A certain talent for inflammatory monosyllabic rhetoric and self-aggrandising histrionics might never have percolated up through the selection processes of liberal democracy had these qualities not already been a greater part and functional necessity of the political game. And game it most certainly is: a set of defined (if evolving) rules and logically self-inflating biases favouring particular results and outcomes, narratives and transient end-states.
What is uniquely interesting (and perhaps disturbing) about this situation is that the same information and communication vectors which delivered the planet this President, and the role’s Global significance could hardly be more prononouced than when it is performed sans tact or intelligence, those same channels and self-propagating systems of meme, slogan and conceptual transmission have themselves only derived positive feedback, effective reinforcement and benefit from this situation. When the President decries “fake news” it is in itself still real news as a fact and ontological entity and its effect cascades across the online and traditional informational channels like shockwaves from an explosion.
It is the systems of information and communication themselves (as considered agnostically and not beholden to any particular corporate or commercial self-interest) that benefit the most from the turbulence generated from the current Presidency. It may not be such a long stretch of the imagination (after all) to suggest that those self-propagating, at least partially free-floating or abstract and semi-detached complex systems of information and communication replication tend to autonomously reproduce those media events and entities which reinforce and probabilistically bias their own continued presence and logical necessity.
This view of media (and of history) suggests that at the point where sufficient complexity within an information and communications system arises, the production and self-replication of the methods and dynamical properties systems of information and communication becomes the primary (if widely unacknowledged) purpose of those systems. Consequently, those political and media personalities most likely to find themselves in ascendance through information and communications systems are those which for better or worse (and by skill, sly wit or bullish luck) that generate the continued efflorescence and effervescent propagation of information and communication depth and complexity through their own presence within that system.
The decoupling of truth from narrative is largely irrelevant for a system of autonomous and disembodied emergent complexity (for which the primary function is self-replication) and, in fact, various complex informational narratives, accelerations and ripples concerning the problems and effects of this transparent detachment of truth from public assertion only really also serve to heighten the depth and complexity of this self-inflating, recursive logical space. That Apple, as the first Trillion dollar company in history, has emerged leviathan-like (or perhaps more akin to a self-gravitating monstrosity of informational and economic black hole) from the facillitation and generation of information and communication technologies may be incidental but at the very least indicates ways in which these self-propagating informational systems can be effectively harnessed and usefully exploited if sufficient time, intelligence and analysis were to be invested.
The President we all “had to have” is as much, or more, a consequence of existing symmetries and emergent patterns of non-linear information and communications self-propagation than he is his own (or anyone else’s) product and media-savvy political provocateur. It may take a certain intuitive talent to hitch a ride on the information and energy flows of existing information communications systems but it does not necessarily require intelligence or foresight. These systems are already undergoing profound and open-ended metamorphosis and it is precisely through this replication and internally extensible or logical and recombinatory self-inflation that this systemic transition self-propagates. I also doubt that, whatever the probabilities and potential for any individual, ideology or political self-interest to clamber or rocket their way up the food chain into positions of effective gravitational or logical influence across media or information systems, we can ever finally and completely extract an irreducible tactical factor of luck from any particular successful human instance.
This recursive self-reference and self-propagating bias towards continuity is the effective metabolic process and raison d’etre of information and communications systems, interpreted holistically.
Daedelus Kite 