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Originally Posted by JoltinJake
I'd be really interested to hear you flesh this out a bit more, as I fall squarely into the category you describe. I mostly understand how this could be happening in America, but I am more perplexed by the global trend.
Going through your list, for example, is it really the case that these fascist uprisings are being limited to countries with a history of technocratic liberalism? Or income inequality? Migration? Seems dubious to me based on a few examples, but my knowledge of international history is limited.
As you point out, this also makes me wonder about the U.S. causes you identified. Like, the fact that we're a super racist country doesn't explain why we're seeing a rise in fascism right now. We've always been a super racist country. That might be a requirement, but it can't be explanatory given how many years we went without fascism despite the ever-present racism.
Just spitballing here, but it makes me wonder if perhaps we are undervaluing the social media / internet piece of this. Maybe that is a driving force causing polarization, the idea that "others" are evil or illegitimate, etc... conditions in which fascism and authoritarianism can thrive.
This could be. And I'm not of the "history always repeats itself" mindset or that it's necessarily cyclical. Perhaps we really have crossed some boundaries into a different phenomenons of mass political participation and engagement and the internet/social media are breaking our brains. I don't think it's absurd.
Also I'm not like a historian so treat me as just an amateur dude who likes to read and write.
But, OK, those two points aside: I would just point out that based on my limited knowledge, I *do* think we can find neighboring typologies and parallels in history that feel close to our current time. This isn't the world's first go around with authoritarianism and right-wing populism. It's not the world's first encounter with new technologies disrupting social institutions that send populations into chaos, that make governments and institutions reel; consider the impact of the printing press on 15th-16th century European religious life, the Reformation, the European wars of religion, the fierce social conflicts the period produced, and rise of modernity.
So I'd say: yeah, the internet / social media are huge influence factors but the historical analogues (here's this new tool that is cultivating global inter-connectedness set against the backdrop of decaying institutions and restive populations and a fast-evolving world) are extent.
Turn it around the other way: is there any such thing as a global internet, social media, heavily networked computers WITHOUT telling the story of global finance capitalism, of militarism, of modern commerce? Against the backdrop of competing systems like communism and socialism? The internet and computers and transistors doesn't just spring out of nowhere; you can easily see it as a parallel development or a co-morbid symptom of the very same processes that are influencing people, making the world feel destabilized and different.
I'm obviously spinning a pretty leftist yarn here, but why not see the internet and social media as the products of the same modern capitalist system that are uprooting populations, causing global migrations, changing labor and settlement patterns, influencing institutions like churches and organized religions and labor unions and families? The dawning of the internet was a military project undertaken at least partly to give us supremacy over the Soviets; lots of computing and technological developers that are the basis of modern technology emerge as de facto military projects (remember you cannot separate out modern American academia and the resources that flow to our institutions of high education without the underlying, frankly military and commercial justifications for public funding headed that way).
And the internet's ascendancy into the primacy of ours lives absolutely cannot be separated from the commercial interests that underpin it, of the economic system that underlies the whole thing.
Put differently yet still: in the world of cause and effect, why isn't social media an effect? Cynically, Zuckerberg and Google and @jack don't create these platforms which take our worst impulses as inputs and throws them back at the world for clicks -- they didn't do that to change the world, despite what the press releases and biopics tell you. They did it to make gobtobs of ****ing money. Their financiers and capital looking for the next vehicle to grow into an even larger pile of capital found its way to them because of a set of systemic social decisions (regulatory, financial, economic, commercial, etc.) that really shape the world -- and I think the true cause underlying those decisions lies elsewhere, and I think social media is just an effect of the real systemic factors.
That is to say, bluntly, I think the true ultimate CAUSE is capitalism and then social media and the internet are effects. Critical ones, sure. They're producing an accelerated feedback loop. But it's that same cause (capitalism, specifically modern finance capitalism) that is causing governments to embrace liberal global trade, motivating governments to roll back regulatory schemes and the welfare state, it's underlying mass migrations of people chasing jobs and resources across the globe, evolving labor patterns and moving people into various sectors or out of the workplace in lieu of automation, modifying social life (secularization, women working, etc.).
Last way to think about this: if a someone who died in 1450 or 1750 or 1950 something was reanimated and arrived at your doorstep, and you had to explain how the world really worked and what got us from there -- the world they knew -- to here, the world we live in, and you started with the internet, you missed the better explanation. To the 1450 person, you'd have to explain the eradication of feudalism due to the dawning of capitalism, of the marketization of labor and commodities. To the 1750 person, you'd have to explain how modern finance capitalism evolved from the more rudimentary capitalist systems they knew first and all the **** that followed next. And to the 1950 person or whoever, you'd basically have to explain how the Cold War resolved itself and capitalism won and everything that followed sprung from there. Not the other way around, where you'd start with the technology and work backwards into how it's influences our economic and social ordering of the world, feel pretty strongly that would get it wrong. The best explanation starts with how we organize ourselves economically and specifically around capitalism (e.g., the processes of production exist to accumulate profits which are then re-invested in the financial system). From there you could explain everything else neatly and sequentially with the appropriate cause --> effects, and the internet and social media would just be another effect (a big one, to be sure).
Last edited by DVaut1; 10-09-2018 at 03:56 AM.