Memeplex Politics

Intermediaries and Propaganda

Years ago, when I was first starting out in the foray of online politics, when Mr. Prudentialist was still modified Edmund Burke profile pictures (old fans of the frog remember), I had come across a Twitter thread where someone was wishfully thinking that Trump wouldn’t be in office had Jon Stewart not left The Daily Show in 2015. If anything, Jon Stewart, while responsible for ruining a whole generation of voters, is left as a dinosaur of a bygone age, something for Millennial leftists to cling to of an older type of political arena where The Daily Show was seen as the go-to place for news rather than anonymous frogs on Twitter and other social media platforms. While The Daily Show is a ghost of its former self, late-night television and political shows like Stewart’s feel like relics, the same sort of men you’d see on Viagra commercials begging to be potent once more in an age of disintermediation, despite their obvious role of serving propaganda to normie masses.

To say that the state of modern American political discourse is laughable would be stating the obvious. The Internet, for those with a certain autistic flair of data-mining and going down the rabbit hole, has led to receipts proving adages and “conspiracy theories” of American politics that we’ve taken as truth for decades. It comes as no shock that American political discourse has been rapidly declining, and experiencing a kind of dilution for almost forty years, where the pre-approved talking points have their punditry classes speak with the kayfabe we’ve grown to see past. PBS has a remarkable documentary on this issue, The Best of Enemies, focused on the 1968 debates between Gore Vidal and William F. Buckley, Jr., as the model of American punditry theater.

Social media and its memetic framework of communication is a refined model of this network pundit system, but acts as an effective regime disintermediator, where you don’t have to rely on the Dan Rathers or Lester Holts. Well known phrases like “The Woke Are More Correct Than The Mainstream” from X user and podcaster Covfefe Anon are densely packed meme-phrases that charge political talking points, and require actual understanding. The Left have their own memeplexes, such as “No Human Is Illegal” and “Trans Women Are Women” to “Diversity Is Our Strength.” These phrases have their own charged meanings, but to the average Democrat voter or leftist, these are more of feel-good mantras and proverbs that reduce any room for nuance because wanting to be “a heckin’ decent human being” matters more than any semblance of truth. This is in part what killed an era of online politics, because the truth stopped mattering when it came to actually attaining money or power. The “Skeptics” era of certain YouTube political personalities embodies this quite well.

“The Skeptics”

Most people who vote have the smallest understanding of a complex or nuanced political position by the nature of the bannered or advertised position of their particular political affiliation. Now there are some caveats to this, primarily in what has been classically defined as traditionally low-information or single-issue voters, who are engaged in the political process as a mechanism to bring out bodies for the purposes of voting for a particular group, or to engage only in the specific advancement in a policy position, traditionally guns or abortion. American political participation has seen its steady decline over the years, and America’s increasing diversity (forced upon Americans, never asked for) has ensured that low-trust societies are here to stay for the time being.

This age-old thread, similar to aging Millennials cheering on their “Comfort Character” being back on streaming and television to tell them how to think and feel one more time. The parasociality of our political media environment has created cults of personality on the political Left and Right, from Hasan Piker to Sam Hyde, from Carl Benjamin to Vaush. Prior to the advent of Internet blood sports, political YouTube, and the bygone eras of most video essayists, you had your Rush Limbaughs and Jon Stewarts. Going back to this age-old Twitter thread, one feels inclined to ask: What was Jon’s contribution to the information memeplex of our political era?

1. Convince/propagandize an entire generation of potential voters that only Fox News/Right-Leaning Media is biased in the United States, and that other forms of media are objective fact-reporting journalists — essentially establishing the lie that reality has a liberal bias.

2. Encourage activism of progressive causes and for the youth to lead them, despite having limited experience and information on the subject other than the comedic one-liners and non-sequiturs that Stewart would outline for them.

3. Pan and dismiss conservative activism as strawmen, liars, or perpetuating the claims of the slippery slope — Jon Stewart famously did this with gay marriage.

4. Progressively satirize and strawman the premise of Christian metaphysics, bringing on the trend of the enlightened atheist; or worse, twisting traditional dogmas into positions incongruent with orthodoxy, or that having faith in anything is not an intellectual position to hold in modern political discourse.

5. Moralize politics, increasing tribalism and polarization through the simple political rule that progressive=good, conservative=bad.

6. Hire and instill a trend for future hosts and similar-type shows, leading to The Colbert Report, Full Frontal, Last Week Tonight, and others, so that more entertainers can control the narrative with humor, satire, and a bias presented as objective fact ad infinitum.

The era of online politics, cutting through the bullshit, has been effective at radicalizing individuals to very different ends politically, whether that be to the Right (that online pipeline was very much real) or to the social contagion of state-sponsored castration with transgenderism. “Waking up the masses” to “Redpilling the Normies” was for a moment the way to cut through the bullshit of the mainstream press to a younger, more online audience.

As Nick Land writes in “Cathedral Decay”:

The Zeitgeist is its story, not ours. In this tale, it goes from strength to strength, overwhelming everything in its path. Recognizing the structure of this narrative is important. Subscription to it is not thereby implied. Every critical component of the Cathedral — media, academic, and bureaucratic — is exceptionally vulnerable to Internet-driven disintermediation. The current phase of capital reconstruction is distinctively — and automatically — Cathedral-hostile, when evaluated at the level of technonomic process (which we do not do enough), rather than at the level of surface public pronouncement (which we concern ourselves with far too much with). Dying things can be very dangerous, and even more frenzied. It would be a mistake to confuse such characteristics with fundamental strength.

The last fifteen years of online politics have replaced the Jon Stewarts of the world for their independent (and some very much state-sponsored or -approved) online replacements. This isn’t to rehash the last decade or so with the episodes of Ezra Levant and the Alt-Lite, ContraPoints being on a podcast with Hillary Clinton, and so on. The fans and the viewers of these programs, podcasts, and the like have radically reoriented (and at the same time re-intermediated) our political media ecosystem. It is simultaneously more democratized, and very much top-down.

Angela Watercutter from Wired magazine, of all places, writes the following:

Still, it was in the US that fandom’s influence on everything felt most astute. As Aja Romano wrote for Vox at the beginning of the year, people don’t just vote for Trump, they stan him—in a way that’s not that different from Beyoncé fans. While that might seem like an oversimplification, Romano wrote, “in both subcultures, the rise of social media echo chambers has fomented toxicity, extremism, and delusional thinking.” Disinformation and zealotry, then, serve to “distort and fracture our shared sense of reality, all in the name of what devotees believe to be a higher cause.”

While the Left is incapable of understanding MAGA or the online Right in general with its beyond-the-Overton-Window positions, we have reentered an age where we have our respective camps, programs, and talking heads. Even the age of streaming has basically reintroduced Cable-style packages with bundles, and the microtransactions to avoid seeing the Amazon Prime equivalent of commercial breaks are not stopping. While the Right is not fully in power yet (although the attempts to go about purging the bureaucracies are a good start!), we must recognize that the media landscape that brought on this era of politics is changing, iterating off of its vestigial pre-Internet forms. It has accelerated — Elon Musk’s claim that “You are the Media” rings true — but just as a YouTuber can be picked up by an agent, scripts and presentations can be written by government agencies or the same bureaucracies that told you just a few years ago to “Trust the Experts.”

Trump or some other force like him in American politics would’ve emerged with or without Jon Stewart, even if his cult of personality and Obama worship helped bring the Trump moment to the stage a decade ago. We will reinvent our own Jon Stewarts, and one could argue that the Right already has to some extent, whether it be with the current lineup of hosts at The Blaze, Canon+ programming, or even The Lotus Eaters across the pond. This may be a sign of how far conservative media has to go (lest we forget how the Daily Wire tried their hand at movies), and just how far behind the Right is in the game of online politics.

Right now, we enter a new age of disintermediation and the creation of now semi-official channels to go to for breaking news and fandoms autistically charging at data and the swamp of bureaucracies in Washington. We’re on the precipice, and you certainly get to be part of the show, if you want to.