Re: The Left Needs a New Strategy
Some people have said that January 6 turned out to be, for many of the participants, little more than a photo op. In 1998, Paul Virilio said “the great ‘danger to the system’ is no longer that of the bankruptcy of companies or banks in a chain reaction, such as we have recently seen in Asia, but the formidable threat of a blinding, of a collective blindness on the part of humanity – the unprecedented possibility of a defeat of facts and hence a disorientation of our relation to reality.” He was speaking of what he called an “image crash” as the once dominant medium of television converges with “the most immense enterprise of opinion transformation ever attempted in ‘peacetime’, an undertaking which has scant regard for the collective intelligence or the culture of nations” – the web.
He said these things in “The Information Bomb” (1998) in which he credits Einstein as the origin of this warning. Roger Stahl has a nice summary of the concept at
We see that this is in fact happening. We have even labeled it The Post-Truth Era. It is upon us. And it has been years, if not decades, in the making. As we speak of a new strategy for the Left, take a look at the outstanding abilities of right-wing propaganda. There are the obvious latter day wars in such things as meme-making as a simplified but more direct continuation of the grand history of editorializing. And there are more insidious manifestations throughout modern media found in such things as sports radio and morning shows. This direct signaling and reinforcement is both subtle and effective. A message that one can “read” simply through veiled cues reaches people where other approaches don’t. And then there is QAnon.
The New Yorker podcast recently had someone on who has likened QAnon to Augmented Reality gaming:
https://www.wnyc.org/widgets/ondemand_player/thenewyorker/?share=1#file=/audio/json/1082113/