It is difficult to know what constitutes the latest social media “scandal” for the news organizations that promote it as such.[1] Of course, it follows the seemingly unending political concerns around social and digital media since the election of President Trump and other cornerstone events such as the Brexit vote. It stands in the long line of concerns about email hacking, Russian “meddling,” “fake news,” undignified presidential tweeting, and bots, and the indictments of workers of a Russian internet agency. There is the more general, but somewhat vacuous, thesis that the “politics of truth” has been replaced by a “politics of untruth.” Within this framing, there is the sense that “democracy” is under attack through social media; that populists, the “alt-right,” shady billionaire donors, foreign authoritarians and nativist Svengalis have found secret pathways to sow discontent within Western democracies and tip elections and plebiscites to previously unconscionable leaders and unimaginable outcomes.
There are of course colorful characters in the most recent iteration of the social media fright, including a punkish whistleblower, and a posh Etonian CEO, of a small data company, Cambridge Analytica, in the UK. There is the Moldavan academic at Cambridge University who “harvested” the data through a quiz “app” and on-sold it to Cambridge Analytica. There are also the public-relations driven acts of contrition by the chief and founder of one of the largest companies in the world, Facebook, which collected the data. There have been revelations of the gigantic character of the dataset shared with the academic, with the claim that it comprised fifty-seven billion Facebook friendships all round the world. There has been a television sting of the principals of Cambridge Analytica that included the requisite amount of dirt as they courted fake clients, introducing us to the term “honey trap.” Politicians, often at the urging of journalists, can denounce the undermining of democracy by the political “dark arts” that have overtaken the internet.
At the heart of all this, however, is a large company that is in the business of collecting data on individuals to sell it to advertisers. It shared or sold this data to one of the thousands of small companies who curate, aggregate, and represent that data for the purposes of their clients who are in the business of selling things, including political candidates. This is not surprisingly called “digital marketing.” All of this might be done with more or less ethical scrupulousness. There are concerns for the consent and the privacy of the users of Facebook, but these concerns would apply to the entirety of that company’s activity and not simply the political uses of data. The raising of all this has already and will lead in the direction of tighter internal and external controls but not so tight one would imagine as to undermine the business model—even if the brand of Facebook is itself fatally injured. One can also imagine that there are certainly enough jurisdictions involved, national and transnational (including the European Union), and U.S. state and federal governments, administering enough laws for teams of lawyers to comb the activities of Cambridge Analytica and others for breaches of the law. In the New York Times editorial of March 19, 2018, however, the only violation that was concretely specified was a 2011 consent decree of the Federal Trade Commission.[2]
One can agree that what is going on is a form of the political dark arts, conducted sometimes by not particularly ethical types for material and ideal rewards associated with political partisanship. But these dark arts are as old as democratic politics itself, from those who sought to manipulate the Athenian demos to the public-relations specialists, opinion-poll experts, media gurus, and spin doctors who grew up around the discovery of “public opinion” by those such as Walter Lippmann one hundred years ago.[3] While there might be a case for the greater use of law and regulation to govern the use of this data, no one could seriously believe that we can return to a kind of politics that pre-existed the internet. This cat cannot be easily stuffed back in the bag.
The moral condemnation rests on a series of background assumptions that are rarely articulated about the nature of democratic politics. Two involve the dialectics of secrecy and openness in liberal democracy. On the one hand, there is the inviolability of the secret ballot. The secret ballot takes place in a sacred space of the polling booth, characterized by curtains or partitions that leave the voter alone with their conscience and decision. A genealogy of the polling booth as a confessional space has yet to be written, although it has clear political-theological and sacramental antecedents. But this paradoxically takes place in a liberal world that should be without secrets or mysteries, in which all is open and transparent, allowing rational consideration and deliberation on arguments of all sides. Somehow, against the evidence of the history of political communication, this norm is upheld, and invoked, but typically only when one’s opponents appear to have been more effective in the use of the “dark arts” than one’s own side.
Even more pervasive, perhaps, is the assumption that democracy is about the mere clash of different opinions and, given enough transparent information and rational argument, will arrive at the best possible result. We do not have to accept a “friend–enemy” definition of the political to allow that there are views and material interests at the heart of our societies that cannot be readily reconciled. As much as authoritarian rulers, liberal newspapers, and their columnists would like, consensus cannot simply emerge as a kind of “liturgical unfolding of truth” if only correct protocols were observed, to use a phrase of Michel Foucault.[4] Perhaps we are hearing nothing more than the cries of a (neo-)liberal hegemony and mass media in their death throes.
This begins to bring us to the heart of the matter here. Many of the stories have focused on the “harvesting” of data from something as superficial and apparently ephemeral as the ubiquitous “likes” that appear in most social media applications. But none asks why “likes” are important, and what is political about them? My proposal, explored in Telos last year,[5] is that social media “liking,” “friending,” and “tweeting” constituted the recent form of political “acclamation,” a key but ignored concept in twentieth-century German political, social, and theological thought and recently revived by Giorgio Agamben.[6] Facebook itself chose for its own logo the “thumbs up” symbol, a putative representation of one of the oldest gestures of acclamation.
In its classical meaning, an acclamation is an exclamation of praise, triumph, or disapproval accompanied by the waving of flags or handkerchiefs, applause, or the raising of hands. It has sources in ancient mystery rituals, antique Greek voting practices, the greetings to the Roman emperors, the hailing of imperial commanders, and in medieval Christian chants and hymns. It is a key component of what Nicholas Heron has called “liturgical power.”[7] For its most spectacular and frightening modern instance, think of Leni Riefenstahl’s documentary of the Nuremberg Rally, Triumph of the Will. Now, it is found in political campaign rallies and nominating conventions in liberal democracies. But it also occurs at formal public rituals like presidential inaugurations and at sports and entertainment events. Acclamation traditionally generates and heightens emotions and binds them to a figure or entity: of awe in the medieval chants or praises (laudes) to Christ; of triumph to the returning commander; of identification with the modern political leader or nation.
Today, however, acclamation is not simply limited to these events in public assembly. In the twentieth century, it first migrated to the mass media in the form of “public opinion.” Political acclamation shifted, at least in part, from the acclaiming public to the approval and disapproval of a public nurtured by newspapers, film, radio, and later television. During our present century, it has migrated to the internet generally but especially to social media with its likes and “thumbs up” icons, and menus of emojis, that provides data that automatically registers, records, and allows the computation of what I have called the “public mood.” As what Foucault called a “mode of veridiction” (or truth-telling), the truth of acclamation concerns the performativity of the subject in the very act of truth-telling, not the logical parameters or objective referent of an assertion.[8]
One way of viewing the current scandal and its antecedents would be as a clash between truth and untruth, real and fake news. But another way would be to view it as a counterattack of once powerful institutions that have lost their monopoly of public opinion formation. Some time ago, the late German sociologist Ulrich Beck observed that science had “lost its truth,” and he would not have been surprised by recent public demonstrations in support of science.[9] Today, we can add that it is the old mass media that has lost its truth, together with the entire public relations and public opinion dispositive of which it is a part. There is material basis to this: the collapse of its advertising revenue and its sales, and the shift of the former to the giant digital media companies. But there is a sense that key decisions of citizens can no longer be effectively shaped by the forms of narration of truth of the mass media that used to make up public opinion.
Nowhere was this most clearly illustrated than the seismic shock of the 2016 presidential election, a trauma from which the mass news media and neoliberal Left still suffers. Consider how most newspapers endorsed Hillary Clinton, and other publications, some of which had never endorsed any candidate, either endorsed her or positively rejected Donald Trump. The views of the mass media view were reflected in the measures of public opinion. The average of national opinion polls on the day of the election, as measured by the aggregation website Real Clear Politics, showed Clinton ahead by 3.3 percentage points, and 6.5 percentage points ahead in Wisconsin, a state she would lose by one percent.[10] The Clinton campaign reportedly outspent the Trump campaign by three to one on advertising, running 383,512 television ads compared to 125,617. Clinton was widely viewed as having “won” the three presidential debates, the first of which was watched in their homes by 84 million viewers on conventional television channels and by countless others.[11] Clinton scored a decisive victory in the sphere of political acclamation that has mattered most since Lippmann wrote, that of public opinion. Indeed, she won the popular vote by more than two percent, making the average of polls well within “the margin of error,” as they say.
By contrast, Trump not only had many more rallies than Clinton but also was able to attract much higher numbers of supporters to them.[12] Reports suggested that he held two or three times the number of rallies and attracted a vastly greater number of total attendees. Perhaps still convinced by the efficacy of the mass media and its ability to “manufacture consent,” a phrase already used by Lippmann,[13] Clinton preferred fundraising events to rallies. Trump sought greater engagement with his public through direct assembly of his supporters, at which they shouted acclamations (or declamations) such as “Lock her up, Lock her up.” It was notable that Clinton did not personally campaign in Wisconsin during the general election, no doubt buoyed by opinion polls.[14] Trump proved a hard campaigner, finishing his last rally, the seventh for the day, in Grand Rapids, Michigan, at midnight, proclaiming that he would win that state, despite polls showing him significantly trailing. Whatever the value of this most “traditional” kind of political acclamation in a modern liberal democracy, Trump certainly appeared convinced of its importance as a part of the liturgical elements of politics.
Now we can return to the social media issue. The recent revelations of the activities of Cambridge Analytica (which date from 2013 and 2014) do not add much to what was already known at the time of, and indeed before, the election. One of the few successful predictions of the outcome was an Artificial Intelligence system called MogIA, reported a week before the election.[15] It found that that Trump had overtaken by 25 percent the “engagement numbers of Barack Obama’s peak in 2008.” Even more germane, standard news outlets already reported that the Trump campaign had applied the principles of digital marketing to sell their candidate, employing a firm in San Antonio, Texas, Giles-Parscale.[16] Bloomberg reported in the month before the election that the Trump campaign was using the profiles of individuals based on their preferences or likes on Facebook. It reported that the firm matched the email databases of the Republican National Committee and small Trump contributors to Facebook profiles of others through the platform’s Lookalike Audience survey tool. By doing so, the campaign identified 13.5 million individual voters in sixteen swing states who could be moved to vote for their candidate. It sought to do so by “micro-targeting” the individual users of Facebook with test-marketed “dark posts.” Significantly, it identified geographical clusters of “persuadable voters” for Trump rallies. By so doing, the Trump campaign fought with weapons forged from commercial digital marketing and linked them to the most traditional form of political mobilization, the acclamations of the public assembly.
To put this in another language, the “liturgical power” of the acclamation of the leader at the rally had been linked up with the “economic theology” of the market’s hidden hand. Inadvertently reminding us of this, the digital campaign director, Brad Parscale, was quoted as saying, “I always wonder why people in politics act like this stuff is so mystical. It’s the same shit we use in commercial, just has fancier names.” This comment could be directed to the advocates of moral panic around the current scandal, who failed to notice the use of personal digital data without consent in previous political campaigns of all kinds.
The cultivation of acclamation by the mass media formed “public opinion” through the claim of an objective truth. The sentiments, feelings and emotions displayed on social media are more fleeting and changeable, much more like those of the direct assembly. The key difference is that they are expressed in physical isolation to a virtual public rather than in the space of the crowd. Here we can witness the formation of “public mood” rather than public opinion. But as with the shouted acclamations of the assembled crowd, the likes of some influential users can generate more liking. They can, as we say, “trend” and “go viral” when they jump platforms or even media.
Several years ago, people believed that social media would be emancipatory, making possible uprisings like the Arab Spring and the Occupy movement. Perhaps this is so. But they also portend a new art of politics. Just as the “spin doctor” who sought to manipulate public opinion succeeded or joined the propagandist or agitator who could incite the assembled crowd, so a new generation of operatives is seeking to act not on our opinions but on our likes and preferences to engage us to produce a new form of political acclamation. These operatives triangulate “Big Data,” individual psychological profiles, and the “nudging” of consumer behavior. In place of, or as well as, the manufacture of consent, comes the mobilization of what we most like and, more powerfully, what we most dislike and even resent. In exemplary recent cases, we might suggest, the machinery of public opinion based on “the manufacture of consent” was defeated by the dispositive of the production and manipulation of a public mood that made resentment go viral.
Whatever the doings of Cambridge Analytica and its links to the Trump campaign, there was another, already documented and admitted pathway by which the latter operated its digital marketing strategy in the latter part of 2016. What was done out of the offices of a small San Antonio firm, as reported at the time, was far more effective than anything the British company has been accused of today. If we think this was merely a low-rent ruse to disguise the truly dark arts occurring elsewhere, then we would have to account for the fact that Trump has already named his overall campaign manager for 2020, Brad Parscale.
More generally, however, whatever regulation and even censorship might arise from the current furor, and whatever outcomes current struggles might lead to, liberal democratic societies have crossed a threshold in the political use of the kind of data made available by digital communications, which it is impossible to uncross. With the concept of acclamation, we can begin to grasp the full significance of what has occurred.
Notes
1. Hilary Osborne and Hannah Jane Parkinson, “Cambridge Analytica Scandal: the Biggest Revelations So Far,” The Guardian, March 22, 2018.
2. “Facebook Leaves Its Users’ Privacy Vulnerable,” New York Times, March 19, 2018
3. Walter Lippmann, Public Opinion (Brunswick: Transaction Publishers, 1991; reprint of 1922 ed.).
4. Michel Foucault, Wrong-Doing and Truth-Telling: the Function of Avowal in Justice, trans. Stephen W. Sawyer (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 2014), p. 39.
5. Mitchell Dean, “Three Forms of Democratic Political Acclamation,” Telos 179 (2017): 9–32.
6. Giorgio Agamben, The Kingdom and the Glory: for a Theological Genealogy of Economy and Government, trans. Lorenzo Chiesa with Matteo Mandarini (Stanford, CA: Stanford Univ. Press, 2011).
7. Nicholas Heron, Liturgical Power: Between Economic and Political Theology (New York: Fordham Univ. Press, 2018).
8. Foucault, Wrong-Doing and Truth Telling, pp. 19–20.
9. Ulrich Beck, Risk Society: Towards a New Modernity, trans. Mark Ritter (London: Sage, 1992), p. 166.
10. I have used the figures at the RealClearPolitics website as of November 10, 2016.
11. The figures for advertisements are those quoted in Ken Kurson, “Donald Trump Didn’t Just Win; He Won With Unprecedented Efficiency,” The Observer, November 10, 2016. The number of television viewers was widely reported, including by the TV ratings company Nielsen.
12. See Laura Meckler and Colleen McCain Nelson, “On the Campaign Trail, Donald Trump Leads in Rallies,” Wall Street Journal, October 4, 2016.
13. Walter Lippmann, Liberty and the News (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Howe, 1920), p. 5.
14. This was widely reported.
15. See Arjun, Kharpal, “Trump Will Win the Election and is More Popular than Obama in 2008, AI System Finds,” CNBC, October 28, 2016.
16. Joshua Green and Sasha Issenberg, “Inside the Trump Bunker, with Days to Go,” Bloomberg, October 27, 2016.
