Long before I came to Europe for the winter, I was briefly talking about applying for a few programs like the Digital Methods Winter School (in Amsterdam) and spending some time helping out with Innoweek (in Grenoble). It was still early in the semester, around October, when IDEP thesis research was in full swing and I was desperately grasping for straws. I knew I was interested in the idea of “civil civics” and how discourse generally happens on the internet, and how the “post-truth condition” of fake news and fractured politics was affecting that conversation. My sniffing around led me to to Claire Wardle, who was still leading the First Draft News team at HKS then. I had seen DMI’s “A Field Guide to Fake News” and sought out Claire for her incredible expertise in the area of fake news and politicization (1), and had one of the most amazing two hour conversations with her, hogging the last two hours she had to spend on Harvard’s campus. Offhand, she said, “You should definitely go. They’re doing some cool stuff in Europe, but most importantly, it’s really helpful to get out of the US and see what’s going on in the rest of the world for a bit.”
Fast-forward a few months later, and I did exactly what she suggested back then without much thought. The past week I spent in Amsterdam doing digital humanities research and this current week spent in a small, quiet town in the French Alps has made me feel obnoxiously American, passionately curious, and entirely humbled by the size of the world. Travel is supposed to have this affect on people, but I always knew I wouldn’t be as interested in immersing myself in another place without a reason, and these two programs were perfect excuses. I had a built in group of people doing research and thinking about what was going on in their societies, affected by but not all-consumed by the obnoxious Trump bubble, and it’s given me some stunning clarity around my world view.
There are volumes I could already write about DMI last week, working with Marloes and a team of mostly Dutch/pan-European students researching affective expressions on social networks (e.g. emotional expressions and how they create solidarity online, (2)), but tonight, as we were wrapping up the penultimate night of Innoweek in Grenoble, I had the fortune of sitting next to Soizic, a French journalist-turned-design director of the Biennale Internationale Design week in Saint Etienne later this year. Soizic is amazing in her own right for her work, but she was one of those people that immediately *got it* when it came to this weird world view that I’ve been increasingly forming from MDE and actually, ever since Penn. This hard-to-describe worldview is a little “interdisciplinary artscience”, a dash of design fictions and speculative futures, a little historiographic digital humanities sociology, and a bastardized philosophy of science-dipped STS studies dripped in pure political and governance theory in the manor of the philosopher kings of antiquity. And people. Always a love of people — talking to them, observing them, embracing their weirdness.(3)
It sounds like the most obnoxious thing, but Soizic got it immediately. It started around the gilets jaunes, the yellow vest protests in France. As much as the government shutdown is crippling and embarrassing America, I was in NL and France these past two weeks and so I was blissfully out of the Trumpzone, where every single tantrum he threw did not immediately portend potential world war. On the news, French media eyed the gilets jaunes as commentators dissed Macron and a whole host of politicians from the president to random commentators to Marine Le Pen attempted to claim the movement for themselves. But as Soizic described to me, a total outsider to the issue who knew little more about the protests than that they were in response to Macron’s oil tax policies (as part of committing to climate change emissions reductions), that this protest movement was something else entirely.
The bizarreness of the movement was that the protests were calling out a portion of the population that was quite literally a “silent majority”. They differed greatly in age and backgrounds, united by the fact that globalization had not treated them well and they were struggling economically. Some were young and some were much older, but they mostly lived outside of the cities, relied on their cars to work, and repeatedly saw over and over again how politicians had lied to them. While policies eliminated taxes on the richest proportion of urban city-dwellers in Paris, this group was the one bearing not only the rising cost of living and struggling to make ends meet, not as the poorest members of society (“they are absolutely silent”) but as just short of the average (considering the long-tail, unequal wealth distribution curve the world has come to know). Mostly, as Soizic described it, this group had been isolated and separated for a long time and were finally now meeting each other and talking to each other as they marched in protest. Silent and separated no longer, this rather diverse group of protesters came together out of the collective cultural anxiety of being detested, hated, and mocked by the media, politicians, and the intellegentsia. And so very much like Tolstoy’s swarm-democracy of man, this movement also lacked any singular leader or explicit agenda.(4)
It was difficult to resist the immediate comparisons with the US context. From the POV of the media I had heard in the US, I thought it was a similar type of protest to the US, where “flyover state” rural redneck types were lashing out in racism and anti-globalism. I felt so American this week, while trying to teach innovation to a bunch of French undergrads, as I could only access an endless stream of references related to America ranging from urban farms in Newark to coal state politics in West Virginia. One of the students mentioned as an “abandoned place” (the theme of their innovation topics) that the diagonal du vide in France was their subject of choice — a land “forgotten and left behind by globalization.” Perhaps it was the clumsy direct translation, but the loneliness of that translation suddenly struck me to the core.
Also as a rather hardcore leftist like me (perhaps even more than me), Soizic mused, “They feel hated by society”, and because I am a foreigner to this scene, I did not look upon the swarms of yellow vested protestors on TV and see the type of throngs that swelled in the 2016 election. Of course, it’s not the same. Because of the radicalization that occurred within two years, now we have neo-Nazis assembling. But two years ago during the election, those who voted for Trump included more than the neo-Nazis. They also included people outside of the big cities, who would feel the impact of rising oil taxes or small encroachments by the establishment on their way of life, which was deemed backwards and should be left behind. For all the fits thrown about border walls and bathrooms and the right to marry, none of this was ever about the issue by itself. Left to encounter an affected member of any of these populations — an illegal immigrant, a transgender person, a LGBTQ person — I don’t actually doubt that a tentative rapport could even be formed. Because people are bizarre. And I could see, from the relation to gilets jaunes, that many of them might even acknowledge that climate change is happening and that oil is living on borrowed time. But what other choice do you have? In the big cities in Europe, it is quite easy and possible to navigate without a car. The poorest of urban society must make do, and the richest can happily live carfree in the lovely, aesthetic on-demand sharing economy, but this middle class that is losing its identity, property, livelihood, and most importantly, dignity has nothing to fall back to. The “snobbery” they feel from the urban elites turns them away, and now, with the protests, they are gathering for the first time.
Soizic is an optimist and does not yet think this will be a terrible thing. An unexpected side effect of the gilets jaunes solidarity is that it is providing this previously apolitical, uninvolved population a platform for conversation about their needs and expectations from politics and politicians — the purest embodiment of “civil discourse” I could ask for out of a social movement. But I am a pessimist and I am more concerned that this path will go similarly to the way of other social movements in the Arab Spring and Trump’s Memes2Nazis America. The normalization of extreme views of hate in the United States is one of the trends that I am most concerned about, alongside the potential for exploitation by a demagogue. But France’s fractured and unique political environment (especially in the broader European context) has thus far painted this to be a unique case. No single politician yet is able to sweep this fractured, multifaceted social complaint under a single flag the way that Trump has done for all the disenchanted in America. The same groups that cast side eyes to illegal immigrants (including my parents, most ashamedly) is looped together with the religiously devout, offended by transgender bathrooms, as well as neo-Nazis and Klansmen. But a pure rejection in political establishment itself harkens back to the Greek times of politeia, and the early roots of providing a platform for civil society. This vision is indeed utopian, the way Steve Fuller even described (as the second DMI opening keynote). Bring back the Sophists and the schools of rhetoric, perhaps to reach the masses how to engage as equals with the Senate. Let there be a battle of philosopher kings. For as little as I can relate to the gilets jaunes cause, I am still rooting for the outcome of this culture war. Because that’s where are are now: the culture wars of the 21st century.
- I have seen Claire’s work referenced nearly everywhere I go. Even the keynote speaker, Whitney Phillips, at DMI was excited to talk about Claire’s work when I brought it up. This thesis topic has always felt like a charmed time meeting the most amazing people, but Claire is one of the top ones.
- Impressions of DMI: hopefully a future blog post.
- Also potentially in the next post: as brief of a synthesis as I can for how I’ve been thinking about this digital humanities, computational social science, art x science, interdisciplinary, “critical design theory” view of history and science and society. I want to reference especially the design critiques of Airspace, how the Great Recession influenced a decade of design, the Big Flat Now, maybe mention Matisse’s cut outs and the APESH**T music video + art history, why the study of humanities matter in the age of machine learning, Momin’s social data science talk, and some summaries from my convo with Soizic: generation theory, signal/noise, pendulum swing, novelty, Rene Girard’s ascription of envy as the root of all human violence, and my personal views now of dynamicism as a motivator towards novelty. Reminds me of the Musee de Confluences: perhaps we are static only when we die. And from MdC’s exhibit on death and the afterlife: perhaps life is just a brief and beautiful gift from death. But also from Soizic, regarding my jitteriness and inability to exist in equilibrium: “I hope you find the skill to stay still. Otherwise… it’s exhausting. Life.”
- Reading Agent_Zero in the back of a car in New Zealand was one of the greatest decisions I made this winter break. Epstein’s model of a socially-influenced “intelligent” agent was already brilliant, but I never expected to read the quote from Tolstoy tying agent-based modeling with a literary author’s view on history. It was quite a novel interpretation of Tolstoy’s work and I haven’t read the original enough to even tell how much of a stretch it was, but right when I read the idea, I had to take a break because my brain was SHOOK. Epstein’s reading of Tolstoy describes how War and Peace repudiates the implied “great man” assumed view of history, instead depicting how the swarms of humanity can cause such events. “If Napoleon had been found lacking, another would’ve surfaced.” And so the recent swarm revolutions, from Occupy Wall Street to Black Lives Matter and now to Gilets Jaunes, represent this 21st century historigraphical phenomenon of leaderless revolutions.