I've read a book I came across at my local library a couple weeks ago with the bold title, How to Stand Up to a Dictator: The Fight for Our Future. It's by 2021 Nobel Peace laureate Maria Ressa and recounts her chronicling the return to authoritarianism in the Philippines under Rodrigo Duterte, ending with the election of Ferdinand Marcos' son and Duterte' s daughter as his replacement president and vice president. Along the way she presents a lot of distressing facts and events suggesting we are headed ever closer to a willing abdication of our political rights in favor of the relinquishment of our political responsibilities.
The "our" of the subtitle is not rhetorical. If you're tempted, as many of us are, to shrug her warning off as "that's Asia's problem," presuming that as bad as Trumpism has proven for the US, it can't be that bad, she points out that in the early 20s the US was the only country whose use of Facebook superseded the Philippines. And while both nations have since then lost their number one and two status--India now dwarfs us, and the Philippines has slipped behind Indonesia, Brazil, and Mexico--we remain thoroughly within the grasp of what Shoshanna Zuboff has named "surveillance capitalism" which is the -ism whose operational form is "primary extraction". This is a practice by which " social media companies took our private actions and lives by using machine learning and artificial intelligence to collect and organize our personal data..., then publicly declared that they now own those corporate assets, which are then used to create algorithms that... manipulate us for profit. They offer no compensation, and they don't have to ask us for permission."
As an example, you will never find a way to lower the number of ads you see on FB, despite those regularly appearing pitches that claim all you have to do is this and this. Delivering ads to your feed is what Facebook does, what it's meant to do. It's not good or bad in itself, but as Ressa describes, it can easily be put to bad uses. For instance, it will favor news and information one entity paying another wants you to see. She includes charts and details that, frankly, are too much for my very small brain, but people with greater experience with how the internet works will likely understand it.
There are moments when we might see the light at the end of the tunnel is not an approaching train. Ressa focuses on Facebook, for instance, because that was the primary social media platform at the time. While it remains the lead it is swiftly being overtaken by YouTube, Instagram, and WhatsApp, and as the bulk of boomers like me die off and stop using it, will be subsumed by younger, more malleable apps. They're likely to start by aping the successes of FB, but we've already seen how that kind of thinking has already become both corrosive and obsolete for Elon Musk/X.
In her penultimate chapter with the depressing title "Why Fascism is Winning," Ressa explains that you stand up to dictators by "embracing values, defined early...: honesty, vulnerability, empathy, moving away from emotions, embracing your fear, believing in the good. You can't do it alone. You have to create a team, strengthen your area of influence. Then connect the bright spots and weave a mesh together.
"Avoid thinking in terms of 'us against them.' Stand in someone else's shoes. And do unto others as you would have them do unto you. Technology has proven that human beings have far more in common than we have differences; the tech platforms insidiously manipulate our biology regardless of our nation or culture. Fascist ideology, whether you call it 'the great replacement' or not, pits homogeneity against domestic enemies, who invariably champion democracy and its ideals. It's happening not just in the West, but in India, Myanmar, Sri Lanka, the Philippines. We all have our own Pol Pots who encourage mass violence based on us against them."
Indeed, trump is simply the airbrushed version of Putin, Kim, Orban, and Bashir, made more palatable for a nation that claims it operates on individuality while it thrives on fetishistic consumerism. As we should already know, the hard work of governing ourselves requires paying attention and making difficult choices. Evil lurks in the easy answer, the simple solution. The core thing we have in common is the dignity all of us deserve. Dignity demands real thinking, hard thinking, and we must not let that go.
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