The Closing of the American Public Sphere

Mark G. E. Kelly

In an article published last year in this journal, I suggested that, compared

to the possibility of “fascism” developing in the United States, the extent
to which a rising Big Tech might, through its combination of new technol-
ogies with the concentration of immense wealth, transcend the state form
altogether presented a greater danger.1 The actions of Big Tech after the
so-called “Capitol Storm” of January 6, 2021, in censoring not only so-
called “insurgents” but also a sitting U.S. president might seem to bear out
this warning of mine.2 However, the way this played out in fact caused me
to reassess my analysis and conclude that Big Tech is far more politically
subordinate than I had previously estimated it to be. The analysis I will
now present is, in short, that technology corporations seem to be solidly
imbricated within a ruling alliance that has cemented its power in America
as of January 2021, as a minor partner relative to the outsize influence of
more conventional news media. Other prominent partners in this alliance
are the Democratic Party establishment, the national security state, and the
U.S. haute bourgeoisie, each with their own distinct agenda.
This alliance is not particularly new, and indeed has presented its
renewed control over the commanding heights of U.S. politics precisely
as a return to normalcy. The mechanism by which it has achieved this
renewed political dominance, however, has been new, namely, a conquest
of the public sphere during a period in which its nominal opponents held
ostensible political power, viz. the 2017–2021 Trump presidency. Given
1. Mark G. E. Kelly, “Is Fascism the Main Danger Today? Trump and Techno-Neo-
liberalism,” Telos 192 (Fall 2020): 101–23.
2. For my counter-narrative on these events, see “Trump l’Oeil: Ceci N’est Pas un
Coup d’État,” Telos 194 (Spring 2021): 163–65.

Telos 195 (Summer 2021): 157–64 • doi:10.3817/0621195157

© 2021 Telos Press Publishing • ISSN 0090-6514 (print) 1940-459X (online)
www.telospress.com

157
158 Mark G. E. Kelly

the entrenched power of these allies, their victory in this regard has not
been a case of a “long march through the institutions” or a “war of posi-
tion” so much as an extraordinarily effective counterinsurgency operation
in the public sphere, utilizing the center-left’s existing dominance in the
media to suppress opposing voices. Donald Trump won the presidency in
2016 despite (or even to some extent perhaps because of) a remarkably
hostile media reaction toward his candidacy. Anti-Trumpists controlled
essentially all television news (with the significant exception of staunchly
Republican Fox News, but even there anti-Trumpism had a significant rep-
resentation) and most of the major print newspapers (the New York Post,
owned like Fox by News Corp, being the most significant exception),
along with the most prominent online news websites (such as BuzzFeed,
the Huffington Post, the Daily Beast, etc.), which are increasingly indis-
tinguishable from newspapers inasmuch as newspapers are themselves
increasingly primarily read online. Indeed, the main locus of the public
sphere today is firmly and ever-increasingly the internet.
The response by this hostile media to what they viewed as a cata-
strophic electoral loss was to try to increase their control over the public
sphere in order to prevent a repetition in 2020. The media were quick to
blame Trump’s electoral success on a distortion of the information envi-
ronment, showing no critical self-awareness of the fact that their implicit
idea of a perfect information system is one that they were in complete con-
trol of. There were several planks to this, the most extreme of which was
the allegation that the Russian state had interfered to change the result
of the U.S. election, but which more generally involved concern about
the proliferation of “fake news,” and of course the simple circulation of
“hateful” discourse. Since it was an article of faith among his opponents
that Trump was a racist and sexist, and that therefore those tens of mil-
lions who voted for him were either themselves actively racist and sexist
or at best immured in racism and sexism, the media took it upon itself to
become a force for the active alteration of American culture away from
racism and sexism, which meant increasingly that its content had to be
not only lacking in racism and sexism (as previously) but actively anti-
racist, etc.
While the media immediately hyperbolized its own discourse in a
hyperreaction to Trump, then, it still encountered the massive obstacle that
the main locus for public discussion was outside their control, namely, on
online platforms, in particular “social media.” The main such platforms
 The Closing of the American Public Sphere  159

are owned by, and indeed largely constitute the business of, major tech-
nology companies: namely, Twitter (the dominant microblogging plat-
form), along with Facebook (the dominant social network), and YouTube
(the dominant online video platform, owned by Alphabet, formerly known
as Google). Twitter, Facebook, and Google produce little content of their
own but rather initially offered themselves as open platforms for all com-
ers to create and disseminate their own content, with paid promoted
content (advertising) making such platforms immensely profitable. It was
precisely this business model that had allowed dissenting voices, offering
something that the mainstream media did not, to rise to such prominence
on these platforms. Correlatively, like most of the tech sector, these cor-
porations long espoused a libertarian ideology, involving both unlimited
rights for them as corporations as well as a maximally open internet.
Yet almost immediately after Trump’s election, Twitter engaged in
its first mass banning of far-right accounts. This was not entirely unprec-
edented, insofar as right-wingers had been banned before individually
for various infractions, but it was the first targeted wave of such bans. A
gradual, creeping deplatforming of right-wingers online followed, often
occurring in the form of discrete “purges” in reaction to some or other
event on the dubious basis that online discourse had caused it, culminat-
ing on January 6, 2021, in the deplatforming of the U.S. president himself.
These bans have supposedly been for terms of service violations, but
Twitter has the sole prerogative to determine what constituted a violation:
as a private company, it has discretion over who is allowed to use its plat-
form. As many have pointed out, this implies a serious degradation of the
right to free speech in practice given the proportion of public speech that
now occurs on such platforms. The autonomy of such near-monopoly pri-
vate companies to act to control public political discussion is precisely
one reason we should worry about the political power of Big Tech, more
so because these corporations often act in concert as an effective political
cartel, with bans on individuals being near-simultaneous across multiple
platforms.
However, for social media and other online platforms, profit corre-
lates to traffic, and thus the motive of increasing traffic militates against
ideological or moral content curation. The only point from a business per-
spective in engaging in censorship (other than what is legally mandated)
would be to remove content so controversial that it drives away traffic.
There is no evidence though that tech companies were acting to curb any
160 Mark G. E. Kelly

demonstrable diminution in their traffic, however. Twitter, Facebook, and

YouTube are after all near-monopolies in their respective areas, without
serious competition for traffic to go to. We might suspect that they are
haunted by the possibility that if they are not careful there might be a
sudden flip to a new provider, the way that Facebook initially became a
monopoly by displacing MySpace, although it is far from clear that such a
shift could happen to Facebook, given that it has achieved a market pene-
tration vastly greater than any other social network ever.
Why then did tech begin to censor its platforms with such sudden
alacrity? One reason is surely that, like the bourgeoisie in general, tech-
nology barons saw Trump’s rise as a threat to them in certain respects. One
aspect of this was the simple disruption to the business environment that
populism represented; another was the extent to which such companies re-
lied on supply chains that were threatened by Trump’s neo-protectionism.
Still, such concerns surely did not loom large for social media companies
(unlike for technology companies focused on hardware, such as Apple, for
which trade with China is the lifeblood).
The willingness of social media companies to engage in anti-Trump
censorship can I think only be explained by the influence of ideology,
and more specifically the fact that tech companies’ owners and employees
overwhelmingly ideologically agree with the premises of the arguments
for censorship, that censorship was necessary to prevent the “violence”
and “fascism” represented ultimately by Trump. That is to say that the vic-
tory over liberty in the online space was won at the level of ideas rather
than pure pragmatics or economics. Here we must note where this ideol-
ogy is produced and spread, which is to say the most public-facing fringe
of the academic humanities, the more editorial end of journalism, and
indeed in online spaces themselves, in ecologies that involve academics
and journalists together with lay people. College education has increas-
ingly become the main indicator of alignment with the Democratic Party:
business leaders, highly educated tech workers, and even the military offi-
cer corps now skew heavily Democratic. It is notable that tech compa-
nies actually remain generally resistant to direct pressure from politicians
as such: if this were not the case, they would be responding to Republi-
can pressure as much as Democratic, which has not at all been the case
in recent years. Rather, it is essentially an ideological narrative that tech
responds to, sometimes preemptively.
 The Closing of the American Public Sphere  161

What has happened here has been obscured by the fact that the voices
that have been suppressed have precisely been some of the most ostensi-
bly powerful, and their suppression has been justified on that very basis.
The new media hegemony casts itself as the defender of the oppressed
from “violent” speech that perpetuates in the realm of discourse actual
violence that was once widespread. This notion of discursive violence
serves to occlude the extent to which power relations have substantively
changed in that society.
The media has thus successfully staged a counterrevolution—a full-
scale reaction and restoration—in response to the revolutionary disruption
of the media landscape by new digital technologies. The news media have
increasingly demanded a monopoly on the transmission of information
on the basis that others cannot be trusted to do this accurately. In doing
so they have not only sought to silence voices that contradict their narra-
tive, and thus to defeat political forces that threaten their power. The new
media hegemony today differs from the status quo ante internet primarily
inasmuch as the ideology of American liberalism has become more radi-
cal on certain questions but ultimately functions in the same way, namely,
by elevating relatively trivial moral causes to obfuscate the power dynam-
ics in American society.
The universal adoption of the internet and invention of social media
threatened to create a public sphere where access was more genuinely pub-
lic than at any point in history. Ideas circulated and associations formed
relatively free from both tyrannies of distance and establishment gate-
keeping. The concrete results, however, were unexpected and horrifying
to elites that had allowed this situation to emerge via neoliberal presump-
tions that free markets would only redound to their benefit. The educated
were horrified at how the ideas that contradicted theirs proved popular.
Capitalists were horrified at the destabilizing effect on markets (although
they liked the opportunity to mine data and sell things to the politically
incorrect). The old media—publishers and journalists—were perhaps the
most unhappy because this all seemed to be causing their business model
to enter a free fall and hence to threaten their very livelihoods. Politicians
and entrenched power elites (including the deep state) hated the loss of
control of information and the direct threats to their control via the elec-
tion of populist leaders via online campaigns.
This produced an extraordinarily powerful coalition for the regula-
tion and control of this new public sphere. Since it is not yet normatively
162 Mark G. E. Kelly

possible to complain about the free exchange of ideas or online democracy

per se, the normative basis for the fightback against online populism was
the proposition that certain ideas are inherently bad and hence need to be
excised from the public sphere, requiring the imposition of control over
the unruly internet. Which particular ideas were declared bad depended on
the balance of ideological forces existing in society at this time, but also
on what the dominant elites came to see as the main threat to their dom-
inance. One can readily imagine that an only slightly different scenario
would have seen the main danger appear to be the left-wing populism
represented by a Bernie Sanders and then a rather different ideological
lens might have been applied to suppress a rather different set of ideas.
This counterfactual is, of course, like all counterfactuals in politics, ulti-
mately speculation. It might be that suppressing the left in the same way
that the right is today being suppressed would not have been readily pos-
sible, perhaps because some of the forces in the coalition (in particular,
academics and journalists) would not have gone along with that to the
same extent. However, the witch hunt of Jeremy Corbyn and his support-
ers using largely baseless accusations of anti-Semitism indicates that the
conceptual resources were there (of course, many readers might disagree
and think that these accusations were not baseless—but my substantive
point is simply that some basis will be found to suppress such a threat, and
hence if these accusations were well founded, this simply goes to my point
that this is readily possible).
Politicians, even presidents, thus hardly seem to be in the driver’s
seat, from the deplatformed Trump to the doddering Biden, whose senility
makes it seem unlikely that he dominates even his own cabinet discus-
sions. Far from reigning in the power of the media, states currently are
acting actively in its service by forcing social media corporations to cross-
subsidize legacy media. Even as it flexed its cultural power, the old media
has continued to decline in profitability, notwithstanding a major uptick in
media consumption due to public appetite for news of President Trump’s
never-ending stream of outrageous statements and for the predictable
bromides that journalists concocted in response to them. Outlets have con-
tinued to close, amalgamate, and lay off journalists. Yet the media retain
sufficient power to lobby to stem their decline by taxing the platforms
that are driving it. In 2018, the European Union promulgated a “Direc-
tive on Copyright in the Digital Single Market,” which will come into
effect in 2021. Opposed by the tech sector and activists, it will increase the
 The Closing of the American Public Sphere  163

responsibility of platforms for the content they host and also force them
to pay content creators for links to their work. More recently, in 2021,
the Australian federal parliament passed legislation requiring social media
and search engines to pay news publishers for the appearance of links to
their news content. The background in this case is a near monopoly in the
Australian newspaper sector of Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp, combined
with that corporation’s staunch support for the Australian Liberal Party,
meaning that the Coalition government is significantly beholden to this
company. In response to the new law, Google threatened to cease services
in Australia entirely, and Facebook began to block Australian news content
on its platform. The Australian government retaliated by withholding its
advertising spend from Facebook. The legacy media sternly warned that,
shorn of conventional news links, social media websites would become
“misinformation” sites—unmistakably using language that would target
such platforms for banning. Facebook and Google both ultimately reached
agreements with the Australian government and News Corp.
In the United States, the media and governing Democratic Party are
similarly explicitly allied. A mostly nakedly partisan media—both old
and new—has lately delivered the Democrats control of the White House.
Nothing exemplifies this more than the conspiracy of silence around the
leaks of material from Hunter Biden’s laptop. A story in the New York
Post, perhaps the most prominent pro-Trump masthead in the country,
disclosing leaked material was treated as a priori disinformation, to the
point that Twitter banned linking to the story on its platform and other
media refused to report it. Considering the explosiveness of the allega-
tions concerning a presidential candidate’s son and the closeness of the
reporting to the poll, this news might have, if widely publicized, been suf-
ficient by itself to tip the election in the other direction. It was not even
generally held by those who refused to report the story that it was substan-
tively false, only that the information had been obtained by underhanded
means as an attempt to influence the election. These scruples were more or
less invented especially for this instance, flying in the face of established
journalistic practice, thus amounting ultimately to nothing more than a
decision by the media to tip the election in the opposite direction.
In America, then, we see an entrenched political elite and an en-
trenched intellectual elite reasserting control over a wayward cyberspace.
In this situation, the accelerationist dream of “exit” via information tech-
nology seems almost quaint, a naive hope that the internet will somehow
164 Mark G. E. Kelly

ultimately win out and deliver what it promised in the end. The internet
is ultimately still material, depending on physical wires or broadcasting
towers or satellites and servers, material objects under the jurisdiction and
effective control of states. In the end, they can cut access to blockchain
wallets and peer-to-peer communication networks. The cold monster,
Leviathan, remains in control. Where American dissidents find hosting
options to evade the restrictiveness of the American online space, it is
increasingly and inevitably in the jurisdictions of antagonistic states, in
particular China and Russia, which are notoriously restrictive in relation
to their own dissidents.
Some potential for the relation between state and tech to flip remains,
however. Social media companies have demonstrated considerable power;
though they have wielded this at the behest of a state–media alliance, we
might imagine a point at which they turn against it. Facebook and Ama-
zon are now the two biggest single corporate lobbyists in Washington:
we can imagine (but not predict) the inversion of the current relationship,
with Big Tech becoming the masters of the state and not vice versa. The
alliance between the new government and tech has allowed the latter to
evade antitrust concerns, and indeed assert that it needs to be monopolis-
tic to protect society from violent dissidence. A concrete example of this
was the way in January 2021 that Parler, Twitter’s largest competitor, was
pushed off its servers and removed from app stores by larger tech com-
panies (Amazon, Apple, and Alphabet) because it was largely a home for
right-wing voices banned from Twitter. It is still possible that, by catering
to the current political moment, the tech barons will in the end emerge as
its greatest victors.

Mark G. E. Kelly is Associate Professor in Philosophy at Western Sydney Uni-

versity. He is the author of three books on the thought of Michel Foucault, as well
as more recently of Biopolitical Imperialism (Zero Books, 2015) and For Fou-
cault: Against Normative Political Theory (State University of New York Press,
2018).
 Critical Theory for Practical Problems

Civilizational States and Liberal Empire—Bound to Collide?

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