2016: The year that truth died

The Oxford English Dictionary, while nominating post-truth as its word of the year for 2016, defined the term as “relating to or denoting circumstances in which objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief”. This seems a grossly inadequate account of why truth came to be at the centre of political debate in the present moment, because objective facts have always been less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion or personal belief.

To understand why 2016 was different, let us step back a few years, to the wave of optimism generated by the Arab Spring’s early successes. Remember Wael Ghonim? He is an Egyptian engineer who was employed by Google when the 2011 protests broke out, and created a Facebook page titled We Are All Khaled Said. The page began as a homage to a man tortured to death by Egyptian police, and developed into a rallying point for decentralised protests that, within a matter of weeks, toppled an entrenched dictator without bloodshed.

Although Ghonim was one of the intellectual leaders of the agitation, the movement had no formal structure or chain of command. In describing the nature of the protests, he likened them to the most famous collaborative project on the Web:

“Our revolution is like Wikipedia, okay? Everyone is contributing content, but you don’t know the names of the people contributing the content. This is exactly what happened. Revolution 2.0 in Egypt was exactly the same. Everyone contributing small pieces, bits and pieces. We drew this whole picture of a revolution. And no one is the hero in that picture.”

Five years ago, social media and YouTube were potent weapons in the fight of democracy and individual rights against tyranny. They gave agency to previously powerless citizens by providing them a way to share videos, opinion and notices. Images of Khalid Said’s mutilated body on Wael Ghonim’s Facebook page turned thousands of civilians into active dissenters. It seemed a fulfilment of a prophecy made by the German Marxist philosopher Walter Benjamin in his most famous essay, The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction. Benjamin wrote about how printing technology was helping overturn elite control of knowledge and the dissemination of information:

“For centuries a small number of writers were confronted by many thousands of readers. This changed toward the end of the last century. With the increasing extension of the press, which kept placing new political, religious, scientific, professional, and local organs before the readers, an increasing number of readers became writers – at first, occasional ones. It began with the daily press opening to its readers space for ‘letters to the editor’. And today there is hardly a gainfully employed European who could not, in principle, find an opportunity to publish somewhere or other comments on his work, grievances, documentary reports, or that sort of thing. Thus, the distinction between author and public is about to lose its basic character.”

Benjamin might have been thrilled to be told of a time when billions of individuals would carry a still camera, a video camera and a typewriter in their pockets, and publish images and musings instantly on to platforms where most of the earth’s population had free access to them. He argued that technology in itself had liberatory properties, and the early narrative of the Arab Spring seemed to be proof of this idea on a grand scale.

From 2011 to 2016

The year 2016 demonstrated that the internet and social media could be used as effectively for the deliberate dissemination of falsehoods and vicious propaganda as they had been five years previously in bringing atrocities committed by brutal regimes to public notice. I have written a few pieces on the issue over the course of the past two years, including analyses of how the Islamic State has aped Hollywood in its web-based publicity and indoctrination campaigns; how images are easily falsified or misinterpreted when they lose context, as they do on the Web; how the sensationalism of television news drives people to think circumstances are worse than they are, and make damaging decisions as a consequence; how the rise of unmediated falsehoods is inspiring a reconsideration of the merits of a discerning elite among both conservative and socialist intellectuals; and how a conventional understanding of the primacy of prejudice over logic is insufficient explanation of the catastrophic US election.

What is evident from the events of the past year is that the marketplace of ideas is no more self-correcting than an actual marketplace. Disinformation by states and non-state terrorist organisations, politically directed hackings and leaks, the rise of fraudulent news bolstered by ideological bubbles, and troll armies deployed by authoritarian rulers, all suggest that the decentralisation, anonymity and autonomy provided by the Web can be used as easily for malevolent ends as for benevolent ones. The 2011 dream of an intrinsically emancipatory technology has proceeded very much like the Arab Spring did: in confusion and uncertainty, with a few victories and many defeats.

All is not lost. Facebook has already responded to the shock of 2016 by introducing a mediatory layer between news and its consumers, expressing its faith in an identifiable gap between fact and non-fact. I believe the gap exists and is usually as wide as the gulf between evidence for India’s victory over Pakistan in 1971 and information made available regarding the surgical strikes of 2016. Perhaps 2017 will provide signs that rumours of truth’s death were exaggerated. After all, if mythologies, soap operas and film franchises teach us anything, it is that death isn’t necessarily final, there is always an unexpected comeback or resurrection round the corner.