The Democrats' Alarming Nonchalance About The Juggernaut Of Reactionary Media
Posting is praxis
I’ve always preferred watching movies in theaters, so much that I’ll regularly buy tickets to a fairly bad movie, like the one I saw this past weekend, rather than watch something good at home. But now I value it on a new level as a disciplining tool. In a theater, if the plot lags, I’m forced by good manners to stick it out. At home, watching the same movie, I’d be liable to pull out my phone and scroll through the news or solve a chess puzzle while the plot thickened.
As if to underscore how badly modern technology has wrecked my attention span, I watched a pretty good movie at home on Monday night, but even as it held my attention, my addiction overpowered me once or twice. What if something even more interesting was happening in the world, and I was missing out?
This time, I made the mistake of scrolling through the “For You” tab on Twitter. I can’t even explain why—perhaps the app just defaulted there—because I never do this. Even before Elon Musk wrecked it, I only ever enjoyed Twitter as a microblog—a reverse chronological stream of updates from the people I chose to follow. To make this firehose of information manageable, I break my follows down into lists, some fleeting, some permanent. Instead of keeping up with all 1000 or so accounts I follow, I spend the overwhelming majority of my time on Twitter in these lists, getting reliable news from reliable reporters and analysts about issues I’m not on hand to cover, or that fall outside my areas of expertise. Even in the Musk era, this makes Twitter a valuable and powerful tool.
But Musk’s Twitter apparently really wants me to see video clips of violent crimes, almost all of them committed by non-white men. That’s what awaited me Monday night.
I imagine Musk is pumping the same snuff into all the feeds he can, and to the extent he’s aware of what his algorithm prizes, he’s happy about it, because he wants Americans to become more angry, fearful, and reactionary. (I think he’s well aware, and increasingly radicalized by his own agitprop.)
Scrolling a bit slackjawed through endless depictions of social decay, most fully stripped of context, I had to remind myself that as jarring as this experience was for me, for millions of other Americans, it’s banal. It may not be measurable experimentally, but “scrolling with the TV on” has become a pastime. Or whatever you might call a pastime in a zombie population.
Social media executives like Musk and the engineers who fine-tune their algorithms know this. They also know most users aren’t as discerning about the content they absorb as media professionals. We have reached the future and it’s reactionary media stomping on the human face forever.
This is especially unfortunate if you’re a political party that has reduced its tools of persuasion to paid television ads. What do the buyers of those ads think people do when a player calls time out and the game breaks for commercial?
MEDIA-RUN STATE
The party I have in mind is the Democratic Party.