Whose Time Is It Anyways?

Politics in the Internet Age

I’ve often said that on the Internet 6 years of in-real-life history and time is actually about 600 years of history. For those of you who have been online, I’m going to make you feel a rush of nostalgia, and perhaps a bit of cringe.

This is from a thumbnail of a (now removed) video from Sargon of Akkad (Carl Benjamin) explaining what happened to him at VidCon 2017, an event that took place a little over six years ago. And just what on earth has happened in that span of time? This article would be tens of thousands of words if we tried to detail just what happened in terms of political history, not to mention the ever-evolving landscape of Internet politics. Even these words that are written here could easily be forgotten in a matter of years. But I am still around — Lord willing — and I will have a record to keep my thoughts in a relatively neat and linear format to maintain how my opinions and thoughts have evolved over the years and whom I associated with. The same can be said for you. After all, it’s called a “Timeline” for a reason on most social media feeds — perhaps with the exception of Snapchat, as those images and videos have a tendency to disappear.

A recent example was that of the “Nyan Cat” meme and a channel that had the “original” uploaded to it some 12-plus years ago and had recently put out a new video to “Free Palestine.” Since then, the original video, which had over 200 million views, has been deleted.

Oh, a new video…

Oh boy…

And finally…

It seems all rather silly, something that some people may not even be culturally aware of anymore. Do you remember Nyan Cat? Or what about the “Can I haz cheezeburger?” style of memes? An older, vanished time — and probably for the better — but it illustrates how fast things can move around here in order to be heard on the issue of Current Thing. Our social media-dominated news ecosystem has the pernicious ability to affect long-term social and cultural memory. You may only be 31 years old, but taking into consideration just how many of your in-real-time life-minutes you’ve spent online, you may feel much, much older. Even in the short span of my own life online as “The Prudentialist,” I’ve witnessed more “lore” and “arcs” of people I’ve interacted with in ways that I don’t think I could put into an effective analogue for my real life.

The same can be said for our politicians and political movements. A little over ten years ago now, I remember Senator Ted Cruz taking the stand to do a faux filibuster on Obamacare, speaking for almost 24 hours on the issue of how awful the Affordable Care Act was alongside its buggy website when it finally went live to the public. Ted Cruz has gone through a few arcs, from his “arguing boots” to his debates and sparring over Trump in the 2016 primaries, to growing a beard and barely beating Beto O’Rourke in the 2018 election cycle. Nowadays, he’s relatively quiet, it seems, in the media. He has his own show and continues to vote conservatively, but the star power that he might have had is certainly gone for good.

Social media has radically altered the way we judge the character and track records of “thought leaders” and personalities, whose best and worst ideas are only reified because we make memes out of them. From Curtis Yarvin’s “Dark Elves” take to Covfefe Anon’s “The Woke Are More Correct Than the Mainstream,” their worst and best tend to stick with you, and their larger corpuses are just swallowed up into the ether. People will say something without realizing where it came from. In an age of competing narratives, theories, and ideas all fighting for your attention span, the one with the most power is he who can get a thought into your head without you remembering where you got it from.

This also allows for individuals whose track records may not be the best — from encouraging protests to poorly-aged takes on Covid-19 — to be easily hidden from the social consciousness of someone’s new and growing audience. In a game of ideological and political clout, you wouldn’t want anyone to know that your batting average is closer to .112 than your self-reported .566. This is why it is still so important to read and to have a sense of history beyond just the last thirty years. Sure, the ’90s were better than today’s standards, but the ’90s also had problems that were from decades prior (such as immigration) that have been kicked farther down the road to our present age.

We write because we want a record, something we can look back on and say: “This is what we believed then. How much have we changed? Did this age well? How accurately did we predict?” Records enable us to track our own success both in terms of audience growth and finances. However, so much of that gets ignored for the sake of the “What is your take on the now?” rather than the “How have you been on the takes overall?” Outside of those wondering whether you could be allies with X group or Y organization, it falls to the truly dedicated, and thus an artificial scarcity of information is created by those who are willing to keep records on e-celebs, writers, and politicians. If you are a “Lore Master” or a “Second-in-Command,” you wield power, which is what makes e-drama so damn interesting in the first place; they know things we simply don’t.

Overall, the Internet, Social Media, and Personalities with Vast Parasocial Command of Audiences have shortened the memories and attention spans of our modern body politic. Who cares what you said five years ago, and whether it was true? Are you Dunking on the Libs today? Despite the fast-paced and frenetic environment of our social media, political history didn’t begin in 1991 with the introduction of the World Wide Web, or in 1981 with Usenet. As the political environment changes, and as politicians adapt to the changing mediums of social media, understand that while our perception of history or lore may be radically altered, it shouldn’t stop us from critically assessing whom we read, what we consume, and how best to act with prudence of forethought, with history in mind.