Many books on the Twilight Zone-esque 2016 presidential election campaign have been published and many more certainly are going to be written. So far, a majority have chronicled the (purported) lurid details of daily life in the White House, stuff of political theater and scandal (and even comedy). Unhinged, anyone? Others have examined the history of right-wing movements or the rise of certain economic forces like globalization in order to contextualize the Trump phenomenon. Author and former attorney Ben Fountain, in his 2018 entry Beautiful Country Burn Again: Democracy, Rebellion, and Revolution, continues in this tradition, with a heap of psychological examination of the American psyche on top of the usual historical chronicling.
In his account of 2016, Fountain begins each chapter (one per each month of the 2016 campaign) with an immersionary litany of monthly news, rapid-fire summations of the big stories internationally, before zooming in domestically to the dizzying array of forces active in the American political scene that he believes could precipitate a potential civil war or proportionate cataclysmic event of national crisis. A kind of window on the world to the threats brewing abroad to freedom and a contrasting of them with the dangerous political squabblings of 2016 that threaten to undermine from within instead. (A bit of irony there.) Perhaps the claim yet another existential crisis after the Civil War and Great Depression is a bit of a stretch in current conditions, but it definitely is a jolt for readers, a call to heed the social, economic and political forces that are converging and giving rise to not just Trump, but to demagogues like him across the world. Fountain is not shy about shining light on these forces he believes to be at the root of current American woes: a system predicated on white supremacy that has put people (often white) into positions of power to institute a plutocratic system of racial, economic, and gender-based discrimination. A common refrain throughout the book is Fountain's core assertion of a base systemic logic at work in our daily lives of "profit proportionate to freedom; plunder correlative to subjugation" (Fountain, 2018, p. 4).
Democrat or Republican, no one is spared from blistering (and honest) critique in Fountain's analysis. While he notes that conservative philosophies have had a closer alignment to privileged politicians and tycoons at the expense of the working class they purport to liberate from a bloated, inefficient government bureaucracy, mainstream Democrats have also moved closer to this new centrist political position starting in the late 1990s, with more business friendly party planks alongside those pertaining to traditional social justice and environmental protection ones. Oh, and there were many appeals to the near-universal (and universally overused, in my opinion) "middle class values" of hard work and less government dependence (Fountain, 2018, p. 258). In an attempt to gain a broader coalition and re-brand, Democrats may have inadvertently shafted their traditional minority and union constituencies in a time of rising income inequality, uneven globalization, immigration crises, the rise of social media and politics as reality TV, emerging philosophies of subjective reality, and increasing far-right sympathies. Meanwhile, the conservative strategy of "campaign on a platform decrying government as dysfunctional and ineffective, and once you're in power do everything you can to make government dysfunctional and ineffective" does nothing to improve the situation (Fountain, 2018, p. 383). In turn, this leads to corresponding (mostly justified) reactionary responses from both left (the Occupy movement, Black Lives Matter) and right-wing (the Tea Party) populists.
Instead, both parties have been guilty of pandering more to the One Percent than the majority, complicit in maintaining the former's preferred method of control in the "fantasy industrial complex," or "FIC," defined as the "saturation" of our personal and national scene with an "onslaught of media and messaging that...dims our capacity for understanding the world as it actually is" and instead promotes a relentless barrage of fantasy and the simple and lurid (Fountain, 2018, p. 312). In other words, as the chaos of 2016 unfolded, the American psyche was already coping with the trauma wrought by the FIC, designed to enrage and confuse the response to serious problems like income inequality, racial and gender discrimination, and climate change. What a double whammy. It becomes easier to understand why Trump's warped and racially-charged perception of the American Dream epitomized in his campaign slogan of "Make America Great Again" so easily found its mark, bringing to power a man that has so far raised a middle finger to his working class base with a relentless campaign of deregulation and tax breaks that gutted the New Deal-promoted (relative) stability we enjoy today.
The question left at the conclusion of Beautiful Country Burn Again is whether America can manage the collective will to solve the problems it faces rather than retreating into an alternative reality in reaching a new New Deal, a reworking of the social contract to better align our system of government with serving all and not a few of its citizens. Here, like other authors of the books so far attempting to contextualize 2016, Fountain has difficulty in prescribing a specific treatment for America's ills, rather urging the latter updates of our social contract and calling for Americans to re-realize our common humanity in order to keep democratic governance above the rising tide of globalization and capitalism and other planetary problems like climate change. Perhaps that is unfair, considering the complexity of the project that needs to be undertaken to solve the complex, borderless issues of our era. If anything, Fountain's message of the need to reconnect with our common humanity in order to govern better is enough, a first step in a long journey of national healing.
Works Cited:
Fountain, Ben. (2018). Beautiful Country Burn Again: Democracy, Rebellion, and Revolution. New York: HarperCollins.
Friday, November 16, 2018
Friday, November 2, 2018
Book Review: David Patrikarakos's "War in 140 Characters"
At the risk of sounding repetitive, social media platforms have become ubiquitous in our lives for both good (allowing news from dangerous war zones journalists are unable to reach in great numbers) and ill (the Russian social media disinformation campaign). Everything from citizen journalists to the infamous troll farms have been made possible by these technologies, part of what is commonly termed "Web 2.0," websites that offer various tools for Internet users to become active producers of content rather than passive consumers (Partikarakos, 2017, p. 9). Author and journalist David Patrikarakos explores how these technologically-empowered networks of individuals (the homo digitalis) are impacting twenty-first century warfare in his 2017 book War in 140 Characters: How Social Media is Reshaping Conflict in the Twenty-First Century.
Warfare is by no means a novel concept for humanity. However, Patrikarakos sees the emerging breed of tech-savvy homo digitalis as reshaping conflict into both a physical contest on the battlefield between competing armies or militias and a parallel one in cyberspace. In other words, the narrative about a conflict matters equally as much as the battlefield reality. This is made possible by a variety of factors, including the inauguration of Web 2.0 technologies in an era of post-truth or subjective reality, where individuals can at low or no cost network with other like-minded individuals and broadcast to the world. This has had the effect of circumventing or even undermining traditional actors like the state and media organizations when individuals can get various tasks done without the aid of these often slow-moving, hierarchical institutions.
Patrikarakos illustrates the latter decentralizing and destabilizing effect of social media technology and homo digitalis by exploring from various angles the conflicts in Gaza, Syria and Ukraine. In the Gaza strip, we are introduced to a Gazan teenage citizen journalist named Farah, whose emotive tweets and blog posts helped to galvanize international outrage against Israel during its Operation Protective Edge campaign in July 2014. On the other side of the conflict, Israel's IDF (military) Spokesperson's Unit attempted to contest the narrative space that Farah and other Gazans had utilized to their advantage, by countering their narrative of a people under cruel siege by a superior military force with one of an embattled military doing everything it could to protect their own civilians and Gazan ones from an organization (Hamas) accused of using their people as shields. However, because the Israeli government was largely playing catch-up for much of the ongoing Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the fact is is that Palestinians were able to fortify their position in the narrative arena by virtue of having established a strong presence there first on social media (and giving mainstream media enough time and exposure to then pick up their content).
Meanwhile, in a Ukraine destabilized by the annexation of Crimea by Russia utilizing underhanded propaganda and military aid to back-up eastern Ukrainian separatist militias, a middle-aged Ukrainian woman named Anna Sandalova used Facebook to aid the embattled and under-equipped Ukrainian military. In a country beset with corruption issues, Sandalova was able to create a Facebook page as a private fundraising engine to supply necessities to Ukrainian army personnel battling the separatists in the east, bypassing often corrupt and slow-moving governmental institutions leftover from the Soviet days. Up against Sandalova and individuals like her, however, is a massive propaganda machine in autocratic Russia who is admittedly ahead of the game in comparison with Western democracies with embracing a new doctrine of hybrid-warfare. This has aided them in destabilizing both Ukraine and Syria, where a civil war currently rages.
For all the actors both Eastern and Western involved in Syria, ISIS stands out, even as it is currently in retreat from its peak territory and recruitment game. Just as individuals like Anna Sandalova can use social media for good, various non-state actors and individuals like ISIS, who are often out-matched in resources compared to state institutions, can use those same tools for ill. The ISIS siren song created by their cyberspace recruiters was able to cast a wide net, catching both educated individuals and die-hard jihadi ideologues with a message specifically targeted to these disaffected groups feeling like passive spectators in the lives: with ISIS, you can serve various roles (from caretakers to soldiers) in an idyllic caliphate. The call to something bigger than yourself is a universal narrative, inspiring people to serve states and non-state actors alike. Add this social media and the message's reach, serving whatever group, is amplified greatly.
While I enjoyed Patrikarakos's scholarship on this important topic of 21st century war, War in 140 Characters may be prematurely signing the death certificate of established institutions and states. Sure, outmatched networks of people can definitely influence the political dimension of war when they themselves aren't soldiers of the traditional kind. Yes, states and other slow moving organizations like diplomatic corps are playing catch-up right now in terms of embracing the potential of these Web 2.0 technologies. However, states probably will be able to close the gap, using their vast resources to back-up their own teams of cyber-warriors, as Russia appears to be doing to great effect with their troll farms and misinformation campaigns. As for Patrikarakos's concluding assertion that the destabilizing effects of social media embedded in today's globalization-crazed world facing innumerable transnational crises can precipitate WWIII, I'm less able to dismiss this assertion. While social media can bring people together, it often brings together diverse groups that can and often oppose others, spewing out huge tides of often unverified claims that even the best-equipped fast-checkers cannot keep up with. This is how we end up with autocrats inflaming divisions among their peoples and even those of foreign populations, a situation not the most stable or conducive to democratic dialogues and processes.
All in all, War in 140 Characters is a well-written and researched treatise on an important emergent topic in technology-driven warfare. While the jury is out as to whether or not states are a dying breed in the international arena, readers nonetheless will appreciate the intriguing and thought-provoking intellectual discussion found in Patrikarakos's book. It will be interesting to see how social media continues to play out with the conflicts explored in this book and many others, as the implications will certainly be far-reaching.
Works Cited:
Patrikarakos, David. (2017). War in 140 Characters: How Social Media is Reshaping Conflict in the Twenty-First Century. New York: Basic Books.
Warfare is by no means a novel concept for humanity. However, Patrikarakos sees the emerging breed of tech-savvy homo digitalis as reshaping conflict into both a physical contest on the battlefield between competing armies or militias and a parallel one in cyberspace. In other words, the narrative about a conflict matters equally as much as the battlefield reality. This is made possible by a variety of factors, including the inauguration of Web 2.0 technologies in an era of post-truth or subjective reality, where individuals can at low or no cost network with other like-minded individuals and broadcast to the world. This has had the effect of circumventing or even undermining traditional actors like the state and media organizations when individuals can get various tasks done without the aid of these often slow-moving, hierarchical institutions.
Patrikarakos illustrates the latter decentralizing and destabilizing effect of social media technology and homo digitalis by exploring from various angles the conflicts in Gaza, Syria and Ukraine. In the Gaza strip, we are introduced to a Gazan teenage citizen journalist named Farah, whose emotive tweets and blog posts helped to galvanize international outrage against Israel during its Operation Protective Edge campaign in July 2014. On the other side of the conflict, Israel's IDF (military) Spokesperson's Unit attempted to contest the narrative space that Farah and other Gazans had utilized to their advantage, by countering their narrative of a people under cruel siege by a superior military force with one of an embattled military doing everything it could to protect their own civilians and Gazan ones from an organization (Hamas) accused of using their people as shields. However, because the Israeli government was largely playing catch-up for much of the ongoing Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the fact is is that Palestinians were able to fortify their position in the narrative arena by virtue of having established a strong presence there first on social media (and giving mainstream media enough time and exposure to then pick up their content).
Meanwhile, in a Ukraine destabilized by the annexation of Crimea by Russia utilizing underhanded propaganda and military aid to back-up eastern Ukrainian separatist militias, a middle-aged Ukrainian woman named Anna Sandalova used Facebook to aid the embattled and under-equipped Ukrainian military. In a country beset with corruption issues, Sandalova was able to create a Facebook page as a private fundraising engine to supply necessities to Ukrainian army personnel battling the separatists in the east, bypassing often corrupt and slow-moving governmental institutions leftover from the Soviet days. Up against Sandalova and individuals like her, however, is a massive propaganda machine in autocratic Russia who is admittedly ahead of the game in comparison with Western democracies with embracing a new doctrine of hybrid-warfare. This has aided them in destabilizing both Ukraine and Syria, where a civil war currently rages.
For all the actors both Eastern and Western involved in Syria, ISIS stands out, even as it is currently in retreat from its peak territory and recruitment game. Just as individuals like Anna Sandalova can use social media for good, various non-state actors and individuals like ISIS, who are often out-matched in resources compared to state institutions, can use those same tools for ill. The ISIS siren song created by their cyberspace recruiters was able to cast a wide net, catching both educated individuals and die-hard jihadi ideologues with a message specifically targeted to these disaffected groups feeling like passive spectators in the lives: with ISIS, you can serve various roles (from caretakers to soldiers) in an idyllic caliphate. The call to something bigger than yourself is a universal narrative, inspiring people to serve states and non-state actors alike. Add this social media and the message's reach, serving whatever group, is amplified greatly.
While I enjoyed Patrikarakos's scholarship on this important topic of 21st century war, War in 140 Characters may be prematurely signing the death certificate of established institutions and states. Sure, outmatched networks of people can definitely influence the political dimension of war when they themselves aren't soldiers of the traditional kind. Yes, states and other slow moving organizations like diplomatic corps are playing catch-up right now in terms of embracing the potential of these Web 2.0 technologies. However, states probably will be able to close the gap, using their vast resources to back-up their own teams of cyber-warriors, as Russia appears to be doing to great effect with their troll farms and misinformation campaigns. As for Patrikarakos's concluding assertion that the destabilizing effects of social media embedded in today's globalization-crazed world facing innumerable transnational crises can precipitate WWIII, I'm less able to dismiss this assertion. While social media can bring people together, it often brings together diverse groups that can and often oppose others, spewing out huge tides of often unverified claims that even the best-equipped fast-checkers cannot keep up with. This is how we end up with autocrats inflaming divisions among their peoples and even those of foreign populations, a situation not the most stable or conducive to democratic dialogues and processes.
All in all, War in 140 Characters is a well-written and researched treatise on an important emergent topic in technology-driven warfare. While the jury is out as to whether or not states are a dying breed in the international arena, readers nonetheless will appreciate the intriguing and thought-provoking intellectual discussion found in Patrikarakos's book. It will be interesting to see how social media continues to play out with the conflicts explored in this book and many others, as the implications will certainly be far-reaching.
Works Cited:
Patrikarakos, David. (2017). War in 140 Characters: How Social Media is Reshaping Conflict in the Twenty-First Century. New York: Basic Books.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)