In the grand tradition of Lee Siegel, it seems that Andrew Keen has discovered that the absolute worstest thing evar in the world is to let the Little People express their opinions by sending them over the Intert00bz. Indeed, giving people an online forum to share their views is the most certain way to bring about the return of the Nazis. No, that’s what he really thinks:
The Internet Is Bad For You
by Andrew Keen
On December 6, Barack Obama announced his intention to fund a massive public works program of somewhere between $400 and $700 billion which will create enough jobs to avert the economic catastrophe of the 1930s. But I fear that one element in Obama’s well-intentioned infrastructure plan—his goal of providing all Americans with broadband Internet access—might one day be seen as inadvertently laying the foundations for a return to fascism, the political catastrophe of the 1930’s.
In the Europe of the 1930s, representative democracy’s abject failure to confront the rage of mass unemployment and dislocation led to the rise of fascist organizations such as the Spanish Falangists, the German National Socialists, and the Romanian Iron Guard. What the interwar fascists provided—with their messianic leaders, their torchlight parades, their xenophobic propaganda—was a placebo to the hopelessness that had enveloped ordinary people’s lives.
The 1930s fascists were expert at using all the most technologically sophisticated communications technologies—the cinema, radio, newspapers, advertising—to spew their destructive, hate-filled message. What they excelled at was removing the the traditional middlemen like religion, media, and politics, and using these modern technologies of mass communications to speak with reassuring familiarity to the disorientated masses.
Imagine if today’s radically unregulated Internet, with its absence of fact checkers and editorial gatekeepers, had existed back then. Imagine that universal broadband had been available to enable the unemployed to read the latest conspiracy theories about the Great Crash on the blogosphere. Imagine the FDR-baiting, Hitler-loving Father Charles Coughlin, equipped with his “personalized” YouTube channel, able, at a click of a button, to distribute his racist message to the suffering masses. Or imagine a marketing genius like the Nazi chief propagandist Josef Goebbels managing a viral social network of anti-Semites which could coordinate local meet-ups to assault Jews and Communists.
The idea here is pretty basic: the Little People are far too dim to think on their own and reach their own conclusions, and they will inevitably turn into Nazis unless a class of Enlightened Beings oversees the information that they are allowed to consume.
Now, I don’t buy into the Ole Perfesser’s “Army of Davids” theory that we can replace the traditional media with the bed-wetting loonies who read his blog, but I also don’t think that people such as Keen should be allowed to appoint themselves the Grand Overseers of Our Enlightened Discourse, as he so obviously proposes doing. Some balance is needed, my friends. Continuing:
Now fast forward to the digital world of 2008 and what even the normally cheerful Economist has predicted will be a “long and deep recession”. Like in the 30s, we are faced with a systemic crisis not only to free market capitalism but also possibly to representative democracy. The 2008 economic meltdown is beginning to rival the 1929 Great Crash for its catastrophic impact on the lives of ordinary people. The United Nations has described today’s world economy as the “weakest since the ‘30s”. And 2009 promises to be worse, much much worse, with the U.N. predicting that the entire world economy will actually contract for the first time since those bygone days, and Princeton’s Nobel prizewinning economist Paul Krugman forecasting that American unemployment may rise to the “double digits”.
In the Thirties, mass unemployment lead to the catastrophe of fascism; in today’s crisis, I fear that it will lead to digital fascism.
And what would this dread face of digital fascism look like, you ask? Behold:
Read the rest of this entry »
