Fact signalling and fact nostalgia in the data-driven society

Abstract

Post-truth tells the story of a public descending into unreason, aided and abetted by platforms and other data-driven systems. But this apparent collapse of epistemic consensus is, I argue, also dominated by loud and aggressive commitment to the idea of facts and Reason – a site where an imagined modern past is being pillaged for vestigial legitimacy. This article identifies two common practices of such reappropriation and mythologisation. (1) Fact signalling involves performative invocations of facts and Reason, which are then weaponised to discredit communicative rivals and establish affective solidarity. This is often closely tied to (2) fact nostalgia: the cultivation of an imagined past when ‘facts were facts’ and we, the good liberal subjects, could recognise facts when we saw them. Both tendencies are underwritten by a myth of connection: the still enduring narrative that maximising the circulation of information regardless of provenance or meaning will eventually yield a more rational public – even as data-driven systems tend to undermine the very conditions for such a public. Drawing on examples from YouTube-amplified ‘alternative influencers’ in the American right, and the normative discourses around fact-checking practices, I argue that this continued reliance on the vestigial authority of the modern past is a pernicious obstacle in normative debates around data-driven publics, keeping us stuck on the same dead-end scripts of heroically suspicious individuals and ignorant, irrational masses.

Trolled by the enlightenment

Post-truth is often chronicled as the end of a dream – a ‘collapse of the modern project of disciplining knowledge by promoting the scientific model as the only legitimate knowledge’ (Waisbord, 2018: 1869), aided and abetted by technologies of datafication. Yet this alleged collapse is characterised not so much by the gleeful abandonment of facts and Reason as normative ideals, but by their enduring gravitational pull. Facts and Reason are not so much in decline, but in crisis: a state in which long-entrenched social orders are reopened for contestation (see Chun, 2011). Specifically, I argue that much of what we call ‘post-truth’, across both self-proclaimed disruptors and defenders of the online information landscape, involves the eager reappropriation of the vestigial moral authority and legitimacy of facts and Reason.

Crucial to this co-optation of felt legitimacy is the cultivation of historical myths as stabilising devices. ‘Post-truth’ practices are often haunted by (or willingly summon) the spectre of an idealised, modern past when ‘facts were facts’ and we, the good liberal subjects, could recognise facts when we saw them. Beyond their familiar roles in the curation and amplification of information, technologies of datafication reaffirm these cultural sensibilities through their own foundational myth of connection: the still enduring narrative that maximising the circulation of information regardless of provenance or meaning will eventually yield a more rational public (van Dijck, 2013) – even as data-driven systems tend to undermine the very conditions for such publics (Hong, 2020b).

Below, I illustrate these dynamics through two common practices: (1) Fact signalling involves performative invocations of facts and Reason, which are then weaponised to discredit communicative rivals and establish affective solidarity. This is often closely tied to (2) fact nostalgia, in which the fantasy of a once rational society is cultivated to stabilise such appropriations of facts and Reason. These practices of reappropriation and mythologisation are found across both would-be disruptors and defenders of the informational status quo. Focusing on the post-2016, US context, I first present qualitative analyses of the ‘alternative influencer network’ (Lewis, 2018): a loose umbrella of primarily YouTube-based, US-oriented influencers, whose bid to disrupt the information status quo hinges on their performative attachments to the iconography of facts and Reason. I then examine fact-checking discourses and their relationship to diagnoses of post-truth, primarily through US-centric secondary literature, to unpack how arguments around journalistic facts and reasonable publics are being articulated against what kind of fantasies about the data-driven public.

Throughout, fact signalling and fact nostalgia, reappropriation and mythologisation, are wound together by a transgressive relation in which a value is defined only through its violation and loss, animating an indefinite project for its restoration. The paper traces three major aspects of this dynamic: (1) the figuration of the heroic individual, who is tasked with discerning facts from falsehood through their exercise of innate Reason; (2) a selective suppression of the contradictory narratives around facts and Reason as a path to group solidarity; (3) a displaced attachment to an irrational other as the perpetual guarantor of one's own legitimacy. I argue that the continued reliance on the vestigial authority of modernity is a pernicious obstacle in normative debates around datafication and post-truth, keeping public and policy debates too often stuck on the same dead-end scripts of heroically suspicious individuals and ignorant, irrational masses.

Strategies of reappropriation

Post-truth is a notoriously imprecise term. Along with fake news, it is more a rough gesture at a conflagration – ‘there's something going on there!’ – than a clear theory of temporal decline in truthiness (Carlson, 2018; Waisbord, 2018). After all, even a cursory glance at the history of media presents substantive doubts about the newness or ‘post’ness of post-truth (Darnton, 2017). Instead, these panics reflect a broader uncertainty about – and indeed, a desire to relocate – the normative anchors for truth. They index a widespread sentiment that ‘we’ (or more often, ‘they’) have suffered from a decline of Reason – whether it be the ‘irrational social justice warrior’, the overwhelmed Facebook user, or even late capitalist society in general (Harsin, 2018). Such ways of seeing have more to do with Bourdieu (1983) prises de position, in which social actors position themselves and others relative to attributions of fake news, irrationality and citizenship, than any historical decline in truthiness.

It is in this performative context that the idea of facts and Reason is invoked and weaponised. Historians of science and technology and STS researchers have long documented the historical contingency of the modern fact, showing it to be an aspirational ideal that indexes contemporary moral and political struggles, maintained through webs of communal norms rather than natural law or teleology (e.g. Daston and Galison, 2007; Fleck, 1979; Poovey, 1998). But some performances are more regulated than others. Institutionalised norms around experimental procedures or even journalistic objectivity yield fairly concrete standards by which practices of fact production may be coordinated. In contrast, fact signalling and fact nostalgia skew far more to the idea of facts and Reason as objects of loyalty and accusation, of moral claims and weltanschuung of History. Kenneth Cmiel and John Durham Peters write that ‘fact is a “pointer word”’; neither a raw piece of reality nor so socially constructed to be ‘basically fictional’, but a way for us to ‘take [something] out of the flow of experience, and mark it for consideration’ (2020: 13) Talking facts means drawing boundaries around what is up for debate and what is taken as given, and the terms by which that debate might be conducted.

Crucially, fact signalling and fact nostalgia conduct this regulatory work against the backdrop of a mythical past ‘when facts were facts’. At times, this involves mining referential material from the iconography of modernity and the Enlightenment – though not as any coherently defined historical period or project. What we find is not so much specific arguments about Kant or Diderot or Cassirer, but the amorphous afterglow of an imagined history that implies a government of facts once was achieved, and may again be possible. While scholarly histories of modernity and the Enlightenment rightly emphasise the heterogeneous and troubled nature of these periodisations, and the unstable and partial notions of facts and Reason even in, say, Diderot's Encyclopaedia, fact signalling and nostalgia tend to depict a conveniently ambiguous tapestry of the past that lionises facts and Reason as singular and heroic values. This vestigial authority is used to maintain the familiar fantasies of individuals as information-processing machines, sunlight as a disinfectant, and the marketplace of ideas.

The common thread running through these definitional problems is an agitative gap between the value and its projected other: between a rational society and its enemies, between the ‘actual’ practice of reason and its performance, between the history of modern fact and its politicised invocations. Post-truth, after all, is what you call others, not a label you yourself wear with pride. The most potent amplifiers of disinformation will often insist that they are the genuine defenders of Reason, relying on exactly that figure of authority that is being dismantled by their own hands. In other words, we find a transgressive relation, wherein the violation of a value is accompanied by its laudation, and where the violation is disavowed as laudation. Žižek (1998a) writes that such transgression is inherent: we recognise a value only through its loss or violation. Premodernity is articulated only as that which is already lost, glimpsed only through the thick smoke of the industrial factory. The fantasy of the past when ‘facts were facts’ is never to be restored, but it is that absence which incites action and attachment. It is a relationship founded on displacement, where something that is not here fuels an indefinite process of change, conflict and disruption. This absent guarantor proves difficult to dispel or overcome precisely because of its phantasmal quality. Each concrete event of contradiction or disappointment can be isolated as a case of false prophets, protecting the absent value as a normative horizon. The idea of a ‘properly’ modern society thus endures precisely through loud pronouncements of its decline.

Fact signalling

Symptoms of this transgressive relation manifest across the spectrum of post-truth engagement. Elsewhere, I define fact signalling as a strategic invocation of the idea of facts and Reason weaponised against one's political enemies (Hong, 2020a). Fact signalling leverages performative trappings of research and analysis, from the lexicon of formal logic to the theatrical flourish of scientific papers. It claims a heroic loyalty to logical argumentation as the only legitimate instrument of expression, positioning the signaller in a grand struggle for modern values. While fact signalling does not strictly belong to one type of political or media actor, it has proven especially effective today for what Lewis (2018) calls ‘alternative influencers’: an umbrella of platform-amplified micro-celebrities loosely united against an imagined ‘radical Left’. These would-be disruptors assail incumbent institutionalised expertise – emblematised by the bogeyman of MSM (mainstream media) – by claiming themselves as the true defenders of facts, Reason, truth and objectivity. Here, what is being signalled is not specific, itemised factual claims that might be verified one way or another, but ‘facts’ as a grand moral principle to be invoked against the irrational other.

One emblematic case is the American conservative Ben Shapiro: a self-proclaimed disruptor who dresses up in the quintessentially establishment brands of Harvard (Law School graduate) and the New York Times (#1 bestseller). Shapiro presents himself as a fearless truth-teller silenced by the mainstream media, downplaying extensive ‘old money’ funding he has received from benefactors like the fracking billionaires Wilks Brothers. The Daily Wire, Shapiro's brainchild, has been among the greatest beneficiaries of Facebook's capacity for algorithmic amplification. In 2020 and 2021, it led all American news publishers by a wide margin in user engagement (Parks, 2021) – a feat achieved through a network of Potemkin news publishers tasked with amplifying The Daily Wire stories on the platform (Zekeria, 2020). While the practice violated Facebook policy, Mark Zuckerberg personally intervened to protect the outlet from moderation (Mac and Silverman, 2021). Shapiro's far-reaching media brand defines itself explicitly through fact signalling, emblematised by the unofficial slogan: facts don’t care about your feelings. The inherent contradiction of a bombastic war cry in the name of dispassionate Reason is telling. Shapiro's product, delivered primarily through fast-talking YouTube videos and well-funded college speaking tours, offers a confident, adversarial style, in which a battery of arguments are launched rapid-fire to create an impression of overwhelming logic. In 2017, the New York Times duly underwrote Shapiro's own PR image as a Man of Reason, labelling him a ‘cool kid's philosopher’ who dissects ‘arguments with a lawyer's skill and references to Aristotle’ (Tavernise, 2017).

Shapiro fills but one niche in a spectrum. A more cerebral image is provided by figures like Sam Harris, a neuroscientist and a prominent New Atheist, while former comedian and UFC commentator Joe Rogan offers a more down-to-earth style. Each offers stylistic variations on the common theme of fact signalling: a figure like Dan Bongino offers the more aggressive variant, ‘Get ready to hear the truth about America on a show that's not immune to the facts’. Central to this positioning is the conceit that influencers like Shapiro are simply trying to be good modern subjects, bringing common sense facts and Reason to a society that has succumbed to post-modern relativism and disinformation. A common refrain is that the influencers are ‘just asking questions’, and that they are empowering the audience to make up their own mind. As one long-time listener of the recently convicted Sandy Hook denier Alex Jones put it (Tarrant, 2018):

Does Alex [Jones] believe everything he says? Probably not […] but being unafraid to question things out loud and propose different thought experiments has a long history in this country.

Parks (2020) shows how the Intellectual Dark Web, with which Shapiro is often associated, painstakingly describes itself as ‘reasonable thinkers’ – the adults in the room. ‘There's a certain level of hatred and tribalism that's building up in American politics that I hadn’t seen before’, Shapiro exclaims in one video, eliciting hearty agreement from his host, Jordan Peterson (Peterson, 2019). In an episode of The Ben Shapiro Show on YouTube, the prominent skeptic Michael Shermer warmly hails Shapiro as a fellow classical liberal ‘in favour of Reason, and logic, and empiricism’ – which, Shapiro responds, stands in contrast to ‘the Left [which] has become so focused on … identity politics and Unreason’ (Shapiro, 2018). Such cultivation of righteous affects is, again, offered in a variety of flavours for consumption: where Ben Shapiro offers a debating club style dubbed the ‘fully automatic verbal assault rifle’ (The Young Turks, 2017), we might elsewhere find long-running radio host Glenn Beck's combination of ‘wild chalkboard expositions’ with ‘sobbing monologues’ (Jutel, 2018: 256).

These discursive patterns are often accompanied by a performance and aesthetic that we might shorthand evidence theatre. As if quasi-Peircian indexes, we find diagrams, legal documents, academic journal articles, and other such visible objects used to anchor practices of fact signalling. Data and algorithms feature regularly in this array of props, reflecting their enduring cultural image as harbingers of mysterious and hidden truths. Following the 2020 US presidential elections, Michael J. Lindell, the pillow company CEO and avid Trump supporter now known as the ‘MyPillow Guy’, released a documentary titled ‘Absolute Proof’ (2021) that claimed to reveal exactly how the election was manipulated. There, images of internet activity logs, data management dashboards, and even electronic ballot technology patent filings, make up a cinematography of data apophenia (Steyerl, 2016): the sheer overwhelming reel of evidentiary objects cultivating the sense that indeed, there is enough smoke to suspect fire.

Performativity is no guarantee of invalidity. Institutional certification of evidence is also known to leverage strategic performances to meet and cultivate audience expectations: Gates (2013) has shown how CCTV footage is regularly produced for public consumption, with artefacts like timestamps sometimes added on artificially, in order to communicate a sense of ‘computational objectivity’. The twist is that the fact signalling of alternative influencers tends to leverage the established credibility of institutional expertise in order to discredit them. Journalistic cues, for example, are reappropriated in a visual illustration of the attempted transfer of legitimacy: notorious conspiracy theorist and supplement peddler Alex Jones fills his newsdesk with printouts and clippings of evidence – most of which are in fact articles from his own Infowars outlet, and whose content tend to be copied and recombined from mainstream media sources. Such evidence theatre joins what Chatterjee (2022) calls numbers without experts – a populist decoupling of the veridical authority of numbers from institutional expertise.

These performances tie specific grievances and arguments (around political correctness, transgender rights, journalistic objectivity etc.) to a grander, pseudo-historical horizon through the language of facts and Reason – demonstrating the importance of a nostalgic, mythological backdrop for the process of reappropriation. Here, facts and Reason are presented as the shining jewels of a highly selective imagination of Western civilisation as the ultimate source of veridical authority. Shapiro's 2019 book (and another New York Times best seller), The Right Side of History: How Reason and Moral Purpose Made the West Great, is unabashed in this regard, down to Libertas’ hand grasping her torch on the cover. In it, Shapiro explicitly links his proclaimed loyalty to facts and Reason with the glorification of Western and Judeo-Christian civilisation. Brief commentaries on Aristotelian eudaimonia or French existentialists add up to a grand narrative of the West losing its Reason, the cast of villains ranging from transgender rights to postmodern theory. These invocations of God and civilisation return inexorably to the familiar bugbears of American conservative politics: ‘Western civilisation was rooted in good, eternal, immutable truths’, Shapiro suggests, but this is under threat now that ‘people in the West are resonating with the spirit of Marxism’ (Peterson, 2019).

Different brands of fact signalling will often concoct their own mixture of historical tropes. There is the race-obsessed theory of the Great Replacement, which interprets all world events as part of a vast non-white invasion of white civilisation, or Alex Jones’ career-long diatribe against the vaguely left and cosmopolitan ‘globalists’. But these differences often constitute variations of emphasis and strategy, many of which return to the central theme that the ‘West’ is losing its Reason and must be restored through their truth-telling. In Shapiro's case, it is the ancient edifice of Judeo-Christian civilisation that is elevated to the altar, while the Enlightenment is scolded for allegedly opening the door to secular, postmodern amorality. But these historical and philosophical references serve primarily as stylised and interchangeable tropes, akin to inspirational quotes or Van Gogh paintings printed onto mugs and T-shirts, rather than building blocks for a coherent epistemology. Whether Aristotle or Kant, what matters is how these figures are used to set up a grand historical narrative in which proper Western values are under siege from irrational enemies. Thus Steve Bannon, for instance, misconstrues the Enlightenment as a doctrine of incremental reform, against which he presents an apocalyptic vision of Western volk under siege and requiring violent revolution (Alexander, 2019). Fact signalling seeks its roots in a deliberately ahistorical curation of Western civilisation as the cradle of Reason – which, in true transgressive fashion, is perenially both lost and on the cusp of heroic restoration.

Fact nostalgia

As alternative influencers knit their mythological fabric of facts and Reason, we find a distinct, but comparable, form of dependence on the factual past in the self-proclaimed defenders of the informational status quo. One widespread response to scandals like Cambridge Analytica and Brexit in 2016 was to return to a stringent defence of classical liberal values: that the crisis can and must be overcome through further education, transparency, information, expertise: in other words, by doubling down on the myth of connection. This sentiment found clear expression in the March for Science of 2017. Catalysed by the Trump government's more-or-less denial of climate change, the international protest brought forth a Sisyphean wit that reasserted facts and science as common sense that had long held sway and had recently been forgotten. ‘Ice has no agenda/it just melts’, quips one protestor's sign from Washington D.C.; ‘I can’t believe I’m marching for facts’, says another. Together, they sketch something of that wider sentiment in reaction to the felt trauma: that the institution of modern society still stands, and that we can return to a reassuring normal.

Fact-checking provided the policy correlate to this sentiment of repairing the factual fabric. For many policymakers, academics, and the beleaguered platforms themselves, fact-checking offered a specific remedy that would leave the wider information economy intact. The rhetorical commitment to free speech could stay, since fact-checking would obviate the need for direct censorship; users could continue to be trusted to choose their own information diet and process it rationally; platforms could remain popularity-driven to large extents. Following Noortje Marres, I suggest that fact-checking discourse entails a ‘convenient’ nostalgic position, one which is buttressed by a highly ‘creative interpretation of the recent past’ (2018: 424) – or what Marwick et al. (2021) call ‘the myth of an epistemically consistent past’. The idea that the modern fact had worked pretty well until a recent, platform-facilitated injury depends on a far smoother and unified imagination of modernity than history would suggest. Journalistic objectivity, and its related elevation of transparency as an axiomatic ideal, is often treated as a venerable modern institution, but it was historically a fragile and temporary tendency concentrated in the mid-20th century, at least in the American context (Schudson, 2015). Social media platforms have long worked to preserve their own version of this fantasy via the myth of connection: namely, those rational publics are best served by a frictionless spread of information, and that maximally informed users in a maximally transparent environment will eventually produce rational outputs (e.g. Gillespie, 2010; Phillips, 2020; van Dijck, 2013). But it is precisely this myth, encapsulated in the endurance of the metaphor ‘the marketplace of ideas’, which has proven so fertile for contemporary forms of post-truth. Platforms like Facebook are built, technologically and economically, to discount truth value from calculations of reach, engagement, or ‘relevance’. Indeed, many of Facebook's own fact-checking partners have since described their efforts as public relations exercises, co-opting the credibility of the partners to maintain a Potemkin veneer of factuality (Levin, 2018). More broadly, Turner (2019) has argued that the formula of maximising data-driven connectivity to maximise rational publics and democratic deliberation is essentially a retroactive historical fiction, blanketing over the ways in which mass media technologies, notably the radio, repeatedly demonstrated their ability to facilitate authoritarianism. This insistence on seeing connectivity as inherently liberal and rational reflects what some have called the horror of communication: a recurrent desire to master and neutralise the dread of the unknown that remains so crucial to data's cultural allure (Jutel, 2022; also see Daston and Galison, 2007). Myths of connection thus connect datafication and post-truth at a cultural and epistemic level, beyond the question of whether certain algorithmic systems encourage filter bubbles or radicalisation.

To identify fact nostalgia in its midst is not to condemn fact-checking as a whole, but to identify the grounds upon which it models its intervention. The growth of fact-checking in the 21^st-century US journalism was strongly driven by the profession's discourses of objectivity and news values (Graves et al., 2015). In turn, fact-checking relied on certain figurations of a reasoning public – that is, ordinary citizens who respect the same values and can undertake the necessary labour of verification and education (Marietta et al., 2015). Yet there is substantial evidence indicating that fact-checking has bounded effectiveness. Fact-checking appears to often succeed at correcting individual falsehoods, but results remain mixed on whether this correction carries through to broader attitudes and beliefs, as might be expected of a rational subject (Carey et al., 2022; Kim, forthcoming; Nyhan, 2020; Nyhan et al., 2020).

Another issue here is that fact-checking as a social practice relies on a certain regression of credibility, in which fact-checking initiatives rely on indicators of trustworthiness, such as industry expertise and financial independence that themselves draw from earlier norms of journalistic objectivity. Thus early, post-9/11 initiatives like FactCheck.org insisted on appearing ‘dispassionate’ (Marietta et al., 2015: 583), while more recent computational approaches like Factmata hope that new automated techniques like natural language processing will add to the legitimacy. Yet since such gestures repackage the trustworthiness of traditional gatekeepers, with no guarantee of an increase in public faith; research suggests that public attitudes toward fact-checking are often divided, including along partisan lines (Nyhan and Reifler, 2015). It is as if to suggest that if people do not trust ‘mainstream media’, perhaps they will trust an independent fact-checking initiative often run by (ex-)mainstream media journalists. The regression of credibility is another instance of the underlying belief that the information environment was more or less rational and healthy until the recent crises, and that it can therefore be restored through the guardians of that older order. Quite aside from the question of whether the news is made up of ‘facts’ that can be ‘checked’ in a consistent way, or whether fact-checkers are as accurate and impartial as they claim to be (e.g. Graves, 2016; Nieminen and Sankari, 2021; Uscinski and Butler, 2013; Yarrow, 2021), fact nostalgia points to the models of fact-making and fact-consuming that underlie the project of fact-checking in the first place.

Schematically, then, fact nostalgia involves an effort to (re)claim the legitimacy of facts and Reason against its enemy through a selective and moralising invocation of ‘modernity’ – an effort which is charged with affective intensity as a point of solidarity and optimism. The point here is not to equate fact signalling with fact nostalgia at the substantive level, as if both are equally (un)faithful to evidence and logic. Such an argument would quickly fall into an ‘anything goes’ relativism. Nor is it to say that facts and Reason operate here as entirely empty signifiers, to be shaped into anything and everything with equal ease. What holds constant, rather, is that tendency to look to an imagined past through a transgressive lens: to perceive that once, we lived truly according to fact and Reason to build a stable, happy society, a gift that we have now lost – and to return time and again to this loss as the engine of solidarity and legitimacy, to spin yet another story about its imminent overcoming.

Mythologising the factual past

These strategies of reappropriation thus depend on a mythologised past as a sprawling tapestry of referential material. Invocations of facts and Reason often rely on a certain impression of history, in which (Western) civilisation is progressively Enlightened into the rule of Reason over all things, and an informed, rational public is demonstrably possible – until, that is, our lived present of crisis and loss. Such a horizon serves as a sufficiently distant and hazy ‘before’ against which specific social and political claims can be sustained. For some, this mythical time is emblematised by a more recent postwar order in which, ostensibly, news media was relatively objective and politics was less polarised. For others, it is a grand lineage throughout the ages composed of marble sculptures and heroic thinkers as the very stuff of civilisation. Yet if the historical terms of reference are imprecise, what is more consistent – and effective – are the kinds of practices and subject positions that these invocations authorise.

The heroic individual

The individual subject – as a consumer, as a user, as an audience member, as a citizen – is consistently called on to embody the imagined dynamics of heroic rationality. Whether in educating themselves through fact-checking tools or in alternative influencers’ exhortations to ‘do their own research’, the individual is expected to fulfil the virtuous connection between communication and truth. This ‘good liberal subject’ (Hong, 2020b: 2, 48) does not merely exercise Reason, but is endlessly obligated to do so against the odds. The general relation between Reason and individual autonomy, of course, has been central to the Enlightenment since Kant's (1996) description of aufklarung as the subject's overcoming of ‘immaturity’. Yet, as Foucault observed, this overcoming represented not a moment of absolute sovereignty, but a ‘modification of the preexisting relation linking will, authority, and the use of reason’ (1984: 100) – one which still left the boundaries of individual authority ambiguous. Historical permutations of the scientific self has repeatedly run up against this struggle to draw reliable lines between the individual's sovereign exercise of Reason and the social and technological discipline required to ensure the former does not go astray (Porter, 2014; Shapin, 2008). In this long context, the post-truth milieu accentuates individual responsibility amidst a growing scarcity of structural support. As a fearless truth-seeker against the mainstream media, or dutiful citizen trying to fact-check a torrent of information, the individual is effectively asked to know the facts within a platform economy built to undermine their ability to keep track of information and its circulation. Here is the paradox of the crisis: the pursuit of facts and Reason as grand, aspirational ideals demand that individuals function as autonomous, critical verification machines. But it is precisely the affordances of data-driven information networks, from the prioritisation of decontextualised sharing, to the opacity of algorithmic curation, that increasingly militate against individuals’ ability to ‘know for themselves’.

In the fact signalling of the alternative influencer, this heroic sovereignty manifests as a hypermasculine and adversarial rendition of Reason. Facts and logic are consistently wielded as weapons with which to dismantle and mock the irrationality of the interlocutor, rather than, say, tapping into the cultural imagery of the dispassionate analyst or the Popperian principle of falsification. Epistemological conherence is eschewed in favour of adversarial opportunism. The key here is the regularity of these affective performances, whose primary product is not so much a growing archive of empirical facts or theories, but to afford the feeling of being factual and rational, the ability to occupy and live out this heroic subjectivity (e.g. Boler and Davis, 2018). Accordingly, alternative influencers’ everyday content tends to focus on chronicling the Unreason of the enemy. Much of Ben Shapiro's content revolves around the figure of the social justice warrior or the ‘extreme’ feminist, reliably eliciting loud cheers and sympathetic outrage from his predominantly conservative audiences (The Daily Wire, 2019). Some of Shapiro's most popular YouTube videos thus advertise him ‘DESTROYING’ something called Transgenderism, ‘CRUSHING’ a question on Atheism, and ‘SMACKING DOWN’ on Black Lives Matter. These staged, ritualistic victories over the ‘radical left’ are glossed as a logical consequence of factual and rational analysis – a connection which remains crucial for bestowing these practices with the mantle of heroic rationality. Such performances are better understood not in terms of their stated epistemic operations, but the affects and subject positionalities that they offer through the conceit of fact-making.

Such figurations of the heroic individual leverage a long and especially American heritage of thinking about the individual as besieged by totalitarian media. Wendy Chun describes a postwar dominance of the ‘transgressive hypothesis’, which posits that modern media corrupt free publics into Orwellian husks, against which the individual must struggle for authenticity. Here, to be free is to think different, to transgress, and even to offend as a matter of course (2021: 75–77; Melley, 2000). In a similar spirit, Turner (2019) suggests that postwar America came to define the dangers of mass media as a (Soviet/Nazi) totalitarian homogeneity – to which the remedy ever becomes the idolisation of decentralised, individualised expression. This does not mean a bald-faced rejection of facts by the expressive subject, but a search for the kind of facts that can serve as the ingredients of expression and solidarity. Fact signalling thus leverages a generationally accumulated symbolic cool around adversarial performances of rationality.

Looming behind these 20th-century sensibilities is a longer modern tendency to theorise Reason as a masculine mastery of the self. While the Enlightenment is hardly a homogeneous intellectual project, the conceptualisation of dispassionate Reason (or Reason emerging through controlled passion) frequently relied on contrasts like the feminine/domestic and masculine/public (Rooney, 1991). Later, the emergence of race as a dominant classifier for the differential capacities of human beings in the 19th century was supported by a division of ‘the sentimental woman, who possessed both a heightened faculty of feeling and a more transparent animal nature, and the less susceptible and rational man, thereby relieved from the burdens of embodiment’ (Schuller, 2018: 16; Yao, 2021). It is this colder and warlike image of Reason that tends to be championed in fact signalling's mythical past, eschewing the many other strands of this historical milieu – such as the Enlightenment's complicated engagement with sensibility and sentimentality (O’Neal, 1996; Riskin, 2002).

This selective rendition of ‘good old’ facts and Reason provides its audience with a jouissance of heroism and righteousness: to enjoy the gladiatorial combat of ‘fully automatic verbal assault rifles’, the sheer speed and clarity of the action, while also disavowing that viscerality through the conceit of cold heroic Reason. Such theatre can stoke collective resentment, especially around the perceived crisis of whiteness and the West that Ganesh (2020) describes as ‘white thymos’, while wrapping in a deflective cloak of statistics and logic. And where influencers like Shapiro emphasise the ‘cool’ logical veneer, others lean more heavily into the bombast. The Golden One, a moderately popular Swedish YouTuber and fitness coach (and self-proclaimed philosopher prince), offers a mélange of anti-‘liberal leftist’ ideology, self-help advice for a properly masculine self, dubious health supplements, and excursions into Norse paganism – all against his favoured enemy, the ‘homo-global attitude’. The Golden One's branding, carried into his merchandise, tap directly into the symbolic cool of this militant and heroic Western history. His ‘Legio Gloria’ clothing lineup prints medieval crests and Western mythological figures like Perseus onto hoodies and shorts. They are usually modelled by The Golden One himself, who prefers to exhibit his muscles against grand natural landscapes in a rough allusion to landscape painting. His social and political arguments – for instance, that the husband must protect his wife against her own bad decisions, or that immigration threatens Europe's ‘Proud Sons of Rome and Macedon’ (The Golden One, 2019) – thus operate through an aesthetic that constantly reaches back into an imagined past for not merely validation, but excitement.

The demands on the subject manifest differently in fact-checking discourses, but again grounded in a moralised duty to know and to discern the truth – that ordinary citizens will use these tools to fulfil a rational public sphere that never quite was (Mejia et al., 2018). There is a strong moralising dimension to this line of thinking, which constantly draws ‘public divisions between virtuous knowledge and sinful non-knowledge’ (Marres, 2018: 439), making it possible to attribute each outbreak of doubt or falsehood to individuals who were not rational enough, whether due to a lack of capability or a lack of moral strength. Again, these normative contours are replicated and amplified by the myth of connection, which supposes that within a networked public sphere, individuals will function sufficiently like rational information-processing machines. The corollary is that deviant results are more likely to be attributed to individual failure and responsibility. This manifests, as I argue elsewhere (Hong, 2021), in a faith in transparency as a general corrective to every kind of algorithmic harm. The public becomes burdened with duties it cannot possibly fulfil: to read every terms of service, understand every complex case of algorithmic harm and fact-check every piece of news. The push for transparency, including through fact-checking, mobilises the ordinary citizen as individualised solutions for the structural flaws of the data-driven information environment. Hence, for example, disinformation and hate speech is routinely amplified through extensive media coverage, under the hope that the public will then sift through the information and sort the truth from falsehood (Phillips, 2020). Fact-checking asks the ordinary subject to close the gap between an imagined rational public and the lived experience of the frenetic network.

Most tellingly, whereas fact-checking and other literacy-focused approaches often focus on the individual capacity for verification, ethnographic research suggests that people often rally behind falsehoods because they help give shape to deeper lived experiences. In her research on conservative evangelical groups in the US, Tripodi (2018) shows how people fall into disinformation rabbit holes, not through a lack of research, but rather an abundance of research that is filtered through alternative interpretive frames. Recasting contemporary disinformation against the Satanic Panics of late 20th century America, Milner and Phillips (2020) argue that what viral messages do is to tap into ‘deep memetic frames’ – patterns, tropes, frames, that dispose us to interpret new events as extensions of a familiar and grand story. We may also think of anthropologist Victor Turner's (1974) root paradigms, which describe not so much the substantive factual claims themselves, but enduring tendencies in how a community tends to make sense of things. Such paradigms govern how a cultivated mind might turn left rather than right at a crossroads, attaching itself more readily to certain stereotypes or narratives. These perspectives highlight the disjunctures between what fact-based approaches expect of the post-truth situation, and how people draw on information to stitch together a liveable, usable interpretation of the world. To try and be a good liberal subject is to take on the burdens of excessive information flows, to become the heroic sunlight that disinfects society of falsehood – even if it is increasingly clear that the very structure of our online information landscape undermines our capability to live up to this role.

Suppressive solidarity

If the heroic individual is thus called to the work of exposure and enlightenment, this subject positionality is secured only through the active curation of what facts and Reason are meant to look like, historically and normatively. Amongst alternative influencers, this often involves a parasitic relationship with the irrational enemy as a stabilising anchor. Simon Strick calls it a ‘metamedial’ tendency, in which alternative influencers incessantly criticise mainstream media and traditional experts as corrupt while simultaneously relying on them to legitimise their own analysis as factual and rational (2020: 213). One example is Tim Pool, who presents himself as an independently thinking journalist connecting the dots that the mainstream media will not. In his YouTube content, Pool might present Pew Center opinion polls or Science research papers, but largely through secondary coverage from mainstream media rather than by examining the original publications. The pool will brandish the PhDs and university credentials of an atmospheric scientist precisely in order to discredit the scientific consensus on climate change. In such performances, the most traditional indicators of institutionalised Reason are presented with the same flourish of the smiling ‘authentic’ artisan on a bottle of factory-made condiment. In ‘Absolute Proof’, Michael Lindell also turns to such traditional markers of expertise, culminating in a ‘Dr Shiva … [who] has 4 MIT degrees, he's an expert in system science’ (Absolute Proof, 2021: 48, 58) – that is, one V.A. Shiva Ayyadurai, better known for his outlandish claims, ranging from COVID misinformation to seeking credit for inventing e-mail. More broadly, many of the newer ‘alternative influencers’ have adapted techniques forged by an earlier generation of American conservative media: Breitbart, in particular, relied on mainstream media as both a crucial source of material and a perennial adversary against which to burnish its truth-telling credentials (Roberts and Wahl-jorgensen, 2021; also see Nadler, 2020). To deflect scrutiny, influencers like Pool and Shapiro repeat the disclaimer that listeners should ultimately ‘do their own research’. Of course, it is precisely through this curated diet that these influencers reprise legacy media's much-critiqued role as gatekeepers, offering guidance on which mainstream news reports are to be suspected of conspiracy, or which interpretive frames should be used to see through them.

This parasitic relation – to not only mainstream media but longstanding cultural proxies for institutional facts – adds up to a suppressive solidarity: a togetherness that is founded on, and constantly militating against, a foundational contradiction. Drawing on studies of prophetic cults, Amarasingam and Argentino (2020) argue that when specific empirical claims, like accusations or prophecies, are shown to be false, the active suppression of this setback becomes an occasion for reconfirming loyalties and rallying the base. For fact nostalgia, this dynamic is visible in the stubborn persistence that platforms and algorithms can supply a neutral solution to the disinformation problem. Although the last decade has seen a considerable mainstreaming of critical perspectives, the official position of much of the tech industry remains firmly committed to the narrative that more connection is the only possible answer to the crisis of facts. In 2019, Mark Zuckerberg, beset by high-profile scrutiny like the 2018 US Senate hearings, chose to respond with a much-publicised speech at Georgetown University. There, he reaffirms this idyllic liberal landscape in no uncertain terms, proclaiming that ‘giving everyone a voice empowers the powerless’, and that ‘people having the power to express themselves at scale [through social media] is a new kind of force in the world’ (Meta, 2019).

This position reproduces the deep contradiction between the liberal democratic hopes bestowed on data-driven information systems, and those technologies’ agnosticism towards meaning and the quality of information – a contradiction that goes well beyond social media platforms, and is deeply into the basic tenets of datafication itself. Big data analytics, for instance, fundamentally relies on an indifference to the data's meaning and even utility, because this data must always remain open for further exploratory analyses, recombining different datasets and analytical methods to discover unforeseen correlations that can then be marketed as ‘insights’ (Betancourt, 2014). Such indifference is indispensable because it is what allows for data-driven systems to be meaninglessly scaled in Anna Tsing's (2012) sense. Here, scale functions as a generalising and modular attitude in which technical tools can treat a staggering variety of social situations as essentially the same kinds of correlation problems. These orientations themselves are not practiced with surgical disinterest. Just as modern theorisations of scientific objectivity came hand in hand with new expectations for an ‘objective self’ (Porter, 2014), the technical tendencies of data-driven systems are often wound up with hardline attitudes about data's objectivity that critical researchers have described as ‘enchanted determinism’ (Campolo and Crawford, 2020) or the cathedral of computation (Finn, 2017). At its logical limit lies what Dan McQuillan calls a culture of ultrarationalism in data-driven thinking: ‘a sociopathic commitment to statistical rationality’ (2022: 93) in which to approach a social or political problem objectively is to be willing to endorse any conclusion, no matter how morally or philosophically questionable – such as in contemporary facial recognition's replication of physiognomy and biological essentialism (Agüera y Arcas et al., 2017; Stark and Hutson, 2022). Datafication's own troubled relationship with the temptation of epistemic certainty facilitates practices of fact signalling and nostalgia, through the common currency of idealised facts as reservoirs of certainty – indeed, facts that ‘don’t care about your feelings’.

But indifference does not secure neutrality (e.g. Rieder, 2016 on the Bayes classifier). As demonstrated by the ongoing scholarly shift from the notion of algorithmic bias to algorithmic harm, the fact that an algorithm is ‘blind’ to categories like race or gender does little to prevent the reproduction of historical disparities or emergent discriminatory effects (Alkhatib, 2021; Birhane, 2021; Dave, 2019). When the myth of connection decrees that good speech will ‘naturally’ win out in an unregulated environment, it encourages this indifference to be built into our information systems, which then become less capable of understanding or correcting the proliferation of ‘bad’ speech as well. Social media thus remains dominated by what Marres calls a ‘behavioural vision’ that ‘concep[tualises] users as influencable subjects, not knowledge agents’ (2018: 435). In this model, the subject is primarily theorised as banks of commodifiable attention, and not actors that come to know things one way or another. Meanwhile, the tech industry is excused as well-meaning actors whose contribution to post-truth, if any, must have been an unintended mistake. Thus Mark Zuckerberg has spent the better part of the last decade apologising in words while doubling down in action (Hall, 2020), and enterprising tech workers have swapped developer jobs for self-help books and lucrative tours performing public repentance (Farrell, 2020). Such ‘hopeful ignorance’ (Chun, 2021: 3) continues to dilute the significance of platform disasters and historical harms, insisting that the same technoculture, the same companies and the same few individuals, can correct the temporary mishaps on the path to an informed and data-driven society.

Attachment at a distance

In a transgressive dynamic, modernity looms as a constitute lack: that which is always already lost, and a constantly receding horizon against which present endeavours must find meaning. The fact signalling of alternative influencers is sustained by an everyday obsession with the irrational other – a bogeyman often crafted in familiar recombinations of the ‘radical left’, mainstream media, and knowledge institutions like universities. This relation is not simply a hypocritical one, in which the hypocrisy undermines the validity of the normative ideal. Rather, it stages an indefinite struggle of overcoming the absent or lost other – which, in Žižek's account, is at the heart of jouissance (Glynos, 2008).

Or, in the language of affect: Sara Ahmed writes that hate operates as a form of attachment that generates the endangered and aggrieved body (2014: 42). And insofar as this attachment creates an unresolvable predicate (the final purification of that body, whether the individual body or the body politic), it provides an indefinitely sustainable relation. This must not be confused as the individuals in question possessing an infinite capacity for hate; rather, it is a mediated pattern of feeling through which individuals become primed with an open wound, a sensitivity, a willing trigger, for new opportunities to hate – until, finally, it genuinely feels like it ‘comes from inside’ (ibid.: 50). It is then no surprise that even as this drive for purity seeks to eliminate its identified enemy, it also requires an indefinite and obsessive attachment with that enemy. Fact signalling generates this network of affective attachment not around any coherent methodology for the production of facts, but the very relation of adversarial struggle in the name of facts and Reason. It is the vanquishing of the irrational other that provides jouissance, that double-bind of satisfaction and anxiety.

Across fact, signalling and fact nostalgia, the elevation of the idea of facts and Reason into an object of solidarity requires a fixation with others who supposedly do not or cannot exercise their Reason. In the paranoia of the alternative influencer, it is we the few, the brave, who seek rational debate while besieged by an imagined horde of irrational enemies. In the rhetoric of fact-checking, it is the ‘third-party effect’-like conceit that some of us (the educated, the tech-savvy, the self-disciplined) can discern the truth in the news, but others cannot; that some of us wouldn’t fall for the hucksters in the information landscape, but others (the children, the elderly, the uneducated) might. In schematic terms, these are interpassive relations: a formula of ‘not me, but another for me’. I may not know for myself, and I may not experience authentically, but someone or something else has done so in my stead (Matviyenko, 2015; Žižek, 1998b). This deferral and distance maintains that indefinite horizon for the reassertion of the grand project of facts and Reason.

At the heart of this messy intersection of attachment, hatred, and interpassive jouissance is an anxiety that one cannot ever truly be the heroic sovereign, the good liberal subject who is sufficiently in the mastery of Reason. Kalpokas (2018) argues that post-truth constitutes a romantic escape from this crisis of self-sufficiency. The vigorous commitment to facts and Reason, especially when expressed as a moralising injunction against the other (I have found the facts, you have not), constitutes an anxious response to the lingering sense that finding our way in the contemporary information environment may always leave us vulnerable, gullible, and complicit. In this sense, the viral spread of falsehoods on social media often functions as affiliative facts: claims which may or may not be technically accurate, but confirm and extend a community's deep memetic frames, helping assuage this anxiety of the inability to know for myself (Kalpokas, 2019).

There is one last source of ironic disjuncture. Where fact signalling and fact nostalgia tend to repaint modernity and Enlightenment as a relatively smooth and inevitable march towards Reason, we know that the Enlightenment was often a combative thing, an instrument of transgression wielded against the establishment. The tools and methods of modern fact often emerged through contentious political conflicts, and especially around underdogs’ search for novel sources of legitimacy. Deringer (2018) shows that when post-1688 England saw an early modern mainstreaming of calculative reason, numbers were not immediately perceived as neutral and universal. Rather, numbers were enlisted as flexible ‘instruments of dispute’ (ibid.: xviii) – a space where those currently lacking in political influence might find an alternative path to persuasive authority. Ironically, the history of Enlightenment Reason or the modern fact as a politically contingent instrument – a history that is often de-emphasised in fact signalling and fact nostalgia – is nevertheless instructive for our present situation. Just as there was no single Enlightenment, united in an apolitical and universal project of a society governed by Reason, the imagined legacy of the Enlightenment serves as an opportunistic space for new forms of transgressive politics in the name of facts and Reason.

The realism problem

Fisher (2009) famously observed that we are now more capable of thinking about the end of the world than the end of capitalism. Moreover, the kind of ends that are imaginable – techno-dystopias, climate apocalypse – themselves tend to affirm the impossibility of thinking outside capitalism. This closure generates its own momentum: it becomes difficult to imagine a viable alternative because no viable alternatives have presented themselves for so long.

A similar realism problem afflicts post-truth discourse – a term whose very epithet, like post-modernism, stands in for the absence of an alternative. Post-truth has often been described as the erosion of some form of common ground, leading to an inability to agree on the basic premises about the social reality that would enable substantive disagreement or debate, to begin with. In one of his later works, Latour (2018: Essay 6) asked: if ‘ordinary people’ should seem afflicted with disbelief or patently wrong beliefs, isn’t it largely because the institutional order that was supposed to secure the bounds of reasonable beliefs have demonstrated such repeated incompetence and bad faith? In other words, what we may be seeing is the erosion of a postwar network of informational values – that is, normative relationships between notions like expertise, objectivity, and verification. Fact signalling and fact nostalgia articulate post-truth neither as a decline of belief in facts and Reason, nor some new order of epistemic practices to take the helm, but as transitional and retrograde symptoms of this interregnum stage. They are neither the future nor the past, but convoluted expressions of the realism problem. The task facing us, then, is twofold: more immediately, how might we better understand and critique post-truth practices by approaching them as transgressive reappropriations of incumbent epistemic norms? And looking beyond, what new forms of epistemic norms and expectations might be forged against the overdue decline of the myth of connection? That is: what good does it really do to maximise the circulation of information, or to seek to render all decisions, algorithms, and expert judgment ‘transparent’? What would data-driven publics look like beyond the enduring myth of connection, and what kind of role might the still powerful authority of facts and Reason play towards a different epistemic order?