Category: Politics

“Everybody can now feel much safer than the day I took office,” the president of the United States announced today. “There is no longer a Nuclear Threat from North Korea …. President Obama said that North Korea was our biggest and most dangerous problem. No longer – sleep well tonight!”

Perhaps especially at his most incoherent, you can hear little bits of the man’s character crying out. The desperation to believe something so unfounded, he doesn’t even attempt a theory for it. The need for that fiction to be so unquestionable, immediate, automatic as to defy any justification. And always posing his predecessor in the role of dupe because he’s recently experienced an unfortunate attack on one of his core beliefs — that everyone but him is and has always been incompetent, and that the world’s problems fall away naturally in his omnicompetent hands, if he just does whatever comes to mind, his radically gifted mind. One of the lesser appreciated things about the Trump era is the window we’re getting into the mind of a man that is mightily trying (and mostly succeeding, by the looks of it) to transcend cognitive dissonance. A man who believes that if he is just insistent enough, the facts will come to him.

It helps that when you say something, an entire national media ecosystem will spontaneously start to craft the supporting narrative structure to justify it. If you wrestle briefly with doubt, you just have to read your favorite news source or watch your favorite show the next morning to see the pieces fall into place, see the facts and arguments now bolster you where before you were vulnerable, where you cried out the thing that you needed to be true at some stupid hour of the night, unsure.

***
Coherence has lost the war in the United States, I’m starting to think, and that makes it a very dangerous country going forward. There is, if not a consensus, at least a winning coalition across both parties that there is no mutually agreeable independent arbiter of the facts anymore. And because the mass media environment has become both increasingly consuming and pointedly unrestrained by any kind of gatekeeper, everyone can and typically does find the reality that suits them. The quality of that reality represents its own quality of life. It is not just how we interpret the world around us. It is very much becoming its own world worth fighting for.

It’s not hard to imagine the next (previously) laughable thing that can come out of that environment, nor how quickly people will habituate to it. Invade Canada, goes the old line, a trope of a trope. But how easily would we accept it with just a little spit shine on it. Canadian steel is now designated a national security threat, an assertion to which the Foreign Affairs Minister can only muster “Seriously?” (increasingly the last imaginable response between any two parties from opposing medias). Of course, Canada also shares the world’s longest unprotected border with the United States, and while an order of magnitude increase in refugees from America’s immigration reforms are flowing North, it’s not hard to imagine (if, indeed, the fact would matter at all) how an immigrant crossing a border in either direction becomes a live threat in a sense, seeing as how if these animals can escape US jurisdiction long enough to avoid capture abroad, they might easily reenter the country unobserved to carry out their mayhem — and suddenly you have pretty reasonable grounds to mandate that Canada actually police its own damn border, or the US will do it for them (just like troops are being sent to do now in Texas), and if lining up troops through the fields of North Dakota doesn’t work, it becomes existentially necessary to send US troops in to police the border cities (as they’re threatening sanctuary cities in California now) — and at every step in this process, if some logical leap beggars the rational mind, just spend five minutes trying to imagine the argument you would give for it if someone was paying you to. These guys aren’t geniuses. They’re just committed, and brave enough.

This morning, the North Korean nuclear threat was neutralized. Praise be. If I had to bet, the only thing keeping that assertion from being accepted fact for half the country is whether the president continues to want to believe it or not. If he repeats it every day until he leaves office, there will be media universes where that truth is reinforced, and the facts will come to him. Trump did not create that environment. An entire country of people creating and choosing their own information universes and disintegrating the idea of gatekeepers or independent arbiters of fact did. And whether that country happens to be trending blue or red at any given moment, that is a dangerous society for the rest of the world to reckon with.

There’s something about self-immolation that strikes one as holy, as negating one’s presence on the earth, retracting the sin of living.

RIP David Buckel, gay rights attorney found dead in New York City, leaving behind a note decrying the “pollution ravag[ing] our planet,” and noting “my early death by fossil fuel reflects what we are doing to ourselves.”

There’s been a good amount of study recently on the effects of climate change on mental health, finding symptoms akin to PTSD in some cases. If the science is to be believed, it is the appropriate scale of reaction, if not the type. Would that there were more people living with the kind of purpose that Buckel is trying to die with.

There’s the threat that as we live increasingly in a world of media, we will lose our grip on what remains decent in reality. There’s the inverse threat that as we live increasingly in a world of media, we become blind to what we are rendering indecent in reality. A perverse conflict cycle. As changes in climate are necessarily planetary-scale, we have no choice but to absorb the preponderance of these impacts through media, and that can be a passive, debilitating experience. It can become unhealthy in the mind to the same degree as society’s blindnesses become unhealthy to the planet.

The world seems too vast and hostile to determine, one can only determine oneself. A man goes up in smoke in a major metropolis and asks to be remembered as a warning. He negates himself, he retracts. He leaves a negative space where he would like something better to emerge. And the world goes on, will retract everything for us eventually. Every time something dies, something different gets born where it was.

Media Killed The Live Environment, or Trump’s Democratic Breakthrough

If you were to point out the defining cultural shift between, say, my grandfather’s generation and mine, it would be that media (of all types, from print to the internet) has gone from being mildly engaging and substantively controlled to being all-engaging and substantively uncontrolled.

By “controlled,” I’m talking about whether and to what extent any authority figure is able to control what messages are produced for mass audiences. In the 1970s, you had three network stations, a small set of executives who controlled them, and editorial guidance filtered down to a handful of Walter Cronkites, who would interpret the truth of the day’s events to the population. These folks had invested a lot into getting this kind of power, and had a lot to lose by misusing it. In 2017, any asshat with an internet connection can create an entire alternate media reality with all the apparent authority of the NY Times at no cost and transmit it worldwide. Without any burden or consequence associated with distributing media, when no one must earn a press pass or risk termination for printing an untruth, our narratives lose the objective value those costs impose.

By “engaging,” I’m talking about how much of our daily hours and attention we devote to spending within some form of media. This is perhaps the more meaningful shift. The relation of a few minutes with a daily paper and the majority of your time interacting with live environments has inverted. We spend the preponderance of our waking hours engaged with some sort of media – in media habitation, if you will. In consequence, one might expect us to value the quality of our media environment more than the quality of our live environment. That’s the fundamental shift I’m most concerned about.
The Trump presidency gets this. It’s staring us right in the face, but media has a hell of a time diagnosing its own impact on society.

The most revolutionary thing about the Trump presidency isn’t particularly about race, regressivism, or Russia. It is that he is an eminently anti-qualified candidate by all traditional metrics whether you’re left, right, or KKK, which is to say, he’s upended what qualifications actually matter. For the first time in our democracy’s history, we elected a man with no service to his country in government or the military. His business acumen is dubious at best. His expertise is in television. He does not particularly understand what the government is or does, and is not particularly interested in learning about it. Issue by issue, this is well-catalogued. He can’t articulate what Obamacare is or does; what Trumpcare is or does; or what health insurance itself is. He doesn’t understand the state of our immigration law, or, apparently, who it affects; the state of our border security; or what he’s proposing to do about either. He doesn’t understand the state of our trade agreements; what TPP is/was; what will come in its place. What he says on Monday doesn’t need to match what he says on Wednesday. He has turned simply shouting non-sequiturs into the foundations of a platform. And those are his pet issues. You could go on. He’s not even prepped enough to know not to admit to obstruction of justice on television. He gets caught time and again by hand-waving fact-checkers, like clockwork, and doesn’t care a whit. Unlike most candidates for the Presidency, he hasn’t tried to educate himself, and I’d wager he doesn’t know much more about the government now than when he declared himself a candidate. This also is unique – while the US has had a handful of daft Presidents, they’ve all been universally respectful of the office, humbled themselves to learn what they could about its functions, worked to become fluent on the issues they were championing. On the scale of competence in understanding and managing government functions, he’s not just the least qualified officeholder we’ve ever had, he’s uniquely repulsed by the concept. Saying he’s less qualified than the man on the street would be a wild understatement – his television-personality narcissism gives him the uniquely disqualifying capacity to disdain even trying to understand things he doesn’t intuitively grasp, and you’d have to assume better of the poor man on the street.

The reason he behaves this way is simple: his self-ascribed success as a President doesn’t have anything to do with changing anything particular in our live environment. It has to do with how he represents the office in our media environment. That is the unconscious, genius breakthrough he represents. He sees the office of the Presidency primarily as the most influential position in the media landscape, and interprets all of his mandate through that lens.

On any given day, it is natural to expect that he’s more likely to be found watching television, engaging with media, badgering entertainers, and managing his own media than he is negotiating a bill or an executive action. This is because he (rightly) sees the electoral base that won him the Presidency as more concerned with the quality of their media environment than with their live environment. That base is growing.

After working as hard as he could to pass a health bill that would disproportionately take health care away from his own voters, his approval rating is basically where it was on election day. And that’s because John Doe spends a precious little amount of his time going to doctors, and much more of it in media habitation, where any bill the President gets to sign becomes occasion for celebration, a ritual round of engaging fights between partisan reps, etc. This is the environment that matters to people.

This is Trump’s fundamental lesson for democracy: that what politicians do in the live environment is at least competitive with, if not wholly secondary to, how they manipulate the media environment. That these are related, but (if well-managed) can be functionally separate, independent systems. That the age of entertainment democracy isn’t a spasm. “Fighting for our country” is now a dualistic concept, where the live environment now must fight for priority with the media environment. And there’s every chance that second country asserts primacy over the first.

The end game of this system should be intuitive: an increasing priority on how we regulate our media environment. The growing attention to this issue is manifest in both parties. Everyone is concerned with how we weed out Fake News. The left has been itching to regulate Fox since 2000, the right is now itching to regulate CNN. The President has spent more energy tweeting about his concerns over media than any other substantive issue, and has floated substantive reforms. Trump TV now fucking exists.

Over the next generation, as the traditional subjects of media shrink in importance next to the medium itself, we may find ourselves increasingly living in and concerned with the shape of the mirror as over its subject. We have accepted that, in a free country, the mirror on society should be allowed to be bent, colored, festooned with glitter in the name of free speech. The more we live inside the mirror, though, the greater the stakes are for how we allow it to be manipulated. That’s a lesson for the left, right, and center: there’s now a winning electoral base that is more invested in the medium than the subject it is representing, and you have to reach them if you want to compete.

There are two ways a defeated center could respond: reform the media landscape, or master it.

On the reform side, consider: Newsrooms are shrinking, local news is dying out, legacy papers are on the wrong side of the advertising dollar. A wave of independent media support would be timely. The simplest solution might be to simply reinvest in public broadcasting, which has a long record of comparative quality and lags grossly behind other major countries. If it’s a private route, you might do well to come with a new business model, one that is not predicated on the slippery slope of grabbing as many wasted seconds of attention for your advertisers as possible. So subscription-based, but delivering a different product than newspapers. Netflix for news and analysis, maybe. In part, just aggregating the media arms of the major newspapers, but soon enough producing your own. How lonely is a guy like John Oliver out there in the world, producing his thirty minute analyses that the actual news media still isn’t trying to compete with because every second of air time is about grabbing random viewers rather than producing something of a quality that it might be viewed on demand for personal edification later. I’m not a media savant, but this is for illustrative purposes. Think outside the box and create what the marketplace is missing. Try to make it a smarter monster.

On the master-the-existing-marketplace side, consider: it’s becoming increasingly clear that we don’t have to play by any rules but holding your audience’s attention. Note to scientists. Note to economists. Note to public health experts. You want to win an election, you have to win a ratings war. Provocative narratives without any kind of factual support can work. I shouldn’t have to explain the end game. If it helps you sleep at night, you can pursue all the best evidence-based policy outcomes you want when you’re holding the keys.

Dear exoplanet enthusiasts,

Every planet outside the solar system is far enough away that we’d have to build ships that go between 1,000x and 10,000x faster than anything we’ve ever built to get there in a lifetime, two lifetimes, a handful of lifetimes, whatever. In the last fifty years, our progress has been something less than 1.5x?

All this habitual hullabaloo around how close such and such planet is completely misses that none of this matters without fictional technology. It’s like you’re a starving refugee and someone lists a fortune 500 Company for sale at an unusual discount. That’s neat. But this information is completely irrelevant to you until your income is roughly a million percent higher than it is now, maybe ten million, who knows it’s all rough math, and at that point whatever purported discount you started by considering basically vanishes in the error rate for the primary problem you’d have to solve, which is that you have — whoops — zero money.

Let alone the fact that if we ever wanted to colonize some other planet we’d have to completely chemically remake an entire (probably toxic) atmosphere, starting with zero infrastructure on the ground, develop agriculture out of (probably toxic) local conditions, probably create some kind of water system, terraform an entire planet with nothing but what we can fit in an apartment-sized rocket. Suggesting these kinds of things as some kind of response to the fact that we can’t change a miniscule atmospheric carbon issue with our entire species’ infrastructure already in place here, or figure out how to better manage our current agricultural waste, or water issues here, or whatever the long-term environmental problem you’re speculating about is, is just — no. No, nope, stop. Category error, do not proceed.

​Name me any problem on earth that you think could be solved by space, and I’ll name you a solution on earth that’s six or seven orders of magnitude easier to effect here.