Democracy in the age of bad bots and anti-social media

Posted on 12 Nov 2024

By Denis Moriarty

Tattered US flag

Not so long ago, offending fellow members of society had consequences. Now the gloves appear to be off, says the group managing director of Our Community, Denis Moriarty.

The American cynic HL Mencken, a journalist and critic, said in 1915, “Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard.”

Americans have voted, and democracy has gone all the way. In 11 weeks, when Trump actually takes power, they will feel the burn in all the wrong places.

The American tectonic plates have jerked abruptly to the right, levelling entire cities’ worth of illusions. A shock like that can echo through the terrestrial globe and rattle the chairs in Canberra offices.

Don’t expect any gestures towards generosity or humanity in any major party policies for the next election, or longer. We’ll be lucky if we get hip-pocket-oriented policies, which at least have a kind of logic, and not the full contentless primal scream that has now demonstrated its malign effectiveness in the US.

Australia has some barriers against the American experience. Compulsory voting is one of them. In this election Trump actually got two million fewer votes than he did in the last one, which would have been fatal to his cause if 11 million Democratic voters hadn’t also decided to sit it out. Americans are finding out that their democracy is a house of straw. Ours is at least a house of sticks. Do you find that reassuring?

It is pertinent at this point for me to observe that I don’t matter any more. Neither do you, dear reader. Sorry about that. I have rather enjoyed our little chats through this column.

This kind of long-form legacy print media argument has been proved to have all the impact of a meringue hammer. Virtually every serious newspaper in America denounced Trump, and it only added to his appeal. We are now unequivocally in the era of TikTok news. Create ‘content’ or get dumped.

"For eons, human beings have had to be sensitive to the needs of those around them. Giving offence has had consequences. Now it doesn’t have to."

Or, of course, create content and still get dumped, because it’s yet to be demonstrated that new media (new? Kids who were born in the same year the first iPhone hit Australia will soon be old enough to vote) are able to carry a progressive message.

The more personalised the message, the harder it seems to be to evoke solidarity. As a species we appear to have mastered the promotion of conspicuous consumption, conspiracy theory, and toxic masculinity. Equality and fraternity, not nearly so much.

Our Community group managing director Denis Moriarty.

In this, we have to learn from our children. It could take a while. When printing first came to Europe – when people could read the Bible in their own rooms, alone, rather than have them read out in the church – the immediate effect was a couple of hundred years of bloody religious wars. Media transformations have huge effects, and they can take a while to settle in.

It may take people who were born into a digital world to bed things down. Instead, we’re about to forbid young people to have anything to do with social media. What could possibly go wrong?

I have immense reservations about social media. Who doesn’t? I decided to delete my X account after realising I drank too much while watching Q+A on ABC TV and my tweets about some politicians were a little too forthcoming.

Still, if you try and imagine a physical equivalent to the online space – ‘[Random town] has descended into a living hell of discrimination, misogyny and incitement to violence,' say – would our only official response really be ‘Don’t let children go near the place?’ Wouldn’t we first try to do something to fix it?

If, after wrestling with the practicalities, we found that these awful qualities were so closely entangled with our lives that they couldn’t be cut away, wouldn’t we have to go deeper and ask ourselves what this said about the nature of our civilisation?

Exactly 60 years ago, Canadian philosopher Marshall McLuhan popularised the motto “The medium is the message”. He didn’t know the half of it. We’re finding now that the shift of the political sphere from politicians addressing a mass audience to AI bots whispering to individuals is a change not so much in information content – or, at least, not only in information content – as a change in the relationships that make up citizenship.

In the online world there’s no more space for public accountability, or even shame. We don’t have to listen to any other opinion, or take into account any other interest, or explain ourselves to any other person.

For eons, human beings have had to be sensitive to the needs of those around them. Giving offence has had consequences. Now it doesn’t have to. We have to turn our minds to where we’re being led, or carried, or tossed, good and hard.

Denis Moriarty is group managing director of OurCommunity.com.au, a social enterprise that helps the country's 600,000 not-for-profits.

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