Journalists often miss the longer-term trends that underlie the tech stories, because they are under pressure to meet insane deadlines and produce insane headlines. Here’s another example.

There is at present an understandable concern that social media has been exploited by fascists and bigots, who use it to spread their message of hate. There are good grounds for such concerns of course. But I think the bigger trend is not that fascists are good at social media: it’s that social media is turning all of us into fascists. Not in our ideology, but in the style

of politics we adopt.

The fascist style of politics is one which creates alternative realities, prioritises reaction without thought, whips are rage and encourages tribal loyalty to the Great Leader. If Mussolini were to design a communications system to encourage a fascist style of politics, I suspect it wouldn’t look too dissimilar to some of our popular social media platforms.

Let’s take fake news, an obsession de nos jours. It is widely assumed that people like Tommy Robinson — former leader of the English Defence League — surrounds himself with ‘fake news’ and conspiracy theories. It’s not quite that simple. I’ve spent a lot of time with Robinson (shadowing him for my second book, Radicals

). He does read and share fake news of course, but it’s more accurate to say he surrounds himself with cherry picked true news, which corroborate his world view of Islam and the West being incompatible. For several years he has therefore constructed a plausible and coherent version of this world view, through careful one-sided selection of truth. This is not the same as ‘fake news’. This is a problem of selectively omitting certain truths.

The ability to construct believable alternative realities is an important component of any fascist mode of politics, because where there is no commonly shared truth, there is nothing upon which you can anchor political discussion and debate. All that remains is two groups screaming at each other.

This is something we are all doing, albeit in a less extreme way. Selecting some truth and omitting others, in order to build our own plausible and coherent realities.

I’m not blaming Zuck or Dorsey or Brin or Page. It’s simply that certain technologies lend themselves to certain behaviours. Part of the problem stems from a major miscalculation repeatedly made (in good faith) since the 1990s in Silicon Valley. These techno-utopians believe that more information and connectivity will make us wiser, kinder, smarter. Our politics will be more informed if have more information. However, we have too much information. We’re drowning in blogs and facts and charts and more facts. It’s too much to deal with rationally. All we can do is relying on gut instincts and heuristics: my guy / not my guy, that feels true, that confirms what I already thought. Essentially, these are all emotional responses.

That overload, in part, drives us to select our truths. (And to make matter worse there is some evidence that social media platforms are incentivised to show more polarising, aggressive content: because that is more likely to attract our attention and keep us online. This is not even done consciously, it’s simply an algorithmic reflection of what we tend to click on.)

It also drives us to reaction without reflection. In a print-based society, for all its flaws, there is at least a cultural predisposition for an ordering and coherence of facts and ideas, something the linguist Walter Ong called “the analytic management of knowledge”. It lends itself to reflection. Social media platforms however are built to a very different logic: an endless, rapid flow of dissonant ideas and arguments, one after the other, without obvious order or sense of progression. It’s designed for you to blast out thoughts or ripostes over breakfast, on the move, at the bus-stop. It demands your immediate, ill-thought through response. What’s on your mind, Jamie? Facebook asks. What’s happening? Demands Twitter. I’ve noticed people rush to get their denouncements and public displays of outrage in quick, without bothering to work out what they actually think.

Fascists have always worshipped action for action’s sake, because to think is to emasculate oneself with doubt, critical analysis, and reasonableness. “Action being beautiful in itself,” explains Umberto Eco, in a famous essay about the fascism “it must be taken before, or without, any previous reflection”. It would be difficult to write a better definition of a mad rampaging online mob than this. This tendency has been brilliantly exploited by Steve Bannon, who makes statements designed to provoke a frothing-mouth response from liberals. They always oblige, which forces people in the middle to take sides — and that’s the goal. I’m not talking about left or right here, by the way. Both are guilty, since both are reacting to the same basic incentives and new information structure.

All this — the speed, the info overload, the emotive mode — is driving a very obvious re-emergence of tribalism. This combines to create a new form of tribalism in politics. In our hyper-connected, information saturated world, we are encircled by enemies and protected by fellow travellers. Joining a tribe is the only way to survive. And online there is always a fact or a comment or a hot take to prove your side is right and the other side is utterly wrong. When was the last time you actually changed your mind after discussing something online? I’ll answer that for you: probably never, because who has time online for the long, careful, respectful discussion necessary to see the other side of it? In such a world, opponents can’t merely hold principled differences of opinion, they must have sinister motives. Our opponent are liars, cheats, Machiavellians. There’s no compromising with any of them.

These are of course prefect conditions for the tribal leader to arrive and channel the rage, fix the world’s chaos, and bring order to chaos. Hannah Arednt warned us of this decades ago.

Is it all that surprising therefore that social media is helping politicians that embrace this style? Populists are far more in keeping with the philosophy and feel of today’s tech. They promise easy and immediate solutions to complicated problems, without compromise or failure. This is Tinder politics. (They all, incidentally, are in favour of some form of direct democracy — because they claim to represent the ‘real people’).

Is it surprising that, despite this apparently being an age without deference, there is a newly found hero-worship and total leader loyalty in certain quarters? Whether Macron, Trump, Corbyn, Wilders, Trudeau — we await the anointed one to save us, and thus swear total loyalty and fealty to them.

Is it surprising that surveys find growing taste for authoritarian leaders? Is it all that surprising that, in these conditions, truth appears less important than loyalty to the side you’re on?