I learned a long time ago that "Propaganda affects everyone else, but not me" is an important component of understanding how people consume media, but it's wild to see it play out in real time. I've seen people explicitly state that swimming in the big cauldron of Nazi sludge is not getting them dirty while sneering at how filthy it's making everyone else.
Or they claim to be "owning" it, doing it whole-heartedly, going all-in on "nostalgie de la boue." It's like gamblers getting delirious and throwing their last money away.
you once made a great point that reactionary intellectuals operate in an ambiguous space between base emotions and high ideals--lionel trilling's "irritable mental gestures"--and turning shitposts into disquisitions seems like the purest distillation of that
relatedly, corey robin made a similarly great point that modern reaction sets itself against the very notion of public intellectual because of its association with liberalism and civil society, and what better way to mock and befoul that notion than for highbrow demagogues to intellectualize filth
In the same way as you suggest mainstream media shaped me into something of a mainstream media puppet. Their opinions were my opinions, from the time I started reading mainstream media seriously in the early 'seventies until the mid 'eighties until I discovered Chomsky and other progressive authors, and started hanging with actual lefties.
Mainstream media has always done this, at least since the 1920's. It's just that what Musk does with X, etc., is even more effective, and definitely more malign.
I just don't know how to get anybody who isn't already attuned to me out of that prison.
It's interesting to note this existed before the Musk takeover : after all, Trump was elected in 2016, and there were already a lot of strategies from interest groups to "rig" the platform. A lot of these are about propping up : find genuine content that's interesting to them, then send in a limited number of bots (or coordinated accounts) to like it, so that it will pop up on the "For you" feeds of actual people and generate genuine engagement. As with the Das Man analysis, this relies on our ability to be swayed by perceived popularity. Now Musk has embedded this in the platform for his political allies. This is another level of meddling.
An interesting and less covered aspect of this is that the political rigging of the platform is pretty blatant, it's an open secret, but Musk remains adamant about maintaining a facade about it, probably because he knows that overtly admitting to censorship wouldn't fare well. So he spends his time claiming he made X freer while meddling with everybody's reach, claiming transparency as he destroys the means of transparency (the API access to data, the ability to see likes, the search engine, etc.), spouting that he's going to release the code while only releasing very limited versions of it, playing a kind of calvinball and making up new seemingly universal rules which mostly seem to be fronts for very narrow political objectives of his. It seems to me that the extent of this bullshit remains under-documented, and would deserve being documented more.
I'm not sure whether the designers of "social media" and other multi-modal interaction media like chatgpt are conscious that these things are basically weaponized Mcluhanism. These media are designed to restrict the direction of attention in various ways, making some things very difficult to say and others very easy.
Oh you can also sell ads, and ferret out social networks, should you need those. And as you said, create sociological bubbles defined by what persuades them to act.
I loved your insights on social media, especially X, and tying it to Das Man was a good parallel. My only argument was lumping ChatGPT into social media. I understand the dislike of AI slop, but I’m a heavy user of AI for research purposes, which is completely opposite to social media.
This is great and helpful. Also, some thoughts: vibes are not germ particles, free-floating and passed between individuals. We can’t catch one and put it under a microscope. They are (I think) by-definition downstream from the aggregation of news-opinion production and distribution and always have been. Is there any way to think of vibes as not the byproduct of some mechanism of temperature-taking of the culture that depends on where you stick the thermometer (bad metaphor, since temperature measures the same, but regardless, X is not an oral temp)? Not disagreeing so far, just thinking out loud. Here, I will disagree: where does Heidegger’s Das Man come from if not in part other people, perhaps just ones that are closer by? Of course it makes a huge difference to know the people that are the backstory of what you do and say as opposed to spewing internet stranger gunk, but, you know, does Heidegger know that? (I will probably go read him better to find out). I get why it is useful to articulate a self outside society, I’m just not sure it is right.
I learned a long time ago that "Propaganda affects everyone else, but not me" is an important component of understanding how people consume media, but it's wild to see it play out in real time. I've seen people explicitly state that swimming in the big cauldron of Nazi sludge is not getting them dirty while sneering at how filthy it's making everyone else.
Or they claim to be "owning" it, doing it whole-heartedly, going all-in on "nostalgie de la boue." It's like gamblers getting delirious and throwing their last money away.
Hm, Google tells me that Tom Wolfe made that French phrase popular in English. I don't know what to make of that.
you once made a great point that reactionary intellectuals operate in an ambiguous space between base emotions and high ideals--lionel trilling's "irritable mental gestures"--and turning shitposts into disquisitions seems like the purest distillation of that
relatedly, corey robin made a similarly great point that modern reaction sets itself against the very notion of public intellectual because of its association with liberalism and civil society, and what better way to mock and befoul that notion than for highbrow demagogues to intellectualize filth
In the same way as you suggest mainstream media shaped me into something of a mainstream media puppet. Their opinions were my opinions, from the time I started reading mainstream media seriously in the early 'seventies until the mid 'eighties until I discovered Chomsky and other progressive authors, and started hanging with actual lefties.
Mainstream media has always done this, at least since the 1920's. It's just that what Musk does with X, etc., is even more effective, and definitely more malign.
I just don't know how to get anybody who isn't already attuned to me out of that prison.
Nate Silver's study of the largest accounts on X (https://natesilver.substack.com/p/social-media-has-become-a-freak-show?r=3hnvrl&utm_campaign=post-expanded-share&utm_medium=post%20viewer) was also enlightening in this regard, and got very entertaining when Elon Musk and Nikita Bier had a meltdown over it, as a whole lot of people were telling them that the changes they'd bought to the platform were really bad, even for casual use.
It's interesting to note this existed before the Musk takeover : after all, Trump was elected in 2016, and there were already a lot of strategies from interest groups to "rig" the platform. A lot of these are about propping up : find genuine content that's interesting to them, then send in a limited number of bots (or coordinated accounts) to like it, so that it will pop up on the "For you" feeds of actual people and generate genuine engagement. As with the Das Man analysis, this relies on our ability to be swayed by perceived popularity. Now Musk has embedded this in the platform for his political allies. This is another level of meddling.
An interesting and less covered aspect of this is that the political rigging of the platform is pretty blatant, it's an open secret, but Musk remains adamant about maintaining a facade about it, probably because he knows that overtly admitting to censorship wouldn't fare well. So he spends his time claiming he made X freer while meddling with everybody's reach, claiming transparency as he destroys the means of transparency (the API access to data, the ability to see likes, the search engine, etc.), spouting that he's going to release the code while only releasing very limited versions of it, playing a kind of calvinball and making up new seemingly universal rules which mostly seem to be fronts for very narrow political objectives of his. It seems to me that the extent of this bullshit remains under-documented, and would deserve being documented more.
I'm not sure whether the designers of "social media" and other multi-modal interaction media like chatgpt are conscious that these things are basically weaponized Mcluhanism. These media are designed to restrict the direction of attention in various ways, making some things very difficult to say and others very easy.
Oh you can also sell ads, and ferret out social networks, should you need those. And as you said, create sociological bubbles defined by what persuades them to act.
The metaphors are so on point in this one, John.
I loved your insights on social media, especially X, and tying it to Das Man was a good parallel. My only argument was lumping ChatGPT into social media. I understand the dislike of AI slop, but I’m a heavy user of AI for research purposes, which is completely opposite to social media.
This is great and helpful. Also, some thoughts: vibes are not germ particles, free-floating and passed between individuals. We can’t catch one and put it under a microscope. They are (I think) by-definition downstream from the aggregation of news-opinion production and distribution and always have been. Is there any way to think of vibes as not the byproduct of some mechanism of temperature-taking of the culture that depends on where you stick the thermometer (bad metaphor, since temperature measures the same, but regardless, X is not an oral temp)? Not disagreeing so far, just thinking out loud. Here, I will disagree: where does Heidegger’s Das Man come from if not in part other people, perhaps just ones that are closer by? Of course it makes a huge difference to know the people that are the backstory of what you do and say as opposed to spewing internet stranger gunk, but, you know, does Heidegger know that? (I will probably go read him better to find out). I get why it is useful to articulate a self outside society, I’m just not sure it is right.
One of your best. Thanks