What is the power of the hidden in our apparently “open society”? Why has the drive to make everything visible—to secure and democratize the world by making governments and citizens “open books”—seemingly normalized conspiracy theories and lies, which stubbornly insist on “awakening” people to hidden truths? That anti-vaxxers who do not trust Covid-19 vaccines (which have undergone extensive public tests of their safety and efficacy), willingly consume horse-medicines known to be toxic to humans encapsulates the bizarre world we find ourselves in.
To make sense of our situation, we must look to the past. Writing about truth and politics in the wake of the Pentagon papers, which revealed the secrets and lies of America’s involvement in the Vietnam War, the philosopher Hannah Arendt observed “how vulnerable the whole texture of facts in which we spend our daily life [is]; it is always in danger of being perforated by single lies or torn to shreds by the organized lying of groups, nations, or classes.”{1} Building on her earlier work on the rise of twentieth-century totalitarian propaganda, which she argued replaced truth with a consistent and total system of lies, she contended that lying in politics weakened peoples’ abilities to “believe in the reality of their own experience” and to make informed opinions based on fact.{2} Thus, according to Arendt, its most damning consequence is not “that the lies will now be accepted as truth, and the truth be defamed as lies, but that the sense by which we take our bearings in the real world … is being destroyed.”{3} Because of this, we turn to totalitarian fictions that offer us a “sixth sense,” so that our imaginations can apprehend the universal “natural and historic laws” that lie beneath the surface.
Today in our own post-truth era dominated by ‘alternative facts’, conspiracy theories and ‘fake news’, Arendt’s words are finding new relevance, precisely because of her courage in unveiling the efforts of those in power to blur the distinction between truth and falsehood. Re-reading Arendt, it is difficult not to think of our current social media climate and rallying cries to ‘take the red pill.’ In July 2020—during the endless first wave of the Covid-19 pandemic—Elon Musk, who sought to open his California factories illegally, tweeted “Take the red pill.” Many, including Ivanka Trump, replied “taken.”{4} The ‘red pill’ is of course fictional: A reference to a scene in the 1999 film The Matrix, in which Morpheus, the leader of a group of human hacker-rebels, offers the protagonist Neo two pills: The blue pill, which will erase all memories of their encounter, and the red pill, which will reveal the truth. Neo takes the red pill because he feels that something is wrong in his world—the world that visually mirrors that of the audience. By doing so, Neo becomes ‘woke’ to the true dream/nightmare, for ‘our’ world is shown to be a computer simulation.
Intriguingly, though, the choice to “take the blue or the red pill” has become a passive act in response to a command: “take the red pill.”
So what problem are we trying to solve by ‘taking the red pill’? To answer this question, we need to move beyond Arendt, whose celebration of freedom as a heroic Greek struggle between equal free men depended on the active subjugation of women and slaves. Further, calling our world “post truth” because of fake news elides the differences between truth, facts, authenticity and media. While fact and truth are connected, they are not interchangeable Fact stems from the Latin word facere (to do) and the modern fact is linked to double-entry book-keeping practices in early mercantile capitalism (whereby order and numerical representation were essential elements in the keeping of accounts and the generating of their empirical facticity).{5} Truth is etymologically linked to “trust,” and authenticity—as well as authority, authorship and authoritarianism— which is historically linked to dramatic self-creation and rhetoric.{6} What we need to grapple with is not only the importance of accuracy—fact checking, however important, is remarkably ineffective in debunking conspiracy theories or fake news—but also why people believe something to be true regardless of its truth or falsehood. Tellingly, the U.S. 2016 elections were both dubbed the “fake news” and the “authenticity” elections, with the winner scoring high on both.
‘Redpilling’, in this context, should be understood as a threefold concept. Firstly, it reveals how our digital systems, built on seemingly-consistent forms of technological codes and knowledge, have been constructed to become temples of modern medicine, offering endless rabbit-holes of palliative hopes for a diseased social body. In these systems, paranoia is dangerously reparative. Thus, the danger is not questioning or criticism—both are central to democracy—but rather the transformation of these into a deep faith in hidden sources. Secondly, redpilling also underscores the importance of network neighborhoods and the formation of echo chambers built around open secrets. One “takes the red pill” at the command/suggestion of another, whom one trusts because they question what you question; they like what you like; they are as authentic as you are. Lastly, redpilling and The Matrix also point to the bizarre chains of mis-identifications that polarize society and are perhaps capable of leading it elsewhere. The film was not supposed to be a QAnon recruitment tool, but rather a call for its viewers to liberate themselves from repressive ideologies. The Matrix is dominated by themes of slavery, militant civil rights movements, and the White Man’s Burden. The series of identifications with “others” in the film—the human race as slaves, described in historically racist terms; the Oracle as a wise older black woman; and Zion as the city of free humans—reveals the extent to which conspiratorial and conservative visions of emancipation now operate by “dis-identifying” with the oppressed, a toxic liberation envy that seeks to undo civil freedoms by allegedly “learning from” their heroes and replacing them.
So what if we, as artists, designers, and publics, simply tarried with surfaces and took on the violence and discrimination around us that is barely under cover? What if we engaged the lives, dreams and experiences of these heroes not to inhabit them, but rather to build together the world they seek to inhabit? This question touches on the ontology of design. At the end of the day, as Arturo Escobar so poignantly states, “design is a key element in who we become because of the kinds of practices designed objects and tools call on us to perform.”{7} Here, we are again entering Arendt’s territory: To see the darkness of our times as a possibility for illumination.
References
{1} Hannah Arendt, “Lying in Politics: Reflections on the Pentagon Papers,” The New York Review, November 18, 1971.
{2} Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 1st ed. (New York, NY: Schocken Books, 2004), 351.
{3} Hannah Arendt, Between Past and Future. Eight Exercises in Political Thought (New York: The Viking Press, 1968), 257.
{4} Sonia Rao, “Analysis | How the Red Pill Got to Elon Musk: A Brief Look Back at Public Figures Co-Opting ‘The Matrix,’” Washington Post, accessed October 27, 2020, https://www.washingtonpost.com/arts-entertainment/2020/05/18/elon-musk-ivanka-trump-matrix-red-pill/.
{5} Mary Poovey, A History of the Modern Fact: Problems of Knowledge in the Sciences of Wealth and Society(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 29-91.
{6} For the relation between truth and trust, see Steven Shapin, A Social History of Truth: Civility and Science in Seventeenth- Century England (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 3-4.
{7} Arturo Escobar, Designs for the Pluriverse: Radical Interdependence, Autonomy, and Making of Worlds (London: Duke University Press, 2017), 30.
