Why Trump is Good for Philosophy
Rivers of ink have been spilled and terabytes of data have been created trying to explain the Trump phenomenon and why it is so pernicious. Memo to all journalists, pundits, and analysts undertaking this spree of commentary: you are all speaking to people who agree with you. Trump supporters long ago tuned you out.
It would also be wrong to assume that Trump supporters only get their information from “right-wing talk radio”. Trump supporters — who aren’t a single monolithic bloc, as Primary and Caucus results show — don’t live in the pre-digital age and aren’t unacquainted with the Internet and social media. All those selfies with The Donald tell us that much.
What they do have in common, beyond their obvious disappointment in the institutions which govern their lives, is a very different view of who gets to decide what matters and what doesn’t.
That’s why the “if-only-they-saw-clearly” tone to much of the anti-Trump commentary misses an important fact about the current state of information and communication technology: digital media have knocked many of these authorities of importance from their perch of privilege.
Revolutions in information and communication technology always challenge authority. Homer — using a new technology called the alphabet — challenged the dominion of the bards and poets who passed on knowledge orally. Gutenberg’s printing press upended the authority of the monks and priests who wrote and interpreted the bible. Walter Cronkite’s TV newscast displaced the clout of newspapers. In each case, technology empowered a new set of individuals at the expense of those gatekeepers who had established themselves as the arbiters of what mattered and what didn’t. In each case, a greater number of people got to decide what mattered and what didn’t. Call it the democratization of information.
Digital media is no different, although the scale is staggering. Estimates are, that at some point this year, there will be 2 billion smartphones in use globally. By 2020, that number is projected to rise to 6 billion. When these phones are connected to the internet, they make everyone a source of information — free to tell the stories they want, free to describe things as they see them, free from someone else making these decisions for them.
And, increasingly, this is where people are turning for their news. Take just one example from the plethora of social media: Facebook. Fully 60% of Canadians and Americans use it. 30% of those say it is their primary source of news. Facebook also drives about 20% of traffic to news sites — higher if you only count mobile devices. “The fortunes of a news site,” an analyst recently wrote in the New York Times, “can rise or fall depending on how it performs in Facebook’s News Feed.”
Forget about your morning paper or your favourite magazine. Forget about the men and women who read the news every evening, or on the hour. In this world, the news is — quite literally — what your Facebook friends, and Facebook’s algorithm, say it is.
Now, apply this across the range of social media: in the time it took me to type that last sentence, more than 2000 pictures were uploaded to Instagram. In the last minute 7,200,000 videos were watched on YouTube. By the end of the day, 500 million tweets will have been posted to Twitter. This is the engine that is driving the Trump phenomenon. Trump’s supporters have different Facebook friends than you, they follow different people on Twitter and look at different stories on Instagram. Their authorities, their arbiters of what’s right and wrong, what is important and isn’t, are different than those of you who don’t like Donald Trump.
This raises a huge problem for people who live in the same society and have to come together every four years to elect their representatives. How do we practice politics when we are talking past one another?
When I was in my teens, a friend of my mother’s told me that major technological change forces us to ask philosophical questions. Trump’s candidacy has crystallized his insight and forces us to confront an epistemological challenge: what do we know, how do we know it, and how do we know it to be true?
Every day, according to IBM, we create 2.5 quintillion bytes of data. In such a world, how do we get from that to knowledge? In such a world, who gets to be an authority? How are we supposed to agree on what matters?
We are probably a long way from establishing a new status quo in which most people agree on the answers to these questions. Until then, we will live in an increasingly messy time, with competing authorities of importance, competing versions of truth, competing conceptions of what matters. Don’t anticipate the consequences of this messiness — including Donald trump’s candidacy — to go away any time soon.
— Dan Dunsky is the founder of Dunsky Insight, a consultancy for the digital era. He was the creator and Executive Producer of The Agenda with Steve Paikin on TVO.