On Data, Media, and the Deconstruction of the Administrative State

At a Glance

Metadata	Details
Publication Date	2021-07-01
Journal	Critical Quarterly
Authors	Lee Grieveson
Citations	2

Abstract

I shall start with some belated and limited conclusions.11 I shall focus principally on the United States and the United Kingdom. Obviously, many of the developments I shall explore are global ones, albeit of course with local and contingent variations. Resurgent forms of authoritarian nationalism, for example, are currently key to governing regimes in countries as diverse as Brazil, China, Hungary, India, Indonesia, the Philippines, Russia, and Turkey. Right-wing nationalist-populist movements spread too in Italy, with the electoral victory of the Lega and the Five Stars Movement; in France, with the strength of Marine Le Pen’s following; in Germany with the rise of the AFD; and in Austria with the Freedom Party. In elections in the United Kingdom and the United States in 2016, an unstable bloc of militant liberals and neo-fascists fashioned new media and data practices to smash existing political norms and institutions in order to restructure reality, ‘deconstruct the administrative state’, and further hollow out democracy and de-regulate capital.22 Stephen K. Bannon, Conservative Political Action Committee, 22 February 2017. (See, for example, Philip Zuker and Robert Costa, ‘Bannon Vows a daily fight for ‘deconstruction of the administrative state’,’ Washington Post, 23rd February 2017.) Definitions follow shortly, but for orientation, the word ‘liberal’ here is not used in the common mistaken modern US parlance of ‘progressive,’ but rather to reference liberal praxis emerging from the eighteenth century to limit state action and enlarge the sphere of the market. I explicate the place of media in the elaboration of a global liberal political economy in the first half of the twentieth century in Cinema and the Wealth of Nations: Media, Capital, and the Liberal World System, Berkeley, 2018. For material defining ‘liberal,’ see pp. 38-45. I shall return to fascism. Ongoing press, parliamentary, congressional, and legal investigations on both sides of the Atlantic broadly reveal that political actors re-worked the recently established practices of ‘surveillance capitalism’ to marry the data produced by people in their interactions with social media and the Internet to ‘psychographic messaging’ designed to influence their thoughts and actions.33 E.g. ‘Disinformation and “Fake News” Interim Report,’ UK Parliament, Commons Select Committee, Digital, Culture, Media and Sport Committee, 29th July 2018, accessed August 6th 2018, https://publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm201719/cmselect/cmcumeds/363/36302.htm; Electoral Commission, UK, ‘Report on an Investigation in respect of the Leave.EU Group Limited,’ 11th May 2018, accessed August 9th, 2018, https://publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm201719/cmselect/cmcumeds/363/36302.htm; House of Commons, Digital, Culture, Media and Sport Committee, ‘Disinformation and “fake news”: Final Report,’ Eight Report of Session 2017-19, HC1791, 18th February 2019, accessed 29th March 2019, https://publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm201719/cmselect/cmcumeds/1791/179102.htm; ‘Democracy under threat: risks and solutions in the era of disinformation and data monopoly: Report of the Standing Committee on access to information, privacy, and ethics,’ 42nd Parliament, Canada, December 2018, accessed June 25th 2019, https://www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Committee/421/ETHI/Reports/RP10242267/ethirp17/ethirp17-e.pdf; David Smith, ‘Mark Zuckerberg vows to fight election meddling in marathon Senate grilling,’ The Guardian, April 11th 2018; Carole Cadwalladr, ‘The great British Brexit robbery: how our democracy was hijacked,’ The Guardian, 7th May 2017; Carole Cadwalladr, ‘Follow the data,’ The Guardian, 14th May 2017; Hannes Grassegger and Mikael Krogerus, ‘The data that turned the world upside down,’ Motherboard, January 28th 2017; David Smith, ‘Putin’s chef, the troll farm in St Petersburg - and the plot to hijack US democracy,’ The Observer 18th February 2018. On the emergence of new practices of surveillance capitalism that monetize the data extracted from people’s interaction with the Internet, and social media in particular, see Soshana Zuboff, ‘Big other: surveillance capitalism and the prospects of an information civilization,’ Journal of Information Technology, 30 (2015), pp.75-89; John Bellamy Foster and Robert W. McChesney, ‘Surveillance capitalism: monopoly-finance capital, the military industrial complex, and the digital age,’ Monthly review, Vol. 66, Issue 03, July-August 2014. Commercial procedures of data surveillance such as those integral to the business model of entities like credit-rating agency Experian (1996) and multinational search and social media corporations like Google (1999) and Facebook (2004) were supplemented by governmental practices of mass data surveillance such as the PRISM programme from 2007 as part of the expansion of ‘exceptional’ state practices in the ongoing ‘War on Terror’.44 Experian claims its US database has data on 300 million individuals and 126 million households and that the company can segment individuals into 71 ‘personality types.’ ‘Experian Audience Lookbook,’ in Tactical Tech, Personal Data: Political Persuasion. Inside the Influence Industry, March 2019, available here: https://cdn.ttc.io/s/tacticaltech.org/Personal-Data-Political-Persuasion-How-it-works.pdf, last accessed October 25th 2019. On the role played by credit-rating agencies in generating new forms of data about people, establishing new forms of economic personhood, see Josh Lauer, Creditworthy: A History of Consumer Surveillance and Financial Identity in America, New York, 2017. For some insight into the data broker industry, see O.H. Gandy, ‘The political economy of personal information,’ in Janet Wasko, Graham Murdoch, and H. Sousa eds., The Handbook of Political Economy of Communication, Malden, MA, 2014, pp.436-457. On the exceptional practices of state surveillance that expanded after 9/11 see, for example, Giorgio Agamben, State of Exception, trans. Kevin Attell, Chicago, 2005, pp. 32-36. PRISM was the code name for a program under which the US National Security Agency collected digital communications routed through companies like Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Apple, and more. See Glen Greenwald, No Place to Hide: Edward Snowden, the NSA, and the Surveillance State, London, 2015. In the early 2000s, hybrid governmental/commercial consulting institutions began meshing data surveillance with what one of the British entities close to the centre of this history - Strategic Communication Laboratories (SCL) - called ‘influence operations’.55 SCL Group, https://sclgroup.cc/home, accessed July 16th 2018. SCL deployed this data/media complex in elections and referendum campaigns across the world, including Australia, Brazil, Gambia, Ghana, Indonesia, Kenya, Nigeria, Philippines, Thailand, and elsewhere.66 House of Commons, Digital, Culture, Media and Sport Committee, ‘Disinformation and “fake news”: Final Report,’ p.78. Cambridge Analytica, much in the news across 2018, grew out of SCL and built on data harvested from the data Facebook sells access to (and public data sets such as censuses, credit reports, insurance data, and so on) to construct psychological profiles of populations for political campaigns in the United States and the United Kingdom to develop a near-personalized propaganda system using digital screen media to influence political attitudes and conduct.77 E.g. Carole Cadwalladr, ‘“I made Steve Bannon’s psychological warfare tool”: meet the data war whistelblower,’ The Observer, 18th March 2018; Matthew Rosenberg, Nicholas Confessore and Carole Cadwalladr, ‘How Trump consultants exploited the Facebook data of millions,’ New York Times, March 17th 2018; Ryan Watts, Izzy Smith, ‘Cambridge Analytica: How the scandal unfolded,’ The Times, April 10th 2018; Isobel Thompson, ‘The Cambridge Analytica scandal is going global,’ Vanity Fair, March 26th 2018. Both of the campaigns in Britain to leave the European Union (EU) broke electoral laws about spending and collusion to amass this data and use it to deploy media to shape the attitudes of voting populations.88 Electoral Commission, UK, ‘Report on an Investigation in respect of the Leave.EU Group Limited,’ 11th May 2018, accessed August 9th, 2018, https://publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm201719/cmselect/cmcumeds/363/36302.htm. The Vote Leave campaign used the services of a small Canadian-based data analysis firm known as Aggregate IQ (AIQ). AIQ worked extremely closely with SCL. Carole Cadwalladr, ‘Follow the data: does a legal document link Brexit campaigns to US billionaire?’, The Observer, 14th May 2017. Both campaigns to leave the EU, then, used data analytics firms with close ties to the para-military psychological operations organisation SCL. See Carole Cadwalladr and Mark Townsend, ‘Revealed: the ties that bound Vote Leave’s data firm to controversial Cambridge Analytica,’ The Guardian, 24th March 2018. Vote Leave - now effectively the British government - received the largest ever fine in the United Kingdom for breaking laws designed to safeguard democracy in order to spend money on dark Facebook ads.99 Jessica Elgot, ‘Vote Leave fined and reported to police by Electoral Commission,’ The Guardian, 17th July 2017; David Pegg, ‘Vote Leave drops appeal against fine for electoral offences,’ 29th March, 2019. Many of these ads targeted directly to people’s newsfeeds using behavioural data warned of illegal migration to the United Kingdom, and a number of them straightforwardly lied in asserting that Turkey (and its large Islamic populations) were joining the European Union. Ongoing revelations show, too, that the Russian state fostered digital practices beginning from around 2013 to try to influence people or simply to virally spread confusion via strategies of propagating ‘disinformation’ that have long been significant to KGB strategies for controlling populations and that are now integral to secret service and military practices to use the digital and cyber sphere as a component of ‘information warfare’ to foster state interests.1010 ‘Russian targeting of election infrastructure during the 2016 election: summary of initial findings and recommendations,’ US Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, May 8th 2018, accessed August 9th 2018, https://www.intelligence.senate.gov/publications/russia-inquiry; Luke Harding, Collusion: Secret Meetings, Dirty Money, and How Russia Helped Donald Trump Win, New York, 2017. Michael Connell and Sarah Vogler, ‘Russia’s Approach to Cyber War,’ CNA Center for Naval Analyses, CNA Analysis and Solutions, March 2017, accessed 25th April 2018, https://www.cna.org/CNA_files/PDF/DOP-2016-U-014231-1Rev.pdf. (Here broadly the weakening of NATO and EU alliances and the rolling back of liberal globalization, a project that has frequently found common cause with fascism.)1111 Anton Shekhovtsov, Russia and the Western Far Right, London, 2017; Al Jazeera, ‘The Death of the Russian Far Right,’ broadcast 18th December, 2017. Currently, the British government, which is formed from the Vote Leave campaign, is refusing to release a report into Russian funding of the Conservative Party and election interference.1212 Dan Sabbagh and Luke Harding, ‘PM accused of cover-up over report on Russian meddling in UK politics,’ The Guardian, 4th November 2019. Broadly, then, these sobering conclusions demonstrate that the ‘influence operations’ enabled by the meshing of the collection of data about people integral to the digital sphere with media as a form of psychographic messaging or viral distortion were operationalized to transform political reality. Any genealogy of the intersecting threads that produced the political revolution of 2016, and our present, must excavate the history of the radicalization of liberalism and the sprawling and well-capitalized efforts to shape the political and the public sphere beginning systematically in the 1970s. Key to this radical libertarian praxis was the reduction of the authority of the state (or supra state entity) to regulate capital, to sustain the architecture of liberal social democracy, and to exceed its rightfully limited role as protector of property rights.1313 The neo-liberals shared many of these goals, and both the neo-liberals and the libertarians called for something like a return to classical laissez faire liberalism. But in the former, this was tied together with the expansion of a global system - closely intertwined with financialization and governed by international institutions like the International Monetary Fund - and in the latter focussed on the deconstruction of the state and its re-articulation as simply a protector of property rights. The history of neo-liberalism is, of course, well-known, befitting its centrality to the global capitalist system between the coup in Chile in 1973 and the financial crash of 2008. (For useful guides, see David Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism, Oxford, 2007, and Daniel Stedman Jones, Masters of the Universe: Hayek, Friedman, and the Birth of Neoliberal Politics, Princeton, 2012, among others.) The history of libertarian praxis is less visible and merits further attention given its growing importance to the post-neo-liberal world system that appeared to emerge in 2016. Useful materials can be found in Jennifer Burns, Goddess of the Market: Ayn Rand and the American Right, Oxford, 2009, in particular pp.256-66; Sara Diamond, Roads to Dominion: Right-Wing Movements and Political Power in the United States, New York, 1995, pp.123-127; and in two brilliant and essential books: Nancy MacLean, Democracy in Chains: The Deep History of the Radical Right’s Stealth Plan for America, New York, 2017; and Jane Mayer, Dark Money: How a Secretive Group of Billionaires is Trying to Buy Political Control in the US, London, 2016. Over time, a disparate group of billionaire libertarians in the United States formed a network to use capital to re-shape the political and public sphere by funding a network of ‘think tanks,’ front groups, academic positions and departments (notably in Law and Economics), fellowships, foundations, policy support for radical-right-leaning politicians, and media institutions and practices.1414 Mayer, Dark Money; McClean, Democracy in Chains; Jason Stahl, Right Moves: The Conservative Think Tank in American Political Culture since 1945, Chapel Hill, 2016, in particular pp. 96-133. The network has funded over 5,000 scholars, more than 24 academic centers, and contributed hundreds of millions of dollars to the teaching of free-market ideology at nearly 300 four-year colleges. Mayer, Dark Money, 354-78. McClean shows clearly how these private ‘educational’ programs flourished at the same time the billionaire donor networks were working to defund public education. McClean, Democracy in Chains, pp.63-70, 218-219. It was a concerted effort to deploy capital to shape the political and public sphere. The libertarian Cato Institute described it as ‘protecting capitalism from government’.1515 Dwight R. Lee, ‘The Calculus of Consent and the Constitution of Capitalism,’ Cato Journal 7 (Fall 1987), p.332, cited in McClean, Democracy in Chains, p.81. Obviously, media was integral to this project, and libertarian agendas were expedited when the ideological workers from those think tanks, foundations, and educational institutions spread out to populate the new cable shows and networks that began in the 1980s and expanded particularly after the 1984 Cable Act and further again after the 1996 Telecommunications Act stripped away regulations about cross medial ownership and corporate conglomeration at the dawn of the commercial digital age.1616 On this media history, see Jennifer Holt, Empires of Entertainment: Media Industries and the Politics of Deregulation, 1980-1996, New Brunswick, N.J., 2011; and Eileen R. Meehan, ‘A Legacy of Neoliberalism: Patterns in Media Conglomeration,’ in Jyotsna Kapur and Keith B. Wagner eds., Neoliberalism and Global Cinema: Capital, Culture, and Marxist Critique, London, 2013. (Fox, for example, began in 1996, one component of the sprawling global media empire of NewsCorp and a key step in the fragmentation of the mediascape that ultimately broke down the idea of ‘news’ into differing epistemological communities.) Overall, the militant liberalism of the libertarians was subsumed within the broad rubric of neo-liberalism and its logic of deregulation, of government as ‘problem’ and not ‘solution,’ but the two positions diverged notably after the structural crisis of the neo-liberal order in the financial crash of 2008-9 and the subsequent state bailout to banks.1717 The reference is to Ronald Reagan’s inaugural address, in January 1981: ‘In this present crisis, government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem.’ Reagan, Inaugural Address, January 20th 1981, available here http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/?pid=43130, accessed September 13th 2018. On the structural crisis of neo-liberalism see, for example, David Kotz, ‘End of the Neoliberal Era? Crisis and Restructuring in American Capitalism,’ New Left Review, 113 (Sept.-Oct., 2018). Billionaire libertarian petrochemical oligarch Charles Koch, for example, declared that this ‘over-reach’ of the state to protect finance capital and its global architectures, combined with Barack Obama’s policy efforts from early 2009 in particular to introduce new practices of health insurance, meant that America now ‘faced the greatest loss of liberty and prosperity’ since the 1930s.1818 Charles Koch, cited in Mayer, Dark Money, p.6. Koch criticised neo-liberals like Milton Friedman because government more when the libertarian be it out at the Koch, cited in for New York, 2009, libertarian to liberal and forms of social democracy the of the in early funded by radical libertarians and broadly to government and the administrative and state that expanded from the state bailout of finance capital to of health and The A to the Resurgent Right, New York, Mayer, Dark Money, It was a of of are to them I focus here (and on practices - such as the of libertarian long worked to back state but it that the Party was part of the against governmental that to the political of 2016. On the Party from this latter see and The Party and the of Oxford, in order to sustain the radical expansion of free-market ideology and the on the idea and of is one component of a praxis to and reality. 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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1111/criq.12613