The Rise of Fascism in a Brave New Digital World

By Jeff Einstein
"There will be, in the next generation or so, a pharmacological method of making people love their servitude, and producing dictatorship without tears, so to speak, producing a kind of painless concentration camp for entire societies, so that people will in fact have their liberties taken away from them, but will rather enjoy it, because they will be distracted from any desire to rebel by propaganda or brainwashing, or brainwashing enhanced by pharmacological methods.

And this seems to be the final revolution." Aldous Huxley

We are watching Huxley’s dystopian vision of a Brave New World controlled by state-sanctioned addiction unfold right before our eyes. And true to Huxley’s prescience, we rather enjoy it. The only surprise is that the operative pharmacological agents he warned against aren’t delivered in pill or liquid or other physical form, and we don’t call them soma or heroin or crystal meth or crack. They’re delivered in bits and bytes instead, and we call them media. Consider…

The average American household has only 2.75 people, but 3 TVs and 6 Internet devices.
The average American family spends more money each month on media consumption than on groceries or electricity.
The average American consumes 12-15 aggregate hours of digital media per day.
The average American child consumes more than 10 hours of digital media per day.
The average American smartphone is checked every 6-12 waking minutes.
70% of Americans binge view.

The jury is in and the verdict is irrefutable: A pervasive and pernicious meta-addiction to all things media and all things digital has emerged over the past generation as the default condition of American life, the rule rather than the exception. We are born into and live our lives in a completely immersive screen culture whose primary directive is to search for, find and ingest media all day long — virtually every waking minute.

We carry pocket-size TV screens with us everywhere we go, and more screens of various sizes greet us wherever and whenever we pause: at home in our bedrooms, kitchens and living rooms. At work in elevators, reception areas and atop every desk. On the road in gas pumps, airline seats, taxis, airports and train stations. At play in bars and restaurants. In school, in the doctor’s office and just about everywhere else.

Our kids are hooked on media before they enter pre-school. Digital media shape and define our lives at every stage and in every possible way. We are, per media ecologist Neil Postman’s seminal title, Amusing Ourselves to Death, forever swapping electrons in a Brave New Digital World where none of us will soon be able to find or fashion context or meaning for our lives beyond the High-Definition bits and bytes we consume virtually nonstop through all our digital devices.

Our meta-addiction to all things media and all things digital is passionately non-partisan and politically correct to a fault — but also perfectly attuned to protect and promote the interests of the corporate, government and academic power brokers who yield it so effectively. Like all late-stage addictions it moderates and controls almost all of our personal and social debates, and narrates virtually every facet of our lives.

Our meta-addiction to all things media and all things digital extols personal empowerment while it compels us to work twice as hard and twice as long for half as much money. It preaches community values while it sells brute efficiencies of scale, destroys jobs and shifts trillions of dollars from middle-class neighborhoods and retirement accounts to gilded and gated enclaves.

It preaches democracy and transparency and digital accountability while it sells power and influence to the highest bidders behind closed doors and buries culpability in the bottomless fine print of online user agreements and privacy statements. It preaches income equality and sharing economies while it converts entire industries into white-collar sweatshops where carefully crafted and legally vetted job descriptions translate into piecework for pennies with no benefits. It preaches retirement planning while it euphemizes blatant ageism and the eradication of job security as worker liberation and workplace flexibility.

Our meta-addiction to all things media and all things digital celebrates, blames and balkanizes everyone — Republicans and Democrats and Independents and males and females and young and old and straight and gay and black and white and every shade in between — but is accountable to no one. It befriends, informs, comforts and amuses us without end while it steals our time and money and freedom — just like any other addiction to any other narcotic.

Meanwhile, thousands of highly educated and well-qualified financial experts tell us how to invest and protect our money. Thousands of highly educated and well-qualified health and nutrition experts tell us how to eat well and stay healthy. Thousands of highly educated and well-qualified lifestyle experts tell us how to manage and empower our lives. All of them tell us to stay tuned for more. Yet barely one generation into the digital era — with functionally limitless access to everything worth knowing about the secrets to financial success, the science of health and nutrition and the keys to personal empowerment — we find ourselves with less money and more debt, fatter and besieged by chronic lifestyle-related disease, time-starved, sleep-deprived and far more anxious and fearful than ever before. What’s wrong with this picture?

The same digital technologies of scale that created millions of jobs and powered the dot com boom of the late 1990s now destroy far more American jobs than they create. The same digital technologies of scale that gave rise to the Wall Street and digital media cultures now all but guarantee periodic financial calamity and the steady erosion of civil liberty. The same digital technologies of scale that promised utter accountability and transparency have turned forensic accounting into a growth industry, and are now common license for corporate, government and academic executives to rob us blind while they barricade themselves behind an opaque veil of impenetrable complexity and bureaucratic inertia.

Pushed to extreme, our digital tools of scale have started to push back and turn against us. Much of the opportunity that once defined the Great American Dream has quietly migrated en masse over the first digital generation to other parts of the world with cheaper labor and fewer regulatory constraints. And as opportunity leaves American shores for other parts of the world, the quality of life for middle-class Americans leaves with it.

Historically, the extreme polarization of wealth and the decline of opportunity are the classic pre-conditions for the ascent of secular Fascism. Such is increasingly the case in America today, just as such was the case in post-WWI Germany and Italy and such was the case also in pre-Communist Russia, China and Cuba.

Like the old Fascism, the new Fascism comes wrapped in the strident language of identity politics and tribalized victimhood. But this ain’t your daddy’s Fascism. The new Fascism is hip, stylish, thoroughly inclusive, immensely entertaining and powered by thousands of server farms and billions of microchips. I call it eFascism, and define it simply as the religion of the state in 21st-century digital America.

One common feature of secular Fascism (capitalist or socialist) is the early and ongoing suppression, marginalization and/or elimination of organized religion. Like its 20th-century analog counterparts, American eFascism doesn’t play well with competing gods, precisely why popular media have vilified and portrayed Western religion as the sworn enemy of all things progressive over the past generation (despite obvious and abundant evidence to the contrary). And precisely why secular Fascists like Hitler and Stalin and Mao and Castro all felt the same acute need to marginalize and eradicate clergy as prelude to their murderous regimes.

Where theocratic Fascism rises by the sword of imposed moral authority, the rise of secular Fascism demands the opposite: a moral vacuum filled by the cults of personality, celebrity, expertise and political correctness. Both forms reflect spiritual disorder and disease, but only secular Fascism promotes itself as our primary co-conspirator: friend not foe, partner not master.

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https://www.activistpost.com/2018/11/the-rise-of-fascism-in-a-brave-new-digital-world.html