Affective Encounters of the Algorithmic Kind: Post-Truth and Posthuman Pleasure

Abstract

This article goes beyond the current discourse on post-truth, fake news, and related developments by tracing the emergence of a broader and more fundamental change—a posthuman turn in politics. The article begins with examining the background of post-truth and the causes of its prominence. Those causes are found to primarily lie in the natural human predilection for pleasure and satisfaction as well as capacity for affective agglomeration. Such agglomeration is particularly manifest in the digital and, even more specifically, new media environment where the abundance of information and alignment opportunities has led to incessant competition of media and political actors for audience attention. The main weapon in this competitive struggle is maximization of consumer satisfaction, that is, pleasure (and not, e.g. veracity). However, the main transformative factor that both enable the maximization of satisfaction and lead to the posthuman turn is the abundance of data and the potential for its algorithmic analysis as well as interpretation of the results of such analysis. In this context, data-rich algorithm-wielding political actors are capable of knowing in advance the utterances and other affective triggers necessary to alter their audiences’ choice environments in such a way that it will have no other option but to choose the preferred outcome, receiving pleasure in return. However, the same political actors are simultaneously reduced to mouthpieces for algorithmically selected utterances instead of themselves being active shapers of political strategy. Consequently, humans must share agency with algorithms and other pieces of code, if not cede it altogether.