Reality For Sale
Misogyny, blind items, and our impending digital dark age
Donald Trump has always given slimy used car salesman vibes to anybody with a good sense for that kind of thing. He’s got the vibe of a guy who would sell his second favorite daughter’s oversized veneers out of her perpetually slack-jawed mouth if it could ratchet him a few spots up the Forbes billionaires list. Donald Trump only cares about being infinitely rich and famous. There is no bottom to his appetite. As president, he’s like a 5 lb dog that figured out how to tear open the 30 lb bag of dog food. Everybody who he has surrounded himself with is somebody who furthers that goal. It isn’t that complicated.
The Republican party writ large is only a bit more complicated, but still aligned fairly closely with Trump’s wendigo personality disorder. It’s all a cash grab. They are interested in eliminating public institutions so that the services that public institutions provide can be transformed into ways the wealthy can extract more money from the middle and lower class. They want to eliminate regulations so that this cash grab can occur in a low-accountability environment, so that there is no friction in the poor-to-rich cash pipeline. Instead of paying taxes to the government and getting services, you can instead pay even more money to billionaires, and fewer benefits.
Republicans are for eliminating public libraries so that people have to pay for the services they’d normally get from those places. They’re trying to sell off federal property, because that’s another easy way to get money and open those holdings up to private development.
They’re eliminating parts of the government because they want to create an opportunity for private entities to do it worse and at a greater expense to the public, all while paying former public employees poverty wages with no job security or retirement plan, so the former public servants can never retire.
They want to eliminate national parks because there’s more money to be made if those suckers are mined or privatized.
They don’t want us to have reliable nationwide high-speed rail or public transportation because they want all of us to be forced to buy cars or pay for expensive flights.
They want to eliminate support for birth control and outlaw abortion so that there will be more workers to exploit and extract labor and profit from in the future.
They want to eliminate public education because they want to make more money on private education. (They are also in favor of this because their political future has and always will depend on the ever-important Dumbass Vote.)
They want to eliminate public media funding so that the only reliable sources of information must be paid for, and the only free sources of information are easy to manipulate.
That last point– that the current media environment has led to a world where the only reliable sources of information cost money and the only free information is wildly unreliable– has been on my mind a lot this week.
Folks, I’m not going to sugar coat this: unless all of us suddenly develop a sophisticated level of digital-age media literacy, we’re Kentucky fried fucked. The truth is breaking down faster than a Cybertruck in winter, and we’re not doing enough to stop it.
Donald Trump has always used the media as a way to make himself look good. During the 1980’s and 90’s, Donald Trump used the New York Post to basically write fanfiction about himself. Like this:
Trump even was known to pretend to be his own assistant named “John Barron” when speaking to members of the press. Years later, he would name his son “Barron,” and years after that, the New York Post would publish this:
Still, even the New York Post gets in trouble for publishing something damaging with no regard for its veracity. The problem is that our current media environment has paper-thin guardrails compared to the way things were. An account can get suspended or deleted if they do something that violates the platform’s terms of service, but by that time, the reputational damage is already done. The story’s already out there, and there’s no guarantee that the people who internalized it will ever be served the correction.
Furthermore, audiences seem to lack the sophistication to understand the difference between something reported by professional journalists and some influencer paraphrasing a blind item they saw. The comments on incredibly salacious pieces of gossip are a horror show of credulity. Very few voices are pointing out that media with no barrier to entry– virality and algorithm-driven social media networks– can be manipulated by anybody willing to shell out enough for a botnet army-driven disinformation campaign, or willing to shell out enough for a publicist who has no qualms playing with AI to create artificial hype. Or a mob.
Since the publication of the first newspaper, there have always been smear campaigns and PR puff pieces. There have always been lies. But never in history has amplifying untruth at scale been easier for bad actors, and never before have those bad actors been so organized.
Never before have so many of us spent so much time staring at a palm-sized super computer that spits a steady stream of information meant to make us angry. Never before has the formula to achieve that been so easily manipulated by the highest bidder, and outsourced to machines capable of drowning all of the world’s knowledge in nonsense. We are circling the black hole of a dark age.
The bullshit event horizon is the Republican dream, one long ago realized in Putin’s Russia. In America as in other digital dystopian autocracies, reality itself is for sale.