Style and Argument

I’m reading two books at the same time, a page of one and then a page of the other. One is a lurid uncouth novel, the other a sterile highbrow theoretical treatise. One is about ordinary people’s lives, their jobs, encounters, mates, sex, crises, work, sex, discrimination, sex, exploitation, sex, freedom, everyday activities. The other is about what it means to be a citizen of a democratic state, to live in a society worth living in, to exchange arguments, to lend others’ opinion an ear, to participate in politics. One can be read by anyone who can read, the other even highly educated academics will sometimes put aside in despair. That is why I’m reading them at the same time. When I’m exhausted by one, I turn to the other.

To illustrate,

“In any case, self-propelled capitalist modernization creates a need for state regulation in order to tame the centrifugal forces of social disintegration. The welfare states that emerged in the West during the second half of the twentieth century must undertake such a political countermeasure under increasingly demanding conditions of legitimation.”

Just read it again, or, if you find this tiresome, do as I do and read this:

“ONE OF THE CURIOUS ASPECTS of the Twenty-First Century was the great delusion among many people, particularly in the San Francisco Bay Area, that freedom of speech and freedom of expression were best exercised on technological platforms owned by corporations dedicated to making as much money as possible.”

What freedom of expression should encompass is, is surely a matter of opinion, but it is not so difficult to understand what the author is saying; whereas the “increasingly demanding conditions of legitimation” are a bit demanding, aren’t they? The second author also gets tiresome at times, even annoying because he uses very rough language, if only to illustrate what he hears around him, which, however, I find disgusting and therefore will quote only reluctantly.

But my strategy of alternating pages of one and the other was successful, as it helped me to get through the two books which, notwithstanding their annoying qualities, are extremely valuable. And because I read them in such close proximity with each other, I realized after a while that they are dealing with the same subject, which is clearly expressed in the title of the first, I hate the Internet, a bestselling novel by Jarett Kobek, but recognizable only by the initiated in that of the second, A new structural transformation of the public sphere and deliberative politics, a recently published essay by philosopher Jürgen Habermas. Kobek was five or six years ahead of Habermas, but then philosophers need time to think, and if at 93 you can think as lucidly as Habermas, you can be happy and proud of yourself.

Kobek lists, illustrates with many disquieting examples, and makes you understand all the reasons that justify the title of his book. Habermas basically does the same, without ever descending in his discussions to the distressing specifics we are all familiar with, such as hate mail, internet stalking, identity theft, ransom attacks, promoting conspiracy theories, inciting violence, etc. He stays in the abstract sphere of political philosophy, state-society relations, technology-engendered achievements and the risks they imply for liberal democracies.

Kobek says:

“These men believed that freedom of speech and freedom of expression were necessary for the functioning of a society and thus designed the Internet to prevent governance from impeding the free flow of discourse.

This wonderful fantasy disappeared around the time that another, more powerful fantasy took hold in the minds of the useless men who worked in technology. The second fantasy was money.

The men who championed money recognized that a platform where any asshole could say any old bullshit was a zone without any rules of discourse. A lie was as powerful as truth. This made the Internet a wonderful place to advertise.”

Habermas puts it this way:

“The siphoning off and digital processing of personal customer data, which is more or less unobtrusively exchanged for the information provided free of charge by search engines, news portals and other services, explains why the EU Competition Commissioner wants to regulate this market. But competition law is the wrong lever if you want to correct the basic mistake that the platforms, unlike the classic media, do not want to accept liability for the distribution of truth-sensitive, i.e., potentially deceptive, communicative content.”

Habermas became famous with his book The transformation of the public sphere which was published some six decades ago when the world wide web wasn’t even on the horizon. His concern at the time was with the first formation of a public sphere in the Western world in train with the spread of literacy which made it possible to form and exchange political opinions, thus turning subjects into citizens. Against this historical background he was well-positioned to recognise the potent effects of the changing media landscape on social formations and “post-truth-democracy”.

Kobek, by contrast, is only a decade older than the Internet and can hardly remember a world without it. He worked for the Net industry and knows it from the inside, but unlike many others recognized its downside and the risks it brings with it. If you are looking for examples of Shoshana Zuboff’s “surveillance capitalism” you can find them in his novel.

Kobek uses rude language by way of illustrating that “Internet pornography had anesthetized an entire population” and that cyberspace has brought about communications without restraint. Habermas aims at this very phenomenon as a defining characteristic of the changes the political system is undergoing at present. Liberal democracies which he calls “deliberative democracies” rely for decision making on the power of arguments freely exchanged in the public sphere which is open to all citizens. Presenting one’s arguments in proper form is more than superficial embellishment, as it expresses recognition of the opponent’s dignity and equality. In this sense, the mere fact of a deliberative approach, he says, is almost more important than the argument itself, since it opens the eyes and then the respect of the closed in-groups for one another. “The style is the argument.”

Both Habermas and Kobek perceive an unregulated cybersphere where the most appallingly vulgar language along with racist slurs and other -isms is tolerated in the name of freedom of expression as a serious danger that undermines the foundations of the relatively free society that evolved in the West since the end of World War II. Their writing varies greatly, but their messages are more than just compatible, which makes reading their books side by side so enlightening.

Florian Coulmas

……………………………………….

Jürgen Habermas, Ein neuer Strukturwandel der Öffentlichkeit und die deliberative Politik. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp

Harett Kobek, I hate the Internet. London: Profile Books.

Literature, Technology