Days passed and the consternation over the Cerimedo case faded away, giving way to other controversies that, as is typical in this hyper-informed and connected world, will surely meet the same fate. The point is, of course, a bit exaggerated: the case left a trail of actions that, if properly directed, could make it harder for dirty political campaigns to operate. But to get there, it is advisable not to let the issue dissolve in its various facets and drift far from our ability to understand its causes and, worse, to be able to do something not only about its means (bot training, media manipulation, relations with other shady businesses) but also about its ends (to pulverize politics).
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Something that does not help in this regard has been characterizing Fernando Cerimedo as a “monster,” a word that describes a horrible, non-human creature in which we do not recognize any of our traits. His record has enough merits to deserve repudiation. But Cerimedo did not invent dirty digital warfare nor is he the only one who lives off it. He is just a particularly dark and influential specimen within an entire industry of right-wing consultants dedicated to exploiting the possibilities offered by social networks to degrade politics until it fundamentally appears to be a filthy thing, something better avoided so that others (their clients) can deal with it.
The Chilean right knows this story well. In the wake of Trumpism, its most radical sectors have adopted the strategy of “flooding the zone with shit” — as Steve Bannon put it — at least since José Antonio Kast’s second presidential campaign. They applied it on a large scale to derail the first constituent process (not being, of course, the main cause), continued exercising it from the opposition to Gabriel Boric’s government, and to win the last presidential and parliamentary elections. One of its main exponents is none other than the head of content for President Kast’s advisory team.
The treatment of Cerimedo as a monster with whom now no one has anything to do is reminiscent of the portrait of Dorian Gray. There is a right-wing that tries, like Oscar Wilde’s character, to keep its face intact while a hidden portrait ages and deforms in its place. Cerimedo serves the right as this portrait: he concentrates all the ugliness and amorality so that those who benefited from or tolerated these practices can continue to look at themselves in the mirror without asking too many questions. Perhaps so as not to stop capitalizing on their consequences?
The media should not be exempt from the questions raised by his case either. Today they investigate it, reconstruct its links, and reproduce the allegations about the dirty campaigns he orchestrated. It is very good that they do so. But it would be even better if they also reflected on the role played by the media in normalizing the degradation of public debate. There is no need to imagine conspiracies or journalists on the payroll of shady strategists. The problem is much more mundane: weakened media, precarious newsrooms, and a journalistic culture increasingly dependent on the war of ‘reactions’ have too often turned the media into instruments of these operations.
The chain is well known, everyday bread: an anonymous account — not even that anymore, now the lie is not even disguised — installs false content, then a political leader reacts and the reaction becomes ‘news,’ ‘news’ that in turn provokes another reaction, generally louder than the previous one. Next, a columnist from the square — often a buddy of the disinformation strategist — neither validates nor refutes the content, but uses it as justification to make a political point. By this point, the truthfulness of the content does not matter, because it has already managed to shape public perception of politics and its actors.
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There are communicators who believe that their loyalty to the truth lies in being neutral towards this type of campaign, that questioning them is doing a favor to the affected party, thus falling into the sin of partiality. They are wrong on two levels. As communicators because the campaigns orchestrated by the radical right are also directed against them: they saturate the public space to neutralize the media and their function of helping us distinguish what is real from what is false, what deserves to be a public issue and what does not. And as citizens because the “involved party” is not only the left, but the public space that we all use to try to reach agreement.
Cerimedo represents a professionalized and particularly sordid version of all this. Strictly speaking, it is not a way of doing politics, but an extreme form of denial of politics. Its practitioners often present it as something bold and novel. But behind it there is nothing more than the old and destructive idea that politics is the continuation of war by other means (as it was for the totalitarian regimes that invented disinformation). In politics, the adversary is legitimate and words serve for more than deception, because there are facts that from different points of view can be objectified and intervened upon. Disinformation destroys all that, because it makes it impossible to trust the other’s word. Thus, deliberation loses meaning and only the force of stridency, state control, and noise remain.
The force that results from deteriorating politics is, paradoxically, extremely powerless. It has no capacity to articulate diverse wills, it does not manage to turn small and partial truths into big and universal truths, it does not manage to change behaviors or build shared horizons for majorities. It is powerless force because it organizes few, not many; and a few more only for furious enterprises, but extremely fleeting and meaningless. It is likely that the radicalization of the right, its aggressive style and authoritarian drive, is actually a compensation for this powerlessness.
Therefore, the traditional right does well to be outraged and repudiate Cerimedo and his henchmen. But hopefully that repudiation survives the particular case. And allows them to understand that the political communication of the radical right is a problem not only when it affects one of them, but always, even when it harms a left-wing adversary. Like it or not, every dirty maneuver that is useful to defeat them destroys the politics we need to build a shared world and, as such, a world that can be intervened in, fine-tuned, improved. Recognizing monsters when misfortune befalls them — well done — is a virtue out of time. To prevent damage, they must be recognized while they still inhabit palaces, protected by the aura of power.
