be uploaded to one’s profile while the event is still going on and subsequently receive Facebook validation. The experience of the concrete event and the abstraction may now occur simultaneously. Thus, the abstract world of Facebook hovers about during social gatherings, patiently waiting for the invitation to place its stamp of validity on what has taken place. If a party happens and nobody is there to post a photograph of it, does it occur? With the increasing accessibility of technology, most notably smart-phones, this abstract world now follows us around, filtering our experiences.
Every experience has the potential for further validation by the world of Facebook. But the latter has increasingly obscured the former. Lanier (2009) explains how “on a typical social networking site,”
either you are designated to be in a couple or you are single (or you are in one of a few other predetermined states of being)—and that reduction of life is what gets broadcast between friends all the time. What is communicated between people eventually becomes their truth. Relationships take on the troubles of software engineering. (p. 50)
Friends get together to talk over a cup of coffee. Conversations increasingly feature the discussion of events that have been mediated by Facebook. This is only provided conversation actually unfolds. It would not be unusual to imagine two friends seated opposite one another, each of them on their smart-phones plugged into the world of social media or “Googling” for other bits of information. Since it would be impossible to imagine that they might both put their phones away, imagine instead that they both lose power on their phones and are forced to be in each other’s presence. Are they saved from the looming influence of Facebook? Or do they continue speak in the generic manner endorsed by Facebook: “yes or no” questions; replies limited to “that’s good” or “no, that’s bad.” Descriptions of one’s morning might read as would their status feed: I did this, did this, felt that, listened to this, so-and-so did this, etc. Once again, Fromm (1990) would describe this as a social exchange where both parties are alienated from each other. He writes,
In any productive or spontaneous activity, something happens within myself while I am reading, looking at scenery, talking to friends, etcetera. I am not the same after the experience as I was before. In the alienated form of pleasure nothing happens within me; I have consumed this or that; nothing is changed within myself, and all that is left are memories of what I have done. (pp. 136–137)
While these two hypothetical friends might be sharing spatial proximity, their exchange is of no consequence. Lanier (2009) explains what happens when two people risk a personal encounter. “A real friendship ought to introduce each person to unexpected weirdness in the other” that “cannot be imagined or accessed in any way but through genuine interaction” (p. 39). Here one finds the relationship between man and man that Marx (Marx & Engels, 1978) has described, the one that is not obscured by abstractions or imagination, but is infinitely personal.
Social networks were originally available to serve as a tool that might facilitate concrete social interaction. As such, the breadth and depth of singular personality has been fitted into an abstract representation called a profile, available for review by a much larger audience than concretely practical. However, over time, this abstract representation has slowly replaced the singular personality from which it was taken; this has been called abstractification. Social media, of which Facebook has been discussed as an exemplar, has been responsible for the abstractification of its users in three ways. First, it has done so by limiting the description of self into predetermined and concrete categories; second, by mediating social interaction—that is, replacing concrete social interactions with abstract interactions; and finally, by alienating persons from their own experiences, social and otherwise, through the increasingly prevalent and accessible technology that has been commandeered by social media networks.
To combat the present example of abstractification, Lanier (2009) provides a few suggestions, which might also be read as challenges for those loathe to admit their own abstractification:
Create a website that expresses something about who you are that won’t fit into the template available to you on a social networking site. […]
Post a video once in a while that took you one hundred times more time to create than it takes to view.
Write a blog post that took weeks of reflection before you heard the inner voice that needed to come out.
If you are twittering, innovate in order to find a way to describe your internal state instead of trivial external events, to avoid the creeping danger of believing that objectively describable events define you, as they would define a machine. These are some of the things you can do to be a person instead of a source of fragments to be exploited by others. (p. 17)
And as an exhortation delivered specifically at what remains of humanistic movements, he writes:
[A] campaign should be taking place now, influencing engineers, designers, businesspeople, and everyone else to support humanistic alternative whenever possible. Unfortunately, however, the opposite seems to be happening.
Online culture is filled to the brim with rhetoric about what the true path to a better world ought to be, and these days it’s strongly biased toward an antihuman way of thinking. (p. 18)
Part I
Fact-minded Metaphysics
The first part of the book will explain the history of fact from a philosophical vantage point. This begins by returning to a time before scientific investigation was tantamount to gathering all of the facts that make up our universe. A “fact”—that elusive kernel of truth which fights valiantly against speculation and assumption—is itself based on an assumption. This is important because we often allow facts to stand by themselves. This means that, in order to humiliate a far-right politician for his inane worldview that discounts the importance of facts, there must be a worldview that assumes that such facts are not only possible to discern, but that they may be relied on to the exclusion of other forms of understanding. But remember, believing a fact is a judgment call that you must make—something for which you are responsible. In the end, it is your fault if the fact turns out to be inaccurate because you chose to give up your own responsibility to understand the more complicated sets of relationships that the fact stood for. But it is much easier to deflect responsibility elsewhere: “How could I have known better? It was a fact, after all!”
That the universe may be understood “in fact” is an assumption. A powerful one, indeed, but an assumption nonetheless. More specifically, this assumption is called positivism. Positivism is the assumption about reality that eventually replaced Theology in the 19th century. As the story goes, the church was no longer what people could turn to with questions about the universe, about education, about child-rearing, ethics, and so on. They were left with nothing. Imagine that. You would have nowhere to turn for how to restore old barn wood except for your old chemistry lessons. People were no longer able to deflect responsibility onto a spiritual text or figure—“I did it because the pastor said ….” The modern Europeans quickly found something else onto which they could deflect their responsibility for understanding. Auguste Comte proposed a new gospel—that of positivism! Positivism is the assumption that there are a finite number of things that can be known about the universe. That is to say that there could be such thing as universal knowledge. Without the guidance of the church for “best practices” for child rearing, parents threw up their hands in despair. To them, Comte explains that there is a best manner of raising your children, and we just need to learn what it is. With positivism, all the answers to life’s questions are “out there,” waiting to be discovered. Scientists are on the front lines, peeling back the frontiers in their quest to know everything. More on positivism later.
The fundamental unit of understanding within the positivist worldview is a fact.
