Radio came too soon. The society that invented it was by no means sufficiently advanced for it, as Bertolt Brecht observed in a lecture he gave in 1932 on the function of radio: “The public was not waiting for the radio, but rather the radio was waiting for the public.” Instead of handing everyone a microphone and bringing society into conversation with itself, Brecht said, people in broadcasting were imitating the old theatrical and print media, addressing the masses from the “stage” of the ether. Brecht thought that the task of turning radio from an “apparatus of distribution” into “the finest possible communications apparatus in public life” was impossible to achieve under the existing social order, but would be possible in another one, which it was therefore necessary to propagate.1
A medium as starting point for the overthrow of an entire social order? The idea isn’t so outlandish if we consider the social consequences of the invention of printing. But it would take until the end of the twentieth century before everyone would have access to a microphone. Only with the Internet and then, in earnest, with the social networks of the web 2.0 was there a bidirectional medium that allowed every message recipient to become a sender. Did that mean that the public Brecht had envisioned for radio was at hand?
This time the medium came too late, although at first people thought its arrival was just in time. The coincidental demise of socialist social systems in the same year as the birth of the World Wide Web seemed to argue for removing all socially utopian ambitions to the realm of new media. So it was no surprise when, shortly thereafter, the independence of cyberspace from real-world governments was declared—an idea that admittedly lasted only as long, as hardly anyone was genuinely interested in occupying this space.2 Today, all the energies of social change are produced and consumed there, under slogans like “big data,” “industry 4.0,” and the “Internet of things.”
For a time, the optimism outlived even the commercial capture that accompanied the new millennium, and it still survives today among some very stubborn types. For the Internet, as cyberspace is now more matter-of-factly known, continues to be a space that is freely accessible: There are no more gatekeepers, no thought police, no elite opinion-makers, but instead free access to information and a much-expanded public realm. Admittedly, the often-invoked comparison with Jürgen Habermas’s historical study, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, was always already limping, since he himself held that even the model of deliberative democracy was better off in the asymmetrical, ideally also self-reflective and multiperspectival discourse culture of the traditional mass media than in the symmetrical and decentralized culture of the Internet. For the Internet not only frees public discussion from institutional control, it also frees it from the central role of political themes and creates a public that is doubly dispersed: a public that is broken down into very small groups, which are scarcely willing to consider anything that exceeds the compass of their smartphones.3
The “communication apparatus in public life,” which for Brecht and numerous others after him promised the emancipation of the individual, undermines—such is the bitter irony of its success—the minimal demand that Brecht posed for radio: that as the locus of political information and discussion it should sharpen society’s critical awareness. Brecht’s critique of the radio—that “a technical invention with such a natural aptitude for decisive public functions is met by such anxious efforts to maintain without consequences the most harmless entertainment possible”—still applies, indeed more emphatically, to the Internet—this despite WikiLeaks, political bloggers, and the critical commentary that bravely persists here and there.4
The “organization of the excluded,” with which radio was supposed to confront the “powers that exclude,” has become reality in diverse social networks, but not in order to challenge the status quo, as Brecht and others once hoped.5 The end of history that was proclaimed in 1989 also spelled the end of Adorno’s perspective, according to which history—as the emergence of an emancipated, exploitation-free life—had not yet begun. Talk of a life freed from social delusion (Verblendungszusammenhang) has faded away. Amusement is no longer disdained as a compromise with false life, and emancipation is now primarily taken to mean self-expression and branding on the social network.
The survival trick of the society Brecht and Adorno wanted to do away with is participation. It starts economically, with the transformation of society’s members into small-scale investors, and continues as a media phenomenon that makes the culture of participation a hot commodity in the advertising industry. Corporate sponsorship is the great hope of “Generation Like,” which is doing everything it possibly can to become famous on Twitter, YouTube, and Instagram. After being successfully “discovered,” the fortunate individual then consistently wears only certain sneakers, T-shirts, and baseball caps in her skateboard videos, or drives repeatedly through the video clip in a blue Ford Fiesta.6
Thus, teenagers become advertising partners and occasionally even sponsors themselves, if their links and shared performances draw attention to other YouTubers. This solidarity of the formerly excluded, and even the self-marketing, would certainly have earned the approbation of Brecht, and maybe Adorno as well, if the heroes of the social media were ultimately using their newfound power as the lords and masters over millions of pairs of eyes and ears to spread the really important messages among the people.
But accidental revolutionaries are as rare as political memes. For Generation Like, the end justifies the means even where no liberty, equality, or fraternity is involved. This generation has an astonishing confidence in its self-marketing, and has no problem boasting, as a sign of growing success, that it has attracted the interest of Taco Bell or McDonalds. The name “Generation Like” refers not only to the “likes” it is so eager to garner, but also to its good relations with society in general. Its vocabulary is appropriately positive: to this generation, “opportunism” means seizing opportunities, and “selling out” means that all the tickets for an event have already been purchased.
The Internet came too late for what it could possibly have become. After the free market economy, with its tangible consumer culture, had won out over competing contenders for the future of humankind, the new media system could not expect much more from people than what they had made it into: a virtual shopping center that is accessible at all times and places, with a few niches consigned to social creativity and political education, which, surrounded by advertising and subject to the laws of the attention economy, ultimately serve as supply chains for the neoliberal social model. And, what’s worse, the new medium even sucks in all the older media too.
Classical journalism has suffered for some time from the fact that more and more people are getting their information from social networks, but until recently at least the links readers encountered on the networks’ sites steered them to journalism’s own sovereign territory, where journalistic responsibility had a seat at the table and it was even possible to give covert nourishment to less popular but actually important news items. With “Instant Article,” Facebook’s latest star attraction, the last defense of zoon politikon is being dismantled, in the name of democracy.
Officially, as always, the change is about improving communication, this time even political communication. People don’t want to wait very long for a news article to load, and as a result many of them don’t even bother to click on the link. Hence Mark Zuckerberg’s response to a journalist’s question, at an in-house virtual press conference on July 1, 2015, about Facebook’s plans to support “good journalism.” Zuckerberg’s solution: embed the news items on Facebook’s server, so they can load in less than three hundred milliseconds, instead of three seconds or more, as in the past.
What many people might regard as a coup is for Zuckerberg merely part of his educational mission: “When news is as fast as everything else on Facebook, people will naturally read a lot more news. That will be good for helping people be more informed about the world, and it will be good for the news ecosystem because it will deliver more traffic.”7 Interestingly, “news,” here, evidently refers to stories filed by members of the Fourth Estate, which Facebook’s “news feed” had effectively and successfully depoliticized as early as 2010. But this is absolutely no grounds for hope.
The rationale offered for Zuckerberg’s plan to preserve quality journalism is simultaneously its death sentence. For how much intellectual attention can a news article claim, if three seconds is already too long to wait for it to appear? Quickly downloaded also means quickly consumed, between exciting status updates. The rule of thumb of the attention economy is a simple one: the easier it is to like something, the more likes it gets. The essay on Kulturkampf will face a tough road if it is competing with the eyewitness account of the double murder in the Rue Morgue. Picking the winner requires no explanation; it materializes in a form that is fully consonant with grassroots democracy: by the numbers. Verbal comments, if there are any, don’t carry much weight, and while it may be important to the editor in chief that ten people wrote eloquently formulated, enthusiastic comments on the Kulturkampf story, the shareholders will not be impressed.
This may sound cynical, but it actually entails a subtle and far-reaching critique. Social networks place a radical bet on public opinion polling; they completely disempower all the experts who think they know better when it comes to what people actually need or ought to want. For Zuckerberg, education for social maturity begins with getting rid of waiting and ends with a discussion-free plebiscite of likes. And because he wants to give people what they want, he says in the same interview that he sees the future of journalism in “rich content,” such as videos (instead of “just text and photos”), and in “immersive content like VR.” In 2014, in anticipation of this development, Facebook spent $2 billion on the Oculus Rift VR headset company. In 2016, it invented Facebook Live as a video livestreaming experience for everyone and everything.
Of course it is true: Facebook’s social model aims, to the maximum extent possible, to corral its users within its own sphere of influence, since this is what generates the data and attention that it is then able to sell. Fears about Facebook as a media monopoly and Zuckerberg as uber-censor are justified, as are complaints about the media’s financial dependence on advertising revenues, which now forces many news outlets into a kind of horse-trading with Facebook. The real problem, however, is neither Zuckerberg nor commerce, but the Internet itself.
The Internet would not have come at the right time earlier, either. Its dispositives—hyper-reading, multitasking, power browsing, filter bubble, instant gratification, quantification, and so on—are diametrically opposed to the public sphere that Brecht intended. With the next distraction only a click away, patience for anything that requires effort evaporates. Anyone who doesn’t have quick responses to complex questions is promptly and publicly punished by a withdrawal of likes. So is the medium responsible? Is it the human condition as such? Is the anthropological and technological constellation an overlay over political and economic interests in the background?
Whatever the answer turns out to be, one thing is clear. If, in the future, the journalists ‘stories—embedded in Facebook’s news feed along with the videos of Facebook friends (which, unlike the journalists, will show the victims lying in pools of their own blood)—have to compete for likes, a process that began as hope will end, in an unanticipated way: the “organization of the excluded” materializes as a communication culture in which, as Zuckerberg argued when he introduced the news feed, “a squirrel dying in front of your house may be more relevant to your interests right now than people dying in Africa.”8 Liberation, once again, flips back into dependency, this time as a dialectics of participation.
Brecht’s contemporaries already saw the first signs of this reversal in the 1920s, when they warned not only about “radiotitis,” excessive radio-listening, but also about “tunitis,” the constant tuning of the dial from one station to another. The variable tuner was the beginning of the end of the radio as a people’s university and apparatus of emancipation, for it made it possible to keep dashing off to wherever something more interesting was going on. No one could have envisioned the temptations offered by its technological successors—the zapping of the remote or the clicking through of hyperlinks. But the criticism of the radio audience shows that already in Brecht’s era not everyone was waiting in anticipation for the public sphere that radio was beginning to create.9