“I can feel in myself, and see
In others around me, a powerful
Nostalgia for the time
When history existed.”
Francis Fukuyama
Bust of President Zachary Taylor covered in plastic after blood was smeared on it when a Trump mob broke into the Capitol Building on January 6, 2021
We’ve created a world where everybody can talk, but only a select few people are actually heard. Anybody can start a newsletter or get on social media, but only a few people are ever actually seen and heard.
Francis Fukuyama writes about in his new book, In the Realm of the Last Man: A Memoir, that while free speech is certainly important, the issue facing us today is about amplification.
More than a conventional memoir, In the Realm of the Last Man is a personal history as well as a political history. Returning to and developing the concepts that have been central to his work, recognition, thymos, trust, identity, human nature, institutions, and he illuminates the crises of the twenty-first century. In the Realm is the story of a life that illuminates the troubled fate of democracy and liberalism over the last fifty years.
In our current fragile democracy, who gets to be heard? How is the President of the United States allowed to use taxpayer dollars for his political propaganda? How is the President of the United States allowed to stymie freedom of speech?
Another important terrifying tell is, why did Elon Musk buy Twitter? Because it bought him a megaphone. Musk was already the richest man in the world, and yet he had to sit by the phone and wait for the BBC or CNN to call him. Billions of dollars couldn’t get him an audience, but his own social media could. And so, he bought social media.
As long as humans have been alive, some people have been heard more than others. At first, this meant the loudest or the most charismatic voices were heard. But then came the gatekeepers. First, publishers decided who could write a book or get in a newspaper. Then came radio, then TV, and now the internet.
Today, Meta and Google control the vast amount of what anybody hears or sees. Everybody can speak. But who gets heard is decided by a few companies changing algorithms and rules.
And so, we hear from the influencers and celebrities who know how to make a viral reel. We hear only about those topics that get shared or liked, or don’t violate a company’s terms of service.
Here and now, our conversations get narrowed, and the speakers are muted or amplified, depending on what a few gatekeepers actually want us to see and hear, while calling it free speech.
Shine On
