"Fascists," "Cancel culture" and the language of Grievance: "Angertainment," Engagement Through Enragement, a Media Business Model
Last weekend's CPAC conference in Orlando featured comments and content that has become de rigeuer for the disgruntled right. The well-debunked claims of election fraud made the rounds. The by now well-worn proclamations against cancel culture and its handmaiden "big tech" were made regularly and forcefully.
There was mention of Democrats wanting to "promote socialism," that we live in "dark times," and that those who are not Democrats need to "defend liberty," suggesting those who are Democrats attack liberty.
The reactions in the general media, and those on social media who are mollified (or affirmed) by it, were made up of the usual vocabulary that portends the end of the world at the hands of fascists ("threat to democracy," "anti-science,"white supremacist").
In either case, public discourse -- I use the term loosely -- continued the chronicle that each side thinks the other represents an existential threat to themselves and the country.
But I'm not interested in politics or political parties. I want to start an inquiry into how it is that these world views could be so different. Where is it that the sides in opposition come by their views of those they see across the way?
Media and the public discourse spends little if any time on this question. Maybe that's because it's too difficult. Maybe it's because there isn't time. Maybe it's because there's no interest. But maybe it's because to answer the question would mean thinking in ways we aren't used to and in coming to conclusions the media's dominant paradigm isn't interested presenting.
Why don't we question our beliefs based on what we think we know? I'm not talking about another New York Times tour of diners and truck stops to understand the Trump voter. I don't mean another National Review aggregation of stories about college students stifling speeches that AOC finds offensive. I mean fundamental questions of epistemic claims we make about what goes on in the world need to be posed. Not in the way sociologists and economists suggest when they talk about "epistemic equality," which refers to unequal distribution and access to information. Or as has been elevated recently by Dr. Shoshana Zuboff of Harvard Business School in her work on surveillance capitalism. The question we have to put to ourselves is "how do we know what we know?" When it relates to others and what we think they want, do, think, and feel, the answer is that we know what we know based on the window to the world nearly all of us look out: the screens in our houses, on our desks, and in our hands.
Media is how we know what we know.
The notion of media as epistemology is not a new one; it's been the subject of many scholastic articles, technical and academic. It's what the oodles of columns and articles and op-ed pieces about "fake news" are really about. In Neil Postman's 1985 book, Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business, the second chapter is titled "Media as Epistemology." The thesis is that "the concept of truth is intimately linked to the biases of forms of expression."1 I don't want to get into the larger discussion of how society is in a constant state of distraction -- though the theme of this blog is ultimately about that -- but I want to point out how asking about how we know what we know in a media ecosystem gets to the "what" of that distraction and the "how" of that distraction and perhaps even at the "why" of that distraction.
As the media and advertising ecosystem evolved more to rely on data and technology to optimize its business functions, the companies relying on that ecosystem focused more on actions and events that were countable. Why? Because machines aren't smart. They need blunt and simple noticeability. In the modern media environment, increasingly driven by a digital infrastructure, the most noticeable action or event is the click. Human behavior, then, has to be reduced to its stickiest, crudest, countable configuration. Rendering human action into machine-readable form in order to get “clicks” was motivated by driving easy action for the purposes of generating revenue. The law of unintended consequences has been amplified exponentially through the accident of a platform — social media — emerging at the same time as did a convenient device for distributing it — the smart phone. Marry this to an ecosystem based in last-click attribution (i.e. the last place a person encountered an advertisement gets the credit for what that person does next, e.g."click" on an ad), and you end up with a media memesphere driven by engagement through enragement. Not because enraging is the motive or the goal, but because getting the click — and as many of them as possible for as long as possible from as many people as possible — is best facilitated by enragement. The click is the end; the enragement the means.
Over the years of living steeped in an environment that either tries to entertain us or seeks to incite us, we’ve become a people of emotions, not reason.2. And media — all media — stokes emotions to maintain conflict. Why? Because it’s good for business. Right, left, or otherwise... the motive is the same, which is to keep people engaged. And that engagement is fostered through enragement.
Statements about "censorship" or "deplatforming" or "coup" are not meant to appeal to our reason. If we used our reason and not our feelings, we’d see that there’s more opportunity for more voices to shout at the crowd and curse the night for the darkness than ever before. Apple and Google and AWS aside, voices aren’t being silenced. There are a few that might be quieted, but they are not silenced. However, the framing of being silenced is a lot more provocative -- and simple to pose -- than a nuanced and deliberative discussion about corporate purview over use of product, speech, and how the 1st amendment works. Why this framing? It angers up the blood. If we’re angry, it's easier to distract us, taking our eyes off problems, attention away from finding common cause with one another, and then working together to solve those problems.
If we did that, we’d see that a lot of content put out for us to react to is what I call “angertainment.” Words and phrases like “war,” “surge,” “insurrection,” “fraud,” “steal” “domestic terrorism,” “fascist,” "cancel culture," and others are meant to inflame and affirm, not inform and explain.
But media —ALL media — prefers we keep our eyes on screens instead of on our world. Because if we all saw each other as people and we all saw each other as basically wanting the same things, and we saw each other as partners in finding solutions rather than as enemies causing problems, we’d stop watching those screens, sharing those memes, and making them money.