Late Enlightenment decadence

Social media. Musk, Weidel, the fact-fuckers

The fact-checkers are probably one of the most annoying spawns of liberal discourse. Without any ideological or theoretical self-criticism, the media precariat takes it upon itself to „uncover“ the „real“ truth behind opinions, judgements and political attitudes on every social issue. Of course, this is primarily about the fight against right-wing, conspiracy theory and ‚querfront’, but also about issues of war, peace and terrorism. The media then regularly features so-called „experts“ who „expose lies“ and „uncover the truth“. Such experts often come from institutes and NGOs of dubious origin, or their origin is often enough not made public. In other words, the fact-checkers probably don’t trust themselves. In the current debate on migration, „legal experts“ warn, for example: „Instead of evidence-based knowledge, emotional reactions and political reflexes currently dominate“ . Truth degenerates into evidence-based knowledge: as if the universality of human rights is based on evidence.¹

Surprisingly, this fact-checking and obsession with evidence contradicts the general credo of many progressives and liberals that the politics of the New Right are so successful because they are based on emotions and affects, which they know how to skilfully exploit in order to capitalise on them politically and ideologically. The reference to facts and evidence, i.e. supposed arguments, is therefore unsuitable in view of the realisation that the left is not in a position to appeal to people’s emotions and affects, let alone understand them, due to logic, rationality and the better argument. This is why some conclude that „learning from the right means learning to win“ and secretly adopt Chantal Mouffe’s concept of left-wing populism (although many would deny that they are populist) in order to reconcile emotion and argument or, more precisely, to make emotion serve another, left-wing argument. The latent dissatisfaction, which is articulated in racist terms, is to be turned into an uprising against ‚those at the top‘, ‚the capitalists‘ or similar. The fact that progressives don’t really succeed in doing this may be due to the fact that they don’t feel like many people because they are ultimately still convinced of civilisation, modernity, technology, deliberative democracy and the like (examples would probably be politics during the Covid state of exception, the war in Ukraine or the attempted genocide in Palestine). Progressives and leftists are identified with empiricism, logic and rationality, but not with truth.

The fact that progressives are not aware of the crisis of their categories means that their talk becomes awkward and mindless, pure ideological stuff and nonsense that sustains this world, which has long since cannibalised itself economically, politically and epistemologically, bloating up like a decaying body, living on like a zombie. And the right-wing benefits from this because many people consciously or unconsciously have a feeling of exactly that. Anyone expecting a „but the right-wing…“ can stop here and devote themselves to more morally wholesome things such as anti-fascist popular front politics or, as it is called today in class struggle terms, anti-fascist economic policy and continue to indulge in the dead end of modernity. This is not about the right, but about its progressive counterpart.

Fact checkers as ideological state apparatuses

What are facts? Wikipedia writes – already not particularly factual – that a fact is a real, provable, existing, true or recognised state of affairs. This already explains the whole problem of bourgeois science. For it claims that there are objective, empirically verifiable facts, but without – and this is the crucial point – accounting for its own epistemological premises. The fewer scientists there are who make the epistemological premises transparent and question them, the more it becomes an ideology. Today we find ourselves in a time in which it seems that most scientists themselves no longer have any knowledge about the origins of their profession, to the extent that science today is often just ideology, in the worst sense religion (e.g. Covid pandemic and the laboratory charlatans). It should be clear that ideology is not abstract, but is inscribed in its specific historical and political context. This is particularly evident in the fact-checkers who, with the modest, rational tone of conviction, ‚disprove‘ everything that does not fit into the or their prevailing discourse (from the AfD to left-wing anti-war positions). For example, the term ‚alternative facts‘ was introduced by the new right to justify their own lies and fact-checkers checking these alternative facts and expose them as false. Firstly, the invention of the term ‚alternative facts‘ is ingenious because it is true. Because of course there are alternative facts to other facts. After all, ‚a fact‘ is the selection of an element of reality. The fact is shaped by how it is selected, from which point of view and from which perspective (e.g. micro or macro). The only criterion for arguing about facts can be to make the selection criteria transparent and to enter into an argument about truth. (An example: Is it a fact that poor migrants and refugees are a burden on the german state’s social system? Of course it is. It is also a fact that Germans do the same, because it is also a fact that a social system exists precisely to support poor people. It is true that Germans and migrants are pitted against each other because of racism. It is wrong to deport migrants and refugees because of the above-mentioned fact. False is therefore a normative category, linked to the truth, not to the fact).

With the fact checkers as a form and notion, the new right discourse is firstly ennobled as equal and secondly the fact checkers expose themselves as not interested in discourse, in the exchange of arguments, because they ultimately always expose the alternative facts as lies and thus as not capable of discourse. In doing so, they make a third mistake, namely that they abolish politics as an argument about the good, the true and the beautiful. Because apparently it is only about facts, i.e. an objectively correct point of view. Political opinions can no longer exist in it. Still, politics naturally continues to exist as interest-led strategic action and the fact-checkers produce it non-stop with the tenor of objective, fact-based facts. In times of revolutionary theory, this was called ‚technocracy‘. Leftists emphatically call it democracy, the fight against the right or somehow more openly authoritarian: regulation of the public sphere.

Now all the real, true, genuine and only Marxists could cheer. After all, they feel confirmed that only Marxian materialism leads to objective knowledge and thus out of misery. However, ‚knowledge‘ itself has lost its emancipatory potential, as it has become the central form of domination of our time. Lacan called this the transition from a discourse of the master to a discourse of the university. Whereas in the past, enjoyment was still made possible by transgressing and resisting the transparent and authoritarian prohibition of the master, today the discourse of the university offers people infinite enjoyment, without prohibitions. Only the acquisition of knowledge, e.g. through fact-checkers, checklists, counselling literature or Check24, is a prerequisite today for proper and unrestricted enjoyment. However, the discourse of the university deliberately covers the fact that enjoyment does not work without negativity and covers up its ‚prohibitions‘ and authoritarian character behind requirements and offers, ultimately fostering voluntary servitude. In this way, knowledge, beyond its bourgeois origins, becomes a problem for liberation itself.

In this respect, the fact-fuckers are part of the ideological state apparatuses and have thus moulted into their own status group together with similarly acting actors: the experts. They include all the „journalists“, „academics“, „I’ve lived here and there for a long time – people“ and „I’m part of the community, so I can really judge – people“ who work in the same logic of the highly official fact-checkers. And for all anti-fascist anti-conspiracionists, it should be mentioned here that it is not uncommon for „journalists“ and „fact-checkers“ to work not only in the ideological state apparatus, but even in the black hole of the state, where it suspends itself and its positively established law, namely directly for secret services or at least in ‚third-party funding bordels‘ that do the preparatory work for it.

After the accusation that they are in the same business as fact-checkers, the average journalist will oppose and assure, that they are asking the relevant questions about context, position and perspective. That they ask what happened after or before the recorded scene that can be seen in a video on Social Media (e.g. Twitter) and which person recorded the scene and with what interest. However, the well-known cry for ‚contextualisation‘ is also only motivated by an interest in interpreting the scene according to one’s own interests. This legitimate concern is hidden behind the claim that one has now, contrary to many others, considered all the facts, the entire context. One’s own legitimate political claim and the fight for the images is hidden behind fact-fucking: again, ideology production. Furthermore, the true essence of this supposedly „moving image“ is not understood at all, meaning that any thoughts we have had up to this point are meaningless if we don’t get to the true essence of the supposed images. Because the moving images are not images, but techno-images. Behind the supposed images is not a real or scene of reality, but text. Text in the sense of the epistemological premises that we have developed for centuries through our linear alphabet (symbolising, abstraction and conceptuality). The supposed image is therefore the product of philosophical, scientific and mathematical concepts that flow into the construction and functioning of the apparatus (the smartphone, the camera), into the perspective and thinking of the operator (the person filming). In this respect, every cry out for context, for more facts in order to classify the moving image „correctly“ misses the essential problem of our time: the techno-image has long since escaped the categories of objectivity, progress, enlightenment, logic, history and anyone who tries to grasp it with these categories remains in the self-cannibalisation of their own modern subjectivity. Therefore the helplessness and hysteria with which everyone hurls themselves the terms „lies“, „facts“, „fake news“ etc. at . Helplessness in the face of the lack of understanding that all the lashing out does not lead to the desired result.

Hitler the communist

So anyone who talks themselves into a rage over Alice Weidel’s statement that Hitler was a communist and pulls out the big anti-fascist phrases ‚Never Again is Now‘ and ‚Resistance‘ has no understanding of information or communication. Any moral indignation that follows the proof of the „lie“ of this statement misses the basic problem: to quote a well-known activist of the ‚Identitarian Movement‘ in reverse: The fact that it took place is the problem, not the expressions of political opinions and lies. Because political opinions cannot be disproved with facts and the false claims or lies in the conversation between Weidel and Musk, for example that Hitler was a communist: whether the claim that Hitler was a communist is a lie or not already so obviously right-wing Dadaism that no argument, whether in the discourse of facts or truth, helps, but only a good shove in the Sagittarius A*, would be a really productive question. In any case, it would be more productive than organising human chains of lights, shouting slogans at the Quadriga and painting cheesy, contentfree posters with hearts on it.

As someone wrote something likeon Twitter: When right-wingers vomit in the public discourse space, the liberals are already waiting, cheering, horny and eating the right-wingers‘ vomit. Afterwards, they turn away in disgust and perhaps secretly ashamed, knowing that they are already lustfully waiting for the next shower of vomit. Accompanied by the corresponding videos, reels and GIFs (most recent example: Elon Musk with his autistic-national-socialist Hitler rocket salute), this has something of pharmaceutical pornography about it; an infinite cybernetic logic of arousal – satisfaction/frustration – arousal, which never allows for real, just frustrated enjoyment.

Fact checkers as amphitheatre discourses

Vilém Flusser, a communication scientist and philosopher of the 1980s, already realised that fact-checkers are nothing more than a desperate but futile attempt to save bourgeois democracy, and developed his criticism of forms of publicity and discourse not on the question of evidence, of right or wrong, but on the structure of modern forms of communication in general. For behind the debate about facts, evidence and arguments versus emotions lies the problem of a public sphere, public communication, which is still naively assumed to be a decisive place for negotiating social changes, compromises, etc. This applies to both the right and the left. At the beginning of the 1980s, Gottfried Oy once put it this way: approaches to counter-publicity (on the left) were based on a causal connection between information and action, or counter-information and liberation; it was sufficient to simply replace the „false“ and therefore „ideological“ information of the bourgeois media with the „right“ information and analyses in order to change social practice. This has proven to be wrong, as we know. The public sphere is not the place of resistance against the prevailing conditions and powers, but part of them. But let us take inspiration from Flusser and his critique of the public sphere, communication and discourse.

He attributes the mass media that were hegemonic at the time, such as the press, posters and television, to the so-called amphitheatrical discourse and the fact checkers can also be described as an amphitheatre discourse. Vilém Flusser borrows the term from the architecture of the ancient amphitheatre, the Roman circus, in which transmitters stand in the middle of a circular theatre and send information to a potentially random and undefined crowd. In the age of modern and above all digital media, such a discourse produces maximised openess because potentially anyone can receive. At the same time, the amphitheatre discourse is only geared towards the preservation of information because the recipient has no structure. The information is not sent for the purpose of reaching a specific person, an individual, but the masses. Due to this lack of structure, each individual in the masses becomes a mere recipient of information, a can of information who cannot take any ‚responsibility‘ for the information. In this case, ’no responsibility‘ means that the recipient is not able to process the information further due to the structure of this communication and thus revolution, change or process is excluded from the outset. In addition, the information must be little, simple and uniform so that it can be sent and received at all in the open, structureless structure of the amphitheatre discourse.

Ultimately, the hegemony of this discourse in today’s society means that social media is exponentially increasing entropy, a lack of history, uniformity and the deformation of information. In the New Right, the Left and all other milieus of liberalism, however, this development appears as an increase in general, although perhaps unregulated, participation or digital democracy. What is actually happening, however, is that we are confronted with a totalitarian depoliticisation with seemingly general participation. Or to put it more fundamentally with Flusser: The production of meaning in our western linear alphabet has exhausted itself, which means that our forms of communication are also no longer able to deal with the tendency towards entropy and we are moving step by step towards the realisation that we are just natural animals doomed to die. No wonder the majority of humanity is indulging in hysterical screaming, from left to right, from top to bottom.

The fact checkers can be understood as part of the amphitheatre discourse, which is an attempt by progressives to deal with this loss of meaning without understanding that it is not the content (irrationality, opposite of logic, emotion instead of fake news, alternative reality) of the information they are fighting against (on social media, for example) that is the problem, but the function and form of the medium and communication. From there, however, the problem would then point to a content, namely the fact checkers‘ own decayed, enlightened, modern content. The fact checkers feed themselves on progressive and highly specialised tree discourses (science & technology) and hierarchical, conservative pyramid discourses (e.g. political parties or NGOs), which have themselves already survived their historical crisis, but continue to be ridden to death. In any case, due to the communication structure of which they themselves are part of, they find themselves in a feedback loop that superficially tends to generate more and more confusing information, but in reality cannibalises itself, like the universe. Once again: X, Instagram, Bluesky, TikTok are not structured as dialogues or progressive discourses in which arguments, rationality, logic and reality have a chance. Even the desperate attempt to venture an exodus to Bluesky does not help. Although one could argue that an attempt is being made here to re-establish an elitist dialogue (and thus a revolutionary dialogue), this once again ignores the problem of form and function. Even without excessive advertising, various types of pornography and the new right trolls, Bluesky will not become a round table, a plenum or a parliament.

Fact checker as a net dialogue entropic bomb

Flusser also captures the avoidance, containment or workability of entropy, i.e. the tendency towards excessive disorder, in the concept of network dialogues as the basic network of all other forms of human communication. These include gossip, chatter, chit-chat and the spreading of rumours. The most developed forms of network dialogue today are social media, Telegram, Signal and Whatsapp chats and channels. They are not about the intention to synthesise new information (revolution, change, process), but as network dialogues they are actually the last ‚dam‘ that is supposed to protect information from the entropic tendency of nature, they are the collective memory. In social media, however, our collective memory threatens to explode due to overload, making any possibility of ’stable‘ localisation and positioning in the world impossible: The standpoint or weightlessness in space, time and politics; Anthropological opportunism in times of fake news and facts; What irony.

So perhaps we should not speak of social media as amphitheatre discourse and network dialogue, but rather of an amphitheatre network, a symbiosis of both forms of communication, which is characterised by the fact that everyone is supposed to send and at the same time everyone is only supposed to receive. An obvious contradiction that constantly leads to collisions that result in short circuits (see hysteria in the media). And even where information finds its way, a channel (what we now call bubble formation and echo chambers), it falls back into the old pattern of amphitheatre discourse or network dialogue and merely contributes to the preservation of history and the overfeeding of collective memory because it lacks progressive dialogue.

The hegemonic forms of communication in bourgeois society are therefore eliminating themselves and thus communication in general. That is good and not bad, because underneath there is still the human love of freedom, which wants to communicate, indeed, cannot do otherwise and will find another language, other forms. So the old question of the situationists remains: how can the core of communication be the creation of new contexts of meaning rather than the communication of information? Whether such communication must be public or can be public at all becomes our challenge against the background of the logic of the media (image/tiktok etc.).