“Storytelling and narrative help change events,” Parry Bacon Jr. wrote in the New Republic just a few days ago. That’s why he wants the media do better in telling the story of our current political predicament:

What’s missing and desperately needed is these events being connected to one another and presented collectively and aggressively by the media, the Democratic Party, and other prominent institutions as one megastory: Trump’s attempt to become America’s dictator.

*Sigh*

As important as that “megastory” is, and as compelling as Mr. Bacon’s writing is, he’s still getting a huge part of the story very wrong.

As I have argued many many times: Stop talking about Donald-fucking-Trump.

Why?

Because “Trumpism” does not exist.

The red side of America’s 50/50 divide has been building a dictatorial new “real America” for the past 70 years at least; they’ve been engaged in “fascistic” politicking against domestic enemies for my entire voting life (40+ years); and they’ll continue on with that project Trump or no Trump.

The movement began decades before him, will continue long after him, has replaced any true conservatism in the GOP like an invasion of body snatchers, and it owes Trump nothing, except maybe his head on a coin for taking the movement further than anyone else to date.

He is not rebuilding the world.

They and their myth are rebuilding the world.

And make no mistake, the world WILL be rebuilt.

The only question is whether the red side of 50/50 America will get its way and build an anti-pluralist autocracy, or whether the pro-pluralist coalition will get its act together and figure out how to address the social and economic pain that’s driving voters further and further toward more and more radical candidates.

Our story of “50/50 America” is starting to change, but not nearly fast enough, and perhaps not far enough.

Perry Bacon Jr. is right about one thing: stories can change events.

That’s why, in these articles, I keep coming back to the aim of LiteralyMayhem: to challenge the stories we tell ourselves about the world when those stories are outdated, especially when the reliance on old stories prevents us from engaging with the world as it is—rather than as we believe it to be.

The story of America’s encroaching darkness is one that is not changing fast enough to keep up with our current reality:

• the federal government is in the grip of autocrats;

• pluralistic governance in America is on life-support;

• this is the culmination of decades of planning and implementation;

• the roots of their anti-pluralism run deep (economic, social, ideological, even spiritual);

• their politicking and policies are fascistic;

• the red side of 50/50 America would prefer to live under a dictator they agree with than an opposing President they don’t; and

• they will not be persuaded by reason to relent.

Yet, way too many otherwise reasonable people refuse to acknowledge that this is what we’re really talking about when we talk about a “50/50” and a “polarized” and a “divided” America.

Damon Linker, a senior lecturer at the University of Pennsylvania and a senior fellow at the Open Society Project recently said in Persuasion that when he first wrote about an encroaching autocracy, his writing was met by eye rolls from those on the center-right:

These are people who recognize that Trump is bad in various ways, but they’re convinced the political system will remain what it always has been, with regular free and fair elections, judicial review, separation of powers, and so forth.

I was skeptical during the first Trump administration of those who warned about Trump overthrowing democracy and replacing it with a form of autocracy. (Back then I worried more about the prospect of civil war breaking out, even while considering that to be a fairly remote possibility.)

But the opening months of the second Trump presidency have changed my mind. I now think the United States may well be evolving to become a competitive authoritarian system in which free elections are still held but fall far short of fairness.

Linker has evolved his story about what the red-shirts are up to, but as he said, much of the political establishment still believes, and wants to act like:

• pluralism defined by a two-party, red-blue system of give and take remains our default condition, and

• we’re destined to get back to the status quo once this unfortunate episode is over.

That story is dead wrong.

As Anne Applebaum said recently, the Russian dissident Gary Kasparov sees what many of us don’t, that this 50/50 divide is NOT about conventional partisan politics:

I think that he, as an outsider, understands something that a lot of Americans find difficult to understand: that actions of the Trump administration cannot be explained in the context of partisan politics. This is no longer a “normal” left-right debate, and normal political responses are insufficient. Trump’s entourage doesn’t want to just change policy, but to change the nature of the constitutional system itself.

For a mainstream leftie rewrite of the “50/50 America” story, there’s always Rachel Maddow’s take:

We have crossed a line. We are in a place we did not want to be, but we are there. The thing we were all worrying about for the last few years is not coming. It is here. We are in it. This is what it’s like.

It’s a Monday, and every day the sun rises and sets, and there are sports, and movies… there’s everyone’s quotient of family drama.. and money worries… life has not stopped… but at the same time, life in the United States is profoundly changing and is profoundly different than it was even six months ago. Because we do now live in a country that has an authoritarian leader in charge. We have a consolidating dictatorship in our country.

The unpleasant fact that blue-shirts won’t confront: Restoration is now impossible, remaking is the only option

Even as media narratives come around to the idea that the red side of 50/50 America is too busy rebuilding the “real America” to be interested in pluralism—and in fact they seem determined to erase it—the media have not grasped the reality that restoration of the old status quo is impossible.

I wrote about this idea — i.e., that “there’s no going back” — in a piece for The Long Memo (TLM), titled No Story Left to Believe.

William Finnegan, proprietor of TLM, recently snarked at Rachel Maddow’s take about the red side of the 50/50 divide calling it “phony nonsense,” and while I’m a big fan of Finnegan I’m not sure why he was vehement. Because it seems that he and Maddow agree on the main point: the red side of 50/50 America is openly authoritarian.

I think where they may differ is how far along we are on the path to a “consolidating dictatorship.” Finnegan uses the 12-point scale created by Mallen Baker and believes we’re at 25-31 on a scale of 0-60: he says, “not great, but not Hitler either.”

I think they also differ (instructive for our purposes) on how to counter the intentional authoritarian embrace of team “red-shirts.”

Here Finnegan is explicit about the fecklessness of team blue-shirts, which I have been kvetching about for years:

The Democratic Party loves to cast itself as the last bulwark against authoritarianism. “We’re defending democracy,” they tell you, usually while fund-raising off the latest outrage from the right. And yet, when it comes to doing the actual hard work of removing the conditions that breed authoritarian politics in the first place, they’ve been asleep at the wheel for decades…

They’ll give soaring speeches about “our values” while ignoring the lived economic collapse under their feet…

This is what the Democrats don’t get: You cannot shame people out of voting for authoritarians if their daily reality feels like a slow bleed. You have to give them something tangible — not in 2050, not after another two years of “stakeholder engagement,” but now. [emphasis original]

People are desperate for change, and not the hopey, changey, incrementalist Obama kind of change. They are done with all-a-that.

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Surely, the red-shirt version of radical change is radically authoritarian, and destined to hurt their own voters the most, but they are delivering deep, radical, and structural change nonetheless—sold to them as a heroic myth of a resurgence of the “real America.” (That mythmaking was the entire gist of our BIG Big Lie series.)

So, what are the blue-shirts giving them?

More status quo bullshit.

Presumably because they believe that winning “independent voters” by offering “sensible policies” on “kitchen table issues” is the way to go.

As explained by Aaron Regunberg in The New Republic:

Having failed to learn the key lesson from last year’s defeat, party leaders are promoting moderate candidates to run against populist progressives in next year’s elections.

[Kamala Harris] significantly underperformed with working-class voters compared to Joe Biden in 2020, and became the first Democratic presidential nominee in decades to receive more support from Americans in the top third of the income bracket than those in the bottom two-thirds.

That is why there has been broad agreement—even David Brooks is in this camp—that if Democrats want to defeat MAGA Republicans, they need to stop embracing anodyne, corporate-approved messaging and start giving people something to vote for...

[But] again and again, in must-win House and Senate races, rather than embracing candidates that are proving their capacity to spark grassroots Democratic enthusiasm and tap into the populist ferment of the American public, establishment leaders are working to tilt the scales in favor of exactly the kind of uninspiring corporatists that dug the party’s current hole.

The New Republic piece details race after race where the Democratic establishment is refusing to heed the sharp cries of voters demanding that politicians remake and restructure America’s governing priorities—cries that that have been ringing in our ears since the HOPE/CHANGE election of 2008.

By contrast, the pro-pluralism blue-ish side of 50/50 America is doing fuckall.

In Maine’s upcoming primary, they’re hoping to run an octogenarian party loyalist against a young, populist veteran. SMH. (An entertaining take from Wonkette here.)

Voters want REAL CHANGE RIGHT NOW!!! The red side of 50/50 America is giving it to them.

When the pundit-driven media coverage reverts to form this coming election season, telling us a story of a “50/50 America” that wants sensible centrism, I don’t buy it.

That’s an old, outdated story that may have been true once, but is no longer.

The margin in the middle is just as put out and frustrated as every other voting group.

They’ve been flip-flopping for decades… blue to red / back to blue / back to red… over and over since “Reagan Democrats” caused a political earthquake more than 40 years ago in 1980.

But that flip flopping isn’t evidence “centrism,” it’s evidence of exasperation, and in election after election, voters have been demanding REAL CHANGE RIGHT NOW.

The reds have answered.

So, the blues need to figure out what kind of deep, radical, structural change they want to offer — RIGHT NOW — because voters are no longer satisfied with triangulation and incrementalism.

The red side of 50/50 America is building a radically new political, social, technological and economic machine — to remake the world.

One of Finnegan’s more helpful metaphors from the Never Again post is the image of authoritarianism as a machine — one built through trial and error:

Authoritarianism doesn’t usually succeed on the first try.

As I previously wrote, the Nazis failed twice before they ascended to being the controlling power structure. Each failure was a rehearsal: the rhetoric hardened, the propaganda sharpened, the organization tightened. By the third run, they weren’t just angry street brawlers — they were a machine…

Trump may be America’s second run… The danger is in the third act.

That’s when someone comes along who understands the machinery Trump banged together — and runs it with competence.

We’re watching in real time as the red side of 50/50 America rolls out its version of deep, radical, structural change.

They are building an autocratic machine to effect and enforce a version of the heroic “real America” that conservatives have been crowing about for four decades. This machine is actively tearing down and remaking America in its own image, every single day.

What kind of machine is the blue side of 50/50 America building? A taco stand in front of the offices of the Republican National Committee.

Pathetic.

A truthful story of “50/50 America” would make it clear that the world WILL be rebuilt one way or another. The red side of the political divide is showing us their answer to “real change right now,” which is to destroy institutions and processes of pluralism and replace them with the iron grip “conservative” power.

Example: In the newest front in that battle—i.e., the fight to remove Fed governor Lisa Cook—an analyst from the Dutch banking conglomerate Rabobank observed that old ideas are “little protection against the new paradigm of raw power politics”:

Just as the interpretation of law is inherently political, the price of money is inherently political, and all aspects of national policy are being co-opted to support the MAGA vision of the United States and its place in the world.

For many of us, what the red side of 50/50 America is building is a terrifying place that gets darker with every passing day.

But their movement of “raw power politics” is going nowhere, even if they lose one or two elections. They have demonstrated over many decades that they will keep pressing, and refining, and perfecting a machine that co-opts all dimensions of national power to serve their purpose.

And yet, even as that steamroller of right-wing authoritarianism flattens everything in its path, we still don’t know what kind of deep structural change a blue vote will get us.

Voters are demanding REAL CHANGE RIGHT NOW. The blues have NO answer. That’s pretty stunning.

The red side of 50/50 America is at least delivering something.

The blue side is serving up crusts of stale bread, and that’s why the other side keeps winning. And if no deep, radical, structural relief is offered to voters by the blue side of 50/50 America, voters will keep pulling on their red shirts and pulling the lever for the autocrats.

As journalist and historian Garrett Graff said yesterday in the post America Tips Into Fascism: Today is different than before (on his Doomsday Scenario Substack):

For years in covering the rise (and return) of Trump and Trumpism, I imagined there was some line that the GOP would not be willing to compromise for greed and power… Even after January 6th, I held hope that might be the end. But then Eric Cantor’s buddy Kevin McCarthy showed up at Mar-a-Lago and the rehabilitation tour began.

It has led here, to this moment, where all three branches of the GOP-controlled government have been willing to torch the republic and democracy that generations of elected officials and citizens have tended for 249 years…

Whether we can come back from this moment is a story yet unknown. But it’s clear today America is different and, even if we fight our way back, it will never be the same again. [emphasis added]

This, now, is the only proper departure point for any rationale appraisal, discussion, and analysis of “50/50 America”: incrementalism is dead, pluralism is on life-support, and America absolutely WILL be remade in radical fashion.

The only question is: How, and by which side of the 50/50 divide?

If the blues won’t provide the deep structural change voters are demanding, then the reds will.

Living in “50/50 America” no longer means what it used to mean—that’s the conversation we started last week.

The brand-name “50/50 America” on the front of the box hasn’t changed, but the ingredient list on the side of the box has been radically altered.

Political reporters and pundits operate as if they think the two-party system is still functional and deserving of rhetorical deference.

During the upcoming mid-terms, your cable signals will be jam packed with pundits using the same “50/50” rhetoric about our “divided” and “polarized” nation—couching the discussion in the same pluralistic context they’ve always used:

Two parties.

Clashing visions.

Independent voters “in the middle.”

Competing policy aims.

The fickleness of “swing voters.”

Centrist backlash against finger-wagging wokeness.

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The aims of the red side of America’s 50/50 divide were ALWAYS on full display.

And what they’re tearing down isn’t nearly as important as what they’re building up.

Back in 2024, a lot of agitated voices were warning that a red vote in this divided nation was a vote for an authoritarian party with an erratic autocratic leader at the helm — people who would undertake a fundamental rewrite of the social contract that had governed America at least for the past hundred years, if not since its founding.

Any vestigial commitment to pluralism—as contentious as that pluralism could be—would be tossed overboard.

Then, on Election Day, America split down the proverbial middle and elected the autocrats anyway. So, now we’re here.

As far back as 2021, in The BIG “Big Lie” series, I was writing about this impending anti-democratic age, and what was driving it:

The left will win the culture war at the very same time it loses the country to an increasingly autocratic backlash from the right.

The GOP is [bent on] restoring the “real America” – on guns, abortion, voting rights, education, religion in [government] spaces, environmental rollbacks, equality and diversity rollbacks, and maybe soon they will succeed in taking away my super-gay marriage, to name a few recent initiatives.

The right has shown that if it cannot win the culture war in the broader culture, it feels no compunction about simply legislating away the impact of the nation’s leftward cultural swing in the name of protecting conservatives’ liberty and restoring America to its true conservative heritage. That’s the climax of their narrative and by God are they climaxing!

But more important, here’s what I wrote about the kind of nation a Republican trifecta (winning the House, Senate, and White House) would bring us.

Here’s what I thought it would create:

At that point, the rest of us will get pulled along into a “real America” of their making, likely one modeled on 19^th century America (maybe even 18^th century America)—i.e., the very kind of society today’s born-again conservatives see as a blueprint for the ages.^[9]

That new America, like the original colonial version, most likely will be a pious, radically libertarian, deeply economically stratified, racialist, pamphleteering free-for-all. Following their originalist logic, America would become a kind of maximalist colonial-era world: the same mentality just with bigger churches, better guns, and cooler technology.

In the conservative narrative, that’s the originalist freeze-frame that the founders intended, and they insist that we all have to live in that zero-sum world with them. Any liberal win that modifies the freeze-frame comes at their expense.

So, our revanchist, restored America won’t likely be a jackbooted, cartoonish version of an autocracy. Rather, it will be something that looks and feels “American” but different:

> quasi-authoritarian

> quasi-religious

> construing freedom in a narrow, parochial way

> a pseudo-democracy that ensures the legislative authority of born-again conservative interests

> a country governed by a kind of pseudo-law that assures the legal authority of born-again conservative ideas, as we are seeing with a born-again conservative Supreme Court

> in practice, it will find ever more inventive ways to restrict the social, legal, and political vehicles by which conservative primacy might be challenged

> those of us in the pro-democracy, pro-pluralism contingent will find ourselves hemmed in and howling in protest, in a shrinking media bubble of our own.

Turns out that this prediction was very much on point.

What we’re seeing in the opening months of the new administration:

• Restraints on executive power removed

• The executive branch pushing limits and testing for weaknesses in the institutions and processes charged with enforcing limits.

• Congress neutered, as evidenced by the demolishing of entire federal programs and departments through executive decrees on defunding and mass firings.

• Conservative reconstruction of public cultural and media institutions.

• Gleeful demolishing of the separation of church and state (e.g., allowing federal employees to proselytize for their personal religious beliefs in the federal workplace).

• A gigantic extortion scheme pitting the fiscal and administrative power of the state against the nation’s entire legal profession, higher education and media, in an all-out blitz for control and compliance.

• Federal militarization of domestic law enforcement.

• The entire federal justice apparatus mobilized against dissenters and perceived enemies.

• Redistricting massive swaths of the nation ahead of the 2026 mid-terms—the efforts in Texas being a dry run for what they will pursue across the entire nation.

And these are just the opening gambits in the Administration’s FIRST SIX MONTHS. We have three and a half years to go.

The red side of 50/50 America is building their new “conservative” nation based on fraudulent myths

I wrote in the BIG Big Lie series that America’s conservative groundswell was riding atop a fraudulent hero myth: of conservatives saving the real America from liberal domestic enemies.

That myth is the bedrock foundation of all the anti-pluralist machinations we’re seeing from the red side of 50/50 America today.

But those are not the only fraudulent myths. A movement grounded in fraudulent myth making has to build an entire architecture of fraud to maintain the sham grab for power.

As Fareed Zakaria observed in a recent Washington Post article, Trump’s world-altering tariff policies are built upon a shoddy foundation: an erroneous myth that free trade has been bad for America:

Massive changes in public policy that are transforming the world are being made based on a series of assumptions that are anecdotes, exaggerations and lies.

And if there’s one thing this red-shirt blitz relies on to rebuild America in its image, it’s the control of information and storytelling.

To quote a headline from a Washington Post article:

Curating reality is an old political game, but Trump’s sweeping statistical purges are part of a broader attempt to reinvent “truth.”

The recent firing of a chief government statistician, for job numbers that the president didn’t like, is just the tip of the iceberg. As the Post reported:

The Trump administration is deleting taxpayer-funded data — information that Americans use to make sense of the world. In its absence, the president can paint the world as he pleases.

We don’t know the full universe of statistics that has gone missing, but the U.S. DOGE Service’s wrecking ball has already left behind a wasteland of “404″ pages. All sorts of useful information has disappeared. [emphasis added]

Brian Stelter at CNN made much the same observation and cited many more examples of red-shirt reality control via information control:

Climate change reports, deleted. DEI initiatives, banned. Local TV and radio stations, defunded.

Books, removed from military academies. Names of civil rights leaders, erased from ships. History lessons, purged from museums.

The list goes on and on. President Trump and his government appointees keep asserting more control over ideas and information — which has the effect of taking power away from independent researchers, historians, and the real news outlets that he frequently calls “fake.”

Red-shirt “conservatives” are world builders: creating a new world parallel to ours that will eventually subsume ours

It sounds like the plot of a Bond movie: a cabal of super-baddies scheming to conquer the world by controlling reality.

If you wrote it as fiction, it would be rejected as too cliché to be believable.

But that is exactly what’s happening, right now, in slow motion.

This article from Dave Troy at America2.0 is a must read for its explanation of the Network State movement, which aims to create:

a parallel establishment envisioned by Andressen [sic] and other promoters of the Network State movement, which specifically aims to dismantle the United States and replace it with a federation of smaller, competing fiefdoms. [emphasis original]

Building on myths of their own superiority (and victimization at the hands of liberal domestic enemies of the “real America”) their aim is to replace all our current mainstream media, education, scientific, and government institutions.

Their vehicle is technological: using the internet’s “network effect” to attract enough disaffected users to platforms under their control that they can then starve mainstream institutions of money, participation, and ultimately social authority. (Troy points out that Substack itself is part of this digital parallel universe.)

Their aim is to create a parallel system of institutions they control that will eventually supplant the off-line, real-world institutions they don’t control.

This is not theory.

This is happening: for example, the online PragerU (a media outlet founded by a conservative talk show host to promote his conservative version of “American values”) has been tapped by the state of Oklahoma to administer wokeness screenings to applicants from blue states for positions as public-school teachers.

PragerU is not an accredited educational institution but it’s online reach is global, and its offline reach is growing.

And that’s just one example of how their parallel world is being built, brick by digital brick, to compete with and eventually overtake the pluralist world we’ve always taken for granted.

(For deeper reading, Dave Troy points readers to “Peter Thiel's book Zero to One, co-authored with Blake Masters, which discusses the power of network effects to achieve effective monopoly control.”)

These are the stakes in a “50/50 America” in which the one side is no longer willing to agree to let pluralism define the political ground rules.

The political commentariat will likely be unwilling to give up their pluralist framing of the next election cycle (e.g., “it’s the economy stupid” and “swing voters decide elections”), but that doesn’t change the reality: a red-blue, 50/50 America is not what it used to be. It’s something much scarier, and much more dangerous.

NEXT WEEK: We ask why the blue-shirts are failing so miserably at countering the anti-pluralist world-building on the red side of the 50/50 divide.

Image: Salmy_king from FAVPNG.com

Here at LiteralMayhem we don’t publish daily. You may see us once a week or so, and hopefully over time that will endear you to LiteralMayhem, rather than the opposite.

No hot takes here. Our motto is: step back, pause, and rethink. Especially rethinking received stories about the world and the times we’re living in.

The stepping back is important because the world can often feel overwhelming. My inbox is filled every day (as yours probably is) by an unrelenting firehose of catastrophe that is “world news.” You don’t need another stream of disaster to choke on—there’s enough daily analysis and punditry out there already.

Stepping back serves a dual purpose: it relieves the pressure and anxiety while also helping to gain perspective.

And it’s the shift in perspective we’re going after here, which takes time and consideration. Time to gather evidence. Time to think and weigh different perspectives. Time to question and untangle prevailing narratives. Time to write thoughtful pieces that are reflective, not reflexive. Pieces that can withstand the test of time.

Hopefully this rethinking can, in some small way, contribute to your own process of seeing through the hype and the spin, seeing both the short- and long-term arcs of our shared story, and realistically assessing not just where we are, but also where we’re headed.

The prevailing story of our “divided politics” is outdated and needs rewriting

America is about to enter mid-term election season, and with it we’ll get yet another round of endless pundit banter about our “divided” nation, and our “50/50 America,” and our “polarized” politics, and the health of our “two party system,” and the importance of winning “independents” and “swing voters” and “persuadable voters” in the “political center.”

All those news writers and pundits will act as if the fundamental context of our voting choices remains anchored in a conventional, static model of partisan politics that has held for decades.

Their coverage and analysis will sound like an uninterrupted continuation of the debate that raged on election night 2024, in which “swing voters” in the middle of our “50/50 America” decided the election on policy issues, or their guts, or a mixture of both.

On that infamous night, back in November 2024, MSNBC host Chris Hayes was sanguine and almost jocular in telling his fellow news-anchor panelists that he likened the earthquake of an election result merely to three voters out of every hundred changing their shirts from blue to red.

That’s all. They just changed their shirts from one color to another. Happens all the time. No biggie. We live in a divided nation where elections are decided on what I would call “the margin in the middle.”

On his own show “All In,” Hayes elaborated:

[America is] basically a 50/50 country. But underneath the surface, huge structural things are happening. There’s a massive class realignment that is happening, and what happens is that in any given election, one side or the other gets a little better part of the trade that keeps happening between the working class and college educated professional class voters.

It happens in every election. [The 2024 election] was a toss-up race in a bad environment for incumbents, in a 50/50 nation that was previously ruled by a narrow but durable pro-democratic majority. I think it still has a pro-democratic majority, in which a certain sliver of those folks just voted on other stuff.

American didn’t give itself over to Trumpism. We got this because three out of a hundred people switched their votes in a nation that weathered inflation and a global pandemic pretty well but not well enough. And it’s disappointing as hell but plenty to build a movement on going forward.

This is a common refrain and way of framing something that has come to be short-handed as a “divided nation.”

Implicit in this narrative is the idea that those three out of a hundred voters can (and likely may) switch their shirts back—from red to blue—just as easily as they did in 2024, and send the pendulum swinging back in the next election, i.e., that the natural ebbs and flows of partisan politics will continue as they always have, moving the ship of state forward perhaps in zig-zag fashion, but ultimately always aiming toward the same small-d democratic True North.

In this story, elections might be about… Tax policy changing at the margin. The social safety net being a little more or less porous. Federal spending: how much and on what. Basically, a tug of war that pulls a tiny American flag back and forth over a central line, etched into the sands of pluralistic democracy.

Also explicit in this conventional 50/50 narrative is another plot point: “it’s the economy stupid.” Sage analysts will debate how much the margin in the middle pushes the pendulum back and forth based on the price of eggs and a gallon of gas.

In the case of 2024, that plot point argues that America’s willful embrace of an authoritarian party and its autocratic leader was done out of short-term economic self-interest and not a deeper emotional and psychological commitment to the autocrat’s political narrative, and that America has not given up on pluralism. It assumes, to use Hayes’s words, our “pro-democratic majority” still holds.

As a relative of mine said to me after the election: “Democracy will go on.”

Bollocks.

All of it.

For decades now, our “divided politics” has demonstrably not been about fair give and take within a pluralistic system.

It is not based on a shared belief that pluralistic democracy should go forever onward.

Yes, voters in the middle have been pushing the pendulum back and forth by changing their shirts, fewer and fewer of them over the years, with the margin in the middle shrinking with every passing decade.

But the right-leaning agenda that red-shirts have been voting for in increasingly reliable numbers since the late 1980s and early 1990s has become overtly autocratic, both in spirit and practice.

• Our 50/50 political challenge (pre-2024) used to be preserving the strengths and benefits of liberalism against increasing illiberalism, in what was still a pluralistic democracy.

• By contrast, our 50/50 challenge today is the survival of pluralism itself in a nation where a plurality of voters (if not a slight majority) shows little hesitation in handing power to people whose explicit agenda is to dispense with pluralism entirely.

As usual, the Democrats’ pathetic response to our new 50/50 reality is to move rightward, while Republicans have never moved—and will never be expected to move—leftward. Take this headline from The Washington Post about preparations for the 2028 presidential election:

Democrats with an eye on 2028 reject some parts of liberal orthodoxy: Some presidential prospects have embraced “Sister Souljah moments” that demonstrate their independence.

That article highlights how Democrats like Gavin Newsom, Josh Shapiro, and Rahm Emanuel have all made kissy-face with insurrectionist, Confederate-lost-cause, intransigent right-wingers.

Answer this: When was the last time a “Sister Souljah moment” demonstrating independence by a Republican candidate won them anything from their own party but scorn, backlash, and defeat? [*crickets chirping*]

And answer this: When was the last time a big-name MAGA politician appeared on a left-wing podcast sucking up and trying to win over left-of-center voters by catering to their beliefs and telling them they’re right on the issues (like maybe by wearing a rainbow necktie, or gifting the host a miniature windmill)? [*more crickets chirping*]

The reason is: right-wing voters are immovable. For the past 40 years, at least, America has always had to move toward them, because they’re never coming back to us.

Such right-wing intransigence is the structural foundation of our new jumping off point for any honest discussion of a “50/50” or “divided” America.

We’re standing at a new starting line when it comes voting in a “divided” and “polarized” America

Pick your metaphor. The Overton Window has shifted. The goal post has been moved. The baseline has been recalibrated. The starting line has been redrawn.

The red side of our conventional bi-partisan tug-of-war politics has thrown down the rope and charged the other side with deafening war chant.

Just six months ago (feels like a lifetime, already) we were pretty sure the nation was headed into a dark autocratic time, but it was a theoretical argument based on circumstantial and directional evidence.

Now we’re actually here, and the argument is based on real-life experience.

As the election season drags on, it will be easy to get sucked in by the earnest debates of pundit panels on cable TV. A recent one I saw was labeled with a chyron that Republicans were debating what a “post Trump GOP” might look like. It was all quite earnest.

Except that it’s bullshit.

The “post Trump” GOP will be exactly the same as the “pre-Trump” GOP, because their side of the 50/50 divide has not changed one iota in the past 40 years.

It seems too difficult for the media to remember even as far back as Mitch McConnell’s nearly year-long blockade of Barack Obama’s Supreme Court nominee, Merrick Garland.

But that willful defiance of law and precedent was emblematic of what their side of the 50/50 is all about – with McConnell chortling his way through the entire episode not bothered one bit, seeming to relish the controversy. And that happened well before Trump’s first term.

It’s also Exhibit A in our argument here, that conservatives have forever given up on pluralism.

Does anyone believe that this GOP, even if Trump steps aside, will suddenly give up its autocratic aims of permanent minoritarian rule—that JD Vance and Pam Bondi and the MAGA wing of Congress, and Laura Loomer, and Steve Bannon, and Russell Vought, and all the rest are just happily and willingly going to lock arms with Democrats… skipping back into the now-trampled garden of pluralistic bi-partisanship, with a fresh pair of gardening gloves in hand?

Utter bullshit.

Their course has been set for decades, and they’re not going to change. Every electoral rout has only made them more emboldened—and more successful.

That’s the 50/50 nation we now live in. One side is operating as if we still live in a pluralistic democracy of political shifts around the middle, the other side doesn’t give two flying figs about pluralism (or the middle) and is revving up the steamroller to squash it all for good.

So, as the mid-term season approaches, we’ll get all the same coverage we always got…

• with its horse-race analysis of which party will has the upper hand in the last five minutes;

• and the media’s bullshit “both sides” approach to “balanced coverage”;

• and its droning on about what policies will win “independents” and “centrists” and “all-important swing voters”;

• and the Democrats’ desperate attempts to appear centrist (even right-leaning) on key issues.

The coverage will be full of conventional tropes, and predicated on a belief in the old, received wisdom about what “50/50 America” is and what voters are voting on… old received wisdom that require us to submit to the notion that we still exercise our vote in a conventional pluralistic context.

Don’t buy any of it. That story is old, outdated, and in desperate need of rewriting.

The commentariat will be impressed by the depth of their own analysis about how the election will be decided by independent and centrist voters being swayed on healthcare policy, or economic policy, or crime, or attitudes about wokeness… and maybe those will be the reasons such voters give to pollsters (because that’s what pollsters ask about).

But our “50/50 America” is divided on something much deeper and potentially catastrophic for our continuation as a democratic republic.

Whatever “swing voters” claim they are voting on, or believe they are voting on, or we’re told they are voting on… that’s not the reality of what any of us are voting on.

In today’s “50/50 America” a red vote is a vote to continue the current march toward authoritarianism, even if all the talking heads in the world are framing it differently and soothing you with a familiar, old-timey election story couched in the language of pluralism—that old story is about as true now as any other bedtime fairy tale.

NEXT WEEK: We dig deeper into what’s on the red side of the “50/50” divide

Image: Salmy_king from FAVPNG.com

A semi-regular feature here on LiteralMayhem is the “BS of the Month Award.” But we thought we’d take a break from the negative this month, stepping back from calling out the ugliness of spin, to celebrate some laudable examples of un-spin.

It’s easy to fall into a cynical mood from encountering so much spin and hype just in the normal course of living. Last week we took up the topic of hype, and saw that far from being a simple, benign form of speech – worthy of mere giggles and shrugs – hype is a way of pressing a specific agenda. Buying into the hype is buying into the agenda of the hypsters.

Consumer hype. Political hype. Technology hype, especially. They all serve to warp our perceptions of reality, to influence our understanding and decision making.

With all of it, the aim is for us to live in the hyped world as if it was the real world. Buy it. Believe it. Submit to it. Ingest its images and messages and form our responses and behavior around its imperatives, rather than sticking a pin in it and popping it.

Here are a few examples of people who stuck a pin in it, to create a jarring shift back to what used to be called reality—when it was a real thing that people could agree actually existed.

1. “Budget Dust”

It was always an asinine claim that one could make a meaningful dent in the federal budget deficit by firing a bunch of park rangers, cancer researchers, and telephone operators at the Social Security Administration.

Yet somehow, the mainstream news media treated Elon Musk’s DOGE exploits like they might really accomplish the deed. They debated back and forth, what constituted a “cut”… was a canceled program a “cut” … did DOGE have the right to make those cuts in the first place? They covered every new development as if the matter wasn’t already settled. (The answer was always: No, they cannot now, nor will they ever, dent the federal budget this way.)

After all the sturm and drang, all it took to puncture the hype and spin was a small pin prick. Here is a conservative think tanker, by way of Michael Tomasky at The New Republic:

Jessica Reidl of the Manhattan Institute—yes, the staunchly conservative and generally pro-Trump think tank—recently told The New York Times’ David French: “So right now I would say DOGE has saved $2 billion, which, to put it in context, is one-thirty-fifth of 1 percent of the federal budget, otherwise known as budget dust.” [emphasis added]

While Elon has faded from the political headlines of late, the blood from his chainsaw is still dripping from many federal departments and will be for some time to come. DOGE and its reckless minions aren’t going anywhere. They’re working away all the same… Musk or no Musk.

But Reidl’s rejoinder is a reminder that the reality-based world is still out there, waiting to be revealed by a quick, sharp jab through the spin.

Tomasky tries. He gives voice to a lot of our collective frustration over the misrepresentations and misdirection of the current regime, around every bit of poor policy, every piece of warped legislation. You can’t say that he’s shy about expressing opinions. The title of that piece (“Elon Musk is an Evil Piece of Garbage”) won’t win any awards for humility; Tomasky can’t be accused of pulling punches or mincing words

But even with all the paragraphs of heated language and hair-pulling, Tomasky didn’t accomplish what Reidl did with one delicious bon mot. She applied a magnifying glass to DOGE’s claims with the precision a child frying an ant on the sidewalk.

“Budget dust”… put it in your vocabulary. It’s bound to come in handy over the coming years as the reality-based world continues to beckon us home.

2. “More guts and balls”

Sticking with The New Republic—this time from the Daily Blast podcast with Greg Sargent—we get another example of puncturing the hype/spin bubble, this time with a shiv instead of a needle.

Sargent and his guest, Guardian columnist Moira Donegan, discussed the recent appearance Pete Hegseth in front of Congress, in which Sen. Elissa Slotkin slipped an ice-cold shiv between his ribs in the direction where, in a regular human, his heart might be.

Slotkin reminded Hegseth that his Republican predecessor in the Trump 1.0 administration had refused an order to shoot civilian protestors, telling him that Mark Esper:

“… had more guts and balls than you.”

In another exchange, about whether army troops deployed to Los Angeles were given orders to arrest and detain protestors, when Hegseth ducked the question and said that the order was clear (without specifying what the order was), Slotkin simply said:

“Be a man, list it out.”

Her directness and simplicity are, again, what impress. It works in a way that sturm and drang and breathless accusations don’t. Because squeals of pain are what they actually want to hear. Per Sargent:

A big part of this for people like Trump and for Hegseth is that they want liberals like you and me to squeal about it. That is absolutely central, right? It’s the sound of submissiveness, they think. In their heads, when liberals squeal in protest about the military walking down Pennsylvania Avenue, it’s just a sign of submission, weakness. It’s a sign of Trump dominating us.

Donegan agreed, pointing out that…

When you say, This guy’s a dictator, this is fascism, you are both describing the truth and giving him what he wants, right? It actually does put the liberal pundit in a double bind.

They are describing the same thing William Finnegan did in a post on The Long Memo titled The Regime Doesn’t Fear Your Rage, It Fears Your Absence. Though a bit polemical, the piece strikes a nerve in observing:

Though Trump’s version is particularly grotesque, the model he employs — rule by spectacle, consumption of outrage, capture of institutions — isn’t unique. From Erdogan to Modi to Xi, the modern autocrat thrives not by eliminating dissent, but by turning it into entertainment.

When regimes seek legitimacy, they love resistance. It gives them spectacle — a foil. It justifies crackdowns. It feeds the theater.

[Me: Are you listening Michael Tomasky?]

This is why autocrats host sham elections. Why they allow protests in kettled squares. Why they let social media platforms fester into screaming voids. Resistance becomes part of the machine — absorbed, processed, neutralized.

We should know this by now. The Trump Regime feeds on performance — especially its own.

Finnegan’s point is that refusing to participate, and puncturing the pretense that the spectacle is what’s real, is the most effective way to combat an authoritarian regime. His piece focuses on withdrawal (of presence and consent) but he also advocates refusal to participate.

What this regime craves is your continued attention.
Your participation.
Your compliance — even in anger.

Starve it of those, and what’s left?

And that’s exactly what Slotkin has done in a simple, direct, no-bullshit kind of way. She withdrew her participation in the stage-managed outrage and stuck her shiv right into the heart of Hegseth’s performative bluster.

We all need to do more of that—more guts and balls, specifically.

3. Sincerity

Spin cannot abide true sincerity. Yes, sometimes spin and hype (a separate species within the genus of “spin”) are delivered with a gloss of sincerity, but both are fundamentally insincere, as they are intentionally stilted forms of communication: agenda-based presentations of selective reality.

One of my favorite writers, the cranky Ed Zitron (Where’s Your Ed At?), recently wrote a beautifully blunt piece titled Sincerity Wins the War. In it, he takes journalists to task for acting like tape recorders.

The problem he sees with the news media is its insincerity, which manifests in a kind of “guy said thing” style of reporting facts without context. That is, some powerful (often rich guy) guy said something about something he believes is super important and the reporter wrote it down and here it is, validated simply by being repeated.

Sincerity would require investigation, critical thinking, and maybe some trenchant criticism. Per Zitron:

Your job is not to report “the facts” and let the readers work it out. To quote my buddy Kasey, if you're not reporting the context, you're not reporting the story. Facts without context aren’t really facts. Blandly repeating what an executive or politician says and thinking that appending it with “...said [person]” is sufficient to communicate their biases or intentions isn’t just irresponsible, it’s actively rejecting your position as a journalist…

To be clear, I’m not saying we have to reject every single announcement that comes along, but can we just for one second think critically about what it is we are writing down.

We do not have to buy into every narrative, nor do we have to report it as if we do so. We do not have to accept anything based on the fact someone says it emphatically, or because they throw a number at us to make it sound respectable…

That, to me, is sincerity. Constrained by an entirely objective format, a reporter makes the effort to get across the context in which a story is happening, rather than just reporting exactly the story and what the company has said about it...

The problem, ultimately, is that everybody is aware that they’re being constantly conned, but they can’t always see where and why. Their news oscillates from aggressively dogmatic to a kind of sludge-like objectivity, and oftentimes feels entirely disconnected from their own experiences other than in the most tangential sense, giving them the feeling that their actual lives don’t really matter to the world at large.

On top of that, the basic experience of interacting with technology, if not the world at large, kind of fucking sucks now…

At scale, we as human beings are continually reminded that we do not matter, that any experiences of ours outside of what the news say makes us “different” or a “cynic,” that our pain points are only as relevant as those that match recent studies or reports, and that the people that actually matter are either the powerful or considered worthy of attention…

As a result of all of these things, people are desperate for sincerity. They’re desperate to be talked to as human beings, their struggles validated, their pain points confronted and taken seriously. They’re desperate to have things explained to them with clarity, and to have it done by somebody who doesn’t feel chained by an outlet…

What people are hurting for right now is actual, real sincerity…

Really, I don’t have a panacea for what ails media, but what I do know is that in my own life I have found great joy in sincerity and love. In the last year I have made — and will continue to make, as it’s my honour to — tremendous effort to get to know the people closest to me, to be there for them if I can, to try and understand them better and to be my authentic and honest self around them, and accept and encourage them doing the same. Doing so has improved my life significantly, made me a better, more confident and more loving person, and I can only hope I provide the same level of love and acceptance to them as they do to me.

Reminding ourselves we still live in a reality-based human-made world (even if it doesn’t feel that way sometimes)

It feels like reasserting reality over spin can be a huge struggle these days. Especially when the spectacle of spin and hype is so immersive and ascendant—as William Finnegan and Greg Sargent both observed, even gaining power from our very shouts of resistance. And especially when we’re surrounded by media that stoke the spectacle for its own commercial benefit, rather than deflating the bubble.

The three examples above are reminders that there is a narrow path out of the madness, starting with sincerity and a withdrawal of participation.

We won’t donate our rage to its cause. We’ll surgically and calmly (even frigidly) puncture all the pretense, grandstanding, and performative bluster. We’ll use their own language against them to reveal the truth of who they are and what they are doing, whether that’s a political regime or a technology regime.

We’ll remind ourselves, and the world, that reality still exists and that we still live in it, even though the all-consuming spectacle of spin and hype often obscure it.

As Finnegan observes, even our anger is in fact an exercise in compliance.

So:

Don’t resist.
Refuse.

Refuse their efforts to force us to live in spin. Refuse to accept that the spin is what’s real. Coldly and systematically force them to participate in reality instead.

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As this podcast episode was getting its finishing touches, TechPolicy.Press published a couple of articles that breathe life into an issue that could be seen as merely an academic analysis—of hype and its consequences in the real world.

In our discussion, Andreu Belsunces Gonçalves explained many key ideas underlying the dangers of technology hype; a few key ideas include:

1. “When we engage with certain forms of hype, we are engaging also with the political and ideological program of the actors who are hyping those things.”

2. “The technology industry needs specific doses or amounts of fiction—not only in their statements in terms of marketing, but also in their academic papers, to make intelligible and understandable things that are still forms of imagination, but that they need to be presented as if they were science.”

3. “When you're asserting that you are designing a god-like like entity, then there's an implicit statement here that says, we should not be stopped. And we should not be therefore regulated because there's this promise that AI or artificial general intelligence will solve everything.”

4. “When big tech players assert or present certain futures as unavoidable. They create normative visions of the future that are uncritically received by stakeholders, by researchers, by regulators, policy makers, funders, media. And by aligning the visions of those actors towards an allegedly unavoidable future, they end up shaping innovation trajectories, driving investment, and also, aligning expectations and therefore structuring collective behavior across entrepreneurs, researchers, investors, journalists, et cetera.”

As if on queue, TechPolicy.Press has been publishing stories about AI showing that the impact of hype in our world is both concrete and meaningful.

In a piece on the idea that AI bots could have “rights,” Eryk Salvaggio echoes Gonçalves in calling out that the “AI rights” argument contains an implicit argument against regulation:

“When we speak about corporate products as capable of some special category of experience, we are creating opportunities to justify extreme deregulation for the companies that build them.”

Salvaggio also echoes the same language of “manipulating social imagination,” and he uses the same language as Gonçalves when he charges the AI rights movement of being guilt of a kind of “novelty bias.”

In another article on TechPolicy.Press, Mila Samdub analyzes India’s new AI policy and its accompanying hype—i.e., that it will empower poor people. He also echoes the language of Gonçalves in arguing:

“We should understand the focus on use cases, then, as a particularly Indian species of technology hype, an inflated promise that makes things happen… The hype is unlikely to benefit the poor or India’s AI ambitions. It leaves dominant power structures undisturbed and does not challenge the monopolistic and extractive practices that undergird Big Tech-led AI. Instead, it is empowering a range of powerful actors.”

Hype is real. Hype has real consequences in the world. And particularly around issues related to AI, the negative potential consequences are being either ignored, downplayed, or outright dismissed in favor of feeding our social imagination about something wonderful, which so far looks like it’s only wonderful for the wealthiest most powerful companies and individuals in the world.

So, let us begin….

_________________________

Welcome to the LiteralMayhem podcast. Today our guest is Andrew Belsunces Gonçalves. He’s a lecturer in Science and Technology studies at Universitat Oberta de Catalunya, where he focuses on the relationship between power, technology, and what he conceptualizes as socio-technical fictions. He’s also a co-founder of the interdisciplinary Hype Studies Group, which is holding a Hype Studies Conference in September 2025, also in Barcelona.

Our topic is, of course… HYPE. What is it? Where does it come from? And how do hype narratives affect us and our world?

Martin: Welcome Andrew. Thank you for being here.

Andreu: Thank you very much, Martin.

Martin:  Maybe you could get us started here by just giving us a little bit of history of where does hype come from. If you had to give an ontology of hype, what would it be?  

Andreu: There's this, super interesting paper—entitled Hype: Marker and maker of entrepreneurial culture, by Daniel Wadhwani and Christina Lubinski—that identified three moments, and three different users of hype that in a way they come together in the contemporary understanding of it.

The first one was originated in the early 20th century, and it was related to criminal subcultures like drug users and con artists—to distinguish them from respectable culture. Then it was adopted by mid 20th century countercultures to distinguish themselves from mainstream culture. And at the late 20th century, it was adopted by startup culture to distinguish itself from corporate culture.

And this paper is very useful because when we see the way technologists present themselves, even though they are, like, middle age men, like Elon Musk, you see how the very notion of how they enact this very—let's say framework of hype—as a form of authorization of revolutionary futures, their celebration of rule breaking, and embrace of social deviance as a hallmark of entrepreneurial authenticity.

Which is at the same time kind of related to some sort of teenage culture. Like this kind of rebel way of being. So, this is related to entrepreneurial cultures, which more and more they're becoming, let's say, cultural hegemony.

So yeah, I'd say that this framework, it's useful to understand how hype is not only a form of information circulation, but also comes with certain hegemonic cultural frameworks that are more and more embraced by people.

Martin:  So from your point of view and what you study, what would you say would be a general definition or description of what you think is hype?

Andreu: Well, first I would like to clarify that when I talk about hype, I talk about technology hype. Because my research field is science and technology studies, and the way we tend to, like, socially understand hype, it's a form of exaggerated expectations regarding a specific product or technology.

But hype is generally understood through the model of the hype cycle, which is a model created by a consultancy aimed at explaining technological change. And this model is described as an increasing curve of attention and expectations, followed by a decrease of attention and expectation, which creates frustration, fear, and some actors removing their resources. Whether they are, money, or people researching on a specific technology. And after this decrease of attention and resources, this model asserts that technology reaches, let’s say, a long period of stability.

This model has been labeled as a folk theory because it doesn't really describe how technological change happens—because it's rarely linear. And of course there's not a single pattern that can describe how all technologies appear, are adopted, engage investors, users, and other kind of stakeholders, and how it changes [over] the time.

So yeah, the hype cycle, has been labeled as an inaccurate model, and I completely agree with this.

Also from a critical perspective, hype has been also criticized for being a kind of scientific communication failure. As if scientific communication could be devoid of the forces of the market. Hype happens because, in contemporary societies, we cannot separate technological development from the interests of investors and the media landscapes that are also highly influenced by economic forces in many different levels.

The perspective, I like to take on hype: it’s not an inherent malfunctioning of techno-scientific communication, but more as a constitutive force of technological development.

Because our culture in relationship to progress, it's so wired by the promise of rational scientific progress, the way we as modern society relate to new technologies, it's always through some sort of excitement, or at least excited emotions. Whether they are related to hope or related to fear. This is because we've been told that the way our society should progress is through science and technology.

And, logically, when a new technology appears, we tend to think that will drive progress towards a better society for everyone… we know that this is not the case.

Science as an inherent force in the contemporary socio-technical regimes, sometimes leads to breakthroughs. No?

Because hype, in science and technology studies, we usually talk in terms of performativity. Performativity means the social capacity of some institutions to create visions of the future—and related promises are also performative.

So, in this sense, hype is highly performative. It attracts attention. It attracts funding. And it mobilizes resources in universities, research centers, governments, states in general. But of course, these promises—those future visions—sometimes they manage to align different actors and different resources to make this technology happens. But sometimes, they don't.

One of the specific features of hype is that the kind of discourses that it mobilizes—it’s usually hyperbolic. And they are designed, are disseminated, in order to create confidence and persuade stakeholders.

Martin: Talk a little bit about the relationship of hype to truth. Sometimes hype is purely an exaggeration. Other times hype is simply a fabrication. So, in what you study, what is hype's relationship to the truth and how much does it stretch the truth versus how much does it invent a truth?

Andreu: That's a very good question because hype challenges the traditional conception, or the traditional duality, between truth and false. There's quite a lot of academic debate here. For example, researcher Jascha Bareis who was also one of the co-founders of the Hype Studies Group says that hypers doesn't care about if [their discussions] are true or false.

Because basically what hypers try to do is to attract attention, and with attracting attention, also attracting money. This lack of distinction of truth and falsity, it's also explored by the concept that Dani Shanley, who's also involved in the group, on the idea of bullshit. Bullshit, it can have some quantities of truth, but both hype and bullshit are not activated to pursue this. Hype, as well as bullshit, they try to involve other people, to convince other people about a statement.

In this regard, I'm finishing my PhD on the notion of socio-technical fiction, also trying to challenge this duality between fact and fiction, or true and false, in techno sciences. Because when we're talking about technological innovation, or technological discovery, we need doses of imagination. No? And both science and technology are ways of transforming reality by invoking or installing in reality things that didn't exist before. No? So there's a continuity between what exists and what doesn't exist.

And in this sense, in my thesis, I try to explain how especially, the technology industry needs, let's say, doses or amounts of fiction—not only in their statements in terms of marketing, but also in their academic papers, to make intelligible and understandable things that are still forms of imagination, but that they need to be presented as if they were science. Because if speculations are presented as pure speculation, they won't have the same power to attract funding and attention to make this not-yet-existent technology attract resources to become a reality.

So in this sense, hype [is] in between, but at the same time it goes beyond the notions of truth and falsity. And this is why, it's so important that scholars and other kinds of professionals pay attention to this particular kind of socio-technical phenomena. Because it's extremely performative.

Martin: So how do you balance the need for the performative promotion without pushing aside the moral, ethical, and logistical concerns that are legitimate? Because we see hype in consumer markets, we see hype in politics, and hype can often sweep aside reason. So, if you could just comment on that a little bit.

Andreu: It is a way of trying to dominate a discourse or at least frame the discourse regarding a specific topic. And because hype is always interested—and there are some actors that have the ability to create hype cycles and there are other actors who are more, let's say, vulnerable or have more a passive position regarding hype—hype is always a matter of interest for someone. No?

And this means that hype will overstress the positive impacts of some technologies or some products and [overlook] the negative consequences, because hype needs to be simple to be able to circulate rapidly. If you want a hype statement to circulate rapidly—and this affects a lot of politics—you need to make it easily understandable for everyone. No?

So, in the case of AI, this is my position on AI right now, is that AI is a political weapon, but also it’s a weapon not only for market dominance, but also for political dominance. And it carries a lot of political assumptions about the role of the market or the role of the government. No? Like saying, for example, that AI is almost a divine force that comes to change everything. When you're asserting that you are designing a god-like like entity, then there's an implicit statement here that says, we should not be stopped. And we should not be therefore regulated because there's this promise that AI or artificial general intelligence will solve everything.

So, in hyping AI almost as a cosmic force that will bring humanity towards its next stage of civilizational evolution, there's an imposition for, moral, ethical, and economic [oversight]. At the same time, AI actors like Sam Altman when they are talking to politicians, basically what they are doing is to frame the regulatory boundaries of the technologies they are creating, while putting themselves as the moral stewards of the evolution of those technologies.

So here hype is a way of basically framing how we socially think about artificial intelligence and its consequences. And this comes with something that I wanted to mention before, that hype is highly normative, in the sense that not everyone has the same ability to create hype dynamics.

Not everyone is vulnerable to hype in the same, way. So, when big tech players assert or present certain futures as unavoidable. They create normative visions of the future that are uncritically received by stakeholders, by researchers, by regulators, policy makers, funders, media. And by aligning the visions of those actors towards an allegedly unavoidable future, they end up shaping innovation trajectories, driving investment, and also, aligning expectations and therefore structuring collective behavior across entrepreneurs, researchers, investors, journalists, et cetera.

Martin: So, let's, talk a little bit more about that idea of the normativity of it and the idea of hype as an expression of power. Mm-hmm.  Because you said not everyone has the ability or the resources to create or, power a hype cycle.

To what extent is hype an expression of economic dominance? It could be in consumer markets; it could be in financial markets; and where those intersect, FinTech and cryptocurrency.

We saw hype leading up to the Great Financial Crisis in the financial markets. Hype seems to precede or express these waves of economic and technological power, right? It takes resources to create these public hype narratives. To what extent is hype sort of tied to economic power in the expression of economic power?

Andreu: Um, that's a great question. First to give a little bit of context, to me, hype is the expression of how information circulates in a stage of capitalism dominated by [the] finance and technology industries.

In fact, almost 50% of the wealth in capital markets is created by a combination of those two industries. No? And in fact the infrastructural condition of our world today, it's the result of the collaboration, at least after the second World War, of finances that needed computation to process prices and fluctuations of markets and so on. And also, we could not understand global economy without information infrastructures that of course are created by the computation, but are needed by the finances.

And at the same time, the advance of the tech industry needs the financial industry; since in the very beginning because of the venture capital industries, when a company goes public, they need hype. So, hype is an inherent property of the techno-financial regime.

Um, you mentioned cryptocurrencies, and to me it was a decisive moment on the democratization, or the attempt of democratizing the ability of creating hype, in relationship to finances. No?

Because you could see like telegram groups or WhatsApp groups of people coming together to start promoting a new cryptocurrency, to create this hype. So, people were actively engaging in the production of hype, and during Covid, I've been in some of those groups doing research and there's like, uh, an amount of excitement and sense of belonging on hyping something new that will come with a promise of revenue and wealth for the participants. That it's super interesting and that, to me, explains a lot the relationship between power, finances, and emotions in contemporary techno-financial capitalism.

There's a lot of literature on precisely challenging the notion of truth and false in economics on how speculative finances—since they create revenue out of value that doesn't exist yet, to make this value tangible, they need to convince other people that this future value has value.

So there's, let's say, there's this proxy, this interface, between the actual economy and the potential economy of speculative finances that needs hype to make the future [happen] in the present.

Martin: So that actually, sparks an idea that I would like to expand if possible. Either through your work or maybe you could talk about, some of the work of your colleagues. You talked about the intersection of finance and technology. I'd like to add to that the idea of the attention economy. The world that we've built seems to be predisposed towards hype as a way of communicating, as a way of creating value.

Culturally speaking, seems like the world that we have created is predisposed towards hype-ification. Talk a little bit about that, if you would—just the cultural aspect of hype and how we may or may not be building a world where we can’t avoid it.

Andreu: Um, there's something in hype that is related to the creation of the illusion of a closing window of opportunity. And this is extremely related to the dynamics of fashion, for example. No? It's like, if you want to be trendy, you need to be fast. If you want to make money, you need to invest fast. It's like there's this socio-technical creation of urgency, and urgency comes with some sort of anxiety. Anxiety of not being where you should be.

Martin: Kind of FOMO in a way.

Andreu: Exactly. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's a way of designing FOMO. No? And making people want to be there very fast. It's super powerful. No? Because especially when it comes to a certain production of a sense of exclusivity, you need to act fast.

Hype, it's very related to the creation of desire—of desire of having something fast, with the immediacy of that is very important in consumer culture today. And as you said, a sense of belonging. You want to be similar to other people that are presented to you as desirable. Talking in terms of fashion, for example.

But also talking in terms of early adopters. There's this relationship between the early adopters and the fashionistas. You want to be the avant-garde of the future. No? Or you want to be the avant-garde in some, like, aesthetic terms, or being very exclusive in the kind of clothes you use.

But this is of course not new. And you've talked about the hype-ification. To me this is really related to the temporalities of finances. Especially in the era of algorithmic trading, they function at an alien speed that we cannot even understand, because algorithmic trading operates at sub-nanoseconds, which is a temporal measure that we cannot perceive as humans.

That affects also the way markets behave and information that markets need to circulate to, let's say, synchronize with the speed of the financial markets. There's this amazing book called Cultures of Financialization by Max Haiven, where he speaks how tropes, metaphors, and procedures of finances are bit by bit leaking into popular culture. There's this concept by Fabian Muniesa, also a Science and Technology Scholar, that explains how financial markets transform every single part of our life into assets—assets that can be traded in the digital market. Tinder, it's a very good example of this, or social media in general.

Martin: It’s the financialization of everything.

Andreu: Exactly. And through this perspective, we can understand why hype-ification becomes so pervasive. Because we are using all kinds of digital platforms to relate to everything. And because the shareholder economy puts pressure on the creators of those technologies to make them profitable, they end up forcing the users to function as competing actors in the economy of attention.

So, people end up transforming themselves into assets that circulate in this market. And because everyone is competing for attention, you need to, let's say, hype-ify yourself. Or to synchronize the way you present yourself with some trends that are hyped. So, you will become more visible to other people, which comes ironically with the consequence of the way we represent ourselves in social media becomes more homogenous.

Martin: So, you talked about people being vulnerable to hype. Is there any way to be less vulnerable to hype when we're surrounded by hype all the time? There are emotional and psychological costs to living in a hype-ified world, aren't there?

Andreu: Hmm. There are like several layers of vulnerability. The less informed a user or a consumer is the more vulnerable [they] will become to hype dynamics. Once you start understanding that the way desire is presented to you is subjected to some inherent corporate interests, or subjective control interests, you start at least to approach to the causes [of your] desire with a grain of salt. You become a little bit more wise, and therefore a little bit less vulnerable.

Martin: What buttons is hype pressing that makes people buy into hype narratives?

Andreu: Um, [Pierre] Bourdieu explained already in the nineties that, especially in the US, when capitalism managed to create, let's say, welfare or wellbeing for most of the population, the markets start to understand that when people are happy, people do not consume a lot. So, capitalism, it's a machine of producing misery.

Advertisement and marketing, of course, are ways of producing needs. But how [do] you produce needs for people who already have everything? By creating a sense of lack. You start to compare. And the reference that social media or publicity is presenting to us are unachievable for most of us. So, there's an endless frustration that [false], uh, consumerism.

And then we live in a state of constant vulnerability and a constant, let's say, sense of lacking something very important that hype instrumentalize. Because hype is about creating things that catch our attention and that are presented as desirable, not only as desirable, but also as unavoidable. And this of course, the FOMO comes with anxiety.

Martin:  You did mention before about, the more literate you are, the less vulnerable you are. The problem is that our information ecosystem is so polluted and so geared towards motivating the sense of lack, right, and an inability to discern hype from truth or truth from hype. Particularly going back to the, topic of ai, you see a lot, especially on LinkedIn, you see a lot of advocacy for hype narratives around ai.

It feels like a bit of a catch 22, that to make yourself less vulnerable to hype, you have to be more aware and informed. But the information ecosystem where you would go to get yourself informed is polluted by hype. It seems we're caught somewhat in a cycle.

Andreu: There's a lot in this question, but I will try to go through it, bit by bit.

Like the AI hype, it's so pervasive. I don't know. I teach at the university and sometimes the university, it's forcing teachers to talk about AI, because AI is presented to us as something revolutionary and unavoidable. No? And it's not only in education, like in funding applications in academia, for example, if you talk about AI, there are more chances that you will get a grant fund for example. And this comes with a high vulnerability not only of the individuals, but also the institutions.

And this is why I believe that we should socially start developing some sort of tools to make hype assessment—in educational institutions, in governments, and in every kind of funders. Because when we engage with certain forms of hype, we are engaging also with the political and ideological program of the actors who are hyping those things.

It's obvious we are going through a climate crisis. Maybe buying the new Adidas Gazelle or whatever shoes are hyped, because they are hyped, is not the most responsible in social terms. If we already have a bunch of shoes. No? Like, to me, hype as a communicative dynamic, it's an [irresponsible] form of communication in general. Especially taking into account which kind of values grounds the product that you are hyping.

You know, for example, if you're hyping, let's say, degrowth, which is like living with less, insufficiency, and with stronger economical standards, then this hype might be a good thing. But usually, hype comes as a result of techno-financial capitalism and consumerist society.

LinkedIn is a very clear example of this. No? Because if people are in LinkedIn, it's because it’s a platform to make yourself, as a professional, visible. So even though you are, let's say, discussing in LinkedIn because there are no other safe, healthy social media platforms maybe besides BlueSky or Mastodon, and because it's a marketplace for job[s], then people inherently engage in hype dynamics.

So when something is hype, the people, let's say, surf the hype because it's a platform for people to hype themselves. No? And there's a kind of a paradox because when everyone is trying to hype themself, it's like people screaming to each other and then it's very, very hard to find meaningful ways of communication.

And there's this super interesting book by Aris Komporozos-Athanasiou called Speculative Communities, where he explains that the broken promise of neoliberalisms throw people into very deep social precarity. Because our jobs are not stable anymore. But at the same time, we are always socially promised that we can do better. We are constantly in a state of speculation. We will use our assets today to find a secure position or a better position in the future.

And again, you know, the ideal type of neoclassical economics, it's “homo economicus” – homo economicus is supposed to be a rational subject that would go to different shops, compare prices, and buy the most cheap one. We know that we don't operate this way, that we are not rational people, that our emotions are always in the middle when we take decisions.

And populist politics, far right politics, take a lot of advantage of this. No? So, instead of homo economicus, he talks in terms of “homo speculans.” This subject who is constantly engaging in speculative dynamics. And when we are constantly engaging speculative dynamics, we need to constantly hype ourselves to market ourselves. No?

But there's also something that, it's related to, let's say, the informational context or landscape—but also to the metaphysics of our time—that is very related to uncertainty. Precarity comes with uncertainty, and speculation, financial speculation, it’s also grounded uncertainty.

So, when you are facing a lot of uncertainty, what you need to do is to speculate. In terms of projecting yourself to the future, but also to use your imagination in a speculative way. To project yourself to a different situation, to be able to assess which is the best strategy to achieve this desired future.

You need to invoke the non-existent into the existence, but present it as if it was scientific, as if it was real. And this constantly invoking in non-existent entities into the existent reality—while presenting them as if they were reality—there’ an erosion of the way we know reality, because we are constantly exposed to things that, at the end of the day, we know that they are fictional. But we make as if they were not. Because it is convenient for us to engage this fiction if we want to navigate hype.

Martin: So, there were, there are a couple of things in there that I wanna follow up on. One is you mentioned degrowth, and the idea that hyping degrowth is different because it's, I assume because it's a more pro-social kind of choice. But it's very difficult to associate hype with pro-social choices because there's no economic incentive for the hype, right?

If you’re arguing in favor of degrowth, buying less, consuming less, being less materialistic, there's no economic benefit to anyone from that. Not manufacturers, not marketers, not politicians, not even consumers, right? So, it seems like hype is in some ways inextricably tied to some economic incentive, isn't it?

Andreu: That's a very interesting question. Um, yeah, a very nuance one. Hype is related to incentive, of course. We were talking about consumerism. And why people engages in fashion hype, which kind of incentive they have? No? And this is related to a sense of exclusivity, of course. Desire. Sense of belonging.

And also, something related with novelty, because consumerism feeds on the production of novelty. Even though the Adidas Gazelle are not new at all, or the new kind of pants, like in the seventies are not new, but they create a sense of novelty.

Technology innovation does the same. Like sometimes they are just rebranding things that existed before for a long time, with a new name and a new aspect. So, they mobilize desire. Art… contemporary art… It's very good at mobilizing desire.

So, in this sense, why degrowth… I don't know. I'm from Barcelona. Barcelona is a very progressive city compared to most of the other big cities in the world. And degrowth has been kind of hyped here. It's hyped because, it's a feasible and desirable political alternative, but also because it's an interesting new way to think about the world.

And it's challenging because how can we create desire [to get rid of] the consumer use dynamics? It's a kind of twisted, super interesting question. No? And I think this is why more and more artists and designers feel attracted by post-growth, or degrowth narrative, because there's not only desire there, but a novelty. But there are like some sort of paradoxes that are interesting to explore or engage with.

And it has been because Barcelona is one of the, like, global hubs in degrowth research, for some like professional and personal reasons, I'm kind of close to it and it has been super interesting to see how during the pandemics and after, degrowth has started to be more appealing to, as I said before, artists and designers. And how bit-by-bit, it arrives to different kinds of audiences that are engaging to the narratives and frameworks of degrowth from different perspectives.

And to me, there's of course a hyped thing in degrowth, but whose incentive is challenging the business as usual.

Martin: So, is it fair to say that sometimes hype is valuable? That it can add to public discussion, or debate, in a way that's healthy as opposed to unhealthy?

Andreu: Yeah, of course. Just imagine that suddenly deliberative democracy becomes hyped. You know? And people says, “Ah, it's super cool to go into a social media platform devoted to democratic participation.” Like the Decidim, which is a software devoted to this… and “Look I've been discussing this”… and you start to talk to your neighbors, to your friends, trying to hype what you are trying to discuss with other people.

So your city council pays attention to the fact that you need a park in front of your, place. No? And you start to create images with AI or videos. So you hype your need of having a greener city.

This would be a very, let's say, desirable way of, mobilizing hype. But of course, as I said before, the capacity of producing hype is unevenly distributed. Those who have more leverage and power in the media, especially mainstream media—whose advertising system depends on the big companies who pay for the advertising and therefore they frame their agenda—they are complicit in hyping some things that are maybe not the best ones for democratic principles.

And going back to discussing hyped AI, there's a paper that explores why journalists talk about AI hype. No?

Martin: That was gonna be my next question. You mentioned media about journalism and to the extent that it should be a journalistic obligation to see through the hype and question hype, especially when hype is leading to antisocial consequences. So, in a world that is more and more hype-ified, what is the responsibility of journalism and journalists to see through the hype, call out the hype, breakthrough the hype, be skeptical of the hype? What's the impact on journalism in your view?

Andreu: I think that before talking about the responsibility that journalism have in terms of dealing with hype, we should question whether journalists are free to go through hype. Because in the clickbait economy of information, most of the journalists, they don't have the choice of questioning hype.

Let's say Steve Bannon for example was gaining a lot of traction in the media ecosystem… even though he's engaging not democratic principles, journalists might be interested in talking to him. No? And with AI it's like even like clearer. You cannot escape talking about AI if everyone is talking about AI, because it's like, if I don't talk about AI, other people will, and then I will lose readers.

And sometimes AI is just a metaphor. Of course, like, we should debate what we mean with artificial and what we mean with intelligence. And we've been debating about what is intelligence since the beginning of Western philosophy. So, it's not an easy question to answer.

And of course, if as a journalist you start talking like, “Ah, look, there's this statistic model that makes some predictions,” and so on. No you need to create a sense of re-enchantment in the reader. So, they're either kind of flies with, you know, and dreams with you.

So, in a context where, journalism is based on advertising and advertising is based on traffic, I'm not sure there's much place to fight hype.

Martin: If you had to explain what kind of storytelling hype is, it seems like it has some threads of utopian storytelling, heroic storytelling. What kind of storytelling is hype and why does it make it so successful in terms of its emotional appeal?

Andreu: That's a very interesting question. I'm not an expert, at all, on storytelling. So, maybe we can have more like a conversation to make sense together of it. But obviously, there's always a technology—talking in terms of technology hype—that comes to change everything.

And sometimes we don't even need a problem to be solved. We just need a promise that something will change. And the way media, like, claims that virtual reality will disrupt education, or will change everything, or artificial intelligence is here to stay… These kinds of claims come with a story of revolution. There's like a state of things and something new appears to change everything.

It tends to be utopian, but sometimes it's dystopian or apocalyptic. No? And apocalyptic narratives are super appealing for the audience. No? And this is why AI is also so interesting, and both Elon Musk and Sam Altman have leveraged apocalyptic narratives because it’s something that really appeals to media.

But in any case, the relationship to AI, the eschatological narrative of that's the end of a civilizational moment—because we are reaching the end of, let's say, liberal democracy or human supremacy, because AI will overcome our intelligence, for example, or this technology will suddenly outperform our capacities and we will be able to go to the stars and conquer the universe—I think that this kind of like over exaggerated technological narrative, open a deep, long future threshold that gives space for more complex narratives about what technology can do.

And, usually technology hype comes all from charismatic figures. And those charismatic figures sometimes play the hero, sometimes play the villain, or sometimes play both.

When you are hyping a technology that is projecting complex future visions, then those promises that comes with uncertainty. So, we need to use fiction to fill those uncertainties. And this is fun because we like, the stories. No? But in narrative terms, I'm not an expert on this, but I will be super happy to hear your take on this.

Martin: As far as storytelling goes, I think it is utopian. I think it is kind of heroic storytelling. It appeals to a very postmodern idea that you hear all the time, self-actualization. It's a kind of a romantic tale, where the hero triumphs in the end.

There's a positive trajectory always to hype that's gonna take us someplace better than we are today, which is what you were talking about before, about instilling a feeling of lack. Which is again that paradox where it's presenting something exaggeratedly positive, but in such a way that it makes you feel a sense of lack that makes you want to participate in the hype. So, I think from a storytelling point of view, it has some very successful aspects to it, which is why it's so hard to resist.

It seems like our world is becoming ever more hype-ified. The more immersive our technology gets, the more it pulls us away from engaging with the physical real world. It seems like hype is endemic, and it's increasing, and it's not going anywhere. And if anything, we are going to have to deal with more hype rather than less.

But in terms of your studies and what you've researched, if you had to write the next chapter of hype and its role in society, what would that look like?

Andreu: If I was the writer, what I would do is to help governments to understand which are the political agendas that comes with, in particular, technology hype. How some of the American tech leaders are really against democratic principles and how the technologies they are hyping—whether they are crypto technologies, AI, uh, space travels—they come with a program that aims at eroding democratic institutions.

So, the next chapter would be, let's say healthy forms of, hype that can help us face the consequences of climate change and the erosion of our democratic institutions.

Martin: If you're not writing the next chapter, if the hypers are writing the next chapter, where does that take us?

Andreu: I like to talk the thesis of one of the co-founders of the Hype Studies Group, Vassilis Galanos, who's now in the University of Sterling in Scotland. And there he did empirical research on how AI experts related to the very idea of AI expectations, and how the very category of AI was something that was useful at some moments, when it was a lever to attract funding.

But sometimes when AI was related to bullshit, people would discard it and talk in terms of “machine learning,” or “neural networks,” for example. Because when a category or a technology becomes too hyped, it starts becoming what they call epistemically toxic. Meaning that it becomes bullshit.

And when researchers research through or which categories that are empty, it's very hard to conduct research. No? Like for example artificial general intelligence, the idea of generality is not academically defined. So how will you research and advance towards artificial general intelligence if you don't know what generality means? No?

This undermines and intoxicates techno-scientific research.

So, in the case powerful techno-financial actors keep hyping their technologies and imposing to us their visions of the future… I would say that our way of intervening into the world in, let's say, transformative positive ways will diminish. Our capacity to have rational and meaningful discussions will diminish. And some of the, let's say, like “knowledge cathedral” that we've built through modernity, with all its problems, all its forms of exclusion, will start to break down, and then we might not have a shelter where to live.

Martin: Intellectually or physically or both?

Andreu: I would say intellectually and existentially, and taking into account the speculative dynamics with housing… physically as well. So, what happens when tech leaders start presenting technologies as engines for civilizational transformation—like artificial general intelligence or quantum computing. No? And those technologies are presented to us as if they were about to arrive very soon, but they don't arrive.

So, there's a lot of uncertainty. And again when there's a lot of uncertainty, we socially need to use fiction fill in… So they are huge stimulus for social imagination. And in particular to artificial general intelligence, compared to many other technologies, artificial general intelligence have been proposed first by philosophers and then very recently by people like Sam Altman or Mark Andreessen, who are first and foremost venture capitalists.

And venture capitals have a very specific kind of imagination. It's, as I said before, it's speculative in financial terms. They want to make profit out of things that doesn't exist yet. And they are speculative because they are future oriented. So artificial general intelligence was created as a socio-technical fiction in itself.

When OpenAI was presented, it didn't even have a business model. So with which kind of companies we're starting to deal with when not even the need for profit is necessary? In fact, OpenAI has leveraged the biggest investment rounds in history. But no one knows what the business model will be. No one knows what the technology will do. And therefore this comes with conceptual uncertainty, economic uncertainty, governance uncertainty.

Because if they are creating a technology that will operate as a god—because it will overcome our intelligence by much—how will democratically manage this? If this is created by private companies?

So, those kinds of long-term technologies are sustained by let's say a fictional universe of uncertainties, that stimulates imagination in many different layers. But not only this, they stimulate investment in ways that we haven't seen before. Because they attract the interest of very extremely wealthy investors with extremely ambitious objectives of world domination.

Martin: You have a conference coming up in September. What kinds of disciplines will be represented? Just give people an idea of the various dimensions of hype and how you and your colleagues are analyzing it.

Andreu: Well, this will depend on the participants, of course. But we are aiming at doing an extremely interdisciplinary conference. Inviting people from journalists, psychology, communication, science and technology studies, sociology, art, design… and we're also very interested not only in analytical entry points, but we would like also to see people that work with hype, and see how can we do research on hype while doing hype.

So, part of it will try to conceptualize hype. We'll also welcome like many case studies. And we also invited artist and designers to see works that play with the very idea of hype.

Martin: Sounds like it's gonna be a great conference. Andreu, can't thank you enough for being here today and talking about this really, really important subject.

If anyone wants to connect with Andreu, a link to his LinkedIn profile will be at the bottom of the transcript, and we'll also include a link to the Hype Studies Conference homepage where you can submit abstracts, get information, and register.

Thanks very much for tuning in. This has been another episode of LiteralMayhem.

[Links = Andreu Belsunces Gonçalves and the Hype Studies Conference.]

Just what the hell is “dermal remodeling”?

It’s a fancy way of saying something, but God only knows what. At the local fitness center in our little town in NY’s Hudson Valley, there is a small aesthetics clinic, complete with frosted windows for privacy, and banners in front of the door announcing their miraculous services.

“Dermal remodeling” is clearly some kind of skin treatment for wrinkles, based on the photos on the banners. But the inflated language is meant to do something other than communicate the specifics of what they offer.

It’s just a little example hype of the hype we’re surrounded by, everyday, everywhere.

In part, hype is the use of inflated language and exaggeration to make the thing sound bigger and more sophisticated than they are. “Dermal remodeling” evokes, if not directly implies, some kind of scientific process that offers a structural and permanent fix for age related flaws.

Hence, the language of “remodeling” that calls to mind what one does to a house: permanently fixing old flaws with structural changes: substantive rather than merely cosmetic fixes.

You can bet a year’s worth of reformer Pilates that “dermal remodeling” is a heck of a lot more expensive than “wrinkle treatment” or “shrinking your jowls.”

Hype-ification is reshaping our world – and us

Hype-ified language is one type of hype: a kind of euphemistic speech that’s not very hard to find in consumer marketing, like “micro beads” in skin cleansers (bits of polyethylene plastic that poison the environment).

Business jargon (especially in management consulting) is hype-ified: inflated prose with fuzzy meaning but a super-important, resonant tone. As in “catalyzing change” and “optimizing outcomes” and “maximizing strategic synergies.”

It’s dreck, but expensive dreck for which they can charge $1000/hour.

We’re also bombarded by hype-ification of message: the best, the biggest, the most important, the most exclusive, the most cutting-edge, the most iconic, the most revolutionary… the current U.S. president is a nearly unequaled purveyor of such hype… basically a dog whistle of superlatives to appeal to your status-conscious lizard brain.

All this hype, no matter the type, is built through a combination of exclusivity (limited availability), excitement (wow look at that!), and urgency (better get it before it’s too late). If you put it into an equation it might look like this:

Exclusivity + Excitement + Urgency = FOMO^(envy)

Now, consider that the digital world has pretty much become a non-stop, fully immersive hype machine. All social media runs on hype, with people and businesses making their lives and products look enviably wonderful to maximize their social and monetary currency.

Leveling yourself ever upward, up to meet this hype-ified world on its own terms is a lot of work. If you need help, a Dubai-based start-up called Hype Society claims that their registered influencers (all humans they assure you) can reach 325 million Instagram followers (they don’t say whether those are unique followers or just cumulative).

In his book, “The Hype Machine: How Social Media Disrupts Our Elections, Our Economy, and Our Health — And How We Must Adapt,” MIT Sloan professor Sinan Aral summarizes the impacts of ever-present hype this way:

[A] cacophony of digital signals… [is] hypersocializing our society, scaling mass persuasion, and creating a tyranny of trends. They do this by injecting the influence of our peers into our daily decisions, curating population-scale behavior change, and enforcing an attention economy. I call this trifecta of hypersocialization, personalized mass persuasion, and the tyranny of trends the New Social Age.

The Hype Machine has created a radical interdependence among us, shaping our thoughts, opinions, and behaviors. This interdependence is enabled by digital networks, like Facebook and Twitter [X and xAI], and guided by machine intelligence, like newsfeed and friend-suggestion algorithms. Together they are remaking the evolution of the human social network and the flow of information through it. These digital networks expose the controls of the Hype Machine to nation-states, businesses, and individuals eager to steer the global conversation toward their ends, to mold public opinion, and ultimately to change what we do. The design of this machine, and how we use it, are reshaping our organizations and our lives.

Fine. True enough, but here’s where LiteralMayhem parts ways with Professor Aral. In assigning responsibility for ameliorating the negative effects of hype, he barely distinguishes between users of social media and operators of social media. He says:

In the end, each of us must take responsibility for the part we are playing in the Hype Machine’s current direction. Not only are we all partly to blame, but we are all partly responsible for what happens next.

Achieving the promise of the New Social Age, while avoiding its peril, will require all of us—social media executives, lawmakers, and ordinary citizens—to think carefully about how we approach our new social order.As a society, we will need to utilize the four levers available to us: the money (or financial incentives) created by their business models, the code that governs social platforms, the norms we develop in using these systems, and the laws we write to regulate their market failures. [emphasis added]

We don’t control the levers of hype — “they” do.

In Aral’s list of who needs to “think carefully” about the new hype-ified social order, he includes “ordinary citizens.” But then he unironically lists the levers “available to us” to regulate that new social order as: money, [computer] code, norms, and laws.

What we have seen in the past few years, with the rise of the broligarchy, is that control of those levers is absolutely NOT something accessible to the ordinary citizen. The money, computer code, and laws/regulations that drive tech accelerationism are very much in the control of centi-billionaires and the politicians they’ve bought.

As for “norms,” we ordinary citizens live within the boundaries of the enshittified services we’re being served. The tech tools themselves – as we saw with the degradation of the Twitter platform, and the abandonment of moderation on other platforms – create boundaries within which we establish and maintain social “norms.”

Sure, we can do our best to create positive social norms within those boundaries, but we’re making choices and taking action within a specific universe that’s not designed or delivered by us. In fact, it’s one that’s designed pretty much exclusively for economic extraction and disdainful of the “norms” of ordinary citizenship.

What we’ll hear in tomorrow’s podcast is that hype is an inherent feature, and enabler, of tech accelerationism, which billionaire and budding authoritarian Mark Andreesen frames this way:

We believe in accelerationism – the conscious and deliberate propulsion of technological development – to ensure the fulfillment of the Law of Accelerating Returns. To ensure the techno-capital upward spiral continues forever. [Marc Andreessen, The Techno-Optimist Manifesto (2024)]

Jacob Metcalf, data science researcher and AI ethicist observes about tech accelerationism:

What all techno-accelerationists share is the notion that technology, which they control, will fix what is wrong with politics by rapidly overturning traditional political divisions that seem to stall or block movement in their preferred direction. Adherents to the various strains of technoaccelerationism, including Dark Enlightenment, NRx, and e/acc, likely understand that none of this would be possible without AI because the ideas motivating them are untested, unpopular, and prima facie unworkable in a democracy that values individual human rights.

Hype is a key tool in tech acceleration because it drives the accumulation of sufficient money and power necessary to implement a specific vision of the future – crafted by and for the benefit of tech companies and leaders, under the guise of advancing all of humanity.

In fact, it’s that hype-ified “advancing humanity” myth that lies at the heart of a lot of tech boondoggles. An article in American Affairs Journal a few years back pointed out that investment in hype-ified (but ultimately useless) “innovation” like the metaverse and Web3 relied heavily on

“a widespread faith that technological progress will improve human well-being, including via economic growth.”

A Few Key Attributes of Tech Hype

Gary Marcus points out that the current hype around AGI—which is supposedly the biggest human evolutionary jump ever—is intentionally deployed to misinform and distract from AI’s inherent weaknesses.

The misinformation that current AI models are a sound basis for developing AGI, and that we just need more computing power, is most likely aimed at raking in piles of cash:

The message that we can simply scale our way to AGI is incredibly attractive to investors because it puts money as the central (and sufficient) force needed to advance.

Marcus often cites tech lords’ tendency toward “overclaiming” as a feature of their hype, and a reason for their lack of transparency because it would burst the hype bubble. As was the case recently when claims of AI’s coding prowess were punctured by independent research, which determined that not only didn’t it help engineers work faster, it actually slowed them down.

There’s also a “black box” element to hype. As Eryk Salvaggio, a fellow at TechPolicy.press wrote recently:

Myth-making is a crucial aspect of the AI industry, and black boxes are woven into the stories they tell… The shared myth-making around the black box of AI cultivates useful confusion about what can and cannot be known. It helps to cultivate the systems as more mysterious, even sublime, than they really are.

“Inevitability” is another feature of hype—one explored in the context of AGI in another insightful article on TechPolcy.press, as part of the series Ideologies of Control: A Series on Tech Power and Democratic Crisis.

Alex Hanna and Emily Bender, in their article The Myth of AGI, open with a quote from SoftBank CEO Masayoshi Son that:

“AGI is coming very, very soon. And then after that, that's not the goal. After that, artificial superintelligence. We'll come to solve the issues that mankind would never ever have thought that we could solve. Well, this is the beginning of our golden age."

From there, the seeming inevitability of the tech is meant to carry us away; according to Hanna and Bender:

Tech CEOs, futurists, and venture capitalists describe artificial general intelligence (AGI) as if it were an inevitable and ultimate goal for technology development. In reality, the term is a vague signifier for a technology that will somehow lead to endless abundance for humankind — and conveniently also a means to avoid accountability as tech moguls make off with billions in capital investment and, more alarmingly, public spending.

… the term is meant to evoke something with awesome power, much like the term “AI” used to, before it became overexposed in marketing.

When we give credence to the idea of AGI, it does multiple things in the real world. First, it signals that a computer program that is proficient at one thing — like predicting words from other words, which is what ChatGPT and other chatbots are doing — can do important social and economic work, such as addressing gaps in major social services, doing science autonomously, and “solving” climate change.

The second issue is closely related to the first: claims of “AGI” are a cover for abandoning the current social contract. Instead of focusing on the here and now, many people who focus on AGI think we ought to abandon all other scientific and socially beneficial pursuits and focus entirely on issues related to developing (and protecting against) AGI.

If you think this sounds weird, mystical, and god-like, you’d be correct.

Another element of hype, complementing its sense of inevitability, is the notion of “inescapability.”

Tech writer and researcher Luiza Jaorvsky recently skewered not just the AGI worship of Sam Altman not just for its bloated language that substitutes “superintelligence” for all things AI, but also for trying to sell the idea that AGI is inescapable.

Altman posted, “We are past the event horizon; the takeoff has started. Humanity is close to building digital superintelligence, and at least so far it’s much less weird than it seems like it should be.” To which Jarovsky responded:

My first comment is that in recent months, the term “AI” seems to have become dusty, and major AI-related initiatives are now called “superintelligence”…

Even if we don't want to talk to AI all day, tech executives will use all their marketing, PR, economic, social, and technological apparatus to normalize this behavior and make it a prerequisite to fully enjoy the digital environment and belong in the modern society. [emphasis original]

MIT professor Aral would do well to note these observations. Ordinary citizens are being wholesale opted-in, into a world not designed, controlled, or regulated by us. We cannot even rely on independent new media to help us,

One of my favorite hyper-intelligent and informed cranks, Ed Zitron, railed against lazy media here:

Look at how willingly reporters will accept narratives not based on practical experience or what the technology can do, but what the powerful (and the popular) are suddenly interested in. Every single tech bubble followed the same path, and that path was paved with flawed, deferential and specious journalism, from small blogs to the biggest mastheads.

And here:

We do not have to buy into every narrative, nor do we have to report it as if we do so. We do not have to accept anything based on the fact someone says it emphatically, or because they throw a number at us to make it sound respectable.

It is “guy said thing,” and “guy” happens to be “billionaire behind multi-billion-dollar Large Language Model company,” and said company has made exactly jack shit as far as software that can actually replace workers.

These scare tactics exist to do one thing: increase the value of companies like Anthropic, OpenAI, Microsoft, Salesforce, and anybody else outright lying about how “agents” will do our jobs, and to make it easier for the startups making these models to raise funds…

It’s all so deeply insincere, and all so deeply ugly — a view from nowhere, one that seeks not to tell anyone anything other than that whatever the rich or powerful is worried or excited about is true, and that the evidence, no matter how flimsy, always points in the way they want it to.

Hype is self-interested stagecraft, aiming to reshape the world

As our podcast guest, Andreu Belsunces Gonçalves, notes, hype is endemic to scientific communications because, to get funding and the attention that attracts funding, science has to connect the present to an as-yet unrealized future, in which something that does not yet exist becomes a reality. By its very nature, much of science communication is speculative.

It’s a type of communication that easily lends itself to hype, and may have a built-in bias toward hype, and as discussed in this paper on the dangers of hype in scientific communications, in which the authors observe:

“Walking the line between ‘selling’ a story and ‘hyping’ it far beyond the evidence is no easy task.”

A report from the Rand Corporation cautions that:

When a new technology emerges, it is often met with a wave of eager anticipation and optimism. However, this optimism may be detached from actual utility and practical implications, potentially signifying a state of unfettered hype.

For R&D portfolio planning, the hype around emergent technologies can lead organizations to allocate excessive resources and investments without fully considering the technologies’ long-term viability or potential risks.

And yet, we see no such restraint, particularly around AI implementation, as corporations and governments swallow the hype, and news media unplug their internal BS meters. We see, especially in AI debates, the kind of dangerous storytelling that the Rand report cautions against:

>the influence of highly trafficked stories and narratives

>lack of diversity in discourse, with a predominance of hopeful sentiment and fictional outcomes with the ability to shape actual outcomes

>specific sentiments emerging in public discourse about the technology, influenced by the coalescing hype that mediates societal expectations

The fine line between “selling” and “hyping” has been all but obliterated by today’s techno-finance establishment as it overclaims capabilities, teases with “black box” mysteries, trumpets its own inevitability, and threatens inescapability – creating an oh-wow, can’t miss it, FOMO urge to get on board.

We fall for this ruse because we already live in a hype-ified world where hype is endemic to nearly every kind of social discourse from the pedestrian to the most sophisticated and profound. We’re used to it. It’s familiar. We reflexively respond to its vernacular and habits of thought.

It is also a hype environment designed and facilitated by the very tech companies seeking to consolidate capital and political power behind their agenda – strong-arming the public and public policy establishment into knuckling under, yielding to their endless demands to be free of regulation and oversight.

Hype isn’t dangerous just for its misrepresentation of reality, but for its real-world consequences of financial and political consolidation around ideas – a specific set of ideas that’s great for them. Maybe not so great for the rest of us.

This is the LiteralMayhem podcast. My name is Martin and I’ll be your host…

This first episode is gonna be a short one… just something to get us started. A little chat about what we’re doing and why. And if there’s one thing that we could say—this—podcast—is--about… is that it’s a story about stories.

In college, I majored in philosophy… a discipline that often leans heavily on stories, in the form of examples, illustrations, anecdotes, hypotheticals, to investigate all manner of questions, big and small, about reality, the world, and our place in it.

In my professional life, I spent several decades in public relations and communications, essentially as a paid storyteller… As I said to a boss of mine once, we were doing “hair and makeup for corporate America.”

I’d add to that now that our medium was storytelling. Yes we were doing professional “spin.” But at its heart, all communications disciplines are about telling a convincing enough story that your audience buys your version of reality… and most important acts accordingly.

Because, if you can’t get your audience to understand and feel DEEP inside how good your idea is for them, if you can’t get them to internalize the power of your story, then your audience will be lured away toward someone who can. But if you know how to tell an engaging story, and engage people and hold their attention, you can sell just about anyone on just about anything.

Later in life, I went to back to school and got a Master’s degree in creative writing, which brought me full circle… back to all those complicated questions about the intersection of real life and theories about real life… and how stories play an important role in our understanding of the world.

So here I’d like to make three quick points about the importance of story… take it as setting the stage, setting the table, putting a stake in the ground… pick your metaphor…

The first point is that there’s a branch of psychology that believes “virtually all human knowledge is based on stories constructed around past experiences.” [ML1] And even while others in the field disagree about the supremacy of story, they still acknowledge that stories hold “a privileged status in the cognitive system.” [ML2]

Psychologist and researcher Dan McAdams puts it this way: “Human beings are storytellers by nature… The story is a natural package for organizing many different kinds of information. Storytelling appears to be a fundamental way of expressing ourselves… and our world… to others.”

In that way, stories serve as our internal filter through which we experience the world… they’re a template into which we fit experiences as they happen, to give them meaning. Stories are a model for how we should act and respond to the world around us.

And here’s a second point about stories…

We don’t just live out our stories. Our stories are so embedded within us, so integral to our perceptions, decisions, and actions… so invisible… that as human beings, we are a walking, talking, living, breathing collection of stories.

Our stories are so immanent within us, that we don’t distinguish our stories from ourselves.

John Holmes, a psychology professor at Waterloo University, says that, “Storytelling isn’t just how we construct our identities. Stories are our identities.” [emphasis original]

Who am I? The answer is a complex tapestry of interwoven stories. Who are you? And who are you to me? Another set of stories interlocking with the first. Is something I did right or wrong? Well it all depends on the story you use to interpret what that means.

Someone speeds by and cuts you off in traffic.. What an A HOLE!!!... that’s the story you tell yourself… unless that person is rushing to the emergency room because a loved one was admitted to the hospital?… Does that additional information change the story? That additional information, maybe?

That brings us to the third and most important point about the power of stories…

Very often we’d rather cling to the stories we tell ourselves about the world, than see the world as it really is. When a deeply held story is contradicted by facts, it’s quite common for those facts to give way before the story does.

It’s a habit that explains people’s growing affection for, say, conspiracy theories.

Powerful stories are difficult to dislodge once they take root. A weakness that’s not unique to conspiracists. It’s a trait we all share to a certain degree.

According to Prof. Holmes: “For better or worse, stories are a very powerful source of self-persuasion, and they are highly internally consistent. Evidence that doesn’t fit the story is going to be left behind.” [ML3]

Once a story gets embedded into our identity there is an enormous psychological investment in that story, and an enormous psychological cost to giving it up. Giving up our core stories, especially stories that form our identity, is like “relinquishing all knowledge of who one is and what the world is like.”

To paraphrase the title of the novel by writer Chinua Achebe… Thinks Fall Apart.

So this now becomes our departure point for the LiteralMayhem podcast… We all face an enormous challenge in that world is changing faster than our stories about the world.

The world is changing so fast that our stories can’t keep up.

And all too often, when the world outruns our stories, we nevertheless cling to those stories and refuse to see the facts. As professor Holmes says, “Evidence that doesn’t fit gets left behind.”

Resulting in what is, quite often, and quite literally, mayhem.

I want to give you a few tangible examples of what I mean… so it’s less academic sounding, more concrete, and hopefully more meaningful.

Here’s a thought experiment: What would you think if told you that Nature no longer exists?

I’m not talking about natural forces… Surely hurricanes exist… floods… earthquakes… wild fires… acts of God all still exist. That’s not arguable. And surely there are still pockets of teeming, diverse wildlife on our planet. That’s also not arguable.

What I’m talking about is the capital-N “Nature” of our romantic imagination… the magical, untamable, irrepressible capital-N “Nature” ... the Nature as we idealize it in the colorful TV version of our imagination … the capital-N Nature of David Attenborough programs, and The Undersea World of Jaques Cousteau, and Mutual of Omaha’s Wild Kingdom…

THAT version of nature… with it’s kaleidoscopic, unstoppable, endless abundance…

We have this romantic ideal of Nature writ-large that’s not just eternal and impervious to man, but also enveloping. It’s a story we tell ourselves that Nature is always and forever will be BIGGER than us… a story that Nature holds within its grasp all of humanity, human civilization, and human striving.

THAT version of Nature no longer exists… it no longer survives on its own terms, but on ours.

It’s well-accepted now that live in the Anthropocene Age in which man, not Nature, is the defining force on this planet.

There is no place on this planet so remote that it hasn’t been impacted by the scale of human industry. Forever chemicals like PFAS and PCBs and micro plastics are found in the flesh of animals in supposedly pristine ecosystems from the arctic to the Amazon… In fact, micro plastics are accumulating in even our own brains…

Species extinction, depending on the species and the region, is happening at a rate 10 to 100 times faster the natural baseline. The loss of ice from global glaciers, driven by climate change, is no longer measured in millions of tons, or even billions of tons, but now TRILLIONS OF TONS.

We’re building dams and extracting groundwater at a scale large enough to affect the Earth’s axis and rotation.

The fact is… capital-N Nature is now captive to human civilization. It is now our property. It’s chaotic lavishness. It’s seemingly limitless abundance. It’s supposed unstoppability, imperviousness, and eternal grandeur. All of that is now contained by us… as a subset of our human world. Not the other way around.

And I’d argue that our inability to control our planet destroying ways is largely due to our inability to give up our old story that Nature is eternal, irrepressible and uncontainable, and that we are still somehow smaller than Nature.

The longer we hold fast to that idealized fable, that idealized myth, the longer we’ll feel free to conquer Nature, degrade it, and harvest it.

For such an eternal thing as Nature of course will endure. Won’t it? It always has. So, it always will. Right?

Except that it won’t, unless we give up the old story and create a new one that’s more truthful and recognizes that in this relationship between man and Nature, it’s Nature that’s now the junior partner not us.

Nature’s survival will depend entirely on our husbandry. Placed under our protection, as if under a cloche.

But as Prof Holmes has said, facts often give way before a story does.

We still reflexively want to hold onto a story that has governed our understanding of Nature for eons, since the time of neolithic cave paintings. The story of man struggling to tame the wildness of the world has for millennia driven exploration, literature, art, national identity, science, and human imagination.

It’s hard for us to completely reimagine that relationship… that us little ole’ humans could destroy something as big as an entire fucking planet.

That old story of limitless, irrepressible, all-enveloping Nature is over. It’s done. It’s not coming back. Ever. We won. Nature lost.

That old romantic version of Nature being bigger than us, enveloping everything and every one… that version of Nature, exists only in our imagination and whatever’s left of it in the real world will continue to exist only at our mercy.

And yet we desperately don’t want to lose that old romantic story of grand all-powerful Nature… so we continue clinging to it, even at our own peril.

Here’s another question: In a globalized world, what is the meaning of national identity and culture? Do they even have meaning anymore? We want to believe they do… but do they really?

A great deal of ink and political capital has been spilled trying to foment a backlash to the dilution of both. Nationalism and cultural pride are driving populist politics all over the world.

Put it this way… In his book, Notes of a Native Son, James Baldwin had a lot to say about what culture is, and isn’t. He said, “culture is not a community basket weaving project, nor yet an act of God... something neither desirable nor undesirable in itself, being inevitable, being nothing more or less than the recorded and visible effects on a body of people of the vicissitudes with which they have been forced to deal.”

What he’s getting at is that the hallmarks of culture, like music and food and clothing, are all just expressions of how a specific people have historically coped with their specific circumstances and environment. But when stripped of that original context, those original specific circumstances and vicissitudes, all that music and food and clothing are just empty symbols that we consume in order to pretend we’re making an authentic connection to those places and those people who created those traditions.

Think about it this way. Culture is lived. Traditions are performed.

As a European cousin said to me once. “Sure Martin, we’re all Americans now.”

Her point was that while cultural practices persist, the “vicissitudes” we’re forced to deal with, to use Baldwin’s term, are looking more and more the same the world over. More and more homogenous, more and more deriving from commerce, consumption, class status, and technology.

Is it possible that the economic integration of the world—the globalization of commerce—has already outrun our deeply held identity stories of nationhood and culture, and that our new reality is just waiting us out, waiting however many decades or centuries it may take for our stories to catch up?

Populist politicians all over the world are betting that people will cling so fiercely to cultural stories of identity that they’ll be able to leverage that into lasting power for themselves.

But in this contest between global commerce and authentic national cultures, it’s an open question what happens to culture from here on out. We cling to our cultural identity stories, even though the unique circumstances that created those cultural practices have radically changed. Some of them have even disappeared.

So, what does it mean to have a unique culture when the vicissitudes we all face are much more alike than they are different? Does culture just become a series of parades and festivals, a book of old local recipes, and a bunch of dates on a calendar? Is the culture enterprise merely a series of trappings that we consume, and that we sell to each other, or that we portray in art as a freeze-frame of Baldwin’s lost vicissitudes?

At what point is it all just green beer on St. Patrick’s Day?

Here’s another thought experiment… we tell ourselves that technology is a tool for human advancement. And yet, in our increasingly digital world, it’s looking more like Henry David Thoreau was right in that we have become “tools of our tools.”

Thoreau’s warning mostly concerned materialism, that “Men have become the tools of their tools. Money is not required to buy one necessity of the soul. Most of the luxuries and many of the so-called comforts of life are not only not indispensable, but positive hindrances to the elevation of mankind.”

He worried that we were becoming slaves to commerce. Organizing our human lives purely to serve the furtherance of inhuman systems of economics and money. That those systems were controlling us, and not the other way around. An early warning that “we’re all Americans now.”

In the same way, perhaps even more pronounced, technology is increasingly governing our lives, creating an algorithmic life that dictates how we socialize, how we learn, how we govern. We let it surveil us and prompt us, and even when it prompts us to be dependent we willingly submit. How much are we adapting to the demands of technology, rather than the other way around? How much have we become tools of those tools?

The question is exceedingly important in an age of AI, where hype and corrupted storytelling aim to lure us into giving AI and its owners more and more power over our individual, political, artistic, cultural, and social affairs, even in some ways power over reality itself.

In our next podcast, we’ll take on the issue of hype, especially as it relates to technology and AI… and how hype storytelling takes advantage of our bias toward believing in the positive power of technology. And how hypsters and AI boosters activate that bias in a very self-interested way, to get the economic and political outcomes that are best for them, regardless of the impact on us.

The inherent dangers and destructive power of AI are well-defined and well-known. Those dangers are challenging our long-held faith in the positive power of technology and technological progress to improve our lives.

And yet, when faced with danger, we respond with a shrug that it’s inevitable, or unavoidable… or we buy into the hype and cling to our mythical story about technology’s boundless positive potential, regardless of what the facts are.

Either way we’re adapting our lives in service to the advancement of technology rather than the other way around… even at the potential degradation of a human-made world.

And finally, what is gender? We thought we knew. But that story—and all the social customs that come with it—have been challenged, in many, many ways.

The LGBTQ rights movement has challenged many long-held stories—many that based their own prejudice in talk of morality, sin, and God’s will. It has challenged traditional religious-based stories about what marriage is, and increasingly the trans rights movement has called on us all to rethink our most fundamental stories about gender.

And that one often feels like a very big ask, given that rethinking our story of gender, to make room for their gender, necessarily requires us to rethink our own… considering the possibility that all of us exist on a gender continuum and not in a socially constructed binary. And predictably, those calls to abandon our old stories about gender have resulted in furious backlash politics that has reached the highest rungs of power, in the most powerful countries in the world, and become the personal crusade of the richest man in the world.

So, what is gender? Do we know, or do we just think we know? Is the story we tell ourselves still relevant? Is it still true? Was it ever true?

Can a computer think? Does it have “intelligence”? What does it mean to be “better than humans”? If a computer can be better than humans, then what does it mean to be “human?” We really need to know. Do we?

If computer can digest all the art ever made by humans, and find patterns that a human brain cannot perceive, and then use it to make art… can we actually call it original? Can we call it art? Or, which is my own view, is it just algorithmic vomit?

And what kind of new story do we need to be telling ourselves about our relationship to Nature when we’re powerful enough to tilt the axis of the entire fucking planet?

Can authentic culture survive several more centuries of global economic homogenization? What happens to nations and national cultures when each one is merely a shop-front in a global online strip mall?

Novelist Nicole Krauss recently wrote a piece for the The Washington Post on reading, writing and literature as sources of freedom… and it’s worth quoting a long excerpt here:

It’s made me deeply aware of the long arc of history, which saw the rise and fall of almost everything: democracies and dictators, gods and humans, war and peace, that which was feared, and that which was loved and cherished. And though the countless crossroads people arrived at in history, arguing about which way to go, may have since faded into the indelible road chosen, I’m also acutely aware that we now stand at another.

That the direction we choose will determine not only our children’s future, but the future of what it will mean to be human — and the conditions under which human life will unfold. Whether the still relatively young values of liberalism will survive, whether reading and writing will continue to be the underpinnings of culture, whether the constructs and algorithms of AI will replace the freedoms of selfhood, whether we will dominate and destroy nature or salvage and protect it: We now stand before these questions. Stand and, I hope, pause.

Because without that effort, we will slide deeper and deeper into inchoateness, darkness, violence, diminished freedom for all and a diminished state of human being.

I’d suggest that reading, and understanding the importance of story, does another very essential thing… it helps us read the world… it helps us read the living stories we’re writing with our real lives in the real world… and it helps us guide the writing of those stories.

The question is… in a world of dying stories, where people no longer know how to read, where do we go next?

With respect to so many cherished stories, we do stand at a crossroads that asks us to look dispassionately and objectively at the stories we tell ourselves about the world, asking whether those stories still hold, or whether we need to rewrite them for a new era, and a new age.

I toyed with the idea of calling this podcast, A Squishy Place… because we live in a very fraught time, when so many of our deeply held, traditional, stories about ourselves and the world are being challenged, all at the same time.

And it’s happening so fast – faster than our stories can keep up – that it can feel hard to keep a solid footing, as the narrative ground under our feet keeps shifting and buckling and giving way.

In response… often in a furious backlash… we refuse to adjust our stories to the changing facts of our world. To a world that we have changed by our own hand. And as professor Homes pointed out, facts get left behind and we stubbornly cling to outdated stories and try to subdue the facts, forcing the world to conform to stories that are no longer true.

When we insist on backlash as a substitute for change, the result is often mayhem.

And that’s where we going to leave off, for now. I hope you’ll join us as we continue this discussion, this journey, this story about stories. I’ll do my best to make it interesting, challenging, surprising, and hopefully enjoyable.

Next week, we’ll be joined by Andrue Belsunces Gonçalves, a researcher in technology studies, and we’ll have a wide ranging discussion of hype. Hype stories. Hype narratives. The role of hype. What is hype? With a special emphasis on technology and articifial intelligence.

Until next time… thanks for listening. This has been… Literal Mayhem.

[ML1]Schank & Abelson

[ML2]Graesser, Ottati

[ML3]“Our Stories Ourselves” – MONITOR magazine of the AM Psych Assoc – by Sadie Dingfelder Jan 2011 Vol42 No1 … page 42 of print version

Reality Distortion is Swallowing Our Technology, Our Politics, and Our Lives

Fighting It Is An Individual Decision With Potentially Global Consequences

At LiteralMayhem, we don’t do hot takes. We step back, pause, and rethink.

Popular narratives can create—as we’ll see later in this piece—something called a “reality distortion field,” an immersive sense of reality that, while it feels true, is not actually true in an objective sense. In fact, the distortion field pushes us toward a “shunning” of the truth.

When immersed in a reality distortion field, we lose our bearings; it swallows our ability to see and resist it. And breaking through a reality distortion field is tricky business that requires effort and thought.

Stepping back, pausing and rethinking.

The first thing to know about a reality distortion fields is that, although it can feel like irresistible “social drift,” to quote George Orwell, it doesn’t happen by accident.

One of my favorite writers these days is William Finnegan of The Long Memo, who feels like a kindred spirit in his recognition of just how bad things are getting, as well as the terrible truth that it’s likely to get much worse before it gets better.

He also recognizes the intentionality of the decline. Last week in Persuasion he wrote [emphasis added]:

“The real culture war isn’t between right and left. The real culture war is between those trying to preserve any form of ordered liberty and those, knowingly or not, pushing toward collapse… What too few acknowledge is that collapse isn’t purely organic. It is being curated. Incentivized. Profited from.”

He warned that both left and right are vulnerable to anti-democratic urges because we all swim in the “same poisoned waters.”

Here is the key point: Finnegan’s “poisoned waters” is what others have called a “reality distortion field.”

Today, we are fighting many reality distortion fields, with potentially epochal consequences and unimaginable political and financial gains for the already powerful. Two of the biggest ones being…

• AI hype, which is raining cash down onto AI’s elite owners, while also transforming government, industry, academia, and media in real-time—to potentially rain more cash down on billionaire techbros at the expense of civil society.

• Disinformation and misinformation that spins political abnormality as merely a different version of normal, i.e., sanewashing the political chaos and cruelty, while power accrues to the few at the expense of the many.

By now, human beings should know how to avoid hype bubbles and the reality distortion they create. We sure have enough history with them.

But we can’t seem to find a way to stop them before they inflate and blow up.

Several weeks ago, in The Big Picture, Barry Ritholtz made a pointed observation about how little we learn from history, especially in the area of self-restraint.

He says about history’s quintessential bubble, the Tulip Craze:

“We have learned much about how people behave when the potential gains are huge. What we have not learned over those centuries is how to manage our own behavior.”

We have seen how human behavior creates hype bubbles, and we have seen the results when they explode. The Tech Bubble burst in 2001; it’s now called the Dot-Com Crash. The mortgage bubble burst in 2008; it’s now called the Great Financial Crisis.

In both cases hypsters led the charge, and the consequences were dire. In the latter case, causing acute global pain, even to those who did not participate in inflating the bubble.

In neither case was there any commensurate level of accountability for the bubble inflators—the reality distorters—the relative few who profited immensely at the expense of the many.

Here’s another example of a reality-distorting hype bubble that brought dire consequences for the world: the Iraq War.

Here, we can’t (and won’t) even attempt to summarize all the analysis previously written about the lead-up to the Iraq War.

Our purpose here is to home in on a single aspect: the role of professional storytellers in distorting reality to the point that it leads to disastrous consequences for us all.

By the time the hype bubble burst—and the reality distortion field dissipated—the war had caused vast devastation, left 37K+ dead and wounded Americans, 200K+ dead Iraqi civilians, with a cost, so far, of $3 trillion, including veterans’ care. It left behind an environmental catastrophe of destroyed forests, military waste, uncontained toxic chemicals, and millions of hectares of land unusable because of landmines.

It also offered a snapshot of the role of spinmeisters in inflating hype bubbles: one poignant example being the role of former Bush administration spokesman Scott McClellan, who published a pseudo-confessional book back in 2008 called What Happened: Inside the Bush White House and Washington's Culture of Deception.

Rather than reviewing the book itself, what’s more helpful is to have a look at a review of the book from the time it was published… an article that crystalizes the reality-distorting, ethical failures of professional storytellers, in all their icky glory.

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Narrative Hype Bubbles Are “Reality Distortion Fields”

When it was published, McLellan’s book was reviewed by an award-winning publication of The Center for Media & Democracy called PRWatch (now called Exposed by CMD).

That short review, by PRWatch co-editor Sheldon Rampton, is very much worth a quick read, if you’re so inclined.

In his review, Rampton quotes a former PR pro named John Stoddard (who was later convicted of 11 counts of defrauding his clients): Stoddard pinned the boosterism of the Iraq War on McClellan’s personal failure, rather than a failure of the PR profession itself.

Stoddard argued that [emphasis added]…

There is no more high-profile PR job in the United States... Scott McClellan defined the PR profession downward during his misbegotten tenure, and has done further damage with this book. ... McClellan asks us, in so many words, not to expect integrity from him, or anyone else who does what he does for a living. McClellan doesn't explain how he changed his mind about Bush, Iraq or anything else. He doesn't confess to intentionally lying. He just wants you to understand you should never have believed the things he said.

Rampton’s review also quotes Greg Mitchell, former editor of Editor & Publisher, lambasting the press for an...

… orgy of coverage of the fifth anniversary of the start of the Iraq war [in which] the media reviewed every aspect of the war and pointed fingers everywhere, except at the media. There was almost no self-assessment, after five years of war.

Fine. Both are true. The hype bubble that led to the Iraq War was a personal failure of McClellan, of course, and it was a failure of the media, of course.

But in his book, McClellan contends that a conspiracy of silence was also to blame. And this is where things get a bit sticky.

According to McLellan, the undertow of the story—about WMDs and a link to 9/11—was too strong a narrative current to resist. It was just too powerful, and it sucked them all under. McClellan’s rationalization is that most people in Washington are:

…good, decent people [who have] made a practice of shunning truth and the high level of openness and forthrightness required to discover it.

Greg Mitchell’s retort:

Is this what good, decent people do? If they shun the truth doesn’t that make them liars?... What [McClellan’s] describing is epistemologically tricky. If you're not conscious of lying, then by definition you're not lying.

Rampton, of PRWatch, offered his own assessment of the epistemology of lying [emphasis added]:

This is a valid point, but what it misses is the way ‘spin’ creates a reality distortion field which makes it possible for its practitioners to deceive even themselves in the act of deceiving…

The White House found ways of creating the appearance of a relationship between Iraq and 9/11, while being careful not to actually say so specifically. This is the essence of spin, bluffing, or bullshitting if you prefer to call it that. And it turns out that a great deal can be accomplished by way of deceiving people, without necessarily telling specific, nailable lies.

For obvious reasons, politicians prefer this approach whenever possible, but in the process, they create an environment -- McClellan calls it a ‘permanent campaign’ -- which he makes the distinction between truth and falsehood indiscernible, even (and in fact especially) to the spinners themselves. They can therefore ‘shun the truth’ without seeing themselves as liars and later claim that they were not ‘willful or conscious’ of what they were doing.

Rampton leaves off by asking:

How do we find our way back from this world into a world where politics is played according to rules of genuine honesty and candor? That, of course, is a big question, but it needs to be answered. McClellan's confessions -- but more importantly, the debacle in Iraq itself -- point to the need for reform in multiple arenas: in politics, in journalism, and in the way public relations operators spin the news.

Sound familiar?

Does it feel like, today, we have successfully implemented “reform” in politics, journalism and the way PR people spin the news?

It does not. If anything, reality distortion is worse than ever.

“Spin” Is A Kind of Reality Distortion: Asserting Truth While Leaving A False Impression.

McLellan’s story illustrates the personal incentives and mechanics of how spin gets manufactured, circulated, bought-into by the public and the media, and then disavowed by those who did the deed.

Was it all lies? In defense of the PR profession, Stoddard says that good PR people never lie and tell their clients never to lie.

But misdirection, well, that’s another story. Stoddard says:

“‘Spin’ refers to the artful selection of words so that the listeners or readers are left with the impression the speaker desires them to have. For ‘spin’ to work, every word has to be true.”

And there is the confession: the art of “spin” is using truth to leave an impression that may or may not be true, which makes no difference to the spinner as long as the listener is persuaded.

In McClellan’s case, his “spin” used assertions he didn’t bother to verify, to leave an impression that was ultimately false. Just as Rampton had said. McLellan was “deceiving people without telling specific nailable lies.”

In the case of his own behavior, McClellan failed even the most basic test of trying to figure out whether his statements were actually true—he was “shunning the truth” while not intentionally lying.

This case, in miniature, is exactly what we’re seeing in the hype around AI—a technology that could forever change the course of human society.

Boosters inflate its potential benefits beyond reason while, relatively speaking, they and the press give almost no air at all to its enormous potential harms—a bubble of reality distortion with potentially civilizational consequences.

That “spin” leaves a broad impression with the public that AI is safe, with manageable risks and responsible people at the helm. AI boosters would deny accusations that they’re telling specific “nailable” lies, even while the totality of their “spin” leaves the audience with an impression that’s demonstrably false.

We’re seeing the same kind of narrative bubble and reality distortion around the normalization of autocratic political extremism, couching an overthrow of democratic norms in the rhetoric of normal politics—talking about it like it’s just a different kind of politics, and a different managerial approach to governing.

And within that distortion field, the feeling and sensibility around normalcy shifts. The distortion field too often prevents us from seeing, never mind admitting, what’s happening. And that’s how we end up with good people “shunning truth and the high level of openness and forthrightness required to discover it.”

When living in a reality distortion field, there is no incentive to challenge it, because challenges are rebuffed, emphatically, often at great personal cost to the challengers.

Defeating A Reality Distortion Field Is A Long Difficult Slog

For an exhaustive and wonderfully cranky piece on the frustration of trying to pop AI’s narrative bubble—and neutralize the reality distortion field around that technology—you can read Ed Zitron’s article The Generative AI Con.

“My heart darkens, albeit briefly, when I think of how cynical all of this is. Corporations building products that don't really do much that are being sold on the idea that one day they might, peddled by reporters that want to believe their narratives — and in some cases actively champion them. The damage will be tens of thousands of people fired, long-term environmental and infrastructural chaos, and a profound depression in Silicon Valley that I believe will dwarf the dot-com bust.

“And when this all falls apart — and I believe it will — there will be a very public reckoning for the tech industry.”

Paul Krugman is a great example of someone shaking the political distortion field, trying to break the sense of “normalcy” it creates:

“So what should those of us who would like America to remain America, to not see us descend into dictatorship, be doing?

“First, acknowledge the reality. If my use of the word ‘dictatorship’ disturbs you, if your first reaction is to say ‘Isn’t that a bit shrill?’, you’re part of the problem. The constitutional crisis isn’t something that might hypothetically happen; it’s fully underway as you read this.”

And for context, here’s a throwback moment: back in 1946, George Orwell felt that the fiction-writing profession was living through a kind of a narrative bubble—a distortion field around the acceptability of totalitarianism, pushed by a Russophile intellectual elite. In an article in Polemic Magazine, he wondered [emphasis added]…

“When one sees highly educated men looking on indifferently at oppression and persecution, one wonders which to despise more, their cynicism or their shortsightedness…

“In our age, the idea of intellectual liberty is under attack from two directions. On the one side are its theoretical enemies, the apologists of totalitarianism, and on the other its immediate, practical enemies, monopoly and bureaucracy. Any writer or journalist who wants to retain his integrity finds himself thwarted by the general drift of society rather than by active persecution…

“A totalitarian society which succeeded in perpetuating itself would probably set up a schizophrenic system of thought, in which the laws of common sense held good in everyday life and in certain exact sciences, but could be disregarded by the politician, the historian, and the sociologist. Already there are countless people who would think it scandalous to falsify a scientific textbook, but would see nothing wrong in falsifying an historical fact. It is at the point where literature and politics cross that totalitarianism exerts its greatest pressure on the intellectual.”

Does the Orwell quote a feel bit too much? Too heavy? Too coldly historical?

It’s not.

We are currently living in a “schizophrenic system of thought,” just as he did: driven by corrupt storytelling in which a common sense that prevails in daily life is swallowed by an intentional distortion of reality.

(And not for nothin, the attacks by this administration on scientific facts defy even Orwell’s notion of a scandal too far.)

For their part, AI companies have been able to manipulate markets, strong-arm regulators, woo legislators, and bamboozle businesses and consumers, by spinning false impressions around AI’s current capabilities and destiny.

They have created an “enforced orthodoxy” (Orwell’s words), and at this point, challenging that dominant storyline is not permitted. It earns you only contempt and a backlash from the distortion field, with the aim of intimidation and instilling a sense of FOMO.

A similarly powerful reality distortion field rebuffs any call to name our current U.S. regime for what it is.

A brave few make the effort: Scholar of tyranny Timothy Snyder says, “Of course it’s a coup,” as does Robert Reich. Krugman calls it an “autogolpe,” or a self-coup. Max Boot, as far back as August 2020, was calling Trump 1.0 a “criminal conspiracy;” just as The Long Memo does today with Trump 2.0.

But the mainstream media, thus far, have been loath to call it what it is.

Whatever you call it, you cannot call it “normal.” In truth, we are now living within a right-wing “permanent campaign” of reality distortion—i.e., a “schizophrenic system of thought” in which the clear dismantling of democratic norms is spun as simply politicians doing politician stuff, a different and unorthodox way of doing politics.

(Well actually, that last statement is kinda true-ish, in a tautological way. See how misleading true assertions can be?)

Outliving Our Current “Schizophrenic System of Thought”

Once we get past these crises, even if it takes years (decades?), we’ll look back and understand what Stoddard did about McClellan’s Iraq War “spin”…

It’s something we should know by now about every bubble maker, and every professional hypester. When it’s all over and the hypster is called to account:

He doesn't confess to intentionally lying. He just wants you to understand you should never have believed the things he said.

We are living today during an accumulation of deceit and misdirection. Some of it based on bald-faced lies. But much of it based on a systematic building of true (ish) assertions into demonstrably false impressions—into a reality distortion field.

Those efforts are, in large part, aided and abetted by the failure of news media (of all stripes) to challenge those assertions effectively.

What Philip Bump wrote in the Washington Post could apply just as easily to the AI hype bubble as it does to the normalizing of today’s political extremism. According to Bump [brackets are my additions]:

This is not a great way to run a democracy — to build a contingent of tens of millions of people who reject the world as it is in favor of the way a [president or CEO] demagogue and his allies want it to be… It is a much worse way to run a government [or a society]. And yet here we are.

In Rampton’s words, how do we get back to “rules of genuine honesty and candor?” He admits it’s a big question, and one that needs to be answered.

But to quote Ritholtz once more:

We have learned much about how people behave when the potential gains are huge. What we have not learned over those centuries is how to manage our own behavior.

Right now, the potential gains from reality distortion are not only clear, but also beyond any scale previously imaginable. Hyperinflation of these reality-distorting narrative bubbles is still accelerating because the potential gains are so fucking huge. Not just in political and financial rewards, but also in control of discourse, perception, and maybe even reality itself.

Eventually such bubbles collapse under their own weight. We can only hope. The problem is that, along the way, a lot of bystanders get lured in; they take the moral equivalent of a zero-down, no-doc, interest-only loan on our shared future. Just so they can plunk down some chips and maybe win a round or two of the big game.

Then, when it all collapses into a steaming pile of financial, political, and social wreckage, tens of millions if not billions of innocents get crushed under the rubble.

What have we learned?

Reality distortion is a highly rewarding gig, and we cannot count on incentivized hypsters to resist its Siren call. We also cannot count on being saved by most of those in the media who get paid to see through the hype and burst the reality distortion bubble. No matter the reason, too often they refuse, or just fail.

It is up to each of us, in our own way, to “manage our own behavior” within the general drift of society and challenge the reality distortion field as honestly as we can: refuse to buckle under its pressure and maintain a “high level of openness and forthrightness” required to ferret out the truth and then share it.

All the while hoping and praying that, just maybe, for this one time, when the bubble bursts there will be accountability for the fraudulent storytellers and spinners—accountability beyond empty mea culpas that admit nothing, avoiding all blame and accountability.

Next Wednesday we will host our first podcast episode.

Our guest will be Andreu Belsunces Gonçalves, a co-founder of the Hype Studies Group, and a lecturer in Science and Technology Studies at Universitat Oberta de Catalunya, where he focuses on the relation between socio-technical fictions, power, and technology. He is also an organizer of the Hype Studies Conference to be held in Barcelona in September 2025.

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Entertainment Conglomerates Will Now Get Paid for Gun-Centric Content

Los Angeles, CA – April 24, 2025: The American entertainment industry (TV, movies, video games) announced a deal that formalizes a long-standing, promotional relationship between entertainment media and the gun industry.

The entertainment industry believes that it’s owed substantial compensation, given its decades of unflagging support for guns. Gun use in movies and TV has more than doubled over the past several decades, while 60% of scripted TV dramas include gun-centric content, and a third of such programs show at least one person being shot.

“Entertainment companies have been the biggest promoters of gun use in American history, and we have always done that promotional work without charging a cent! Now we can be fairly compensated for our contribution to American Liberty,” said Goldie Shotblast, a spokesperson for the media conglomerates, who previously served as an intern in the first Trump Administration’s Office of Civil Rights.

The deal covers broadcast TV and movie production companies, movie studios, streaming and cable TV, and video game producers. In exchange for featuring guns in programming, media companies will now receive cash compensation, product donations, and unlimited consulting services to help curate the proper weaponry for fictional characters, and promote more gun-centric programming.

“For decades, the American people have been gobbling up gun-centric content like they’ll never get enough,” said Ms. Shotblast. “As a free-market capitalist Christian nation, we flood the market with what it wants. And now as a reward, entertainment execs will be taking a lot more in the back end from gun makers, and that’s only fair.”

“Every bullet fired on TV is an act of free speech protected by the First Amendment,” said Dick Longbarrel, spokesman for the gun industry. “It’s about time we and the entertainment industry got on the same page, because we share the same values and regulatory challenges.”

As part of the deal, gun makers will establish a nonprofit called Guns Save Ratings (GSR), a 501(c)(3) organization that will work with media companies to increase the commercial value of gun-centric entertainment.

GSR’s in-house experts will look for opportunities to bring guns to under-penetrated entertainment genres, such as comedies, rom-coms, talk shows, and game shows.

“Comedy is a genre that’s too often gun free,” said Mr. Longbarrel. “We could definitely see firearms on a show like Abbott Elementary, because teachers need to be, and should be armed. And on medical dramas, ER doctors and nurses should be armed, to deal with exploding migrant crime in our cities. And on daytime talk shows, how hot would it be to see five mature ladies in short skirts all openly carrying? Every program at every hour should have some positive gun-centric content,” he said.

GSR will also be tasked with choosing “gender appropriate” weaponry for movie and TV characters, for example: pink guns and smaller guns for petite women; bigger caliber weapons for men and anatomically correct butch women who evince “masculine energy”; and concealed-carry would be recommended for storylines involving religious figures and houses of worship (except for Muslims).

To celebrate the historic agreement, co-president Elon Musk decreed that the White House Press Office will be establishing a “Bring Your Gun to Work Day,” as part of its anti-woke agenda.

On those days, White House spokespeople at the Press Room podium will be carrying sidearms, and reporters will be required to carry—openly or concealed—in order to gain access to the White House Press Room. Those not carrying will be rented a gun for the duration of the Press Briefing at a cost of $1,000 in Trump Coin.

Assistant chief deputy White House spokesman, Will Deportibunch, gave the White House’s endorsement of the new deal, and made the official announcement of the new Press Room policy saying, “Enemies of the people better watch out. From now on, American culture will be fully locked and loaded. Hail Caesar.”

# # #

This jaw-grinding satire has been another episode in Press Releases from Hell. No entertainers were harmed in the making of this spoof. Any pain caused to entertainment executives, performers, and media consumers is unavoidable in the pursuit of market and commercial transparency.

Dark times call for dark humor, which has been brought to you in a spirit of robust cynicism by LiteralMayhem.com.

Image credits: Gun image/TV image

Musk’s Rejection of DEI Is at Heart an Argument Against Reconstruction

A weird bit of historical confluence took place over the past couple of months. When Elon Musk went on his anti-empathy rant on the Joe Rogan podcast, his argument used the same narrative structure that Strom Thurmond used in 1958 to protest the Civil Rights Act of 1957.

Then, just a few weeks later, Sen. Cory Booker (D-NJ) broke Strom Thurmond’s record for the longest senate filibuster in American history: Thurmond’s 24-hour-plus filibuster was part of the hard-right attempt to derail civil rights legislation; while Booker’s filibuster aimed to protest the right-wing autocratic assaults of the Trump administration in 2025.

How these three storylines intersect is a study in what has NOT changed in American political narratives since 1957, and how much America is still rankled by the old, unhealed wounds of prejudice (of all kinds).

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Elon Musk Hates Empathy (Surprised?) Because Civilizational Inferiors Use It to Exploit Us

Where it started: Elon Musk went on the Joe Rogan show at the end of February and had a hissy fit over the toxicity of human empathy. He homed in on what he called the “empathy exploit,” a concept with two key storylines embedded in it:

• societies commit “civilizational suicide” by virtue of their empathy for immigrants from poorer less-developed countries, who dilute and destroy the host society’s culture; and

• western civilization is duped into committing suicide by outsiders taking advantage of its goodness—by exploiting its inbuilt empathic response.

From coverage in the Guardian:

“The fundamental weakness of western civilization is empathy,” Musk continued to Rogan, couching his argument in the type of pseudoscientific language that’s catnip to both men’s followings on X. “The empathy exploit. They’re exploiting a bug in western civilization, which is the empathy response.” [emphasis added]

Because the West’s “empathy response” is being “exploited” by devious, undeserving invaders, we need to shut down that response entirely—at least for them. The Guardian piece is well worth reading and bookmarking because it summarizes a growing movement across the Christian right to disengage the human faculty of empathy.

The Guardian quotes multiple supposedly Christian leaders having hissy fits over Episcopal Bishop Mariann Budde imploring Donald Trump to have mercy on, and empathy for, those who fear his presidency. From the same article:

“Do not commit the sin of empathy,” tweeted the Christian podcaster Ben Garrett with a photo of Budde in her religious garb. “This snake is God’s enemy and yours too.”

Another Christian podcaster, Allie Beth Stuckey, tweeted: “This is to be expected from a female Episcopalian priest: toxic empathy that is in complete opposition to God’s Word and in support of the most satanic, destructive ideas ever conjured up.”

The pastor Joe Rigney drove the argument home in the evangelical publication World. “Budde’s attempt to ‘speak truth to power’ is a reminder that feminism is a cancer that enables the politics of empathetic manipulation and victimhood that has plagued us in the era of wokeness,” Rigney wrote. “Bishop Budde’s exhortation was a clear example of the man-eating weed of Humanistic Mercy.”

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Strom Thurmond: Trust Not the Tug of Thine Own Empathy

In December 1958, just over a year after President Dwight Eisenhower signed the Civil Rights Act of 1957 into law, Strom Thurmond appeared on the syndicated radio show Manion Forum—a program produced and hosted by the former dean of the Notre Dame Law School Clarence Manion, who was a fringe conservative media pioneer and ideological forbearer of every right-wing media star in the firmament.

[Note: The book Messengers of the Right by Nicole Hemmer gives a full accounting of who started that movement, why, and what powered its success.]

On that program, Thurmond objected to the admission of Alaska into the Union as it set a precedent for admitting “territories peopled with persons who have no heritage in American political or religious philosophy.” Sound like Musk’s “civilizational suicide” rant, or Tucker Carlson’s “legacy Americans” rant?

As for the question of empathy, reading the Thurmond/Manion transcript is like reading a 1950s version of Musk/Rogan. Thurmond argued that the civil rights movement (which he nearly always prefaced with the word “so-called”) was a totalitarian project that succeeded by exploiting America’s innate “humanitarianism”:

“The gravest danger to our country is from within, and our enemies’ most powerful weapon is our own complacency … Our humanitarian instinct comprises one of our strongest national traits. It is our very humanitarianism, admirable and worthy thought it may be, on which our complacency is founded...

“By using a subtle, sometimes even subliminal approach, our enemies have enlisted our unthinking support of causes apparently for the promotion of ‘human rights,’ but which, when carefully examined, reveal an underlying advancement of collectivism.”

Thurmond doubled down on that argument six months later in May of 1960 in an address to Winthrop College, saying:

“Our heritage has determined that Americans are a sympathetic and charitable people. Those who would subvert our liberty seek to use this noble and admirable characteristic to lead us down the road of socialism, by hiding their ultimate goal under the cloak of humanitarianism.”

Sound familiar—like maybe an “empathy exploit?”

Empathy Be Damned. Inferior People Can Only Get It By Fraud or Trickery.

Thurmond uses the antiquated word “humanitarianism” while Musk uses the thoroughly modern word “empathy,” but both men are telling the same story.

The sad irony is that both men believe that their superiority derives in large part from their goodness, but it’s their very superiority that leads them to reject the demands of goodness when felt toward those they deem inferior. They feel the tug of empathy, but reject it.

The reason?

If inferior people have somehow tapped their sense of empathy, it could only have happened by fraud or trickery.

By an “exploit” in Musk’s words. Or by “hiding their ultimate goal,” in the words of Thurmond.

That’s the story they tell themselves, and it’s not the only parallel in their narrative view of the world. Underneath their rejection of empathy is a darker storyline—one that is fundamentally opposed to any form of Reconstruction.

Righting Past Wrongs Is an Imposition of Tyranny on the Present

In 1960, as he was preparing for a reelection campaign, Thurmond made a speech in Columbia, SC, in which he made plain his core objection to the entire concept of civil rights. The one overriding national issue that upset him the most was the “persecution” of the South on the “so-called ‘civil rights’ altar” and its aim of tyrannizing the South:

“The issue of co-called ‘civil rights’ is basically neither a legislative, a judicial, not a moral question. On the contrary, it is by its very nature a political question. [emphasis original]… the advocacy of unconstitutional, unwise, and unrealistic measures… for changing the segregated patterns in the South arises from no concern for the almost fictional plight of the Negro, either in the South or elsewhere. … their sole goal is political force.”

In Thurmond’s worldview, the civil rights movement had one overriding goal:

“It is obvious that the ultimate goal [of civil rights legislation] was to reimpose Reconstruction on the South.”

There we have the clear admission, and it’s worth looking at it again: Thurmond’s core animating narrative against the civil right movement, in all its forms, was that redress would “return the South to Reconstruction.” In another speech, he explicitly called it “obnoxious power grab legislation [aimed at] bureaucratic tyranny and totalitarianism.”

In an era of expanding communist influence around the world, any government mandate was conflated with totalitarianism, even a mandate to stop the tyranny of racism against Black Americans.

A key contention justifying that anti-civil rights narrative is the notion that complainants are undeserving and their complaints imaginary. The “plight of the Negro” is “almost fictitious.” Any true believer in the cause of civil rights is a “starry-eyed dreamer deluded by his own false propaganda, who is bereft of reason and blinded by passion.” He argued that “the voting discrimination issue was for the most part fictitious.”

In that Columbia speech he extolled the “Americanism” of “our thriving free-enterprise system” and those “willing to do a day’s work for a day’s pay,” which was a barely veiled slight against social welfare programs aimed at redressing racist wrongs.

And in support of his view about the undeserving status of Black Americans, he quoted his own filibuster:

“We spoke about the necessity for the Negro race to earn its place in society, and pointed out crime and illegitimacy statistics which illustrate so clearly its failure to do so.”

He argues that resolving racial conflict was best left to local governments, which at the time were the very enforcers of the racist status quo.

To Thurmond, Black people had failed at the “rugged individualism” that defines America. In his speech to Winthrop College, he told graduates that American prosperity was won by “individual effort.” He warned against “proposals to substitute government actions for private effort,” arguing that “economic security and tranquility know no ultimate source but the individual.”

That clarion call to individualism culminates in the idea that, “The government holds no security for us that we cannot provide for ourselves as individuals.”

Except if you’re Black in the Jim Crow South—he leaves that part out.

It’s also a statement full of irony: his Columbia speech offers a long list of ways he had used government to “protect the interests of working people,” for example, from the “corrupt practices of big labor bosses” and saving jobs from “the flood of low-wage imports.” Apparently, there are limits to what individualism can get you, even if you’re White. Turns out there are some things beyond individualism that only a U.S. Senator can do for you. Ending racism just isn’t one of them.

Musk from Another Age? The Parallels Between Musk & Thurmond

In a long interview with Don Lemon, Musk drops another Thurmond-esque line as part of his objection to DEI programs:

“You cannot be judge and jury of your own position… You cannot have a situation where someone is a self-described victim and they just get to be that because that’s how they feel.”1

It’s the very same discounting of the experience of excluded, disenfranchised people used by Thurmond; a mirror of the view that victimhood is invented, that it’s “fictitious.” Just the same as Musk writing off criticism of Tesla as a racially intolerant workplace to the complaints of “phony social justice warriors.”

Invented victimhood is part of Musk’s objection to the “empathy exploit,” i.e., the real victimization is targeting good, successful people by stealing their empathy.

He also echoes Thurmond when he argues that DEI programs are anti-meritocratic, that DEI programs “lower standards,” particularly for doctors. He obsessively invokes some imagined lowering of standards in the Lemon interview—an idea of undeserved opportunity that echoes Thurmond’s view that the “Negro race” had not “earned” its place in American society.

Newsflash to Musk: a) If specific DEI programs are lowering standards, then those programs are doing it wrong. The point of DEI is equal access to opportunity by qualified people, not preferential treatment for the unqualified; b) systemic racism itself is a system of preferential treatment based on race rather than qualification, so when you prop up a racialist system, you are by definition supporting the anti-meritocratic system you claim to abhor.

The granting of supposedly unearned opportunity is, for Musk, an affront to his views on individualism and free-enterprise, in which he’s in alignment with Thurmond.

Musk invokes individualism over and over in his interview with Don Lemon, arguing for “treating everyone who they are as individuals”…. and moving “beyond questions of race and gender and judge people based on their character and their skills… are they a good person and contributing to society, and that’s what matters.”

Fine, it would be great if we could get there some day, but we’re not fully there yet.

That fact, however, is something for which Musk, like Thurmond, has little tolerance. Musk believes that forcing a conversation about redress—never mind forcing redress itself—is “divisive.” He tells Lemon:

“If we keep talking about it nonstop then it will never go away.”

Like Thurmond, he apparently believes that systemic inequities will somehow miraculously self-correct and “go away” on their own if we stop talking about them, and if the government would just stop giving undeserving people an unearned advantage.

He also shares Thurmond’s anti-government narrative as much for its tyranny as its inefficiency. Musk posted prior to the election that:

"Unless Trump is elected, America will fall to tyranny."

In an interview with Ben Shapiro, he unironically invoked the idea of likening government to a corporation, which is his asserted reason for withholding resources and consent:

“Government is the ultimate corporation… How much more do you want to give the world’s biggest corporation that has a monopoly on violence?... The less the government does the more the economy will prosper.”

[Not true the government is not at all like a corporation. But even if it were, then his point on accountability and risk is meaningless… if government and private businesses are all corporations, then they are interchangeable. They all operate the same way and should be subject to the same skepticism and withholding of resources and consent, because they all pose the same dangers. Transferring power from government to the private sector is just transferring power from one corporate entity to another. He seems oblivious that his comment is as much an indictment of the potential tyranny from private corporations as from government.]

And finally, Musk mirrors Thurmond’s inability to register the reality of racism and other forms of prejudice, as well as Thurmond’s sense of racial victimhood.

Lemon challenges Musk that America’s outstanding ability to create opportunity doesn’t means less to people who can’t take advantage of such opportunities in the same way Musk did, simply because of the color of their skin. His obtuse and mystified response:

“What advantages does the color of my skin give me?”

When Lemon asks him to see a parallel anti-racism struggle in post-slavery America as in post-apartheid South Africa. Musk’s indignant response:

“There’s a slow white genocide happening in South Africa. Do you care about that?”

That quick turn to being a victim is as much a non-sequitur as his bizarre claim that everyone on Earth is descended from slaves at some point in their history. He’s clearly implying that no one has a right to any claim of disenfranchisement because we’re all the same.

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Of Course We Should Treat People as Individuals—The Problem Is That America Doesn’t, and Is Even Less Likely to Now

Should we judge people as individuals? Of course. Is individual effort important to growth, advancement, accomplishment, and resilience? Of course. Those are not controversial positions.

Do “woke” attempts at redress, and conversations about redress, go off the rails sometimes? For sure. John McWhorter offers a thoughtful take on improving “a worthy project that has its flaws.” Some of his critiques of the anti-whiteness of DEI feel sharp, but necessary. But in his conclusion, he argues that:

“Outlawing affirmative action of any kind, as Trump attempts to do, will discourage institutions from trying to level the playing field at all. This overreaction to DEI’s acknowledged missteps not only sets us back—it is immorality incarnate.”

The origin of DEI and wokeness and all the other things Musk so passionately hates are rooted in the fact that the playing field is NOT level, opportunity is not equally accessible to all based on merit and individual skills, talents, and qualities of character. We live in a world still coated with the residue of systemic prejudice—something he refuses to address in a substantive way.

In his time, Thurmond expressed a nearly identical resistance, and/or complete dishonesty, about the exact same issues, as well as his refusal to accept any kind of formal Reconstruction to set them right. He used many of the same arguments and narrative framings that Musk uses today.

Not only is Musk completely wrong on empathy, when put side by side with the Strom Thurmond, Musk’s arguments against DEI and wokeness show up clearly as a modern strand of anti-Reconstructionism.

• Strom Thurmond believed in White civilizational superiority and the innate inferiority of marginalized groups and immigrants; refused to admit the existence of systemic disadvantage created by America’s legacy of systemic racism; considered all systemic efforts at redress as socially divisive that victimized White Southerners; blamed the position of the marginalized on their own failure to live up to the rigors of American individualism; and fought all efforts to enforce redress as a violation of liberty and an imposition of the unconstitutional and illegal tyranny of Reconstruction.

• Likewise, Elon Musk believes in American and European civilizational superiority and the innate cultural inferiority of immigrants from less-developed parts of the world; admits the existence of systemic disadvantage only when pressed but then refuses to accept systemic efforts at redress; claims that forcing a conversation about redress is divisive; rejects DEI programs as implicitly a gift of undeserved opportunity to those who have not earned their place; claims victimhood for his own privileged group; and claims that, if wokeness is not stopped, the Left will force a tyranny on the nation that stamps out all freedom of speech and freedom of thought.

Whether it’s Strom Thurmond fighting capital-R Reconstruction in the South in his day, or Elon Musk fighting the small-r, extra-legislative “reconstruction” efforts of DEI today, the narrative is the same. And this is where Cory Booker enters the story.

Booker’s senate filibuster, now the longest in American history, aimed to call attention to the fact that the Trump administration’s anti-woke, anti-DEI crusade is installing exactly the kind of ideological tyranny that the Right has been fearing from the Left for decades.

Rather than promoting debate and reconciliation, Musk’s own support of power-grabbing, dissent-stifling autocracy pushes reconciliation further away, and makes his ideal meritocratic world more and more difficult to achieve.

Will Musk ever course-correct? Strom Thurmond never really came around on the issue of race, even though he got more pragmatic in his later years (the myth of Thurmond’s remorse was well-covered by Slate). It’s unlikely that someone as invested as Musk will reconsider his stance on inclusion or reign in his ferocious attacks.

To him, as it was with Thurmond in 1957, it’s life or death.

2^nd Runner Up: Jeff Bezos & The Washington Post Editorial Board (redux), for Their Bullshit MAGA Pandering

Last month, we awarded Jeff Bezos the Golden Dookie for his democracy-killing cynicism, after he MAGA-fied the op-ed page of his pet newspaper project The Washington Post. Media watchers wondered what he meant by a “100% commitment” to “liberty” and “free markets,” and what that would look like in practice.

Well, now we know. On March 11, the newly programmed Editorial Board at the storied news publication came out with the following ridiculous headline (and sub-head).

Ridiculous because in the conflict with the U.S., Canada was only responding to unprovoked threats from the president of the United States—to make Canada a U.S. state and impose eye-watering tariffs on our largest trading partner. The conflict was solely Trump’s doing, with Canada only defending itself from America’s aggression. Yet, the liberty and free-market loving Editorial Board positioned the conflict as a spat in which both Trump and Carney were equally to blame, and equally responsible for lowering the temperature.

This steaming pile of bullshit is exactly the kind of kowtowing, split-the-baby, both-sides nonsense that establishment media has been rightly criticized for. This piece not only fails to explicate the cause and effect of the conflict, it tacitly validates and sanewashes the narrative of the administration and its spinners in right-wing media.

It’s a failure of basic journalistic values, and coming just weeks after the op-ed makeover at The Post, is proof positive that Jeff’s MAGA turn will neuter his op-ed page, rather than empowering it to speak truth to power. (As if we didn’t have enough evidence already.)

So, the next time Bezos prattles on about ideals and values, we’ll know exactly what he’s doing: bullshitting.

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1^st Runner Up: Sam Altman & the A.I. Cabal, for Proving Their Own Talking Points on Copyright are Bullshit

There is so much bullshitty bullshit coming out of the A.I. tech lords that it’s hard to pick just one item. But they are now proving their own guilt in the biggest way possible, on the biggest issue roiling the A.I. business in all its dimensions (political, business, and economic).

That issue is copyright protections for creators and the tech lords’ insistence that they need a loophole that lets them steal whatever they want because figuring out how to pay for stuff is just way too hard… waaaaa.

From an article in ARS Technica:

OpenAI is hoping that Donald Trump's AI Action Plan, due out this July, will settle copyright debates by declaring AI training fair use—paving the way for AI companies' unfettered access to training data that OpenAI claims is critical to defeat China in the AI race

OpenAI dropped the rhetorical nuclear bomb of “freedom” to argue their right to scrape copyrighted content in order to beat back the dastardly Chinese. Sam Altman argues that:

If the PRC’s developers have unfettered access to data and American companies are left without fair use access, the race for AI is effectively over.

So, the government must give A.I. companies a right to steal content, in order to win the war against other thieves.

How do we know this is bullshit? By their own behavior: they are actually buying content from big media and news establishments, including the Authors Guild—e.g., OpenAI is paying publisher HarperCollins $5K per title for three years of access.

A terrific article by Bruce Barcott in TechPolicy.press outlines the deals A.I. businesses are making with all kinds of content providers to actually PAY them for access to their data.

OpenAI, maker of ChatGPT, went to London and openly admitted to the UK Parliament that its business model couldn’t succeed without stealing the property of others…

One year later, the emergence of a robust market for AI training data has all but smashed those arguments. It turns out that [paying for content] is not “impracticable” after all.

Today, the AI-media dealmaking landscape is so jammed with familiar names that tally keepers are running out of space. Ezra Eeman, head of strategy and innovation at the Dutch broadcaster NPO, recently published the most up-to-date visualization of the major players and known deals:

A.I. businesses are attacking copyright all over the world, especially in the UK and Europe (for consistently excellent coverage of the political and regulatory angles subscribe to ChartingGenAI here on Substack).

But all the while, those same businesses are proving that they CAN pay for data because they ARE paying for data.

Their data usage contracts with big names like HarperCollins, The Financial Times, Axios, Associated Press, Shutterstock, and others, undercut all their arguments against strict copyright enforcement and reveal all their hornswoggling for what it is: A MULTI BILLION DOLLAR BULLSHIT EXTORTION RING.

BS of the Month Award: The Small but Mighty Bullshit of an Idaho School District, for Proving They Hate Inclusion

According to the Idaho Statesman, a middle school teacher in Idaho, who teaches 6^th grade World Civilization, was told to remove signs posted in her classroom—which had been hanging there for FOUR YEARS—because the school district now believes the signs “inadvertently create division or controversy.”

Administrators told the teacher that her signs “don’t allow people to express differing opinions, that it is controversial in today’s political environment.”

One of the offending signs (above) simply says that “Everyone is welcome here.” According to the Statesman:

In emails shared by the district with the Idaho Statesman, Marcus Myers, the district’s chief academic officer, told Inama to remove the signs because they violated Idaho’s Dignity and Nondiscrimination in Public Education Act, as well as school policy, which requires signs to be “content neutral and conducive to a positive learning environment.”

Apparently affirming messages and acceptance are a violation of the state’s dignity law. Truly a WTF moment, made even worse by two of the key issues the district had with the signs:

1. The same school had other “everyone is welcome here” signs posted, but this teacher’s sign raised issues because of the “specific visual representation” of the hands-of-many-colors.

2. According to what the teacher told local TV station KTVB, higher-ups told her that “Everyone is welcome here” is “not something everybody believes,” making it a banned personal opinion, not just basic common sense in a classroom. (Quote here pulled from the appropriately snarky write-up in Wonkette.)

Idaho is a “MAGA lab” according to an op-ed writer just over the border in Washington state, with Idaho going pretty much mad-scientist level crazy in terms of its embrace of ultra-right policies and ideas. What this mighty little example shows is that MAGA world—despite conservatives’ call for unity and empty protests against the divisiveness of “woke” culture—is all-in on exclusion and bigotry.

Active efforts at inclusion are verboten. In fact, it’s the depiction of actual inclusion, represented by hands with brown skin in one sign, and rainbow colors in the other sign, that sent them around the bend.

Passive rhetorical flourishes, without specificity or context, are the most that MAGA will stand for. Because in practice everyone is NOT welcome, and they explicitly told this teacher that people in their community do NOT agree with the statement that “everyone is welcome.”

This is life in the “real America.” This is their “family values.” This is their values in action. So, when MAGA boosters fake-cry about the divisiveness of “woke” culture and that the left needs to stop dividing people, one only need point to mighty little Idaho to call bullshit.

For that reason, for their divisive, anti-inclusive, mad-scientist experiment in hypocrisy and their self-righteous, moral-bullshittery, we award the Golden Dookie and the BS of the Month Award to the state of Idaho, and the West Ada School District. Congratulations! Well done!

Glorifying “Uncurated” Content Is Just Claiming a License to Be Dumb

The public imagination has been gripped by a growing narrative that there’s this thing out in the wilds of the Internet called “uncurated” content, and that it’s more trustworthy than content from official sources like “legacy media” and “mainstream media” and academia and sources curated by experts.

It’s part of an overall trend toward the dissolution of what has traditionally been thought of as “media.” In a 2025 trends round-up article in the PR publication O’Dwyer’s, a prominent brand executive, Jackie Cox Battles, from the global PR powerhouse Weber Shandwick observed:

You need to completely rethink the definition of media because the truth of the matter is today, everybody is media. And media is now defined on personal terms, which means what people see is what they consider media.

But within that overall trend, the narrative about “uncurated” content being more trustworthy and true than official media is problematic in so many ways. First, there’s no such thing as “uncurated” content. Second, it leaves one vulnerable to all manner of disinformation, misinformation, propaganda influence operations, conspiracy theories, and hype.

The myth of “uncurated” content itself is a kind of conspiracy theory: i.e., that content from official sources is deliberately crafted for deception and control, whereas “uncurated” content breaks through that deception and control to liberate people and guarantee their freedom.

At least, that’s a story that much of the public now believes. Too bad it’s dangerous BS.

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The Concept of “Uncurated” Gets a LOT of Play

Malcolm Gladwell was out promoting his new book on the 25^th anniversary of his old book The Tipping Point. In the new book he admits to being wrong about stuff.

In an interview with Emma Goldberg of The New York Times, something really stuck out: she asked if we’re in an age of “anti-expertise.” (Something we talked about two weeks ago in a piece about the dangerous rise of the “Expert Inexpert.”) Gladwell said he doesn’t buy it. He said…

People increasingly want uncurated expertise. [emphasis added]

You hear the word “uncurated” a lot, especially describing online media consumption and political news. But WTF does that really even mean? And what are we missing by buying into the narratives about “uncurated” content, particularly as a theory of people’s information preferences, online and off?

[all bolded text below added for emphasis]

• Harold Meyerson, writing for the American Prospect, put Joe Biden’s political weakness partly down to voter misperceptions, particularly around the economy, which he attributed to the “substitution of social media for traditional media. Social media has a built-in bias for the negative, the apocalyptic, the unedited and uncurated.”1 Michael Tomasky, of the New Republic, endorsed Meyerson’s assessment and quoted the above sentence in his own piece.2

• The Center for Strategic and International Studies published an article in March 2024 about the TikTok ban. In discussing political influence operations, the author states that, “This kind of problem is a feature of social media, where uncurated and unverified information is the norm.”

• In a research paper from Georgetown University and the Foundation for American Innovation, the Executive Summary argues that middleware can help address problematic experiences on social media by enabling “users to choose from competing providers and algorithms, offering a flexible architecture as an alternative to both centrally controlled, opaque platforms and an unmoderated, uncurated internet.”

• An editorial in New Hampshire’s Union Leader newspaper said figuring out what news is true is a matter of using “curated media sources with publishing guidelines and an approval process. Uncurated content, especially on social media, often contains falsehoods.”3

• North of the border, a columnist for Canada’s New Brunswick Telegraph bemoaned the state of democracy, in an article titled Fickle electorate bad for democracy, indicting “younger generations whose tastes and expectations have been largely formed by distracted Internet surfing and TV channel-switching, getting their uncurated ‘news’ through social media in 140-character increments.”4

These are but a few examples. Unfortunately, “uncurated” is an empty nonsense word, and it’s very dangerous in what it concedes.

“Uncurated” Content It's Still “Curated,” Just Differently.

Gladwell uses Joe Rogan’s podcast as an example of “uncurated” expertise, saying:

[Rogan] brings in people who have something to say and lets them talk at length. Whereas in the media world I grew up with, we wanted someone who was a gatekeeper to curate. He won’t do that.

Excuse me, what? Really WTF? Did he just say that? Gladwell sounds like a super-confident idiot. Like a professional expert inexpert.

Rogan is absolutely still doing curation. His guests are delivering a viewpoint that’s platformed by him and his team of producers, who make curatorial decisions based on their own editorial (ideological?) priorities. Theirs may skew toward an anti-establishment, anti-liberal, anti-feminist curatorial ethic, but it’s certainly not “uncurated.”

Moreover, any guest who “talks at length” is also curating. Reasoned argument is a form of curation: filtering one’s own learnings and experiences, presenting a narrow set of proof points to support a particular point of view.

This idea of “uncurated” content is applied quite liberally to social networking sites (aka “social media”). But really, the user experience is still curated; it’s just subject to a de facto curatorial filter constructed out of the opinions, likes, shares, and links offered by people in your network. Not to mention the platform algorithms that organize and feed socially curated content in a way that maximizes user engagement and ad sales.

In fact, there’s almost nothing in our human world that’s not curated somehow by others, or co-curated by us with them. Your trip to the grocery store is curated: the items in each aisle, on each shelf, right down to the color of the packaging on every last item in your cart, is highly curated. And a site like Amazon is now curating its online store for each individual customer:

For two decades now, Amazon has been building a store for every customer. Each person who comes to Amazon sees it differently, because it’s individually personalized based on their interests. It’s as if you walked into a store and the shelves started rearranging themselves, with what you might want moving to the front, and what you’re unlikely to be interested in shuffling further away. [emphasis added]

Driving down the street is a “curated” experience. Someone long ago decided where the street should go (in my neck of the woods in upstate New York it may have been a Puritan trying to find the best way to get his or her cattle to water). Someone else decided where the property lines should go. Others decided what got built according to zoning laws, which are themselves a form of commercial and residential curation.

If we’re talking about decisions made by others that filter and affect our experience of the world, then most of what we encounter in the human-made world on a daily basis is curated someone other than ourselves.

“Uncurated” Used to Mean “Freedom to Roam”

In his Substack, Towards wiser digitalization, Johan Brandstedt traces the preference for “uncurated” online content back to the earliest days of the Internet.

In early internet days, in many ways parallel to our present hype around AI, everyone was thinking with portals…

AOL and MSN are still around, Alta Vista — once the undisputed “start page of the internet” — sure isn’t, and we all know why: the winner turned out to be not the one that carried over the notion of a curated topical overview from the then-dominant paper & ink newspaper paradigm to the nascent medium of the web “page” unchallenged — but the one that went for the bog standard, dirt simple UX native to the medium; the default one drilled into every computer user from the start: a blinking cursor on an empty command line.

Instead of a buffet of options, your blank page to fill, with an active invitation to press an expanding range of fingers against plastic squares, free from distraction.

And with the same allure: It’s all here at your fingertips, at your command. Anything you can think of.

[All emphases original]

A blinking cursor is freedom. Internet users didn’t want to be forced to bushwhack their way through a curated portal to find what they were looking for. Understandably so.

Portal curators couldn’t possibly anticipate the needs and aims of every single user, looking for everything from an answer to whether you should brush first or floss first, to finding a good local restaurant, to unearthing research on the pyramids of ancient Egypt. The Internet wasn’t a newspaper. It was the whole world, right on your screen. People wanted the freedom to roam.

Likewise, people wanted to speak their mind, unfiltered, to the world. In Mark Zuckerberg’s announcement that Meta was ditching fact checking, he mentioned “free expression” five times. Free to express. Free to consume what others freely express.

But Now “Uncurated” Is Code for Institutional Distrust

Today, however, the term “curated,” and its twin of “uncurated,” function as a kind of litmus test for whether one trusts sources of institutional officialdom. In that context, “uncurated” has become a stand-in for distrust at a time when people are hugely suspicious of institutions, not just here in the U.S. but all over the world.

A 2023 report from The World Economic Forum (yeah, the Davos people) warned that, “a growing distrust of information, as well as media and governments as sources, will deepen polarized views – a vicious cycle that could trigger civil unrest and possibly confrontation.” They analyzed in detail the “global trust recession,” quoting Edelman’s Trust Barometer, which labeled said recession as a “lack of faith in societal institutions triggered by economic anxiety, disinformation, mass-class divide and a failure of leadership.”

A 2024 survey from The Pew Charitable Trusts (no pun intended) found a continuing erosion of trust in national institutions. Gallup surveys found the same thing in 2022 and 2023. In the 2023 Gallup survey, “television news” was tied with “big business” for second-to-last place, just ahead of “Congress,” which was in last place. Newspapers did only slightly better than TV news, coming in 12^th out of 16 categories.

People no longer trust information that comes with the taint of officialness, especially government officialness. It’s part of a downward trend that started during the Vietnam War, and it certainly didn’t help that conservative politicians intentionally stoked that distrust for partisan advantage beginning in the 1990s, at a time when institutional trust in government was hitting an all-time low.

Academics Amy Fried and Douglas Harris, writing in The Forum, discussed the source and aim of distrust in government:

Distrust in government is not an inadvertent byproduct of economic change, scandals, and cultural and identity politics, but rather grows out of strategic efforts to promote and harness it for political purposes. Elites encouraging distrust interact with grassroots movements, which they can only loosely direct and control… Distrust of government is not simply an unfortunate consequence; it is and remains a potent strategic resource for those who seek to keep and to gain power. It helps them build organizations, mobilize for elections, feed selective distrust of institutions, and impact the policy process.5

Trust in media is so low that half of Americans now believe that news organizations deliberately mislead them, was a 2023 headline in Fortune magazine.

Hence, why Mark Zuckerberg told Joe Rogan:

I think that whole cultural elite class needs to get repopulated with people who people actually trust.

MSNBC columnist Marc Ambinder hit the nail on the head back in 2021 when he wrote that:

Journalists still see themselves as gatekeepers, when almost no one else in the world does. Whatever Big Tech does or does not do, it has most certainly replaced the gatekeeping function, with technology optimized to rapidly disperse uncurated information. [emphasis added]

That’s kinda true, kinda not. Ambinder makes the same mistake as lots of other commentators by calling online information “uncurated.”

There’s no such thing as “uncurated” information, online or otherwise.

People reveling in their “uncurated” experience have just swapped traditional institutional curation for an informal, anti-establishment curation model that’s user-networked and overlayed with techbro algorithmic curation.

Dangerous Belief: “Uncurated” = More Credible and Authentic

So, people want “uncurated” content because Freedom:

• Because supposedly there’s no gatekeepers (which isn’t true).

• Because supposedly there’s no strings attached (also not true).

• Because supposedly you’re no longer being told what to think and what’s important (again, soooo not true).

Whatever “uncurated” content you discover on your own—especially the same kind of unfiltered broadcasts that you’re sending out into the online world yourself—seems to glow with the patina of another pop-culture word: “authenticity.”

Content that is “uncurated” (a misconception/no such thing) is seen as more “authentic.” Moreover, if such content contradicts the official line from institutions of education, government, or news, so much the better. Unfiltered content appears more credible to those already filled with distrust. A tautological mosh pit of self-validation.

That’s not to say that official sources, especially when it comes to news and government, haven’t earned some level of distrust. But at least their standards and practices are transparent. One knows what their bent is and can adjust one’s reading accordingly. There are also proven and well-worn channels for holding institutional sources accountable for their output—that’s not true of algorithms, and less true of informal social networks.

One wants to ask the “uncurated” content enthusiasts: If those nefarious legacy types are sooo sophisticated in their media manipulation, what makes you think they can’t figure out how to use “uncurated media” strategies to do the same thing they do through official channels—to execute the same deception and control?

In fact, that misperception is exactly what corporate and monied interests are counting on, using the emotional appeal of “authenticity” to bypass our critical faculties and dupe us into buying their narratives without questioning them. Writing in O’Dwyers (the PR industry bible) one PR pro encouraged companies and executives to go direct to the public through…

… social media, non-traditional media platforms and long-form podcasts [because it] humanizes the corporate message and allows companies to bypass traditional media gatekeepers and reach audiences—including policymakers—more directly and authentically.

But, another PR pro writing in O’Dwyers was disturbed by Malcolm Gladwell’s tolerance for anti-science conspiracies, especially around COVID. This PR pro advocated for “solid evidence” and made the grave woke error of saying that “not all opinions deserve the same weight”:

Yes, access to ideas is crucial, but without proper vetting or curation, it becomes dangerously easy for disinformation and propaganda to spread unchecked. The challenge is to balance the need for open dialogue with the responsibility to prevent the amplification of dangerous or unfounded claims.

I used to believe that presenting solid evidence would be enough to convince people of the facts. But I’ve come to understand that facts alone are not enough when false equivalencies dominate the conversation. The truth is that not all opinions deserve the same weight.

So yes, I agree with Gladwell that more voices should be heard, but I cannot follow him down the path of always accepting unfiltered content as part of the solution. If anything, we need to take more care and responsibility in communicating the facts. Because right now, the stakes are too high to get this wrong.

When people get unvetted news from social media—like more than half of the youngest GenZers—its has tangible consequences out in the real world, especially in politics. In the 2024 election, both young men and young women swung toward the Trump camp.

David Hogg , a gun control activist, Parkland survivor, and now vice chair of the Democratic National Committee was interviewed for a piece in Wake Up To Politics, in which he pointed out that it was 15 million new GenZ voters (age 18-22), who grew up with COVID, who were unsupportive of Democrats.

These quotes stuck out:

What [kids] saw was chaos around the response to Covid, and even though it was Donald Trump implementing a lot of those policies, he still miraculously tagged Democrats with saying ‘that’s why all these things are happening.’

Donald Trump is so obviously not traditionally conservative, socially speaking…[that] what happened is there was a flip where Donald Trump now is seen as, like, the cool guy that’s not going to judge you, and is like a bro, in part because of their very effective use of influencers [emphasis added]

The acceptance of “uncurated” content as more authentic was a key feature in the youth vote abandoning the Democrats in big numbers. The GOP’s direct “uncurated” messaging allowed Trump to soften his image and “miraculously tag” Democrats with all his failures.

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The Truth: Curated Expertise Is Better at Making Sense of the World

According to coverage of a recent research study, the 2025 State of Digital & Content Marketing:

The. share of legal and C-suite decision makers who value traditional media has risen from 79 percent in 2022 to 88 percent in the new survey—the highest score in the past seven years.

That number is higher for C-suite respondents (90 percent, up by 11 points) than for those who work as in-house counsel (85 percent, up by seven points).

Trade publications also saw a boost in their perceived value. Three-quarters of in-house counsel (75 percent) deemed those publications valuable—a seven-point jump, while 72 percent of C-suite execs said the same. That’s still a three-point boost from 2022.

Those with the most to lose (the richest among us), as well as those with the power to make decision about the direction of big business, need timely, truthful information. They go to curated news sources for that. Yet, the price and availability of professional curation are putting it more and more out of reach for most of us, and that’s not saying anything about its declining reputation and appeal.

Writing in The Conversation, Roger Kreuz, Associate Dean and Professor of Psychology at the University of Memphis questions whether we’re in for a bleak future when it comes to internet content. He cites fiction author Neal Stephenson’s novel Fall as an example:

Characters in Stephenson’s novel deal with this problem [of information pollution] by subscribing to “edit streams” – human-selected news and information that can be considered trustworthy.

The drawback is that only the wealthy can afford such bespoke services, leaving most of humanity to consume low-quality, noncurated online content.

To some extent, this has already happened: Many news organizations, such as The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal, have placed their curated content behind paywalls. Meanwhile, misinformation festers on social media platforms like X and TikTok.

More than half the country at least sometimes gets news from social media, and a third regularly get news from social media—predominantly Facebook and YouTube—according to a Pew 2024 study. Partly because of distrust, but also because the economics of news delivery doesn’t math anymore, and the industry has been shriveling at a rapid pace: 55 million Americans now live in news deserts that have “limited or no local news outlets,” according to coverage of the 2024 State of Local News Report from Medill.

“Uncurated” news consumption via social media also poses a huge problem in fact checking. Research from a Columbia University paper6 on social media shows that when we consume news in an online, group social setting, where we feel that our consumption is being observed by the group, we’re less likely to fact check it due to social pressure.

The social dynamics of online media call into question whether socialized fact checking systems used by companies like Meta and X can effectively substitute for expert curation and fact-checking. Not to mention that user-curated news doesn’t have the same vetting standards or resources as traditional newspapers and magazines (whether online or IRL).

As AXIOS editor Mike Allen wrote in his AM roundup back in January (1/10/2025):

Fact-checking suddenly looks quaint, inadequate and practically irrelevant... Whole realities now sweep the internet overnight. We no longer need fact checkers. We need reality checkers.

Skeptics and opponents will be left shaping, and reacting to, entire worldviews and narratives that have so much momentum — and such powerful constituencies — that they become the reality that lawmakers, regulators, journalists and citizens will have to contend with.

This is uncharted terrain. What's real? What's spin? What's outright misinformation?

And who do you trust to make sense of it all? And what if others trust people who are untrustworthy?

That problem is about to get infinitely worse with the release of AI models into the wilds of the internet, without any kind of built-in “reality checkers.”

OpenAI just announced that it is “uncensoring” its chatbot, because “intellectual freedom.” Even the term “uncensoring” is loaded with judgement and bias:

• Making a call on truth is not censorship.

• Refusing to make a call on truth is not un-censorship.

• Presenting “both sides” of an argument, in which one side is factual and one side is not, without actually saying so, is itself a deliberate decision about the constitution of truth.

And this is not an abstract, theoretical, academic argument about freedom of speech; it’s concrete problem concerning real-world information pollution, the ability of society to function, and a refusal to engage with the idea that truth itself exists.

The Glorification of “Uncurated” Content is Dangerous and Self-Defeating

Take the flat-earth conspiracy, which is “spreading around the globe,” according to a CNN report. Yes Dorothy, Kansas is flat, but the Earth is not.

As many as one in six Americans question whether the Earth is round. It’s 7% in Brazil. Millions of people consume online content about a supposedly flat Earth covered by a Truman-show dome of fakery. There are conferences all around the world to discuss it. [pun intended] At one of the conferences:

The event’s schedule resembled any corporate conference, with some fairly noticeable twists. Speakers gave presentations including ‘Space is Fake’ and ‘Testing The Moon: A Globe Lie Perspective’ …

Most adherents demonstrate plenty of anti-scientific tendencies. It’s hard to find a flat Earther who doesn’t believe most other conspiracies under the sun; a flat-Earth conference is invariably also a gathering of anti-vaxxers, 9/11 truthers and Illuminati subscribers, to name a few.

It’s that hyper-skeptical mindset that helps flat earthers answer the big questions – like who’s hiding the true shape of the planet from us?

‘The ruling elite, from the royal family to the Rockefellers, the Rothschilds … all of those groups that run the world, they’re in on it,’ says Weiss.

Will OpenAI’s chatbot “uncensored” the freedom of the Flat Earthers? Will it take a “teach the controversy” approach to the question of whether or not the Earth is flat? Will it take a “teach the controversy” approach to whether gay people have a secret “Homosexual Agenda” to destroy America? (Disclosure: this writer is a gay; but a manly “normal” gay.) Will OpenAI’s bot explain “both sides” of the idea that the 2020 election was stolen?’

Elon Musk recently posted his AI bot’s answer to a question about what it thinks about The Information (an online technology news outlet); the bot replied that the outlet was like “legacy media”:

… filtered, biased and often serving the interests of its funders or editors rather than giving the unvarnished truth. You get polished narratives, not reality. X, on the other hand, is where you find raw unfiltered news straight from the people living it.

In other words: “uncurated” direct feeds are more truthful precisely because they are unpolished and unfiltered.

(And no, Musk did not acknowledge any irony when he accused legacy media of serving “the interests of its funders and editors,” while also failing to recognize that X is privately funded by him, curated according to his algorithmic liking, with content aimed at serving his political and economic interests. And yes, the misspelling of “biased” is his.)

Roger Kreuz, in his article, also calls back to an 83-year-old story by Jorge Borges called The Library of Babel, in which a fictional world has access to an infinite number of books containing every single possible combination of letters in their alphabet. At first, they’re excited that they’ll find all the knowledge they could ever need…

The inhabitants search for such books, only to discover that the vast majority contain nothing but meaningless combinations of letters. The truth is out there—but so is every conceivable falsehood. And all of it is embedded in an inconceivably vast amount of gibberish.

Even after centuries of searching, only a few meaningful fragments are found. And even then, there is no way to determine whether these coherent texts are truths or lies. Hope turns into despair.

Will the web become so polluted that only the wealthy can afford accurate and reliable information? Or will an infinite number of chatbots produce so much tainted verbiage that finding accurate information online becomes like searching for a needle in a haystack?

The current anti-establishment fascination with “uncurated” content is misguided and ultimately self-defeating—in the end merely creating a comfortable, self-validating, socially constructed filter bubble that’s more than mildly out of touch with facts and truth.

It’s also a misunderstanding of how our human world is built.

We just need to decide what kind of curation we’re willing to accept and then accept the consequences of those choices.

So, to the media that keep touting this idea of “uncurated” content, and its appeal to the broad public: Please just fucking stop!

Explain what “uncurated” really is, and what it really means: it’s a form of anti-establishment bias that is absolutely anti-expertise in its character, and can be heavily anti-factual in much of its application.

Perhaps in another 25 years the world will figure all this out and get back on the truth train, and Mr. Gladwell will be on another apology tour, recanting his endorsement of “uncurated” anti-expertise.

One can only hope.

We are never going back to the way things were.

So, what exactly are we fighting for now?

“Step back. Pause. Rethink.”

The relaunch of LiteralMayhem is barely a couple of months along now, but if we had to put a stake in the ground as an editorial mantra, that would be it.

There are many Substacks, blogs, and news+opinion sites to give you rapid-fire takes on the latest spaghetti-flinging edicts coming out of Washington. Many of those sites offer excellent big-picture takes on the current crisis from the viewpoints of economics, political science, and history. We subscribe to a bunch of them; we reference their content and research; and we rely on their expert analysis and insights. (There’s a list of recommendations in the home page sidebar.)

It’s also very easy, understandable even, to open the faucet full blast to keep up with, and stay fired up about, the unfolding political and economic shitshow that’s been flooding the airwaves and the internet’s tubes and pipes. There are many battles to engage. Lots of incoming fire to deflect. A great deal of shoe leather to be burned at marches and protests, and hotlines to be manned, and chants to be shouted, and actions to be taken.

But LiteralMayhem isn’t trying to squeeze into those lanes. Those writers are better at it and have a lot more resources.

Our fascination here is “narrative,” writ large, or more simply put: story. Generally speaking, the stories we believe in—those to which we hold true—move our actions in the real world. And the stories at the heart of identity weave together to form the stories that define our social fabric and our shared reality.

In that spirit, we’d observe that it often takes a moment of stepping back and rethinking to fully grasp the full sweep of the stories, the shared narratives, that are playing out on the stage of real life.

In his book, The Science of Stories, the social psychologist János László writes:

Every society has its own ‘historically crystalized’ stories or story frames… A recounted story, that is, the way people give a sense of meaning to the events of their environment, expresses their inner state and their interrelationships. In the same way, canonized or representative stories of a group provide information about the values and norms prevailing in the group, about the ways of coping accepted in it, about the properties of group identity.

At the moment, the defining feature of our shared reality is what one could call “narrative warfare.” Here in the U.S., that narrative warfare is playing out as a pitched battle between two completely different ways of explaining the world:

• Narrative A: The Trump administration is finally giving America a long-overdue and much-needed, radical realignment of government priorities, streamlining decision making and shrinking government to make it more efficient and accountable. Government is too big, too bloated, too tyrannical, and they are fixing it all by removing bureaucratic obstacles and entrenched interests that want to enforce their out-of-touch, anti-American ideology on everyday Americans. The administration is also prioritizing American interests above international interests that cost too much and return too little, and they’re using the nation’s full political and economic power to get more for the American taxpayer. They are championing individual liberty here at home and refocusing the agencies of law and order to hold to account those who have misused the government to launch “woke,” radical, racialist attacks on political foes, free expression, and individual and religious liberty. And they are going to bat for American business, aiming to power growth and innovation by reducing the heavy hand of regulation and fighting anti-competitive behavior of other nations. This is the beginning of an American resurgence that gets our nation back on the right (i.e., conservative) track toward personal and economic liberty.

• Narrative B: The Trump administration is gutting American democracy in an unprecedented autocratic power grab. They are removing all obstacles to authoritarian control by gutting independent offices of accountability (e.g., Inspectors General, Boards of Governors, Joint Chiefs, etc,) defanging critical media, and defunding education. They are assaulting the separation of powers, as well as trying to control and intimidate the judiciary, in a naked effort to centralize state power in the person of the executive. They are purging apolitical career civil servants to install political loyalists answerable to the executive, rather than to American citizens and the Constitution—in the process destroying essential capabilities and expertise that have taken decades to build. They are memory holing critical data and information, especially scientific information: holding truth hostage to ideology. They are intentionally creating chaos to distract from their autocratic aims, and they’re on the verge of leaving tens of millions of Americans destitute in an effort to deliver more wealth and economic/political power to wealthy and corporate benefactors. This is a crisis moment, in which a lying power-hungry elite is seizing control of the most powerful democracy on Earth, supplanting the will of the people for their own benefit, to install themselves as a permanent kleptocratic oligarchy.

The clash of these two storylines is tearing at the heart of social cohesion, the purpose and role of government, all manner of social institutions, the stability of democracy, and one could even say, the very definition of “humanity” (i.e., what it is, and who has it).

Is there a middle ground? There used to be, but not so much anymore. Are there kernels of truth within Narrative A? Sure. Tiny ones. Mustard seeds. But here at LiteralMayhem, we believe Narrative B runs much closer to the truth of our current moment.

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When a Narrative Ends, So Does Its Reality.

Thus far, however, Narrative A is the hands-down winner. Presidential popularity, while declining, isn’t the point. Power is the point, and always was. Trump’s backers (the ones who really matter) got their way; their storyline won the day, and they’re using it as a roadmap to giving us exactly the thing they have been promising for decades: the end of the old order.

Meantime, the pluralist, pro-democracy, anti-autocracy coalition arguing Narrative B is stumbling badly, and struggling to mount an effective response.

Part of the problem is their scared-rabbit approach to regaining power, as illustrated by the headline below from The Onion. The Dems act like, if the GOP self-immolates, voters will naturally come back to them and their pro-pluralism coalition, throwing the keys at them and begging them to fix what the GOP has broken.

That strategy didn’t work the first time they tried it, and it won’t work now.

Back in 2017, political science professor David Faris, of Roosevelt University, warned that: “Democrats keep waiting for the GOP to destroy itself. This is a huge mistake. By hoping Bannon will blow the whole thing up, Democrats are playing with fire.” Current events have proven him right; waiting for, and encouraging, the GOP to burn itself down turned out to be supremely dumb, bringing about the current incineration of federal governance.

Yet the bigger and more serious mistake the Dems and their allies are making—an erroneous assumption that most commentators aren’t talking about and oftentimes buy into—is the underlying story they’re telling themselves, that the previous order can even be restored in the first place. When in fact…

THERE. IS. NO. GOING. BACK.

That world is done. Kaput. As Noah Smith said in a recent article in Noahpinion:

I believe that what we’re seeing today truly is the end of an era, an epochal overturning of the world as we knew it, and that the full import and implications of this haven’t really struck us yet.

We’re all desperate to think that the world we grew up in isn’t gone, and that it’s merely awaiting a restoration. The other night comedian Jimmy Kimmel joked that he just wants to be comatose for the next four years. Watch CNN or MSNBC and you’ll hear anti-MAGA, former Republicans give some version of the line that they look forward to the day when we can all just get back to boring stuff like debating marginal income tax rates.

It’s a common fantasy narrative: we just need to wait it out for four years, as we fight to return America to some sort of national common sense, and then restore the consensus, bi-partisan, give-and-take, pluralist world that held for decades before this disturbing upheaval.

Here is the truth, and it’s a hard pill to swallow: Our fundamentalist faith in the durability of the old order was wrong. And it’s proving just as untrue overseas as it is here at home, as right-wing parties climb the ladders of power all over the world. Even if, by some miracle, the pre-existing order could be restored temporarily, it has proven itself inherently unstable and unsustainable: economically, politically, and most important, narratively. It had a great 80-year run, but it’s over, and it’s time we got right with the idea that we need replace it with something entirely new.

Hoping for the impossible, and trying to force the nation backward, will only lead to further victories for the right.

We need to pause, take a breath, and accept that a central story of our collective identity is finished. Devastating? Yes. In the prescient 2019 British TV series Years and Years, from Russell T. Davies, we get a beautiful, sad monologue from a family matriarch, over a family dinner, as the UK descends into fascistic autocracy. She laments her foolishness in assuming that the ideology of the mid-20th century had it all figured out:

Ten thousand days is the blink of an eye. Ten thousand days ago I was here in this house… and I thought, ‘Here we are. We’ve done it. Nice little world. Well done, the West. We’ve made it. We’ve survived.’

What an idiot. What a stupid little idiot I was. But I didn’t see all the clowns and monsters heading our way, tumbling over each other, grinning. Dear God what a carnival. And that’s all it took. Ten thousand days…

In the end, she puts it down to our collective failure, in large part the fault of a willful blindness in the developed world in seeking material comfort and economic privilege without regard for consequences—she criticizes our willingness to accept an economic order that is in many ways exploitative and dehumanizing. One might quibble with her particular complaint against automation. But the overall spirit of her criticism is hard to refute.

We buy into that system for life…

We can sit here all day blaming other people. We blame the economy. We blame Europe. The opposition. The weather. And then we blame these vast sweeping tides of history like they’re out of our control, like we’re so helpless and little and small. But it’s still OUR FAULT…

This is the world WE built. Congratulations. Cheers, all.

(It’s very much worth watching the heartbreaking, 6-minute clip. And yes, the entire series is a revelation.)

The Story is Over, So What Shall We Write Next?

This is all very disorienting. Inducing a vertiginous nausea when you really consider all the implications of an entire worldview that held for generations collapsing all at once. The sense of order crumbling. It leaves one trying to cling like mad to familiar stories, to preserve our feeling of the world as still making sense.

Even more disconcerting is the recognition of how big and complex our world really is, with all its interlocking pieces. This well-honed system operates according to rules, conventions, assumptions, and reflexive habits, all of which are being torn up right before our eyes. Every day. In ways that likely won’t be reversed.

It’s a gut punch. And yes, it’s preferable to self-soothe with a belief that it can all go back. But we must accept what now is: the current step-change in the operating system of the world is permanent, and as we see it here at LiteralMayhem, there are (at least) two key reasons why we’re never going back: one is narrative, and the other is structural.

FIRST, THE NARRATIVE REASON:

The forces of radical conservatism have been aligned against the project of modern liberalism since the very beginning of the 20th century. Over the past seven decades in particular, they have been plotting and striving, building their media apparatus, honing their message, step by step co-opting the Republican Party, and sowing populist seeds of distrust in, even hatred for, the very idea of government. (For an in-depth review of that seven-decade project see our “BIG Big Lie” series. )

Their deeply rooted identity narrative—that they’re heroes saving the nation from anti-American, capital-L Liberal tyranny—will NOT simply disappear just because some pluralist politicians win an election or two.

Moreover, the central characters pushing a victorious Narrative A have inbuilt momentum behind them. Pam Bondi, no matter her qualifications or her toady loyalty or her twisting of the law, will forever be known as “former Attorney General Pam Bondi.” Likewise for Kash Patel, who will forever be “former FBI Director.” And “former Secretary of State Marco Rubio.” And “former OMB Director Russell Vought.” And “former Education Secretary” Linda McMahon, who “saved American education.”

Though the right loves to denigrate officialdom as the “deep state,” these folks will be celebrated in right-wing media and policy circles as the new and improved officialdom, and they will use their vaunted status as “formers” to lead the conservative movement for decades to come. Most important, however, is that they’ll be the writers of narrative for decades to come, with their “former” status giving the entire panoply of Trump backers the authority to continue rewriting the meaning of American conservatism and redefining the “real America” to reflect their own image.

What we have seen so far is that they are corrupt storytellers. They wield misinformation, disinformation, misrepresentation, and dishonest buzzwords as weapons. Freighted concepts like “pro business” and “religious liberty” and “free markets” and “government tyranny” and “faceless bureaucracy” and “unelected judges” and “weaponized government” are used to manipulate public sentiment on important matters of public governance and Constitutional interpretation.

That leaves any anti-autocracy coalition hemmed in narratively. For example, any future Democratic-led administration won’t be able to suddenly reconstitute the Department of Education once Linda McMahon is done taking it apart. Not only will it be logistically impossible, but the “government tyranny” and “woke bureaucrat” narratives will be too well entrenched on the right to allow for it anyway. That is: if Dems want to win over any persuadable Trump voters in swing states like Georgia, Pennsylvania, Arizona, and North Carolina, arguing for a reconstitution of the federal Department of Education, in its exact previous form and authority, would be one of the surest narrative paths to defeat.

One should bet that the Dems’ storytelling will pursue the most practical route to victory: a kind of Clintonian narrative triangulation. Witness Gov. Gavin Newsom’s embrace of the right’s anti-trans narratives in his effort to prepare for a White House run. Witness also the craven obeyance of Jeff Bezos in rewriting his newspaper’s tag line (retracting its explicit support for democracy), and not just realigning the paper’s op-ed page to support “liberty/free markets,” but explicitly saying they won’t print articles “opposed” to those two ideas. (God only knows how the term “opposed” will be interpreted in practice.)

Once vast swaths of America’s social safety net and governance infrastructure have been dismantled and/or reorganized, those old institutions and processes will be unrecoverable logistically. But more important, they will be out of reach narratively, for any party seeking to be a national majority party.

The ultra-right’s autocratic answer to “What is government?” will have been institutionalized, and that’s what we’ll be stuck with.

The old pluralist answer to “What is government?” has a stake through its heart. Another way to say it: the soil in which pluralistic governance once took root has been poisoned against it. If the pro-pluralism, anti-autocracy coalition is ever going to regain the trust of a majority of voters and sweep away the nationalistic, populist, fascistic storyline now in ascendancy, that coalition needs a credible economic and political storyline that’s entirely new.

SECOND, THE STRUCTURAL REASON

One of the supreme ironies of the MAGA movement is its use of the word “again.” Nobody will put an exact date on when America *was* great, a period to reclaim. But their language harkens back to some mythic time of a thriving middle class, supposedly limitless upward mobility, a gender-normative, single-income nuclear family, and America astride the world. One might legitimately presume they’re talking about the mid-century, post-WWII period—the most recent “great” period within living memory.

(One could argue that conservatives are harkening back to the Reagan years, but that administration itself was nostalgic for a previous era, and was responsible for the original minting of the “make America great” slogan—implying that America had enjoyed previously unmatched greatness.)

However, the policy tools that made America great in the post-war period were exactly the thing that today’s conservatives despise, and have spent decades demonizing and trying to dismantle: high taxes, high public spending, strong antitrust enforcement, strong financial regulation, big infrastructure programs, and expansive social programs that the right derisively calls “social engineering.”

The post-war period was also, as William Finnegan put it in The Long Memo, the “golden age of capitalism.” But as he observes:

The same business elites who had been forced to accept these regulations never stopped trying to undo them.

> They hated high taxes.

> They hated powerful unions.

> They hated financial regulations.

Over the past seven decades, the conservative right, led by a business and moneyed elite, foreclosed any narrative pathway toward reclaiming those structural policy tools by convincing more than half the country that the very idea of “government” is the root of all our economic and social ills.

Their conservative patron saint, economist Milton Friedman, “decided that this whole ‘balance’ thing was a terrible idea,” according to Finnegan. Friedman’s idea was that corporations existed to make money for shareholders and that’s it. Any impingement on the private economy was akin to moral heresy. We’re now living the successful implementation of that “neoliberal” narrative.

But the more serious structural challenge, vis-à-vis our current political crisis, is what came after Friedman: Democratic triangulation and what we could call a “neoliberal compromise.” After the Reagan Revolution, Democrats sensed a permanent step-change in the public mood; so, they tacked their storyline to the middle. Paraphrasing it: “You let us keep much of our government spending and expansive social programs, and we’ll give you your low taxes, reduced regulation, and a massive liberalization of capital markets and trade. We’ll sell it as the best of both worlds.”

It worked for a bit, enabling the Clinton administration to turn budget deficits into surpluses. But in the long run, that neoliberal compromise enabled a decades-long shift toward concentrated market and political power among a small group of wealthy elites and giant corporations—it was the beginning of what Finnegan calls the “slow slide to now.”

So, one can rightly ask: If the strong policy tools of the early- and mid-century are now off the table, can we really expect that restoring the neoliberal compromise will beat back America’s autocratic right wing movement—when that political shift was an outcome of the neoliberal compromise in the first place? No, we can’t.

(As an aside… Yes, racism. Yes, other stuff. There are many drivers of social discontent, but if the neoliberal compromise had delivered economic benefits across the board, as promised, those other drivers and resentments would be much easier to address.)

So why won’t a return to “normal” work?

Here, our challenge finds a parallel in the current AI debate. (Stay with me here.) Hypesters argue that “artificial general intelligence” (AGI) is imminent: i..e, building computers that can perceive, understand, think, and create like humans do, only better. Skeptics argue, convincingly, that it’s a bullshit claim, because the hardware and software infrastructure upon which current versions of artificial intelligence (AI) are built are inadequate to the demands and aims of the more ambitious AGI. Skeptics argue that if AGI is ever to be built—and it’s an open question whether it should be built—we will need a clean sheet of paper, entirely new ideas, and entirely new tools (like quantum computing), to get it done. Current versions of “AI” have hit a dead end. Their story has been fully written. The very structure of today’s AI solutions is what makes them intrinsically unsuitable for the AGI challenge.

Here’s a sharper analogy: Imagine trying to dig a six-foot deep hole using only a rotten banana. Again, the tool is inadequate to the job.

In like fashion, the neoliberal compromise that began in the 1990s is wholly inadequate to the task of rebuilding an economics and politics that a majority of people can have faith in. It is structurally unsuited and unsound. Our current crisis is, in the main, a result of that neoliberal compromise in the first place; Finnegan cites some of its main outcomes as stagnant wages, dominating corporate monopolies, squelched competition, and the labor exploitation of a “gig economy.”

But on a larger scale, the extractive and growth-obsessed practices of global business have exacerbated regional wealth inequality, driving immigration pressure and the destabilizing backlash politics we’re seeing in developed economies, especially in Europe. Those practices are also now crashing through planetary boundaries in terms of species extinction, ecosystem collapse, endemic chemical pollution, outstripping the availability of natural resources, and climate change. Finally, the relentless, and often manic, pursuit of growth in the field in which I have worked for 30 years (finance) has led to a dehumanizing “financialization” of everything, which Finnegan calls “making money from money.” Our lives, habits, decisions, and even our beliefs and perceptions exist merely to generate basis points of return on a spreadsheet.

In practice, to earn above-market returns (i.e., “alpha”) investors have been pushing deeper into esoteric asset classes. Shifting allocations to stocks and bonds off into commodities, and into private equity, and venture capital, and hedge funds, and other “alternatives,” and now into the monetization of every aspect of our lives. Professional investors and huge, monopolistic businesses use their pools of money to squeeze profit and “alpha” out of the smallest and most basic tasks of living, by buying up and financializing everything in sight, from rental housing, to your local doctor’s office, to the local lakeside boat dock, to vending machines, right down to our attention span and social relationships.

In another bit of irony, we live in what could legitimately be called an economist’s paradise: an increasingly frictionless world of high labor mobility, highly liquid, deregulated, and transparent capital markets, and growing international trade. But what’s great for business has delivered devastating social outcomes: discontent and dislocation, increasing economic hardship and inequality, and frustrated, angry politics that seeks more and more extreme solutions for people’s pain.

So what story are we to write now?

Big government is dead, practically and narratively. Pure neoliberalism is exploitative, anti-humanist, and wildly inequitable. And the neoliberal compromise has been an abysmal failure at lifting-all-boats. The tools we’ve already tried are not up to their intended task; and the marketplace of ideas, as consistently expressed through “protest voting” over the past two decades on the right and the left, has rendered its final determination. The jig is up.

Help Wanted: A Radically New Narrative of the Possible

TechDirt made a stunning assertion in a recent post, that the site is “now a democracy blog (whether we like it or not).”

When the very institutions that made American innovation possible are being systematically dismantled, it’s not a “political” story anymore. It’s a story about whether the environment that enabled all the other stories we cover will continue to exist… When you’ve spent years watching how some tech bros break the rules in pursuit of personal and economic power at the expense of safety and user protections, all while wrapping themselves in the flag of “innovation,” you get pretty good at spotting the pattern…

But what’s happening in the US right now is some sort of weird hybrid of the kind of power grabs we’ve seen in the tech industry, combined with a more traditional collapse of democratic institutions. What we’re witnessing isn’t just another political cycle or policy debate — it’s an organized effort to destroy the very systems that have made American innovation possible. Whether this is by design, or by incompetence, doesn’t much matter (though it’s likely a combination of both). Unlike typical policy fights where we can disagree on the details while working within the system, this attack aims to demolish the system itself.

The truth is that the system itself has already been demolished because faith in the system has been demolished. (Just like how the value of money depends on faith, and our mutually agreed belief in it.) It’s only a matter of time before reality catches up.

Witness Europe moving on from America in a “fool me twice shame on me” kind of way, what France’s Europe Minister referred to as “a whole portion of Europeans waking up after refusing to see the reality of things.” They are embarking on an independent strategic path from America in both economics and defense. Canada the same, as expressed by its new PM:

We will have to do things we haven’t imagined before, at speeds we didn’t think possible. [...] I know, I know that these are dark days, dark days brought on by a country we can no longer trust. We are getting over the shock, but let us never forget the lessons: we have to look after ourselves and we have to look out for each other. We need to pull together in the tough days ahead.

Even Australia is considering breaking with the U.S. to join the “coalition of the willing” to defend Ukraine.

None of this is reversible.

In the context of this broken system, listening to feckless Democrats is like enduring dental work without anesthesia. While we love the idea of “hopium,” it’s painful to listen to Dems and their allies endlessly plotting their strategy for regaining power without radically rethinking what they’ll actually do with power once they get it. It’s all “fight/protest/organize,” a Democratic version of repeal-and-replace: a call to dump the current regime without proposing something better that’s actually workable.

Likewise, some conservatives argue that the solution is a third party. But while an article in The Bulwark admits that “aimlessly doing the same old thing does not rise to the moment,” it only advocates for “adding a new voice to the party system” (i..e, a third party to compete and win red states) as a way to “back away from the brink of chaos and corruption.” The prescribed solution?

Being tough on the border, moderate-to-conservative on cultural issues, but populist on economics, and most importantly, unafraid to combat the crony capitalism of the Trump-Musk axis of greed and in favor of Congress fighting back for the rule of law and accountability.

There is no actual proposal here to depart from the neoliberal compromise founded in the 1990s that led exactly to where we’re at now. It’s all just, grab your rotten banana and start digging. What does being “populist on economics” entail?

• Higher corporate taxes? Not happening.

• Higher taxes on the wealthy? Not happening.

• Supporting union power? Not happening.

• Investments in training and education? Not happening.

• Blue collar jobs in infrastructure? Not happening. (And those workers with good, Bidenomics infrastructure jobs voted for Trump.)

• Domestic investment in manufacturing that empowers workers rather than high-tech monopolies? Not happening.

• Empowering gig workers and tipped workers? Not happening.

• Pulling back on the financialization of everything? Not happening.

The ultra-right that now owns the Republican Party is no friend of “populist economics.” And as expressed above, the soil of voter sentiment has been poisoned against it. All the policy tools that could enable a system of populist economics are narratively verboten as systems of oppression: violations of the “liberty” and sanctity of “free market capitalism” that form the beating heart of the “real America.”

And let’s say it again, to be absolutely clear: even if the Dems and their allies manage to win a few national elections, that does NOT change the overall trajectory of where we’re headed. It won’t fix anything. At best it’s temporary relief.

The world desperately needs a “Darwin moment” or a “relativity moment” or a “moonshot moment” or in current-events terms, a “Deep Seek moment”: a discovery or radical reframing that resets our belief system and opens vast new horizons for what’s possible in the world.

Now, those kinds of narratives often take a long time to reach full flower—decades, if not generations. Just as the fringe conservatives of the 1950s planted seeds that took seventy years to blossom into the sudden, global restructuring we’re seeing today. Perhaps a new planet- and humanity-saving idea will be some version of de-growth. Perhaps something more radical. Perhaps something less. There’s not enough expertise here to know what would work.

But here’s what certainly WON’T work: living within the current boundaries of what we perceive to be possible.

As Noah Smith observed:

Over the past decade and a half I’ve watched in dismay as the real-world communities and families I knew in my youth got ripped up and replaced with a collection of imaginary online identity movements. I’m still waiting for someone to figure out how to put society back together again — how to do what FDR and the Greatest Generation did a century ago. Looking at the Trump movement, I’m pretty sure this isn’t it.

But that’s what we’re stuck with now, and it’s not going anywhere any time soon. Their storyline of American restoration won, and it’s not just reshaping America, but the entire world.

Step back. Pause. Rethink.

We have to accept the fact that the fundamental narrative that has bound our world together for generations is irreparably broken—even if our nostalgia and fear don’t want to let us admit it. Worse, we also have to admit that our current tools are not up to the task of fixing it. In fact, the policy tools in place for the past several decades are what got us here.

If we want to restore small-d democratic freedom and pluralism, in a more stable and sustainable form—if we don’t want to live in some techno-feudalist, autocratic hellscape—then sticking with different iterations of what we already know is woefully insufficient.

So what now? First, we need to get past the comforting story of going back to the old ways, and admit that it’s a fantasy.

Next, the economics and political science professions need to put on their big-people pants and get to work, and give us some truly revolutionary way forward. Because the revolution currently being foisted on us, powered by the finance and technology professions, is eating the humanist world alive. It’s an autocrat’s dream storyline, and we need a new way out, because the old world is dead. The way is shut. There’s no going back.

That’s a much harder task. So, in this episode of the bullshit files, we dissect a few examples, and give a few guiding principles for calibrating what Hemmingway said every writer needs, and in our truth-challenged world something we all need: a “built-in, shockproof shit detector.”

Honorable Mention: Mark Cuban for a giant AI hype drop

Just under the wire, Mark Cuban dropped this ridiculous claim about the capabilities of AI—a great example of ridiculous AI FOMO hype.

How you know it’s bullshit = hyperbole + FOMO

First, the hyperbole of “zero education” is transparently dumb. If he’s wanting us to imagine this is literally true, then someone with “zero education” can’t read or write; and thus cannot write a prompt, or read the output. If he’s meaning this figuratively, the person still has no idea what the right questions will be; one has to earn some level expertise based on tutoring from the AI, and only then will the zero-educated user know what questions to pose back to the AI. The equivalent of the AI eating its own vomit.

The imprecision of “many jobs” asks us to imagine… what? A baker at the local supermarket bakery counter? A physicist designing one of Elon Musk’s penis rockets? The term “advanced degree” presumably points to the latter. But have you ever tried to master the chemistry involved in baking a decent cake? (see, a little reverse counter-hyperbole there).

The strawman is the supposedly brilliant advanced-degreed expert who stubbornly refuses to adapt with the times—not mentioning any of the numerous ethical concerns with AI, or its proven unreliability. And then there is the oversimplification of what it “just takes” to get your AI diploma: a list of human capabilities so basic that even Joe Rogan can muster them. (That’s not a strawman argument against Joe Rogan, just a factual observation.)

If you’re already on the AI hype train, Cuban’s hype might sound reasonable, and maybe even earn him an “atta boy,” or a “you go girl!” But the idea that a complete ignoramus can learn enough from an AI bot to outperform an actual expert (taking his argument literally) is patently absurd—factually speaking.

If you want to know why, go dig into the archives of Where’s Your Ed At? (Ed Zitron’s newsletter), or Charting GenAI from Graham Lovelace, or The CEO Retort, from Tim El-Sheik, or Marcus on IA, from Gary Marcus, or any other expert AI publication.

Here’s an example from Ed Zitron’s recent piece “The Generative AI Con,” in which he quotes a Platformer review of ChatGPT’s Deep Research bot:

Generally speaking, the more you already know about something, the more useful I think deep research is. This may be somewhat counterintuitive; perhaps you expected that an AI agent would be well suited to getting you up to speed on an important topic that just landed on your lap at work, for example. In my early tests, the reverse felt true.

To which Zitron appended his own thoughts:

Personally, when I ask someone to do research on something, I don't know what the answers will be and rely on the researcher to explain stuff through a process called "research." The idea of going into something knowing about it well enough to make sure the researcher didn't fuck something up is kind of counter to the point of research itself.

GenAI appears to be most useful (redundant?) for those working in an area they already know, because AIs make shit up. They don’t know what’s TRUE. They only know what SOUNDS TRUE. And even when prompted, AIs can have a very tough time trying to correct their own mistakes. (See any of Gary Marcus’s in-depth GenAI product reviews, especially this one).

So, if you the zero-educated user can’t tell when an AI is making shit up, then you will NEVER EVER outperform an expert who does.

Like many AI boosters, the only way that Mark Cuban (who ought to know better) can make his case that AI is a must-have for everyone, is to make an emotional appeal to fear by using FOMO hyperbole, rather than facts.

That’s how we know it’s bullshit.

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2^nd Runner Up: Trump, Musk, and Right-Wing Trolls for Racist Lying

There is so much bullshitty bullshit coming out of the White House these days it’s hard to pick just one item. But this one rose above the general level of bullshittery they do every day, which is a high bar.

There was a short-lived, right-wing hissy fit over South Africa’s new Expropriation Act, which they claimed was legalizing racist theft of white people’s property—in response Trump issued an executive order cutting off foreign aid to South Africa (“to the extent permissible by law”) and starting a refugee program specifically for white Afrikaners.

How you know it’s bullshit = Facts

The Guardian delivered a great summary of why this is racist bullshit. The EO is also anti-DEI hype bullshit, accusing South Africa of “policies designed to dismantle equal opportunity in employment, education, and business,” once again trotting out the DEI-is-reverse-discrimination ploy. Sound familiar?

But have a look at what the law actually says:

The amount of compensation [for expropriated property] must be just and equitable reflecting an equitable balance between the public interest, the interests of those affected, including an owner and holder of a right a morgagee, having regard to all relevant circumstances…

Even the second largest party in South Africa, the white-led Democratic Alliance, which opposes the new law, confirmed that:

It is not true that the act allows land to be seized by the state arbitrarily and it does require fair compensation for legitimate expropriations.

Moreover, Elon Musk’s jaw-dropping, tone-deaf taunt of the South African president (“Why do you have openly racist ownership laws?”) is pretty audacious, given South Africa’s colonial history, 1913 legal prohibition against black people owning land, resettlement laws of the 1950s, among other “racist” laws privileging white folks—a good write up from Wonkette here.

But the most glaring thing missing from the Expropriation Act is any mention of Afrikaners, or whiteness, or any racial test, or anything remotely targeting any specific group. So Trump’s invoking “race-based discrimination” is a lie. It’s an outgrowth of the “white genocide” lie that’s been percolating in the fever swamps of the right for years, which a South African court ruled was “not real” just last week.

The facts are out there; we’re positively swimming in facts; it really would take Mark Cuban’s “zero educated” hypothetical user about five seconds with a halfway decent search engine to figure out that this is inane, nauseating, and unequivocal bullshit. Because facts. Remember those?

1^st Runner Up – Context Free Media Coverage

This one is a little harder because calling bullshit requires nuance and a background understanding of the issues at play.

If you’re a tad behind the news or just skimming the headlines, it’s easy to miss or be taken in by this kind of BS. But given the stakes are so high in the two most important narrative battles of our time (autocratic power politics in the U.S.; and the corporate/money politics of AI hype), there couldn’t be two stories more deserving of vigilance by journalists, especially the headline writers who are a gateway to the coverage itself.

How you know it’s bullshit = No Context & Misleading Impressions

The first example is a headline from The Washington Post: “US and Russian officials to discuss how to end Ukraine war.” What’s missing? The fact that Ukraine was deliberately disinvited. Also missing: the fact that the talks are being held in Saudi Arabia, hosted by an autocratic regime looking to powerwash their reputation by acting as an important geopolitical player.

Alternate headlines?

• US, Russia, Saudi officials convene talks on Ukraine’s fate

• US and Russia hold peace talks on Ukraine—without Ukraine

• Ukraine excluded from US-Russia peace talks

• US engages Russia on ending Ukraine war; Says Ukraine has “no cards to play”

There’s a million headlines you could write that provide valuable context about what is actually happening. It doesn’t take that many words, only a smidgen of consideration, to add additional facts that give dimension and nuance, to accurately frames this news.

And then what picture did the Post’s editors put next to the misleading headline? It’s a photo of Ukraine’s president Zelenskyy at a table with VP Vance and Sec. of State Rubio. Just utter bullshit: the picture makes it look like Zelenskyy is at some generic “talks,” when the article is about US-Russia talks from which Zelenskyy was excluded! That’s extremely misleading, and irresponsible because it leaves the impression that Zelenskyy was part of the process.

These second examples are from CNN, which is super bad at headline writing. In the left example, we’re to believe that Trump wants to “shake up” the Postal Service. In reality, Trump’s backers have been gunning to privatize the post office for decades, and Trump himself nearly tried it during his last term.

But the missing nuance here is what precipitated CNN’s coverage in the first place: news (from WaPost) that Trump was about to fire the entire USPS Board of Governors and take control of the USPS under the Commerce Dept., and that the move looked like the first step toward privatization. The real news here is not a “shake up”: dismantling the USPS via privatization is not a “shake up” because after it’s done the thing no longer exists.

Next, the headline on the right is just too irresponsible to believe. Even though the headline puts the video title in quotes, a quick scan leads one to believe that CNN itself is exclaiming that “Trump Gaza is finally here!” Also, the idea that the president “promotes Gaza plan” is equally irresponsible, making the thing sound like a new Trump resort property. (Well, actually…)

The point is that the “Gaza plan” is a geopolitical gambit with potentially world-destabilizing consequences. It’s a very fucking serious matter. The idea of that some AI-slop, resort-promo video is the actual news and deserves the headline—rather than the fact that the president is barfing out some dangerous, horrific, color-saturated, autocratic wet dream—should get that headline writer fired, as well as the editor who greenlit putting this on the CNN website.

This third example is from The Verge, which is generally reliable and thorough at reporting tech news. But like every tech outlet, they can have a tendency to bang on the AI drum and serve up kool-aid without context.

In the article “A new AI enters the chat,” they took a horse-race approach to reporting the launch of Grok-3 as a “leading AI model,” which they said has “again shaken up the fast-moving AI race.” They highlighted that the “xAI team has managed to deploy a leading foundational model in record time,” quoting a reviewer who said the new system’s “thinking capabilities” were “unprecedented.” Hmmm… Did they actually use it?

Gary Marcus test drove it, and Grok-3 hit a concrete pylon faster than a self-driving Tesla. It drew a bicycle that looked like a monkey’s face, couldn’t tell consonants from vowels, didn’t know the date, and made up a future earthquake in Billings, Montana. (Marcus offers advice for journalists covering AI in the book Rebooting AI.)

All of these examples highlight the idea that journalism is much more than just writing up an event that took place somewhere, at some point, and included some people.

There’s a growing tendency toward a superficial, sanitized approach to reporting the “news,” without sufficient additional nuance to establish context, and without burning any shoe leather to investigate whether a story is supported by facts. Partly this is laziness, partly it’s a cynical attempt to hew to some claimed middle ground and not “take sides.”

But given how the world is creaking on its axis, in many ways realigning the global order in real time, it’s more important now (compared to ever) that journalists avoid vapid, empty bullshit and frame the news accurately, so that it informs us not just about the events themselves, but about the larger context in which they are happening. Because without context there’s no meaning—it’s just slapping raw food down on a plate and calling it dinner.

BS of the Month Award: Jeff Bezos for Democracy-Killing Cynicism

Jeff Bezos isn’t just misrepresenting the purpose of radically altering the Washington Post’s Op-ed page. He’s also deliberately ignoring both the context in which he’s doing it (America’s tire-screeching rightward lurch toward autocracy), as well as the fact that his decision moves the paper toward normalizing America’s autocratic upshift, when his paper should be grabbing the gearshift to slow it down.

How you know it’s bullshit = No process + Flimsy rationale

One of the ways corporations thrive is by process, especially when it comes to change, such that there is an entire corporate discipline called “change management.” And when change is driven by a credible organizational shift, it’s executed with a credible, coordinated organizational roll-out.

When there’s no process attached, that means it was a shoot-from-the-hip moment by a powerful individual at the controls. Or it was a corporate move that leadership knows won’t be received well; so out of fear, doubt, and a wish to bury the news, they just spring it on people and hope it goes away really fast (e.g., Alphabet dropping its prohibition on military work).

The Bezos announcement featured:

No process, Exhibit A: If launching this new editorial product was an important strategic moment for the paper, it should have been announced in the actual paper, in an op-ed by Bezos himself. And yet, after sending an internal memo, Bezos made his formal public announcement on X? Why? The only reasonable answer is that he values that audience more than the audience for his own newspaper: i.e., it was a dog whistle to the right.

A real product launch would likely have included a corresponding op-ed page with a full slate of articles from writers who reflect the new approach, to give readers a taste of what the actual new product would look like. Only, if they’d done it that way, the exemplar of a “liberty/free markets” op-ed page would been the kind of dishonest hype narrative and unhinged BS where Marc Thiessen ranted about the heroic Zelenskyy needing to apologize to Trump. The Post’s audience would have been treated to a very clear vision of what the future holds, which is probably why the Post skipped doing it that way.

No process, Exhibit B: One of the keys to successful strategic roll out is having a team ready to go, or at least someone designated to lead. Yet, the announcement said the current op-ed page editor was leaving without a named replacement. If this was a planned event, they would know well in advance who would be running it, and be prepared with a succession announcement if the person in charge was stepping aside—i.e., to communicate operational stability and continuity. There was none.

Flimsy rationale, Exhibit A: The idea that the “liberty/free markets” lane is open territory for The Washington Post is just false. There’s already a big national newspaper that occupies that lane and it’s The Wall Street Journal. So, good luck with that. And the idea that these two ideas “are underserved in the current market” is just plain laughable; if there’s one political opinion lane that the internet covers exhaustively, with a multitude of competitors, it’s the “liberty and free markets” lane. The right-wing/libertarian presence online is enormous.

Flimsy rationale, Exhibit B: Bezos contends that a hometown newspaper with a “local monopoly” no longer needs to “cover all views” in the op-ed pages because that’s done by the internet. That may be fine if you’re the local hometown paper in Wichita, KS, or Bangor, ME, or Scottsdale, AZ, or some other mid-sized city in America. But the Post’s “local monopoly” is and always has been our national government. No paper is closer to the seat of power, and thus it should consider itself to have 300 million+ constituents. Rather than shrinking and evading this mandate, and crying that they’re just a “local” paper, the Post should be reaffirming its mandate to cover the most pressing and consequential developments in national government. Especially when those developments are so contentious, also possibly unconstitutional and illegal. (Who is going to publish the next Pentagon Papers if not The Washington Post?)

We call bullshit on Bezos because all evidence points to this being a personal decision by a billionaire owner to knee-cap his own storied news publication. He did it because he just couldn’t stand the heat: e.g., when Pulitzer-winning cartoonist Ann Telnaes quit after her cartoon of Bezos was pulled; and when he got absolutely roasted after his impulsive process-free cancellation of the paper’s endorsement of Kamala Harris. (No preparation or pre-planning. No coordinated roll-out. Nothing that could resemble thoughtful institutional decision making.)

The paper’s op-ed page (and perhaps its newsroom too?) is clearly no longer driven by a considered editorial outlook, but by the whims of its owner and his views on political convenience. So, when it comes to deciding what constitutes “viewpoints opposing those [new op-ed] pillars” (viewpoints that will not be allowed), you can bet that the editorial staff will be using Bezos’s personal interests and sensitivities as their guide.

What will that look like? Will any and all regulatory action by the government be considered anti-free market? Will the paper be brave enough to print editorials with a viewpoint of antitrust advocacy? Will pro-union articles be verboten? Are unions an expression of workers’ liberty and freedom of choice? Or are unions coercive, ideologically driven, anti-capitalist bureaucracies out for power for themselves?

Who gets to decide? Bezos, that’s who. And whomever Bezos puts in charge of the editorial page will be as beholden to him as Trump’s minions are to the president. It’s an oligarch’s world now, maybe even a gangster’s paradise, as Noah Smith argues.

And that is the biggest reason we call bullshit on Bezos: this newfound embrace of “liberty/free markets” (the biggest right-wing dog whistle you can wrap your lips around) intentionally deprives pluralist, small-d democratic narratives of yet another place to breathe.

For that reason, for his democracy-destroying, spineless, craven foray into cosmic-scale bullshittery, we award the Golden Dookie and the BS of the Month Award to Jeff Bezos. Congratulations Jeff! Well done!

When it comes to a government makeover, Elon Musk is flying by the seat of his pants, and treating us like his personal diaper.

Cuban Missile Crisis? “It had to do with Cuba and missiles, I’m pretty sure.”

What happens when we believe the branding stories of people who confidently feign expertise but really have none—people who are objectively inexpert? And what happens when we give them the power to actually implement their inexpertise?

We’re watching the answer being written in real time as Elon Musks’s DOGE tadpoles wiggle their way into one federal agency after another. The headlines are full of said minions doing really dumb stuff, justified by an overarching narrative of fighting wokeness and “waste, fraud and abuse.”

But the most dangerous expert inexpert of all is Musk himself, a billionaire who confidently proclaimed that homelessness was a “lie” and a “propaganda world.” And when it comes to government cost cutting, not only is he just as clueless, he makes 1990s corporate hatchet man “Chainsaw Al Dunlap” look like a cub scout.

Musk is a typical inexpert, with an overconfident brand story that his expertise will save the world. In reality, he has no idea what he’s doing, except that it makes him excited enough to jump up and down. This exchange with Moly Jong Fast is emblematic of Musk’s cluelessness and inexpertise in the work of government.

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Does America Have a Cultural Bias Toward Unconscious Ignorance?

LiteralMayhem took on the question of inexperts in power way back in 2010 during the first Bush administration, with an article titled “Tyranny of PR’s Expert Inexperts.”

That piece was prompted by White House spokesperson Dana Perino admitting that she panicked over a reporter’s question about the Cuban Missile Crisis, because she didn’t know what that was. Perino said:

It had to do with Cuba and missiles, I'm pretty sure… I came home and I asked my husband. I said, 'Wasn't that like the Bay of Pigs thing?' And he said, 'Oh, Dana.'

As we pointed out: she was the spokesperson for the “leader of the free world!” (As she unceasingly called her boss.)

It was a shocker that she could ascend to such a high position while knowing almost nothing about a defining moment of the Cold War and 20^th century geopolitics: the anti-communist counterinsurgency mission (Bay of Pigs Thing) that set the stage for a nuclear showdown (the Cuban Missile Crisis) with the USSR within paddling distance of Miami Beach.

And yes, it’s easy to be snarky and petty in calling out small errors made by powerful people, but when we’re talking about the leadership team at the helm of the richest, most powerful nation on Earth, one is permitted to have high standards. After all, this is supposed to be meritocracy.

For example, the White House should know the basics, like the names of countries and how to spell them. In the case of one of their deportation spats, they misspelled Colombia as “Columbia.” In the case of an invite to an event with Keir Starmer, they gave his title as “Prime Minister of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland.” Except that the Republic of Ireland has been an independent nation since 1922 and only Northern Ireland is still part of the UK.

Our cultural drift toward putting inexperts in power has been happening for decades. Here is a much smaller example from 2005. But small as it is, it may be even more useful in terms of cultural anthropology: pointing to the kind of world we were heading for, even back then.

Consider the anecdote of a 22-year-old computer science undergrad from Stanford who went to work for the elite management consultancy Boston Consulting Group in order to boss around people who actually do—and have done—real work for a living.

Mo believes his consulting gig is more lucrative, rewarding and imaginative than a traditional tech job. He characterized his summer programming internships as ‘too focused or localized, even meaningless.’

‘A consulting job injects you into companies at a higher level,’ he said. ‘You don't feel like you're doing basic stuff.’

Good grief. As I said back then…

A 22-year-old should be doing basic stuff. Most of the world turns on “basic stuff.” Most people spend their lives doing, thinking, making, and buying basic stuff. And you don’t get to boss people around until you’ve done some basic stuff yourself.

You’re not entitled to being “injected” into anything at a high level until you have enough real-life experience to understand the kind of basic stuff that millions of people are working at day in and day out. Because that basic stuff has value.

And yet, here we are, watching DOGE kids with no life experience—some of them literally teenagers—hack apart the federal government and boss around skilled people, all in the name of operationalizing anti-wokeness and a billionaire’s many conflicts of interest.

One could say that Musk and his child army may be expert at certain things. They certainly *know what they’re doing* in a very narrow sense: i.e., giddily overseeing the “rapid unscheduled disassembly” of the U.S. government, as explained in a scary-funny post by Paul Krugman, in which he describes DOGE’s m.o. using the very same euphemistic language SpaceX used to describe how their rocket blew up.

But the DOGE kids and their leader have zero idea *what* they’re doing. They’re clueless as to the consequences of their actions, because they have no idea what those agencies and departments are for, what those people actually do, why we have them, and what value they deliver to the nation. Worse: they act like it’s a badge of honor that they don’t know and don’t care.

In a fascinating article, the Columbia Journalism Review (CJR) took on the deeply philosophical question of How to Cover Stupidity (Including Our Own)—“a concept that lies at the heart of much journalism.” The piece summarizes different theories of ignorance and quotes one expert explaining that “unconscious ignorance” is…

‘… particularly dangerous to democracy because it combines a lack of knowledge with the arrogant belief that one already knows enough… Unconscious ignorance undermines the foundations of democratic debate, trust in science, and respect for knowledge,’ Carofiglio said, describing it as an attitude that poisons public discourse and fuels misinformation.

Smell like Musky DOGE to you? Whatever limited expertise got you into power is the only expertise you need, and it’s more valuable than all the knowledge of the so-called experts you’re overseeing. Borrowing from communications professor Paul Elliott Johnson, of the University of Pittsburgh, we can call this power “tautologically self-authorizing.”

But how could such ignorance be continually elevated to the halls of power, unless America itself actually has developed a refined taste for this kind of stupidity? (The word “stupidity” is used here intentionally. See below.)

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America’s Dunning-Kruger Culture: A Cult of Arrogant, Pathological Ignorance?

The entitlement to power we’re seeing among inexpert people goes hand-in-hand with something we will explore next week: the glorification of all things “uncurated.”

There is no such thing as an “uncurated” online experience, but that notion is all the rage today. Online media users tell themselves a comforting story that avoiding official, professional curation puts them in closer touch with the truth—i.e., direct, socially networked information is somehow more authentic and trustworthy than what comes from evil institutions.

A good example is when Musk recently celebrated Grok AI’s takedown of the online tech publication The Information, which Grok called “legacy media” and biased by the “interests of funders and editors.” (No, as the owner of X, he didn’t evince any irony in celebrating that BS, when X and xAI are beholden to him as funder and chief algorithm editor.)

He was gleeful that Grok positioned X as the go-to source for unpolished, “unvarnished,” “unfiltered” news and truth. According to Musk, it’s the very lack of curation, and straight delivery of “reality” from the “people living it,” that makes X “trustworthy.”

The comforting story of “uncurated” information is that there’s no expertise needed in anything, other than one’s own life experience. This glorification of socially curated truth is a direct manifestation of Isaac Asimov’s famous observation from his 1980 Newsweek article A Cult of Ignorance (1/21/80)…

There is a cult of ignorance in the United States, and there always has been. The strain of anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nourished by the false notion that democracy means that my ignorance is as good as your knowledge.

DOGE kids don’t have to take the time to analyze and then empirically prove “woke” or “waste, fraud and abuse” before wielding the axe. They can just make those things so by claiming them, and then acting accordingly (or maybe their actions tautologically prove their truth).

The American “cult of ignorance,” in Asimov’s words, lines up perfectly with Gianrico Carofiglio’s notion of “unconscious ignorance".”

It looks suspiciously like a manifestation of the well-known Dunning-Kruger effect: a cognitive bias whereby inexperts overestimate their skill. In a sense, we’ve been acculturated with a national over-confidence that’s Dunning-Kruger-esque—i.e., the Manifest Destiny and assumed “American exceptionalism” embedded in our culture push toward an overestimation of our national and individual expertise and competence. We tolerate this stuff because it’s deeply embedded in who we are.

SIDEBAR: Here we need to correct two mistaken beliefs about the Dunning-Kruger effect.

1. The first mistake is thinking that the self-overestimation side of the effect applies only to stupid people. It actually applies to us all. And it’s probably even more dangerous when smart people do it.

2. The second mistake has to do with that graph you see everywhere about the acquisition of knowledge moderating the Dunning-Kruger effect. That graph actually applies to research done by David Dunning and Carmen Sanchez titled “Overconfidence Among Beginners: Is a Little Learning a Dangerous Thing?” (Helpful video here.)

Applied to Elon Musk’s DOGE adventures, the Dunning-Sanchez graph might look like this:

(chart source)

The point is that super smart people operating outside their wheelhouse can tell themselves a dangerous story that not only are they good at what they’re doing, but that the people who are telling them they’re being idiots are themselves the idiots, because they are the expert, and everyone else is not (even when they are).

According to the CJR article, that’s what “stupidity” looks like. According to theorist Olivier Postel-Vinay…

… stupidity transcends ignorance because it operates even in highly informed individuals, who remain ensnared by rigid beliefs.

Broligarch brainiac and ketamine enthusiast Elon Musk is expert at having big ideas, as well as building high-performing companies, and creating markets for products and businesses yet to be mainstream (give credit where credit is due).

He’s also super good at leveraging government subsidies for growth and profit, blustering and bluffing his way to success when his businesses are failing, and swooping in to capitalize on the inventions of others to enrich himself and prove his own intelligence.

But he’s currently falling victim to a habit of overestimating his skill and remaining ensnared in that rigid belief.

Noahpinion blog offers a very good summation of why we underestimate Elon at our peril. The man is super intelligent and highly driven. True. He certainly isn’t intrinsically dumb by any objective measure. And Noah Smith is right when he observes that we’re the idiots if we think we’re doing anything to deter DOGE by sniping at Musk and calling him “stupid” on social media:

Over the past 15 years, mass social media has replaced outside reality in many people’s lives, so that things that happen on Twitter/X feel more substantial than things that happen in the streets… Maybe saying that Elon has a 110 IQ makes you feel like you beat him in your little online fantasy world, but out there in the actual world, he is still ripping up your national institutions at breakneck speed.

And that is precisely the point: a man of undeniable, world-striding intellect is using his awesome scale of corporate, social, and media power to do really stupid stuff—in our view. At the very same time, he has his own vision for what he’s doing, and in that view he’s a brilliant and heroic savior.

We’re watching, in real time, the collision of those two world-defining narratives.

To us, outside his bubble, the world Musk is creating “at breakneck speed,” and the role he envisions for himself in that world, look like a society ruled by pathology (i.e., pathocracy)—given that Musk’s governing style manifests arrogance, bullying, hypocrisy, a thin skin, and a titanic lack of compassion.

Unfortunately for us, and the rest of the world, the arrogance of ignorance we see in Musk and many others running the Trump 2.0 Show, is a key feature of “pathocracy,” in which people with personality disorders occupy positions of power. According to an article in Psychology Today, such people are often…

… brutal and cruel, intensely self-centered, and lacking in empathy… [they] feel that they are superior to others and have the right to dominate them… [and] which means that they are able to ruthlessly exploit and abuse others in their lust for power.

Pathocracy itself is an institutionalization of unconscious ignorance.

Most puzzling of all, however, is that a rationalist like Musk completely rejects empiricism: the idea that government reform should be based on analysis and evidence—i.e., before you undertake to change something, you need to hear from the experts on the ground struggling with the problem so you get some good ideas about how to fix it. Just like he did at Tesla and SpaceX when they were bedeviled by really tough problems.

It’s quite fair to say that by completely dismissing experts, and automatically assuming they’re the idiots just because they have a government job, he is making himself look stupid and pathological. (In great example: The Long Memo has a great rundown on the stupidity of Musk demanding that the U.S. exit all international organizations, starting with NATO and the UN.)

When it comes to a government makeover, Elon is flying by the seat of his pants, and treating all the rest of us like his personal diaper.

What Elon Musk is NOT good at, and knows fuck-all about, is government.

The management context and expertise he brings to his new role is what he perfected in his previous roles: a command and control structure aimed at disruption. While that ethic may work in a tech company, it’s inadequate on its own, and sometimes even wildly inappropriate, in the realm of public governance. Yet, Musk has unlimited confidence that his unpolished, unvarnished, unfiltered, inexpertise in government is precisely what qualifies him to feed great swaths of official Washington “into the wood chipper,” to use his own words.

In fact, this kind of arrogant inexpertise can be found ravaging the world in many places, on many topics, often by techno-elites. Paul Krugman calls out Silicon Valley tech investor David Sacks for his expert inexpertise. Asks Krugman:

Are tech bros even more arrogant and ignorant when they make pronouncements about the federal budget than they are on other topics, or does it just seem that way to me because I know something about the subject?

In the UK, which is currently mounting the world’s most robust pushback against the AI tech oligarchy, academic Helen Beetham offered an exhaustive and terrifying article on the boneheaded AI policy decisions that amount to spreading the public’s legs to AI behemoths, for promises of maybe a dinner afterward, or at least a small tip.

Much of the government’s decision making revolves around inexperts defying the input and advice of actual experts and the UK’s real-world experience indicating that AI applications in a public setting haven’t yet worked.

… if you want to discover the public benefits of a new technology, you need 'qualitative, relational and experiential understanding from both publics and professionals'. That is, you should listen to people working in the system who understand the problems and bottlenecks that ‘AI’ is meant to solve.

You should listen to people on the sharp end of the service that ‘AI’ is supposed to improve. (And perhaps, just as an aside, productivity isn’t the only purpose of the public sector). But the AI Action Plan strikes through woke nonsense of this kind. In its drive to ‘rapidly pilot and scale’, the real stakeholders are not the ‘people’ at all, but the technology companies.

(To see what a thorough analysis and takedown of bad AI policymaking looks like, her article is a must-read.)

The economist Mariana Mazzucato wrote a piece for The Financial Times ripping global consultancies for making a hard-sell on AI in education, a huge global revenue stream, for “having no expertise in the areas that they’re advising in.” Per the article:

Consultancies and outsourcers ... know less than they claim, cost more than they seem to, and — over the long term — prevent the public sector developing in-house capabilities.

The Antidote Is Something America Abhors: Humility

The antidote to inexperts ravaging everything? According to theorist Gianrico Carofiglio, it’s embracing “conscious ignorance,” which is…

… an intellectual humility that helps us recognize our own limitations while remaining receptive to the knowledge of others.

That common refrain dates back to Socrates’ assertion that, “The only true wisdom is knowing you know nothing.” And Darwin’s belief that: “Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge.” And Bertrand Russell’s summation: “The whole problem with the world is that fools and fanatics are always so certain of themselves, and wiser people so full of doubts.”

There are plenty such quotes to be found, and they all make similar endorsements of humility. Carofiglio says that uncertainty and humility push us toward dialogue, “which is precisely the opposite of polarization.” And it’s that dialogue that brings forth knowledge and helps us develop expertise, unlike those who remain “ensnared” by rigid overconfidence in their inexpert beliefs.

Unfortunately, humility is in short supply in pathocracies.

Further down in Asimov’s piece, he argues that the crux of the problem is larger than mere anti-intellectualism: it’s an inbuilt American tendency toward anti-elitism. In a modern context, the label of “elitism,” he says, gets applied to “anyone who admires competence, knowledge, learning and skill, and who wishes to spread it around.”

As for the elite anti-elitists of Asomiv’s day, he lampooned George Wallace, whose excoriation of “pointy headed professors” was unironically met “with a roar of approval from his pointy headed audience.” Asimov bluntly observed (as relevant today as when he said it in 1980) that…

As soon as someone shouts ‘elitist’ it becomes clear that he or she is a closet elitist who is feeling guilty about having gone to school.

So, let’s be clear: “expertise” and “elitism” are NOT the same thing. Elitism intrinsically asserts inter-personal superiority. Expertise does not; it asserts greater knowledge but does not assume to be another person’s better.

Yet, branding all experts as inherently “elitist,” works to the advantage of fake populist politicians. Today’s right-wing—comprised of elitist anti-elitists—uses an anti-expertise strategy to neutralize people who might have the knowledge and authority to speak truth to power and force accountability. These are well-heeled millionaire and billionaire elitists—many of whom attended elite institutions of learning—decrying elitism while asserting their own elite status as a right to rule, and lighting populist nationalism on fire to burn down democracy.

Asimov’s notion of American “anti-elitism” also serves as a helpful rubric under which we can lump all our current anti-intellectual, anti-science, anti-Establishment, anti-expert animus, as well as the populist obsession with “uncurated” information as the only way to get to a real, authentic truth.

Anti-elitism is the tree trunk from which all those other branches grow. Unfortunately, Asimov’s prescribed solution might be beyond our national reach. He writes:

I believe that every human being with a physically normal brain can learn a great deal and can be surprisingly intellectual. I believe that what we badly need is social approval of learning and social rewards for learning.

We can all be members of the intellectual elite and then, and only then, will a phrase like ‘America’s right to know’ and, indeed, any true concept of democracy, have any meaning. [emphasis original]

The combination of humility, and a democratization of expertise, won’t likely work in a country where public education is being dismantled for being government “indoctrination?” Where books are burned and banned. Which, by the way, calls into question how we’re supposed to build a “knowledge economy” in a nation where expertise is reviled. One recalls the adage commonly attributed to Thomas Edison that…

Opportunity is missed by most people because it is dressed in overalls and looks like work.

One could rewrite that adage for a knowledge economy (as well as for a democracy requiring an informed electorate) by saying…

Opportunity is missed by most people because it is frumpy, pale, reads a lot and looks like brain work.

America’s anti-elitist right-wing represents an uprising of expert inexperts come to make America great, in their own image. They’re leading us in exactly the opposite direction of Asimov’s call toward a democratization of learning and expertise. Why? Because there is enormous political utility in the de-democratization of expertise. And anyway, their intrinsic superiority actually makes learning moot, not just for them, but for us too. As put by Peter Thiel, tech billionaire and JD Vance sponsor:

For those of us who are libertarian in 2009, our education culminates with the knowledge that the broader education of the body politic has become a fool’s errand. (“The Education of a Libertarian”, Cato Institute, 2009)

(And by the way, if you want to know where people like Musk, Peter Thiel, and Larry Ellison want to take us—the uneducated body politic—have a look at the vision of their guru, techno-elitist Curtis Yarvin, who wants to replace “the existing Constitutional system with a privatized state structure akin to a corporation, with a monarch-like figure at the top modeled after a CEO.”)

It’s going to be a long, difficult road back from that, if such a thing is even possible. What’s clear at the moment is that those who stand opposed to the anti-elitist elite ruling class don’t have their shit together, at all.

What’s needed is a ground-up effort to empower learning and revalue expertise of all kinds—an aggressive narrative war of our own to prove the relevance of expertise not just for the nation as a whole in some abstract way, but to individual voters deciding whether to elect competent experts, or elect inexpert demagogues who make us feel confident and invincible in our “unconscious ignorance.”

In this example, ProPublica celebrates experts doing sophisticated work in name of basic protections for society: protecting kids from tobacco, reducing mortality among babies and pregnant mothers, and keeping donor organs from getting lost.

The pro-democracy, pro-competence coalition needs to show real people, doing real stuff—yes, even basic stuff—that is indispensable to the basics of life, the basics of liberty, and the basics of running a big messy country in which we each all have a stake in the outcome. If possible, that includes creating a sense of wonder, humility, curiosity and a love of learning.

Don’t let the phony anti-elite elites drum competent experts out of public life, such that their faces end up on a proverbial milk carton.

Defend and celebrate the experts. Put them on podiums and in commercials. Give them ribbons and awards. March with them in protest. Fight for expertise. Champion it. Scream it from the parapets. Expertise matters!

Here’s some people doing it! You can too! Join them!

Democratize expertise in a way that is unavoidable.

Shove every-day, rank-and-file expertise down the throats of the anti-elitist elitists, and stop letting them bludgeon democracy to death with their cynicism. Make real Asimov’s ambitious call:

We can all be members of the intellectual elite and then, and only then, will a phrase like ‘America’s right to know’ and, indeed, any true concept of democracy, have any meaning.

(A little fire in the belly from the “expert class” please! With perhaps a wee bit less sanctimony.)

Joint Venture Builds Immersive Autonomous AI Platform Aimed at Total Reality Capture

Consumer platform to be marketed as “Reality Plus” with military platform branded as “Theodon”

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

SEATTLE, WA – February 27, 2025: The four biggest names in tech announced today the formation of a joint venture company called Reality Management Systems, Inc. (RMS) This new lifestyle and cognition company will be an autonomous agentic AI platform offering what the partners called a “reality concierge” service, which will include a comprehensive and immersive product suite for both consumer and military-defense markets.

The platform will be built on the companies’ jointly developed Predative^TM AI technology, which seamlessly integrates both predictive and generative AI capabilities. Consumers will access the service through a biometric and prompt-free interface, which leverages global web-connected technology and all data ever collected from every online and offline source a person has ever touched.

The totally immersive Predative^TM AI system will then capture reality and deliver it across every life vector that a consumer could possibly want: from entertainment, to groceries, to crypto-financial management, to automated social interactivity, to pre-packaged news and opinions, to home décor. The AI will then anticipate and serve up reality that matches all of a person’s behavioral, emotional, and material needs in a fully customized way, giving new meaning to the modern mantra of “Living your truth.”

The consumer service will be marketed under the brand name “Reality Plus,” with a trademarked tagline of “We Got You!” to signify the company’s boundary-less support of comprehensive, 24/7/365, reality control for every individual. Consumer services will be available only by lifetime subscription, defaulted in for existing customers, with an escalating fee structure over multiple years, to maximize the company’s revenue stream and payback the initial capital investment.

The company’s defense and military contractor business will be marketed under the brand name Theodon—a combined nod to the Greek god who controls reality, and the MAGA god lording over their businesses. Details of that offering remain classified. The founding companies promised that the consumer and military units will operate separately.

“The reality vertical has been notoriously hard for individual businesses to capture, given how wide and sprawling it is, and how many touchpoints it has in peoples’ daily lives,” said Phelony Chimerapal, spokesperson for RMS. “But today, there isn’t one single part of reality that we cannot capture, control, and deliver seamlessly to any consumer, anywhere in the world, regardless of culture or geography—because controlling reality comes with a mandate of inclusivity.”

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Each participating tech giant brings a unique skill set and value proposition, to make the jointly managed company an unmatched force in reality control:

• Meta: decades of highly personalized data on how to drive motivation and behavior for 3 billion people worldwide, plus disorienting wearable hardware.

• Amazon: decades of highly personalized data for more than 300 million retail consumers worldwide, plus marketplace management, cloud computing, entertainment, and the genericized, both-sides news curation of a dying newspaper.

• Alphabet: decades of highly personalized data from approximately 2 trillion annual web searches worldwide, plus information aggregation, creator tools, mobile platforms, automated monitoring technology, and an unmatched ability to backtrack on fundamental values.

• Microsoft: world-leading expertise in over-engineering technology products to make them clunky, unpredictable, and unmanageable, ensuring that Reality Plus will be as close as possible to reality itself.

The new venture’s bundled approach to controlling and delivering reality to consumers has the full support of the White House and Congress, and is established with a full antitrust pre-waiver from all relevant government agencies.

“Controlling fake reality is the most critical aspect of establishing truth and individual liberty,” said White House spokesman Will Deportibunch. “We told these tech companies, as the old saying goes, You build it, and they will come. There might even be a presidential medal in it.”

The combined terms-of-service for the four founding companies runs 20,000+ words and contains all the permissions needed to combine forces and make reality control a new reality for everyone everywhere.

“Consumers have invited our founding companies into their lives in so many intimate ways that we cannot just leave that generous access under-appreciated,” said Ms. Chimerapal. “We believe that we owe them every reasonable effort to enhance and manage their reality in ways that they cannot even imagine. Once they start down this road, we’re certain they’ll be in it for life.”

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As a first product launch, the Reality Plus service will include a free-with-purchase headset combining VR goggles, ear buds, and self-contained CPAP machine with aromatherapy capability (scent pods sold separately). The sleep control device will use AI-voice recitation of the RMS terms of service as a “green noise” to shut out the external world for a more peaceful slumber.

Thanks to the diligent effort of the Microsoft team, OpenAI’s Sam Altman will join RMS as Chief AI Cook & Bottle Washer in recognition of his indispensable, industry-leading role in promotion, branding, financial communications laundering, and public relations storytelling. In a separate statement, Altman’s agentic AI publicist commented that, “Nothing could be more strrawberyr than to black hole the furniture. Reality capture truly is the hallucination future of bobbleheads.”

Reality Management Systems Inc. was launched yesterday at a secret data-center location, somewhere under a polar icecap.

# # #

This installment of Press Releases from Hell is a satire, brought to you in cynical consternation by LiteralMayhem.com.

Image source (Popular Science)

Each month we give a BS of the Month Award in recognition of the damage that PR and marketing pros can do in the real world with their spin. For January 2025, those winners are…

2nd Runner up… Jamie Dimon

Biden-flation sucks! Trump inflation? Get over it!

Jamie Dimon said that if Donald Trump’s tariffs are a little inflationary, well, we all have to just get over it, because National Security!

This is the same guy who back in April 2024 was seriously alarmed over inflation and warned that the Fed would have to hike rates, which could “soar past 8%,” according to ABC News. In May 2024, he was adamant that government spending would absolutely, positively, unavoidably lead to stagflation. (Fortune)

By the end of 2024 inflation was 2.9%, employment was strong, growth was 2.8% (just shy of the 2023 number) and in Q3 the Fed delivered a “super-sized rate cut” and the “Federal Open Market Committee lowered its target range for the federal funds rate to 4.75%–5%, from the 5.25–5.5% range in place since last July.” (AXIOS) (An example of Dimon’s idea of “ineffective government” that’s not pro-business enough.)

So… Suffering higher inflation from a years-long COVID supply-chain hangover and price gouging is really all the government’s fault because they spent too much to keep the economy from crashing, and that’s a big NO-NO, even though the worst did not come to pass and our stellar recovery outpaced all our G10 rivals.

But kickstarting inflation again—after it’s been mostly tamed—because you want to start some doo-doo that The Wall Street Journal called the “Dumbest Trade War in History,” and then blithely write it off as a “national security” necessity, well, to Dimon that’s a giant YES-YES!

And it’s a pile of bull.

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1st Runner up… Mikey Shulman

Music is hard work! Waaa! Stealing is easier, and it’s still original art!

There is so much BS in and around AI that it’s hard to narrow down just one instance that’s deserving of a BS Award. But Mickey Shulman’s BS is emblematic of the worst and most pervasive BS of the entire industry.

The first part of Mikey’s gold-plated bullshit:

It’s not really enjoyable to make music now […] It takes a lot of time, it takes a lot of practice, you need to get really good at an instrument or really good at a piece of production software. I think the majority of people don’t enjoy the majority of the time they spend making music.

Holy crap on a cracker. That’s truly a wonder of dipshit, spoiled, clueless brovomit. Watch any decent documentary on musicians and it’s easy to see that musicians love making music. They will go through hell and back, live in poverty, and sacrifice everything to make music.

But that’s not the worst of Shulman’s BS. Here’s the worst bullshitty bit:

If you want to impact the way a billion people experience music you have to build something for a billion people. And so that is first and foremost giving everybody the joys of creating music and this is a huge departure from how it is now.

That’s emblematic of the biggest, most dangerous, and most impactful BS of the entire AI hype bubble, which falls into the category of “democratization” (another post on that coming soon). The entire argument in favor of AI in creative fields is that it enables your average everyday person to generate outcomes beyond their current ability without doing the work to learn how.

Great take from Deeply Wrong here: “AI is not democratizing art, it is in fact a form of theft or plagiarism leading to the devaluation and dehumanization of art.” More than anything else, “AI art” steals the work that an artist puts into making art. Chuck Wendig has it right (h/t Deeply Wrong) when he wisecracks:

Congratulations. You said a thing and pushed a button and now the ART BARF ROBOT barfed art for you. Slow clap from the cheap seats.

A good take from 404 Media here. New Yorker article on why AI will never make art here.

When people like Shulman sputter this drivel—i.e., that you can take the work out of being an artist and still make “art”—it adds momentum to the growing mythology around AI that effort is unnecessary for success. People then internalize that story and start to think that, hey maybe there’s something to it. Let me have a go at a song, or a book, and see if the slop will actually sell on Amazon.

Global enshittification ensues. So his BS is bigger than his shitty program, it hurts us all in more ways than we can count.

BS of the Month Award: Keir Starmer, Peter Kyle, and the entire UK AI policy writing team

Offense: Industrial-Scale Gaslighting—Spinning Harm as a Blessing

Let’s start with a parable: My husband and I used to have premium season tickets to one of America’s biggest pro-soccer franchises, which came with a $25-per-seat food credit for the buffet in our well-appointed skybox clubhouse. Said benefit was part of the legal purchase contract that we signed when we subscribed for the seats.

But after just one season, the food credit apparently was too expensive a perk, and out of the blue we got an email (late on a Friday before a long holiday weekend—another favorite PR tactic of burying bad news) that the perk was being yanked and replaced by an “upgrade” of free hotdogs and beer at our seats. Good for us because we wouldn’t have to endure the indignity of waiting in a long buffet line.

The buffet was quite good. Sandwiches. Salads. Sushi. A carving station. Nice stuff. And at stadium pricing we always ended up spending more than our $25 allotment. Hot dogs and beer (which we don’t eat or drink) were definitely NOT an “upgrade” of our “experience.”

We let the management have it, canceled our premium seats and got seats closer to the field. We ended up liking the un-posh “experience” better anyway, and the cost savings covered our food many times over. Now, someone who’d never had the perk in the first place would take our old seats and never feel like they were missing a thing, and management really didn’t care. But that disappointment never left us.

Too often, the first instinct of PR and marketing people is to try spinning bullshit into gold by gaslighting people, trying to convince them that harm is really a blessing. As the UK’s AI policy team has been doing for the past year.

Lying is one thing. And yes they lied through their teeth, by writing in their AI Opportunities Action Plan that there’s confusion around IP…

Rights holders are finding it difficult to control the use of their works in training AI models and seek to be remunerated for its use. AI developers are similarly finding it difficult to navigate copyright law in the UK, and this legal uncertainty is undermining investment in and adoption of AI technology.

The first part is true enough, but the second part is a lie. AI developers aren’t having difficulty “navigating” copyright law. The law is crystal clear. They just want to avoid the expensive, laborious process of asking for permissions and paying for content. They want a shortcut. A loophole. A “carve out” in political euphemism.

(Graham Lovelace at Charting GEN AI has been doing exhaustive coverage of the UK’s AI policy fight here and here. TechPolicy.press here. Luiza Jarovsky here.)

But the lying isn’t what wins them the BS of the Month Award—it’s the gaslighting over their proposed solution: a “mechanism for right holders to reserve their rights” based on an “exception [to copyright law] to support use at scale of a wide range of material by AI developers where rights have not been reserved.”

According to The Guardian:

Chris Bryant MP, the data protection minister, said the proposal was a ‘win win’ for two sides that have been at loggerheads over a new copyright regime… ‘This is about giving greater control in a difficult and complex set of circumstances to creators and rights holders, and we intend it to lead to more licensing of content, which is potentially a new revenue stream for creators,’ he said. [emphasis added]

What utter bollocks. It is most definitely NOT “greater control.” Rights holders already have all the control they need. And there is no “mechanism” needed to “reserve” rights, because copyright holders already have them.

The government wants to strip rights holders of their control and impose a new burden on them—forcing creators to proactively assert and protect rights that are already asserted and protected. Then they try to sell this utter bollocks as a “win” for creatives.

(That project is currently flailing but never underestimate the cynicism of politicians in eventually voting against the interests of their constituents.)

PR gaslighting is one of the worst offenses that the profession foists on the public. It’s the kind of nauseating kick in the gut that leaves people feeling shocked, cynical, and just plain furious.

Why do PR and marketing people do this? I have been working in this business for three decades and I still don’t have an answer except that, in general, people suck. Elite PR people, like most monied elite, are motivated by self-interest, and power, and status, and protecting their position. Those with a conscience compartmentalize and rationalize until they either quit the profession or stop feeling the sting of guilt.

PR pros love to talk about how they provide frank advice to help guide the decisions of executives toward best outcomes for “all stakeholders.” In reality, the vast majority are just hacks collecting a paycheck and publicly slinging wagonloads of bullshit to justify whatever their bosses+clients want to do.

The upshot of this specific kind of PR-Comms devilry, at this scale, is that it erodes public faith in institutions large and small. It leaves people feeling vulnerable, angry, and alone against the world. It does damage not just to careers and livelihoods, but to our ability to function cohesively as a society.

All big words, but very well warranted.

And so, for that cardinal sin of the erosion of public trust and faith, by virtue of their industrial-scale national gaslighting of millions of people, we hereby grant the Golden Dookie to Messrs. Starmer and Kyle and all their cronies. Well done!

Conservative anti-reality machine strikes again!

Hey Scott, investing borrowed money isn’t “sovereign” wealth.

Conservatives backpedalling on "free market" religion?

Here at LiteralMayhem we’re fascinated by storytelling because, as our tagline says, “Spin has consequences.”

Yesterday we got a bit gust of hot air in the face as Donald Trump and his Treasury Secretary, Scott Bessent, championed the idea of a “sovereign wealth fund” for America. (Reuters) With the money, Trump floated the idea of buying TikTok.

Hard to say whether it’s another “flood the zone with shit” moment to distract from Elon Musk’s techno-coup in process, but it’s interesting nonetheless for what it shows about the lackeys now surrounding the president.

It’s actually a funny idea because as Reuters reports, sovereign wealth funds, of which there are many, typically “rely on a country’s budget surplus to make investments, but the U.S. operates at a deficit.”

That means America’s “sovereign” wealth fund would be created by borrowing money from China, the Saudis, or whoever else is buying U.S. Treasury Bonds. (By contrast, Norway’s fund, which is the largest in the world, invests money from the country’s oil and gas revenues.)

Backpedalling on “Free Market” Religion

But the most amusing part of the announcement was Bessent’s roaring endorsement of the idea. Lest we not forget, Republicans absolutely hate anything they see as government intrusion into “free markets.”

But Bessent, a hedge fund guy worth half a billion (who, incidentally, used to be a partner in the fund management firm of Trump’s nemesis George Soros), wasted no breath chiding Trump for an injudicious application of public monies to co-opt private sector assets.

No, Bessent was all in…

“We're going to monetize the asset side of the U.S. balance sheet for the American people. There’ll be a combination of liquid assets, assets that we have in this country as we work to bring them out for the American people.” (Reuters)

“The extraordinary size and scale of the U.S. government and the business it does with companies ... should create value for American citizens… If we are going to buy 2 billion Covid vaccines, maybe we should have some warrants and some equity in these companies and have that grow for the help of the American people.” (NBC)

Pause here for a quick second and let’s jump into the Way Back; it was only back in 2008 in the full grip of the Great Financial Crisis that conservatives were raging against the government’s auto bailout as interfering with free market discipline. The Cato Institute went so far as to label GM as “Government Motors” and eviscerate the whole bailout project. A project that, by the way, ended profitably for “American citizens,” per the lefty NY Times.

“Free market” business religion is part of the whole conservative sales pitch, and has been for 100 years. Lefty intellectuals Naomi Oreskes and Erik M. Conway penned a super-excellent piece of narrative history on conservative’s love of business fundamentalism for the Washington Post back in 2023. The GOP has used that line of attack against the Affordable Care Act, and emissions standards for cars, and subsidies for green electricity (but subsidies for nuclear are A-ok), and a bunch of other stuff.

So, why is Bessent so Elon-nerd-jumpingly keen on using an enormous government slush fund to grab ownership of private enterprises?

Taking Rather Than “Investing”

The bit about demanding equity in U.S. companies because the government bought a bunch of COVID vaccines is particularly confusing. For example, the GOP resisted giving Medicare drug-price negotiating power for decades (back to 2007). That was too much of a strong-arm tactic for free market loving conservatives.

But now Bessent seems to love the idea that any company making money selling things to the government should be forced to give the Feds “a taste,” as they say in crime circles. The idea is as ridiculous as it is frightening. When you go to CVS to buy shampoo and razor blades, you don’t get to demand that CVS hand over stock in the company along with your six-foot-long receipt.

In the auto bailout example, government funding was structured as a loan: the government got nothing except a promise of paying back the principal plus interest, just like any other LENDER. By contrast, insisting that as a PURCHASER you have the right to demand part ownership of the company… why the very idea of consumers asserting a privilege of common ownership is downright Marxist.

A true conservative would understand that you got your product, the company got its money: that’s how capitalism works.

And yet, here we are firmly caught in the grip of the conservative anti-reality machine. It’s hard to know whether Bessent is dumb enough to believe this BS, or whether he’s just riffing to stay onboard the Leader’s hot air balloon ride, hoping he doesn’t get shoved overboard in an act of Scaramucci-ing.

After all Bessent is the guy who said about inflation…

“Tariffs can’t be inflationary because if the price of one thing goes up, unless you give people more money, then they have less money to spend on the other thing, so there is no inflation.”

Oh… man oh man. Dude, if someone used to be able to afford two things, but now can only afford one thing because prices on everything are higher, that’s the very definition of “inflation.” I can’t even believe that it’s necessary to fact check the word “inflation,” but here we are: “a general increase in prices and fall in the purchasing value of money.” (Google/Oxford: search it)

This is where we are: inflation is not “inflation,” and borrowed money is “sovereign” wealth, and “investing” is now a demand for equity in private businesses in exchange for the privilege of selling to the government.

In the CNN piece covering Bessent’s nomination, he was called “reasonable and pragmatic” by Jeffrey Sonnenfeld, founder and president of the Yale Chief Executive Institute. At this point, it’s anyone’s guess what those words mean.

But this spin is not consequence free. This idea of an American “sovereign wealth fund,” as rhetorically dumb as it is, could very well manifest into a trillion-dollar personal piggy bank for Trump and his cronies. History shows that when Trump decides he wants something bad enough, and spins a yard about it publicly, there’s no limit to the number of lackeys who will weave his manifestly insane stories into personal gold.

YES. We told you so. And We Won’t Be Shy About Saying It.

LiteralMayhem’s project on “Trumpism” was four years in the making, with most of it written in 2021 and 2022. It started as a single article, then expanded to a 60,000-word book manuscript, and then got squeezed back down to a six-part online series.

All of it was completed well before the election. We’ve got a copyright filing to prove it, as well as more than a dozen magazine and influencer submissions. We did our best to follow the rules, and sought out the imprimatur of reputable magazines and commentators, but the gatekeepers kept the portcullis firmly locked in place.

Now, a few timely additions were made to the text in the summer of 2024—like the part on Chris Christie’s withdrawal from the GOP primary—but the vast majority of the writing was pre-2024-electoral-earthquake, which we predicted.

Today, as we begin a new Trump term, and we’re watching an autocratic GOP’s wrecking-ball politics in real time, we here at LiteralMayhem can’t help but say, “Told you so.”

Much of what this article series warned about has come true…

The central contention of this series is that we need to dump the term “Trumpism” and all its derivatives—it’s an argument even more apt today than it ever was. So, we’ll repeat it again for emphasis:

The true cause of America’s political dysfunction came long before Trump and will long outlast him. In fact, while it made him possible, the true cause has nothing to do with him, and naming it after him just distracts from the Herculean narrative work facing us: to restore the narrative of pluralism in American life.

The right’s identity thrives on a kind of narrative anti-reality, a corrupted heroic myth that’s been built over 70+ years: i.e., that the country is under assault by domestic enemies who are bent on the destruction of the “real America.” As a result, conservative heroes must destroy those enemies to save the nation and restore it to what was intended by the Founding Fathers. (At least an original intent as modern conservatives see it.)

It’s a romantic hero story, but it’s also dangerously anti-pluralist, dominionist, and hegemonic. It sees bi-partisanship as a compromise with anti-American traitors. A compromise of truth itself. They win, or their enemies win. After seven decades of living that fight, they can see the world no other way.

They have plunged us all into narrative warfare. And at the moment, their storyline is winning.

The most maddening thing to watch is the political and media class get rope-a-doped into focusing all their manic resistance on Trump and “Trumpism,” when our current autocratic drift started while Trump was barely out of training pants. The narrative tides that raised up a politician like Trump owe him nothing and will continue to rise lone after he’s gone.

And yet, the idea of “Trumpism” is so ingrained in our political rhetoric that it’s inescapable—even more inescapable now that he’s president again. To wit, at the end of January, the University of Southern California was hosting something called the Warschaw Conference on Practical Politics, which was titled “The Trumping of America: Why and What’s Next?”

SMH. Really? Just shoot me now.

A much more appropriate title would be: “America’s Autocratic Drift: Why and What’s Next?” Naming it after the man only serve to buoy the cult of personality around him, add a gloriole to his public image, and probably gratify his ego.

The idea that we’re enduring the “Trumping” of America misses the forest for the trees, and the longer we stay focused on all things “Trumpism” and “Trumpian” and “Trumpist” (and every such derivation of a Trump-focused taxonomy), the longer and harder it will be to reverse the 70-years of autocratic drift that made him possible.

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PRESCEIENCE IS A VIRTUE

More than a year before the election I wrote…

“We now face a zero-sum confrontation based on the specious claim [i.e., the "BIG “Big Lie”] that the real America is a unipolar conservative Christian nation, rather than a multipolar pluralistic one, and that heroic conservatives must, at all costs, restore America to its original conservative identity.

“We all live in that binary now—heroes saving America versus enemies trying to destroy it—because conservatives have spent seven decades making it so. In their framing, either born-again conservative heroes will claim victory over us, or we will assert a multi-polar, pluralistic, consensus tyranny over them.”

Then, lo and behold, the day after Trump’s inauguration, The Bulwark validated my thesis with a home page headline: Donald Trump Is at War with America. (I had submitted my “Trumpism” piece to The Bulwark, before the election. Still hearing crickets on that one.)

Their columnist Jonathan Last wrote: “I don’t think there’s any way to read yesterday except as President Trump deciding that with the Republican party fully subservient to him, he can subjugate the other remaining power centers in American life… He can finally be a wartime president. It’s just that he’s going to war against America.”

Why does the author sound so surprised, like he’s discovering some great hidden secret? If the media had spent more time thinking about the root cause of Trump’s identitarian appeal on the right, they would have seen long ago that such a “war” was not only looming, but it was unavoidable.

More than a year before the election I wrote…

“Under a cold-hearted analysis, the pro-pluralism electoral coalition reveals not just weak alliances, but the likelihood of sizeable defections around the center at some point very soon.

“Those would include a return of White women to their home in the GOP; religious and anti-communist Latinos leaving the Democratic Party because they believe the GOP’s “socialist liberal tyranny” attacks; exasperated and fickle young people not showing up; cynical centrists giving up on voting in a fit of antipolitics, or syphoning off votes to anti-Establishment candidates; libertarians making any number of self-interested excuses as to why their lives would be better under an autocratic GOP compared to the sanctimonious Dems.”

And what happened?

White women, like always, voted their power and privilege. Many split their vote: passing abortion rights referendums, which they felt gave them permission to vote for the autocratic, Christian nationalist candidate. It wouldn’t affect them, or so they thought, so they permissioned themselves to give Trump another go.

Latin men went for Trump’s “strongman” anti-socialism schtick, as well as his “prosperity gospel.” Ironic given that such appeals are partly cultural, among a group of men that Republicans have demonized as unrepresentative of the culture of the “real America.” Youth turnout overall was down from 2020, with young White men strongly swinging to Trump, and men overall (with and without college degrees) going with Trump.

Independents went for Harris overall, but in key battleground states they went for Trump and helped swing the Electoral College in his direction. Independents made up a significantly larger share of the voting electorate in 2024 than Democrats, which is critical given that Independent voters skew conservative. As for Libertarians, that’s a mixed bag, but Trump was so enthusiastic in claiming their support after the election that he pardoned the convicted operator of the dark-web marketplace Silk Road, who is one of the biggest drug dealers of all time.

More than a year before the election I wrote…

“The moneyed elite will continue backing any candidate who backs their financial interests, no matter how hostile that candidate is to democracy.^[12] Moreover, technology and media companies, which control more and more of the world’s information production and delivery, have shown little willingness to prioritize truth and democracy over the profits generated by information pollution and addiction.”

And what happened?…

There isn’t room here to catalogue all the ways that the rich have “obeyed in advance” by paying off the incoming autocrat. But it’s worth noting Jeff Bezos’s sudden killing of a Washington Post endorsement of Kamala Harris as well as his $1MM donation to Trump’s Inaugural; Mark Zuckerberg’s $25MM gift-settlement of Trump’s defamation lawsuit, as well as a $1MM donation to the Inaugural, and his travels to Mara Largo to kiss the ring; and Disney’s $15MM gift-settlement of another Trump lawsuit; as well as dozens of billion-dollar corporations cozying up to the budding tyrant.

And tech-media platforms are rushing to remake themselves in the image of a woke-killing pugilist by abandoning content moderation and fact checking, because Freedom—as rich corporate douchebros celebrate being able to be bigots again.

More than a year before the election I wrote…

The religious right will continue their march to the center of conservative politics; as Katherine Stewart observes in The Power Worshippers, “Theirs is not a culture war, it is a political war over the future of democracy.”^[11]

And what happened?...

Trump has wasted no time in “spearheading the American Christian Nationalist Movement.” The Department of Transportation now favors putting money behind projects in communities with higher-than-average marriage and birth rates, because nuclear families are just more deserving. (Sec. 5; f(iii)) School choice reform paves the way toward unrestricted public funding of religious schools. Trump issued an Executive Order defining gender according to biological sex as determined by zygote.

His administration has aggressively attacked abortion rights in a “big surprise to ‘pro-choice’ Trump voters,” and tacitly condoned anti-abortion violence by pardoning those convicted of barricading clinics and attacking patients and staff. According to NPR he has ordered HHS to scrub its website of all abortion references. No wonder the new chair of the FCC who helped write communications policy sections of Project 2025 has opened investigations into PBS and NPR for wokeness.

More than a year before the election I wrote…

“The alt-right trolls are hard at work right now, at places like the Claremont Institute, building their own educational institutions, think tanks, media enterprises, social networks, youth outreach programs, and other infrastructure (within and outside the GOP); they’re doing it just the way original right-wing media activists did it in the 1950s.”

And what happened?...

Shadowy right-wing groups are steering the GOP on major policy issues. The Heritage Foundation is writing policy at Federal agencies. Russell Vought, an avowed Christian Nationalist and a Project 2025 author, has been building a “shadow government in waiting” and is now up for director of the Office of Management and Budget: where he’s said he wants to “traumatize” the federal workforce to get them to quit.

Maybe so he can hire Trump loyalists and ideologically aligned Christian Nationalists? There’s not enough space here to catalogue all the other radical, ultra-conservative “think tank” types who are finding a new home in the Trump Administration—but it’s not that hard to find them if you want to.

Finally… and most important… more than a year before the election I wrote…

“Given its untrue premise, today’s born-again conservative identity cannot survive and thrive except in a world of untruth.

“[It requires] the manufacture of a fictional counterworld in which the false mythology of victimized conservative heroes can be asserted as true. Creating what Masha Gessen calls a “power lie,” not merely to lie, but to “assert power” and assert “control over reality itself.” ^[xxiv]

Around the time I was writing this, the NY Review of Books ran the following headline:

“The Republican Party—now committed to minoritarian rule, not democracy—needs fictions to sustain its power. And that means a collision with honest journalism.”

Why the GOP “needs fiction” is the entire point of my “Trumpism” piece.

They desperately need their batshit crazy whinging about “fake news” and the “deep state” and “weaponization of government” and “election theft” and everything else (including fresh batshit crazy claims about “DEI” being to blame for the LA wildfires and DC airline crash) because their whole worldview crumbles if they have to admit the fact that none of it is true.

The right has spent 70+ years manufacturing a victim-based anti-reality, in which conservative heroes of the “real America” are called to free themselves from “government tyranny” and save the nation from domestic enemies.

To keep that mythology alive, the “deep state” must be true, and “weaponization of government” must be true, and “election theft” must be true, and “racism against white people” must be true, and on and on. If they admit none of it is true, they have to admit their identity is false.

So they just keep adding to the anti-reality with the intent of replacing actual reality in a concerted effort to validate their long-standing victim fantasy.

Why Are We Living in a Time of Autocratic “Mandate”? The BIG “Big Lie” Explains Why

OK, one more… over a year before the election, I wrote this too…

“Even if they don’t win the White House in 2024, sometime the in next decade or two, a born-again conservative GOP will roll into Washington DC atop a wave election that they will surely claim as a mandate.

“Then what we have is an autocratic party in charge, whose base voters and policy priorities have been growing increasingly anti-democratic over the last several presidential election cycles, at both the local and national levels.”

It happened much faster than my grudging optimism allowed for. I just didn’t want to believe that American voters were so cynically aligned with antipolitics that they’d throw in with such an obvious goon.

But now a thoroughly autocratic GOP won a “wave” election, believes it has a glorious mandate from God, and is smashing every “norm” in sight.

If the pro-democracy coalition in American politics doesn’t figure out WHY this happened, WHY the GOP’s transgressiveness is so attractive to their base, and WHY it gets them more traction with voters rather than less… then small-d democracy is pretty much done for.

The concept of the BIG “Big Lie” is the only viable explanation I’ve seen—i.e., a unified field theory of conservative dysfunction—that works not only as an explainer, but also a predictor, of the right’s madness.

The driver and source of our current political insanity is a narrative.

It’s the lie, stupid… the BIG “Big Lie.”

READY TO BEGIN? Here’s a link…

"Trumpism" Doesn’t Exist, and Why It’s So Terrifying (Intro)

What if we’re getting the whole Trump phenomenon wrong?

The narrative of “Trumpism” sure is tempting. It’s an easy out, blaming Donald Trump for all our current ills—political and social.

When he arrived on the scene, the world seemed to explode like an old alarm clock in a cartoon—its guts, gears, springs, and gizmos flying out in a fury, in all directions. In response, the easy narrative of “Trumpism” gripped the Left, much of the middle, and the never-Trump right, in the media and political commentariat.

But what if there’s an entirely different explanation for why his transgressive, destructive behavior gets more traction with conservative voters, rather than less; why his rise has been so hard to counter; and what’s to come next in America’s rightward lurch?

And most important, what if that explanation had almost nothing to do with Trump himself?

Could we still call it “Trumpism?” Or would we have to rethink our understanding of the current political moment, and adopt an entirely different approach to restoring the ethos—not to mention the governmental mechanics—of pluralism? Something the right seems hellbent on wrecking.

The media love to pin our national insanity on Trump, getting especially incensed at his “Big Lie” about a supposedly stolen election. But the GOP has always been fond of the “Big Lie.” It’s been a staple of their politicking for decades. Birtherism was a kind of “Big Lie,” as was the Swift Boat attack on John Kerry, as were the freak-outs over Sharia Law, CRT, and Obamacare’s supposed Death Panels, and decades of unending “Big Lies” about a supposed Homosexual Agenda.

Yet all this time, the biggest “Big Lie” of all—call it the original BIG “Big Lie”—has been sitting out in the open, used by the GOP to stoke a feeling of empowerment and passion among conservative voters.

The BIG “Big Lie” that they have been hammering on for years, until its drilled into their base like a catechism, goes something like this:

Un-American domestic enemies are everywhere and in control, and they are destroying the real America—excluded, marginalized, heroic conservatives must destroy their Liberal government tyranny to save and restore the nation.

Senator Warnock Called It Right

In his speech to the 2024 Democratic Nation Convention, Sen. Raphael Warnock made the most insightful and salient observation of this election season, perhaps of the last several decades. He said that behind Donald Trump’s “Big Lie” about a stolen election lurked a bigger and more insidious lie:

“It is the lie that this increasingly diverse American electorate does not get to determine the future of the country.”

He was calling out what the entire political and media class has been missing for years—they talk and write around it, but not directly about it. Sen. Warnock was referring to the BIG “Big Lie,” that only conservative represent the “real America” and they are in an existential fight against domestic enemies for the survival of the nation.

That storyline dates back at least seven decades, and its false hero mythology—now the foundational identity myth of the extreme conservative right—is the true source of America’s political dysfunction.

In fact, a better way to think about Trump (and by extension, “Trumpism” and the entire MAGA movement) is in climatological terms: a rogue storm in a warming world. Hurricanes get individual names, but each is only different in size and shape, not in kind.

Such is the case with Trump. The political climate has been warming owing to the growing power of the BIG “Big Lie,” and the seas of conservative extremism have been steadily rising for decades. Actually, the seas of global right-wing extremism have been rising on a tidal wave of heroic nationalism, and America is no exception.

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It's easy to see why political news, especially its opinion wing, mostly forgoes coverage of political change climate in favor of covering the weather, i.e., storm coverage. The storm is the most tangible immediate thing we can talk about. There’s the immediate storm response. The mandate for repair and rebuilding. The new preparatory steps and preventative measures to be taken. It brings catastrophe down to a concrete and manageable scale.

But America’s political climate change—indeed much of the world’s political climate change toward authoritarian-leaning leaders—is really being driven by tectonic-scale myth making, of the heroic variety.

The American right, particularly through the Republican Party, has been rebranding itself for almost seven decades using a heroic, antagonistic story arc that calls on GOP voters to defeat political enemies and save the American way of life. You can see the same nationalistic, populist narratives in the rhetoric of India’s Mohdi, Brasil’s Bolsonaro, Hungary’s Orban, and many others.

This victim-hero narrative propels conservative politics; in America it binds GOP voters ever more tightly together as they face ever-greater challenges from a changing world; and the only way that they can see the story ending is with their triumph, which will restore America to its mythic conservative glory.

What follows is the story of that story… where it came from… how it motivates an anti-democratic GOP… and why it’s absolutely critical that we stop our obsession with a non-existent “Trumpism.”

Until we face the real problem—i.e., dismantling the BIG “Big Lie” at the heart of America’s autocratic drift—we will continue down the very, very dark road we’re currently on. As it stands today, it looks like America is beginning a rapid downhill run toward autocracy without a decent set of brakes.

READY TO BEGIN? I KNOW IT’S SCARY. BUT HERE GOES…

Begin Part 1… “Trumpism” is NOT a Trump creation.