CHAPTER 4

Post-Truth, Social Media, and the “Real”

as Phantasm

Michael E. Sawyer

To propose that the current era is one that is marked by something like
“post-truth” requires careful contextualization. As a practical matter, dis-
sembling, fabulation or flat out lying is not a modern phenomenon.
Additionally, the notion of “spin” with respect to political phenomena on
the part of the communications experts hired to craft messaging strategies
is a practice that most people are familiar with and tends to lower the
esteem with which individuals hold political culture. To understand some-
thing like “post-truth” is to examine a fundamentally different phenome-
non than something like lying or spin.
We understand a lie to be a statement that is at a discernible distance
from an identifiable objective fact. This means that to assert that “London
is the capital of Great Britain” is incompatible with a statement like “Paris
is the capital of Great Britain”. Both of these statements cannot be true,
and the veracity of one or the other is established by locating the capital of
Great Britain and determining whether it is indeed the city of London or
Paris or neither. Once that fact is determined, a statement contrary to the

M. E. Sawyer (*)
Colorado College, Colorado Springs, CO, USA
e-mail: msawyer@coloradocollege.edu

© The Author(s) 2018 55

M. Stenmark et al. (eds.), Relativism and Post-Truth in
Contemporary Society,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-96559-8_4
56   M. E. SAWYER

reality of the city that is the capital of Great Britain is at best wrong and at
worst a purposeful misrepresentation of the truth by a speaker who knows
better.
Spin is principally understood as a phenomenon of strategies of political
messaging. This means something like the observation of a set of facts, like
the unemployment rate between the years 2008 and 2016 that can then
be manipulated for political advantage. One side may present to the public
that the unemployment rate is an exemplar of a stagnant economy. An
alternative analysis by an opposing political perception might look at the
same numbers and propose that they indicate the opposite and that the
trend is positive. Both readings of the data assume that the data exist and
that there is a recognized methodology for determining the unemploy-
ment rate. What this means is that there are alternative ways of explaining
that the unemployment rate might be 5.8%, but this is not the same as
proposing that the unemployment rate is actually 17.5%, when it isn’t, or
that there is no such thing as an unemployment rate. Post-truth is a dis-
cernably different phenomenon that allows for the later refutation of
objective facts.
Regimes of post-truth seem to depend upon establishing an archive
(that is accessible to and understandable by the public) of self-referential
data points that are not verifiable through other methods of establishing
objective facts. For instance, in the era of post-truth, the assertion that
Paris is the capital of Great Britain might include documents that establish
that fact, experts who explain why it is true, and crowds of members of this
archival network that assert their agreement with this proposal. The state-
ment becomes true because this “network of agreement” says it is true,
and any attempt to question that assertion is understood to be an attempt
to undermine the entire system of knowing rather than questioning a dis-
crete statement. What this means is that, in this example, the notion that
Paris is the capital of Great Britain is the product of a system of knowing
that resists the introduction of data points that undermine its conclusions.
The title of this chapter proposes a relationship between post-truth and
social media, but it is important to understand that the technological
innovation that allows “social media” is merely a distribution network
that, I will argue, takes advantage of public understanding of the presup-
posed veracity of distributed media in the first place. It would be disin-
genuous to propose that contemporary concerns regarding regimes of
truth are unrelated to the current political moment generally and the elec-
tion of Donald J.  Trump specifically. The Christian Science Monitor’s
   POST-TRUTH, SOCIAL MEDIA, AND THE “REAL” AS PHANTASM    57

January 26, 2017 article “How Donald Trump Fits in the ‘Post-Truth’
World” establishes the following with respect to the use of the term.
“Right after the November election, Oxford Dictionaries announced
“post-truth” as word of the year, as a way to describe “circumstances in
which objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than
appeals to emotion and personal belief” (Feldman 2017). The argument
presented here is that the era of post-truth is related to the evolution of
the media to “social” media and to demonstrate that Donald Trump rode
the wave of this transitional space into the presidency. The proposition
here is not that Trump has somehow instituted or created this phenome-
non but rather that the “Trump Phenomenon” has been uniquely posi-
tioned to take advantage of the seismic shift in the manner in which
individuals receive news and understand the presentation of this material
to represent something like facts.
There are two related events in popular media that occurred before our
current media age that I believe will be useful in framing the way social
media relates itself to the possibility of creating self-referential regimes of
“truth” that are, at best, loosely related to objective facts. The “loosely
related” nature of the cause and effect relationship I intend to explore is
meant to occupy a place of critical importance to the argument presented
here. The artifacts that will be examined to establish this logic represent a
series of media relationships that are stacked one upon the other in order
to allow the public consciousness to mis-recognize the fractured terrain
upon which it builds understanding.
The first of the esthetic phenomenon examined here is from the hip-­
hop artist Nelly whose track “(Hot Shit) Country Grammar” from 2000
contains the following lyrics:

From broke to having brokers: my price-range is Rover Now I’m knocking

like Jehovah; let me in now, let me in now Bill Gates, Donald Trump, let me
in now

The point of the song is exemplified by the short excerpt quoted here
that shows the artist bragging that his former struggles are at an end
because of his new prominence in the music industry and that he is in a
position to enjoy membership in a club that includes the wealthiest men
on the planet. At the time of this release, according to Forbes magazine,
the publication of record in these matters, “[a]t one point in 1999, Gates’
net worth briefly topped $100 billion. By 2000, it’s down to $63 billion
58   M. E. SAWYER

as Gates suffers the first significant decline in his wealth” (McNally 2008).
What this means is that during the time that Nelly was composing and
recording the album for release in 2000, Bill Gates, the first figure that
preoccupies the rapper’s attention in this song, is the richest man in the
world and possessed a staggering amount of wealth that would amount to
$143,941,347,270.62 of purchasing power in 2018 dollars.
The other figure that serves as the point of reference for Nelly in this
release is Donald Trump, at the time, a real estate developer for whom
calculation of his wealth was much more complex than that of Gates.
According to The Atlantic, while Forbes was assembling its 2000 list,
Trump himself “called so many times to haggle over his net worth that an
intern was assigned to field his calls” (Reeve 2011). Ultimately, Trump
claimed to be worth $5 billion dollars (Reeve 2011) but Forbes settled on
$1.7 billion making the real estate “mogul” the 167th wealthiest person
in the world. Timothy L. O’Brian’s October 2005 New York Times article
entitled “What’s He Really Worth?” documented the idiosyncratic nature
of pegging Trump’s wealth by quoting the notes regarding Trump’s 2000
ranking that read “Forbes explains: “In the Donald’s world, worth more
than $5 billion. Back on earth, worth considerably less” (O’Brien 2005).
What this seems to mean is that at the time of the production of “Country
Grammar”, Donald Trump had successfully penetrated the consciousness
of American culture to the point that an African-American 20-something
rapper from the inner city of St. Louis had been convinced that he was
somehow to be considered in a flat relationship with the richest man on
the planet who became so by revolutionizing technology. This is impor-
tant because, at this point, Trump had not begun “starring” in his reality
television series “The Apprentice”. But it seems important to note that the
possibility of the show being taken seriously presupposed the axiomatic
understanding that the star was actually a profoundly successful business-
man who was an expert at extracting performance from a variety of char-
acters and judging those who would ultimately be successful members of
his hugely successful corporations.
What this really means is that the financial difficulties and misman-
agement of the enterprises Trump had been involved with over the
decades had been painted over through manipulation of the Forbes 400
that resulted in the acceptance that he was one of the most successful
businessmen on the planet when in fact the opposite was true. Forbes, in
spite of their manifest concerns with the veracity of the auditing pro-
vided by the Trump Organization, still printed the material and gave
instant credence to his claims. This brings us to consideration of the
   POST-TRUTH, SOCIAL MEDIA, AND THE “REAL” AS PHANTASM    59

second cultural artifact that preoccupies this thinking and serves as the
phenomenon that brackets the existence of Trump’s television show and
his Forbes 400 gambit.
In July of 2004, Fox shot a television series entitled “My Big Fat
Obnoxious Boss” that partially aired between November and December
of the same year. The show was meant to be a spoof of Trump’s
“Apprentice” in that a bunch of young and ambitious junior corporate
executives were competing to become a member of the multi-billion dol-
lar venture capital firm, ICOR run by its brilliant CEO Mr. N. Paul Todd
whose name was an anagram of Donald Trump. It is critical to understand
what has happened here. The foundational hoax perpetrated by Trump on
the editors at Forbes magazine served as the catalyst for the production of
the television series that itself was a fictionalized show that is finally
“spoofed” as if it were real by a second series. “The Apprentice”, in all of
its non-sense—scenes like Dionne Warwick arguing with “The Atlanta
House Wives” NeNe Leakes over who is working hard enough to produce
commercial for a telephone company—becomes suddenly “real” in that
“My Big Fat Obnoxious Boss” is fake.
The ambition of “Obnoxious Boss” was to determine how many of the
guardrails erected by reason, curiosity, rectitude, and common sense might
be eroded to the point of non-existence in the face of tremendous
“wealth”. It is telling that in Episode Two of “Obnoxious Boss”, entitled
“The Sword and the Soup”, the contestants are tasked by Mr. N.  Paul
Todd with selling blazing hot soup to Chicagoans on an oppressively
humid July afternoon. Before being sent on the task, the contestants are
given a tour of Mr. Todd’s garish home, where they are shown his prized
possessions, one of which is King Arthur’s sword Excalibur, which the
actor claims he purchased at auction in China. One of the contestants in
the typical reductively Shakespearean “confession” of truth (that is a staple
of the reality show genre) proclaims that she has new admiration for Mr.
Todd in that only the “pure of heart” could wield Excalibur. Several obvi-
ous problems here: (1) Excalibur is not real. Period. and (2) Mr. Todd
only “wields” Excalibur because he was able to buy it. What this short
sequence reveals is that the producers of the show gave short shrift to the
influence of wealth over the common sense and morality of the public.
Here we witness that this individual is convinced that the ability to pur-
chase an object—leaving aside that Excalibur is no more “real” than the
One Ring carried by Frodo the Hobbit in The Lord of the Rings’ Middle
Earth—is indicative of purity of heart and implicitly (understanding the
telos of the Arthurian Legends) indicative of the right to rule.
60   M. E. SAWYER

There are at least two reasons to mark the series of events sketched here
as causal elements of the political moment that causes us to carefully con-
sider the notion of post-truth and the engine that seems to drive it, social
media. First there is the fact that the ability of the producers of “My Big
Fat Obnoxious Boss” to imagine the depravity of consumer culture fell far
short of the mark. They seem to have been interested in demonstrating
that seemingly educated and ambitious people would do almost anything
to be put in a position to become grotesquely wealthy not  seeming to
acknowledge that the show they were spoofing was already a spoof that
featured a person who would do anything to make people think he was
wealthy. But, more importantly, it is the curious statement of the contes-
tant about the purity of heart that allowed Mr. Todd to implicitly pull the
sword from the stone and save the state. This tells the real story. What
people would do in the face of being convinced that a person were
extremely wealthy and willing to share the secrets with you if you were
deemed worthy is make them the head of a nation state.
Ironically, the lie that Trump introduces into the public discourse that
serves to shift his cultural relevance from that of a popular media figure
and purported business titan to politician is his relationship to “Birtherism”.
Here, Trump leant his celebrity to a conspiracy theory that was gaining
momentum on the internet that alleged that Barack Obama was not eli-
gible to be president because the documentation of his birth was forged in
that he was born in Kenya rather than Hawaii. A Politico article from April
22, 2011, is on this point:

Just when it appeared that public interest was fading, celebrity developer
Donald Trump has revived the theory that President Barack Obama was
born overseas and helped expose the depth to which the notion has taken
root—a New York Times poll Thursday found that a plurality of Republicans
believe it. (Smith and Tau 2011)

The notion that a plurality of Republicans believes in Birtherism in one

form or another is exemplary of the power of the internet generally, and
social media specifically, to create an alternative archive of “facts” that can
be marshaled to “prove” the veracity of even the most lurid falsehood.
Further, when Trump becomes the leading and most prominent propo-
nent of the lie, it is employed to create the momentum for him to leave the
gravitational pull of television and the business world (real or imagined)
and become a national political figure. One might quibble with the
   POST-TRUTH, SOCIAL MEDIA, AND THE “REAL” AS PHANTASM    61

­cause-­and-­effect relationship between Trump and the post-truth era, but

what seems indisputable is the manner in which the politician has weapon-
ized social media and established his Twitter feed as an unmediated and
self-­referentially true source of news.
These two elements of media, music and television, have an almost
unfathomable amount of mediation between the artist and consumer. As
a practical matter, it is not hyperbolic to imagine that, at the turn of the
century, there were several dozen people in the world who decided,
because of their positions of authority in music distribution companies and
television networks, what the world listened to and viewed. What this
means is that the media age, as opposed to the social media age, accultur-
ated the consumer, consciously or subconsciously, to understand that
some thinking and discernment had gone into the production and distri-
bution of any piece of media. This is even more important to understand
as it relates to the press. The “news”, as a cultural artifact of modernity,
was understood, perhaps mistakenly, to be without bias and opinion—as
carefully delineated in the practice of journalism from the editorial page.
Prior to the dawn of social media, the information that was distributed to
consumers had some filter (the editor, producer, etc.) between the report-
ing of any event and its delivery to the masses. Of course, there were mis-
takes of both commission and omission, but the ethos surrounding what
the consumer understood as the production of media presupposed an
attempt at honesty.
What this means is that the fact that something was on network televi-
sion meant that it was “true” (at least to itself) and the interpretation of
how one might feel about the material was up to the consumer. By employ-
ing this logic, the materialities of the journalistic, musical, and televisual
phenomena discussed here become “true” in that they were produced for
general consumption. The (il)logic flows in this fashion: Trump becomes
a billionaire because Forbes magazine says that he is. Nelly understands
him to be as wealthy as Bill Gates. The viewers of the “Apprentice” recog-
nize him as a brilliant businessman and the show becomes relatively “true”
because the “Obnoxious Boss” is “false”. The interlocking series of “tra-
ditional” media events are the bridge between the media age and the social
media age. What I mean here is that the media age had its share of “fake”
events: Orson Welles’ “War of the Worlds” radio broadcast and the late
twentieth century’s series of movies like “The Blair Witch Project” that
were presented to the audience as “real” come to mind. Briefly rehearsing
the details of these two media phenomena is useful for this analysis.
62   M. E. SAWYER

The October 30, 1938 radio broadcast of “The War of the Worlds”,
included “news alerts” that led the listener to believe that the show was
presenting actual events. This was not because of the content (which was
ridiculous) but authoritative because of the format of the presentation.
Radio broadcasts of the day were recognized as the primary means for dis-
seminating news. Orson Welles exploited the predisposition of the pubic
to recognize the form in which material was presented as being indicative
of its veracity. The broadcast caused a national panic because radio listen-
ers were convinced that the continual “interruptions” of the regularly
scheduled programming were indicative of the catastrophic nature of the
events being described (dramatized) in the broadcast. In fact, the only
thing “real” about the broadcast was that it was on the radio. The broad-
cast, in its form, created the illusion of a description of real events rather
than it being a dramatization. The key to the success of the hoax is the
form of a radio broadcast of breaking events and, obviously, its presenta-
tion over the airwaves.
“The Blair Witch Project” plays a similar hoax on its audiences but
represents an important shift in the relationship of the public to media.
The 1999 film was presented as the “found footage” of a trio of filmmak-
ers who were meaning to document paranormal activity and then become
victims of the phenomenon they were pursuing. What I mean to empha-
size here is that the film is presented to audiences as different from the
standard horror film in that the footage is “personal” and presented as
“unedited”. This introduces into the collective imagination of the public
the possibility of self-produced media that is authoritative even in its raw
and ostensibly poorly produced fashion. The fact that “The Blair Witch
Product” was in fact a produced piece of media is, in many ways, both
beside the point and the point itself. Many audience members had to be
convinced that the movie was fiction as well as the fact that the filmmakers
perceived that the seemingly unedited and unmediated nature of the film
granted it a new type of authority that presages the era of social media that
concerns us here.
What I mean is that the requirement of form over content that
attended the possibility of Orson Welles effectively duping the public into
believing that aliens were attacking Earth is altered in that the authorita-
tive voice of self-produced media is authoritative in the fact that it is self-
produced and unmediated. As early as 1999 cinema presented the
possibility of the self-­curated material of social media being sufficient on
its own to be presented to the public as equivalent to a professionally
   POST-TRUTH, SOCIAL MEDIA, AND THE “REAL” AS PHANTASM    63

produced ­film/documentary. As technology for the broadcast of real or

imagined self-curated material renders even the theater, television, or
radio anachronistic, the notion that an individual can produce media that
is self-referentially authoritative establishes the regime of “post-truth”
that concerns us here.
Social media becomes an apparatus that implodes the concept of “truth”
and allows the creation of regimes of discourse (political conversation as
just one instantiation of this phenomenon) that are potentially purpose-
fully at a distance from what are traditionally framed as “facts” in that they
were dependent upon being part of a produced and hierarchical media
ecosystem. It may prove useful to think of the traditional modes of pre-
senting media (television, radio, theaters, magazines, books, etc.) as analo-
gous to the relationship that the public maintains to the brick and mortar
store in the age of the internet. The existence of a “bricks and mortar”
shop is often only understood as “real” when that presence is backed up
by a virtual one, meaning a place becomes “real” or reliable when it has an
internet presence. The reverse is not true: an online store need only have
a presence in cyber space while a terrestrial store is viewed as at least anach-
ronistic, if not illegitimate, without an online presence. What this seems to
mean is that our culture has accepted the online presence of a phenome-
non as coincident with truth and this logic can be stretched to allow online
phenomena to serve as events in and unto themselves without a relation-
ship with or to an actual event or experience.
The fact that individuals can now curate and broadcast their own media
and, further, that the primitive nature of the content does not tend to
undermine its authority allows the creation of an infinite number of “net-
works”. These networks operate in a fashion that facilitates the creation of
discourses of internally coherent “truth” that are true only in relation to
themselves and are in fact designed to obscure, eliminate, or decenter the
notion of what amounts to a fact. The struggle for propagandists, up until
the current technological epoch, had been the relative impossibility of creat-
ing a ubiquitous public sphere that facilitates the practical implementation
of regimes of post-truth. In the current moment, social media stresses, to
the point of virtual logical dystopia, the relationship of ideology to events.
Stated differently, events can be created out of whole cloth or framed in
such a way that they comport with the ethos of the subject employing the
made-up phenomenon to fit a narrative. Nothing need actually happen
except that the “event” is memorialized on social media networks that carry
the notion of authority because of the sequence of events described above.
64   M. E. SAWYER

The presence of these networks becomes the social media equivalent of

the question of form or presentation that allowed for the traditional media
hoaxes I mentioned above. What I mean here is that the curating and
archiving of “information” in an attempt to assemble “post-truth” employs
the variety of social media networks to reach particular audiences and,
further, to enhance the faux-veracity of the claims. Jacques Derrida, in his
text Archive Fever, gestures at this phenomenon even when one considers
his argument against his naïve understanding of the internet. In the text,
Derrida is under the impression that email is a fleeting form of communi-
cation that confounds the possibility of building an authoritative archive
of the sort that the written word facilitates. He was clearly not in a posi-
tion, in 1996, to understand that the digital record of this form of elec-
tronic media will likely outlast any other form of archiving, but he is
correct, in that email, as a medium of communication, is marginally useful
in the construction of post-truth networks. Derrida misunderstood the
“life” of email, but there is a way in which we can understand the notion
that it is both fleeting and “personal” (independently of how many recipi-
ents might see the correspondence) in a way that social media is not, but
still indicative of a form of transformative media. Derrida writes:

But the example of E-mail is privileged in my opinion for a more important

and obvious reason: because email today, even more than the fax, is on the
way to transforming the entire public and private space of humanity, and
first of all the limit between the private, the secret (private or public), and
the public or the phenomenal. It is not only a technique, in the ordinary
and limited sense of the term: at an unprecedented rhythm, in quasi-­
instantaneous fashion, this instrumental possibility of production, or print-
ing, of conservation, and of destruction of the archive must inevitably be
accompanied by juridical and thus political transformations. (Derrida
1996, p. 17)

Derrida accurately understands the transformative nature of email and

the way in which it transforms the public sphere. It is the “social” aspect
of the media networks in question that exceed the authority of email in
that we understand the term “social” as it is employed as a qualifier of this
form of media. The definition of “social” in the Oxford Dictionary accom-
modates the possibility of email in the sense that it is deemed personal and
hierarchical, and beneath the status of something like Twitter, which is
covered under the definition as well.
   POST-TRUTH, SOCIAL MEDIA, AND THE “REAL” AS PHANTASM    65

The Oxford Dictionary defines “social” as an adjective in the following

fashion: “1. [attributive] Relating to society or its organization. 2.
Needing companionship and therefore best suited to living in communi-
ties. 2.1 Relating to or designed for activities in which people meet each
other for pleasure.” Definition 2.1 relates to the notion that social media
is just that: a way to meet people and communicate and socialize.
Definitions 1 and 2 speak to the manner in which the social speaks to the
assemblage of social media networks that allow for the production of post-­
truth. The information that is promulgated on social media networks is
deemed to speak to the most important matters of societal order, and
further allows for the likeminded to meet in this space and agree upon the
same archive of self-created facts.
Derrida was focused on the longevity of the media from a perspective
of its presence and accessibility by future generations. Temporality is
important in the regime of post-truth networks but more in relationship
to another aspect of the lack of mediation that is an essential component
of the operation of this media. Recall that the removal of the traditional
modes of producing media (editors, writers, producers, etc.) allows for the
information in question to reach these networks without any barriers to its
distribution. Time, in the sense of how rapidly the media can be put into
circulation and then how rapidly it can be distributed, literally at the speed
of light, removes the mediating factor of time and space as well as the
necessity of restrictions on distribution because of broadcast schedules.
What this means, comprehensively, is that unedited claims can be distrib-
uted to millions of network subscribers without mediation. For instance,
according to Statista, “[a]s of the fourth quarter of 2016, Twitter had
more than 319 million monthly active users” that can all distribute media
whenever they want without any restriction in the manner of traditional
media networks that operate on a schedule. The “evening news” is just
that, in being available to viewers in the evening and, as a practical matter,
we find that during the period of time examined here, “the average num-
ber of viewers watching network evening newscasts each night during the
2016–2017 season was 23.1 million, down 4% from the 2015–2016 sea-
son” (Battaglio 2017). As a point of reference, according to Statista, the
current leader in Twitter followers, pop star Katy Perry, has over 108 mil-
lion people who subscribe to her broadcast and therefore have access to
her unmediated musings 24 hours a day. This is not a series of phenomena
that are lost on individuals and institutions who are interested in shaping
the thinking of the public and recognize the power of these networks that
66   M. E. SAWYER

do not require objective truth as a precondition of their employment. This

renders the notion of the “Real” as substantively a phantasm in the sense
that it is an illusory likeness of the common understanding of reality.
This regime of knowledge production, distribution, and the defense of
its veracity attracts our attention because it seems to have transformed
modern political culture. It is no surprise, when we follow the logic of all
of this, that the information that scrolls across each individual’s personal
device, when they access a platform like Facebook, is labeled as a
“Newsfeed” and substantively has the same, if not greater, effect on the
public consciousness as the Reuters or AP news crawl from these  tradi-
tional news organizations. The implications of this are profound and, in
this sense, allow each individual to be immersed in an information phan-
tasmagoria, seemingly of their own creation. The implication of the pre-
supposition that this is “self-curated” allows for a particularly insidious
form of manipulation of this media source. Recent revelations regarding
the manner in which social media was weaponized as a tool to manipulate
voter behavior all over the world is indicative of this phenomenon.
What we have learned, over time, is that the consulting firm Cambridge
Analytica mined the personal information of social media users in order to
shape their perception of political candidates and society. Marketing compa-
nies have always sought to affect behavior through the employment of mes-
saging tactics, but Cambridge Analytica harvested roughly 50  million
profiles (at last count) from users of Facebook in order to create false narra-
tives to shape voter behavior. It was reported in March of 2018 that the
CEO of Cambridge Analytica was caught on hidden camera explaining
their marketing strategy. The CEO, Alexander Nix, was under the impres-
sion that he was speaking to the representative of a Sri Lankan political
candidate and proposed that the firm was prepared to use operatives to offer
political opponents bribes and film the interaction for distribution across
their network. Again, political dirty tricks are not a new innovation but Nix
goes on further to describe the power of post-truth and social media. Wired
magazine described the investigative report in the following fashion.

In a separate November 2017 meeting filmed by Channel 4, Turnbull

appears to admit that the company is in the business of preying on people’s
fears. “Our job is to get, is to drop the bucket further down the well than
anybody else, to understand what are those really deep-seated underlying
fears, concerns,” he says in the video. “It’s no good fighting an election
campaign on the facts because actually it’s all about emotion, it’s all about
emotion.” (Lapowsky 2018)
   POST-TRUTH, SOCIAL MEDIA, AND THE “REAL” AS PHANTASM    67

These revelations reify the principal argument here that the technology of
social media has created a dramatically altered environment with respect to
the public’s relationship with facts and the institutions as fundamental to
societal order as governance are susceptible to manipulation. The CEO of
Cambridge Analytica is proposing that post-truth, as a cultural phenome-
non, has rendered objective facts anachronistic and “The Real” as a
phantasm.
There are multiple ways to think about the phenomenon of post-truth
and its reliance, if not causation, on the technological innovation of social
media. What seems most important is to propose an account of why seem-
ingly rational subjects seem disinterested in objective truth. In a recently
published text, Trump and a Post-Truth World, the author Ken Wilber
proposes the following:

The promoters of Brexit openly admitted that they had pushed ideas that
they fully knew were not “true,” but they did so “because there really are no
facts,” and what really counts is “that we truly believe this.”…In other
words, narcissism is the deciding factor—what I want to be true is true in a
post-truth culture. (Wilber 2017, p. 25)

This buttresses the fundamentals of the argument presented here, but

also seems to require an account as to why it appears that what an indi-
vidual wants to be true is not the objective “truth”. Stated differently,
what is it about the creation of a phantasm that resists objective facts about
serious matters? Climate, war, governance, the economy, medicine, taxes,
and so on are avoided in order to construct a fiction that seemingly allows
everyone to feel good about themselves and the world they inhabit until
the moment of crisis. One argument might be that there is something
fundamentally different about constructing a personal phantasm that traf-
fics in idealized personhood. Some might even argue that there are posi-
tive implications to constructing a positive self-image in whatever manner
available. Leaving that to the side, the regime of post-truth that concerns
us here operates in the realm of the political.
In many ways, as mentioned earlier, Trump is at least a product of the
social media age, if not exemplar of the most extreme elements of its pos-
sibilities. What we do seem capable of asserting is that regimes of post-­
truth are particularly detrimental to the orderly operation of governance.
It is important here to witness the employment of Twitter by Trump in
the service of his presidency, which illustrates the dire concerns that were
68   M. E. SAWYER

voiced by Derrida with respect to the transformational nature of elec-

tronic communication as it applies to the political. Here, the unmediated
nature of social media communications that are explored here as the
identifying characteristic of the technology and the age witness conse-
quences for modern political culture that are difficult to quantify. As a
practical matter, it is one thing for Katy Perry to present her unmediated
“ideas” to her followers or for an individual interested in online dating to
stretch the truth in order to attract suitors. One cannot be so cavalier
when the unmediated missives of the most powerful country in the world
are lobbed into the public sphere without regard for the necessity of
them being related to facts, probity, or decorum. To understand the
implication of social media and the regime of post-truth in the final anal-
ysis is to assert that the possibilities explored by Trump represent the
extremes to which this phantasm can be taken. What began as the manip-
ulation of his net worth and culminated in the West Wing speaks to a
linkage of “old” or more traditional methods of media (Forbes magazine)
and social media (Twitter) that confounds the possibility of mitigating
the effect of lies for governance. The assertion on the part of the Trump
administration that his Tweets should be understood as official govern-
ment communiqués is notable. This was made clear and instituted into
the regime of the juridical when the Department of Justice was required
to respond to questions regarding the manner in which the public and,
perhaps more importantly, the legal system is to “take” the president’s
tweets stating:

“In answer to the Court’s question, the government is treating the

President’s statements to which plaintiffs point—whether by tweet, speech
or interview—as official statements of the President of the United States,”
the Justice Department responded. (Blake 2017)

This means that the official statements of the government of the most
powerful country in the world are completely unmediated and under no
restriction to relate themselves to objective truth. This renders the “real”
as it must be understood as representing the profound implications of the
utterance of nation states as fantastic in the sense of being unrelated to
rationality. It seems incumbent upon thinkers who are grappling with this
unreal-reality of comprehending how the structures of public understand-
ing, as it related itself to media, must be restructured to render this form
of “truth”-making inoperable.
   POST-TRUTH, SOCIAL MEDIA, AND THE “REAL” AS PHANTASM    69

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