The Digital Reformation

A Civilisational Convulsion

In a 1996 presidential briefing, Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan compared the economic activity of the early internet to the discovery of a new planet. At the time, the administration was tracking what later became known as the dot-com bubble. But long after that bubble burst and its fortunes vanished, Greenspan’s cyber planet held its shape.

A visualisation of Internet activity

Thinking of the Internet as an abstract planet has always struck me as a fruitful way to view the sprawling technology. When I was in the business of building social media platforms, I found that giving the Internet a sense of place helped me to hold unfamiliar tech concepts together and communicate strategies to my collaborators.

I thought of my co-founders as explorers and our developers as tradesmen as we carved out a piece of land from the limitless cybermass. We established laws through code, shaped customs through the user interface, and encouraged digital pioneers to build profiles on our land in the hope that one day, we would preside over our own digital nation. 

World Three (Meaning Sanctuaries)

The playful construct became more profound for me when I came across philosopher Karl Popper’s concept of the ‘Three Worlds’.

Popper wrote about three distinct “Worlds,” which he used as a categorical schema to think about reality as a whole. World One, he said, is the realm of physical objects, the lifeless domain of matter and movement. This world gives rise to living organisms from which a separate world of subjective states emerges. The second world is the realm of experience, where all feelings, inner thoughts, and memories reside. From the subjective realm of World Two, a separate world of human abstraction is possible - this is our intersubjective “World Three”.

Popper’s World Three is a category that includes our ever-evolving language, art, culture, and concepts. It’s our collective world of meaning that’s not quite physical, although it manifests through material means, and it’s not entirely experiential, though it’s felt in our experiences. It has existed in various forms for as long as humans have communicated and our civilisations are built and destroyed via World Three’s many possible configurations.

At any point in time, a massive corpus of human mental activity sits scattered across the planet within minds and media, ready to be engaged with. This sprawling mess of symbolised thought is created and destroyed, lost and rediscovered, built upon and reconfigured as human populations work together to create meaning and commune through it.

Prehistoric humans reach into World Three

Sociologist Clifford Geertz, borrowing a line from Max Weber, wrote that man is “an animal suspended in webs of significance he himself has spun”. I suspect Geertz and Weber chose the spider’s web because it is not under the spider’s rational control. It emerges naturally, shaped by environment as much as the instinctual information embedded within the spider.

Like the spider, human groups instinctively arrange symbolic sanctuaries that form the basis of communal life. Put another way, a sanctuary of meaning is a complex of facts, values, and stories that represents the world and allows people to place themselves within a coherent social context.

The Reformation

Early humans transmitted their tribal sanctuaries verbally, which placed hard limits on how much complexity could be memorised and passed on. The invention of writing systems was a quantum leap in the storage and transmission of information. Humans externalised memory and language into physical matter and, in doing so, gained the power to think and communicate more clearly across time and space. As we grew better at learning from the dead, teaching the unborn, and converging on increasingly sophisticated symbolic systems, tribes expanded into civilisations.

My civilisation, the one we call the West, has been shaped by a body of texts and cultural memories stretching back to the ancient Greeks and Romans, and by the stories that make up the Bible. Around the biblical scriptures grew a vast body of secondary media, from which emerged the sanctuary of meaning we call Christianity. I am setting aside theological questions here in order to focus on how Christianity was established and maintained in practice through worldly institutions.

Consider these churches as infrastructure for maintaining and distributing a sanctuary of meaning.

Throughout the medieval period, worldly institutions derived their authority from Christianity. The Catholic sanctuary of meaning that spread across Europe was understood to be the word of God, mediated through His institutions. Popes, emperors, and kings were anointed in explicitly Christian rites that marked them as chosen by God. The work of making and preserving meaning fell to a tightly knit intellectual class working in Latin. These clerics, monks, and theologians were the experts of the age, and Latin created a hard barrier between them and the rest of society, who lived in the vernacular. In terms of the collective World Three, participation was narrow and highly restricted.

It was, of course, messy and complicated, but overall, a level of stability was maintained through the masses’ willingness to bend a knee to the will of God and take their place within His Great Chain of Being.

The invention of the printing press around 1440 meant that books, pamphlets, and posters could be replicated relatively cheaply. Literacy spread, and through the work of Martin Luther a Bible translated from Latin into the vernacular became accessible to laypeople. Ordinary believers began to develop and circulate personal interpretations of God’s will outside the Catholic Church’s purview. As doubts grew about whether the clergy were truly best placed to interpret divine will, printed media carried reports of their worsening degeneracy. Complaints clustered around church officials selling God’s forgiveness, alongside extortion, nepotism, and sexual scandal, and the foundations of the Church’s legitimacy began to fracture.

What followed was the civilisation-wide convulsion known as the Protestant Reformation. It was an era that erupted into decades of war, waves of collective delirium, brutal persecutions, and desperate flights to distant lands to build new bespoke sanctuaries of meaning.

A mass grave site from the Battle of Lützen

Liberal Democracy

During the Reformation the masses were unmoored from faith in their governing institutions and swung wildly between new sources of authority. They were searching for something to which they could earnestly bend a knee. As theological conflicts wreaked havoc, many turned toward more stable, observable truths, and the scientific method gained traction as a source of authority.

This shift in mental orientation began to take explicit form in thinkers like Baruch Spinoza (1632–1677), a philosopher whose conception of God was highly unusual for his time. He saw his proto-scientific methods as a way of knowing God, who was not an omnipotent deity but the inherent order of the material universe. Centuries later, when asked about God, Albert Einstein replied, “I believe in Spinoza’s God.” Today, in the depths of a late-night, boozy conversation, you can fairly reliably get pious scientists to admit that this is the god they worship too.

This is what Nietzsche was pointing to when he famously declared the death of God in the late nineteenth century. By then, God was no longer the central source of gravity around which the West’s World Three had clustered. In His absence, Western institutions increasingly reoriented themselves toward the material world. In effect, the Enlightenment project sought to yoke Popper’s Worlds Two and Three to World One. What followed was a profound reconfiguration of the West. Out of it emerged a new philosophical and political paradigm in liberal democracy, grounded in the radical belief that objective truth could be found in material reality, that it was open to investigation by all, and that society as a whole would benefit from efforts to converge upon it.

In liberal theory, power is constrained by independent courts, competitive elections, and a pluralistic public sphere in which different perspectives are permitted to clash without violence. That clash is now often framed as a marketplace of ideas, where competing claims meet in public, are tested, and either gain adoption or fade away. In the idealised account of liberal democracy, this quasi-Darwinian process serves as an engine of civilisational progress. The ideas most fitted to truth and social betterment survive selection pressure and become the working assumptions of society. For the liberal, this emergent order, always correcting and improving itself, takes on something like the role of divine will.

Since the Enlightenment, the institutions once tasked with mediating between God and the people have gradually ceded authority to those claiming to mediate between objective reality and the public (universities, journalistic orgs, bureaucracies). Clergy gave way to experts, and verifiable fact, rather than divine revelation, became the basis of their authority.

It is, of course, messy and complicated, but overall, a level of stability has been sustained by the public’s continued willingness to bend the knee to facts and to subordinate personal interests to the demands of “progress”.

The Pseudo-Environment

In 1922, a journalist by the name of Walter Lippmann published a book called Public Opinion, where he explored the limitations of the Liberal democratic order. This was a time between the world wars when mass media innovations in radio, the telegraph, industrial printing, and cinema were making their presence felt.

Running against many of the assumptions embedded in the Liberal paradigm, Lippmann argued that people don’t have direct access to objective reality due to limitations in their knowledge and access to information. Instead, they rely on heavily mediated information and simplified constructs to create a functional but distorted version of objective reality. He called the World Three they inhabited a ‘pseudo-environment’. 

“It is often very illuminating to ask yourself how you got at the facts on which you base your opinion. Who actually saw, heard, felt, counted, named the thing, about which you have an opinion?”

“We are told about the world before we see it. We imagine most things before we experience them. And those preconceptions, unless education has made us acutely aware, govern deeply the whole process of perception.”

Lippmann’s reflections on the human mind are at times cynical, but his observations about the inner workings of mass media and the manipulability of popular opinion are hard to fault. After identifying a long list of seemingly insurmountable problems with the Liberal project, Lippmann came to the conclusion we ought to abandon the marketplace of ideas in favour of a scientifically managed information environment.

“It is no longer possible to believe in the original dogma of democracy; that the knowledge needed for the management of human affairs comes up spontaneously from the human heart. Where we act on that theory we expose ourselves to self-deception, and to forms of persuasion that we cannot verify.”

Lippmann wanted to refine democracy by inserting a mediating class between events and the public mind. He assumed this class could be trained into disciplined objectivity. Their task was to study populations scientifically, then shape public opinion toward conclusions that matched thier expert picture.

Lippmann wasn’t alone in his studies of mass media and meaning. The early twentieth century was a laboratory for media technique. New technologies made it possible to project a shared reality into millions of homes at once, and politics moved in to engineer it. The repressive regimes that emerged in Europe and Asia are case studies of the outer limit of these techniques, when a state aims to seize total control of Lippmann’s pseudo-environment, or Popper’s World Three.

It’s comforting to treat propaganda as a foreign pathology, but technique has no respect for borders. In the liberal democracies of the West, propaganda practices that began as wartime coordination and commercial tinkering evolved into the advertising and public relations industries, then sank into the background of everyday life.

Throughout the mass media era, even the democratic West became awash with meticulously crafted messaging designed to elicit predetermined behaviours. Something like the marketplace of ideas survived as a civic ideal, but in practice an order closer to Lippmann’s vision emerged. Not explicitly as a result of Lippmann’s book, but as a function of the sheer complexity of the post-industrial world.

Because the post-industrial world is so complex, it’s now broadly accepted that competent experts require a degree of insulation from the heat of politics to keep the machine running. Through a steady stream of progressive reforms, decisions once fought over in elected legislatures have passed into the domain of permanent agencies and expert commissions. Sophisticated public relations techniques are then used to sell these prescriptions to the public, while respected media institutions maintain a fairly narrow Overton window.

Our symbolic work of meaning-making is now carried out by analysts, academics, bureaucrats, and media professionals, a tightly knit class of material reality interpreters who often work in technical dialects. Seen this way, the modern knowledge class can resemble a secular echo of the premodern clerisy. The level of actually existing liberal democracy in any nation depends in part on this class’s openness to heterodox debate and its willingness to gauge ground-level public opinion.

The Digital Reformation

When the enormous media distribution channels of the Internet opened up at the turn of the 21st century, we effectively created a public interface into World Three. Anyone with a PC and web connection could have their ideas frictionlessly replicated across millions of screens worldwide.

Institutional floodgates began to crack open, and a tsunami of information and perspectives rushed into our shared world of meaning. If history never repeats itself but often rhymes, then the invention of the printing press and the advent of the internet share a particular resonance. Both increased information flows by orders of magnitude and enabled meaning-making outside the purview of authoritative institutions.

Consider that before the flood, if your ideas were unpalatable or incoherent to the people working within academic, media, arts, and religious institutions, they were unlikely to circulate in any impactful way. In theory, you could still participate in the marketplace of ideas, but you would be stuck outside the mass media distribution channels, trying to circulate leaflets or magazines on a small scale, perhaps handing out CDs on a street corner or ranting from a soapbox. Whether you welcome the possibilities of mass participation in mass media or lament the loss of the knowledge class’s filters, the old establishment did help make the world a more coherent place.

The information floodplains we now inhabit have a hallucinatory feel, as if any sense of shared reality has come unstuck. Our instinctual need to create sanctuaries of meaning drives like-minded people into digital networks built around bespoke World Three configurations, generating vast amounts of mental material faster and more cheaply than ever before. These networks interpret and arrange objective facts, and less effectively invented fictions, in different ways, then compete for the legitimacy of their perspective. In an environment saturated with uncertainty, simple and emotionally resonant frameworks become highly appealing.

In this new information landscape, complaints coalesce into political movements faster than defensive public relations strategies can be mounted. The knowledge class is rapidly abandoning the civic ideal of a marketplace of ideas in favour of pragmatic censorship measures. Left- and right-wing populism, political entertainment, and ideology prevail as new forms of rapidly evolving propaganda, while warring state actors around the world race to develop sophisticated techniques for engineering the global media environment.

For better or worse, I believe we are at the beginning of a civilisational convulsion on the scale of the Protestant Reformation.