Infocracy and necropolitics

Today politics has made false gods and false villains. The greatest threat to the state, Aristotle said, is not faction but distraction. The digital media ecosystem has disempowered the public sphere which has undermined democratic discourse. Infocrats and practitioners of necropolitics have taken full advantage of the current age of abundant distraction

- ASH NARAIN ROY

The pitfalls of excessive digitisation are there for all to see. Today, the abdication of moral imagination is pervasive across the world. The digital media is reprogramming us. As the other stands eliminated, we encounter nothing but ourself in the digital echo chamber.

The journey towards a digital world has led to algorithmic control of society. Social media is a market place, not a social good. AI expert Yvonne Hofstetter argues that we are all living in a “black box society” which is a society of secret control. She further maintains that the private companies are now engaged in what “only totalitarian countries normally do ~ namely, keeping consumers under complete electronic surveillance.”

As truth is inconvenient to many of the democratic regimes’ triumphalist victory laps, many democrats are waging wars on democracy. Digitisation has given way to information capitalism which has unleashed a tsunami of information threatening all facets of our live including politics.

South Korean philosopher Byung-Chul Han, in his book, Infocracy: Digitization and Crisis of Democracy, says that infocracy is a new form of rule. The great danger today, Han argues, “lies in the prevailing illusion that we are free.” We are actually not, as we are “continuously surveilled, directed and controlled.”

Social media platforms were once touted as an enabler for disenfranchised citizens to participate in civic engagement and in fostering democratic ideals. Today, more and more analysts agree that modern media platforms are holding democracy hostage. Rather than empowering, it has become a tool for mass surveillance, phishing, fake news and tribalism.