The Digital Demons in Democracy

A Review of Byung-Chul Han’s Infocracy

The Tyranny of Infocracy

Han argues that as the world is increasingly driven by data, we come to live under an information regime where technique, efficiency, and computational power reign. In contrast to Michel Foucault’s disciplinary regime, the “form of domination characteristic of industrial capitalism,” as Han puts it, where each person is a cog in the machine restrained by command, an information regime is a “form of domination in which information and its processing by algorithms and artificial intelligence have a decisive influence on social, economic and political processes.”

The disciplinary regime suppresses freedom—controlling the body through punishment, isolation, compulsion, and prohibition. The information regime, by contrast, works via positive incentives—exploiting freedom rather than repressing it. We may think we are freer to be ourselves and forge our own paths, but we’re actually being duped because the information regime is hidden “behind the friendliness of social media, the convenience of search engines, the soothing voices of virtual assistants and the courteous servility of smart apps.”

With the information regime, “self-exploitation is more efficient than exploitation by others, because it goes hand in hand with a feeling of freedom,” Han explains in a 2021 interview. “So it is not oppression but depression that is the pathological sign of our times.” And, I might add, it is anxiety, since the “freedom” to create and produce oneself is a burden heavier than we were created to bear.

While I do wonder if we are as far beyond the disciplinary regime as Han suggests (take for example the pandemic measures that directly involved bodily prohibitions), he is putting his finger on something important about how self-exploitation works. In the information regime, “mechanisms of power function not because people are aware of the fact of constant surveillance but because they perceive themselves to be free.” We allow ourselves to be exploited, willingly and gladly, via smartphones and other devices. Everything seems available and consumable, which produces the illusion of freedom. “Under the information regime, being free does not mean being able to act but being able to click, like and post,” he writes. But what a shallow view of freedom this is.

The Supplanting of Truth

The information regime significantly impacts civic life, our perception of truth, and even the idea that there is a shared objective reality to begin with. It has “taken hold of the world of politics, creating massive fault lines and disruptions in democratic processes. Democracy is degenerating into infocracy.” By infocracy, Han means a “digital post-democracy” in which expertise, efficiency, and technique reign. Experts and computer scientists will administer society, and politics will be replaced by data-driven systems management. Decisions will be made by big data and artificial intelligence. This is a dehumanizing turn of events, one that French philosopher and theologian Jacques Ellul warned of years earlier, as all aspects of life were increasingly being subsumed by technique and efficiency. Ellul saw it coming; now the technologies exist to make it feasible.

There is little place left for public discourse about what is good and true. A true public square disappears in the digital age:

Digital communication redirects information flows in a way that undermines the democratic process. Information is distributed without passing through public spaces. It is produced in private spaces and is sent to private spaces. The internet is therefore not a public sphere.

Without a public sphere for discourse, what’s left is only uncontextualized content, disembodied information, and subjective perceptions, which is a recipe for intensified identity politics, digital tribes, and conspiracy theories. In cult-like fashion, “discourse is thus replaced with belief and confession,” something that is now evident on both the political Left and Right.

Not only is the public sphere fragmented, truth itself is clouded. Han argues that information is “additive and cumulative,” while truth is “narrative and exclusive.” And it is in a “de-narrativized information society” that truth “radically declines in importance.” Fake news, “truthiness,” alternative facts, and much more all are symptoms of truth’s decline in importance and the fragmenting of a shared reality and narrative to make sense of it all. Instead of seeking truth, we curate our own sense of what is right and craft our own pet versions of reality that align with what we want to be true and real. What is breaking down is the very idea of a true reality that is really real for all people, a shared understanding of the cosmos and human nature that really reflects and describes things as they truly are.

Recovering True Myth: Where Truth, Reality, and Story Meet

Han draws thought-provoking connections between truth and narrative, explaining how the decline and suspicion of narrative today directly relates to the clouding of truth. Humans are storytelling creatures, and we are designed to function best when the story we are living by actually aligns with reality as it truly is. This is precisely the problem Han is diagnosing—namely that when we divorce truth from story and are left only with endless bits of information apart from any larger embodied context and are bombarded with the proliferation of personal or niche narratives, we find no true meaning that can transcend our tribalism or sustain meaningful leaving over time.

This also shows us that today’s widespread “crisis of meaning” is at least in part a crisis of the loss of narrative. There are no grand stories left to situate one’s life within. They have all been obliterated by the postmodern project, and splintered by the digital world in which we all tell our own stories.

But Christians have something to offer when it comes to narrative truth and meaning. No story appeals to both beauty and reason to greater effect than the Christian Gospel. It has a mythic resonance, but yet is a real, historical story of unsurpassed artistry and truth. It speaks to humanity’s universal experience of fallenness and the common desire for forgiveness and restoration. Even more, it presents a living person, an embodiment of truth, goodness, and beauty—Jesus Christ, the God who has taken on flesh, overcome death, and reversed our Fall by the indestructible power of his life.

The Christian ethic flows from this divine narrative, which is more compelling than the greatest works of human art and literature. Christianity is true myth, reminding us that the world is enchanted and imbued with deep meaning—sometimes inexplicable, sometimes mysterious—where wonder and awe are returned to their rightful places, grounded in the reality and truth of the Divine Logos whose symphony is unfolding through four majestic acts of Creation, Fall, Redemption, and Restoration.

While Han doesn’t take the book in the precise direction I’ve just suggested, he is on to something important and is working further on this topic of the power of narratives in counteracting our social breakdown in his forthcoming book, The Crisis of Narration. It will be offering reflections like this:

Narratives produce the ties that bind us. They create community, eliminate contingency and anchor us in being. And yet in our contemporary information society, where everything has become arbitrary and random, storytelling shouts out loudly but narratives no longer have their binding force. Whereas narratives create community, storytelling brings forth only a fleeting community – the community of consumers. No amount of storytelling could recreate the fire around which humans gather to tell each other stories. That fire has long since burnt out. It has been replaced by the digital screen, which separates people as individual consumers. Through storytelling, capitalism appropriates narrative: stories sell. Storytelling is storyselling.
 

In a rare recent interview, Han interestingly commented about the church, perhaps hinting at the power of its narrative to provide an anchor amid all the disintegration. Cryptically he said, “It’s sad, when I go to church, there are barely 10 people, it’s empty.” Then he let this linger: “I live my life backwards. When people leave the church, I enter.”

Might Han be another one being drawn in by the power of the Christian narrative? Time will tell.