media/propaganda

He’s the One Who Likes All Our Pretty Songs

By in media/propaganda, music 1 Comment

Casey Chalk:

But who would accuse the favored bands of the last quarter-century of being truly innovative, of carving out new, uncharted territory? Most of them seem as artificial and intentionally mainstream as The Monkees. Does Maroon 5 even play their own instruments? And as much as I adore the Black Keys, a band that in its early years perfectly represented the frustrated, post-industrial tenor of Rust Belt Ohio, they are at their best when retreading, or modifying and improving, paths made by earlier blues rock musicians many years before. And they are self-aware and self-deprecating enough to make light of their wealth and mainstream fame.

But Creed, like many of the other post-grunge poser bands of the late 1990s—Nickelback, Puddle of Mudd, Staind—were simply jejune copycats of perhaps the last legitimately novel rock movement, the authentically counter-cultural grunge bands of the late 1980s and early 1990s, most of whom hailed from the Pacific Northwest.

If I were feeling like an ornery li’l cuss, I might argue that “the last legitimately novel rock movement” was actually the rap-metal hybrid generally known as nü-metal. In the late-80s and early-90s, there were a few cross-genre collaborations, like Run-DMC and Aerosmith, Anthrax and Public Enemy, and the Judgment Night soundtrack. Rage Against the Machine was probably the first band to make it big by combining elements of rap and rock, and given that they were basically Noam Chomsky’s politics set to music, they were widely acclaimed by music journalists. The same could not be said, to put it mildly, for those who followed in their wake around the turn of the century. Bands like Korn, Limp Bizkit, Linkin Park and Hed PE were seen as the worst of both worlds. I have my theories about why this was so, but regardless, allowing that the whole debate over “originality” in such a mongrel beast as popular music is a fool’s errand to begin with, I think it’s still fair to say that the nü-metal bands were, if not original, certainly no less derivative than the punk/metal/alternative hybrid that we call grunge music. The fact that one style is glorified while the other is vilified tells you more about the agenda of the music journalists themselves, who often seem to suffer from sociology-envy, much to the detriment of their craft.

Which brings me to my real point, which is that Chalk is doing the same thing. He feels nostalgic for grunge music, and he wants to arrange a shotgun wedding between it and his national conservative/populist politics somehow. Grunge is vital because he sees it as a musical expression of the abandoned white working-class. If only they hadn’t been so hostile to organized religion, he sighs. Well, yes, that, combined with their predictable left-wing politics, is what makes this an exercise in fantastical narrative-crafting. Grunge was inextricably part of that first wave of political correctness in the early-90s and music journalism was right there with it. Kurt Cobain and Eddie Vedder were just as insufferably snobbish and full of themselves as their descendants are today.

Not that there’s anything wrong with that! Only aspiring commissars want or expect their favorite artists to reflect their own opinions back to them. Most of us have long since made our peace with the fact that the majority of the people whom we pay to entertain us are abject morons. (I made the mistake years ago of reading Everybody Loves Our Town: An Oral History of Grunge, and my respect for the artists still hasn’t entirely recovered.) We wince when they share their vapid opinions on world events, and then get back to the important business of enjoying their acting, athleticism, or songwriting. It’s only when journalists in search of a narrative show up that we get these exercises in Procrustean plastic surgery. It’s fine, even laudatory, that Chalk loves grunge despite its inherent antipathy to his political ideology. The heart wants what it wants, and all that. That’s where it should end, though. Don’t try to reconcile the two and diminish them both in the process.

Showbiz Kids Making Movies of Themselves, You Know They Don’t Give a Fuck About Anybody Else

By in juxtapositions, media/propaganda, writing No Comments

Therein lies the root of the evil that Perez is trying to exorcize. It’s not that the literary world arbitrarily decided to cede all its power to white Brooklyn ladies. It’s that white Brooklyn ladies are the only ones who can afford to be in the literary world. Perez is right that the obsession with elevating marginalized voices only extends to voices who are reciting the expected talking points. He’s also right that the literature of quiet masculine despair is out of style right now (though I predict it will come back around). But he’s off when he says the publishing houses don’t want to hire black female editors and other actual “marginalized” people. On the contrary, the houses would love to hire any such person, almost regardless of their competence level.

But people from marginalized backgrounds don’t go into publishing. They can’t afford to. Working in publishing requires being paid a salary that is not at all commensurate with your education level and cost of living. Being a senior-level editor requires wearing nice clothes and living in or near one of the most expensive cities in the country while, in many cases, earning less money than a postal carrier in Cleveland. It often requires breaking into the business by doing an unpaid internship and then taking an entry-level job that requires supplemental income from your parents. There are exceptions, of course (there are always exceptions). But by and large, if you are the first generation in your family to go to college, you are not going to become a book editor or a literary agent. You are not going to get an MFA or run an indie literary journal like Hobart, much less be a (probably unpaid) editor at one so that you can quit in protest and then tweet about it. You’re going to get an engineering degree or go to law school.

— Meghan Daum, “Who Killed Creative Writing?”

****

If journalists once fought the powerful on behalf of the powerless, in twenty-first century America, they are the powerful. While the average pay for a journalism job is quite low at around $40,000 a year, that’s because entry-level jobs pay so little; at the higher levels, journalists now make quite a bit more than the average American. More importantly, journalists now have social and cultural power, and they are overwhelmingly the children of economic elites. After all, to even be able to make it on $30,000 a year while living in the most expensive cities in America (the only ones left with a functioning journalism industry, thanks to the rise of the Internet and the collapse of local newspapers), you have to come from a family with enormous economic privilege who can help you out. Once a blue-collar trade, journalism has become something akin to an impenetrable caste. And what journalists have done with that power, perhaps inadvertently, is to wage a cultural battle that enhances their own economic interests against a less-educated and struggling American working class.

— Batya Ungar-Sargon, Bad News: How Woke Media is Undermining Democracy

Doesn’t Pass the Smollet Test

By in fresh hell, media/propaganda, race, the geist of the zeit No Comments

Alan Jacobs:

After a fan spent an entire match calling a Duke volleyball player a n****r and threatening her, Brigham Young University released a statement saying, “We will not tolerate behavior of this kind. Specifically, the use of a racial slur at any of our athletic events is absolutely unacceptable and BYU Athletics holds a zero-tolerance approach to this behavior.” But here’s the thing: you did tolerate it, for an entire volleyball match. No one did anything, no one said anything to the abusive fan. Your fans and your officials, including police, silently tolerated it for hours. The offending fan was banned only after the match and after the Duke player who was the primary target of his abuse went public. Saying that “BYU Athletics holds a zero-tolerance approach to this behavior” is therefore a plain old lie.

That does beggar belief, doesn’t it? A crowded sporting event, filled with college students, and someone was able to yell The Slur of All Slurs repeatedly without being confronted, let alone recorded on a hundred smartphones? It almost makes one wonder…but no…surely not again…

Once again, it appears the supply of racism has failed to keep up with the insatiable demand. I mean, I suppose it is technically possible that the guilty party may have escaped undetected and hidden down a well alongside Jussie’s attackers, O.J.’s “real killers,” and the twelfth imam, but it’s looking increasingly improbable. Whenever we encounter one of these too-bad-to-be-true stories which just happen to confirm our priors, it would probably be a good idea to wait at least 48 hours before saying anything publicly. Incidentally, how about those young gumshoes at the student newspaper who somehow got it in their heads to go out and, you know, interview as many people in attendance as they could find rather than just pass along salacious rumors from journalist-infested social media? You’re never going to make it to an industrial narrative-laundromat like NPR with an attitude like that, kids!

Did You Not Know That the Royal Hunting Grounds Are Always Forbidden?

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Madeleine Kearns:

However, this latest accusation of racism betrays the previous Covid complaints for what they were: a pretext. The real reason Rogan’s critics want to silence him is because they don’t like his views and guests. And they will use whatever they find to bring him down.

The DEIhards complaining about Rogan most likely don’t even know what his views are. They don’t listen to his show. All the noise is coming from the permanently-aggrieved activist class for whom self-righteous anger is oxygen, and more importantly, media figures who are bitterly envious that Rogan’s audience and credibility dwarfs theirs. What’s funny is, Rogan could leave Spotify tomorrow and his audience would still follow him wherever. CNN and the Washington Post are still going to be circling the bowl on their way to the septic tank where they belong. For propagandists and stenographers, it’s more important to defend their meaningless patch of media turf against an upstart interloper than to try to restore their nonexistent credibility.

You Keep Lyin’ When You Oughta Be Truthin’

By in free speech, media/propaganda, the geist of the zeit No Comments

Brendan O’Neill:

Here’s the thing about Rogan: his success is the least mysterious thing in the 21st-century media landscape. It is the colonisation of the mainstream media by woke elites who all think in the exact same way, and who will hound you off their turf if you don’t, that created the conditions in which a questioning, dissenting pod like Rogan’s could become a global phenomenon. It is the mainstream media’s failures that birthed the success of Rogan and others; it is the stifling of free, frank, deep discussion in the old media that created the space for new media to emerge and flourish. The old hippy Neil Young would have understood that; the newly square Neil Young clearly doesn’t.

I remember a Daily Show skit from way back in the Obama years. The gist of it, of course, was that Republicans were racists. The twist, though, was that they got very indignant if you called them racists, even when they were saying clearly racist things. Jon Stewart’s punchline centered on the amusing irony that they had accepted that being a racist was a bad thing; the problem was that they refused to recognize that they themselves were racist.

Nowadays, progressives have their own version of this cognitive dissonance. They agree that “censorship” is a bad thing; the problem is they refuse to recognize that they themselves have become the censorious prigs they used to mock. They will go through all sorts of mental contortions to avoid admitting that they believe their superior intelligence and morality gives them the right, maybe even the duty, to prevent anyone who disagrees with them from speaking or being heard. They will split any hair and seek any loophole to avoid saying clearly what they mean, because they know it would make them look bad: “You should not be allowed to say that, and you should not be allowed to hear it!”

Censorship is itself a conservative impulse, in that the censors are acting to defend or preserve some sort of intellectual territory or influence. Revolutionaries are always in favor of free this and open that until they finally acquire real power, at which point they predictably turn tyrannical. But maybe it would be more accurate to say that censorship is often favored by formerly-powerful groups who are losing their grip on power. When I was young, the Moral Majority and the Christian Coalition were supposedly the big threats to cultural freedom, the hypocritical prigs who wanted to dictate what sorts of books and music and television everyone else was allowed to enjoy. In retrospect, it looks like that brief period was the last, desperate surge of Christian conservatism to preserve its diminishing territory and influence.

All the hysteria over Joe Rogan, and digital media in general, is the product of an elite media class losing its ability to set and control discourse. Like many established, lazy industries, legacy media don’t want competition, and would rather cozy up to state power in exchange for the state “regulating” their competitors out of business. Predictably, their inept attempts to accuse everyone else of being disinformation fascists only hasten the decline of their credibility. It’s no coincidence that they should finally come to resemble the censorious church ladies of decades ago and try to dictate what sort of media everyone else is allowed to enjoy. Once you cross that line and start treating adults as dimwitted children who need supervision and “noble lies” in order to come to the correct decisions, it’s impossible to see any way back to normality that doesn’t pass through your eventual irrelevance.

Diversity and Representation Among Deck Chairs on the Titanic

By in books, identity, media/propaganda, race, the cult of multi No Comments

There actually is a problem concerning race and journalism in America, but that problem is not an overabundance of objectivity. It’s that America’s newsrooms remain crushingly and embarrassingly white, especially in the positions of leadership, and have proven stubbornly resistant to attempts to diversify. This is an absolute disaster, professionally as well as morally. According to Census Bureau data, while ethnic minorities make up 40 percent of Americans, they constitute just 17 percent of newsroom staff and 13 percent of newspaper leadership. Diversification efforts all too frequently relegate journalists of color to the “softer” sections of newspapers — culture, “hot takes” on the news or entertainment, arts, and lifestyle — or to the online versions of legacy media. It’s shameful. Just as it is a problem that the people tasked with telling the American story don’t report on the lives of everyday Americans, erasing huge portions of American lives from their pages and airwaves, it is also a problem that they don’t themselves reflect America’s racial diversity.

— Batya Ungar-Sargon, Bad News: How Woke Media is Undermining Democracy

I got Ungar-Sargon’s book after reading an impressive excerpt in the Spectator last month. Her scrutiny of the shifting economic incentives in digital media reminded me of Martin Gurri’s own analysis in The Revolt of the Public. Much of the book is a satisfying attack on the progressive elite for being — if I may paraphrase — a bunch of spoiled rich kids whose monomaniacal focus on other people’s racism serves as cover for their refusal to question their own class privilege. Like mutant Calvinists, they condemn most of their fellow Americans to eternal damnation for the original sin of racism, while allowing their own prosperity and status to stand as proof of the Right Side of History’s favor. Bari Weiss described Ungar-Sargon as a left-wing populist, which sounds about right. Whereas Gurri’s book aimed more at rigorous description, Ungar-Sargon is happy to editorialize on behalf of some vaguely-defined beast called “the working class.” I’m inherently skeptical when a deputy opinion editor of Newsweek, holder of a Ph.D. from UC-Berkeley, starts waxing rhapsodic about a chimera like working-class-consciousness, but that’s easily overlooked. It’s enjoyable enough to see progressives being hoist with their own privileged petard. When the class-based left goes to war with the identitarian left, everyone else should just get the popcorn and cheer for mass casualties.

This part, though, is just baffling. Why would you include this unnecessary sop to identity politics in the middle of your class-based polemic? Why would you lazily conflate immutable characteristics like race with point of view? Which ethnic minorities need to be promoted to positions of leadership, and who gets to decide? How do you avoid the same old problem of “meritocracy,” which she rails against throughout the book, where the “minorities” turn out to be the same products of wealthy upbringings and elite educations, different only in their superficial appearance? Why is it only a problem when elite occupations aren’t diverse enough? Here, again, the contrast with Gurri is illuminating — while he sees the old ideal of 20th-century mass media as a dinosaur blinking stupidly at the approaching asteroid of digital media realty, Ungar-Sargon ends her book with an exhortation to “the national liberal media” to “lead the way back to a more democratic, more moral, and more equal society.” The rest of us, in the meantime, have to rediscover the lost art of getting along with people from different walks of life and learning how to agree to disagree with no hard feelings. Again, this seems like an elite problem for the professional class which spends all its time ensconced in digital-media silos. If you want to encounter genuine diversity and learn how to work and get along with very different people, go work in retail or manual labor. Given the trends in media economics, you might have to do that anyway before long.

Dusty Mummies

By in media/propaganda, socmed, the geist of the zeit No Comments

I did not know that Antonio García Martínez had a Substack, but he does, and he interviewed Martin Gurri on it last year, and as with all things Gurri, it’s a good read:

Human knowledge is much more limited than we like to admit. To shape the flux of events into a story that will persuade the public, therefore, the elites must control the means of communication. When that control slips, the elite class lapses into a state of crisis. Every major transformation in information technology has brought in train widespread chaos and disruption, often accompanied by bloodshed, as the old elites – wedded to obsolete forms of communication – were chased up their castle towers and heaved out the window. The most disruptive innovation of this nature was surely the printing press. It inspired revolutions in religion, politics, and science.

At the present time, we are in the first stages of a gigantic transformation from the industrial mode of information and communication to something that doesn’t even have a name yet. It’s an extinction event for the narratives. The ideal of representative democracy is in trouble, for example, and the institutions around that ideal will have to be reformed if they wish to retain any sort of legitimacy. But every possible ideology that might challenge representative democracy is even more discredited. Putting aside old threats like fascism or Marxism-Leninism, which are museum relics, there is no great cry among the global public for the “Chinese model” or Putinism, and Islamism seems to have sputtered out.

The causes, I repeat, are structural, and not dependent on the creativity of the elites. Today, even George Washington and FDR would be roasted alive over the fires of social media. Not surprisingly, the people in charge of running things are terrified of saying anything at all – it might come back to bite them. In a Darwinian sense, they are selected for the ability to use words that have no meaning.

The sterility of the ruling class in the production of meaning, in turn, has paradoxical consequences. Crude and incoherent versions of worn-out ideals like socialism and nationalism briefly regain currency, and are said to be the next big thing: amid the panicked babble of the elites, we watch these rough dreams slouch towards Bethlehem to be born again. But there is no second coming. History has never sponsored reruns of dead ideals, even as sitcoms. The appeal to the corpses of once-powerful ideologies itself is evidence of our exhausted powers of explanation, and these dusty mummies, dragged up by the swirl of surface effects, will almost certainly be swept away in the great transformation.

A Revolt Against the Revolt

By in media/propaganda, socmed, the geist of the zeit No Comments

Martin Gurri, interviewed by Matt Taibbi:

Content moderation, in my opinion, isn’t really a movement but part of this delusional thinking. The idea is to make the great digital platforms look like the front page of the New York Times circa 1980. It won’t happen. The digital realm is too vast. There can be no question that, with Joe Biden as president, we have entered a moment of reaction — a revolt against the revolt. But all the techniques of control wielded by the elites are, like their dreams, stuck in the 20th century and ineffective in the current information landscape.

To take down an opinion, or an author, or a small platform like Parler would have had a shocking impact in 1980, but today is simply swarmed over by similar opinions, authors, and platforms. This is truly a Marshall McLuhan moment, in which the message is the medium, rather than little threads of contested content.

I’m still keeping a nervous eye on developments in the exciting new field of progressive censorship. From tech giants like eBay and Amazon imposing a social-justice morality standard on products sold on their platforms, to the mania among progressive journalists for censoring Substack, Fox News, podcasts, etc. under the guise of fighting “misinformation,” to the general plague of campus mores spreading into the corporate and political environments, these are worrying times for those who value life in a society where politics doesn’t “tap you on the shoulder.” But Gurri’s book, and subsequent interviews, have helped reassure me that much of this frantic activity is just a traumatized cultural elite, accustomed to thinking of themselves as natural gatekeepers of information, trying desperately to pretend that they can bully their way back to positions of uncontested authority. Nothing is ever predestined in human affairs, but the trends all seem to be against them. We may as well try to be optimistic.

More wise words:

The Revolt of the Public

By in books, media/propaganda, technology, the geist of the zeit, waiting for the barbarians 4 Comments

Like a python with a bellyful of pig, I’m going to be digesting Martin Gurri’s book The Revolt of The Public and the Crisis of Authority in the New Millennium for a very long time. This is one of those books I loved so much I almost feel wary of it now — isn’t it suspicious to find oneself in such overwhelming agreement with an author? Has he really presented such a useful and accurate perspective on world events, or am I just abandoning myself to the debauchery of confirmation bias? Whatever the case, it’s always a delight to find that someone else thinks the same thoughts I think, only better and more clearly.

First published in 2014, this edition added an updated chapter from 2018 which considers Trump and Brexit. I only wish there could be another update analyzing last year’s virus and woke riots in relation to his thesis as well, but I suppose I’ll have to check his blog for that. Speaking of which, he writes:

My thesis, again, is a simple one. The information technologies of the twenty-first century have enabled the public, composed of amateurs, people from nowhere, to break the power of the political hierarchies of the industrial age. The result hasn’t been a completed revolution in the manner of 1789 and 1917, or utter collapse as in 1991, but more like the prolonged period of instability that preceded the settlement of Westphalia in 1648. Neither side can wipe out the other. A resolution, when it comes, may well defy the terms of the struggle. None is remotely visible as I write these lines.

If my thesis is true, we have entered a historical period of revolutionary change that cannot achieve consummation. Institutions are drained of trust and legitimacy, but survive in a zombie-like state. Governments get toppled or voted out, but are replaced by their mirror images. Hierarchies are brought low, but refuse to yield the illusion of top-down control. Hence the worship of the heroic past, the psychology of decadence — the sense, so remarkable in a time of radical impermanence, that there’s nothing new under the sun.

Sometimes he describes what appears to be a dialectical historical process, in which an age of widespread affluence and education paradoxically produces an equally widespread miasma of nihilistic anger. Other times, his focus is more personal and psychological, as when he attributes nihilism to “radical ingratitude” — an inability to hold realistic expectations of both human nature and of the ability of technology, government, etc. to “solve” the tragic dimension of human existence. Again, events seem to be moving too fast to be included in revised editions. In the last year alone, the utter beclowning of mainstream media, public health officials, and elected representatives has been almost too painful to watch. “Rebels” of both the right and left live in fantasy role-playing worlds of cool costumes and worn-out slogans, and have nothing to offer but condemnation and destruction. The response to this upheaval from hapless elites is to double down on demanding respect for their dwindling authority and attempting in vain to censor and control “misinformation.” But if we are in fact living through the most radical changes in media, technology and mass society since Gutenberg, the ripple effect is likely to go on for decades or longer. Perhaps the best we can hope for is to manage to avoid the twenty-second century equivalent of Europe’s religious wars.

Noteworthies (50)

By in free speech, media/propaganda, the geist of the zeit No Comments

(Post-journalism edition.)

• Armin Rosen, “Journalists Mobilize Against Free Speech“:

Here’s a look at other outlets and media figures who have gone into hall monitor mode, revealing themselves to be skeptics of the very system of law and custom that enables their profession to exist in the first place.

• John Tierney, “The New Censors“:

They’ve cheered the social-media purge of conservatives and urged further censorship of “violent rhetoric” and “disinformation.” It’s a remarkably self-destructive move for a profession dependent on freedom of speech, but the journalists now dominating newsrooms aren’t thinking long-term—and can’t imagine being censored themselves. The traditional liberal devotion to the First Amendment seems hopelessly antiquated to young progressives convinced that they’re on the right side of history.

• Kevin D. Williamson, “The Disciplinary Corporation, Redux“:

I have a difficult time accepting the premise that there is a matter of urgent national security, much less one of high principle, at stake in the frenzied effort to get sad Trumpkin knuckleheads, Flat Earthers, and QAnon lunatics (but I repeat myself) dismissed from their jobs at burrito shops, or to turn away an incoming college freshman for having said the verboten word when she was 14 years old. And that is the underappreciated part of the story: Ban Donald Trump from Twitter, and he is not going to have any trouble communicating with the public beyond the fact that he cannot form a complete sentence unaided. Fire me from the Atlantic, and I’ll write about it in the Wall Street Journal. Josh Hawley has lost a publisher, but his insipid impressions will no doubt find their way into print, if he wants them to. More serious is the situation of ordinary citizens attempting to participate, in the way most convenient to them, in the conversation of American democracy — while having to remain vigilant in ensuring that their employers, from Google to Starbucks, aren’t looking over their shoulders. “Accountability,” our progressive friends call it. Revenge is the more accurate word, a kind of soft social terrorism.

The recruitment of corporations as the enforcers of political discipline is the avant-garde progressive project of the moment. Our friends on the left are too greedy, too stupid, and too short-sighted to understand that at some point in the future this very likely will be turned against them, and against vulnerable social minorities to whom they are sympathetic, as it is elsewhere in the world today and as it has been in the past here in the United States. There isn’t anything unconstitutional about Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s blacklist. There wasn’t anything unconstitutional about Senator McCarthy’s blacklist, either.

Perhaps it will occur to some of these worthies, someday, that that isn’t nearly good enough — that the practice of liberty in the world involves more than the question of that which is permissible under statute and that which is formally forbidden.

• Martin Gurri, “Slouching Toward Post-Journalism“:

Revolutions tend to radicalization. The same is true of social media mobs: they grow ever more extreme until they explode. But the New York Times is neither of these things—it’s a business, and post-journalism is now its business model. The demand for moral clarity, pressed by those who own the truth, must increasingly resemble a quest for radical conformism; but for nonideological reasons, the demand cannot afford to leave subscriber opinion too far behind. Radicalization must balance with the bottom line.

The final paradox of post-journalism is that the generation most likely to share the moralistic attitude of the newsroom rebels is the least likely to read a newspaper. Andrey Mir, who first defined the concept, sees post-journalism as a desperate gamble, doomed in the end by demographics. For newspapers and their multiple art forms developed over a 400-year history, Mir writes, the collision with the digital tsunami was never going to be a challenge to surmount but rather “an extinction-level event.”

• A short thread by Antonio García Martínez.

• And finally:

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