3 - The Sound of Our Own Voice

Summary

I pursue the case of natural technology by arguing that it is a technology at odds with political life as such. (1) Community and loneliness. I argue that we wax rosy about “community” online to the extent that we are evoking features of offline communities that we cannot have in online terms. (2) Context and information. By removing speech from social circumstances, the internet produces insoluble problems for the understanding and regulation of speech. (3) Facing and defacing. I discuss how changes in our sense of context make a difference to our conception of who we are and of where our identities are at stake. (4) Equality and authority. I scrutinize what is meant by “democracy” in digital terms and show that it is democratic in name only. (5) Ethnonationalism and cosmopolitanism. Digital communication is tending to polarize citizens throughout the Western world either toward some form of ethnic nationalism or toward cosmopolitanism beyond material borders. I consider China as a candidate for what the internet’s intrinsic “political form” might be. (6) Little men, bigly. I show how many rhetorical features of President Trump’s tenure make sense when understood in light of the imperatives of online communication.