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The Video and the Algorithm: Democracy, Antitheatricality, and Paranoia in the Age of Streaming Media
Stone Peters, Julie
Stone Peters, Julie
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Abstract
As debates about “digital democracy” remind us, democracy is
one of our central political keywords, but its meaning is difficult to pin
down. It can point to any one of a wide variety of political norms, act
rhetorically to buttress a set of contradictory claims, or sometimes merely
gesture vaguely toward the general political good. This essay looks at
democracy not as a set of normative claims but as an idea that takes shape
in the spatial-visual imaginary. Exploring democracy as a set of images, I
argue that two persistent “models” have helped us to envision it, models I
describe as “the performing polis” and “the dispersed demos.” These
models often appear in idealized form, but they also appear as corrupt
Doppelgängers of the idealized versions: in antitheatrical images of the
“evil theatrocracy”; in paranoid renderings of invisible networks of
marauding automatons and invisible agents. I offer a compressed history of
these models, which show up in both their utopian and dystopian forms in
a variety of texts: ancient Greek philosophy, Early Modern and
Enlightenment political treatises, modern and postmodern political and
media theory.
I then turn to two cases recently decided by the Supreme Court: Twitter
v. Taamneh and Gonzalez v. Google. While these cases are formally about
the liability of internet platforms for their users’ incendiary posts, they are
also about democracy in the digital age. I look at how the two models of
democracy I have identified inform them, appearing in the cases in both
their utopian and dystopian forms. At the heart of the visions of democracy
these cases proffer are the figures of the video and the algorithm: vehicles
of democracy and its nightmare antitheses; synecdoches for its promises
and pathologies; the central forces of our digital future.