Democracy and Capitalism – Part 2

                Not only does Capitalism decontextualize and deracinate the material world, as discussed in part 1, the same thought process and the technology it created has done the same thing to information.  The disaggregation on information and the rise of data using computers has destroyed any contextual or ethical relationship between what we know and the values of the social world.  No culture has ever made more information available to more people, but very little of it can be trusted or verified.  Democracy depends on bringing forth a shared world, one that is situated not just in data but value.  When the information is separated from any context or value, it becomes not only useless but corrosive to the building of a democracy.  Once again, the impact of Capitalism goes beyond the limited impact of the economy, striking at the heart of the way we see and interact with the world.

                To make information as ubiquitous and instantaneous as we have, we had to break it into ‘bits.’  That is, instead of encountering and processing information in a context saturated in value and meaning, information was extracted from the conditions and circumstances that created it and literally smashed into binary bits of code.  That code travels virtually, with no social or biological references to situate, restrict or modify the way we intake and process it.  Increasingly, ‘information’ is produced by bots and other programs without any concern for its accuracy or validity.  The impact of this played an important role in the 2016 election, and it has been a telling characteristic of Trump’s presidency.  Once information has been broken free of context and meaning, it’s relatively easy to lie about everything.  You can ‘fact check’ what is said, but the blizzard of factoids and the lack of any sort of authority makes it impossible to counter the lies.  With enough ‘likes’ from enough ‘friends,’ the ‘truth’ can be whatever you want it to be.

                Even the way we deal with information in our educational system has been dramatically impacted by these changes.  More and more, we rely on a testing regimen that mimics the same ‘bitted’ form of learning information, abandoning the analysis and synthesis of the information or even using it to construct or critique and idea.  When students read, they read for matching content to test questions and not for a complex and integrated understanding of the material.  If you can get the multiple-choice question right, it doesn’t really matter if you understand what it means.  Just as in the rest of society, school has succumbed to the quantity information and lost any meaningful way to understand the quality of that information. 

                To be fair, the ‘gatekeeping’ function of education has always been problematic.  It promoted a limited view of the world tailored to the interests and advantages of the elites who paid for and ran them.  The contexts that were provided often left equally valid perspectives out and created an educational system that was stilted and unfair.  I’m not bemoaning its demise, but without some means of contextualizing and situating information within a value system, democracy is impossible.  We’ve adopted a ‘fast twitch’ thought process that consumes information the same way we use and discard plastic, with the same consequences to the environment they come from.  Maybe schools should stop worrying about how much information they dispense and start working toward a more deliberative, creative and collaborative model of critique and communication.

                Just as I don’t think the physical world can survive the consequences of turning the biosphere into a profit margin, I don’t think a democratic politics is possible in a world where information is treated as code instead of value.  Our current political situation should be ample warning of what happens when deliberate misinformation and populism intersect.  Thinking about the world is more than Googling an answer, it is engaging with the people we share the world with in a way that is sustainable and mutual.  The technological manipulation of information is not inevitable.  It is a direct consequence of the impact of capitalism and the destruction and deracination of the life world.