The End of Reality

Roger Berkowitz

Ewa Płonowska Ziarek turns to Hannah Arendt to argue that digital disinformation is threatening reality itself. 

In a February 2020 article in The Atlantic entitled “The Billion Dollar Disinformation Campaign to Reelect the President,” McKay Coppins offers disturbing insights into the digital extraction of big data used to target political advertising and to modify voter behavior. Developed by Cambridge Analytica in 2016, the temporal and geopolitical implications of these techniques extend well beyond the 2020 US campaign and its aftermath. Alarmed by the staggering amount of data collected on voters, Coppins argues that the damage that results from these massive and highly personalized political disinformation techniques includes not only a widely discussed political crisis of democracy in the digital age, but also and primarily the loss of a shared reality. As he puts it, “Should it prevail in 2020, the election’s legacy will be clear – not a choice between parities or candidates or policy platforms, but a referendum on reality itself.” More and more frequently discussed by computer scientists, political theorists, and the wider public alike, the loss of reality has not only prevailed but intensified: As data and computer scientist Sinan Aral puts it briefly, we are approaching “the end of reality” (24–55).