Social media gives legions of idiots the right to speak when they once only spoke at a bar after a glass of wine, without harming the community. Then they were quickly silenced, but now they have the same right to speak as a Nobel Prize winner. It’s the invasion of the morons.
Umberto Eco (2015)
The quotation above, delivered by the Italian semiotician, philosopher, and writer Umberto Eco during a press conference after receiving an honorary doctorate in Communication and Culture from the University of Turin, might lead one to wonder whether the same author who denounced the hijacking of culture in his most famous work—locked away in labyrinthine libraries within inaccessible monasteries—later opposed, as a representative of an elite that has ceased to be one, the massive democratization of culture brought about by technology, or whether, in some way, he retained the spirit of his protagonist, William of Baskerville, in his battle against dogmatism and obscurantism.
Presumably, the villain of that novel, the blind librarian Jorge of Burgos—aware of the impossibility of prohibiting access to information nowadays—would not choose to hide it away in labyrinthine libraries or cryptographic algorithms, nor taint its medium with poisons or computer viruses. Rather, he would do quite the opposite: alter it and replicate it on a massive scale through artificial intelligence, burying it beneath thousands of falsified versions willingly spread by those “legions of idiots” until it becomes invisible or as insignificant and untrustworthy as the thousands of fake clones themselves.
While Umberto Eco seems to focus on how the democratization of the spoken and written word brought about by the internet has fostered an explosion of narcissism in the average citizen—driven by a desire for notoriety to replicate (and dismiss) an expert’s opinion without any filter, with the arrogance and superficiality of someone taking an intellectual selfie—something that this other famous quote would seem to corroborate:
When I was young, there was an important difference between being famous and being on everyone’s lips. Most people wanted to be famous for being the best athlete or the best dancer, but no one liked being on everyone’s lips for being the town cuckold or a cheap whore. In the future, this distinction will no longer exist: as long as someone looks at us and talks about us, we will be ready for anything.
Umberto Eco, Pape Satàn Aleppe: Chronicles of a Liquid Society (2016)
...it is equally true that this democratization has served to free culture from its servitude to a restricted elite, which until recently was the sole owner of the means required for its dissemination.
One might ask whether in our current era—where almost everyone writes and almost no one reads, where the publishing business derives fewer and fewer profits from selling books to potential readers (unless wrapped up as a cool or sophisticated gift item) and instead reaps greater direct profits from hopeful literary aspirants, transformed into enthusiastic sponsors of allegedly literary selfies that will mostly end up forgotten in lonely warehouses awaiting destruction and recycling—there lies purely the latent narcissism of the individual as a reflection of a hyper-individualistic society sceptical of everything, or something more.
Desire is like deodorant: “it only works at close range.” One dreams of the neighbour’s house with a garden and pool, not the palace of an Arab sheikh; one fantasizes about the guy or girl on the second floor, not a supermodel or a millionaire actor. Humans are only interested in what feels close to them, whether it be infamous, mediocre, or excellent—criteria that remain irrevocably subjective. Whatever lies far removed from our thoughts and daily concerns fails to hold our interest. No matter how brilliant it may be, it will remain exiled in the remote distance of indifference— If it does not speak to us, or if it does not align with our feelings or beliefs, it becomes invisible to us (or false and erroneous, if it stems from a perspective far removed from our own).
What Umberto Eco sarcastically denounces as utterly mediocre—“typical of narcissistic fools ("cuñados")”—is, objectively speaking, nothing more than the reflection of an uncomfortable truth: what probably seems exceedingly distant to him, given his vast and formidable intellectual trajectory, is to the majority far closer than all of his works combined.
That what sells the most is usually the allegedly mediocre, commercial, or banal—the sentimental, poorly narrated story that appears on a major online forum only to be copy-pasted the next day across every other site, garnering more votes than anyone taking pain over their writing could ever hope for—is something publishers and film production companies have long understood (never hesitating to sacrifice quality for potential profits), and upon which major internet forums and aspiring influencers have built their success.
And what could possibly feel closer to any individual than what they themselves write at the precise moment they are writing it? —even if it is an idea that crossed their mind five minutes earlier and which the following day, should they bother to re-read it, strikes them as sheer stupidity.
Any individual, no matter how stupid or pretentious they may seem—criteria that are always subjective—enjoys the exercise of their right to freedom of expression, to play the know-it-all, and this is fundamentally part of cultural democratization. Far more controversial, however, is whether this same individual—after stumbling, with the subtle help of the algorithm, upon something close to home (“how could a piece of information be false or biased if it says exactly what I think?”) —also holds the right to irresponsibly spread it without bothering to verify it, thereby becoming the necessary emotional cog for an algorithmic machinery designed to propagate disinformation for its own benefit.
Fortunately or not, AIs have now arrived on this stage—machines that also write, doing so with greater speed, precision, and knowledge than any human know-it-all, and without any kind of narcissistic bias.
I wonder what Umberto Eco would think of their arrival. Would he feel they had been sent by the gods to put an end once and for all to the “tyranny of idiots,” or perhaps that Jorge of Burgos had finally and masterfully accomplished his goal—offering us an omnipresent, personalized digital oracle that tells us, in a seemingly objective and wisdom-laden manner, exactly what we wish to hear, thus irreversibly perpetuating our own idiocy?
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