By Dr Tafataona Mahoso

ON September 4 2017, in the wake of mass deportations of recent migrants to the US by a twitting President Donald Trump, David Mattin published on linkedin a piece titled ‘Why we need to rethink optimism’ in relation to digitisation and media freedom:
“The early web was founded on optimism, by a generation of the 1960s California hippies high on the idea that they could come together to make the world radically better.
Those early pioneers (of cyber space) dreamed a vivid dream of individualism, liberation and self-expression. They saw cyber space as the unsullied utopia in which those (hippie) counter-culture values could find their most perfect expression.”
But these activists-cum-technocrats did more than dream. They convinced the neo-liberal political elite to embrace their vision and make it almost synonymous with the renewed ‘American frontier and dream’ for the 21st Century.
One representative of this political elite was former US Vice-President Al Gore in the Clinton administration at the turn of the century.
According to Mark Slouka (1994), the revolution of the new millennium was launched at the White House in Washington DC by Gore, who is one of the leading digirati of the world, in January 1994:
(The Vice-President) traded his politician’s shovel for a modem and symbolically broke ground on the new data highway: He held the first interactive computer news conference…The glitches were minor, the VP was able to ‘preach the techno gospel’ to ‘the electronic supplicants trooping into the White House’, as Peter Lewis of the New York Times put it.
But what is even more significant is Slouka’s paraphrase of Al Gore’s speech which echoed the mood of the cyberati at the time, who were saying:
“That universal access to information would empower the weak and hamstring the tyrants of the world; that, thanks to the wonders of digital communication, the meek would finally inherit the earth. ‘Blessed are the poor in data, for they shall have universal service…’ The data highway, we were told, marked the dawn of a new day for humankind; it was a wonder, ‘a miracle’, sure to ‘elevate the human spirit and lead to the solution of social problems’… ‘it would promote economic growth, foster democracy, and link the people of the world’, bathing us all, willy nilly … .. in the warm milk of human kindness. One world, one love.”
After the January speech in Washington DC, the former US Vice-President took his message to Buenos Aires, Argentina, in March 1994, where he repeated a similar theme, saying:
“We now have at hand the technological breakthroughs and economic means to bring all the communities of the world together.
We now can at last create a planetary information network that transmits messages and images with the speed of light from the largest city to the smallest village on every continent.”
Therefore between the former hippie pioneers of the web and neo-liberal activists of the same generation who went into US politics, an ideology of ‘connectivity’ and digitisation emerged.
It contained the following assumptions and claims among many:
l Being ‘wired’ or connected and open in cyber terms was subliminally and through repetition equated with both technical and moral advancement, progress.
l Being ‘off-line’ literally came to mean being wrong or backward.
l Those who remained unwired or unconnected were called ponas, ‘people of no account’.
David Mattin in early September 2017 cited The New York Times interview with the founder of twitter and medium, Ev Williams who confirmed belief in Gore’s rhetoric and said:
“I thought once everybody could speak freely and exchange information and ideas, the world is automatically going to be a better place.
I was wrong.”
l In a manner which presented a bonanza to advertisers, digital contraptions and gadgets semiologically became emblems of knowledge, open-mindedness, efficiency, speed and moral superiority against ignorance, lethargy, close-mindedness and evil.
l In a manner which brought René Descartes’ narcissism to cyber-space, mere goodwill and good intentions were presumed enough to guarantee positive results like peace, love and co-operation wherever and whenever the new technology was given a chance.
In short, cyberism, as ideology, tried to endow a technology with humanity without society, morals and ethics without society, solidarity, empathy, friendship and co-operation outside living history.
Real history
It is dangerous, even immoral, to grant to a mere technology moral agency which is a societal duty.
There is nothing which technology alone can do for society which society itself is not organised or re-organised to do. That is why the following sorry developments have taken place, contrary to the euphoria which greeted the creation of the web and the proliferation of digital gadgets:
l In the US itself, President Trump is notorious for his tendency to tweet about almost any issue.
He is cyber-savvy.
And yet his social-political power base includes Jim Crow Red Necks, neo-fascists, misogynists and traditional white bigots.
This picture would perhaps be possible to ignore, if it were not all connected to real policy intentions as shown through the US President’s handling of cases of white terror and the administration’s mass deportation policies which are also seen as racist and dependent on racial profiling.
The allegation of ‘ethnic cleansing’ which US media have routinely associated with regimes elsewhere in the world is now being levelled against the US Federal Government itself.
l The historical pattern of the criminalisation of new technologies is also happening with digital technology. Terrorists and criminals adopted technologies and capacities invented and developed by states and corporations – machine guns, AK47 rifles, poison gas, grenades, cluster bombs – for criminal use.
Likewise, the latest story on the nullification of Kenyan elections in September 2017 due to the proven hacking of the automated voting system concludes that:
“The cyber-crime report warned that nation-state cyber weapons have found their way in the hands of criminals, who are now fuelling cyber-warfare on a global scale.
As seen in several incidents throughout the first half of 2017, the theft and consequent availability of key nation-state hacking tools, combined with wide scale zero day vulnerabilities now enable unskilled hackers to carry out highly sophisticated attack campaigns.”
Anyone who has come across studies such as Henry A Giroux’s ‘Beyond the spectacle of terrorism’ will understand that digital technology has transformed the role and meaning of the screen and its susceptibility to spectacularisation.
All the most powerful forces in communications now fight for domination of the screen of the movie theatre, the roadside bulletin, the iPhone, the Tablet, the PC and the television set. And, according to Giroux, the viewer is daily subjected to varieties of ‘screen terror’.
By varieties of terror, I mean that it is not just terrorists who terrify viewers with their screened terror spectacles.
The ‘shock-and-awe’ of the US-UK invasion of Iraq in March 2003 terrified millions of viewers via the screen.
The live streaming of the so-called ‘Arab Spring’ by CNN, BBC, Al Jazeera and other Western channels camped at Tahir Square, Cairo, represented terror on the screen.
Not only did the misnamed ‘Arab Spring’ turn out to be a nightmare but what was happening to real human beings on the ground in Tahir Square did not show upon the permanently parked giant screens.
The screens served to sanitise a terrifying situation where the world later learned that women were being raped routinely among the crowds.
In future instalments, I shall be analysing the Zimbabwean experience of the same euphoria and misunderstanding of digitisation as ideology against common sense.