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Fascism and The Historical Irony of Facebook’s “Fake News” Problem [1]
['Kim-Mai Cutler']
Date: 2016-11-24 17:14:58.929000+00:00
Fascism and The Historical Irony of Facebook’s “Fake News” Problem Kim-Mai Cutler · Follow Published in Initialized Capital · · Nov 23, 2016 12 min read -- 16 Listen Share
Fred Turner is a Stanford-based historian of 20th century media, who chronicled the emergence of what became the Internet from the ideals of 1960s Bay Area countercultural movements in his book “From Counterculture to Cyberculture.”
He also happened to write a book called, “The Democratic Surround: Multimedia and American Liberalism from World War II to the Psychedelic Sixties,” about how American media artists and theorists were disturbed by the tendency of radio and film to foment fascist movements in Europe in the 1930s and tried to create a new, more democratic approach to media in the U.S. in response.
Before the election, Turner and I did an event on Silicon Valley’s effect on American democracy at the San Francisco’s Mechanics Institute, which was founded by the city’s artisans, craftsmen and inventors in 1854 to address the educational needs of the rapidly growing Gold Rush city.
I wanted to catch up and get his reflections on the election and Facebook and Twitter’s impact on American politics. Much of the discussion in the press feels ahistorical and there is this irony in that the ideas behind networked and peer-to-peer media are rooted in a resistance to fascism and emerged from the lessons of World War II.
Q: So can you explain the core argument of your book?
Turner: In the late 1930s, when Germany turned fascist, Americans were mystified. Our intellectual leaders had long thought that Germany was the most culturally sophisticated nation in Europe. They were all asking how this had happened.
How did the country that brought us Goethe and Beethoven bring us Hitler?
Many Americans blamed the mass media. They had two different ways of thinking about it. First, some believed that Hitler and his clique were clinically insane. Somehow they had transferred their madness over the radio waves and through newsreel movie screens to ordinary Germans. Second, many believed that one-to-many media forced audiences into an authoritarian kind of passivity. When everyone turned their eyes and ears in the same direction, they appeared to be acting out the obedience expected of fascist citizens.
When World War II started, the Roosevelt administration wanted to create propaganda to make Americans fight fascism abroad. But the problem was — what media were they going to use? If they used mass media, they risked turning Americans into authoritarians. But if they didn’t, they wondered, how would they achieve the national unity they needed to fight fascism?
There was one school of thought that said, “We’ll just copy [Joseph] Goebbels. We’ll de-program Americans later [if they turn totalitarian].”
But there were about 60 American intellectuals who were part of something called the Committee for National Morale who had another idea. These were people like anthropologists Gregory Bateson and Margaret Mead, psychologist Gordon Allport, and the curator Arthur Upham Pope.
They believed that we needed to create a kind of media that would promote democratic personalities. And if we did that, we could prevent racist nationalism. They dreamed of media that would surround you, that would require you to make your own choices and use your individual perception to define the images that mattered most to you. It was meant to be a kind of media environment within which you could make your own decisions, and so become more individually unique. At the same time, it put you in the company of others doing the same thing. The environment was designed to help forge both individual identity and collective unity simultaneously.
The Committee for National Morale didn’t end up making media. But a group of Bauhaus artists, who were escaping Hitler’s Germany, took up their ideas and began creating immersive, multi-image environments. Their first big work was a propaganda exhibition called “The Road To Victory” at the New York Museum of Modern Art in 1942. Herbert Bayer and Edward Steichen surrounded visitors with images of all different sizes so that people could choose to be citizens in the company of others. It’s a form that surrounds you, which is why I called the book “The Democratic Surround.”
Over the next 50 years, through a series of twists and turns, the democratic media dreams of the Committee for National Morale actually set the stage for Facebook, Twitter and other kinds of peer-to-peer media.
The irony is that with Donald Trump, we are seeing a medium and a set of tactics designed to confront fascism being used to produce a new authoritarianism.
Benito Mussolini was an Italian politician, journalist, and leader of the National Fascist Party, went on to rule the country as Prime Minister from 1922 to 1943. He ruled constitutionally until 1925, when he dropped all pretense of democracy and set up a legal dictatorship.
Q: What is fascism and how would you define it?
Turner: Fascism, and authoritarianism more generally, is about particular political movements in the early 20th century. They generally feature a leader with dictatorial powers, a single party and the ability to enforce the will of party through military means. You can think of Mussolini’s Italy, Hideki Tojo’s Japan and Nazi Germany.
Some key elements of fascism include the following:
A reversionary desire to return to an imagined state of greatness from the past. A celebration of heterosexual masculinity. You could think of Vladimir Putin’s need to take off his shirt or Donald Trump’s obsession with the size of his hands. A charismatic leadership style. An absolute disregard for facts and a celebration of myth. An integration of the corporation and the state, which is what Mussolini wanted to do and feels reminiscent of what Trump wants to do today. A deep, structural racism. There is always someone on the outs. In Japan, it was particular minority groups. In Germany, it was obviously the Jews, but it was also gypsies, queers and communists, among others. And you can see that kind of racism, that kind of in-group and out-group dynamic here, with Trump.
Many people have called Donald Trump a populist. I don’t think that’s quite right. His anti-elitist rhetoric is certainly in that vein, but his racism, his sexism, and his emphasis on a return to a formerly great America, belong to the fascist line.
To me, the constellation of forces that he’s put into play look like early Mussolini. The key difference is that Mussolini and Hitler came to power by essentially building parties first. Trump has use the media to take over an existing state apparatus. Whether he’s able to do what he wants or not, whether he’s competent or not, and whether institutions will resist him, that’s an open question. I don’t think he’s Andrew Jackson though.
Q: Let’s go back to media now. You’re talking about media exhibitions in the 1940s. How does the work that these thinkers and artists were doing translate to how online media works today?
Turner: The multi-media images in “The Democratic Surround” provide a glimpse of the kind of perceptual world that media thinkers believed would make us less racist and more embracing of our differences. It’s a world in which we’re meant to practice looking at and identifying with others who are not like ourselves.
The surround aesthetics of the 1940s came to shape the 1950s, 60s and 70s by moving through two worlds. One, they became the basis of cold war propaganda exhibitions. Well into the 1960s, Americans built multi-image propaganda environments, with an eye toward democratizing populations in authoritarian countries. They built multi-image environments as part of trade fairs or exhibitions in the belief that they would give people the ability to practice the modes of perception that democracy depends upon.
Above is “The Family of Man,” a traveling photography exhibition that was meant to show the common bonds of humanity. The U.S. Information Agency transported the exhibit to countries around the world, to showcase the argument for peace and human brotherhood despite the risk of nuclear war with the Soviet Union.
In 1955, Edward Steichen built what remains the most influential of these environments, “The Family of Man.” It was an exhibition of 500 photographs of people around the world, hung in a surround format. The US government sent the exhibition around the world for a decade. It’s now on permanent display in Luxembourg. The show’s catalog has sold more than 8 million copies.
The second way the surround aesthetic has come down to us and helped drive the rise of social media is through the art world. Thanks to John Cage, it became the basis of Happenings in New York in the late 1950s. Cage believed that concerts and symphonies embodied the hierarchies of old Europe and were essentially exercises in domination by aural means. He knew the Bauhaus refugees well. And so he did with sound what they had done with pictures. He designed sonic surrounds that would open people up to listening to sounds around them and choosing the ones that were most valuable to them.
In the late 1950s he taught these techniques to the artists who made the first Happenings. Then the people who are hanging out in this art world, like Stewart Brand, saw this open surround form and took it with them to make things like the 1966 Trips Festival in San Francisco, which was a psychedelic surround.
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