I had a newsletter written up last week, all ready to send out. It was about the uneasiness I dealt with in 2020 and coming to terms with the facts that technology and social media have had a bad effect on society and democracy. For most of my life, I've been a technology optimist and evangelist but that has evolved over the years, and especially last year.
I was going to try my damndest to seek out what the future could look like. Could there be an equitable, people-first version of social media? Who's doing it right? Could there be an antidote to the current utility platform bias towards inflammatory content, extremism, mis/disinformation, and harassment? And a complete lack of data privacy?
And then before I could hit send, Wednesday happened. Actually, that's not a fair way to say it. Let me rephrase: before I could hit send, a bigoted, hysterical group of domestic terrorists descended to D.C. and violently took over the Capitol. They attempted to overturn the results of a fair election. They are fascists. Their leader is a fascist. The congresspeople who supported the overturn of the election results are also fascists.
See how I didn't mince my words? I'm still trying to unpack what happened—and what is happening—and historians, journalists, and political scientists are unpacking everything as we speak. But the very first thing we can all do to address our current state is to use the words we have at our disposal. Deliberately.
I actually think our current vernacular isn't well equipped to accurately portray the whiplash, constant acceleration, and trauma of 2020 and 2021. We need new words. Language is a living, breathing, evolving thing and yet we tend to think of words and concepts as having always been around. New language helps us make better sense of unprecedented events or phenomena.
Take "genocide," for example. It's defined as the "intentional action to destroy a people—usually defined as an ethnic, national, racial, or religious group—in whole or in part." The term was only coined in 1944. Prior to that, we talked of "systematic" killing or "race extermination." But then Raphael Lemkin developed this hybrid word, geno-cide (genos, the Greek word for race or people and the Latin suffix caedo, the act of killing). And then the world had a way to more accurately describe the atrocious crimes against humanity perpetuated by the Nazis and the Ottomans.
Back to the present day. We're still in the middle (and yes, I used that word deliberately) of a once-a-century pandemic. The first-, second-, and third-order emotional, psychological, and social consequences of that pandemic will be with us for the rest of our lives. We can be depressed. We'll have PTSD. But I also don't know if we have the word (yet) to represent the enormity of it all.
We had an attempted coup, a physical attack on the country, the election, and democracy itself. It was instigated by an authoritarian president and his enablers, meant to mobilize a wide swath of the bigoted, racist, fascist, conspiracy-driven U.S. public in violenceagainst its very own government and police forces. And rather than being an isolated incident, we're likely to see an increase in this kind of domestic terrorism. Alt-right orthodoxy has made its way into mainstream Republican ideology and practice. If you add all that up: does it feel like we have the words to accurately describe this reality, in this moment? I don't know if we do.
But that doesn't mean we should shy away from using the words we do have at our disposal, deliberately, to describe what is happening. When we use euphemisms or describe those who came to D.C. as "protestors" rather than fascists who actively want to nullify the constitution and overthrow democracy, we're actually encouraging them to tell more lies and act more extreme. We're opening up a space for them to inflict more terror into our people and institutions.
In other words: words matter. Definitions matter. Facts and a shared, common reality depend on them. And so does a functioning democracy.
I'll be back next time with links to the best writing and thinking I've come across, at this awful intersection of technology, democracy, fascism, racism, and death.
Democracy & Deliberate Words [No. 083]