Populism may not need to be manufactured. An overwhelmed communication system already rewards simplification, antagonism and recurrence, while those best placed to change it profit from the resulting volatility.
Nobody needs to control the machinery. Repeated communication changes what people notice, expect and respond to, gradually reshaping the culture and politics that emerge from those interactions.
Trump depends upon the opposing media he seeks to exclude. Its opposition generates the conflict through which his political identity acquires force. The wizard needs the curtain, but he also needs someone on the other side insisting that we look behind it.
This is the triumphal stagnancy of technological overreach: extraordinary technical acceleration coupled to an increasingly repetitive behavioural repertoire.
Disinformation does not persist because individual false claims survive. It persists because the communicative relations that make those claims meaningful continue to reproduce themselves.
A healthy society expects children to become adults. An unhealthy one encourages adults to remain immature.
The ugly implication is that communicative success bears no necessary relationship to truth, intelligence, morality or long-term viability.
Facts may not be sacred in practice, but the alternative is shameless informational feudalism: a world in which power determines visibility, visibility determines belief, and belief dissociatively drifts away from the world it claims to describe.
They paint themselves into a hyper-simplistic corner because simplified narratives feel stabilising during periods of systemic uncertainty. But once political language collapses into slogans, binaries, and permanent outrage, the capacity to think strategically about complex realities begins to erode. The rhetoric that initially appears empowering gradually becomes constraining. Every new problem must be forced through […]
Language does not contain the world; the world contains language, yet impoverished meaning becomes machinery, mythology, and moral fact precisely when language behaves as though its crude categories contain reality itself.
Transnational corporate power does not merely strip-mine the material world. That would be amateur hour. It also strip-mines the symbolic order: trust, language, law, legitimacy, attention, aspiration, fear, guilt, hope, all the warm little mammals by which civilisation convinces itself it is not just a spreadsheet wearing perfume. The corporation no longer sells products in […]
Large populations have, at various points in history, rallied behind loud, simple, certainty-projecting figures who promise restoration, strength, or clarity amid confusion, even as those same movements steadily erode the very conditions upon which stability and shared reality depend, the quiet alignment between what people say, what they do, and what the world allows to […]
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