially reach all dissidents. BigTechs have shown to have more power than the President of the most important country in the world, who is also a billionaire businessman. Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, SnapChat, removed Trump from his networks; Commerce, digital payment and donation platforms like Stripe, PayPal and Shopify are leading a boycott of Trump companies. What is left to the common man? While some left-wing libertarians justify censorship and the oligopolistic boycott, Ron Paul, the most important libertarian politician in the history of the libertarian movement, has just been blocked on Facebook for posting an opinion deemed “incorrect” by “community norms.”
All of this spells the end of
