EPILOGUE TO THE ENGLISH EDITION

A book about a fast-moving digital technology risks being out of date almost before it appears. But if the book is a philosophical treatment rather than a manual or an empirical study, it is less likely to suffer from premature obsolescence. For this kind of study, new developments are welcome, for they offer a way to gauge whether the book’s philosophical arguments and speculations about the deeper meaning of a given technology are actually confirmed.

A main thesis of this book is that social networks and diary apps prompt their users to engage in more or less unconscious and unreflective self-narration of a kind that favors implicit over explicit self-revelation and that prefers mechanical presentation (via photography or automated sharing) to mindful representation (via textual statements or the creation of a narrative structure). The mode of self-expression that takes place on Facebook and other social networks is spontanous, episodic, and documental, rather than deliberate, coherent, and narrative. As a result, it generates a kind of “automatic autobiography” or “posthuman self-description” whose actual narrators are the network and its algorithms.

Evidence for this argument has continued to accumulate since the book appeared. Just a few weeks before the release of the original German edition, Mark Zuckerberg elaborated on his vision of the “next big thing,” the video-streaming feature Facebook Live, which launched in April 2016. “Because it’s live, there is no way it can be curated,” he said. “And because of that it frees people up to be themselves. It’s live; it can’t possibly be perfectly planned out ahead of time. Somewhat counterintuitively, it’s a great medium for sharing raw and visceral content.”1

The buzzwords for this new form of frictionless sharing are raw content and, implicitly, transparency and truth. Like self-tracking and “numerical narrative” (discussed in chapter 2), “frictionless sharing” seems to offer users a “cure” for the inclination to narrate their life in a way that makes sense to them and that inevitably changes it in the process. The desire for more “authentic” data from Facebook users also targets the viewers of a Facebook Live video, who, as with Twitter’s live-streaming video app Periscope, launched in March 2015, can instantly and spontaneously add a thumbs-up or a comment. Judgment is rendered while the video is still streaming; before Periscope, the viewers would have had to wait until the entire video had been recorded and uploaded, then downloaded and watched before they could add their comments. Spontaneity and immediacy function here as synonyms for authenticity; they are the counterpart to frictionless sharing.

An app that already, and very successfully, allows uncensored acting in public is Snapchat, which famously promises that the images shared on it will self-delete after they are viewed. I identify Snapchat as the logical next step after Facebook, since Snapchat not only destroys the experience of the present by constantly capturing and sharing it but also abandons the archive, which has become dispensable in this dialectic of preservation as forgetting. Since then, Snapchat has gone public, and, in March 2017, Facebook copied Snapchat’s signature feature with its Messenger function Day, which deletes images and videos after twenty-four hours. The fact that the lifespan of the image is almost as short as the time it takes to produce it perfectly suits the desire to erase the experienced moment by capturing and sharing it—and never coming back to it again. An idea as seminal as this is too good to be left to the competition.

These new features confirm the prognosis of this book that the type of self-representation to which social networks increasingly seduce us provides less and less content for our own self-reflection and self-understanding and more and more reliable material for the algorithms at the back end of the interface. Not only do we favor the camera as the means of mechanically reproducing our realities; we don’t even take the time to manipulate the images we upload. In essence, we increasingly cease to be the authors of our own autobiographies.

Another central concern of this book was to take a close look at the idea of a digital nation or cosmopolitan community as something the internet or Facebook claims to be able to generate. The book points out that Facebook pursues Zuckerberg’s declared mission of creating a “global community” by favoring postpolitical phatic communication—a model that, at the end of chapter 3, was discussed as the praxis conforming to Jean-Luc Nancy’s theory of a groundless community. We concluded with the notion that today algorithms are already filtering a closed system of knowledge from out of life, and speculated that at some point they might be able to avoid culturally determined conflicts by cleverly interposing individual parallel worlds.

In February 2017, Zuckerberg presented his manifesto “Building Global Community.” The statement stressed the political aspect of postpolitical communication and declared that “the best solutions for improving discourse may come from getting to know each other as whole people instead of just opinions.” It will be interesting to see how Zuckerberg responds when opinions—above all political, cultural, or religious convictions—actually do separate people. While, as we argued in the discussion of social media and community, Nancy’s concept of “groundless community” lacks a political theory of contention, Zuckerberg’s solutions for all the differences and conflicts that work against the formation of the desired community consist in algorithms and filter bubbles.2

Holding that for a community of two billion people it is not feasible to have a single set of standards that governs all divergent opinions, Zuckerberg suggests that “we need to evolve towards a system of personal control over our experience.” The objective is not a mutual experience of different perspectives but a customization that conforms to a person’s own point of view. “Each person should see as little objectionable content as possible,” Zuckerberg promises. To him, of course, this form of “self-governance” epitomizes the expansion not of the filter bubble but of “democratic referenda.”

It could be tempting, on first reading, to agree with Zuckerberg. By treating humans as biological beings and affording them the possibility to decide freely, for themselves, outside cultural contexts and belief systems, he avoids prescribing universal values for all those who coinhabit his “global community.” But the utopia of general understanding cannot be brought about by excluding everything that might result in the drawing of a boundary line. Shutting the Other out of sight and mind is not a form of tolerance. Tolerance, rather, means putting up with difference. To strengthen the unbounded We of humanity, writ large, against the We of nations, cultures, and other forms of belonging, it is not enough to liberate egos from their previous forms of groupthink and to set them loose, through a system of personal control, in their own filter bubbles. Global community must be acquainted with itself in all its facets. In other words, individuals’ freedom to decide their own lives must ultimately be restricted when it comes to the lives of others.

What is disturbing about Zuckerberg’s manifesto is that he thinks the “engineering mindset” he credits himself as having permits him to solve a problem as complex as universal human rights and global community, and to do so through the quick application of a few technical fixes. But hyperlinks do not necessarily lead to understanding, and transparency does not necessarily end in empathy. The initial premise of the manifesto—“Facebook stands for bringing us closer together and building a global community. When we began, this idea was not controversial”—betrays ignorance of the controversial debates over multiculturalism and cosmpolitanism. To this is added a complete lack of reflection on the extent to which the envisioned technical means are actually constructive when it comes to realizing the goal he envisions. Building a global community is at least as complicated as health care.

Toward the end of 2016, there was increasing speculation about Zuckerberg’s ambitions to hold America’s highest political office. A President Zuckerberg would be the correction to Trump, for his motto is not “America First” but the whole world. His model is not polarization and re-ideologification but linking and small talk. A President Zuckerberg would certainly be better than a President Trump. But would a Facebook society be good?

In his February 2017 manifesto, Zuckerberg lays out his purpose as fighting “sensationalism and polarization leading to a loss of common understanding.” Naturally, he does not concede that it is Facebook’s mode of communication that hinders nuanced, well-thought-out conversation: the dualistic reaction scheme of likes and dislikes; the number-based populism; the time pressure under which contributions are received, evaluated, and recommended. If we consider that the medial mode of Facebook communication encourages neither a reflective world image nor a reflective self-image, it must be doubted whether Facebook will bring about the society that Zuckerberg promised in his manifesto. But perhaps it is too early for this kind of judgment. We will have to continue to keep an eye on how things develop.