Just last month I wrote about how the “vibe” seemed to be shifting toward something more positive — partly because Biden had stepped down, freeing us of 20th-Century-style leadership once and for all, but also simply as a widespread feeling of lightness and possibility. Now, at least according to some friends I’ve been running into this week, it feels as if the vibe is shifting back.
In AA they call it the “pink cloud.” Once you detox from your addiction, you get really high off that feeling of liberation for days or weeks. It’s all good. Then, reality sets in and the hard work of being a person in recovery sets in. You have to contend with all those reasons you got addicted in the first place. As if on cue, Labor Day marked our transition from the summer of elation to the hard work ahead. More bloodshed in the Middle East, more bad climate news, more school shootings, and a nationally divisive political season before us.
For me, that vibe shift back to awfulness came when I checked out what was happening on X/Twitter for the first time in many months. Some friends of mine had organized one of those “dudes for Kamala” groups, and got their account suspended from X/Twitter just when they were announcing their Zoom call. No reason. I had learned they were not the only ones mysteriously shut down at the most inopportune times, so I thought I’d look at the platform to see if I could understand what was happening to the supposedly free speech zone.
That was a mistake. My feed was overflowing with the most awful stuff. Half of it was deranged or cruel tweets from Musk himself, who I don’t even subscribe to. I also encountered astoundingly violent stuff, like videos of black girls fighting in the hallways of their schools, women being beaten on the street, and migrants supposedly attacking people. I saw harsh ridicule of presidential candidates’ special needs sons. Even thoughtful threads between people I know were interspersed with ads and bot-created imagery of the most awful stuff, as if to remind us that the greater world out there is truly awful, violent, and authoritarian. The little thread is an exception, a tiny bubble of fantasy, within a greater universe of horror that can only be effectively managed by Musk or those of his ilk.
This is what OG media theorist Jacques Ellul was talking about in his book Propaganda. The object of the game is to make it appear that there is no other opinion, no other truth in the world, than the one you wish to project. Propaganda is total. And on a platform like X/Twitter, it really can feel that way. Unlike a newspaper or a magazine that you can hold in your hand, a feed on a platform feels infinite, coming from everywhere, and all at once. It is a self-contained universe.
This is why we can’t continue to pretend that these platforms are mere social networks, with no responsibility for their editorial choices and standards. They are not neutral technologies like telephones or email servers; they are landscapes fashioned by their owners to convey particular points of view. They are actively edited, even if by algorithms. Musk is promoting his own point of view, even his own tweets. That means X is a publication, and must be regulated as such. It’s not a bad thing, necessarily. It’s just a true thing. It’s a publication with a de facto editor-in-chief making choices about what users will see and not see. Simple as that.
So yeah, if you want a negative vibe shift, visit X. But I’m feeling this drive toward negativity from concerned progressives, as well. I was just on a panel last week called “Are We Doomed?” (I shouldn’t have expected it to be positive, I know), and one guy on the panel — a real environmental scientist — explained that we’re just totally doomed. He said that even if we stop polluting right now, we will “unmask” the atmosphere and all die anyway. He said we only have maybe six years left until we kill the plankton and run out of oxygen they make for us.
It got me wondering, in real time, whether I’m here to help fix the problem, or simply to deliver palliative care to those of us alive right now. So by the time it was my turn to speak, I offered that the way we were contextualizing the “facts” was itself problematic. Yes, each data point may be true, but we mustn’t rule out all the context we still don’t know. We are only just discovering that the gut biome regulates our hormones, that the connective tissue in our bodies is really an organ, or that trees don’t compete for sunlight so much as share nutrients with each other through mycelial networks in the soil. Our science may be correct, but it’s still oversimplified and limited. There’s no need to assume doom in advance.
This tendency for dire conclusions is also a product — at least in part — of this compromised media environment in which we live. The internet is rich in data points (true or not), but poor in context. Television, for all its problems, told stories. The news came on at the end of the day, and some guy put the events in the best context the network could. That’s because the news wasn’t even being delivered for money. It was the way a television network compensated the public for its FCC license. They were required to dedicate some of their resources to news. That’s partly why it was so flat. News people were wonky, well-intentioned, and underpaid.
As TV news moved to cable and became always-on, 24/7 relatively live feeds, it lost ability to provide context. We just watched stuff as someone tried to explain what was probably going on. And as it moved to the net, the news even lost its linearity. It’s just photos and videos without any context at all.
Of course, media’s traditional storytellers had already broken trust with us with great regularity. Back in the 1950’s, Chiquita hired Ed Bernays to feed fake stories about Guatemalan communists in order to get American support for an invasion to replace their duly elected president with a US-backed dictator. This wasn’t an exception to the way Hearst and others ran their media empires, it was the rule. Noam Chomsky showed us how news media is biased by who pays for it, how journalists must cater to government authorities in order to maintain their access, and thus how the stories we’re told advance certain agendas over others.
Digital media’s supposed revolutionary potential was to free raw facts from the biased contexts of these intentionally and unintentionally compromised top-down storytellers. It would turn us from mere spectators into participants. But the owners of digital media platforms weren’t revolutionary at all; they were highly reactionary, willing to disrupt one “vertical” or another, but not the underlying operating system of extractive corporate capitalism. Sure, they were happy to change book publishing (Amazon), hospitality (Airbnb), or taxis (Uber), but still ran to Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley for their IPOs. The underlying power structures and their disempowering agendas remained the same. Let them eat tweets.
Instead of fact-based media, we got factoid-based media. A stream of memes without context, with which we’re all supposed to play a game of global improvisational storytelling. “Yes and…” Whoever can label the picture or video, whoever can name the meme wins the narrative. Yes, the people dying in that photo are real, but the context of who they are and what is really happening to them is up for grabs. Are those terrorists who were foiled in a plot to kill babies, or is it parents of dying babies being killed by overzealous security forces? Are we dying in a climate catastrophe or reclaiming our collective agency to create a new reality together?
While the power of those storytellers is great, so too is our power to forge the meta-narratives — the vibe, if you will — through which we experience and evaluate their stories. Are they consistent with our view of humanity? Do they express our greatest possibilities or our worst potentials? Their traction, acceptance, and likelihood of manifesting in reality depends largely on us.
We may not have absolute power over conditions on the ground. But we do have some, and our ability to exercise it in positive, pro-social, and sustainable ways depends on the stories we tell ourselves and each other about what the heck is really going on here.
If you want to hear the whole monologue from which this piece was excerpted, check out the new episode of Team Human right here.