It's pseudos all the way down
February 20, 2019 4:20 PM Subscribe
How to Escape Pseudo-Events in America: The Lessons of Covington. "In an era defined by virality, is there any way to stop a non-story from becoming a real one? What the Covington saga reveals about our media landscape."
Joshua Rothman:
Joshua Rothman:
The media theorist who best described this problem is Daniel Boorstin, whose book “The Image: A Guide to Pseudo-Events in America,” from 1962, traces the inner logic of artificially generated newsworthiness. A “pseudo-event,” in Boorstin’s telling, is any happening that exists primarily so that it can be reported upon and debated. A lavish party held to celebrate the fiftieth birthday of a fashion label is a pseudo-event, because the party exists only so that photographs of it can be circulated. Boorstin’s more surprising claim is that many serious and genuinely interesting news stories are also based around pseudo-events. Suppose, he writes, that a reporter asks a government official about a sensitive subject and receives an answer, then asks another official the same question and receives a different one. A story can now be written about the rift between the officials. The rift exists only because the reporter asked the questions that he did. Still, now that it’s been articulated, the officials’ difference of opinion is genuinely newsworthy: a topic of discussion has been created on-demand. By this method, Boorstin writes, a news outlet can create a “uniform news stream” of “new-fangled content,” all worthy of readers’ time. Similarly, a politician can stay in the news by staging pseudo-events—leaks, press conferences, and the like—which are both newsworthy and made to order. Newsworthiness, it turns out, doesn’t have to flow from the intrinsic qualities of events themselves. It can also be created by someone who knows how to “embroider and dramatize experience in an interesting way.” Social-media platforms, of course, are specifically designed to encourage such embroidery and dramatization.Michiko Kakutani: The Vanishing of Reality
The danger of this system, Boorstin observes, is that “pseudo-events spawn other pseudo-events in geometric progression.” When a Republican congressman faults Barack Obama for not using the term “radical Islamic terrorism,” that’s a pseudo-event. Obama now has no choice but to explain himself—and when he defends his refusal to use that phrase, he succeeds only in adding another link to the pseudo-event chain. Pseudo-events multiply, spreading over the media landscape and outnumbering real events, many of which occur locally, and are of less dramatic interest. Boorstin predicts a future in which pseudo-events make up the preponderance of what we call political life. “The life in America which I have described,” he concludes, “is a spectator sport in which we ourselves make the props and are the sole performers.” One can’t ignore the performance, because what people say matters. At the same time, society pays a cost: its attention is artificially directed in some directions rather than others. Its image of itself is made to shift.
Long before he entered politics, Trump was using lies as a business tool. He claimed that his flagship building, Trump Tower, is sixty-eight floors high, when in fact it’s only fifty-eight floors high. He also pretended to be a PR man named John Barron or John Miller to create a sock puppet who could boast about his—Trump’s—achievements. He lied to puff himself up, to generate business under false pretenses, and to play to people’s expectations. Everything was purely transactional; all that mattered was making the sale. He spent years as a real-estate developer and reality-TV star, promiscuously branding himself (Trump Hotels, Trump Menswear, Trump Natural Spring Water, Trump University, Trump Steaks, Trump Vodka, Trump Home Collection), and like most successful advertisers—and successful propagandists—he understood that the frequent repetition of easy-to-remember and simplistic taglines worked to embed merchandise (and his name) in potential customers’ minds. Decades before handing out MAGA hats at his rallies, he’d become an expert at staging what the historian Daniel Boorstin calls “pseudo-events”—that is, events “planned, planted, or incited” primarily “for the immediate purpose of being reported or reproduced.”Don Gillmor: How a constant desire to be entertained made us 24/7 performers in an unreal reality: Just as the movies altered who we choose to celebrate, the newest iterations of media have changed who we elect to govern us
Boorstin’s 1962 book, The Image—which would inform the work of myriad writers, from French theorists like Baudrillard and Guy Debord to social critics like Neil Postman and Douglas Rushkoff—uncannily foresaw reality TV decades before the Kardashians or the Osbournes or any number of desperate housewives actually showed up in our living rooms. For that matter, he anticipated the rise of someone very much like Donald J. Trump: a celebrity known, in Boorstin’s words, for his “well-knownness” (and who would even host a show called The Celebrity Apprentice).
Boorstin’s descriptions of the nineteenth-century impresario and circus showman P. T. Barnum—who ran a New York City museum of curiosities filled with hoaxes like a mermaid (which turned out to be the remains of a monkey stitched together with the tail of a fish)—will sound uncannily familiar to contemporary readers: a self-proclaimed “prince of humbugs” whose “great discovery was not how easy it was to deceive the public but rather how much the public enjoyed being deceived” as long as it was being entertained.
Much the way images were replacing ideals, Boorstin writes in The Image, the idea of “credibility” was replacing the idea of truth. People were less interested in whether something was a fact than in whether it was “convenient that it should be believed.” And as verisimilitude replaced truth as a measurement, “the socially rewarded art” became “that of making things seem true”; no wonder that the new masters of the universe in the early sixties were the Mad Men of Madison Avenue.
Baudrillard would take such observations further, suggesting that in today’s media-centric culture, people have come to prefer the “hyperreal”—that is, simulated or fabricated realities like Disneyland—to the boring everyday “desert of the real.”
The exact moment that reality died is hard to pin down, but it was probably much earlier than you think. In 1962, historian Daniel Boorstin warned of its demise in his book The Image: A Guide to Pseudo-events in America. “We risk becoming the first people in history,” he wrote, “to have been able to make their illusions so vivid, so persuasive, so ‘realistic’ that they can live in them.”Nathan Jurgenson:Faked Out: Why are we so ready to believe that truth is over?
And now we are living in them. We prize image over the empirical, favour make-believe above reality. And with each technological advance that supposedly improves our lives, we move closer to a simulated reality, closer to The Matrix. These illusions influence what we buy, what we watch, and even who we vote for. How did we get this way? The culprit, it turns out, is entertainment.
Our current moment tends to misunderstand the Enlightenment, which challenged a world governed by epistemic dogma, handed down by religion and royalty, that held truth as something frozen, complete, and beyond debate. The Enlightenment was an effort to treat truth as something that wasn’t a given but needed to be worked on, and could be failed at. The experience of the Enlightenment was and remains itself a crisis of reality.Excellent previous post about Boorstin and pseudo-events by the man of twists and turns: Princess Adelaide has the whooping-cough
Epistemic uncertainty isn’t something we are newly experiencing. It has, again, lingered through modernity. The modern rise of science and democracy, the industrial revolutions, globalization, the furthering of transportation, urbanism, and mass media all multiply that uncertainty by providing access to other cultures, ideas, and ways of knowing. Technology warps what we think is real faster than we can cope, which continues to bring both possibility and despair. Truth’s contestability means that the meaning of your life, or anyone else’s, is a question that is possible to ask, and possible to get wrong. You can fail to become the person you’re supposed to be. Truth, in short, was and continues to be radically contested. That was always the point.
People often say Neil Postman’s Amusing Ourselves to Death (1985) was prophetic in describing a world where truth wasn’t just hidden but largely irrelevant, as it feels today. But he wasn’t predicting the future as much as describing his present, too: a Reagan era dominated by the information economy of print journalism and television. This is the immediate pre-internet arrangement that the web was born into, and, predictably, replicated. Many of the old media vanguards who today complain about the post-truth internet were, rightly, Postman’s targets then.
And before Postman, other thinkers came to the same conclusions about their own eras. Historian Daniel J. Boorstin wrote about the falsity of his time in The Image (1962), targeting, among other things, radio news. Before that, theorist Siegfried Kracauer said much the same of the years between the first and second World Wars, warning about the implication of the rise of images in newspapers and magazines. Richard Hofstadter, in Anti-Intellectualism in American Life (1963), located many of these trends in America’s early history.
As long as mass media has existed in the West, there have been complaints about social acceleration, uncertainty, and the loss of a real, knowable world. In other words, our current conversations about the loss of reality are familiar; while each writer attempts to sound innovative, the concerns are evergreen. If the term “infocalypse” is useful, it is as a synonym for modernity, where truth is always two decades ago and dying today, and a new dark age always on the horizon.
What a fantastic, horrifying post. Thank you
posted by schadenfrau at 4:33 PM on February 20, 2019 [8 favorites]
posted by schadenfrau at 4:33 PM on February 20, 2019 [8 favorites]
Wait, Daniel Boorstin was Librarian of Congress for over a decade and came up with this brilliant analysis that's the subject of this post and I've never heard of him?
posted by larrybob at 4:39 PM on February 20, 2019 [4 favorites]
posted by larrybob at 4:39 PM on February 20, 2019 [4 favorites]
Datapoint: I had to perform a Google search to understand what "Covington" referred to in the post framing.
posted by mwhybark at 4:57 PM on February 20, 2019 [5 favorites]
posted by mwhybark at 4:57 PM on February 20, 2019 [5 favorites]
Datapoint: I had to perform a Google search to understand what "Covington" referred to in the post framing.
Ah, sorry. It refers to this: January 2019 Lincoln Memorial confrontation
posted by homunculus at 5:41 PM on February 20, 2019 [2 favorites]
Ah, sorry. It refers to this: January 2019 Lincoln Memorial confrontation
posted by homunculus at 5:41 PM on February 20, 2019 [2 favorites]
I don't understand how or why Covington was a non-event.
posted by JamesBay at 5:58 PM on February 20, 2019 [29 favorites]
posted by JamesBay at 5:58 PM on February 20, 2019 [29 favorites]
Especially since that kid is now suing the WaPo. (also I watched the long video - if we had acted like that on a school trip - yelling - taking off our shirts - we certainly would have been in trouble)
posted by Gyre,Gimble,Wabe, Esq. at 6:03 PM on February 20, 2019 [8 favorites]
posted by Gyre,Gimble,Wabe, Esq. at 6:03 PM on February 20, 2019 [8 favorites]
My phone's news sidebar has room for a total of four headlines, and Apple in its infinite wisdom has decided that two of them should be "Jay-Z And Beyonce Have Something Powerful To Say About Meghan Markle" and "Can You Guess What Trader Joe's Item Is Most Popular In Your State?"
Whoever is clicking on this shit, I would like to have a word with you.
posted by Anticipation Of A New Lover's Arrival, The at 6:03 PM on February 20, 2019 [25 favorites]
Whoever is clicking on this shit, I would like to have a word with you.
posted by Anticipation Of A New Lover's Arrival, The at 6:03 PM on February 20, 2019 [25 favorites]
The main article is interesting and I agree with most of it but I also have qualms about using the Covington incident as an example of a pseudo-event.
Maybe it’s due to the visceral reaction I had watching those boys circle an elderly Indian like a pack of wolves… that I don’t agree with the idea that everyone there had equal blame. The tomahawk chops and phony war dances demonstrated to me that there are still people who find this acceptable. Is Governor Northam’s blackface another example of a pseudo-event?
I’m in agreement with the other points of this article and the others in this illuminating post and I have a faint hope our pseudo-President will one day get down-voted into oblivion.
posted by jabo at 6:11 PM on February 20, 2019 [31 favorites]
Maybe it’s due to the visceral reaction I had watching those boys circle an elderly Indian like a pack of wolves… that I don’t agree with the idea that everyone there had equal blame. The tomahawk chops and phony war dances demonstrated to me that there are still people who find this acceptable. Is Governor Northam’s blackface another example of a pseudo-event?
I’m in agreement with the other points of this article and the others in this illuminating post and I have a faint hope our pseudo-President will one day get down-voted into oblivion.
posted by jabo at 6:11 PM on February 20, 2019 [31 favorites]
I also find the use of Covington as an example suspect, especially when one of the factors supposedly undermining the initial narrative is that the Black Israelites may have been yelling nasty things beforehand. I mean, I consider that entirely possible, as it's often part of their MO, but...so what? What does that have to do with the boys' treatment of the Native American man?
posted by praemunire at 6:20 PM on February 20, 2019 [25 favorites]
posted by praemunire at 6:20 PM on February 20, 2019 [25 favorites]
Michelle Wolf and the Pseudo-Event of the White House Correspondents’ Association Dinner
posted by homunculus at 6:33 PM on February 20, 2019 [1 favorite]
posted by homunculus at 6:33 PM on February 20, 2019 [1 favorite]
Also, given the main link's reasoning about Obama's not-saying-something being a pseudo-event, where does that put the failure to unequivocally condemn white supremacy by so many public figures in the present and in American history? Is Steve King not being ejected from the Republican party, or for another example the U.S. House of Representatives' non-refusal to seat Greg Gianforte after he physically assaulted a reporter to avoid answering a question the day before his election, which he later plead guilty to, also a pseudo-event?
posted by XMLicious at 6:52 PM on February 20, 2019 [3 favorites]
posted by XMLicious at 6:52 PM on February 20, 2019 [3 favorites]
I don't understand how or why Covington was a non-event.
because white male teens or young adults circulating in large teams/gangs looking for strangers to intimidate, going so far and being so bold as to harass passing girls/women and minority men while in a strange city and while being filmed, is so commonplace as to be non-newsworthy to anybody not directly affected by it and often to those who are. "bigoted boys go to someone else's city; act like they they own the streets; menace others with impunity" isn't unusual and isn't news. at least that is the argument.
and so long as nobody commits an unambiguous crime, that is an argument. but that argument came to the end of its natural life by the end of the first day: it became a newsworthy event when these people and their parents and other opportunistic bigots decided that Their Boys were too theirs and too boys to suffer the normal everyday consequences suffered by other teens recorded by more than one person doing more than one inexcusable thing (twitter uproar; general condemnation; expulsion.)
the elevation of these boys to hero-martyr status was an event because it was done by adults, both private and public figures, in great numbers. you can say kids don't know better, although I do not believe that in this case. but adults certainly do. you can say that what minors do and say can never be news (though I don't believe that either); you can't say that about adults holding office.
as was seen with the ascent of Brett Kavanaugh and the many admiring tears wept over his imagined teen self, bloated as it was with beery potential, and as was seen with the recent Esquire cover boy and the sentimental sanctification of his archetypally dumb middle-American misogyny, conservatives are eager to champion the purity, innocence, and supremacy of the nice white boy as standard-bearer and patriot-saint. it's a movement, it's ideological, it's obscene. it's a threat to a great portion of the nation. ignoring that phenomenon will not make them stop. declaring this a non-event certainly won't.
posted by queenofbithynia at 7:05 PM on February 20, 2019 [71 favorites]
because white male teens or young adults circulating in large teams/gangs looking for strangers to intimidate, going so far and being so bold as to harass passing girls/women and minority men while in a strange city and while being filmed, is so commonplace as to be non-newsworthy to anybody not directly affected by it and often to those who are. "bigoted boys go to someone else's city; act like they they own the streets; menace others with impunity" isn't unusual and isn't news. at least that is the argument.
and so long as nobody commits an unambiguous crime, that is an argument. but that argument came to the end of its natural life by the end of the first day: it became a newsworthy event when these people and their parents and other opportunistic bigots decided that Their Boys were too theirs and too boys to suffer the normal everyday consequences suffered by other teens recorded by more than one person doing more than one inexcusable thing (twitter uproar; general condemnation; expulsion.)
the elevation of these boys to hero-martyr status was an event because it was done by adults, both private and public figures, in great numbers. you can say kids don't know better, although I do not believe that in this case. but adults certainly do. you can say that what minors do and say can never be news (though I don't believe that either); you can't say that about adults holding office.
as was seen with the ascent of Brett Kavanaugh and the many admiring tears wept over his imagined teen self, bloated as it was with beery potential, and as was seen with the recent Esquire cover boy and the sentimental sanctification of his archetypally dumb middle-American misogyny, conservatives are eager to champion the purity, innocence, and supremacy of the nice white boy as standard-bearer and patriot-saint. it's a movement, it's ideological, it's obscene. it's a threat to a great portion of the nation. ignoring that phenomenon will not make them stop. declaring this a non-event certainly won't.
posted by queenofbithynia at 7:05 PM on February 20, 2019 [71 favorites]
I like the analysis here and in my own intuitive way I view most of modern culture through this lens. This is why people are less and less satisfied with the way things are. Not only embodied objects but also the abstract have been "emptied out". I apologize for the inherently conservative implicit solution to the problem: stop looking for meaning in screens, embrace living locally in all senses. The screen is the meta-pseudo-event.
posted by sylvanshine at 7:34 PM on February 20, 2019 [4 favorites]
posted by sylvanshine at 7:34 PM on February 20, 2019 [4 favorites]
Ahh, yep. Agreed.
It's so many pseudo-events. Lots of shit-takes and crap interpretations of events, plenty of reporting opinion as fact, obscene catering to the drama llamas....
I' m all in favor of nuance and balance, but what ever happened to facts and truth?
posted by BlueHorse at 7:46 PM on February 20, 2019 [1 favorite]
It's so many pseudo-events. Lots of shit-takes and crap interpretations of events, plenty of reporting opinion as fact, obscene catering to the drama llamas....
I' m all in favor of nuance and balance, but what ever happened to facts and truth?
posted by BlueHorse at 7:46 PM on February 20, 2019 [1 favorite]
what is this author talking about when he says that twitter promotes things to the top of people's feeds?
If you don't see promoted tweets, just be glad. (Possibly they are ad-blocked out for you?) Twitter has genuinely hilarious tastes in what it will promote to you. To the point that I wonder if their algorithms haven't been sabotaged, because, if you can't distinguish my twitter from that of a right-wing person with the same general interests within five posts, you probably actually can't read.
posted by praemunire at 8:16 PM on February 20, 2019 [2 favorites]
If you don't see promoted tweets, just be glad. (Possibly they are ad-blocked out for you?) Twitter has genuinely hilarious tastes in what it will promote to you. To the point that I wonder if their algorithms haven't been sabotaged, because, if you can't distinguish my twitter from that of a right-wing person with the same general interests within five posts, you probably actually can't read.
posted by praemunire at 8:16 PM on February 20, 2019 [2 favorites]
a self-proclaimed “prince of humbugs” whose “great discovery was not how easy it was to deceive the public but rather how much the public enjoyed being deceived” as long as it was being entertained.
Look, dudes, just show me the way to the egress.
posted by Hypatia at 8:18 PM on February 20, 2019 [5 favorites]
Look, dudes, just show me the way to the egress.
posted by Hypatia at 8:18 PM on February 20, 2019 [5 favorites]
I put these articles together in a Twitter thread with different framing, if anyone wants to check it out over there.
posted by homunculus at 8:33 PM on February 20, 2019
posted by homunculus at 8:33 PM on February 20, 2019
I agree that; while the Covington event may not be a good example, the central argument put forward in the first article and this post is important. I’m going to check the library tomorrow for Boorstin’s book.
Covington struck a nerve and just really, really, really pissed me off when I saw it. Even more so when the later footage came out that was supposed to justify the actions of those rotten kids. Sorry if I added to a derail.
posted by jabo at 10:02 PM on February 20, 2019 [3 favorites]
Covington struck a nerve and just really, really, really pissed me off when I saw it. Even more so when the later footage came out that was supposed to justify the actions of those rotten kids. Sorry if I added to a derail.
posted by jabo at 10:02 PM on February 20, 2019 [3 favorites]
hippybear: “I do like the suggestion of the final article that it isn't that truth doesn't exist anymore, but rather that we haven't managed to update our worldview to understand what actually is going on. That does feel like it's actually the case.”It's something I've linked a few times before, but I definitely recommend Adam Curtis' HyperNormalisation [Caution: Graphic Violence] (Previously) and the two "Oh Dearism" shorts he did for Charlie Brooker in 2009 [Caution: Graphic Violence] and 2014.
posted by ob1quixote at 11:00 PM on February 20, 2019 [4 favorites]
"Whoever is clicking on this shit, I would like to have a word with you."
People love candy; people hate medicine.
posted by klangklangston at 12:57 AM on February 21, 2019 [2 favorites]
People love candy; people hate medicine.
posted by klangklangston at 12:57 AM on February 21, 2019 [2 favorites]
I suspect this might be contained within the North American browsing and internet experience. We can see it from the outside and have been for some time. SF and Bay Area are working the strings of global digital platforms that link us all together embedded in a very high degree of hyper reality. The gaps are rather obvious, from over here in Kenya, for instance, where there isn't a cacophony of advertising and marketing messaging (the Madmen's outputs) 24/7 and less screen time all around in general.
posted by infini at 2:52 AM on February 21, 2019 [4 favorites]
posted by infini at 2:52 AM on February 21, 2019 [4 favorites]
Dear News Media:
Please stop using Twitter as a news source. You're hurting America.
posted by Kirth Gerson at 5:01 AM on February 21, 2019 [8 favorites]
Please stop using Twitter as a news source. You're hurting America.
posted by Kirth Gerson at 5:01 AM on February 21, 2019 [8 favorites]
"The exact moment that reality died is hard to pin down, but it was probably much earlier than you think."
(" ... in or about December, 1910, human character changed. I am not saying that one went out, as one might into a garden, and there saw that a rose had flowered, or that a hen had laid an egg. The change was not sudden and definite like that. But a change there was, nevertheless ... "
— Virginia Woolf, "Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown," (1924).)
"Newsworthiness, it turns out, doesn’t have to flow from the intrinsic qualities of events themselves. It can also be created by someone who knows how to “embroider and dramatize experience in an interesting way.” Social-media platforms, of course, are specifically designed to encourage such embroidery and dramatization."The core of my critique here would be that this assumes that certain events have "intrinsic qualities" of newsworthiness which other events lack. That's not an assertion I find perfectly obvious.
I went back to my college copy of The Image shortly after the election and while I think Boorstin was on to key characteristics of the information age in ways that are important to heed, it's also weirdly ... iconoclastic ...? in its devotion to some never quite defined quality of "authenticity." Me, I think A) it's much clearer to simply talk about "lies" and "propaganda" than to try to find some quality that distinguishes the "pseudo" from the "authentic" and B) that we'd all be better off if more people could approach their news and social media stories with basic strategies of close reading—asking questions about points of view, rhetorical features, narrative structures, cultural references, metaphors, symbols, etc.—ways of understanding the narratives they receive as narratives.
posted by octobersurprise at 7:58 AM on February 21, 2019 [6 favorites]
McLuhan's take on how if we try to have a global village we will break down into tribalism feels really prescient
Not to pick on anyone, but given the context of Covington, the word "tribalism" here seems pretty loaded. It's also not surprising McLuhan used the word "tribalism" given the inherently conservative nature of his worldview.
posted by JamesBay at 8:56 AM on February 21, 2019
Not to pick on anyone, but given the context of Covington, the word "tribalism" here seems pretty loaded. It's also not surprising McLuhan used the word "tribalism" given the inherently conservative nature of his worldview.
posted by JamesBay at 8:56 AM on February 21, 2019
basic strategies of close reading—asking questions about points of view, rhetorical features, narrative structures, cultural references, metaphors, symbols, etc.—ways of understanding the narratives they receive as narratives
Is it any wonder the right has such a hard-on for dismantling liberal arts education?
posted by tobascodagama at 9:01 AM on February 21, 2019 [3 favorites]
Is it any wonder the right has such a hard-on for dismantling liberal arts education?
posted by tobascodagama at 9:01 AM on February 21, 2019 [3 favorites]
The gaps are rather obvious, from over here in Kenya, for instance, where there isn't a cacophony of advertising and marketing messaging (the Madmen's outputs) 24/7 and less screen time all around in general.
Sounds rather underdeveloped, if you ask me. We'd best get onto fixing this situation, stat. There are untapped markets to be exploited!
posted by Anticipation Of A New Lover's Arrival, The at 9:02 AM on February 21, 2019
Sounds rather underdeveloped, if you ask me. We'd best get onto fixing this situation, stat. There are untapped markets to be exploited!
posted by Anticipation Of A New Lover's Arrival, The at 9:02 AM on February 21, 2019
That was the rallying cry for China and India around 14-15 years ago. I don't know how the US, with its current racial orientation of te administration made clear across the world thanks to social media, will approach these untapped markets on the African continent.
posted by infini at 9:35 AM on February 21, 2019
posted by infini at 9:35 AM on February 21, 2019
hippybear: “McLuhan's Wake (2002)”This was quite interesting. Although realizing that the point of no return probably happened before I learned to walk made me feel more bitter than usual.
posted by ob1quixote at 7:39 PM on February 23, 2019 [1 favorite]
“We shall cope with the information explosion, in the long run, only if some scientists are prepared to commit themselves to the job of sifting, reviewing, and synthesizing information; i.e. to handling information with sophistication and meaning, not merely mechanically.”[1]Democracy in Decline? - "Since antiquity, it has been well-understood that democracies, more than any other form of rule, are susceptible to the disease of demagoguery."[2,3,4]
U.S. Is a Rich Country With Symptoms of a Developing Nation - "The country is backsliding based on a host of troubling metrics."
The Imperfect Truth About Finding Facts in a World of Fakes - "If this sounds like a suspicious and bureaucratic world—far from John Perry Barlow's famous vision of a digital world in which ideas could travel without 'privilege or prejudice'—it's important to remember the alternative: a societal fracturing into a million epistemic communities, all at war with one another over the nature of truth. If we can't even come together around the nature of basic facts, we can't hope to have the debates that really matter."
...which may be just fine for those 'keeping score'...
Life and society are increasingly governed by numbers - "When everything is quantified, power accrues to whoever is keeping score."
-YouTube Unleashed a Conspiracy Theory Boom. Can It Be Contained?
-Nestle, Disney Pull YouTube Ads, Joining Furor Over Child Videos
The entire economy is Fyre Festival
Earlier this week I penned a column about the rise of abstract wishy-washy roles in the corporate and start-up space. Things like "Chief Vision Officer", "Influencer" and "Thought Leader". I equated these roles with the positions of mystics, magicians and warlocks in historic feudal courts and argued they were probably popping up because corporates no longer understood their purpose in society and the marketplace.Why wordcrime has destroyed the economy[5,6]
An important addendum to the column is that anthropologist David Graeber has long identified the phenomenon of "bullshit jobs", and even published a book about it in 2018.
It's important to stress in that context that the column's observation is slightly different to Graeber's.
Unlike the bullshit jobs of the past (which focused on over-defining roles in a bid to compete on status rather than pay, or to justify the roles in terms of social importance and purpose), the relatively new phenomenon of mystic jobs is about something else. These jobs do have purpose: they disguise (according to the column's admittedly hugely generalised hypothesis) the lack of social value associated with the corporations and start-ups they're affiliated to, while justifying their expansionist empire-building agendas.
The sort of companies that entertain mystics are the sort that want to accumulate power and popularity for their own sake -- rather than in exchange for services or products that add to the wealth of society. They are in that sense extractive, not productive. If real services or products are offered they are zero sum in nature (for everyone who benefits, an equal and opposite number of people are disadvantaged).
The corporate strategies deployed hence resemble a type of land grab conducted via psychological warfare rather than traditional warfare. The objective as ever is transferring yield-generating resources from one group of beneficiaries to another, at the cost of the former.
Critical thinking that challenges the rise of executives who normalise or celebrate such practices (or the flawed data metrics that justify them) is understandably a threat to such business models. These models only work if the power-grabbing is presented as a force for good that will eventually enable a larger-than-life utopia to come forth in some way. Hence the importance of the influencers and the thought leaders: they're enablers.
Giving some people more nice things by taking them away from other people has become analogous with economic activity. But it is not. It is a false economy which depends on convincing the majority of people -- through clever marketing and newspeak -- that going without the sort of things previous generations took for granted (houses, holidays, police forces, job security, gardens, pensions, healthcare) is edgy, progressive and cool. All the more so if you get to eat lots of avocado on toast in substitution.The Spiritual Case for Socialism - "He shares the liberal conviction that people have to determine the meaning of their lives by individual reckoning. But he contends that a liberal who fully understood the meaning of this commitment would become a socialist. This is because the market economy dictates answers to the most important question—what is our time worth?"[7]
And it depends on convincing everyone that the mystic jobs and mystic corporates which enable it all are desirable, meaningful and authentic in and of themselves.
In a true growing economy we experience more output with the same input and in a contracting economy we experience less output (or slowing output) with the same input.
The phenomenon of the modern economic crisis, however, consists of the world abruptly discovering that the surpluses we thought we had -- and in many cases pre-emptively consumed -- don't really exist. And the reason they don't exist is because the new modes of industry or technology we deployed (and convinced ourselves were economic) were in fact not economic after all.
But rather than learning from these mistakes and shifting gears towards more economic organisation, our collective trance-like response is usually to double up on the false economies in hand.
And so we find ourselves funnelling more money into business models that transfer wealth from one sector of society to another, rather than those that create economies. And we glamorise and celebrate rent-seeking and pyramidal enterprises that focus on parting the gullible from their money, rather than calling them out.
And that, dare we say it, is the hallmark of the digital economy in particular.
When does one of the central ideas in economics work? - "The concept of equilibrium is one of the most central ideas in economics. It is one of the core assumptions in the vast majority of economic models, including models used by policymakers on issues ranging from monetary policy to climate change, trade policy and the minimum wage. But is it a good assumption? In a forthcoming Science Advances paper, Marco Pangallo, Torsten Heinrich and Doyne Farmer investigate this question in the simple framework of games, and show that when the game gets complicated this assumption is problematic."
posted by kliuless at 9:45 PM on February 23, 2019 [4 favorites]
The Historovox Complex - "When academic knowledge is on tap for the media, the result is not a fusion of the best of academia and the best of journalism but the worst of both worlds. On the one hand, we get the whiplash of superficial commentary: For two years, America was on the verge of authoritarianism; now it's not. On the other hand, we get the determinism that haunts so much academic knowledge. When the contingencies of a day's news cycle are overlaid with the laws of social science or whatever ancient formation is trending in the precincts of academic historiography, the political world can come to seem more static than it is. Toss in the partisan agendas of the media and academia, and the effects are as dizzying as they are deadening: a news cycle that's said to reflect the universal laws of the political universe where the laws of the political universe change with every news cycle." (via)
posted by kliuless at 10:56 PM on February 23, 2019 [1 favorite]
posted by kliuless at 10:56 PM on February 23, 2019 [1 favorite]
Complicating the Narratives. What if journalists covered controversial issues differently — based on how humans actually behave when they are polarized and suspicious? — By Amanda Ripley [updated Jan 11, 2019]
Previously: Rethinking journalism through the lens of mediation and psychology
posted by homunculus at 11:24 PM on March 8, 2019
Previously: Rethinking journalism through the lens of mediation and psychology
posted by homunculus at 11:24 PM on March 8, 2019
Antonio García Martínez (@antoniogm) on Boorstin's and Postman's ideas: Used Wisely, the Internet Can Actually Help Public Discourse
posted by homunculus at 11:48 PM on March 17, 2019
posted by homunculus at 11:48 PM on March 17, 2019
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Neal Gabler: How the Media Enabled Donald Trump by Destroying Politics First: The mainstream media is to blame for Donald Trump’s rise, but not for the reasons most people think.
Andrew Bacevich: The Decay of American Politics: An Ode to Ike and Adlai
posted by homunculus at 4:28 PM on February 20, 2019 [2 favorites]