Digital consensus is more coercive than bourgeois social convention was

Evidence

Today, it seems, the type of the outsider – the idiot, the fool – has all but vanished from society. Thoroughgoing digital networking and communication have massively amplified the compulsion to conform. The attendant violence of consensus is suppressing idiotisms. Botho Strauss pinpoints the difference between contemporary conformism and bourgeois convention of old: ‘For him, the idiot, it’s as if everyone else were speaking in subtle attunement with each other: brought down to the most agreeable level [verträglichsten Stimmungsgrad] … This is a far more implacable convention than any convention known before, in bourgeois times.’ — Byung-Chul Han, Psychopolitics, 185

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to Han’s broader argument across his corpus about digital swarm, the society of ‘the Same,’ and the loss of otherness inaugurated in The Burnout Society; also resonates with the Enlightenment-era observation that unforced consensus is still conformity. — connects to: Digital networking creates a subtler but more implacable conformism than bourgeois convention. — Byung-Chul Han, Psychopolitics: Neoliberalism and New…, 185; Consensus is shaped and structured by unequal power rather than freely formed — Hall, Stuart, Essential Essays, Volume 1, 919; Consent layered through digital networks can function as coercion — Nick Couldry & Ulises A. Mejias, The Costs of Connection: How Data Is…, 690
• SEED: Angle: contrast the fear of bourgeois hypocrisy that drove critique in earlier eras with today’s fear-free ‘agreeable tuning’ where everyone already agrees — and ask what resistance even looks like when deviation is no longer the offense.

Related

• Digital networking creates a subtler but more implacable conformism than bourgeois convention. (similarity 0.91)
• Consent layered through digital networks can function as coercion (similarity 0.79)

Broader Connections

• Digital networking creates a subtler but more implacable conformism than bourgeois convention. #corroborates (0.95) — Byung-Chul Han, Psychopolitics, 185
• Consent layered through digital networks can function as coercion #corroborates (0.85) — Nick Couldry & Ulises A. Mejias, The Costs of Connection, 690
• Consensus is shaped and structured by unequal power rather than freely formed #expands (0.75) — Hall, Stuart, Essential Essays, Volume 1, 919