How the unholy alliance of Big Tech and the far right threatens the world
We are a decade or so into the age of bots – when the algorithms of social media created a new kind of attention economy that overhauled the way we see the world, spend our time and speak to each other.
My birth, by way of example, was announced by old-style telegram. Today, Telegram is a social media platform where FPV drone footage of Russian and Ukrainian soldiers being killed is uploaded daily and watched by millions.
Historian Eric Hobsbawm characterised the short 20th century from 1914 to 1991 as the Age of Extremes. It can also be viewed as the age of modernism, from the publication of James Joyce’s Ulysses (written between 1914 and 1921) to social revolution, industrialised war, and fascism.
Rather than ending in 1991 with the fall of the Soviet Union, I agree with that other great Marxist writer David Harvey’s assessment that it ended earlier, in the late 1970s, with the arrival of the Apple II home computer, Deng Xiaoping’s reforms in China, and a return to free market ideology in the West.
The 40-year age of globalised finance ended around 2016, with the widespread shift to machine-learning neural networks and a return to populist politics.
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This is a measurable social revolution.
In 2015 the average UK adult spent just over an hour online – today they spend more than three hours. Young people led this shift, spending more time online using popular apps than watching traditional television as early as 2015-16. They now spend almost five hours on their phones daily.
No wonder parents are going spare. But they are no role models. Average British adult mobile usage time has increased from 1 hour 17 minutes per day to 3 hours and 21 minutes per day in a decade. TV viewing has remained stable at just over three hours.
This radical shift has also seen a revolution in political discourse in the West and across the world, driven by social media.
Who controls the narrative
In the uprisings of 2011, from Cairo’s Tahrir Square to New York’s Occupy, new forms of social media allowed insurgent movements to mobilise people around their demands for change. It felt like social media could be used for liberation.
But by 2016, the ruling elites of the West and East had managed to seize back control of the technology, and find ways to target millions of voters. The results were seen in the campaigns of Donald Trump, the UK Brexit vote, and later in Boris Johnson’s “Get Brexit Done” election of 2019.
While in 2017 Jeremy Corbyn’s social media outriders were able to break through the hostile right-wing legacy media narratives, within two years the situation was reversed. The Tories’ media strategists used targeted Facebook ads to devastating effect – millions were convinced that Corbyn was a demonic, terrorist-loving child snatcher.
By 2016, the ruling elites of the West and East had managed to seize back control of the technology, and find ways to target millions of voters
The mood on the doorstep, as I remember well, was sour and in some cases violently hostile. Old media played its part, but the algorithm was the critical ingredient in swinging the country to Johnson.
This decade has seen the most dramatic advances for the far right, aided with platforming by Elon Musk’s X, the activities of shadowy media specialists like Cambridge Analytica, and Israeli, Russian and Emirati bots.
From the political margins, populist nationalists have gone mainstream. In Latin America, the pro-Trump/pro-Israel right has swept away half a dozen left-wing governments that had governed for much of the 2000s.
The difference from the rise of fascism a century ago in the age of radio is salient: Mussolini and Hitler were both elected by popular vote and then seized power and overthrew the democratic order. They saw democracy as inevitably favouring the left and socialism.
Not so today. A century of mass politics has shown that effective political advertising can convince the electorate to vote for parties of the right and of capital. There is no iron law that says workers vote for working-class parties.
Moreover, as traditional socialist parties became increasingly dominated by the graduate professional classes, and their organic links to trade unions diluted, it was no longer obvious that they represented workers.
Mobilising left, voting right
As long as a right-wing party can appeal to working-class voters – using fear of immigration, stirring division over issues such as gay or trans rights, and outright disinformation – the left can be defeated. This is the model that has been honed and mastered in Europe and the US over the last half century – first for Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher, then for the populist right in the age of Instagram.
Left-wing parties and movements are battling for attention in a social media ecosystem controlled largely by billionaire media owners and Instagram influencers. Still, effective social media operators of the left, such as Zohran Mamdani and Zack Polanski, have proven able to break through.
There is a paradox at work here: the most mobilised groups – from the pro-Palestine movement, to the students protesting in France, and the millions on the streets of Brazil supporting Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva’s latest presidential run – are from the left. But with the help of armies of bots, malign actors, including Israel and US Big Tech, can mobilise conservative voters, as seen most recently in Colombia.
Nationalism today has its own favoured enemies – Muslims/Islam, the left, globalists, LGBTQ people. It denies climate change and loves fossil fuels, even as the planet reels from wildfires and deadly floods.
So far, unfolding climate chaos is not denting this advance. Elections in Brazil this month, Spain in November and France next April are the far right’s to lose.
Meanwhile, huge plumes of black smoke rise from the fuel depots and tankers targeted in wars for land, sea and oil – from Russia and Crimea to Saudi Arabia and the Strait of Hormuz. Fossil energy is the means and target of these wars.
Collapse – first gradually, then suddenly
System collapse unfolds first gradually, then suddenly, as Ernest Hemingway might have put it. It is worth recalling that the fascist epoch of the 1920s to 1940s only ended due to the catastrophe of World War Two.
The apocalyptic fear today, encapsulated in a new book by Naomi Klein and Astra Taylor, is that the global right, from Washington and Tel Aviv to Brazil, will burn the world, through war, ecocide and pumping every last drop of the planet-frying oil that fossil capital sees as its birthright (and the funding source of the right's political campaigns).
The right's call to end immigration needs an answer, such as 'Tax billionaires, slash rents and democratise AI to enable a three-day week'
The Gaza genocide is the proof that they can and will do this – still largely supported by centrist parties who remain loyalists to the disintegrating western global order (as long as a garrison force like Israel does the “dirty work”).
Until recently, the left’s promises have been insufficiently bold or easy to understand compared with those of the right – the call to end immigration needs an answer, such as "Tax billionaires, slash rents and democratise AI to enable a three-day week".
Amazon’s owner Jeff Bezos is a recent, if unconvincing, convert to a three-day week, which he says will be made possible through the productivity gains of AI – a rather neat fulfilment of the prediction by John Maynard Keynes in his 1930 essay "Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren”.
Keynes warned then that “there is no country and no people, I think, who can look forward to the age of leisure and of abundance without a dread. For we have been trained too long to strive and not to enjoy.” Keynes had not counted on the fact that the gains of productivity would not be spread widely but instead would go to a class of billionaires whose desire to accumulate is insatiable.
The fear of the billionaire class that the masses are turning against them may be crystallising in these kinds of progressive-sounding pronouncements. But they are also pursuing other options.
Far-right populism is the best chance for the tech oligarchs to hold onto power and wealth through the pursuit of “End Times Fascism”, in which genocide, ecocide and evangelical end times are all part of the plan, as described in Klein’s latest work.
Meantime, there are signs that the structures of established democratic politics can no longer contain the frustrations of millions of people, as seen in the mass protests over unaffordable housing in Spain, and students in revolt in France over underfunded education.
German revolutionary Rosa Luxemburg famously wrote from prison in 1915 that the world faces “either the triumph of imperialism and the collapse of all civilisation as in ancient Rome, depopulation, desolation, degeneration – a great cemetery… Or the victory of socialism...”
Klein and Taylor insist the majority who oppose the far right tech lords “must break the doom loop, and find a new way of living together, rooted in our existence on this Earth, in the here and now”.
For now, we are well into the doom loop, with no clear way out.
The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Eye.
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