Debate oversaturates truth – you should overcorrect neg because none of the aff’s truth claims can be confirmed.

A crucial feature of the contemporary media system (and its accompanying global circulation of images) is oversaturation. This oversaturation of media is characterized by so-called viral patterns of production, dissemination, and consumption of content, often achieved through globally networked digital platforms. Enabled by a seemingly exponential growth of networks and by ever-widened thresholds of social connectivity, digital technologies have ushered in an unprecedented intensity of information production. Today’s global mediascape is perhaps best defined by its immeasurable volume of communicative activity, constituted by an interminable accumulation/circulation of representational images (thus, it may be more apt to call it a global media circuitry). In order to theorize the relevance of the accumulative/circulatory effects of representation taking place throughout contemporary media processes, we turn to Jean Baudrillard’s theory of simulation. According to Baudrillard’s theory of simulation, images have a tendency to “exceed” their original or intended function to represent, reflect, or describe some facet of reality. Images eventually overtake, overwhelm, and erase the possibility of originality or referential certainty. For Baudrillard (1983b), this takes place over the course of four “successive phases of the image” (p. 11). The first stage corresponds to the representational function of the image in its most ideal form. It describes a moment in the development of western thought—less likely an actual historical moment than one retroactively imposed on or assumed by western thought itself—whereby any reality can be perfectly reflected by an image. A second stage emerges as a response or opposition to the notion of representational faithfulness. It introduces the possibility of representational malfunction (often deployed intentionally), and it relates to what Baudrillard (1993) refers to in Symbolic Exchange and Death as “the counterfeit,” something that, Baudrillard claims, is “the dominant schema in the ‘classical period’” (p. 50). With the counterfeit, the image does not accurately represent anymore but rather “masks or perverts a basic reality” (Baudrillard, 1983b, p. 11). Representation gives way to distortion. Or, to put it somewhat differently, representation as distortion can now mislead, hide, cheat, dissimulate, or facilitate the production (and valuation) of lies and untruths (or counter-realities). In a third stage, Baudrillard (1983b) theorizes that the image now “masks the absence of a basic reality” (p. 11). The third stage marks a radical break from the first and second stages, and from representation in general. Representation becomes more or less a ruse or a lure; it can no longer be trusted (it cannot even be trusted to spread lies or falsehoods). In the third stage, the image’s “true” function is neither to reflect nor to distort, but rather to mask the impossibility of representation. Baudrillard (1996) conceptualizes that a crater has been left in the wake of a reality whose referentiality/representability has been “murdered” by the image itself, by the lure of representation, and by the desire to over-signify by way of the image. This third stage is marked by an over or hyperactive global (re)production of images and meanings in a panic mode eager to restore reality/referentiality at all costs. The demands that the real always be meaningful are everywhere in excess. “There is a proliferation of myths of origin and signs of reality; of second-hand truth, objectivity and authenticity. […] there is a panic-stricken production of the real and the referential, above and parallel to the panic of material production,” writes Baudrillard (1983b, pp. 12– 13). A panic-driven sense of reality’s radical absence generates a crisis about the capacity of verifiable truth and representable meaning. Still, according to this (il)logic, it is not enough to say that the absence of the real creates a void of meaning and truth inside which the entirety of western thought and its belief-systems disappear. Frantically, this void also stimulates and simulates reproductive effects driven by disappointment (that the real is no more) but also by desire (that the quest for the real produce more and more reality). Thus, this stage of “representation” or of reality-production also inevitably turns toward proliferation and saturation of all the signs that can stand for the real itself. The less reality is present, the more its signs, as substitutes for the real, proliferate. As Baudrillard (2005) puts it: “We live in terror both of the excess of meaning and of total meaninglessness” (p. 134). Demands on reality to be exponentially re-enacted, displayed, and proliferated (the new modalities of representation in this third phase) further deepen the absence of the real. Demands for evermore meaning (everything must make sense, be meaningful) exacerbate a general loss of certainty. Meaning, too, is about the exponential production and display of signs, signs that stand for what is meaningful. As Baudrillard (1988) writes, “Everywhere one seeks to produce meaning, to make the world signify, to render it visible. We are not, however, in danger of lacking meaning; quite to the contrary, we are gorged with meaning and it is killing us” (p. 63). Lastly, Baudrillard (1983b) arrives at a fourth stage of the image/simulation. Here, the image, indebted to the effects of absence-proliferation resulting from the third stage, “bears no relation to any reality whatever: it is its own pure simulacrum” (p. 11). This stage of the image relates to a phase of the “real” in which the effects of representation (or what formerly could be called representation) can now be conceptualized as a series of independent operations. Images now circulate and reproduce in more or less complete abstraction from the demands of referentiality. In effect, the “real” has been hollowed out by its own representations (as we saw in the third stage). Nothing is left of the real but its simulacra, its sign-images that circulate and are exchanged indiscriminately throughout a global mediascape. At this stage, when we point to a “real” object in the world, we actually point to a hyper-mediation of the object and of its sign-function, often to manifold images, void of originality by virtue of having been hyper-circulated. The mediation of reality has led to the disappearance of the real and representation, and we find instead a hallucinatory complex of “hyperreality” whereby things appear and in fact are “more real than the real” (Baudrillard, 1983a, p. 99). Baudrillard’s diagnosis about representation, reality, and their fateful (hyper)- mediation is reflected through many of the operations of contemporary media, particularly those that involve the proliferation and saturation of inputs and outputs in the global circuitry. The immeasurable volume of hyper-produced digital contents seems to have overwhelmed the global circuits of communication, representation, and meaning/signification. The globalized world is faced with an irreducible complexity of interdependent transmissions, exchanges, and always expanding and morphing communication channels occurring between a multitude of networked actors/actants, interests, and media across the shifting realms of speculative finance, statecraft, international intelligence, the management of political processes, journalism, news-reporting/making, publishing, academia, or “scientific” expertise, and everyday consumer practices, on and on, ad nauseam. There occurs a widespread hyper-generation, hyper-distribution, and hyper-signification of causality and connectivity that, in turn, become virtually indistinguishable categories, excreted by digitally mediated social exchange, and often emerging as a series of signs or symptoms of the boundless growth of an implosive global system. As the system grows, all meanings, certainties, and truth-claims implode. Within this implosive global system, mediation of the true and the real may remain operative, but only according to a logic of functional contradiction. Indeed, the promise of certainty is continually (re)produced concomitantly with its disappointment or deferral. This is perhaps the fateful or fatal strategic extension of the culture industry’s logic of domination and libidinal exploitation that had once been outlined by Horkheimer and Adorno (2002). As Horkheimer and Adorno put it, [t]he culture industry endlessly cheats its consumers out of what it endlessly promises. The promissory note of pleasure issued by plot and packaging is indefinitely prolonged: the promise, which actually comprises the entire show, disdainfully intimates that there is nothing more to come, that the diner must be satisfied with reading the menu. (p. 111) Today, however, the operationalization of promise-disappointment functions beyond the strategic scope of consumer marketing and the culture industry. The mediatized subject is constantly hit by a barrage of direct and indirect promissory notes about various forms and versions of certainty, security, and truth emanating from multiple news media pundits, commentators, ideologues, technocrats, politicians, community activists, and fellow “digizens.” Increasingly, the reality of power (social, political, economic, etc.) is being scrambled by a hyper-real overproduction of conflicting “truths” and “untruths,” “reals” and “unreals,” “facts” and “alternative facts,” or “news” and “fake news” that exacerbate the implosion of ideologically incoherent and semantically fragmented images purporting to represent some sort of social/ political/economic reality (Artrip & Debrix, 2014). Put differently, in seeking to diagnose and represent the true and the real, media today often produce a series of “undecidable symptoms, and an assortment of vague and contradictory diagnoses” (Baudrillard, 1995, p. 48). Even mainstream news commentaries today echo a vaguely postmodern concern that we have somehow entered a dangerous “post-truth” era of mediated social and political reality (Davies, 2016; Flood, 2016). One widespread sentiment in response to this “posttruth crisis” is to fetishize “fact-checking” technologies and related epistemic media/ truth policing practices. This sentiment commonly implores that countermeasures be taken in response to “fake news” proliferation. Yet, the machineries that produce and disseminate the true and the untrue are one and the same. Both involve the same conditions of reproduction, the same thirst for reality, and the same system of operationalized promise/disappointment. The imperative to “fact-check” suggests that media need to fight against a threat to their own legitimacy and against the endangerment of truth. But journalists and pundits who tout “fact-checking” as some panacean form of political/social resistance appear to do so in complete ignorance or denial of the hyper-real effects of today’s global media. They fail to see that, in the words of Baudrillard (2005), “[t]he excess of information engenders undecidability of facts and confusion of minds. […] The excess of transparency engenders terror” (p. 193). The ethos/pathos of “factchecking” assumes that the immediacy of truth is still possible, or that media can or must remain neutral conduits for the transmission of reality. Thus, the fetishization of “fact-checking” does not care to address (or cannot make itself address) the more difficult situation, but one that is arguably at the root of the so-called post-truth condition: truth is always already mediated. Truth is always already vulnerable to the challenges of “alternative” forms of reality assessment and representation. The viral form of today’s media simultaneously demands and prohibits a hegemonic instantiation of truth. Perhaps this simultaneous and contradictory demand for and prohibition of epistemological hegemony has always been a central feature of liberal democracies and their quests for truth. The devout faith in the “marketplace of ideas” in (neo)liberal democratic designs—rooted in the virtues of transparency, freedom, and competition—promises that (like the infamous invisible hand of the market, perhaps) it will eventually always be able to sort out fact from fiction. But the radical equivalency and universal fungibility of all ideas make it such that each attempt to instantiate a hegemonic truth tends only to energize an oppositional or contradictory attempt. In the domain of news and political media, the user-subject’s search for truth resembles a shell game, the plight of which is perhaps nowhere more evident than with Counselor to President Trump Kellyanne Conway’s insistence on “alternative facts” in opposition to the seemingly more measured, documented, quantitative, and conventional facts reported about public attendance at Trump’s presidential inauguration (Bradner, 2017). The new U.S. executive’s blatant disregard for referential reality, made evident by the continual torrent of images, signs, and contradictory truth-claims disseminated from the state apparatus (or via the president’s Twitter account), reflects a stage of simulation in which the lie operates as a self-sustaining simulacrum. The lie is no longer a “counterfeit” (as it was in Baudrillard’s second phase of the image), but rather a free-floating signifier. The lie no longer antagonizes truth or the real. Rather, the lie makes sense only in relation to other lies that do not even care anymore to appear truthful. The lie mirrors the hyper-real condition and operations of media because it functions according to a framework of “truth” that assumes no weight about reality, assigns no inherent value to the real, and makes no referential claims. There is no certainty left when it comes to truths and lies. What is left is an unending play of symptoms emanating from the oversaturation (an oversaturation of images, signs, statements, and “realities,” once again) of an undifferentiated global system. Everything becomes uncertain (Baudrillard might say that it is indifferent), reduced to the universally fungible mode of information/news. As Baudrillard (1995) intimated, “everything which is turned into information becomes the object of endless speculation” (p. 41).