The Network Effect
On the Totalitarianism of the present
The German original of the following text, which the readers of ex nihilo were able to witness as a »work-in-progress,« has been published in the latest issue of Lettre International
Martin Burckhardt
Free Radicals1
When one speaks of Totalitarianism, the horrifying image of an overpowering, terrifying state structure almost inevitably comes to mind: Portrait of Leviathan, drawn as a monster! Wilhelm Reich's research and, in particular, Max Horkheimer's and Theodor W. Adorno's studies on the authoritarian character have drawn the subject's psychogram, who, blindly devoted to the authorities, fights every form of alterity with verve—whether it comes in a sexual, aesthetic or philosophical form. Consequently, the post-war political scientists described Totalitarianism as a state religion based on an official ideology, a unified mass party, a monopoly of control, means of mass communication, and terrorist police control.2 While this monster manifested itself in a split form (which political scientists tried to tackle with their horseshoe theory – Les extrèmes se touchent), the fall of the Berlin Wall put an end to its communist variety. What remained was the general suspicion of the State, which, as memories of Nazi atrocities faded, increasingly took the form of a folk devil, even a metaphysical Nazi. In the late 1970s, the accusation that he had indulged in all manner of male fantasies became abstracted from an exaggerated nationalism to toxic masculinity which may explain the semantic shift of chauvinism. Because Totalitarianism is, as in the Foucauldian version of the panopticon, simply equated with the whole of society, we’re dealing with a form of rule that, though headless, is nevertheless omnipresent.3 What all these interpretations have in common is the leitmotif of a polymorphously perverse statehood, which per se can only be countered with general suspicion. The unfortunately forgotten political scientist Franz Neumann,4 provided a structural analysis of National Socialist rule that allows a different view – an interpretation that may also be extremely helpful in considering contemporary forms of totalitarian thinking. This is because Neumann didn’t see National Socialism as a form of State deification, but on the contrary, as an attack against the state – which explains the title of his book published in 1942, whose title is Behemoth is the Leviathan’s adversary. That this assessment wasn’t just plucked out of thin air becomes clear considering Hitler's statements declaring the State to be a mere tool and giving preference to the movement: »The State is not our master, we are the masters of the State.« The ruthlessness with which Hitler destroyed the young democracy's institutions shows just how pronounced this instrumental view was – and how much Hitler despised the rule of law. One particularly successful stratagem in this campaign against the rule of law was his promotion—no, even more than that: his domination technique of institutional ambiguity. Hitler, a social Darwinist, deeply believed in the survival of the fittest and thought that the movement could be given even greater emphasis if the institutional responsibilities were blurred. As an exemplar, Adolf Eichmann's ›Judenreferat‹ was joined by a competing institution. The result was the competing institutions outdoing each other in their efforts to please the Führer – and because this game demanded creativity, the constitutional constraints represented cumbersome shackles its actors could boldly discard. If this form of early Attention Economy5 had an effect, it was that the meticulous and predictable state-owned enterprise was no longer the uncontroversial master of events. Instead, in the form of the movement, there was an unpredictable monster behind it – in a way that allowed the fiction of the rule of law to be maintained externally. Factually, however, this institutional reorganization and restructuring led to the personal rule later known as the Führerstaat.
Order of Terror
The devastating effect of this can be illustrated by a story related by Wolfgang Sofsky in his book The Order of Terror6. There was a rule in the concentration camps that prisoners weren’t allowed to walk around without their caps. If a guard took a prisoner’s cap off and threw it over a line the inmate was forbidden to cross on pain of death, the dilemma was perfect. For what was the prisoner supposed to do when the warden mockingly reminded him he was walking around without his cap – and that he should pick it up again? Because he knew that another guard, whose job it was to monitor the impassable border, would shoot him on sight. In any case, he was dead – and the two guards who had agreed to this perverse killing game were able to persuade themselves the murder of the prisoner was justifiably according to the law. Now, while the exemplum may be drastic, it makes clear how the obscuring and instrumentalization of laws and institutions amounts to an arbitrary rule, indeed ultimately to an order of terror. Thus, the observer witnesses a strange transformation – and in its wake, the Leviathan is transformed into an adversary. But it's too easy to see the Behemoth as a synonym for the civil war, as bellum omnium contra omnes. This ignores the possibility that even a formally upheld constitutional state can mutate into a monster. But what are the laws governing such a degeneration?
Mysterium fascinans
By linking the question of Totalitarianism with the historical experience of National Socialism and Communism, the fundamental question of what makes individuals susceptible to totalitarian thought figures has been lost sight of. This omission explains why a psychology of Totalitarianism7 has taken so long to emerge, and why such a belated attempt risks falling into the trap of mass psychology. To a certain extent, this is even understandable. As Marx’s well-known quote, »Religion is the opium of the people,« demonstrates, religions can also be understood as a form of mass hypnosis - and consequently: as totalitarian thinking. However, this would brand all non-secular societies as totalitarian if the holistic nature of the pre-prescriptive world, or participation mystique, as Levy-Bruhl called it, had been identified as the signature of Totalitarianism. You could agree with this insofar as every religion provides its believers with a reservoir of meaning which, by closing life’s open questions, takes away their fear of life. Or, translating this into a thought of religious scholar Rudolf Otto: one banishes the horror of the Mysterium tremendum by painting over it with the Mysterium fascinans of religious awe. In any case, this establishes a grand narrative, a wholeness that transforms the immediate experience into an order. In this respect, every religion may have an inherent totalitarian dimension, but the understanding of Totalitarianism isn’t served by short-circuiting it with the religious. In doing so, you would have to sacrifice the historical, modern dimension of this way of thinking. Totalitarianism is the Enlightenment's dark companion, which unexpectedly joins it in the same vein as Dr. Jekyll's Mr. Hyde. As is often the case, language, or more precisely etymology, is an extremely reliable witness, as it shows the desire for Totalitarianism was largely unknown until the 19th century. The adverb totaliter comes from the merchant language and means something like ›fully encompassing‹ – and with the English totalizator in mind as a reference to a counting device used in horse betting, the word first entered the German language in the 19th century as der Totalisator. So, if one insists on the religious character of the respective Totalitarianism, it would be more logical to speak of a religion without religion - a machine of meaning that, regardless of its inner worldliness, appears with a dogmatism otherwise only known from religions. If Totalitarianism has a signature, it is its claim to power goes hand in hand with a radical inner-worldliness - which categorically excludes extraterrestrial uncertainties, à la ›My kingdom is not of this world‹, as well as Thomas Hobbes' insight that in the Leviathan we’re dealing with a mortal deity. It’s no coincidence that this desire for closure, in which an inner-worldly power replaces transcendence, found its great narrator in George Orwell—after all, with his reference to the terror of groupthink, he can explain how it is possible that 2x2 equals five.
Self-glare
But even more treacherous regarding totalitarian desire may be a small remark by Hitler himself. According to Hermann Rauschning, Hitler once said the following: If the Jew did not exist, one would have to invent him. When one's worldview is fed by desire but not by a will to knowledge, then we've identified the first characteristic of totalitarian thinking: what could be called blindness to reality or ideological delusion, depending on the case. Because the thought constructs, that is, the narratives, occupy a paramount position in all of this, any non-conforming realities are to be banished from view—or, if they do not comply, they are to be banished in symbolic form, even by the use or threat of physical force. A third, and perhaps even more significant psychological function, which comes into play in the aforementioned quote from Hitler, ascribes a higher value to narrative than to reality. That this is not an individual psychological peculiarity of Hitler's but a widespread character trait can also be seen clearly from the fact that only this phantasmal projection apparatus can explain the emergence of modern anti-Semitism. This isn't based on abstruse prejudices about the Jewish ethnic soul but rather on the adventurous equation of modern power techniques and Judaism. The book used by a Russian Ochrana agent to form The Protocols of the Elders of Zion was nothing more than a sober analysis of the governing techniques Napoleon III used to win the sympathy of France’s ordinary citizens. Maurice Joly's The Dialogue in Hell Between Machiavelli and Montesquieu expresses a transformed, deeply modern power structure – in which Napoleon III appears as a new type of protagonist. While Marx could only characterize this early »populist« as a mediocre and grotesque figure, Napoleon’s ingenuity lay in having a keen sense of mediocrity. Consequently, he concluded it was no longer necessary to decapitate or physically assault people to gain control over your subjects. Instead, achieving a form of psychological dominance through the means of money and the press was enough. And so the French journalist's book wasn't much more than a razor-sharp analysis of these very techniques of power. New was that here, techniques of seduction had taken the place of domination techniques – a revolution reflected in the transformation of ancien régime motto into a bourgeois tragedy line: »What is called violence is nothing: seduction is the true violence8.« What turned these razor-sharp, sobering analyses of populist power techniques into The Protocols of the Elders of Zion was how the Ochrana agent who rewrote the literary text transformed the changed media landscape into a world conspiracy and a Jewish one at that.9 And so a scapegoat was identified, and the unease about the new techniques of power—the press, the stock exchange, and the rule of money—was laid at the door of a culprit. That the Protocols' concoction, based solely on a phantasm, could become the most widely printed work of the 20th century only testifies to how overwhelming the desire for a closed, coherent worldview narrative is—and howTotalitarianism’s enigma is encapsulated in this desire. If the Jew did not exist, he would have to be invented. If we were to apply a strict psychoanalytical interpretation here, such behavior would have to be called psychotic, and Totalitarianism would accordingly be understood as a form of collective psychosis.10 However, we refrain from this because we’re not dealing with an individual deviation but a collective one. As Nietzsche once remarked: »Insanity is rare in individuals, but the rule in groups, parties, peoples and times.« This quote makes it clear there’s not much to be gained by viewing totalitarian thinking as insanity, indeed as mass psychosis. For insofar as it occurs en masse, totalitarian thinking is not experienced as psychotic but takes on a regular, thoroughly rational appearance. Not infrequently, it even takes the form of a social obligation—thus becoming that glue endowing a group, a party, or a nation with a sense of belonging. While National Socialism and Communism may have some affinities with religious thinking, the phenomenon becomes much easier to read if we look at the modern character of Totalitarianism instead of resorting to a religious interpretation. If the structure of the mass is characteristic of totalitarian thinking, and if this is precisely what sets it apart from traditional religiosity, then the logical question would be: How did modern mass society come about in the first place?
Under power
My answer would be modern mass society goes hand in hand with the discovery of the vacuum and electricity.11 It’s only on this basis that the form of the Telematic Society becomes conceivable, which has become a global order in the form of mass media, particularly the Internet. When Lenin said, »Communism is Soviet power plus the electrification of the whole country,« his remark suggests ideological conformity presupposes technological synchronization. A wonderfully prototypical image for this new type of mass formation can be found in one of the early experiments with electricity. In 1746, after it was discovered electricity could be stored in the form of a capacitor, Louis XV's tutor, the Abbé Nollet, gathered several hundred Carthusian monks in a field in northern France. There, he instructed them to connect themselves together using copper wire. When this was done, the abbot touched a small antenna sticking out of a water-filled glass container—the capacitor—and what happened? All the monks began twitching – simultaneously. What appeared to be a mysterious occult gathering was actually a perfectly rational, almost Cartesian experimental setup. The underlying question of the experiment was: How fast does the electrical fluid move that could be stored in a water-filled container by friction with cat fur and which had been found to spread through space via copper wire and the human body? The surprising answer of the experiment was electricity moves so quickly that, unlike the Wave mass movements in our football stadiums, there was no phase shift visible to the eye. And because electricity, at the speed of light, produced an instantaneous mass movement, distance had been removed from the world, at least in thought, and something like a mass formation had been established – or as Kant was later to formulate it, ›a history that progresses with cosmopolitan intent.‹ When a theorist like Benedict Anderson wants to grasp the emergence of modern nationalism by coining the term imagined community, it is evident that this recourse to the imagination obscures the material side of modern society, namely the fact that this mass formation has an electrical dimension. The discovery of electricity not only prompted the development of telegraphy, telephony, and television, but as early as the 18th century, it also took on highly astonishing forms of mass virality. Franz-Anton Mesmer, who recreated Jean-Antoine Nollet's experiment in Paris salons decorated with enigmatic symbols and accompanied by the celestial tones of a glass harmonium, was able to achieve similar results without the use of an electric fluid—thus demonstrating that the spectacle of twitching monks has an inherent psychogenic, mesmerizing function.
While this was reflected in the mass movements of the French Revolution, mass psychology only became a significant topic towards the end of the 19th century, when the telegraphic public sphere was no longer a promise but an everyday fact. What’s astonishing, however, is Gustave le Bon, like Sigmund Freud, simply assumes the electrical coding of the masses—and thus becomes a blind spot in which the reference to Nollet’s twitching monks, and therefore its technology, no longer appears. According to Le Bon, this is a form of hypnotization in which the will of the individual is transferred to the masses. Infected, even intoxicated by the mass excitement, the individual is absorbed in the movement of the collective.
Kevin - Home Alone
Undoubtedly, this phenomenon takes on a physical conciseness at mass events, where an entire collective acts as one man – but the mass can also make an impression, even where it isn’t present as such. In this sense, we could speak of the mass as a cold, formalized aggregation of individuals: massification. Martin Heidegger captured this in Being and Time in the figure of the One.12 By behaving as one behaves, the individual has ceded his center of will and individuality to a mass subject. In this sense, you could say totalitarian thinking begins when the Heideggerian Man— the mass in me—takes control. When the mass soul – and with it totalitarian thinking – coincides with the emergence of mass media, a genuinely modern causality is established. Interestingly, this is the subtext of French philosopher Julien Benda's great lament in his 1927 The Treason of the Intellectuals [Trahison de clercs]. Not only does Benda express surprise at the susceptibility of many intellectuals to totalitarian ideas, but he also never tires of emphasizing how ideologies have acquired an astonishing poignancy compared to the 18th or 19th century. Bearing in mind Benda's observation coincides more or less with the advent of radio and was published in the same year as Siegfried Kracauer's The Mass Ornament – this observation is hardly surprising. You only have to look at Brecht's media theory, where, anticipating the internet, he conceives of radio broadcasting as an apparatus of the masses, to see that with the invention of mass media, society increasingly surrenders the structure of the Man. New is that when an individual sits alone in front of their Volksempfänger,13 there isn't any need for a physical mass aggregate and corresponding mass hypnosis. In this sense, Abbé Nollet's 1746 experiment, where he gathered 200 hundred Carthusian monks and energized them with a capacitor, is something of a metaphor, indeed the hot archetypal image of modern mass society. While the mass soul still has a physical presence in the image of the twitching monks, it has been translated into virtuality—that is, into the image of the mega-monad cooled into a machine. The isolation of the radio listener can heighten the effect even further. Not only does the listener risk subordinating his own will to that of Das Man – but he may also be tempted to mistake the transmitted set of meanings for his own will—meaning transference. If the images of the 1934 Nazi Party Congress Rally proclaim the »Triumph of the Will,« or rather of Totalitarianism, Leni Riefenstahl's apotheosis of the Führer state obscures the much more fundamental question of what made the inhabitants of the modern age so receptive to the totalitarian temptation. Hannah Arendt, who spoke of social atomization in this context while ascribing a significant role of homelessness, even the existential displacement of the contemporary,14 may have been a much more sensitive observer here than, as exemplar, Wilhelm Reich, in his Mass Psychology of Fascism blamed repressive sexual morality for this receptivity. This interpretation, laid down in his Mass Psychology of Fascism, led to the oft-cited study on the authoritarian character presented by the Frankfurt School in 1950. Now, one of the paradoxes of the present is that sexual liberation and the dismantling of authority have by no means brought totalitarianism to a standstill—au contraire. Today, we can virtually speak of a renaissance of totalitarian thinking. The paradox is that the postmodern variety of mass gatherings no longer requires it because one can also devote one’s self to the mass soul alone in front of a video screen. If we have spoken of a religion without religion, this paradox could just as easily be transferred to the masses as you could speak of a mass without masses. Such an interpretation is also constructive for psychological reasons. It is precisely this isolation, the feeling of inner homelessness and uprootedness, that makes the postmodern resident – the free radical – receptive to totalitarian connections. It's in this way that the inner emptiness is filled, and the person, armed with identity politics, can acquire a corresponding self-confidence. If I've introduced a distinction between hot metaphor and cold formalization, it's because the mass soul's logic, in parallel with technologisation, is accompanied by a cooling – and, as a result, its character of massification is increasingly fading away.
Network Effect
Nevertheless, what we have become accustomed to calling the filter bubble is precisely that. For this reason alone, it's worth thinking about Metcalfe’s Law, the so-called Network Effect phenomenon first formulated by the inventor of Ethernet, Robert Metcalfe. The idea is simple: two people connected have only one connection, three have two connections, and four have six connections. If you increase the network to 100 people, you would have 4,950 connections—while if everyone in a small town of 20,000 inhabitants were to network with each other, there would be a dizzying 190 million and 990,000 connections. And if you were to try linking up the 1.41 billion inhabitants of China, the number would be in the quintillion range, paralyzing most people's imagination. In mathematical terms, however, Metcalfe's law, the so-called Network Effect, is nothing other than an exponential.15 What’s new is that the exponential growth here isn’t due to a one-to-many configuration that still reflects the classical order of representation but is accompanied by the network’s densification process. But this novelty is accompanied by a fundamental change. If you apply Metcalfe’s law to populations, or more precisely, to groups clustered around a particular fascination, phantasm, or fetish, it’s clear every fringe group, no matter how marginal, represents an echo chamber that, in terms of its power, can rival any mass formation, however imposing – and even surpasses the classic media corporations. In this sense, anyone who likes a tweet and gathers a specific following behind their Avatar is operating in a field of virality. It’s evident Le Bon's classic mass psychology can’t cope with this, and it’s no coincidence that he followed his text on mass psychology with a book on The French Revolution and the Psychology of Revolutions16. For in this constellation, in which a revolutionary mob takes over, everything is geared towards the material heap of people, while the free, intellectually homeless radical, operating like Kevin, the Home Alone character, must remain a void. Consequently, mass psychology fails where the whole – under the conditions of Internet communication – presents itself as a form of individual opinion-forming. Insofar as we’re dealing with a privatization of the masses through the Machine and the Network Effect, the distinction between the free radical and the masses begins to blur—this is where the mega-subject of the multiplier and influencer rears its head. Strictly speaking, this is a dichotomy, if not a double entity: If, on the one hand, we have the unarmed, analog, and finite self; on the other, there’s the Avatar, the online existence accessible 24/7 and worldwide. Bearing in mind the formula on which the digital order is based, x=xn, the psychological asymmetry is quite obvious. Because the unarmed self is always thrown back on itself and its own limitations, the digital magnification of online existence harbors a totalitarian temptation—especially where there’s the inclination to ›giving sugar to the monkey‹ as a thymotic charge. Or put another way, totalitarian temptation has become a reality for the individual in the form of online existence, even crawling into spaces where the lonely self longs for belonging and socialization. What used to be a state of emergency unleashed at folk festivals and football stadiums in carnivalesque form is now becoming an everyday occurrence where the free radical tries, with a click of the mouse, to console himself over his isolation and depression.
From Representation to Simulation
Metcalfe's Law, if it has any meaning at all, lies in how it highlights the asymmetry between the old and new worlds – or translating it into the political dichotomy between Representation and Simulation. However, above all, it makes it clear this rupturing can't be overcome with traditional concepts of mass psychology, but that this technological caesura represents a far deeper divide than our imagined societies of the past would suggest, whether they be in the guise of Nationalism, Communism or Socialism. This rupturus opening in the wake of electricity and modern mass society is not ideological, but a revolution within the field of communication itself. While in the Logic of Representation, grounded in the Logic of Central Perspective, domination was always conceived as the transference of popular will to a representative as a one-to-many functional pyramid; networking, as a many-to-many constellation, follows a new and different kind of logic. It is not clear what consequences this will have for our communities since they are still organized as representative democracies – only that this game will be played at their expense. In view of this, it's becoming clear the figure of the Leviathan is a historical being – or the »mortal god« as Hobbes called it – will become ascribed tempi passati. If Franz Neumann understood National Socialism as a rebellion against the Leviathan, as idolatry of a movement spilling over from the past and abandoning itself to a new, phantasmal totality, such as the 1000-year Reich or communism's New Man, then the last century's totalitarian regimes could be understood as highly paradoxical attempts to ignore the conditions of modernity through the means of Mass Society. Insofar as they are less an expression of a new presence-of-mind [Geistesgegenwart]—au contraire, they are the fruits of political phantasists translating a world that's become unreadable in our familiar narrative: resentment, lulled by the sound of theVolksempfänger and its propagandistic messages, wraps itself in a transhistorical costume of superiority. That the terribles simplificateurs use the very means they accuse their enemies of using is no obstacle. For where desire becomes the father of thought, it becomes the mother of delusion. If you do come across that adversity called ›reality,‹you can handle it with a conspiracy theory: ›If the Jews didn't exist, they would have to be invented.‹ Putting the past’s ideological varnish aside, it becomes clear the problem that led to Totalitarianism remains far from over even today. Just as electricity electrified the 18th century and confronted it with a completely alien principle, the dawn of digital logic marks nothing less than a rupture between epochs. Not only does the network extend beyond national borders to transfer objects, divested of their materiality, into a free-floating state, but every value is consigned to its superfluousness once digitalised. So, like Gresham's law, where bad money drives out good, their simulations replace the values of representation. And it's not just the things that are robbed of their value in the digital aggregate state; this devaluation also affects work itself, which, once digitalised, is transferred to the Museum of Work. And because it can be retrieved from there at any time and from anywhere: anything, anytime, anywhere, the present-day individual is confronted with his existential superfluousness, a shock that is perhaps an even greater narcissistic humiliation than what Kepler, Darwin, and Freud all together imposed on the individual – after all, it is a collapse of values that, like the Representation, have been preserved for centuries.
Data sovereign, but confused
Seen in this light, Totalitarianism could be understood as a response to a deep-seated unease or, even more that: as the filling of a vacuum that could just as easily be described as a farce. To understand the psychological dilemma, one only has to consider what happened to Abbé Nollet when he sent his monks into convulsions. If the touching of the battery could be seen as something like the apotheosis of an act—a finger touch that sets an entire society into upheaval—we can also see the person touching it being incorporated into it at that moment. From then on, they become one-in-the-other as a mass being, annihilating all traditional notions of individuality and identity. Or, taking it historically, the promised success as a romantic original genius remains a distant dream. It's no more surprising that people are trying to deny this narcissistic humiliation than their susceptibility to totalitarian ideas. What’s more, it is easy to understand why Totalitarianism is no longer confined to the fringes of society but has arrived in the center of society—in a very surprising form. Now, it is undoubtedly true the excesses of the Führer-state, like those of Stalinist rule, belong to the past. However, the underlying problem is far from over—and it’s not made any easier because the institutions of the past are still in place. Caught in Antonio Gramsci’s interregnum17 between Representation and Simulation—between an old world that’s dying and a new one that’s not yet been born—contemporaries all too often succumb to the temptation to don costumes whose aura they’ve borrowed from some intellectual local history museum. De facto, however, such a Great Again! can be achieved only by using the Network Effect and Metcalfe's logic. Because, in this way, the given order is merely instrumentalized, and the meaning of the law is subjected to the arbitrariness of the ruling powers—such behavior can only benefit the Behemoth. Considering the significance of such movements for contemporary political discourse, it is impossible to ignore that totalitarian thinking in a postmodern guise is celebrating a comeback as a form of retrovirality.18 The proclamation of civil society at the beginning of the new millennium was a structural vote of no confidence in the Leviathan and proof the student revolt movements had successfully completed their march through the institutions. In any case, the universally celebrated civil society gave rise to a new classe politique that gathered in various front organizations seeking to influence politics in their interests. This form of lobbying was extremely successful largely because the activists could present themselves as people wanting to help achieve noble goals – whereas traditional statehood was subject to a general suspicion of toxicity. What was overlooked was how moral grandstanding bought the individual moral prestige, which could be converted into a pecuniary advantage, or in the vernacular: State Dough – a movement in which a moral economy replaced the political economy. To the extent that the civil society movements took over State Power, those involved were, in turn, provided with sinecures – making the revolving door effect all too apparent, with people moving from the ministry to a front organization and vice versa. The fatal effects of this political gray area can be seen in the politics of the past decade. An early and particularly questionable exemplum in this context was provided by former Justice Minister Heiko Maas, who pushed through the Network Enforcement Act (NetzDG) in 2017, which autocratic Russia very soon copied due to its political usefulness.19 In truth, the Russian copy wasn’t a form of abuse but only the logical continuation of Maas’ dark self-empowering logic, which had already manifested in the law’s drafting. To warm up public support for his legislative project while giving its proposal the appropriate fig leaf, Heiko Maas gathered several intellectuals around him. Modeled on the Human Rights Charter, they drafted a charter grandiosely adding the corresponding data protection rights to human rights. Strangely enough, the authors were not afraid to paraphrase the teachings of the Third Reich's crown lawyer, Carl Schmitt, in one of the early versions. While Schmitt had decreed that the sovereign is the one who decides on the state of emergency, one of the first sentences of this questionable work claimed: »The sovereign is the one who disposes of his data.«20 While, for psychological reasons, Data Sovereignty may be a perfectly understandable desideratum —comparable to the protection of privacy – the conceptual use of Sovereignty is more than problematic. This already applies to the way Carl Schmitt used and actually misused the concept of Sovereignty. By making the concept of sovereignty into a speech act, the figure of Leviathan was consigned to the decisionism of a single person. This denies that the structural origin of the Leviathan is not the creation of the philosopher's mind but refers to a collective person—which is why Thomas Hobbes did not give the State a rational justification but rather gave the Leviathan and Behemoth equally mythical origins. If Hobbes conceived of his Leviathan as a "mortal god" and also as a machine—a Wheelwork Automaton [Räderwerkautomaten]—it is because we are dealing here with a being that bears no resemblance to living figures.21 From a historical perspective, the Leviathan articulated in the philosopher's thinking and then in the form of the emerging Nation-States equipped with constitutions and central banks could be understood as a pacification measure. In any case, the State ended the ongoing religious and civil wars of the late Middle Ages and the modern era because the State's monopoly on violence ensured man no longer had to be man's wolf.
Self-empowerment
Because this monopoly, which conceptualized the Logic of Representation, has been shaken to its very foundations by the emergence of the Net, a gigantic vacuum has opened up in political Philosophy, indeed in the present’s worldview. Unlike a natural disaster or earthquake, this isn't a one-time disruption but a process with no end in sight. The devaluation of values progresses precisely to the extent that the social drive [Gesellschaftstriebwerk] surrenders to Metcalfe's logic – Representation's thought structures, having become threadbare, lose their binding force. Nevertheless, if one clings to being a representative of this or that, then it can only be as a simulation. The feeling of social powerlessness intensifies precisely to the degree the digitalised operating system reveals itself as the predominant social drive, suggesting that the totalitarian temptation is not only not overcome but will continue to increase in virulence. In this sense, the sinister Hitler dictum of »If the Jew did not exist, he would have to be invented« could be extended into a dark postmodern age. The figures of thought today's activists come up with reveal that here we're dealing with projections whose only meaning lies in self-empowerment.22 Enthusiasm for the apocalypse, the idea climate change heralds the end of the world, the conviction Western civilization is nothing more than a repressive panopticon—all this suggests a fundamental longing for figures of thought that—as a whole—spare the person concerned narcissistic humiliation. What distinguishes these thoughts from the State’s deification, as in the case of classical totalitarianism, is they arise from a feeling of isolation and powerlessness. Take the harmless-sounding claim to the so-called safe spaces that have spread in the wake of identity politics at universities. It may be remarkable enough to believe one's own fragility needs to be protected by such a cordon sanitaire, but the politicization of the self-evident testifies to the fact one's own identity is no longer a given – indeed, that one can only assert it in a totalitarian manner, in alliance with like-minded people; and because this action is usually directed against an enemy, one imposes the responsibility for one's own sense of emptiness on that enemy. When Peter Handke once noted in his The Weight of the World that the only political action he could imagine was running amok, this outlines the final solution to the deep narcissistic humiliation that’s imposed on the free radical in the digital age: you can’t distinguish yourself as a virtuoso in virtuality and can no longer be an individual in a team of the Avatar population. In this sense, overcoming totalitarianism is not a political task but an existential one: people must come to understand what it is like to live a meaningful, human life as a dividual – that is, as a structurally divisible being in need of communication. Conversely, the refusal to recognize this narcissistic humiliation inevitably leads to a heightened receptivity, to the fact you indulge in all kinds of thoughts giving the individual a sense of wholeness – thus bringing lost paradises back into the present. If the individual succumbs to the totalitarian temptation, it doesn’t express itself, unlike the totalitarianisms of the 20th century, as mass hypnosis and the logic of conformity, but can, in a polymorphously perverse way, take on a variety of forms. If the battle cry of the present rhymes with equality, diversity, and inclusivity – and if, on the other hand, it is joined by a Great Again, then we know: The Totalitarianism of the present is as colorful as Society’s Rainbow!
Translation: Hopkins Stanley/Martin Burckhardt
Burckhardt, M. – Freie Radikale, LI 148, Spring 2025
See Carl J. Friedrich: The Unique Character of Totalitarian Society, in: (ed.), Totalitarianism, Cambridge/Mass. 1945, pp. 47-60.
In this context, Foucault is as paradoxical as he is interesting. While his studies—as in The Order of Things—were initially concerned with analyzing an underground power dispositive, this power took on a supreme position in the form of the panopticon. Consequently, when Foucault traveled to Iran in 1979, he welcomed the emerging theocracy as a spiritual revolution. Shortly afterward, he began his lectures on neoliberalism—which he, in turn, understood as an anti-authoritarian counter-power.
Franz Neuman was a German socialist thinker who became a political scientist. He studied under Karl Mannheim at the Frankfurt Institute for Social Research, fleeing with him to London after the Nazis assumed control before moving to New York. He is often considered part of the Frankfurt School.
It's often forgotten that the Society for Consumer Research, which provided TV ratings in the post-war period, was founded in 1934. This organization enjoyed the support of the National Socialists. As its chairman, Wilhelm Vershofen, announced, the Society’s aim was »to make the voice of the consumer heard.«
Sofsky, W. – The Order of Terror: The Concentration Camp, trans. William Templer, N.J., 1996.
The Belgian psychiatrist Mattias Desmet published a book with this title in 2020. See Desmet, M – The Psychology of Totalitarianism, Chelsea Green Publishing, 2022.
From Emilia Galotti by Gotthold Ephraim Lessing.
Not even this trick was particularly new. The first conspiracy theories launched in the wake of the French Revolution by a Jesuit abbot, Abbé Barruel, blamed the Order of the Illuminati, founded in Ingolstadt in 1775, for the excesses of Jacobinism – and attributed all kinds of superhuman or diabolical powers to the secret allies.
Here, Freud makes a distinction established to distinguish between neurosis and psychosis. In a small thought experiment, he imagines a young woman standing before the deathbed of her sister, with whose husband she’s hopelessly in love. Now she could tell herself: ›The field is not open to the brave!‹ But because filial piety at the deathbed makes such a thought unthinkable, the neurotic is forced to repress it. But what does the psychotic do? Her answer to the moral aporia is as simple as striking: she convinces herself that her sister is not dead.
See Buckhardt, M. – Über dem Luftmeer: Unbehagen in der Moderne, Berlin, 2023.
Das Man or The Man is an essential Heideggerian leitmotif often translated as ›the They.‹ Because the German Das Man is neuter, it can refer to an indeterminate plurality of a massification of people best captured by the One in Englisch.
Volksempfänger, or the National Socialst-era radio known as the people’s receiver, was inexpensively available to the general German public, which resulted from Goebbels’ realization of its immense propaganda potential. Ingeniously, what he realized was you only needed to broadcast 10% propaganda material mixed with entertainment for a practical massification effect, something we still see in praxis today.
The truth is that the masses grew out of the fragments of a highly atomized society whose competitive structure and concomitant loneliness of the individual had been held in check only through membership in a class. Hannah Arendt: The Origins of Totalitarianism. New York 2004, p. 421.
The mathematical formula is simple: n(n-1)/2.
Le Bon, G. – The French Revolution and the Psychology of Revolution, Boca Raton, 1980.
In his Prison Notebooks, Antonio Gramsci wrote: “The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum, a great variety of morbid symptoms appear.” See Gramsci, A. – State and Civil Society, in: Selections from the Prison Notebooks of Antonio Gramsci, edited and translated by Quentin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell Smith, London, 1999, p. 556.
Looking at Derrida's writing on the force of law, it’s remarkable that this mouthpiece of postmodernism, instead of facing up to digitalization, takes refuge in the arms of Carl Schmitt – and speaks out in favor of a hollow decisionism. See Derrida, J. Force of Law: The »Mystical Foundation of Authority,« in Deconstruction and the Possibility of Justice, eds. Cornell, Rosenfeld, & Carlson, London, 1992. pp. 3-67.
Christian Mihr from Reporters Without Borders commented on this process as follows: "Our worst fears are coming true: the German law against hate speech on the internet is now being used by undemocratic states as a template for restricting social debate on the internet. In Rebiger, S. – Reporter ohne Grenzen: Russland kopiert Netzwerkdurchsetzungsgesetz, Netzpolitik.org, 7/17/2017.
Apparently, the embarrassment became notorious because this wording disappeared in the revised version. Nevertheless, the conceptualization of Data Sovereignty has found its way into vocabulary and thinking.
In this sense, we have here an institutional equivalent of what I have called Alien Logic. See Burckhardt, M./Stanley, H. – Alien Logic: Why it makes sense to take the Universal Machine as the Unconscious, ex nihilo, 10/13/2024.
The astonishing thing is the price of this self-empowerment isn’t apparent. The #MeToo movement has not only created something like a digital pillory but has also en passant disposed of the presumption of innocence and the need for due process. The cultural regression is evident when compared to the dark Middle Ages. When a wild boar killed a man in medieval southern France, the town's authorities thought it appropriate to give the boar due process. Consequently, the pig was assigned a lawyer, questioned about mitigating circumstances, and the like – and even the executioner who carried out the death penalty apologized to the pig that he was merely the executor of a divine will.