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‘Emerging techno-fascism threat to democracy’

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THE media is at the centre of a battle on how to build conversations that can shape the world and a better future, a member of the AmaBhungane Institute, Sam Sole, has said.

THE media is at the centre of a battle on how to build conversations that can shape the world and a better future, a member of the AmaBhungane Institute, Sam Sole, has said.

BY MUNESU NYAKUDYA in Grahamstown, South Africa

Speaking at the official opening of the Highway Africa conference in Grahamstown, South Africa, yesterday, Sole said most influential people were now using the internet and had the power to abuse it.

“We meet at a time of crisis for journalism locally and globally. Media and journalism are at the centre of a civilisational battle about what sort of communication happens and how it shapes our world and our future,” Sole said.

“That is because now the billion richest and most influential people on the planet are more or less continuously plugged into a digital reality that has an unprecedented ability to manage their connections and influence their perceptions.”

He said the problem was part of a broader crisis of democracy and society flowing from a malevolent combination of unregulated late-capitalism and unregulated technology that had spawned a kind of “techno-fascism.”

Sole also said there were other reasons for the growing fissure between populations and the agents of representative democracy.

He said the other reason was the increasing role of money in politics — and the related growth of the party machine — an instrument for reproducing power and insulating it from those to whom it is putatively accountable.

“The cycle of money and machine-politics has meant that the benefits of power have been squeezed upwards — to the advantage of the 1%, rather than the majority who supposedly deliver political success in a democracy,” Sole said

“The second reason is the globalisation of a free-market fundamentalist hegemony that pooh-poohs the very notion of society.

“This ideological miasma undermines the idea that States can be the custodians of social goods, of beneficial social infrastructure that is dependent on the cross-subsidising of some spheres by others; it undermines the idea that not everything can be commercially structured; indeed that the incentive systems of late-capitalism can be deeply inimical to building society.”

Sole also said the other reason was the weakening of the media as part of the architecture of accountability.