.

Social media, of which Facebook has been discussed as an exemplar, has been responsible for the abstractification of its users in three ways. First, it has done so by limiting the description of self into predetermined and concrete categories; second, by mediating social interaction—that is, replacing concrete social interactions with abstract interactions; and finally, by alienating persons from their own experiences, social and otherwise, through the increasingly prevalent and accessible technology that has been commandeered by social media networks.

      To combat the present example of abstractification, Lanier (2009) provides a few suggestions, which might also be read as challenges for those loathe to admit their own abstractification:

       Create a website that expresses something about who you are that won’t fit into the template available to you on a social networking site. […]

       Post a video once in a while that took you one hundred times more time to create than it takes to view.

       Write a blog post that took weeks of reflection before you heard the inner voice that needed to come out.

       If you are twittering, innovate in order to find a way to describe your internal state instead of trivial external events, to avoid the creeping danger of believing that objectively describable events define you, as they would define a machine. These are some of the things you can do to be a person instead of a source of fragments to be exploited by others. (p. 17)

      And as an exhortation delivered specifically at what remains of humanistic movements, he writes:

      [A] campaign should be taking place now, influencing engineers, designers, businesspeople, and everyone else to support humanistic alternative whenever possible. Unfortunately, however, the opposite seems to be happening.

      Online culture is filled to the brim with rhetoric about what the true path to a better world ought to be, and these days it’s strongly biased toward an antihuman way of thinking. (p. 18)

      Part I

      Fact-minded Metaphysics

      The first part of the book will explain the history of fact from a philosophical vantage point. This begins by returning to a time before scientific investigation was tantamount to gathering all of the facts that make up our universe. A “fact”—that elusive kernel of truth which fights valiantly against speculation and assumption—is itself based on an assumption. This is important because we often allow facts to stand by themselves. This means that, in order to humiliate a far-right politician for his inane worldview that discounts the importance of facts, there must be a worldview that assumes that such facts are not only possible to discern, but that they may be relied on to the exclusion of other forms of understanding. But remember, believing a fact is a judgment call that you must make—something for which you are responsible. In the end, it is your fault if the fact turns out to be inaccurate because you chose to give up your own responsibility to understand the more complicated sets of relationships that the fact stood for. But it is much easier to deflect responsibility elsewhere: “How could I have known better? It was a fact, after all!”

      That the universe may be understood “in fact” is an assumption. A powerful one, indeed, but an assumption nonetheless. More specifically, this assumption is called positivism. Positivism is the assumption about reality that eventually replaced Theology in the 19th century. As the story goes, the church was no longer what people could turn to with questions about the universe, about education, about child-rearing, ethics, and so on. They were left with nothing. Imagine that. You would have nowhere to turn for how to restore old barn wood except for your old chemistry lessons. People were no longer able to deflect responsibility onto a spiritual text or figure—“I did it because the pastor said ….” The modern Europeans quickly found something else onto which they could deflect their responsibility for understanding. Auguste Comte proposed a new gospel—that of positivism! Positivism is the assumption that there are a finite number of things that can be known about the universe. That is to say that there could be such thing as universal knowledge. Without the guidance of the church for “best practices” for child rearing, parents threw up their hands in despair. To them, Comte explains that there is a best manner of raising your children, and we just need to learn what it is. With positivism, all the answers to life’s questions are “out there,” waiting to be discovered. Scientists are on the front lines, peeling back the frontiers in their quest to know everything. More on positivism later.

      The fundamental unit of understanding within the positivist worldview is a fact. “The Earth spins on its axis” is a fact. As denizens of this world, you and I are spinning, too. Neither of us experience this directly, but we take the astronomer’s word for it. I looked at the stars periodically last night. They appeared to be moving in the sky. What does this observation accomplish? As an observation, my perspective is important in understanding my relationship with the world. I can understand how compelling the geocentric theory must have been. The geocentric theory maintains that the stars are traveling around the world (which stays in the same place). That is certainly what it seems like. I don’t experience the Earth’s movement, after all. The theory was generated because it fit the observation of the astronomers up to the 17th century. A handful of astronomers took painstakingly careful notes, mapping the movement of the stars in the sky and found that there were a few observations that didn’t fit into this geocentric theory. They witnessed something happen that wasn’t supposed to. But since they did witness it, they realized that the “way it was supposed to happen” was wrong and needed to be changed. They had a difficult existential decision to make: trust themselves and thereby challenge the common-belief and Biblically-supported idea that the Earth was the center of the universe or “take the other scientists’ word for it” and thereby invalidate their own observations. It was eventually amended into the heliocentric theory that we still use for understanding the spatial relationship between planetary bodies (but not before extreme sanctions were doled out).

      Now imagine if Copernicus had said “planets moving in ellipses?—impossible!” and concluded that his perception had been mistaken. How often do students, educated in our schooling system, have the opportunity to question what they have learned? What if the planets didn’t revolve around us, but that the Earth was also in motion and revolving around some other star? Other students—the good students who do what they’re told and learn what they’re supposed to learn—would probably have laughed at him. Well, they had different methods of discouraging free-thinking back then such as banishment and house arrest. Today we use humiliation. We would brand Copernicus with a learning disorder so that nobody takes him seriously, then spoon feed him the facts of the universe in a private, go-at-your-own-pace classroom until he stops trying to understand it himself.

      That’s the tyranny of fact-mindedness in a nutshell. To know something “in fact” means that it is unquestionable so don’t bother trying to understand it. This means that you must give up your own authority of understanding and entrust this to someone else: a teacher, textbook, blogger, or fake-news-reporter. See the connection? Fact-minded education has taught students to distrust their own ability to think and to problem-solve. Year after year of “it couldn’t be! Well, it must be because my teacher/textbook/news anchor said so.” The good students master this at an early age—they give up the whole project of trying to understand why 10x10=100 and just memorize that shit. Nobody is alarmed by this, because at least she will have memorized what is factual! They’re the facts she’ll need to go far in life! Nobody realizes that she has given up something far more valuable: the ability to think for herself. Now she’ll believe the fake news reports (unless, of course, someone tells her that it is fake, but even then …). So Facebook and Twitter are sanctioned because they didn’t protect their users from in-credible news sources.

      The goal, once more, is to challenge the assumption that facts run the world, guide our experience, or tell us anything even remotely important. At worst, facts distract you from your own concrete experience. At best, a fact can alert you to something about your own experience. Though in the best-case scenario, it is necessary that the fact be misunderstood. This is to say that facts, when misinterpreted, can be a vehicle for understanding.

      Positivism is a compelling assumption about the nature