Demise of Liberal Democracy? Avoiding the Disaster of the "Society of Control"

The erosion of liberal democracies has a long history, starting with the victories of Fascism and Nazism, continuing with the rise of autocratic governments in India, Venezuela, Brazil, Philippines and the U.S. (Richard Seymour), and culminating with Putin’s aggressive war against Ukraine. What has almost escaped notice in the tumult of recent global situation is the impact of the internet communication on the decay of liberal democracies. As Giles Deleuze showed in 1990, the internet as a seemingly open and decentralized network of social communication profoundly transformed individual and collective identities. Based on internet communication, the “society of control” dissolves individual identities into clusters of data (profiles, gaming roles, etc.) managed by algorithms and easily manipulated by marketing and political disinformation. Individuals, the building blocks of liberal democracies and collective political identities, are thus dissipated into “dividuals” (Deleuze) devoid of socially important qualities, namely of integrity and responsibility. This process is intensified by a “nihilistic” relationship of users to internet technologies (Nolen Gertz) transforming the internet into a toxic environment, characterized by “orgies of clicking” and “pleasures of cruelty” (Gertz). The responsibility for these changes lies not only with political and economic marketeers but also with common internet users transformed by “herd networking” and accepting trolling, cruelty and shame campaigns as the new conditions for sociality (Gertz). The promulgators of “disaster nationalism” (Seymour) are using media to disintegrate and paralyze individuals and to suppress the civic society. Nonetheless, their insolence, lies and stratagems can also mobilize individual integrity, moral and political consciousness, which now find their expression in grassroots movements aiming to restore political dimensions of individual and social lives and thus to revive democratic societies.