The Bourgeois Public Sphere is Collapsing
Under the pressure of fabricated non-fiction reality is being crowded out of media reality.
In his novel “Fall; or, Dodge in Hell”, Neal Stephenson describes a world where digital reality is so overwhelmed by artificial content that distinguishing truth from falsehood becomes nearly impossible. This chaos began with an effort to counter a political smear campaign by drowning it in an avalanche of fake information. The unintended consequence: credibility itself was buried. Over time, this strategy was repeatedly used, turning the internet into a wasteland of misinformation. When Stephenson published the novel in 2019, this scenario seemed like a anti-utopian exaggeration. But shortly after, he remarked, “It’s literally happening now, before our eyes. The events described in ‘Fall’ are just slight exaggerations of things that have already happened.”
Deliberate public confusion through contradictory, overwhelming, and unreliable content is nothing new. Steve Bannon, former advisor to Donald Trump and head of the right-wing populist platform Breitbart, coined a special form of discourse destruction calling this tactic “flood the zone with shit”. By saturating public discourse with misinformation, he sought to create mass confusion and undermine rational debate.
1, a selective history of media mediation
However, the struggle for interpretative sovereignty over nature and history has always been waged at the expense of a truthful representation of events.
Our perception of reality primarily depends on our direct personal experience of our environment. Our sensory organs are limited in their resolution. We rely on technological aids such as microscopes, gas chromatographs, thermometers or glasses to make the invisible visible, to find our way around better or to describe our world in values, to measure, record and pass on changes. Because the processing of environmental stimuli in our brain can be unreliable — as we know from various optical, acoustic and psychological illusions — we generally deceive ourselves before we can be deceived by the information that is culturally conveyed to us via the media.
The term medium is broad and covers everything from spoken language, text, physical carriers to digital mass media. Media transport a record of events and enable their delayed perception. Oral storytelling for example is not only prone to error, but also difficult to verify because not even the identity of the transmitted statement can be recorded: “Imagine, I saw a guy who turned water into beer!” The next time the story is told, the beer may have turned into wine. Only by writing it down does the volatility of the information coagulate into a basis that can be better verified. This in no way guarantees that the written information matches reality. No one can turn water into wine, even if it was perhaps beer.
The Bible exemplifies this. It stands out from all early written records of traditions, if only because it remains the best-selling book even today. The stories of the Old and New Testaments are not factual accounts and were not written down for the purpose of faithfully reproducing historical events, but rather to provide a moral basis and philosophy for living together, in short, to make policy. The inclusion of individual text in the biblical canon took place under the aspect of expediency. This gatekeeper function of media is still essential today — regardless of whether humans or machines maintain this algorithm in the selection process. The veracity of the events described was never a condition; it is enough that the audience classifies the information as true, which is astonishing in view of the contradictions in the stories of the New Testament, which ostensibly tell of the same events.
As holy scripture the Bible is also central for social order. As a structural medium its function goes far beyond the transmission of information and, among other things, also influences the individual’s ability to grasp the truthfulness of information. Simply to believe, having to believe, to identify belief as a virtue instead of encouraging skeptical questioning, makes critical thinking more difficult.
2, the emergence of the public
The invention of the printing press in the 15th century using movable type by Johannes Gutenberg transformed knowledge dissemination. Before then, books were rare, and most written content was religious. With mass printing, literacy spread, creating a culture of documented discourse. More books meant more scrutiny and debate. arguments could also be presented in a comprehensible manner in a proto-pluralistic media market.
Jürgen Habermas refers to the space in which these arguments are exchanged, evaluated and categorized in equal, free discourse as the public sphere. It is based on transparency and leads to a shared view of reality through collective forming of opinion. Naturally, this does not mean that all participants perceive reality in the same way and even less that they have the same opinion, but there is at least a similar understanding of the veracity of events. It is no coincidence that the emergence of this — initially bourgeois — public sphere correlates with the Enlightenment of the late 18th and 19th centuries and the secularization of society. Biblical myths without a relevant connection to historical truth had completely lost their power to legitimize worldly power. The strength of this partnership between state and religion can easily be seen from the fact that even today — over 200 years later — this connection has still not been severed in many countries.
Nevertheless, against a free society that creates a public sphere through discourse, a distorted or manufactured truth has little lasting power. Later attempts by totalitarian systems to take over the role of religion by curating perceived reality also failed quite quickly on a historical scale. The bourgeois public sphere also survived the fascisms and communisms of the 20th century. In the late 1980s, Francis Fukuyama famously declared the “end of history,” believing that liberal democracy had triumphed as the ultimate political system. Little did he know.
3, the automated public sphere
Whether the age of mass media ended with the emergence of large social networks in the new millennium, or has merely been further transformed, does not need to be clarified at this point. Platforms such as Tiktok, X or Linkedin can be seen as new mass media though. They enable global exchange — even if this is subject to many practical and political restrictions — at least in principle and thus create a universal communication space and public sphere in a universal media dispositif, the Internet as a macro-medium. If we want to single out one social network that has ideally fulfilled the requirements of a mass medium with regard to the constitution of the public sphere, then it is Twitter, the predecessor of X, once embodied the ideal of an open public sphere, where anyone could engage on equal footing. and it is basically only up to the independent curation of sources how perceived reality is formed. Practice deviates from this idealized picture because not only can various settings be made to control the flow of communication, but above all because the sheer volume of information shared cannot be managed. This network lacks the benefit of editorial selection, which is replaced by algorithmic selection, as is also known from other platforms that pursue the maximization of audience attention. The effects of this distortion are well known: Among other things, popular content entails similar content, boring content is displaced by exciting, emotionalizing content, and commercial content is preferred. This doesn’t mean that disinformation is deliberately favored algorithmically, but fragmentation into individualized realities and an affirmative view of the world can lead to a lack of balanced discourse in a shared public sphere. Criticism is not hidden, but neither is it included. There is no reality check or barriers to discourse.
Precisely because the perception of reality — one could note whether a “so far” should not be inserted here — is individualized by nature, the distinction to the concept of the public sphere becomes important. It is more than just a space for open discourse; it is the foundation for a consensual reflection of reality that is confirmed by fellow human beings. This may sound overly important or even pompous, but if we consider that Galileo Galilei’s heliocentric view of the world in the 17th century collided with the official doctrine of the Catholic Church because the Bible identifies the Earth as the center of the universe, then it becomes clear that only an exchange of information under the condition of free expression of opinion makes the falsification of this and many other interpretations of power possible.
Until a few years ago, the public sphere was so much taken for granted that even the inventor of the term cyberspace, William Gibson, delivered this description of a digitally networked information sphere in “Neuromancer” in 1984: “Cyberspace. A consensual hallucination experienced daily by billions of legitimate operators, in every nation, […] A graphic representation of data abstracted from banks of every computer in the human system. Unthinkable complexity.”
Embedded in a confusing future characterized by AI and biohacking, billions of people are supposed to have a “consensual hallucination” (in this sense: perception of reality)? Especially under these circumstances, the disintegration of a shared public sphere into divided public spheres in conflict with each other, as we are currently experiencing, would be more likely. In the political sphere in particular, the focus has shifted from discourse to the consolidation of certain perceptions of reality into partial public spheres (or public bubbles, analogous to filter bubbles). The polarization of society is rooted not only in differing opinions, but also in different foundations that are considered to be true. For example, if a third of the American population firmly believes that Donald Trump won the 2020 US presidential election, this is not compatible with a consensual view of events that have taken place. If no clarity can be established about major events of a geopolitical nature, then there is no longer a common public sphere. In a globalized world, coexisting truths are obviously cultivated in a way that conserves resources.
The development of large language models (LLM) and generative AI has massively accelerated this trend towards managing the sovereignty of interpretation in a partial public sphere over the last three years. Today, it is easier than ever before to fabricate a large amount of content that gives the impression of truly reflecting reality. It starts with the fact that the texts that are generated via the requests to ChatGPT, Gemini, Deepseek and all the other popular LLMs, which, as we know, do not necessarily have to be congruent with reality, can themselves end up as contributions that can be used to further train these services. The same of course applies to images, audio, video and all other media types. The old coder’s dictum of GIGO (garbage in, garbage out) takes on a new quality of self-reinforcing loops with machine learning and AI. Added to this are the manipulation campaigns we are familiar with from the political sphere, which litter the digital sphere with misleading information and other processes that give rise to memes whose orientation towards reality is no longer recognizable.
The sheer volume of content — whether deliberately intended to suppress or overlay reality — can and will lead to a surplus of fabricated non-fiction. A crowding-out effect is to be feared, in which a factual reproduction of events and circumstances is either difficult or impossible to find, partly because trust in content that is actually trustworthy is replaced by skepticism. Flood the zone with shit is becoming real.
4, the year 4891
While in the 2010s the scenario of a surveillance state and the accompanying erosion of privacy was still perceived as a major or perhaps the greatest threat of digitalization in the political debate, a tsunami of irrelevant information is currently piling up in which the truth is watered down to a homeopathic dose. George Orwell’s Big Brother no longer observes, but prompts. Searches for Orwell’s novel “1984” have declined worldwide over the last ten years. His anti-utopia combines the rewriting of history (fabricated non-fiction), control, surveillance, punishment and torture in a totalitarian state and appears comparatively clear and orderly. Even if we cannot rule out the possibility that liberal democracies are developing in the direction of authoritarian regimes in these aspects, so that there can no longer be any talk of democracy, it seems more plausible to me that the negligent overloading of the information sphere is causing even more damage to the perception of reality and society. The only positive news in this comparison of negative scenarios is that they cannot both occur at the same time. A totalitarian armored official truth cannot coexist with a kaleidoscope of fragmented contradictions of reality. History today can no longer be rewritten to a new controlled truth, it is expanded to many truths. Therefore, in a free society, there is no real danger of ending up in a “1984” with a single curated reality, but rather in one of 4891 public spheres as a reversal of this into the opposite.
Speculative fiction not only describes this dilemma, or rather polylemma, of multiple publics, it also sometimes offers solutions. In “Fall”, Neal Stephenson fights fire with fire. His characters use expensive AI applications to navigate reality in the sea of data, a trusted identity ensures that digital communication takes place between humans and not bots, and consensus reality networks and the interaction of independent, trustworthy sources create a shared view of reality. The latter would then form the basis of a civic public sphere as described by Habermas — but in a protected area that is comparatively difficult to access.
Access with as little interference as possible and critical thinking as a humanistic ideal play a central role in the perception of reality. Technology can help or hinder this. The task is to recognize and avoid negative externalities at an early stage before they take on a life of their own and limit people’s freedom.