Dark Forces at play in 2019
The rise of worldwide populism, an insular tech world unable to correct its blunders, a devastated journalistic landscape that gives an open-field to the social mob, there are little reasons for optimism this year.
As I’m writing this the French Gilets Jaunes (Yellow Vests) social unrest enters its ninth week of action with no real signs of appeasement.
Like his predecessors, Emmanuel Macron’s government has bowed to the pressure of the street. He agreed on an unprecedented boost to the purchasing power for the lower income households, putting an end to the fiscal discipline that was supposed to define his administration. This did not affect the social rage. Macron can no longer hope to embody the EU global leadership as his reformism is now crippled.
In France, the buzzword is now the “Grand Débat National”, a decentralized popular consultation organized by the government in which everyone will vent their demands. On top of them is the “Referendum d’Initiative Citoyenne”, or the possibility left to the people to organize votes on a vast range of issues, bypassing the representative system.
The Yellow Vests movement has revealed its true nature: for the most part, it endorses the far-right rhetoric: anti-immigration, anti-globalization, anti-gay (the first request is the abrogation of the gay marriage), anti-Europe, anti-media (the most popular outlet among the protesters is… Russia Today), etc.
The movement’s anti-democratic stance is largely supported by the far-left, which sees an opportunity to expand its base after a general election it clearly lost in 2017. This trend makes credible the prospects of an Italian scenario in which political extremes could make an electoral alliance.
What makes the Yellow Vests worth watching is that it could be a blueprint for what can be expected abroad. Worldwide, upcoming elections don’t look great either.
Next Spring, the European Parliamentary election could end the era of a relatively balanced hemicycle that shared the same values in favor of an EU moving forward. Now, destructive national-populist forces are in motion. In The Economist special issue on the World in 2019, the Financial Times foreign-affairs commentator Gideon Rachman said this:
“The European Parliament elections in May are also emerging as a set-piece battle between nationalists and globalists. The parliament has hitherto been dominated by the centre-right and centre-left, with both political families agreed on the need to advance European unity, and relaxed about erosions of national sovereignty. But nationalist parties are gaining strength. Efforts to form a pan-European nationalist-populist front have been encouraged by Steve Bannon, who was once chief strategist in Mr. Trump’s White House. He has formed an alliance called The Movement grouping nationalist parties such as France’s National Rally, Italy’s Northern League and Belgium’s People’s Party.”
While Bannon’s influence in Europe has yet to be proven, elsewhere, the prospect doesn’t look better with elections in India, Indonesia, South Africa, each time putting democratic systems at risk with the rise of various forms of nationalism.
As I chronicled here many times over, the common thread in these shifts is their reliance on social media, primarily Facebook and to a lesser extent, YouTube. In the case of the Yellow Vests movement, Facebook is used as a coordination platform and a steam-venting fixture. It also gives the illusion of the perfect vector for direct democracy, where all ideas can have an equal reach, misinformation propagates faster than legit news, and where anybody can be pilloried.
A dozen countries have already suffered from the toxicity of the platform to the democratic process: Donald Trump would not be here without its astute use of Facebook, nor Jair Bolsonaro in Brasil who has built his campaign on WhatsApp. Not to mention countries where the social network has been weaponized against one specific ethnic or political group.
While Facebook can’t be held responsible for the hijacking of its platform, it rests on its shoulders to correct the mishaps.
It’s an understatement to say that the social giant is doing the bare minimum. Aside from a dose of cynicism — the only incentive to move seems to be the fear of PR damage — , Facebook’s numbness is rooted in its insularity. Mark Zuckerberg has yet to understand that you don’t fight global misinformation from the shores of the San Francisco Bay. As demonstrated by a New York Times investigation, Facebook is unable to think beyond its hyper-centralized system when it comes to fighting the junk that litters its pages:
“The rules [for content moderation] are discussed over breakfast every other Tuesday in a conference room in Menlo Park, Calif. — far from the social unrest that Facebook has been accused of accelerating.
Though the company does consult outside groups, the rules are set largely by young lawyers and engineers, most of whom have no experience in the regions of the world they are making decisions about.
The rules they create appear to be written for English speakers who at times rely on Google Translate. That suggests a lack of moderators with local language skills who might better understand local contexts.
Facebook employees say they have not yet figured out, definitively, what sorts of posts can lead to violence or political turmoil. The rulebooks are best guesses.”
Facebook is where Google was five or six years ago in terms of understanding the world. And the social network hasn’t budged much.
The growing disconnection is Big Tech’s main toxin. It results from an ingrained superiority complex measured in wealth and global influence. It also led to a loss of moral compass with, when it comes to Facebook, reckless use of personal data, use of dirty tricks to discredit those who criticize it.
Techno-pundit Kara Swisher who can’t be suspected of being a neo-Luddite wrote recently in the New York Times:
“[T]he frightening news from Silicon Valley goes beyond one company [Facebook]. Tech leaders made screens so addictive that they won’t let their own children use them; they operate in a monoculture that reflects only itself and turns a blind eye to sexual harassment and diversity; and they accept dirty money from unsavory investors like the Saudis. The overall sense of this year is that the brilliant digital minds who told us they were changing the world for the better might have miscalculated.”
One could add to this list tech firms who become suppliers of surveillance systems deployed by totalitarian governments, or brands who handle customer data to the very same regimes in exchange for market access.
Such widespread misbehavior leaves little hope for any self-correction.
Don’t expect journalism to come to the rescue. 2019 will see a continuation of past years trends. Revenue will continue to fall. Paywalls will show their limitations as no one can expect to have readers paying for more than three subscriptions. On the advertising front, Google and Facebook won’t be the only ones sucking up revenue: Amazon and Linkedin are to become advertising giants with respectively $4.6bn and $2bn expected revenue for 2018. To put things in perspective, the professional social platform is now making ten times the digital ad revenue of the New York Times. Even Uber is expected to enter the ad market with greater efficiency, thanks to the trove of riders data. The result will be a lesser capability for newsrooms to do their jobs, precisely at a moment where real journalistic work is crucially needed to defend democracy, nothing less.
Time for a Gin-basil.
— frederic.filloux@mondaynote.com
