This conversation with Elizabeth Anderson asks what it means to be a democratic citizen in a time when we find ourselves divided not only over values, but over facts. As lies, propaganda and fake news have hijacked political discourse on polarizing issues and distracted the electorate from constructive engagement of the problems we face, Anderson looks to thinkers like John Dewey and Susan Neiman in order to reframe democracy as a kind of culture that must be kept alive through civil society.

ELIZABETH ANDERSON is Arthur F. Thurnau Professor and John Dewey Distinguished University Professor of Philosophy and Women's Studies at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. She specializes in moral and political philosophy, social and feminist epistemology, and the philosophy of the social sciences.

ALEXIS PAPAZOGLOU is an Editor at the Institute of Art and Ideas, London and host of “The Philosopher & The News” podcast. He writes on the intersection between philosophy, politics and current affairs.

Alexis Papazoglou (AP): In his inauguration speech, President Biden said, “Let's begin to listen to one another, hear one another, see one another, show respect for one another”. Your 2019 Uehiro Lectures at the University of Oxford are about the ethics of communication, and you try to articulate the conditions that would make possible a constructive discourse across political and identity divides in order to enhance our democracy. One of the things you focus on is what has gone wrong with our discourse around facts, with talk of “alternative facts”, “fake news”, and even a “post-truth era” in which a shared reality of facts is no longer available as a starting point for political discourse. How did we arrive here?

Elizabeth Anderson (EA): This kind of polarization of facts has been going on for several decades now. Much of it was initially driven by right-wing media, but the more recent driving force has been social media and their use of algorithms to amplify polarizing voices and outrage. The algorithms have discovered that polarizing discourse holds people's attention on these sites, and the longer you pay attention to something, the more money social media companies make on their advertisements. So those are the voices that get amplified. How do you generate polarization? By telling lies or presenting facts in a very misleading way that arouses fear and anger.

We tend to think of the internet as an unprecedented and overwhelmingly positive achievement of modern human technology. But is it? This wide-ranging conversation coincided with the publication of Justin E. H. Smith's book The Internet Is Not What You Think It Is. It looks to Leibniz, transhumanism, and mycorrhizal fungus to help us better understand the part of the internet that is continuous with what we have always done and conducive to our thriving, and to fight back against the part that is a distortion of who we are and non-conducive to that aim.

JUSTIN E. H. SMITH is Professor of History and Philosophy of Science at Paris Cité University. His research interests include Leibniz, early modern philosophy, history and philosophy of biology, classical Indian philosophy, the history and philosophy of anthropology.

ALEXIS PAPAZOGLOU is an editor at the Institute of Art and Ideas. He hosts “The Philosopher & the News” podcast and writes on the intersection between philosophy, politics and current affairs.

Alexis Papazoglou (AP): What is the internet is and how have we got it wrong in the ways we think about it?

Justin E. H. Smith (JEHS): The internet is not nearly as newfangled as most people think. It does not represent a radical rupture with everything that came before, either in human history or in the vastly longer history of nature that precedes the first appearance of our species. As a result, we tend to overlook the natural analogy that thinks of the internet as being in continuity with the instantaneous transmission of signals across living nature. In other words, it is more productive to think about the internet as an outgrowth of a species-specific activity. Animal and plant signalling – for example, lima bean plants giving off methyl jasmonate that floats through the air across significant distances to their conspecifics; mycorrhizal fungus networks that attach to the roots of trees, enabling them to communicate with one another; sperm whales clicking; elephants stomping; – are true forms of telecommunication. Throughout the living world, telecommunication is more likely the norm than the exception. The main difference between these and our forms of telecommunication is that we haven't always been doing it.