GLBS2000
Globalization: Social, Political & Economic Aspects

Undoing Global Convergence: Brexit & The Weaponized Past

“A gasp of rancor which seems to have brought to the surface much resentment, hatred, and ill-informed debate.” (Dorling, 2019)

If mapping the precise beginnings of globalized convergence rarely motivates consensus, the identification of moments whereby divergence begins may prove clearer. The United Kingdom’s Brexit referendum of 23rd June 2016 is one such example where we might mark a definitive endpoint of empire, and stark divergence of globalized union. But it’s also the convergence, hardening and validation of nostalgic populist rhetoric based on the outcome of the vote, and increasingly our observation of what has happened since. It is a highly specific event which marks with acute self-inflicted finality the end of a century of decline in imperial power and global influence.

Transcending political affiliation and creating often violent division across age, ethnicity, education, gender, geography and economic background, Brexit stands on the nostalgic shoulders of empire in seeking to ‘take back control’ of decisions increasingly perceived to be happening without nation state consensus in Brussels. Opposed to the rise of centralized Euro-centric initiatives including common currency, military expansion, the free flow of goods and people (McKeown, 2007) and the severe economic consequences of failure to hold to the terms of membership, the United Kingdom began to actively resist the very thing it had imposed upon a third of the world’s population during the sixteenth to twentieth centuries. It wasn’t history repeating itself, but it was an example of a belief that history often rhymes (Twain, in Guillén, 2020). It asserted that the European Union had, ‘through stealth and deception’, imposed upon its nation states ‘a political union’ (Farage, in CNBC, 2016).

The Leave campaign’s political rhetoric centered around promises of more money for public resources, scaling back immigration, and accelerating freedom of trade. As the referendum approached, these sentiments began to harden and turn violent, converging into an ugly xenophobic political alignment with other nations seeking similar outcomes in 2016, notably The United States. In diverging from union, it converged with populist nostalgia where it could find it. But such isolationist and fragmentative tactics (Friedman, 1994), compounded by a global pandemic in same year as the formal withdrawal, are already showing signs of economic, societal, and political hardship. Attempts at further Scottish, Welsh and Irish devolution are accelerating, there is a rising cost of living crisis, governmental instability, frequent strike action by public services, and increases in pricing as the flow of trade subsides (McKeown, 2007). There is exponentially increased bureaucracy leading to slower, more expensive, and ultimately fewer deals. It signals a self-inflicted movement away from a globalist core and towards the periphery (Wallerstein, 2004), but exists in stark opposition to its populist rhetoric asserting the opposite.

The outcome of the referendum also gave voice and validation to those disenfranchised from the processes of globalization. It ‘gave back control’ to those left behind economically, but for whom patriotism, and a deep belief in the UK’s power in the world remained central to a sense of identity. These communities, primarily in rural areas, were identified and weaponized through the new digital tools of predictive analytics (Amer & Noukaim, 2019).

Brexit is an example of how populist rhetoric of nostalgia, and a re-arguing of the globalist disagreements of the past in service of false opportunities for the future, has led to increasing global isolation, a distancing from the economic and cultural benefits of globalized convergence, and a backwards rebalancing of the laws and migration controls of empire (McKeown, 2007). Investment is suppressed, shortages are everywhere, and very little in the Brexit prospectus offered by the Leave campaign remains, except an even deeper convergence of xenophobia, national decline, and defiant unwillingness to reverse course. It’s an undoing of globalization through a weaponized use of the past.

What will Brexiteers yearn for now they have won?

“It is easy to laugh, but laughter is not an effective political tool, because the only people laughing with you are those who agree.”
(Gold, 2020)

As Big Ben’s synthetic chimes rang in the formal moment where Britain left the European Union at 11pm on Friday 31st January 2020, the cheers of the assembled crowd of ardent Brexiteers swelled across London’s Parliament Square. Among those present was Tanya Gold, a British journalist for Harper’s Magazine, there to observe and document her experience, which appeared a day later in The New York Times opinion section in a piece entitled ‘I Went to a Brexit Celebration Party’ (Gold, 2020). Gold immediately acknowledges that it’s both fashionable and easy to laugh at Brexiteers, that it’s a joke that often rings hollow, yet proceeds to do just that. She shares that liberal readers may seek to marginalize populist protagonists such as Nigel Farage, but that the Brexit vote of 2016 was his defining moment of success after decades of opposition to Britain’s membership of the European Union.

Big Ben, at the time under repair, and who’s famous ‘bongs’ were prerecorded, provides Gold with what she refers to as ‘an exquisite metaphor for the recent paralysis in British democracy’ (Gold, 2020). A paralysis motivated by decades of policy failure and stagnation which created the political and economic vacuum out of which Brexit was empowered to thrive as a movement, and into which Farage, Johnson, and Cummings opportunistically rushed (Guillen 2018). That in the wake of so much change and upheaval, and employing a common populist tactic, the electorate had been given a simple solution to a highly complex problem (Guillen, 2020). Remain and continue to be subject to the rules of others or leave and ‘take back control’ of borders, trade, and unwanted foreign influence. Prime Minister David Cameron’s remainer campaign greatly underestimated the anti-European Union sentiment of an electorate who seized upon their moment to roll back decades of closer ties with mainland Europe. He was out of office less than a month later, handing the transition to Theresa May, who now had the impossible political position of having campaigned to remain but now had to implement ‘the will of the people’ and leave. (Guillen, 2018)

But in her anthropological observations of the victorious Brexiteers, and her detailed descriptions of the songs they sing, the fiercely patriotic clothes they wear, and the messages their banners proclaim, she holds her subjects at a forensic, dismissive distance. And in doing so, reinforces a deliberate perspective of us and them, dismissing the assembled crowd’s identity as clearly still them. A lens through which her liberal readers may observe without fear of joining in. Her insight that ‘I had not heard such a swath of regional accents in central London before’ or ‘men in fine suits stood with working men and women from as far north as Cumbria’ (Gold, 2020) speaks to the urban elitist insularity against which many of those voting leave protested. That in doing so, Gold herself is part of the problem, missing populism’s highly effective ability to cut across demographic, economic, geographic, and sociological differences (Guillen, 2020).

Gold also remarks on the finality of the moment for all involved. That with nothing left to yearn for, and the dissolution of the campaign’s community, the will of the people has become the law of the land. The article doesn’t openly mock those in attendance, but there’s a clear dismissive tone and distance in her perspective, and how thankful we might be that this political chapter is drawing to an end. She closes with an ominous question about what’s next, asking ‘who will they blame if it is not enough?’ Perhaps those who write columns such as this. 

How Misinformation Still Spreads Through Non-Engagement

“Doing nothing can sometimes be the most effective form of action.”(Kwan, 2013)

Describing ‘news articles that are intentionally and verifiably false, and could mislead readers’, Allcott and Gentzkow’s ‘Social Media and Fake News in the 2016 Election’ (Allcott & Gentzkow, 2017) motivates a position where the psychological utility of fake news is expressed as reinforcing existing heterogeneous priors and ideological segregation, asking consumers to make tradeoffs between the unbiased accurate news they seek, and the psychological utility of the news they consume. They describe how social media acts as an often-volatile incubator for the spread of fake news, freed from the traditional constraints of cost, distribution, and importance of building long-term reputation (Allcott & Gentzkow, 2017).

Social news feeds are where 62% of American adults report getting their news (Gottfried & Shearer, 2016 in Allcott & Gentzkow, 2017), and where there is deliberate algorithmic reduction in the presentation of a diversity of opposing views. These ‘echo chambers’ insulate users from contrary perspectives and ‘impose private and social costs by making it more difficult for consumers to infer the true state of the world’ (Allcott & Gentzkow, 2017). Fake news is cheaper to produce than accurate reporting, free of ‘third party filtering, fact-checking, or editorial judgment’ (Allcott & Gentzkow, 2017), and a place where consumers, even if they think they can, are unable to tell the difference between inexpensive and accurate.

Allcott and Gentzkow’s argument attempts to define the value of fake news shaped by quantitative evidence of how many times fake articles were read or shared, impressions on fake news websites, and a qualitative survey estimating the number of articles respondents saw and remembered prior to the 2016 election (Allcott & Gentzkow, 2017). But in doing this, their method overlooks two important aspects on either side of that user journey. They ignore the enormous scale and reach of social posts which have no engagement but are still seen in the context of the news feed. Seeing but not engaging is a powerful form of online attention, is highly measurable (as impressions), but attention without action as a variable is absent in Allcott and Gentzkow’s work. Here the power of headline and thumbnail become critical, with only a fraction of these users taking the next step to engage outside of scrolling past. In quantifying fake news visibility, Allcott and Gentzkow begin their analysis too late in the process.

Similarly, Allcott and Gentzkow’s method ends with a monetized page view on a fake news website, but does nothing to analyze the viewability, and the repeatability of those page views. Engagement on fake news websites is not created as equally as Allcott and Gentzkow suggest. Some users read one article and never return. Some become habituated, possibly even subscribed, and are much more valuable to those creating fake news. This is the highly monetized audience fake outlets seek, but again this is missing from the analysis as spectrum of consumption. As Guillén explains, not everyone gets politically mobilized through social media (Guillén, 2020), but not everyone has to like, comment, and share to develop partisan views or mobilize either.

Allcott and Gentzkow’s analysis articulates the blunt digital economics of fake news but doesn’t include the entire breadth and depth of such practice, and importantly misses both the full scope of social distribution and including what the user doesn’t do in the feed or does do after arriving on the fake news site. In leaning on an argument in which 62% of American adults get news from social media, Allcott and Gentzkow ignore the importance of non-engagement and simply being exposed to fake news, independent of likes, shares, and comments as a powerful means by which misinformation is consumed.

When the Losers Fight Back: Inequality in Todd Phillips’ Joker

“Is it just me, or is it getting crazier out there?” (Arthur Fleck in Todd Phillips’ Joker, 2019)

Inequality produces a spectrum of winners and losers. Of haves and have nots. Of them and us. Todd Phillips’ Joker (2019) tells the story of those left behind in the economic horse race of globalization. Set against a backdrop of claustrophobic urbanization amidst an increasingly restless population and a groundswell of anti-rich sentiment, Arthur Fleck, our Joker, is globalization’s ultimate systemic loser. Fired from his job as a clown and discarded as labor, and with spiraling psychotic illness unleashed by his inability to pay his medical bills, he becomes an unlikely lightning rod for the violent powder keg of civil unrest which results from Gotham City’s economic, political and media losers finally reaching their breaking point.

In his journey, there are three distinctly unequal encounters between wealthy, powerful winners and Arthur as the poor, disenfranchised loser. First, a group of Wall Street traders, representative of economic inequality, set upon Arthur in the subway for sport, and are brutally murdered. But Arthur isn’t an agent of Schumpeter’s creative destruction (Guillén, 2020a), seeking to revolutionize an economic structure from within by incessantly creating a new one. Arthur is simply a nihilistic agent of destruction for its own ends, replacing current economic inequality with violence and no system at all.

Second, Thomas Wayne, symbol of Gotham’s billionaire elite and political inequality, declares war on the increasing unrest in his bid for mayor with the populist rhetoric that ‘until these kinds of people change for the better, those of us who’ve made something of our lives will always look at those who haven’t as nothing but clowns’ (Phillips, 2019). Wayne is positioned in comparison to Arthur as a symbol of the widening gap between rich and poor, implementing policies where the rich get richer at the expense of the economy’s losers (Alvaredo et al., 2013). Wayne’s opportunistic, populist speeches promise to lift everyone out of poverty, make everyone’s lives better, and isolate the problem into one which only he can solve (Guillén, 2018). His words prey on the insecure, those whose jobs are threatened, and demonize those unwilling or unable to work to make something of their lives (Guillén, 2020b). Wayne’s fortune is, of course, inherited.

Finally, Arthur becomes a guest on a late-night talk show, where he is openly mocked and derided by the show’s host, here a symbol of media inequality. He bemoans the awful state of things and perceives his portrayal as fake news, distributed at scale beyond his control (Alcott & Gentzkow, 2017). But this time, the tables turn and it’s Arthur who exacts his revenge upon a system which has failed him. He guns down the host on live television, and dances in the ensuing chaos.

As the movie crescendos, Arthur ventures out into the streets, where violent anti-globalization riots are in full swing, reminiscent of 2011’s Occupy Wall Street protests in substance but differing in outcome. The police have lost control, and Thomas Wayne gets gunned down by an anonymous protestor in clown face as a final act of political vengeance. Wayne’s death, in front of his son Bruce, becomes the origin story for who we all know to later become The Batman. Globalization’s borders established for citizens have been violently destroyed, symbols of free trade and political power murdered, and the market itself burns.

Todd Phillip’s Joker contains many depictions of the consequences of a globalized economic and political system which produces winners and losers. It draws upon claustrophobic issues of population increase, failure of individuals and urban expansion. Of populist rhetoric and media bias. But most importantly, articulates the possible violent future for what happens when inequality is allowed to thrive for too long.