MEME ADDICTS

 

Andrew Marantz[1] reminds his readers of a JFK quote.  Kennedy pointed out that people are always disposed to accept simple messages that address their concerns, but that Americans’ good sense seems to sober them up when it comes to how they proceed.  What Kennedy did not foresee is an accelerant.  It happens that today that accelerant exists and, sure enough, it is overrunning what good sense many people have.

          That disrupter is social media.  As the result of the wizardry back in 2004-2005, a technical magic developed that allows ordinary people to communicate with everyone else in the world without going through gatekeepers.  Now, in full disclosure, this writer has both a blog – dah – but also has a book published through the retailer, Amazon.  In both cases he bypassed any gatekeepers.  But even he has to admit that there are inherent problems with this free access to a world audience.

          This writer sees this free access as an opportunity to extend of his career – one that pays a lot less, but one that allows him to continue with that aspect of his former employment that he enjoyed most.  That is “teaching” someone something he, first, feels is important and, second, that he can do with people who want to learn what it is he is sharing.  Surely, there is a vast array of reasons why anyone would expose him/herself by communicating to a world audience.  This writer, for one, finds it as an enjoyable activity and important in a limited way.

          Unfortunately, too many who have engaged in this media has apparently done so to be, as Marantz found out in his research, disruptive.  And the motivation seems not to provide a public service, but as a means to make a buck.  Nothing wrong with that as long as what they do does not offend or go contrary to the common good.  But when disrupters go about their business with no ascertainable aim or goal other than to be disruptive, then the common good is being, at best, ignored.

          The first victims of these disrupters were/are the gatekeepers in an array of industries.  They include advertising, journalism, publishing, and political consulting.  And they were successful in this endeavor beyond what anyone could have predicted.  The effects have not only ignored the common good, but they have also attacked it in ways that few could have predicted back in the early years of this new endeavor.  And their success, of course, is not the sole result of their skills but of the social/political environment in which they initiated their efforts.

          The directly, affected segment of the population that was targeted was what was known as the silent majority.  That is the mostly conservative, frustrated people of middle class, religious oriented groups (usually evangelical groups) and the numbers of dispossessed workers – victims of the global economy – that have stewed over the vast social, economic, and political shifts the nation has experienced since the 1980s.

          What came about has been media that on a continuous basis – often through entertaining messaging such as with the use of humor – issued information that people did not need to see and hear, but what they wanted to see and hear.  As such, they became victimized in ways Marantz captures as in the following:

Then, swiftly, came the unthinkable:  smart, well-meaning people unable to distinguish simple truth from viral misinformation; a pop-culture punch line ascending to the presidency; neo-Nazis marching, unmasked, through several American cities.  This wasn’t the kind of disruption anyone had envisioned.  There had been a serious miscalculation.[2]

And to heighten the effect, due to something new called algorithms, their “published” material targeted their messages toward those who wanted to see it, but not to those who did not.  The computer imaging had a way to draw the attention of those who would be open to such content and away from those who weren’t.

          Marantz goes on a bizarre adventure in which he got to know the producers of this messaging, attended their functions, and extensively interviewed them.  He tells an interesting story that gives his readers insights as to what skills these producers have, their personal motivations, and their politics.  This is not only in terms of how they react to the national political stage, but how they behave politically within the community of fellow social media activists and how they can exploit those environments.

          But to set the stage for the current state of affairs within that community, one can note that by 2014, their community was established.  One early practitioner was Ron Paul who initiated a blog named The Right Stuff.  An early descriptive term for the resulting, early sites was “post-libertarians.”  These more strident sites were attempting to push messaging with a far-right flavor.  Marantz characterizes their political content as creating a “libertarian-to-far-right” pipeline.  The direction of such efforts was toward a “full radicalization.”

          The techniques used can be described as being propaganda efforts, and they include to this day photoshopping images, the use of parodied songs, and what is called “countersignal memes.”  This last technique is characterized with depressingly mocking or unsavory, self-serving images or messages.  When these efforts are well executed and many of these practitioners have proven to be skillful in this realm, they become “must see” material among those disposed to appreciate and believe its messaging.

          Future postings will share some of Marantz experiences as he observed firsthand what these social media communicators have done and what seems to assist them in their efforts.  Anecdotally, this writer has heard that for many, these social media outlets have become what right-wing voters depend on to get their “news” despite their proven misinformation and inaccurate predictions that they have made over the last decade or so. 

Of course, the most recent example is the message that Trump’s victory in the last election was stolen from him.  Gee, what can go wrong with this kind of unfettered, free speech?  Which by the way, this blogger would find it totally acceptable if his blog would be reviewed for its content being responsible.  That would be the case as long as the criteria used in such reviews were subject to public acceptance and limited to concerns over influencing violent or otherwise illegal behavior.

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[1] Andrew Marantz, Anti-social:  Online Extremists, Techno-Utopians, and the Hijacking of the American Conversation (New York, NY:  Penguin Random House, 2019).

[2] Ibid., 4.

A GENERAL INABILITY

 

Funny how national events – or events that capture the national attention – stir one’s memory.  To this writer, the attack on the national Capitol last January 6^th was such an event.  He recalled something he read some years ago.  That being the late Christopher Lasch’s book, The Culture of Narcissism.[1]  When Lasch wrote that book, he seemed to be motivated in part to explain the prevalence of leftist, anti-war demonstrators and of the then popular cultist movements.  It seems that what he had to say then, in the late seventies, has relevance today.

          His basic area of concern is how bourgeois society has lost its ability to meet challenges.  Not only was the Western world unable to think of big solutions, but there also seems to be a lack of willingness to even try.  And that state is not a reaction to a lack of such challenges; they are out there and threaten to overwhelm those societies, including the US.  One can say that even though Lasch wrote this work some thirty years ago, his concerns are still affecting those nations today.

          It is as if classical liberalism,[2] a central strain of belief in the West, has lost its ability to account for multinational corporations or be able to sustain a welfare state.  More targeted in his comments is that that liberalism’s approach, that of science, has not developed effective policies to address the ongoing human/social problems that keep afflicting the West. 

For example, while the loss of manufacturing jobs in the West to developing, low wage countries – mostly in Asia – has left behind segments of those western countries in dire economic straits, none of the western countries seem to devise the policies that would meet that challenge.  Here is one account of this lack of development:

Even if the loss of manufacturing jobs in advance economies may have contributed relatively little to aggregate inequality in advance economies, the negative consequences appear to have been sizable and persistent for some groups of workers and their communities.  Expanding access to programmes that facilitate the reskilling of displace workers and reduce the costs of their reallocation, as well as strengthening safety nets and targeted redistribution policies, can help soften the blow imposed by structural transformation and help ensure that the gains of productivity growth are shared more broadly.[3]

While this transformation has been going on since the seventies, this cited account was written in 2018.  In all that time no meaningful program has been developed to provide the reforms that would reestablish those workers’ prior standing.  They, the dispossessed, instead have become prime candidates for radicalization.

          Lasch writes, “The natural sciences, having made exaggerated claims for themselves, now hasten to announce that science offer no miracle cures for social problems.”[4]  Why this interruption to a history of ongoing successes and advancements?  According to Lasch, one change has been significantly less reliance on the study of history. 

And he not only points out that there is a lack of objectified history (which scientific bias would prefer), but a history soaked in “moral dignity, patriotism, and political optimism.”  That is a history that not only tells of the past but does it with a dose of encouragement, praise, or castigation when a historical tale merits such an account.

          The assumption was that before the post-World War II period, the people were able and disposed to learn from the past, but now the message is that the past is irrelevant.  It stems from the notion that now is modern and then was, well, then and irrelevant to modern challenges.  And this sense for contemporary conditions and their qualitative qualities seems to have affected those in power up and down the political power grid.  And when problems are not fixed or are not even meaningfully addressed, distrust by those in harm’s way follows.

          Recently, after giving conservatives a healthy dose of criticism, this writer pointed out that liberals have their own shortcomings as well.  He then stated that that criticism waited for another venue to express some of that message.  Here it is.  Yes, over reliance on government has led to the diminution of local governance.  This nation, in many areas, has experienced over-governance by empowered, far-off bureaucracies with dehumanizing regulations about how local things should be done.  Please do not interpret this with a non-nuanced eye.

          It is not an either/or issue, but one of degree.  In a world of multinational corporations with enormous power, it is often the case that only central governments can meet the challenges they, the corporations, create or ignore.  The trick – as it is with most of life – is to hit the right combination.  But there is more to this general problem area than merely not reading history.  And addressing that other area or areas will be done at some later posting.

          But for now, this posting leaves the reader with this quote from Lasch:

The inadequacy of solutions dictated from above now forces people to invent solutions dictated from below.  Disenchantment with governmental bureaucracies has begun to extend to corporate bureaucracies as well – the real centers of power in contemporary society.  In small towns and crowded urban neighborhoods, even in suburbs, men and women have initiated modest experiments in cooperation, designed to defend their rights against the corporations and the state.  The “flight from politics,” as it appears to the managerial political elite, may signify citizen’s growing unwillingness to take part in the political system as a consumer of prefabricated spectacles … not a retreat from politics at all but the beginnings of a general political revolt.[5]

Well, now thirty plus years later, as events in Texas this last week indicate – and while the problems with the power there is due to the mismanagement of a state, not a national entity – that revolt still has a way to go. 

Perhaps if the states’ civics curricula were guided not by a natural rights point of view – one that blends in with Lasch’s observation for a preference of objectified studies – but one guided by federation theory, then, at least, how young people are taught about government and politics might help.[6]  It has come to this writer’s attention that the state of Florida is going to consider in its legislature’s next session a mandated change in its public schools’ civics curriculum to offer a more local emphasis.  Hopefully, that comes about, and the resulting change will be effective.

If change along the lines that Lasch suggests does not take place, what then?  He goes on to address the way this whole current situation creates the conditions that generates a generation of radicals such as those who took it upon themselves to attack the US Capitol.  As hinted to above and reflecting the reason this writer presently took up this topic, when this blog again addresses it, it will share Lasch’s attempt at predicting in more detail.

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[1] Christopher Lasch, The Culture of Narcissism:  American Life in an Age of Diminishing Expectations (New York, NY:  W. W. Norton and Company, 1979).

[2] One can see classical liberalism as a main element of the natural rights view, that his blog claims has taken prevalence since World War II.

[3] Oya Ceasun and Bertrand Gruss, “The Declining Share of Manufacturing Jobs,” Vox(EU)/CEPR (May 25, 2018), accessed February 23, 2021, https://voxeu.org/article/declining-share-manufacturing-jobs .  British spelling.

[4] Ibid., xiv.

[5] Ibid., xv.

[6] If the reader agrees, this writer’s book, Toward a Federated Nation, might assist educators and interested citizens to bring about such a shift.  See Robert Gutierrez, Toward a Federated Nation:  Implementing National Civics Standards (Tallahassee, FL:  Gravitas/Civics Books, 2020).  Available through Amazon.