Introduction

American political discourse feels stagnant. Among Americans, 84% say “the tone and nature of political debate has worsened.” Meanwhile 61% say, “it’s more stressful than interesting to talk politics with those they disagree with,” up from 51% in 2016. 

What’s more, 57% say voting has an impact on the country’s direction – a (somewhat) positive statistic on the surface. But consider this: the majority of Americans loathe political discourse and are nevertheless compelled to participate in the political process. 

Politicians’ rhetoric is often empty, demagogic, and appeasing. Trump promised to “drain the swamp,” reduce corruption and the influence of special interests, knowing full well that he was the swamp. On the other hand, Biden has held fast to his promise to wealthy donors that “nothing would fundamentally change” if he were elected. He’s kept just 23% of his campaign promises, only 4% more than Trump. Furthermore, neither Trump nor Biden dared to debate their challengers in their respective primaries.

The obvious response to Biden’s debate abstention: “there is nothing strange about an incumbent president not participating in primary debates; it hasn’t happened since Ford. After all, Biden’s got a lot more to lose than to gain – his challengers are rather unserious.” 

This line of reasoning is logical and revealing. The fact that no incumbent president since Ford has participated in primary debates shows that realpolitik takes precedence over more frivolous considerations (like the public’s ability to make an informed decision at the ballot box). Politicians know they risk their reelection chances by submitting themselves to debate. Recall the first televised presidential debate: Nixon’s gray, sweaty, corpse-like performance against the youthful JFK and the swift swing in the polls that followed.  

The notion that challengers are “unserious” typifies a systemic problem in itself.  Since 1987, presidential debates have been orchestrated by the Commission on Presidential Debate (CPD). The commission is bipartisan and infamous for requiring that third party candidates reach 15% in five separate national polls for debate access. In other words, an independent or third party candidate could be polling at 14% with registered voters (about 23 million people) and be denied the chance to debate the Democratic and Republican candidates. 

In 1992, after being invited to debate Bill Clinton and George H.W. Bush, Ross Perot, a third party candidate, won 19% of the US popular vote. In 1996, Perot was denied debate access and still won 8% of the popular vote. One Washington Post article published at the time smugly compared Perot to “the 100-plus other declared candidates who have no realistic chance of being elected.” Imagine I stepped on someone’s neck and told them they needed to get up off the ground before I let my foot off. That’s about what the CPD does with debate access – it’s trivial to say that the CPD, the DNC, and the RNC are functionally undemocratic. By invoking some ever-changing notion of “seriosity,” the major parties are able to justify denying the American people (God forbid) more than two options. To be clear, this is not a defense of Perot (there’s a lot to not like) but an attack on the establishment’s monopoly over the debate stage.

Power Structures and Discourse Today

The long-running abstention of incumbent presidents from primary debates and the CPD’s gatekeeping of presidential debates indicate a tension between the incentives within systems of power and discourse. On the one hand, incumbents want to preserve their political power, and on the other, they recognize that public engagement, especially public debate, has Nixon-level potential to undermine their political position (or for the newcomer, JFK-level potential to improve their political position). 

Indeed, conversation takes on political potential when held in Congress or on television and social media where ideas can be amplified to mass audiences. One of the systems that does a relatively poor job of amplifying discourse is the University system. Many disregarded conversations are had by professors. According to The University of Texas at Austin Philosophy Professor Daniel Drucker, this is partly due to cowardice on professors’ part. Public engagement, especially in the online sphere, is fraught with fanaticism and death threats, but there’s also a lack of incentive for professors to initiate dialogue outside of academic circles. Papers are the currency of academia. Being published in the most respected journals is a boon to an academic’s chance of climbing the ranks. Within the current American university system, no such incentive exists to encourage public engagement on mass media platforms. Of course, there are still public panels. One panel held from March 21-22 covered this very topic: “Civil Discord.” It was a well run event with a wonderful set of speakers, but I doubt it will be entering the American public consciousness – a shame because UT is an institution with the power to make that happen.

In bringing up Trump and Biden, the CPD, and academia, I mean to suggest that modes of communication (i.e. debate and conversation) may take on political potential and become tools of power when done within or alongside structures of power. The primary mode of communication in contemporary America is social media platforms. Just as academia today structurally incentivizes insular interactions, new social platforms incentivize sensationalized entertainment. Discourse that takes place through social media is subject to social media’s incentive structure, but it’s not clear exactly how that complex incentive structure warps our discourse – that’s the task of this article and the next. 

Quickly, digital media platforms facilitate debate, discussion, video essays, films, and news articles. They do so for profit: this incentive structures communications platforms. For example, there is a steadily increasing number of sponsored results on Google search. These sponsored results are almost never what users are looking for; they degrade the functionality of the Google search engine. Nevertheless, Google continues to push them because it is profitable to do so. The same is true of short-form content like that of TikTok. Shorter content is generally not beneficial for the user, but shorter content is entertaining, boosts engagement. The more engagement a platform receives, the more information they can collect and sell to advertisers, so they can more precisely target and attract consumers. This process is not inherently bad or immoral, but it is new which raises two questions: First, how do mass media platforms affect discourse? And second, do these new, subtle, profit driven modes of communication facilitate the kind of discourse that’s beneficial to society at large? 

To answer these questions we need to lay out how discourse comes to be. In general, discourse is determined by two things: the motivation for communicating and the mode of communication through which discourse takes place.

We’ll focus on communication taking place within power structures. Power structures have varied throughout history – they include the legislature (politics), capital, aristocracy, and the like. We’ll center on these since they incentivize(d) legislators, capitalists, and aristocrats to attain power, an inherently social activity, which requires the use of available modes of communication. Incentives within power structures provide the brunt of the motivations we have to use modes of communication, so the mode of communication only facilitates power attainment when utilized within power structures.

The clearest manifestations of power structures are political institutions like Congress or Parliament, but there are civil power structures as well. The corporate world, for example, has rungs; the higher one climbs, the more power one attains. Sometimes the amount of power is well defined by a title like CEO. In contemporary social life (on social platforms) it is defined by metrics like follower count, view totals, etc. Oftentimes, the potential for attaining power in a structure is a hidden motivator. It isn’t usual for an Instagram user to self-identify as involved in a power struggle when trying to increase their follower count. Nevertheless, a power struggle is what social media entails, notwithstanding how trivial the struggle seems.   

On the other hand, the mode of communication itself influences discourse, too, by limiting the kinds of information that can be exchanged. TikTok allows shortform videos to be exchanged, while YouTube mainly promulgates long-form videos. For now, it will help to draw upon the history of engagement with modes of communication and the incentives that are tied to those modes. 

Modes of Communication Over Time

In ancient Greece, there was no real alternative to long-form speech or oratory. The communications technology the Greeks possessed included papyrus (parchment and wax tablets) but the inability to reproduce these documents en masse meant they couldn’t be used actively. Papyrus, for example, was used to record speeches for correspondence and legal documents. Documents of this kind were to be received and referenced – they could not facilitate widespread discourse. Thus, oratory was the de facto mode of communication used to persuade – to gain power. But, what was power? 

From Plato’s Gorgias:

“Polus: What do you mean, they’re [orators] not held in any regard? Don’t they [orators] have the greatest power in their cities?”

Polus, who was somewhat of a dimwit, is representative of the popular opinion at the time. He shows us that the operative conception of power was the ability to rule over people. Socrates disliked this conception, but again, we’re focused on how modes of communication have been used rather than how they ought to have been used.

He identifies orators as the most powerful people in their cities because they had mastered persuasion. Athenian democracy required oratorical proficiency to gain political influence. Indeed, Greek politicians and legislators sought to master oratory and studied with teachers like Gorgias to better persuade, and subsequently rule people. We should understand politics as the ruling of people on the largest scale – the exercise of power on the largest scale. Meanwhile, oratory can be understood as a means to accumulate and administer power (when situated within politics, a power structure). As an early democracy, ancient Athens provides the most salient relationship between communication and power we’ll see. To leave no doubt though, we can turn to Cicero, the famed Roman statesman and orator who wrote the book Orator. 

Quintilian, in his Institutio Oratoria, says:

“Cicero has come to be regarded not as the name of a man, but as the name of eloquence itself.”

While the Greek historian Appian, in his The Civil Wars, notes that Cicero

“held supreme power after Caesar’s death.”

Oratory remained the dominant mode of communication to persuade until the printed document could be quickly reproduced. That transformation began with the movable type printing press. Introduced to Europe by Gutenberg in 1448, the printing press enabled the mass publication of pamphlets and letters and helped usher in Enlightenment thought. Mechanically reproduced documents allowed thinkers to share their ideas to wider audiences relatively quickly. With the possession of articles and polemics, a larger portion of the citizenry was able to engage in political and philosophical discussion. Recall, for example, that support for the American Revolution was motivated and sustained by Thomas Paine’s political pamphlets including Common Sense and The American Crisis.

Meanwhile, Enlightenment thought laid the theoretical groundwork for European colonialism and the capitalist forces that drove it by giving the emerging Bourgeoisie class, merchants, and business owners a means to question the authority of monarchs. It was an authority that rested on the divine rights of kings and queens. 

As Rousseau put it in his Discourse On Inequality:

“magistrates, having become hereditary, contracted the habit of considering their offices as a family estate, and…of regarding their fellow-citizens as their slaves, and numbering them, like cattle, among their belongings, and of calling themselves the equals of the gods and kings of kings.”

The Existentialist Jean-Paul Sartre reflects on this coming-to-consciousness of the bourgeoisie to their own power. He says:

“At the time of… mercantile capitalism, a bourgeoisie of lawyers, merchants, and bankers gained a certain self-awareness through Cartesianism; a century and a half later, in the primitive stage of industrialization, a bourgeoisie of manufacturers, engineers, and scientists dimly discovered itself in the image of universal man which Kantianism [ostensibly the most influential Enlightenment theory] offered to it.”

Europe’s movement out of the medieval epoch into the early modern is captured by the emergence of global empires from feudal European polities. These empires were initially animated by joint-stock companies, entities owned by their shareholders to spread risk and profit. Joint-stock companies prefigured modern capitalism. The same bourgeois class whose existence called into question the divinity of monarchs were responsible for the joint-stock company system. Notable examples were the Dutch and British East India Companies. The companies were state chartered monopolies, so the concerns of the company were the concerns of the state and vice-versa. 

Early colonial empires left their companies a great deal of autonomy – mostly out of necessity. Correspondence between Britain and India, for example, could take over a year and a half to arrive. It was practically out of the question for the state to directly manage their company. The result: a swarm of untethered European companies in Asia and the Americas vying for control of spices, rubber, coffee, and land to build plantations and grow cash crops. 

The monopolistic company system, however, was inherently unstable. For the Dutch East India Company (VOC) wages were sky high, oversight was nonexistent, and the lack of competition enabled smuggling and corruption. More than that, the companies weren’t just conducting trade: they were governments. 

Indeed, the VOC

“controlled half of Java, Moluccas, Sumatra and Sunda Islands, ruled over a million local population [people], and had trading posts as far north as Japan.”

In order to effectively administer such vast swathes of territory, the VOC needed what was essentially a standing army. The cost of maintaining such a force was enormous. The Dutch state realized this too and began revoking many of the monopolistic privileges the VOC had enjoyed. For these reasons, and some unfortunate circumstances, the VOC collapsed in 1799. The British East India Company met a similar fate following the Sepoy Rebellion in 1857. 

After the failure of the companies, the state became the administrator of the territories; the distant colonial governments, meanwhile, remained very much autonomous. 

Although the company system was indicative of the capitalist forces driving colonialism, and though for a time the company system was the bureaucratic structure holding the colonies together, it was the permanent and exploitative settlement of foreign lands that defined colonialism. As I suggested earlier, independent settlements were necessary, in large part, because of the incredible time it took for European metropoles to communicate with their distant territories. 

With the advent of the telegraph around 1850, along with technologies like the steamboat, European metropoles were able to directly administer control over their colonies; colonial autonomy became unnecessary. According to Charles Jeurgens, an archivist and empire scholar in the book Exploring the Dutch Empire: Agents, Networks and Institutions, the electrical telegraph manifested as a

“cultural and mental concept”

since it

“gave people the feeling that, suddenly, the entire world took part in the exchange of information.”

But, the telegraph took on cultural and mental importance because of what it could do: collapse the space between the homeland and the colony. Telegraph in hand, the homeland could more directly oversee the extraction of resources and administrate native peoples by communicating with 

“missionaries, traders, and colonial officials.”

According to communication theorist James W. Carey in his essay Technology and Ideology: The Case of the Telegraph:

“Until the transatlantic cable, it was difficult to determine whether British colonial policy was being set in London or by colonial administrators in the field – out of contact and out of control. It was the cable and the telegraph, backed, of course, by sea power, that turned colonialism into imperialism: a system in which the center of an empire could dictate rather than merely respond to the margin [distant colonies].”

For Carey, the intimate relationship between the telegraph (the mode of communication) and the administration of the colonies (profit driven power structures) drove colonialism to imperialism. Whereas colonialism was marked by autonomous, transplanted European governments, imperialism was the direct expression of force over territories by the metropole.

By the mid-to-late 19th century, the distinction between power and capital had begun to blur. Capital entailed power but power didn’t always entail the possession of capital. For example, in the 19th century a British factory owner, a capitalist, would have been a very powerful person. A British noble would also have been powerful just by virtue of being a noble, regardless of capital holdings (some means of production). The vast majority of nobles would have held capital, but the aristocracy was a power structure in its own right; the nobility depended on personal wealth, but their titles themselves were claims to political and social power. 

To be sure, increasing industrialization and the progression of colonialism to imperialism coincided with the decline of Western European monarchies, of mercantilism, and their replacement by representative democracies and free trade. The erosion of the old aristocracies left a void which was filled by the bourgeoisie (capitalist class). The power of the state was no longer gripped by royals, but by industrialists. The concern of the state became, through and through, the extraction of resources for profit which was increasingly done with machine-like, telegraph-enabled speed and brutality as typified by the Berlin Conference and the Scramble for Africa. 

Importantly, the telegraph was a mode that served the power structures of capital: the joint-stock companies and state bureaucracies who were responsible for the inflow of spices, rubber, coffee, tea, and other goods to Europe. For one, the telegraph eliminated uncertainty about disruptions in the production of these goods. In 1869, the coffee-rust fungus Hemileia Vastitrix ripped through British Ceylon’s (modern day Sri Lanka) highland coffee plantations. At the time, British Ceylon accounted for a third of the £270,000,000 of coffee imported to Europe. The telegraph dampened the economic effects of crises like these. It could more quickly alert the metropole and ease the economic impact of unforeseen disruptions by compressing response times. I want to stress that the telegraph was not a power structure in itself. It served the state. It enabled the direction of people. It was very much like paper correspondence, but stripped back, extremely quick in comparison, and more direct – a convenient technology for the land and profit hungry imperial powers of the late 20th century. 

What It Means

The blurring of capital and power matters because communications technologies today are tools for collecting profit. Power came to imply the possession of capital, and since communications technologies primarily allow for power attainment, it follows that communications technologies have become, primarily, tools for profit attainment. 

Furthermore, engagement with different kinds of communications technologies imply different relationships to power. Oratory and debate can be seen as a two way exchange where power was gained by persuading either the opponent, the audience, or both. The mass distribution of pamphlets aimed at persuasion too, but it was not an exchange; those who read Rousseau’s pamphlets had no expectation of entering into dialogue with Rousseau himself, but rather with other readers of Rousseau. Whereas oratory was relatively limited in its reach, mass pamphleting enabled large groups of people to question the old power structures and move past them (though it was also used to service power).

The role of the telegraph was unlike oratory and pamphleting. The telegraph was not meant to persuade, but to connect and direct. The number of words that could be sent were limited. Messages were short, dry, and to the point. The high ranking official didn’t send off a telegraph to the colonial grunt to persuade him – the telegraph carried messages to be processed, not contemplated. It did not facilitate debate and discussion, but the administration of people (the ruling of people within pre-existing power structures). 

Each new mode of communication has unique and inherent qualities pertaining to persuasion, reach, efficiency etc. Some modes rely less on their ability to persuade and more on servicing the power structure they exist in like the telegraph. However, every mode can be used to attain, manage, or question power insofar as it’s situated within or pitted against a power structure. Even music, as we’ve seen, can be political and persuasive. Further, new modes don’t always replace older modes. The printing press didn’t obviate oratory. The telegraph didn’t do away with the printing press. Yet, the telephone absolutely turned the telegraph obsolete. In general though, new modes are additive–meaning modes of communication coexist, but in different contexts. Oratory is performed in Congress (a degenerated form). Books, pamphlets, and articles are printed and distributed regularly on college campuses. Radio is common in cars. Vinyl and CDs are collected and compared by enthusiasts. These mediums have become less important, but they exist in different contexts and are used concurrently. As new technologies crop up, the interactions between them become more complex and difficult to disentangle. In other words, they reference each other, inform each other, and become less definite. In late 20th century post-industrial and pre-internet America, the modes of communication I just described existed only in their distinct physical contexts. 

Today, there is a major difference: mass media platforms are their own power structures. Not only that, but they service every power structure that exists and contain, in some form, every mode of communication that exists. The social media platform is a single, all encompassing context for different modes of communication to interact. It is simultaneously a power structure, a context, and a conglomerate mode of communication. Meanwhile, in the “real world,” each mode of communication still exists in its own physical context. In other words, the social media platform is additive, and monumentally so.

It’s tempting to reduce the mass media platform to its profit incentive and summarily attribute contemporary discourse’s successes and failures to it. I want to caution against that. Although the profit incentive is central to the structure of platforms, its influence is obscured by platforms’ quality of being many different modes of communication at once. The mass media platform has overwhelming utility, and as such is so enticing, so immediately useful, and so ubiquitously used that it’s hard to apprehend those hidden motivators internal to it. We must, in part, use mass media platforms because they are genuinely useful and effective. Certainly, as I suggested before, the basic hierarchy created by metrics (follower count, likes, etc.) is a large part of the puzzle, but that doesn’t explain why media like memes exist (they often have no identifiable source and have seemingly no reason for existing that can be attributed to power structures). Although, I will ultimately argue that, in fact, they do. Nevertheless, the next article will seek to shed light on our social, cultural and political moment by drawing from the history of power, profit, and modes of communication sketched above.