by Isaac Enríquez Pérez: There is a multidirectional correspondence between the dispossession of critical thinking – understood as the possibility of questioning and disrupting reality and what is established – and the irradiation of the digital disinfodemic. The recent triumph of post-truth coincides fully with the withdrawal of cognitive processes, the enthronement of emotions and the inoculation of hate in the new public square. It is the terrain of the struggle around the construction of meanings, as well as that related to the appropriation of consciousness.
At the same time, a paradox is widespread in the information age: in the face of the exponential irradiation of data and information, not always true, a limited human capacity to process or assimilate it is imposed and paths are opened to germinate an uninformed and subject individual. to deception and manipulation of emotions. To achieve this, two trends prevail: the stoning of critical thinking as a possibility of raising doubt, on the one hand; and, on the other hand, not even suggesting the existence of the lie because it is considered politically incorrect.
The massive attack of misinformation and hateful messages is not new. In ancient Rome, the future Caesar Augustus ordered the creation of the so-called coins of Mark Antony to defame this political adversary with them, positioning him as someone manipulated by Cleopatra. In feudal Europe, false news circulated about Jews and their alleged practices of sacrificing children to offer their blood. Countless wars were preceded or unfolded by the influence of false news that was never verified (the alleged attack by Spain on the battleship Maine, which triggered the war between the United States and the Iberian country; the alleged German body factory put forward by British newspapers in 1917, etc.). The Third Reich also used this fake news to justify the Holocaust. In recent decades, the Kuwaiti girl who testified before the United States Congress in 1990 about an alleged atrocity regarding newborn children who were taken by the Iraqi military from Kuwait hospitals stands out; or, well, the alleged bombs of mass destruction foisted on the Iraqi government in 2003 by the United States government to justify a second military invasion. The case, in 2016, of Cambridge Analytica, or Pizzagate, which influenced the US elections that year. Generally, the starting point is to identify a false “enemy”, negative traits are attributed to it that encourage the primary emotions of the recipients, and finally their perception is influenced to form blurred public opinion. The aim is to shock the audience with these fake news that are deliberately created to, usually, praise, discredit or discredit someone or something. The big difference with the misinformation epidemics of yesteryear is the instantaneity and simultaneity that characterizes the current massive flows of information, as well as the unprecedented relevance that socio-digital networks assume until creating a vertigo of (dis)information speed that becomes uncontrollable. . Added to this unprecedented character is the emergence and expansion of a media industry of lies, which operates in a transnationalized and global manner.
In the midst of the tidal wave of information, it becomes difficult to distinguish between reality and what is false, manipulated and/or distorted. This opens risks and challenges in public affairs; However, the greatest of them is the nullification of the individual's ability to believe in the other. Thus opening an era of massive distrust that curtails the exercise of citizenship and distances some individuals from their peers. If political praxis is mediated by the collective sense of trust and deliberation about what is common, but misinformation spirals dynamite this trust, then all possibilities of opening channels of social cohesion and building nation projects are diluted.
The speed of (mis)information becomes uncontrollable even for the States themselves. The possibilities of verifying or contrasting it are beyond any individual capacity. Phrases, images, libels, audios or videos circulate without any possibilities of mediation and processing by the often passive audiences. Sensationalism attacks the neocortex and overshadows all will to reason due to the immediate effect. If emotions play a crucial role in this, both leaders and audiences can fall prey to this misinformation pandemic.
The system of this media industry of lies operates in the following way: the fake news is prepared in the editorial desks or in the offices of the publishers, it is disseminated massively even using multi-platforms and it is installed as common sense to to the extent that the commentocracy or the false intellectuals or preachers who have an opinion on everything are in charge of spreading ideas without support and that would not withstand the fire of empirical contrast. It is a global monopoly system governed by slander and defamation regarding the supposed imaginary “enemy.” However, it can also be isolated individuals who have a mobile phone and an account on a socio-digital network who spread unfounded claims that proliferate in cyberspace.
These are devices for controlling the mind, emotions and consciousness. (Mis)information is a process of immobilization of bodies and a state of psychological siege that dwarfs or nullifies the ability to discern, process and decide. In this, encouraging fear plays a crucial role by exposing individuals to a state of permanent vulnerability that minimizes their self-esteem.
Entertainment programs, news programs, newspaper headlines, opinion tables, armies of bots and trolls in cyberspace, among others, conduct and control public debate through symbolic manipulation and indiscriminate attack and disregard for the “enemy.” in turn. Not infrequently its preachers resort to theatrically incendiary participations based on banality and an alarming tone. In electoral times, an entire defamation machinery is activated to attack left and right, with no purpose other than the semiotic annihilation of the other.
This media industry of lies is based on messages that bet on the ephemeral; in such a way that we work so that forgetfulness and forgetfulness, indifference and mental anesthetization triumph. This was observed with the overload of (mis)information at the height of the Covid-19 pandemic. Dogmatism was mixed with histrionics, fatality with the absence of systematized references, mercy with catastrophism, social-conformism with the crisis of hope. In such a way that with the pandemic we opted for a destructuring of memory and identities in the concert of a new religion in search of parishioners: hygiene and its inherent dictatorship of compulsive obsession with data. The Johns Hopkins Coronavirus Resource Center was a clear example of this.
Today's wars unfold, above all, in the mind. They are media/digital wars and, therefore, they are symbolic wars to dominate the construction of meanings and the very meaning of the public. This is a bloody dispute over conscience.
The ultimate objective of the viralization of lies is to preserve the status quo by installing resignation, shackle conscience and ambushing all signs of critical thinking. Installing mental eviction as a lifestyle is a priority of the powers that be that even the totalitarianisms of the 20th century would envy excessively. Hate, fear, controlled indignation, resentment, sectarianism, blackmail, terror, denialism and skepticism give shape to the supremacist ideology endowed with a perspective of the world that is claimed to be unique and unquestionable. In such a way that the mind is the new scenario in which to establish the defeat and prostration of the atomized masses.
The mass media's attack on conscience is also a massive attack against the impoverished and excluded social classes. At the same time, sensationalism and the red notice are an exhibitionist spectacle and a business. Murders, crimes and tragedies are transmitted in real time, even with the participation of Internet users who make some bloody video viral in seconds.
This media invasion of the mind is already a public health problem that is not addressed or regulated. The collapse of emotions and imaginaries of passive audiences is an issue that is not addressed by States despite the high degrees of morbidity. When lies, banality, denigration and the media business of death are questioned, the criminal entrepreneurs of the mass media allege attacks on their sacred right of freedom of expression. If a ruler dares to contain or question this media and digital pack, he is immediately accused of being a dictator. The truth is dynamited and reduced to the smoldering embers of the past; while facts and reality do not count in the face of the ephemerality of post-factual narratives. These are mercenaries of misinformation who traffic in subjectivity as the currency of their exorbitant opinions. Even more: in the midst of postmodern nihilism, the de facto powers that control the mass media and multiplatform systems install an entire furious epistemology of lies theatrically constructed with armies of commentators, snipers who host news programs and other hitmen who wander through cyberspace and the sociodigital networks.
Media trivialization only highlights the intellectual wasteland in which the public debate is installed. The same marketing used to promote merchandise is used to messianically position some politician, generally without a national project. Then, the ideology of democracy is reduced to loot plundered by the voracity of the oligarchs and the disenchantment of the citizens.
The ruins and debris left in its wake by the hurricane of market fundamentalism of the last forty years show a fractured, fragmented society lacking ideological references and faith in institutions. This opens the terrain conducive to the loss of the civic vocation and proactive collective action. Dynamited institutions such as the family and reduced protection and social security mechanisms to a minimum, ideological orphanhood and the absence of class consciousness are only symptoms of a collapsed society and exposed to semantic distortion and mistrust. The assault on reason was not only fueled by nihilistic philosophies, but also by those who installed and empowered homo digitalis in the midst of intrigue, conspiracy and media barbarism. At the same time as the enthronement of hedonistic individualism, reason and speech were stoned to death. The media spectacle is not mediated by the exercise of thought among audiences; Hence, everything that circulates on television or mobile phone screens is stark, subject to exaggerations and often governed by anger and nonsense. Hence, it reached the point of supplanting collective reasoning in political praxis and in addressing public problems. As emotions are exalted from the screens, the margins for reason are reduced. Lies, misinformation, demagoguery and clownish and angry tones combine in the public square to suffocate all sense of community and to consolidate an atomization only mobilized by the six-year vote.
If the disinfodemic and the digital pandemic are rampant with total impunity, it is because individualism took root in a disjointed, distrustful society without sufficient cohesion mechanisms. There have been several decades of ideological domination inoculated from the family, the school, the company, marketing, music, cinema, aesthetics, state organizations, churches, the mass media, the Internet, the anesthetization of universities, etc The rationality of extreme competitiveness and the ideology of meritocracy led to an all-out struggle of all against all and a dead end where apparent individual success, prestige and comfort do not automatically translate into a sense of community that enables individuals. contain the waves of misinformation whose purpose is the marketing of vested interests and the blood of others spilled by the work and grace of crime. It is the triumph of pragmatism, hedonism and exacerbated skepticism. This market fundamentalism permeates, with honorable exceptions, almost every individual who positions himself through conventional media and from there spreads something he calls news. There is no shortage of financiers and the pen and blank paper are sold to the highest bidder. It doesn't matter to claim the truth; What matters is sensationalism and subjecting thought to a totalitarian business regime that exploits the journalist and makes him betray common sense and deviate from reality.
Social reality and the truth about it are the heritage of societies, but they are plundered by the monopolistic media industry of lies that denigrates human conscience. Disinformation and insults must be opposed by the vindication of human dignity and common sense so that decitizenization does not worsen.
Misinformation and the digital pandemic are piloted by pathological beings who make lying an obsession, a modus operandi and a modus vivendi. It is a lifestyle founded on insult and classism; in a frontal war against the popular and impoverished classes that consists of criminalizing them, ignoring them, making them invisible and silencing them. The terrain is that of the symbolic and in it the power and control devices of the body, mind, consciousness and intimacy are built and interwoven. The unfortunate thing about this is that quite a few individuals accept this symbolic domination, consent to it, legitimize it and assume it even with resignation and carelessness. That is the battle won through social-conformism. Therefore, it is important for societies to question themselves regarding their ability to construct and process alternative narratives that provide a rationality and meaning different from those that are claimed to be hegemonic.
Having transferred social antagonisms and conflicts to the field of ideas, plutocracies understood that technological development can lead to the dissemination and imposition of narratives, worldviews, rationalities and meaning in real time and with a high capacity for dissemination and penetration. Hence, technologies are not neutral, but rather conversations are conducted based on pre-established criteria.
Breaking this logic of the dictatorship of hegemonic narratives means constructing alternative narratives that subvert the predominant meanings. The cultivation of critical thinking is a first condition, the second is the regeneration of social cohesion. But the circle will not be closed without the construction of mobilizations that creatively appropriate communication and information technologies from the margins. For this set of minimum conditions, a public university is needed that emerges from ostracism and the lack of creative imagination.
*Academic at the Autonomous University of Zacatecas, writer, and author of the book The Great Reclusion and the Sociohistorical Twists of the Coronavirus. Fear, power devices, semantic misrepresentation and prospective scenarios.
Twitter: @isaacepunam
