“Today’s builders of Babel tell us that there is no room for losers, and that those who fall along the way are losers. Theirs is the construction site of hell,” wrote Pope Francis in his Good Friday meditation on the Stations of the Cross which, though he couldn’t be there in person, was given at the Colosseum on April 18, a couple of days before he died.
I can’t decide if this is an amazingly appropriate metaphor for the techno-industrial complex that currently determines how the world works, or if it’s a sadly revealing insight into how the pope was taking God’s side against his fellow humans. Probably both, as is usual with these complicated matters.
The tale of the Tower of Babel is an origin myth in the Book of Genesis. Traditionally, it’s described as an etiological story about why human beings speak so many different languages. But it’s also about the fact that people in power, even supernatural deities, can’t stand it when humanity starts to work as one. It’s in the interests of the powerful that humans are stopped from working together to address the problems of the world. It’s worth quoting Genesis 11:1-9 at length:
“Now the whole world had one language and a common speech ... People said to each other, ‘Come, let’s make bricks and bake them thoroughly’ ... Then they said, ‘Come, let us build ourselves a city, with a tower that reaches to the heavens, so that we may make a name for ourselves; otherwise we will be scattered over the face of the whole earth.’
“But the Lord came down to see the city and the tower the people were building. The Lord said: ‘If as one people speaking the same language they have begun to do this, then nothing they plan to do will be impossible for them. Come, let us go down and confuse their language so they will not understand each other.’
“So the Lord scattered them from there over all the earth, and they stopped building the city ... The Lord confused the language of the whole world.”
Pope Francis’s comments on Babel were, according to the US Conference of Catholic Bishops, intended to be a critique of contemporary attitudes and systems that prioritise success, power and exclusion, and that marginalise those whom Christians are told will inherit the earth, the meek. In the biblical story that Pope Francis was invoking, the builders of Babel represent those in today’s world who construct societies or systems based on exclusion, competition, and the rejection of those deemed unworthy or unsuccessful.
A better take on it would be to equate the god of that story with those in today’s world who thrive on dividing humanity. And a good example of those culprits would be the big tech companies.
The list of how they do that is long. For instance, there’s the way social media platforms have the amplification of political polarisation built into their profitability. They’ve been shown, time and again, to be amplifying extreme animosity and polarisation between partisan groups, facilitating what have come to be called echo chambers. These are described as algorithm-driven content feeds that reinforce users’ existing beliefs, reducing exposure to diverse perspectives and fostering ideological silos.
This segmentation of audiences deepens misunderstandings and mistrust between social and political groups. And these echo chambers reward the spreading of divisive content. Leaked documents and independent studies have found that the platform algorithms tend to promote content that provokes strong emotional reactions, rather than any sort of balanced discourse.
In South Africa, we’ve seen how social media is a weapon used by bad actors to manipulate our already unstable social fault lines, and to exploit divisions such as race and national origin through hashtagged campaigns such as Put South Africans First and Operation Dudula. It all comes down to profits, of course, though not exclusively the profits of the social media giants.
I don’t want to jump on the algorithm-bashing bandwagon. Algorithms are basically a process a computer follows in a problem-solving operation, and they bring some very useful benefits. In my work, for example, they’re used to flag disinformation and toxic content, which helps to make the internet a (possibly marginally) safer space.
The platform algorithms tend to promote content that provokes strong emotional reactions, rather than any sort of balanced discourse
But algorithms can also be designed to maximise user attention online, and more often than not that means surfacing divisive or controversial content, because that’s what generates more interaction and revenue. The insidious nature of the platforms means that anyone can profit, to varying degrees, from making sure that humanity remains divided on a multiplicity of issues. And what a wealth of issues there is to choose from: fake Afrikaner refugees, Ukraine, Gaza, Chiefs vs Pirates, you name it. And if you think football rivalry seems too frivolous to belong on that list, you’d be wrong. It doesn’t matter what the relative importance and seriousness of the issue is, it’s all equal when it comes to advertising.
It’s not just the hi-tech social engineering of the internet that drives us apart. Sometimes it’s just mundane bureaucratic crap that can dumbfound and dispirit us. My latest bugbear, for example, is that eighth circle of hell, the Standard Bank call centre.
Twice already this year I’ve had the pleasure of having to cancel a credit card because of fraud. This has necessitated many calls to the call centre. Every single time, I’m made to laboriously enter my ID number. And every single time — every single time — when I finally get through to a human, they ask me for my ID number. And when I query why I had to enter it in the first place if they can’t see it, they tell me that there’s an error “at the moment”.
Reader, that “moment” has lasted at least all year, and for all I know has always been there, and always will be. This is why, if you look up “Standardbankesque” in the dictionary, it says “characteristic or reminiscent of the oppressive or nightmarish qualities of Standard Bank’s call centre; having a nightmarishly complex, bizarre, or illogical quality.” They’re not just building Babel, they’re building babble.
So I’d have to disagree with the late pope’s interpretation of the myth of the Tower of Babel. A modern reading of it should actually be on the side of the builders. For centuries they’ve been described as being motivated by pride and a desire to be self-sufficient, as if wanting to reach heaven and have a universal language for humanity were evil aspirations.
And powerful institutions, such as the church, X and Facebook (or God and Elon Musk if you prefer), whose business plans rely on them being the ones who bring a sense of order to chaos, are going to want to prolong that chaos, to “confuse our language so we will not understand each other”, and keep us divided and “scattered over the face of the whole earth”. We aren’t actually in the “construction site of hell”, as the pope put it, but in the waiting room of purgatory. Which, now that I think about it, is also an apt description for call centres.
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