Re: <nettime> made for TV, made for social media

[Felix Stalder <felix@openflows.com>]

On 08.01.21 20:46, Dan S Wang wrote:

> Donald Trump is addicted to Twitter, pure and simple. He doesn't want to
> govern, he wants to tweet. He hates government meetings, legislative
> processes, presidential ceremonies--but loves having his rapid-fire tweet
> storms. More than any aspiring teen IG influencer, Twitch streamer, or
> Facebook friend hoarder, Trump is addicted to hearts and retweets by the
> millions. 
> 
> Some fear once out of office Trump has enough capital (wait a minute, what
> about that half billion in debt that's coming due??) to start a major news
> and social media platform of his own. But he's not thinking about the
> platform launch a year from now. He's too busy composing in his head his
> next few tweets, and like any addict, already getting a charge from the
> anticipation of the effects. For him it's Twitter or nothing.

By now, I would venture to say that "trumpism" is finished.

By trumpism, I don't mean a specific ideology but a method. Trump never
had a coherent ideology. I think he was, basically, a resentful,
narcissistic entertainer/marketer who skillfully repeated the phrases
that elicited the loudest cheers. Sure, all three of them, his
resentfulness, his narcissism, and his marketing skills were on an epic
scale, but, nevertheless, this does not amount to an ideology. Sure, the
loudest cheers came from various corners of the racist, misogynist, and
nationalist right, each with its own deep and traditions in America, but
what bound them together was shared resentment and grievances, not ideology.

The methodology is to create enough chaos, spectacle, volatility,
uncertainty, FUD (different names of the same underlying idea) so that
one could bend reality to adhere to one's wishes. There was no need to
care about facts because they would be created after in the aftermath of
action. This is a world of speech acts. Simply declaring things makes
them real. This is the world of entertainment, the world of finance, and
the world of politics, at least for their most powerful actors. Creating
rumors about falling prices can make prices fall, long enough for the
skillful insiders to profit from it. By the time they move back up, the
next thing can be created. The same method can also operate in politics.
If you apply just enough pressure, you can legislate almost anything
into reality. For Trump, the preferred way to execute this method was
using marketing to shape TV which would then be translated into money.
During his time in politics, the preferred marketing platform was
Twitter, geared towards TV as reality feeding back into various
money-making schemes.

This method, however, is entirely parasitic. It assumes that there is an
underlying support system capable of absorbing and smoothing over the
shocks, steadying the environment enough so that the next shock can be
applied. That support system can either be a legal team, a credit line,
or a well-functioning organization/administration that keeps the boat
afloat no matter what. This is, of course, a world of privilege, where
others constantly clean up so quickly that nobody really cares that the
master trashes the place.

And I think what happened on Wednesday was that the support system broke
down. It's kind of ironic, it was the police, largely sympathetic to the
demonstrators, that led it happen. Everyone could see that the place is
being trashed. I think this is the reason why quite a few people, like
Brian, were happy with this event. And I tend to agree with them.

I think, trumpism understood this way, as a form of violent, parasitic,
entitled mode of operation, is much larger than Trump as a person. So
it's ending might be more interesting than a president being abandoned
by his allies during the final days of his term.

He is both a symbol and an expression of late-stage capitalism. And it's
now most obvious form of parasitism lies in its relationship with the
natural environment. There is a parallel reckoning that the biophysical
systems that support human civilization are no longer capable of
absorbing the shocks inflicted by the particular method through which
this civilization operates. There are only so many hurricanes, floods,
droughts, and wildfires until even the Koch brothers understand that
weakening environmental regulations is a pyrrhic victory, expressing the
same kind of dead-end that the protestors found Nancy Pelosi's office to
be. Enough for some shallow gloating, but then?

The experience of a badly managed pandemic is another moment of
realization that a vital support system, whose existence was taken for
granted, can, indeed, break down at catastrophic costs, not just to
others, but to oneself.

This creates an extraordinarily open situation, in which even large
fractions of the core groups -- those with financial, social/political,
and cultural power -- realize that their respective status quo has
become untenable (marginalized groups knew this all along).

However, who can come up with a new, practical approach is unclear.

On the left, the vision is some kind of eco-socialism, a green new deal
with universal social (human and nonhuman) services, on the right, the
vision is some kind of eco-fascism with radicalized social services.

I think culturally speaking, they are both expressions of a necessary
post-humanist turn, even if they offer starkly different views of what
this "post" entails.













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