Citizens 127
Winkers, and Whisperers, whose business is to strangle all other
offsprings of wit in their birth. [ … ] I appeal to the People, as my
rightful judges and masters; and if they are not inclin’d to condemn
me, I fear no arbitrary high-flying proceedings from the small Court
faction at Button’s.
2
Since the appearance of Habermas’s The Structural Transformation
of the Public Sphere in English translation in the 1980s, coffee houses
across London have assumed an almost mythical status in the history
of the development of the public sphere, a place where the wits of the
seventeenth and eighteenth centuries could gather to debate any subject without reference to class seniority or the status of inheritance.
Markman Ellis offers one of the clearest accounts of their development:
modelled on similar businesses found in the Ottoman Empire (which
makes Pope’s caricature of Addison as “Grand Turk” all the more appropriate, referring as it does to the practice of some sultans to remove
all relatives who could be potential threats to the throne), the ideal of the
English coffee house was that it also encouraged a much wider range of
debates and discussions than were possible under the Ottomans.
3
While
Habermas tended to idealise the quality of conversation at coffee houses
which, as with the salons of France, he envisaged as a place where “a
certain parity of the educated” was possible,
4
Ellis points out that their
actual scope was in practice highly restricted: what he calls “exclusionary mechanisms” were often in place to regulate debate, unstated expectations that, most notoriously, operated in terms of excluding women
from discussion.
5
Even leaving aside such straightforward practices of
censorship, the atmosphere of the coffee houses was often much more
rambunctious and divisive than later figures would recognise – a place
for open fights rather than civil discourses in the service of truth. Rather
than “relatively contained and egalitarian spaces of calm rational- critical
debate”, as Habermas described them, Laurier and Philo describe them
perhaps more accurately as spots where scores could be settled and falsehoods set loose.
6
If there was a golden age of a perfectly rational, liberal public sphere,
the seventeenth century was probably not it. Indeed, while commentators today may bemoan the current divided state of public debate
in the media, it often has far too much in common with the vicious
conflicts of that earlier time. The main difference is that while it was
the commerce of the coffee shop that enabled or troubled the flow of
information in the seventeenth century, today it is big tech that frequently distorts the debate of ideas. This chapter will concentrate
on two particular case studies that claim to speak for wider masses:
the first of these, Infowars, is an example of what happens when a
particular brand of publication comes to rely entirely on social media for disseminating its peculiar brand of fake news, while the latter,
Winkers, and Whisperers, whose business is to strangle all other
offsprings of wit in their birth. [ … ] I appeal to the People, as my
rightful judges and masters; and if they are not inclin’d to condemn
me, I fear no arbitrary high-flying proceedings from the small Court
faction at Button’s.
2
Since the appearance of Habermas’s The Structural Transformation
of the Public Sphere in English translation in the 1980s, coffee houses
across London have assumed an almost mythical status in the history
of the development of the public sphere, a place where the wits of the
seventeenth and eighteenth centuries could gather to debate any subject without reference to class seniority or the status of inheritance.
Markman Ellis offers one of the clearest accounts of their development:
modelled on similar businesses found in the Ottoman Empire (which
makes Pope’s caricature of Addison as “Grand Turk” all the more appropriate, referring as it does to the practice of some sultans to remove
all relatives who could be potential threats to the throne), the ideal of the
English coffee house was that it also encouraged a much wider range of
debates and discussions than were possible under the Ottomans.
3
While
Habermas tended to idealise the quality of conversation at coffee houses
which, as with the salons of France, he envisaged as a place where “a
certain parity of the educated” was possible,
4
Ellis points out that their
actual scope was in practice highly restricted: what he calls “exclusionary mechanisms” were often in place to regulate debate, unstated expectations that, most notoriously, operated in terms of excluding women
from discussion.
5
Even leaving aside such straightforward practices of
censorship, the atmosphere of the coffee houses was often much more
rambunctious and divisive than later figures would recognise – a place
for open fights rather than civil discourses in the service of truth. Rather
than “relatively contained and egalitarian spaces of calm rational- critical
debate”, as Habermas described them, Laurier and Philo describe them
perhaps more accurately as spots where scores could be settled and falsehoods set loose.
6
If there was a golden age of a perfectly rational, liberal public sphere,
the seventeenth century was probably not it. Indeed, while commentators today may bemoan the current divided state of public debate
in the media, it often has far too much in common with the vicious
conflicts of that earlier time. The main difference is that while it was
the commerce of the coffee shop that enabled or troubled the flow of
information in the seventeenth century, today it is big tech that frequently distorts the debate of ideas. This chapter will concentrate
on two particular case studies that claim to speak for wider masses:
the first of these, Infowars, is an example of what happens when a
particular brand of publication comes to rely entirely on social media for disseminating its peculiar brand of fake news, while the latter,