#YouToo? #

The #MeToo movement marks the (re) emergence of new, yet very old social structures. 

At the end of October 2017, #MeToo tweets resulted in the firing of a dean at a Hungarian university – just a week after the hashtag first became a call to arms against sexual harassment in Harvey Weinstein’s Hollywood. In a couple days the movement had spread from America to Europe, from the entertainment industry to higher education. It was not the first time that either Weinstein, the now infamous producer, or the Hungarian dean were accused of harassment. Yet, their professional image had not been tarnished by the accusations – right up until the Fall of 2017.

We can see now that their downfall was an outcome of changing social structures. A sign of shifting times, the end of the Post-Modern age and a return to what we contemptuously used to call Pre-Modern. The coming back of an era where the different roles we play in society merge again after more than a century of isolation.

In the 1950’s, at the dawn of the Information Age, leading theoreticians of cybernetics were quick to recognize the growing importance of information and communication to our societies. Several of them predicted accurately how thoroughly the increasing volume of information available to us would change our lives – no small feat from people who had been socialized in the 1920’s and 1930’s. However, most of their research was focused on the effects of incoming information on individuals – i.e. the information we receive from our environment.

Information is a name for the content of what is exchanged with the outer world as we adjust to it, and make our adjustment felt upon it. The process of receiving and of using information is the process of our adjusting to the contingencies of the outer environment, and of our living effectively within that environment. The needs and the complexity of modern life make greater demands on this process of information than ever before... To live effectively is to live with adequate information. Thus, communication and control belong to the essence of man’s inner life, even as they belong to his life in society. (Norbert Wiener: The Human Use of Human Beings: Cybernetics and Society)

Living half a century before the arrival of social media and big data, even the brightest minds could not have foreseen how the changing patterns of individuals’outgoing information – i.e. what we share with the world about ourselves – would transform our societies. With the benefit of hindsight, now we can clearly see that the effects of this latter change are even more fundamental than those caused by the explosion of information we receive day-by-day.

All this may sound counterintuitive, considering that the volume of incoming information grew exponentially throughout the previous decades, while the amount of data we share about ourselves (or others share about us) merely reached a previous level. To better understand the degree to which we have already returned to long-gone social patterns, consider the parallels between the experience of the protagonists of the following two movies: ‘The Hunt’ from Denmark and ‘Caught in the Web’ from China, both released in 2012.

The Hunt: Lucas is a Kindergarten teacher who takes great care of his students. Unfortunately for him, young Klara has a run-away imagination and concocts a lie about her teacher. Before Lucas is even able to understand the consequences, he has become the outcast of the town.

Caught in the Web: Set in Hangzhou, in modern-day China, a young woman becomes embroiled in controversy after a cell phone video of her being disrespectful on a public bus to an elderly person goes viral. The aftermath affects her personal and professional life and it seems there is nowhere to hide from the all-seeing eye of social media.

While The Hunt is set in a very much Pre-Modern environment, and Caught in the Web’s society shows off all the typical elements of Post-Modernism, both movies reflect on similar patterns in the interaction between the individual and the community. With technology accelerating the speed and broadening the range of information we are continuously transmitting, the limitations of time and space are constantly being reduced. As the #MeToo movement shows, by now the whole world has become a village. Everyone knows or can easily learn a little bit about anyone else, just like in that small Danish town in The Hunt.

However, while #MeToo had an overwhelmingly positive effect on many parts of the global village, The Hunt and Caught in the Web also remind us that social change is often a zero sum game. The two movies display our human biases disturbingly well. Humans can be easy to believe and hard to change their minds. In The Hunt, we see the crowd quickly decide on trusting the little girl’s lie based on the deep-rooted impression that children are vulnerable and in need protection. While nobody should be blamed for that first mistake, the falsely accused teacher’s story shows us where things can go really wrong: both the individuals and the community as a whole are ready to ignore new facts and turn out to be totally unwilling to accept that their judgment had not right.

We witness the same arrogance in Caught in the Web, reminding us that it is not only ancient information transmitting patterns that we are going to resurrect in our new-yet-old future. We will carry with us the same biases that a time traveler from the Middle Ages would have no problem recognizing. What is notable here is that, in a way, the situation actually seems to have gotten worse with the global social media and big data revolution.

First consider the falsely accused teacher’s story from The Hunt. When Lucas goes back to his village and finds that he is still hunted, he has a choice. He can stay there to face people’s gossip and keep fighting for his truth, or he can leave and start a new life in a big city. Then look at Ye Lanqiu’s fate in Caught in the Web. In a 1.4-billion-people-village of real-time hate, her story cannot end in any other way but with suicide, as she hasnowhere to run, nowhere to hide.

In real life too, every time a job applicant is refused based on ‘inappropriate’ Facebook posts, or when New Yorkers protest against dog-meat festivals in China, our world gets a tiny bit smaller and our village bigger.

The fate of our times is characterized by rationalization and intellectualization and, above all, by the 'disenchantment of the world.' Precisely the ultimate and most sublime values have retreated from public life either into the transcendental realm of mystic life or into the brotherliness of direct and personal human relations. (Max Weber: Essays in Sociology)

On the plus side, gone are the times when one could use one’s professional reputation and the public’s ignorance to cover up personal crimes. On the other hand, this shift also marks the end of the rational, secular, and private social order of Modernity - as Max Weber knew it; the end of an order that lived on well into Post-Modernity – as we knew it.

#MeToo showed us that by now we have indeed returned to Pre-Modernity. The only question remaining is how well will we handle the mixed blessings of this re-volution ?