Human Behaviour in the Digital World

[digitalbehaviour]

Denialism: Are we all living in a self-serving delusion? And what can we learn from the ones who undoubtedly are?

Over the past two years we all have been living in unprecedented times. We had to cope with a new sort of reality, a pandemic that required us to change and adapt our behaviour in order to stay safe and ensure the safety of our social surroundings, our friends, families, neighbours and especially of the vulnerable people who have been threatened the most by the Coronavirus. But during this pandemic we might have also had a chance to encounter people who were not just frustrated and hence venting about the difficult situation, but potentially even denying the mere existence of this virus and the ensuing pandemic in the first place.

Personally, I did come across some very interesting representatives of this species, although this admittedly made me struggle to understand the etiology of such behaviour. Mainly because none of the pre-existing labels like “conspiracy theorists”, “skeptics”, “free-thinkers”, “obscurantists”, information bubble “agnotologists” or modern-day “digital esoterics” seem to capture the essence of what happens when otherwise intelligent people are somehow denying empirically proven facts for seemingly no obvious reasons.

However, after doing some initial research I was at least able to identify a common pattern in this behaviour, which can be described as “denialism”. Our beloved Wikipedia defines denialism as a person's active choice “to deny reality as a way to avoid a psychologically uncomfortable truth”. It continues to describe that denialism is “an essentially irrational action that withholds the validation of a historical experience or event, when a person refuses to accept an empirically verifiable reality”.

At first glance this seems to be a correct behavioural description, however it does not adequately explain why otherwise rational people would fall victim to such irrational behaviour. Three areas in which we all could experience such behaviour not just personally, on an individual level, but collectively, amplified via social media, are (1) the Covid Pandemic, (2) Climate Change, and (3) the most recent Economic Crisis. In all three cases, social media has become a breeding ground for the spread and amplification of this type of behaviour, giving rise to the question whether the specific types of “denialists” are all distinct in their characteristics and motivations, or whether in fact maybe any form of denialism might be explained by common features of people who are generally, as Wiki puts it, “rejecting overwhelming evidence … in attempts to deny the existence of consensus” on any given aspect of reality.

Whilst different theories already exist about the motivations and causes of denialism, including explanations based on religion, self-interest, and psychological defence mechanisms such as cognitive dissonance, we wanted to analyse existing commonalities within the personality structure of denialists, across the three above described areas of denialism (1, 2, 3).

As an openly available data source we have chosen to analyse Twitter data, which has shown us the following volumes of denialism-tweets related to either (1) the Covid Pandemic, (2) Climate Change, or (3) the Economy, over the past 3 years:

From the graph above we can see that the majority of all denialism-related tweets on these three topics are concerning either the Covid pandemic or the current economic situation. Together these two topics cover more than 94% of the denialism related tweets across these three topics over the past 3 years. Also, unsurprisingly, Covid is currently the area with the highest number of denialism related tweets among the three, although overall, the volume for the two topics of Covid and the Economy are almost equal in total volume. 

Although all three topics have their own topological and social epicenters, they are actually interrelated. Especially insofar as some Covid denialists also seem to consider the involvement of big economic leaders like Bill Gates, George Soros or Klaus Schwab be involved in planning a #GreatEconomicReset, effectively rendering these denialists to be more like conspiracy theorists. This seems to be especially interesting as the distinction between denialism and conspiracy thinking should in fact be logically exclusive, as one can only be of the opinion that a phenomenon does not exist OR that some obscure conspiracy is ultimately responsible for it, but not believe in both things at the same time (!). 

Psychologically speaking we could interpret this type of logically ambivalent behaviour as a strong, fear-induced impulse to protect the psyche against the disturbing concept of an actually inescapable global pandemic by initially simply denying its sheer existence, whilst then later, subsidiarily, blaming it on some powerful economic masterminds who are manipulating all of our lives from an unattainable, elitist economic position. Although such an irrational behaviour would not be considered technically logical, it might still be “psycho-logically” understandable in the same way that anyone facing an existential challenge in life might go through different stages of coping with this challenge, ranging from denial and anger up to, hopefully in the end, acceptance, where the mindset in any early stage might not be logically compatible with the mindset in any of the later stages of this coping process.    

Such a stage-dependant explanation of coping with the existential angst induced by the pandemic is in fact supported by the relative volume of fear vs. anger related tweets of the denialism audience when talking about the pandemic vs. the imaginatively causal economic reset:

In a way, this interpretation could point to an understanding of denialist behaviour as a lense into the collective unconscious of our societies when facing hard to accept truths which require all of us to significantly change and adapt not just some aspects of our behaviour, but our whole way thinking and feeling as well as our emotional baseline and our normal emotional regulation when it comes to basic human needs such as our personal health, our safety, and our individual security. Not being able to ever feel completely safe again can in fact be emotionally traumatic for some people to the extent that they would rather deny such a reality, than to actually live with the emotional consequence of a never ending fear. Social data supports what has also been described in a recent Guardian article on “Why people believe Covid conspiracy theories”, namely that, like conspiracy theorists, denialists also imagine stakeholders like Bill Gates, George Soros, and big economic players like the WEF or pharma companies to be behind the (not existing) pandemic or climate crisis. 

From a social network perspective it is especially interesting to see how all three denialist groups are ultimately interconnected and how they are utilising arguments from each other’s narrative to support their individual worldview and perspective.

In effect, this reveals how denialists, much like conspiracy theorists, selectively piece together aspects from different anecdotal narratives to create their own version of reality, which ultimately helps them to both a) simplify and hence better grasp “the” root cause behind complex matters like the Covid pandemic or climate change, as well as b) alleviate their individual feeling of helplessness in face of difficult circumstances which would otherwise force them to challenge and adapt their personal worldviews and attitudes with respect to existential concepts like freedom, health and social responsibilities. Especially the most trending hashtags and keywords associated with this audience reveals, to what extent they are perceiving everyone else to be living in some kind of #masspsychosis whilst they see themselves legitimised to #holdtheline in civil disobedience against an inhumane system which is taking their freedom away, committing #crimesagainsthumanity:

But what ultimately drives people to go down this route of constructing such an alternative reality? In their Guardian article “Why people believe Covid conspiracy theories”, Anna Leach and Miles Probyn identify a combination of catastrophic events and environments lacking trusted information as possible cause, whilst also conceding that an overload of information might have the same effect as lack of trusted information. 

When looking at some of the most recently shared #masspsychosis content by this audience, it is however becoming very doubtful whether any overload or lack of (trusted) information can ever explain on its own why someone would unpromptedly just  start to believe that there simply is no virus and that in fact the whole pandemic is just a devious plan to reset the economy.  

A sample of Twitter content examples using the hashtag #masspsychosis:

In summary, based on a more in-depth analysis of the denialist audience data, we have been able to identify a series of clear indicators for denialist behaviour across all analysed segments. These indicators include the following characteristics:

Being (highly) religious, specifically of Christian faith

Being conservative, specifically loyal Republican followers of Trump

Identifying oneself as a “patriot”

(Over)valuing individual freedom

Being interested in guns and rifles

Having an affinity for armed forces and the military

(Over)valuing stability, structure and simplicity

Having an interest in specifically power & dominance oriented sports types like paintball, boxing, wrestling, rodeo riding and bodybuilding

Having significantly lower than average Neuroticism as a personality trait, corresponding to outwardly self-assured and imperturbable behaviour of people who generally try to avoid or find it difficult to respond and adapt to any environmental change but rather compartmentalise or hide any negative emotion or anxiety. 

Especially the latter aspect might point to an underlying emotional reason why denialist audiences will find it difficult to adapt to big behavioural challenges such as the pandemic, the changing economy or climate change - they might have a general problem dealing with the negative emotions such as anxiety, anger, sadness and frustration associated with such big changes. Rather than facing these emotions, denying the challenging facts in the first place might hence simply be the easier route for this audience than having to act contrary to their very own personality structure which mandates them to always keep calm and imperturbable in the face of change. If this is the case, then we should see more of such denialist behaviour in a world that appears to be increasingly determined by volatility, uncertainty, complexity and ambiguity (VUCA), and in which social media stakeholders are incentivised to play right into the resulting anxiety, fear and doubt.

[digitalbehaviour]

Fake news through the lens of evolution

1. General background: the relevance of “fake news”

Fake news have been widely discussed in general media, specifically with regard to their impact on past (specifically US) and upcoming (UK, German) elections (see word cloud below, source: public social conversations about “fake news”, 2016-2017, via Crimson Hexagon).

Google trends data (see below) shows that “fake news” became a generally searched for term mainly at the time of the US election, 8th November 2016, and that issue has stayed relevant until today.

While the use of strategic disinformation in political campaigns is by far a new issue and can in fact be traced back to Roman times when Octavian was using political propaganda to help him win over Marc Anthony, the key difference now is that the internet - specifically social media - has changed the underlying economic structure of the media and information landscape. Effectively, social media has reduced the marginal costs of disseminating information to zero which opened the doors for anyone to enter the “news” business, effectively making it much harder for news consumers to identify truthful signals within the exponentially growing noise. 

Part of this problem is that main social media platforms like Facebook are effectively built on an algorithmic newsfeed design that is favouring highly emotionally engaging content over merely factual information, specifically in so far as its main form and at the same time self reinforcing source of interaction with content is the “Like” button - a rather simplistic and emotional way of interaction rather than a well-reflected means of scrutinising all details of the facts provided and arguments contained in a piece of content. 

On a societal level the problem raises massive questions, including whether and to what degree democratic decisions can still be regarded valid or possible at all if more and more of the electoral body’s decisions are based on invalid or out right false information.

“The real problem of humanity is the following: we have paleolithic emotions; medieval institutions; and god-like technology”. - E.O. Wilson

2. Evolutionary background: a critical inquiry into “fake news” as a concept

Before we are delving deeper into the technological or social aspects of the problem we first have to analyse how far we as human beings are ourselves part of the problem - and whether technology or even our much acclaimed human rationality and problem solving skills are able to resolve this issue.

Without starting a too big of a detour into the basics of epistemology, it is warranted at this point to mention that all of our assumptions of how “reality” and henceforth “facts” look like are based on our basic human (sensory as well as intellectual) capacities to perceive the world - starting with the visually visible spectrum of light and obviously ending with the spectrum of intelligence that every living generation of humans has to offer. So if we consider for a second the abstract question of why humans have not evolved to be more intelligent, the logical answer must be: because they did not have to in order to successfully survive and reproduce up to this point.

The epistemological insight here is that nature has not tuned us towards perceiving reality per se but our human “brain evolved for ideological entertainment rather than epistemic accuracy” [Miller, 2000]. That means, as humans, we are naturally limited to perceive only specific parts of reality: those parts that are biologically relevant to us - and that includes specifically the social side of our biology. This ‘biologically relevant reality’ must not be confused and does not necessarily have any overlap with a merely theoretically existing ‘factual reality’. Even as scientists, we cannot rid ourselves of a certain bias in what and how we do research to arrive at something that we then call “facts”. This ultimately means that there are no absolute or unbiased facts. Rather we are again on a spectrum of more or less biased viewpoints. Or in the words of David Sloan Wilson:

“Fake facts have been written into our brains by evolution, which ‘cares’ only about the practical realism of survival and reproduction and nothing about factual realism per se.”

Ultimately this means that we should not even use a term like “facts”, let alone “fake facts” or  “fake news”, because there is no absolute point of truth that we can refer to in any human system of knowledge reference. It is not even bias, it is our biology itself we are talking about. And we can’t “de-bias” ourselves just as little as we can rid ourselves of our own biology. A lot of practical attempts to tackle the problem which are based on the assumption that we have to “de-bias” ourselves or the social media news sources we are using, are therefore hopelessly naive and very prone to failure as they are not taking the underlying biological structure of the problem into account. Which is why we need to critically address and debunk this still very common information deficit model that is advocating that people just need to be made aware of the facts which will in turn automatically resolve the problem.

3. “Fake News”: Whose Responsibility is it?

Having understood that there is no absolute truth against which we can easily fact check our news and having also realised that our own social biology is inherently part of the problem, the question remains: who is responsible for fake news, whether eliminating it or at least reducing the extreme effects and forms of fake news and keeping these from influencing people’s opinions and decisions on critical public matters - including their voting decisions?

A first reflex which can often be observed in the behaviour of politicians is to blame and make “the media” responsible. On a superficial level that might make sense, given that some data suggests that specifically social media platforms seem to be over-proportional traffic drivers for fake news sites (see graphic below, source: Allcot & Gentzkow, 2017):

Whilst social media might be technically responsible for a quantitative increase in the dissemination and reception of fake news due to its levelling impact on the threshold of how easily news content can be published, expecting social media platforms to solve the problem out right may be unrealistic. First of all it seems a bit paradoxical to blame platforms like Facebook, Twitter and Instagram for making their news feed algorithms as socially appealing as possible in an interest-based peer-to-peer sharing context and then requiring them to re-write their algorithms for truthfulness of the content shared in that context. Similar to our own biological underpinnings, truthfulness is not what social media platforms are designed for in the first place. Secondly, it is generally questionable to expect social platforms that are built to support a free exchange of thoughts to now build a model of “algorithmic censorship” into their newsfeeds - especially as such an algorithmic solution would effectively delegate democratically key questions around free speech and the definition of what is newsworthy to the implicit and not openly disputed bias of random algorithm developers.  

Thirdly, and most importantly, such a technical view on the responsibility for “fake news” ignores the fact that social media platforms are ultimately just informational extensions of our own social relationships. With regard to social media it is impossible to differentiate the influence of the technical media platform from the people that use it. Actually the media is the people - something that Harvard technology researcher David Weinberger has put the following way:

“The internet is not a medium. We are the medium.“

That means the internet is not a bunch of computers, the internet is us! Likewise, social media is just a way of connecting user interests in a peer-to-peer like approach by serving each individual the content that she or he is most likely to engage with. Given that we all form part of and ultimately constitute the web with our digital interactions, no individual or corporation can logically own the web. This principle of net neutrality should also prevent any individual or corporation from policing the web in the name of an abstract idea of absolute truth that practically does not exist. 

Ultimately it comes down to any use of technology that, in part, enables and also in part handicaps us. We forget that we all use social media platforms voluntarily and we overly rely on algorithms spoon feeding us information whilst blindly believing in the truth of that information based on unrealistic assumptions that some kind of “deus ex machina” automatically starts to think for us and relieves us of our own responsibility to fact check the news that we consume before basing our decisions on them.

(source: Reddit)

In consequence, the actual question should not be about the responsibility for fake news but about information responsibility - and the answer is: we are responsible for our own information, both outgoing and incoming. You simply can’t delegate your own brain functioning and personal decision making! #citizenjournalist #informedcitizen

4. How could an actual solution look like?

Before we can talk about possible solutions we have to caveat that we will very likely not be able to completely solve the general underlying problem of people being prone to consume, believe and share false information, especially where it is suitable to their own social belief system.

In her New Yorker article “Why Facts Don’t Change Our Minds” Elizabeth Kolbert outlined some of the existing evidence on the perseverance of preformed opinions - even against contradicting information. Kolbert cites research of Hugo Mercier and Dan Sperber to show that some of the otherwise worrying deficits in our counter-factual reasoning can be explained when we take into consideration when and how our minds evolved: Aligned with the social brain hypothesis, their research points to the social living conditions that were crucial for our human evolution, a situation where we have been living in small hunter-gatherer bands in which our ancestors were much more concerned with their social standing in that group rather than with abstract questions about the factual evidence for global warming, the economic effects of certain health-care programs or whether the foreign policy of a specific party would be more beneficial than that of another party. What this effectively means is that - apart from the above (2) outlined lack of absolute facts in the first place - any potentially realistic solution to the “fake news” problem has to factor in that people will be likely to discredit and call any information “fake news” that is not compatible with their own pre-existing belief system.

This takes the initial problem of how to curb the dissemination and reception of false information to a whole new level as we now understand that it is effectively not about the actual quality of information being right or wrong in a certain reference system but rather about the reference system itself, where anyone can now create their own personal (post)truth belief system and simply ignore any information that is incompatible with that system.

Although technically and logistically quite far-reaching, in that light the current endeavours of traditional news outlets as well as social media platforms must be regarded hopelessly simplistic, especially given their fundamental misinterpretation of the problem in the first place. If we assume that our tribal human nature has made us always more interested in our social status and social standing rather than in the actual facts behind an argument, then it suddenly becomes much more understandable how so much false information is disseminated and how so many people believe and act upon it.

(source: ycombinator.com)

Similar to the evolutionary function of gossip, reasoning is essentially a byproduct of social status bargaining in which facts serve only the role of flexible argumentative ammunition: they really only have instrumental function to help win an argumentative battle - and if the facts don’t fit the argument, it is always easy to bend them.

In order to enable such a “flexible” way of dealing with facts, evolution has gifted our human mind with a specific feature that allows us to buy into one’s own false beliefs: self-deception. In his book “The Folly of Fools”, the biologist Robert Trivers has gone to great lengths to explain why and how self-deception can be evolutionarily advantageous, or as he put it: "Hiding the truth from yourself to hide it more deeply from others.” Understanding that the human male drive for power and control correlates with that type of ignorance and self-delusion can effectively explain how self-delusional politicians can not only lie to a whole nation without showing any signs of conscious deception but effectively set up a fully operational system of political propaganda and post-truth politics. 

Now that we better understand the actual size of the “fake news” problem, it becomes clear that we can only make tentative suggestions on how to counteract such a large scale delusional, ignorant and completely instrumental way of dealing with factual information. On the other hand, understanding the drivers behind such behaviour is our only hope to at least increase the likelihood of a more sensitive dissemination and reception of information. In our view, it is therefore unlikely that a purely educational or information based nudging approach will be able to achieve this goal.

Given the above outlined complexity of the problem, we humbly admit that we are not able to formulate a straightforward solution at this point. However, we are happy to work on finding a solution with anyone who is up for it and feel comfortable to say that any successful solution will very likely take into account the human tendency to:

Be more easily influenced by highly emotional and socially “relevant” content than factual information.

Want to belong to an “in-group” with other individuals who share core beliefs and help constitute and re-affirm an individual’s identity and meaning framework.

Rely on close social relationships and show unreflected social imitation behaviour as an easily habitualised behavioural heuristic to reduce decision making complexity.

Not want to fact check existing core beliefs and previous decisions unless being confronted with the inevitable need to do so.

Bend facts wherever this serves the purpose to advance one’s social status and social standing in a respective in-group.

Consider anything new or unusual as “news”, independent of the trustworthiness of its source.

In our view, all of these aspects need to be considered when trying to solve the “fake news” problem, rendering any solution that is purely informational, educational, based on manual curation or “fact checking”, or even purely algorithmic unlikely to be successful. Our current understanding is that only solutions that are able to shift the focus from the actual piece of shared information to the sharing individual and her/his agenda and sharing intentions will have a realistic chance of having a positive impact - if any of the above outlined fact-bending, unreflected, unchecked, habitual or purely false information sharing can be sanctioned by systematically downgrading the status of that individual/publisher to ultimately be openly visible as not trustworthy source of news and information with her/his sharing agenda being fully transparent and specifically personal, economical and in-group related sharing intentions out in the open for everyone to see.

5. Conclusion

Over the course of this article we tried to provide initial evidence that “fake news” are:

Not a new problem but actually as old as human communication itself: humans have evolved as highly social animals and have always used information sharing as strategic means to navigate their social hierarchy.

Technically not even a problem of differentiating between true and false information as we have seen that there are no absolute facts given that our limited human capacities to perceive and understand the world have always and will always force us to merely “err forward” rather than just look hard enough to be able to then just see the true facts.

As a phenomenon unlikely to be resolved by means of simple fact checking or providing better information about news source, specifically when taking into consideration that people have a vested interest in using information as a means to achieve a specific social/political agenda.

Effectively pointing to a bigger social problem that we as humans are naturally not “factual” beings but highly motivated by emotionally and socially individually relevant issues and prone to optimise our decisions for a tribal social environment rather than for a context of large-scale populations with rational dependencies and instrumentalities.

Obviously there are lots of open questions and as always, “further research is needed”, but we feel that the following next steps might be worthwhile considering - potentially in co-operation with some interested experts, journalists, fact checking organisations:  

- What can behavioural science tell us about potential “nudging” solutions that might make people and organisations less likely to disseminate false information? - Understanding that our basic assumptions about human rationality might be wrong, how can we make ourselves more sceptical about potentially false information without only relying on our rationality? - How can we elevate the public discussion to a level that people start to understand that “fake news” is not about true vs. false information? - How can we avoid the “fake news” debate to become a joke/meme in itself, wearing off like a constant fire alarm, or in this context “fake fire alarm”?

We want to close this piece as we have started it, with E.O. Wilson: “The real problem of humanity is the following: we have paleolithic emotions; medieval institutions; and god-like technology”.

References:

Allcott, H. & Gentzkow, M. (2017). Social Media and Fake News in the 2016 Election. Journal of Economic Perspectives, Volume 31, Number 2, Spring 2017, Pages 211–236. [LINK]

Braman, D. et. al. (2012). The Polarizing Impact of Science Literacy and Numeracy on Perceived Climate Change Risks, 2 Nature Climate Change 732.

Mercier, H. & Sperber, D. (2017). The Enigma of Reason. Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA.

Miller, G. (2000), The Mating Mind: How Sexual Choice Shaped the Evolution of Human Nature. Heineman, London.

Sloman, S. & Fernbach, P. (2017). The Knowledge Illusion: Why We Never Think Alone. Pan Macmillan, London.

Trivers, R. (2011). The Folly of Fools: The Logic of Deceit and Self-Deception in Human Life. Basic Books. 

Author Information:

- Max Beilby is a researcher and business consultant based in London. Max has been teaching at Birkbeck College and holds a master’s degree in Organisational and Social Psychology from LSE.

- Thomas Hirschmann is founder and CEO of Behavioural Economy, a behavioural science driven innovation business. Thomas is teaching at Pearson College London and holds degrees in law and psychology from LMU Munich.

[digitalbehaviour]

“Digital” is an empty attribute - so how do we fill the void?

Today everything is digital - or becoming digital. Digital has been a buzzword for more than a decade, and this buzzword has gradually been extended to include hundreds of new up and coming hypes and trends that are all promising the advent of a new age of a more informed, more fulfilled and happier life by personalising our online experience, virtualising our world, quantifying every step and breath that we make and connecting every device and person with us to finally make us the centre of our own narcissistic digital paradise… [no sarcasm here]

However, whether it was mobile, social, wearables, IoT, quantified self, VR/AR or now machine learning and AI: they all eventually underdeliver against their promise because the cannot do one thing: change the underlying biological nature and needs of ourselves. Whatever device, tech, tool or advanced self learning algorithm you are using: it cannot make you being less needy, greedy, annoying or unhappy with yourself. So rather then filling this spot with more or less funny news about nonsensical gadgets and tech trends - if you are looking for this kind of fun, please check https://twitter.com/internetofshit - we are intending to take a more nuanced view on digital behaviour here, specifically with regard to the social and cultural ways in which technology gradually changes human behaviour (not always in a good way).

But most importantly, we are trying to answer the question of what it actually means to be human in the digital age - what are genuine expressions in the digital realm that truly connect us to each other or to our human roots as they have evolved in a time that definitely has not seen any smartphones or computers (EEA). 

We spend more and more of our time online and almost all of our experiences now have some kind of digital or virtual component - but apart from the efficiency and convenience aspect: is digital really adding anything essential to our human life that we would not also have in a completely analog hunter-gatherer environment?

Also, what do we mean if we talk about things like “digital transformation”, “digital disruption”, “digital marketing”, digital whatever? Is there anything substantial behind it at all, is it giving us any direction or basically just a completely unsupported assumption about our life becoming more and more virtualised, bodiless and information driven?

Some say, the invention of the internet has been the last real innovation in human history [hopefully not]. However, people always reference the likes of UBER, AirBnB, Google and Facebook as paradigms of disruptive (is that even positive?) innovations - although they are technically just exploiting / extending great ideas into the digital realm, so technically not doing anything new at all [not to self: do not criticise tech giants]. Another question that we want to address here is however: what are or would be digital innovations that really make a positive difference for our human life in the true sense of making us more “human” - or even more happy?

And of course in the process we want to identify the ultimate human truths as and when they become manifest in our digital behaviour, reflecting both the positive/good side of what it means to be human as well as the sad/bad side where we behave like trolls, idiots, sexists, racists or anyone who is trying to convince you online that climate change is a myth, Donald Trump is the best American president ever and anyone not member of a specific sports club is your enemy.

So what are the digital behavioural manifestations of our deepest needs and wants that we can learn from? And what can we learn on how to escape the little convenient digital traps that we have created for us in our new digital environment that we are collectively weaving by interacting with each other in our social/digital spiderweb. And how can we avoid digital to become just a big escapism, the big hideaway from the real world and the real challenges where our generation prefers to hibernate instead of changing the stakes - and the political climate - in the real world. So instead of going out there and protesting against the pseudo-democratic autocrats that are calling themselves our leaders, are we doomed to hide away in the privacy of our WhatsApp chats and Facebook groups, our favourite forums and Reddit threads, in the aesthetic kaleidoscope of the make-believe world of the people we follow on Instagram and the instantaneous gratification of our Snapchat communication? Is this what we are aspiring to when we use the world “digital” in a pretentious way where we are trying to appear smart in a professional conversation?