Communication speedups can empower regressive, manipulative politics, not just progress

Evidence

Turning to politics and going further back, Marx had already noted how the accelerating effects of mass communication and rail transport could actually empower regressive social forces as in Louis-Napoléon Bonaparte’s blitzkrieg-style political campaign across mid-nineteenth-century France to consolidate his hold on power (he eventually crowned himself emperor): “Bonaparte used not only the accelerating effect of mass publication and the telegraph but, above all, the speed of the railways to establish in France a style of electioneering that was highly innovative, thoroughly organized in terms of its propaganda, entirely state-wide—indeed, campaign-like, in the military sense. With such means he was able to establish his presence in the entire country and to organize plebiscites whose acclamation was achieved through manipulation.” — Hartmut Rosa, Social Acceleration, 17

Categorization

• SEED: Angle: acceleration narratives usually promise liberation/progress; here the same technology served demagogic manipulation. Fits a piece on how new media speed empowers whoever controls the pipeline.
• XREF: Connects to the Iraq-war example immediately following in this chapter (enlightenment as mass deception), and to wider work on demagoguery and media. — connects to: Forced communication, not censorship, is the modern repressive force — Byung-Chul Han, Psychopolitics: Neoliberalism and New…, 189; Fast social media communication precludes the time political reflection requires — Jenny Odell, How to Do Nothing: Resisting the…, 556; Social acceleration itself erodes the preconditions for democratic self-steering — Hartmut Rosa, Social Acceleration: A New Theory of…, 442 (+1 more)

Broader Connections

• Fast social media communication precludes the time political reflection requires #corroborates (0.85) — Jenny Odell, How to Do Nothing, 556
• Social acceleration itself erodes the preconditions for democratic self-steering #corroborates (0.85) — Hartmut Rosa, Social Acceleration, 442
• Velocity is deliberately weaponized to outpace democratic awareness and freeze resistance #expands (0.85) — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 1092