There's a cost to awareness

July 28, 2024 12:09 PM

It's one of the most chilling things I've ever seen: the legacy media abandoning even their false neutrality to create a totally alternate reality, for the direct benefit of the worst person imaginable. It was an open capitulation to the fascist demand that media enter their misinformation stream and report on whatever it is they want said as if it were real. And it created permission for low-information people, who don't give a shit for anything beyond their own ease, to ignore reality; false equivalence where a more principled neutrality would delineate the differences. And so the seagulls descended. from The Seagulls Descend by A.R. Moxon

[Moxon, Previously]

posted by chavenet (34 comments total)

This is a really, really good essay.
posted by Gadarene at 12:27 PM on July 28, 2024 [9 favorites]

5) The media will test out these narratives of false equivalency, utilizing their practiced neutrality on matters of truth and fiction, and when they find a simple recipe that seagulls like, they will ride it all the way to November in a hellish feedback loop of mendacity.

I checked after it happened, and when "you won't have to vote anymore" wasn't the #1 fucking headline story on the beeb I kinda figured we'd crossed the Rubicon.

You're not just fighting fascists. You're fighting the apologist, media-owning billionaires. Who were probably content to let the populace have a little social progress, as a treat. Until it looked like their billions might be threatened with a 0.000000001% tax burden For Real This Time. Then they took off the mask.

The False Equivalency will hold, no matter what TFG does or says. Dijonmustardgate and TanSuitGate are gonna look fucking quaint over the next few months. TFG is gonna start saying The Quiet Part About Ending Democracy With A Megaphone and CNN et al are going to sit there looking at their shoes, fidgeting nervously and asking questions about Harris' fucking cat.
posted by howbigisthistextfield at 1:38 PM on July 28, 2024 [43 favorites]

LOL, the opening paragraph seems to summarize metafilter electoral discourse (in it's worst forms):

In the United States, I've noticed that elections seem to be a time for politically activated people to come together to bicker and fight and make points that everyone has already heard and considered, and prognosticate and proclaim and act like pundits even though we aren't pundits, and then, after a year or two of this, low-information voters who haven't been paying the slightest bit of attention at all swoop in during the final few days and decide the outcome based on something that they think they read somewhere.
posted by latkes at 1:41 PM on July 28, 2024 [62 favorites]

It is an interesting article. It only makes me wish I was a low information voter swooping in to help decide the election. Or swooping in for a tasty lobster roll.
posted by JohnnyGunn at 2:11 PM on July 28, 2024 [6 favorites]

It is a good essay, and it's always nice to read the truth plainly stated. But it will not be read by seagulls, because seagulls don't read. So, nice to read, but kinda makes me feel worse, because I fear even as little as this is too much to ask.
posted by Sing Or Swim at 2:13 PM on July 28, 2024 [7 favorites]

Thanks for posting this! It's a bit weird to talk about low information voters as the seagulls - most voters are low information voters for lots of reasons from shitty schools to a completely valid understanding that our electoral system sucks stinky balls. Being low information is normal and also the natural result of the system we have. But my other thing with this article is the conclusions:

I look at our electoral system (in the US) and think: this fucking sucks. Sure I'll vote (cost me nothing) but it is irrational to say that voting in presidential elections is how we can impact the system, especially if you're in a non-swing state. So I wish this author had engaged more with how governments do actually change. Powerful forces outside of the electoral system exert power that political actors are beholden to. The Right knows this - from right wing media to paramalitary actors on the street - these folks are pushing their Republican electeds, and society at large, to the right through their action outside of the ballot box. Sure, vote. If you simply love electoral politics - have at it. But building power with coworkers, neighbors, in unions, with folks in shared identity groups, etc, that is durable and lasting (not just a big march where everyone goes home afterwards) is how we change society. And political actors (and the media for that matter) follow.
posted by latkes at 2:23 PM on July 28, 2024 [21 favorites]

ctrl+ f gerrymandering

oh hm nothing there must be a mistake

ctrl+f citizens’ united

nothing there either!

ctrl+f suppression

oh, dear. nothing yet again. i see.
posted by knock my sock and i'll clean your clock at 3:32 PM on July 28, 2024 [16 favorites]

There’s a lot said about low info voters and their power to decide elections, as well as how class and economic structures make it so that some people are forced to be low info voters. But I don’t think enough questions get asked of the media and by the media itself about their own culpability in creating and sustaining low info voters. The two party discourse reporting is so baked in that it turns a lot of people off to news and even ‘news’. if the horse race coverage could be limited for a moment to tackle substantive issues that go beyond clickbait perhaps low info voters would be more engaged.

Who benefits from low info voters? The two parties who spend million on changing their minds. The media who supposedly focuses on getting to the pulse point of the low info voter’s views. Swing states whose votes count for more than even more populous states. The rest of the electorate, even Dems and Repubs, who are desperate to know what a low info voter thinks of their candidate.

And because the chaos and drama and five fire alarms daily of a fascist presidency, the media apologist class will use the low info voter shibboleth for all its worth to propagate a scenario where the fascist ends up in power. I feel like the pundit and corporate media class want a dramatic, daily scandal, oh god look what trump has done now news cycle because it makes them feel they’re important witness to ‘history’ (with book deal dreams in the pipeline’ and of course more profits for news media.
posted by 23yearlurker at 3:34 PM on July 28, 2024 [14 favorites]

I do not know that there is a value in witness if there is no possibility of actual improvement. And that's what the whole essay leads up to, right? There's nothing you can do. The media is not in the business of reporting the news, it's in the business of making fascism palatable. I think that's a reasonable takeaway. The "totally alternate reality" is something we're already soaking in. It's not just journalism, obviously, it is driven by other media too; it's why none of our big movies are about climate change or fascism, why protest songs don't chart. If the narrative drivers of your entire culture are part of the problem, then you're left without a solution. Your witness gets published on a microblog and the world grinds on.

When we talk about the really big systemic and intractable problems facing us, I think the media is probably the biggest. There is no incentive for them to tell us the truth, not in a big, cohesive way that will make sense to everyone. We are living in a fake world with real and deadly consequences. Trump could retire tomorrow and there'd just be a new one, and one of us would post a comment about whatever weird philosophy du jour underpins them and their funders, and none of it would matter, because the larger story--you're in danger!--would be left untold.

So who are you witnessing for? And what good does it do? Or is it less a moral choice, and more a neurotic symptom?
posted by mittens at 3:47 PM on July 28, 2024 [8 favorites]

Why would the media generally be in the business of making fascism palatable if they're going to be victims of any dictatorial regime?
posted by Selena777 at 4:09 PM on July 28, 2024 [1 favorite]

To take just one example, I don't think Bezos would consider himself a victim of a dictatorial regime; he may note that such regimes cannot ever stop talking about themselves, even for a moment, and need an outlet for that speech; he may see WaPo as an appropriate outlet. Eroding freedom of the press doesn't mean we stop having a press, it just changes what it's allowed to say. (All of which, now that I read it and my prior comment, are actually like 90% doomier than I meant them--I do think change is possible!--but I am not sure how change in media is possible without actual removal of billionaires from newspapers and television stations, who are busy creating low-information voters.)
posted by mittens at 4:13 PM on July 28, 2024 [7 favorites]

Why would the media generally be in the business of making fascism palatable if they're going to be victims of any dictatorial regime?

They're profiteers who genuinely believe nothing will happen to them.
posted by Jessica Savitch's Coke Spoon at 4:14 PM on July 28, 2024 [22 favorites]

Why would the media generally be in the business of making fascism palatable if they're going to be victims of any dictatorial regime?

How many media organizations are owned or run by some rich guy who figures that a second Trump administration, while distasteful and no doubt dreadful for other people, will personally only mean his taxes going down? So much of the media coverage feels like people who might sympathize with the future victims but still haven’t appreciated that their privilege might not protect them.
posted by adamsc at 4:16 PM on July 28, 2024 [16 favorites]

The billionaire owners think they’ll become oligarchs, the CEOs think they’ll be oligarch’s friends, and the reporters either write the stories that get published by the first two or aren’t reporters any more.
posted by clew at 4:48 PM on July 28, 2024 [10 favorites]

Stop thinking of people as rational actors. Think of people has rationalizing habitual actors.

Someone who managed to become rich and powerful by politically grabbing credit and maximizing short-term profits will usually continue to do so.

Sometimes people predict the future and react to or try to solve an oncoming problem. But they'll probably solve it using a toolbox of solutions that got them this far, not a brand new toolbox.

In an economic reality where people get rich crafting monopolies, avoiding taxes, leveraging growth and buying out opponents, the people with economic power will be habituated to those kind of responses. If someone got powerful building bridges or the like? Again, that'll be their habituated response to problems.

They'll construct a rationalization for why they do things. And they'll experience dissonance when their actions don't match their rationalization - but often that ends up with them changing what facts they are willing to believe, not what conclusions they reach.
posted by NotAYakk at 5:01 PM on July 28, 2024 [11 favorites]

This is yet another but-actually story that falls apart if you think about it for a few minutes. Who is the low information voter, the guy who doesn’t follow the news but knows about whatever shows up on random tvs he happens to see and how his life has improved or not over the last few years or the person who consumes 4 hours of political content a day but believes that Trump was blackmailed by Russia over a pee tape or Biden pulled Trump’s secret service protection before the assassination attempt? Many of the most politically engaged people I know believe pretty bizarre falsehoods that happen to make the political party they don’t support bad. I would rather the country’s future be decided by so called low-information voters than political junkies.
posted by hermanubis at 5:24 PM on July 28, 2024 [8 favorites]

Who is the low information voter, the guy who doesn’t follow the news but knows about whatever shows up on random tvs he happens to see and how his life has improved or not over the last few years or the person who consumes 4 hours of political content a day but believes that Trump was blackmailed by Russia over a pee tape or Biden pulled Trump’s secret service protection before the assassination attempt?

Mostly, the type of person who believes Bill Barr's claims minimizing the findings in the Mueller report re obstruction just because Barr was AG, or the person that doesn't connect the dots between tariffs or immigration controls and inflation, or the person that can't distinguish between strong evidence-based climate science and muddying the waters.

The low-information voter is a good descriptor for a broad swathe of people I've met. They consume false equivalence from the usual suspects as well as syndicated "local" news content on their phones and TVs. They remember when Newsweek was credible and assume it still is. They have a vague idea that The Heritage Foundation is something respectable. They don't for example identify instances in which unsupported opinions are laundered by the format in which they are delivered or the surrounding context.
posted by Inspector.Gadget at 6:12 PM on July 28, 2024 [5 favorites]

“low-information voter” is often a euphemism for “bad-information voter” but it’s true that the distinction between the disengaged and the partisan wingnut shouldn’t be elided.
posted by atoxyl at 6:22 PM on July 28, 2024 [8 favorites]

I started to write a more pointed and detailed response to some comments here, but, in honor of women's gymnastics vibes this evening, I'll gently encourage people to entertain the possibility that one essay from an author who just published an entire book on a very difficult set of political/sociological/historical problems might not represent the full range of the author's ideas and consider getting less comfortable condemning apparent lacunae in an author's thinking if they haven't read anything else from that author, like, oh, the other essays linked on the same website, even the same page.
posted by praemunire at 6:23 PM on July 28, 2024 [14 favorites]

I'm kind of comfortable describing myself as a "low-information voter" because actually being fully versed in the political history and positions of every candidate in every election is, at minimum, a full-time job, and I need to do more important things with my day, like my job, or, like, preparing and eating meals
posted by DoctorFedora at 7:04 PM on July 28, 2024 [5 favorites]

also yes Moxon is generally very good at his job, so maybe consider asking yourself if that first paragraph describes what you are immediately inclined to do, and if so, ask if it actually benefits anyone, including yourself, to do so
posted by DoctorFedora at 7:06 PM on July 28, 2024 [3 favorites]

Maybe we're all low information voters. Some of us a little less than others.
posted by Glibpaxman at 7:12 PM on July 28, 2024 [6 favorites]

My wife's former boss voted for Trump in 2020 and was genuinely shocked and appalled on January 6 and said he wished he could take his vote back. (She overheard this conversation between him and a like-minded customer.) This despite the fact that Trump had been saying quite clearly and publicly that he would refuse to accept the results if he lost, and would not submit to a peaceful transfer of power, for more than four years prior to the 2020 election, dating at least as far back as his debates with Clinton. Ever since then, that's been my personal prototype for the low-information voter: someone so negligent about educating themselves before casting a vote for a candidate that they are surprised and dismayed when the candidate does exactly what they loudly and repeatedly promised to do.
posted by biogeo at 7:40 PM on July 28, 2024 [29 favorites]

Most people are clearly low-knowledge voters (not just in the US), but that's by design and it's increasingly hard not to be, because we are bombarded every minute of every day by biased and politically driven messaging. We all accept the messages we like and reject everything else, even when it's demonstrably true.

From another article by the same author, this chilling little paragraph:

Bullies always see opposition preventing them from committing violence as an act of violence, I've noticed, and then use the alleged violence as an excuse for committing the violence they've already been committing. They'll hold you down and hit you with your own hand and ask you why you're hitting yourself, and if they accidently hit themselves while they're doing it, they'll beat you harder for the pain they'll claim you inflicted. Fascists like any narcissist act in boundless bad faith, and are fully capable of using a newfound opposition to political violence in order to justify political violence.

The jackboot stamping us in the face is worn by our own foot.
posted by dg at 10:25 PM on July 28, 2024 [14 favorites]

A bunch of people waved MASS DEPORTATION NOW signs at the Republican Convention last week, which reflects a desire to enact inevitable terror and tragedy and abuse and death for millions of our friends and neighbors. And a bunch of elected representatives in Congress hosted a man who has been bombing thousands of civilians to death using our bombs and our tax dollars, and starving them using our political support, among other atrocities, and they cheered and cheered for him.

Okay surely he knows what he's doing here, right? Of all the examples to pick of the broad, simplistic, fascistic currents flowing in American politics, you chose the ones where the two parties are least differentiated? Why would someone who is disgusted at Netanyahu (or, imagine, with Israel itself!) ever be convinced to vote for the party that is enthusiastically enabling him?
posted by jy4m at 7:25 AM on July 29, 2024 [4 favorites]

jy4m: Moxon is an American liberal through and through, and it leaves huge blindspots in his otherwise-usually-decent analysis.
posted by adrienneleigh at 7:28 AM on July 29, 2024 [2 favorites]

If you are against the genocide of Palestinians, why are you minimizing acts of protest against it? Many members of the democratic leadership refused to attend Netanyahu's speech, including Vice President Harris, President Pro Tempore of the Senate Parry Murray, and former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi.

Is it enough? No.

But characterizing that as enthusiastic support is neither helpful nor honest.
posted by Zalzidrax at 7:58 AM on July 29, 2024 [10 favorites]

If a seagull has ever stolen some slightly unappetizing carnival food out of your hands after you stood in line for an hour to get it, you'll have a general idea how this feels.

I have been that high-information political junkie for 40 years now and never in those 20 election cycles have I reacted that way to election results. If it were ever to happen, election night 2016 would have been the moment, and "disappointed because a gull stole my snack" is not remotely like how I felt then.

Not sure if I really want to read the rest, given that intro.
posted by Aardvark Cheeselog at 8:18 AM on July 29, 2024 [3 favorites]

(for 'seagull' read 'eagle'--for 'sandwich' read 'your liver, as you are chained to a rock')
posted by mittens at 8:45 AM on July 29, 2024 [10 favorites]

I can refuse the invitation from our media establishment to join them in making sandwiches for seagulls. I can refuse to flatten everything into just two sides, and then flatten both sides until they are both equivalent.

If I do this, then I step away from the flock of seagulls instead of trying to predict where it will go.

And doing this might help create an impression among people who would prefer to stay low-information that there is no permission in the sandwich they’re eyeing, and swallowing it might not be as easy as they think.

I'm not seeing the point. What am I missing?

There are lots of low information voters, yes. How does writing a several thousand word essay they will never read increase the cost to anything they will do? How does it make it harder for them to go out and vote? The quality of being a low information voter is maintained by not letting what super engaged people are doing blend into a steady background noise.

There are various other observations in the essay that I don't disagree with, about false equivalences, horse race journalism, and political junkies who imagine themselves savvy observers instead of voters. But these are all well trodden.
posted by mark k at 9:36 AM on July 29, 2024 [4 favorites]

Yeah there's something in this that defines the problem as the low information voter, which I just personally find to be bullshit. "people who would prefer to stay low-information" ascribes this kind of tut-tut holier-than-thou attitude that seems to ignore the structural reasons why engaging meaningfully in electoral politics is almost impossible - which is weird because this article is also aimed at 'the media' which is a meaninglessly broad concept that encompasses the article itself.

At this point I think when we hope for true impartiality but receive false equivalence, we're talking about a few legacy publications: the NY Times, The Washington Post, who do deserve critique, but whose influence has narrowed to near irrelevancy. When I open Microsoft Edge at work (a browser I did not choose) I am served a screen full of "news" with headlines like "To prove fealty to Kamala Harris, the media gaslights voters by rewriting her past" from USA Today and "Panda Express brings back beloved menu item". We have a small legacy liberal press (good for getting more accurate information but comes with a huge bias toward maintaining norms and maintaining the ruling class), thousands of small and smaller partisan sources with a wide ideological range and media type (from substacks to magazines to tic toks), and in the lead, garbage channels that exists only to sell ad space and has little relationship with truth.

I think this is an interesting topic and enjoyed the link as it triggered an interesting discussion and helped me think about these topics more. As I think about it more, I find more to disagree with. This is not a critique of the author as a person or their scholarly work or whatnot, and definitely not of the post - it sparked a good discussion - I'm just responding the content of the essay.
posted by latkes at 10:12 AM on July 29, 2024 [7 favorites]

I'm not seeing the point. What am I missing?

There are lots of low information voters, yes. How does writing a several thousand word essay they will never read increase the cost to anything they will do? How does it make it harder for them to go out and vote?

Maybe I missed the point, but the point to me was not about the author writing something somebody isn't reading, but is instead suggesting that you/me/us go out and bear witness to the truth. So being proactive about telling friends/neighbors/coworkers/acquaintances the truth of a situation.

I'm sure I'm not the only one who has people around them who say things that I could talk to them about. Like a person I know who said they wouldn't vote for Biden or Trump, and was going to instead go for RFK. Like the person I know who is dialed into troll culture and their statements around me lead me to strongly suspect they easily buy into false narratives. Like the person I know who has suggested someone who is one of the best to ever do something in their area of expertise, is in fact an amateur.

Other folks I know are known watchers of networks that pump misinformation into them and it ripples through their family.

Each of these people are in my life in ways that might result in them cutting off contact if I straight up went at them over their "lack of awareness."

But to me the essay was saying, you don't have to come up with a whole plan to do so, and to figure out how to be gentle around those relationships, or do anything strident or confrontational. Just bear witness of the truth as you understand it.

Maybe the message wasn't for some folks. Because certainly I have someone in my circle who is brutal with being confrontational and they don't care about which relationships fracture. I don't have that luxury, because some relationships are too vital to be steamrolled over.

But to me the essay is saying hop off the steamroller, you don't have to do all that. Just point out the truths, proactively, each time there's an opportunity. If someone disagrees or gets verbally fighty, I guess that's fine. The truth is the truth. You've shed light on a little bit of darkness. You led the horse to the water. Go on about your day after that.

It's doable. At least for me.
posted by cashman at 2:25 PM on July 29, 2024 [6 favorites]

This article is by far the strangest summary of Jonathon Livingston Seagull that I have ever read but I appreciate the effort.
posted by Jarcat at 7:49 PM on July 30, 2024 [6 favorites]

@Jarcat

This article is by far the strangest summary of Jonathon Livingston Seagull that I have ever read but I appreciate the effort.

showing your age there
posted by Aardvark Cheeselog at 9:25 AM on July 31, 2024 [2 favorites]