Postmodern Culture

I. A New Referendum on Reality

In a February 2020 article in The Atlantic entitled “The Billion Dollar Disinformation Campaign to Reelect the President,” McKay Coppins offers disturbing insights into the digital extraction of big data used to target political advertising and to modify voter behavior. Developed by Cambridge Analytica in 2016, the temporal and geopolitical implications of these techniques extend well beyond the 2020 US campaign and its aftermath.¹ Alarmed by the staggering amount of data collected on voters, Coppins argues that the damage that results from these massive and highly personalized political disinformation techniques includes not only a widely discussed political crisis of democracy in the digital age,² but also and primarily the loss of a shared reality. As he puts it, “Should it prevail in 2020, the election’s legacy will be clear – not a choice between parities or candidates or policy platforms, but a referendum on reality itself.” More and more frequently discussed by computer scientists, political theorists, and the wider public alike, the loss of reality has not only prevailed but intensified: As data and computer scientist Sinan Aral puts it briefly, we are approaching “the end of reality” (24–55).³

With the waning of techno-optimism and the ascendancy of techno-dystopianism, numerous diagnoses have been offered for this state of affairs, ranging from the widely discussed “post truth societies” and the blurring of reality and hyperreality (Floridi)⁴ to critiques of digital capitalism and the ideology of “computationalism.”⁵ However, as the formulation of a “referendum on reality” suggests, this political concern about the loss of the real also foregrounds the negative ontological effects of the digital regime of power – what I call digital worldlessness. With its global reach, the hegemony of the digital regime and artificial intelligence constitutes a new horizon not only for the economy, but also for politics and culture. Therefore, any analysis of this hegemonic framework calls for broad interdisciplinary thinking, in which humanists (and particularly political, cultural, and literary theorists) need to be centrally involved, in addition to scholars and philosophers working in technology studies.

To analyze the problem of the digital worldlessness of big data and its use in AI from the perspective of political theory, I draw on Hannah Arendt’s central claim that any loss of reality is the effect of historically specific assaults on human plurality. I develop the implications of this claim beyond the limitations of Arendt’s own work⁶ by engaging the growing interdisciplinary critiques of the harms of datafication and of the algorithmic mediation of social relations. Although best known for her work on totalitarianism, Arendt interrogates the destruction of human plurality through high and low technologies of domination, from imperialism, anti-Semitism, and racism to nuclear warfare, biopolitics, and even the influence of religious “otherworldly” communities.⁷ For a number of scholars, Arendt’s enduring legacy lies in contesting the resurgence of racism, right wing populism, and fascism in the twenty-first century;⁸ others, such as Zuboff and Weizenbaum, enlist her work to understand the unprecedented character of computational technologies of power.⁹ I propose that the ontological and political stakes of the current referendum on reality require a genealogical account of the ways in which historically specific threats to human plurality are automated and encoded anew in digital technologies of power. Writing before the digital age, Arendt offers such a genealogical account of the destruction of human plurality by anti-Semitism, imperialism, racism, and refugee crises, culminating in the emergence of the horrific novum of totalitarianism. Among interdisciplinary thinkers who directly confront the damages of digital technologies of power, contemporary critical race theorists (in particular Ruha Benjamin and Simone Browne) argue that the long history of anti-black racism both precedes and is encoded anew in the global regimes of big data and AI. Building on this interdisciplinary framework, I argue that the contemporary ontological loss of reality is augmented by the political harms of digital technologies of power to human plurality...