in the near-universal acceptance of the fantasy that an unrestrained private economy could be relied on as the provider of public goods. But it can be seen too in the state and the corporation’s efforts to shape personality, culture and opinion, and in the way private categories – character and competence – dominate the description of politics.12
States and profit-driven institutions downplay or ignore those aspects of reality that undermine their authority. And when omission will not suffice, specialists are on hand to promote falsehoods in the service of a higher truth to which they claim to enjoy privileged access. Far from providing the general population with the information it needs if it is to conduct itself as a public, the major media groups and the institutions of the state endeavour to create a public opinion that amplifies, or least does not challenge, their own power. With this in view, the book explores the media’s record in describing the economy in the long run-up to the financial crisis that began in 2007 and in the coverage of the period directly before the invasion of Iraq. In both cases I want to show how far removed from observable reality mainstream media accounts became.
Opinion-poll results that confirm the prevailing orthodoxy metastasize through the sources of general information; those that do not barely register. The levels of popular support for candidates and elected representatives feature heavily in news coverage. Popular interest in UFOs and ‘conspiracy theories’ also crops up regularly. Distrust of politicians, big business and the media in the United States and opposition to the privatization of state-run services in Britain do not. Media coverage of demonstrations against war or corporate globalization ignores the public contents of the demonstrators’ arguments and focuses instead on their private motivations, or else on the forces that are secretly manipulating them. The population that emerges from the sum of these descriptions sometimes seems fearful and paranoid, sometimes responsible and civic-minded. But it rarely opposes those things that responsible elites consider to be inevitable.
The description of human nature that the general system of information provides denies us a properly human identity. And, in the absence of a public space in which we can engage with one another in an attempt to discover and secure the common good, we fall back on private strategies to shore up both our material conditions and our sense of self. We try to tailor our personalities to become more competitive. We manage our moods and adjust our attitudes through a process of self-surveillance and voluntary intoxication that in its reach and effectiveness far exceeds the achievements of totalitarian government. In conditions of deepening distress, we seek chemical oblivion, sudden enrichment through gambling or the narcosis of being well known. Our energetic, even frenzied, preoccupation with the private self plays out as a civic listlessness. And even as the need to collaborate in the production of public goods grows ever more acute, the economy consigns an ever greater number of us to enforced idleness.
Our inability to understand the world contributes to a deep dissatisfaction with our place in it. We lack the information we need to make sense of our predicament because such information is of no benefit to those who currently preside over the institutions on which we depend for information. And if this incomprehension causes an epidemic of destructive behaviour and despair in Anglo-America, it makes possible disaster worldwide, in so far as we fail to grasp how the governing powers use our money to pursue their interests. Solipsism at home makes possible state criminality abroad.
This is not meant to imply that it is impossible for the individual to develop a reasonably accurate sense of the world. In both Britain and the US lively alternative media have established themselves. In the United States, National Public Radio offers a platform for voices normally marginalized or ignored by the major broadcasters while a host of websites offer analysis from outside the pale of responsible opinion found in the mainstream. In Britain the liberal broadsheet press grants at least some publicity to critics of the prevailing order and, again, the web has allowed all shades of opinion a platform. But the alternative media remain chronically underfunded and, even when the more critical elements in the mainstream are taken into account, they reach only a small percentage of the population with any degree of regularity. The news and analysis that most people rely on comes folded with other products of the entertainment industry that corroborate and subsidize the view of the world they promote. More than this, the effort to understand the world comes at a considerable cost when an even tolerably accurate account contrasts so starkly with the vast bulk of widely accepted descriptions. Most people perhaps can appreciate that something has gone badly wrong but can see no benefit in the alienating work of figuring out exactly what, and what to do about it.
The third and final part of the book sets out a response to the failings in our systems of information that seems to me to be a precondition for both full economic recovery and substantive democracy. This response begins with quite modest proposals for changes in the ways in which the British and US media are funded. Whether citizens engage in the process or not, there is going to be a major shift in the way that the media in both countries are structured. The business model of terrestrial television is already under pressure while print publishing is in disarray. But so far most suggestions for reform do not address the cause of the media’s inability to describe the world accurately – the domination of the commissioning process, and hence of the field of general description, by the employees of state and corporate institutions. Unreformed state-owned (‘public service’) media can no more adequately serve the public than commercial institutions can. Something else – what I call public commissioning – is necessary. The apparently minor changes I propose will enable us to create a gradually expanding space for public participation. Once we engage directly in the production of information in a shared institutional context we begin to develop the knowledge and the self-knowledge necessary to guide further political change. In becoming actors in the system of information we take the first step towards a more complete public identity. In other words, rather than presenting a set of vague general proposals for a transformation of the self and of society, I want to offer some concrete suggestions for how such a transformation might be made both possible and durable.
Whether one believes that only radical change to the structure of the economy can prevent massive ecological destruction, or that America must draw back from its efforts to build a world empire, only a reformed system of publicity can secure the levels of support necessary. Whether one wants to address the worst abuses of the current order or to secure a total transformation, everything flows from a reformed system of publicity. Only an adequately informed population, acting as a public, can legitimately decide how society is to be organized.
So, in outlining the first steps in a process of change to the structure of communications, and in making some suggestions as to how that process might develop, the book sketches how the population as a whole can come to function as a public. Just as the shift from divinely mandated monarchy to a secular state governed by propertied men depended on changes in the economy of knowledge, and just as the current condominium of experts and investors depends on particular forms of state-corporate communications technology, a sovereign public requires a new constitution of information.
The book further outlines how, instead of providing an audience and an object of manipulation for the powerful, the population will become active in the commissioning of inquiry and then of action. It will no longer sit still waiting to be told what is necessary, but will deliberate and direct inquiry in the service of deliberation. The range of subjects that can reliably enter the general understanding will not be limited by the spectrum of opinion represented in Parliament, in Congress, or, most extensively, among the elites that control and populate the media and other powerful institutions. Instead, subjects will become obtrusive in the content of our conversations and of our political deliberation to the extent that the population demonstrates an appetite to know about them, and to the extent that the investigators commissioned can piece together an account that adds substance to our understanding. The state of affairs, rather than the range of admissible opinion, becomes the object of media interest, to the precise extent that the public is interested in discovering that state of affairs.
This process of public commissioning will have the effect of making more, and different, facts generally available. The state and the other large
