It might be said both musicians and writers are both undergoing this same transformation for similar reasons. Monopoly’s in these industries don’t work like they do in retail or banking even though many have tried. The “supply chains” aren’t fixed goods produced by robots in either mechanical or human form. The forces of disaggregation have proven stronger than otherwise hoped by the oligarchy that seeks to dominate these revenue streams. It’s a hopeful place, where the few can no longer dominate the messaging. Oddly enough it could be argued it was the overuse of propaganda itself that tired so many people of mainstream media when it became obvious to anyone paying even the slightest attention, the Onion ceased to be parody and more like the real news about a decade or more ago.
Lol re The Onion. Yes, there has been an interesting development where I think audiences are much more aware of slant and much more aware of how the sausages get made. It's kind of like being in 'the society of the spectacle' - media is such a dominant fact in all of our lives that we all have some intuitive sense now of some of the inherent subjectivities of media.
It’s an interesting exercise in objectivity making the effort to only watch Al Jazeera news and Russia Today. The contrast in reporting from neoliberal countries like the US, UK and Canada is noticeably remarkable if you know what to look for, which you do. Highly recommend the exercise, especially around big international events of contention. It’s been my experience repeatedly over many years that these outlets provide better more objective reporting of situations and conditions than western outlets by a wide margin. Apparently their propaganda against the west is to just tell it how it really is without the slant. And it works.
My experience of the 6 o clock news in the 20th century exactly lines up with Network movie. What with the commercials it almost felt like the collectivising effect happened in the exasperation of the audience, we were together in doubting that we were getting context but waited until Late Night NBC to be sure, yes , no , haply we were bamboozled again. From 2005 til recently online newscasters have been willing to do a scholar yeoman's work at very seriously giving background context as a set-up to their reporting. That is beautiful, and for which reason I expect them to increasingly fly a few tribal signs in under 20 seconds and move on to the CNN fake position of being On the ground, why not? And O could be wrong about that because the now 16 year olds are very conscientious about imitating this larger- story scope when they ask you for permission togoto the bathroom. Wow. I see many fire-lighted possibilities, and I see the Bbc model winning out. By whatever funding method I wish that it comes out that a relatively few 24 hour news cycle outlets come to put live bodies next to the tickertape. Because despite I donot believe the newness makes the news, on the contrary, until a historian reports 4 days later on counterpunch I ignore the import of what fresh blood letting I hear, but Nixon finded the corporation for public broadcasting...I mean detente between three classes: the 5th estate, the wonks, and the loudest man , Prole! , in any room comes from having a journal of record. That seems to me to usefully be cable TV . My idea here has been that since Walter Cronkite, most of us expect each other to doubt the official secretaries. But the truth* needs some of us to be * social* do you dig? I think another competitor to the current cnn cnbc fox infortunately is liable to be Nth another 24 hours of special pleading, but another very editorially controlled new channel is what I say comes next. They will call it Univocal Nobody Knows Apocalypse Now. And it will feature 2 second segments of Apocalypse Now before going to crackly haphazard pretrnded end of the network interrupted commercials....aw, Local man does what?
I need to watch Network! I do get the sense that a lot of FOX viewers really believe anything that's said on FOX. But yes it's hard to imagine some centrist figure ever again having the bland consensus acceptance of Cronkite (or Peter Jennings or Tom Brokaw).
On your word I read Colin Woodard. That was the Americharacter book. The most injustice I have heard laid bare made plain and I see no daylight at all 2-3 hours later. I was already a fan of Lyndon Baines. Who clearly styled himself after FDR and all else is fire-lighted mercenary raids on the public purse. I am terrified. If I find a friend I discovered at work I like the sound of singing 'losing my religion' . ReM ya know, it comes out as a folksy protest song if you take out the production values. Network is my brightest hope, no waste of time watching that. It is Chris Hedges biopic...watch it and I will advocate for a Howard Beale moderated public forum utterly seriously...by the way: Woodard admits in three sentences the hippies were rabidly antigovernment. Those are my people, they must have been clinically depressed as a group to choose LBJ as an enemy, which they did.
I also feel fine. But less due to the structure and history and more due to how this system has resulted in so much fakery and lying. I know that traditional news media lying isn't new - what did Hearst say? "You bring me the stories. I'll bring you the war." But there's no use pretending that a large number of people haven't accepted that they tell the truth even if they know how to phrase this belief without sounding naive. (This being a blessing and a curse of the objectivity rule, which otherwise was one of that era's stronger suits: I don't agree that objectivity doesn't exist, just that it goes against the grain for certain people and journalists became good at finding ways to circumvent
it, like by simply not reporting on news that is inconvenient to them) Much as people like to gloat and say "pfff, ads don't work on me:" all right, then why do these companies pay millions to put out ads? It's because that's mostly just talk, and ads do work. The same with people's trust of the old news machine.
What Boomers in particular don't always get is that an influencer is a lot more accountable to their audience than a CNN host who has that middle-class job. There has been a lot of bs spread online, but there has also been a lot of the exact opposite: the very honesty and sincerity people wanted from mainstream media and never got. After having to just sit back and listen to a bunch of liars on the news, the ability and desire to directly support and influence information is almost narcotic to us. That's why we have the phrase "audience capture," a phrase that wouldn't mean anything in an objectivity-driven environment.
This moment is beautiful to watch, and I will enjoy watching the liars and their industry collapse. I hope this greater collapse eventually brings down the NYT after all they've done to unrepentantly enable the rise of the evil of Communism in the world, and of course the WMD lie: though I won't get my hopes up too high. But I do feel bad for my generation. This is one of those scenarios where it's easy to see how we were caught in the middle of a transitional time as well as a financial crisis. The Zoomers are truly the first internet generation. At least we're young enough to where the change won't hurt as bad.
Interesting Felix. I guess my concern about this moment is the tendency towards 'giantism' and monopoly. As the LA Times' of the world die out, the NYTimes just gets bigger and bigger; and internet discourse is basically run through a handful of platforms (X, Meta, etc). But maybe not. Maybe there are always cycles to this. The 2010s was an era of consolidation. It seems like this may be a moment of relative fragmentation - people leaving X and leaving Meta, people finding a variety of newer, smaller platforms.
Btw I saw in one of your posts that you identify as a "Traditionalist"? Interesting! I was reading a bit about Guenon and Evola recently, but hadn't met a Traditionalist in the wild lol!
I think you're right about fragmentation. Haven't been back on FB for a while, but from everything I hear it sounds like it's becoming emptier and emptier. Again: I feel fine.
Haha. I am a traditionalist in the manner of James Joyce but without rejecting the actual Catholic faith. That's the simple way of putting it. Naturally, I'll have to reckon with Evola's use of the term one day. Perhaps I'd better do that sooner rather than later: it might soon be illegal to buy his books. XD
Interesting, I just wrote a piece about the downfall of Pitchfork (sort of)!
The old model of a select few being granted a mass audience only seems to work when the pipeline to that stage is narrow and the pool to choose those select few is also small. Get too many qualified people involved, and the elites get exposed for being mediocre or biased and/or the outsiders just go and do their own thing. All the recent rage against nepo babies is partially about the rise in nepotism in coveted fields, but this has always been the case. But it's more about a bigger pool of people feeling that they're just as qualified, thanks to technology (e.g. easier and cheaper to make movies and songs yourself) and demystification of celebrity.
Maybe the dichotomy is if you want a world where writers and other artists can make a comfortable living, you can only have a few at the top and everyone has to accept that. Or you can have everybody with their own niche audiences, but then basically everybody has to do their thing as a side gig.
Hi Chris, yes I think the basic issue is in some fundamental sense the scale of a society. Once the pool is too large, too many people are out in the cold, and too many people become very suspicious of the 'social center' and its organizing mechanisms. So you end up with more clusters and more of an 'archipelagoized' society.
In practical terms, yes, I think almost everybody ends up having to do 'their thing' as a side gig - or at least not as their primary revenue stream. The point is seeing that more as an honorable or even desirable way of being as opposed to a boom-or-bust mentality of 'making it.'
I think the dissagregation of audiences is also related to the rise of identity politics, which has been both a cause and an effect.
As the idea of a singular monoculture is deprecated, previously marginalized voices and audiences are served.
The conservative reaction to this is to force a return to a nostalgic idealization of a utopia with three tv channels, which is impossible, so they’re ironically becoming their own niche audience.
The changing & changed nature of “the public” is an interesting concept with manifold repercussions that continue to play out. Thanks!
It might be said both musicians and writers are both undergoing this same transformation for similar reasons. Monopoly’s in these industries don’t work like they do in retail or banking even though many have tried. The “supply chains” aren’t fixed goods produced by robots in either mechanical or human form. The forces of disaggregation have proven stronger than otherwise hoped by the oligarchy that seeks to dominate these revenue streams. It’s a hopeful place, where the few can no longer dominate the messaging. Oddly enough it could be argued it was the overuse of propaganda itself that tired so many people of mainstream media when it became obvious to anyone paying even the slightest attention, the Onion ceased to be parody and more like the real news about a decade or more ago.
Lol re The Onion. Yes, there has been an interesting development where I think audiences are much more aware of slant and much more aware of how the sausages get made. It's kind of like being in 'the society of the spectacle' - media is such a dominant fact in all of our lives that we all have some intuitive sense now of some of the inherent subjectivities of media.
It’s an interesting exercise in objectivity making the effort to only watch Al Jazeera news and Russia Today. The contrast in reporting from neoliberal countries like the US, UK and Canada is noticeably remarkable if you know what to look for, which you do. Highly recommend the exercise, especially around big international events of contention. It’s been my experience repeatedly over many years that these outlets provide better more objective reporting of situations and conditions than western outlets by a wide margin. Apparently their propaganda against the west is to just tell it how it really is without the slant. And it works.
My experience of the 6 o clock news in the 20th century exactly lines up with Network movie. What with the commercials it almost felt like the collectivising effect happened in the exasperation of the audience, we were together in doubting that we were getting context but waited until Late Night NBC to be sure, yes , no , haply we were bamboozled again. From 2005 til recently online newscasters have been willing to do a scholar yeoman's work at very seriously giving background context as a set-up to their reporting. That is beautiful, and for which reason I expect them to increasingly fly a few tribal signs in under 20 seconds and move on to the CNN fake position of being On the ground, why not? And O could be wrong about that because the now 16 year olds are very conscientious about imitating this larger- story scope when they ask you for permission togoto the bathroom. Wow. I see many fire-lighted possibilities, and I see the Bbc model winning out. By whatever funding method I wish that it comes out that a relatively few 24 hour news cycle outlets come to put live bodies next to the tickertape. Because despite I donot believe the newness makes the news, on the contrary, until a historian reports 4 days later on counterpunch I ignore the import of what fresh blood letting I hear, but Nixon finded the corporation for public broadcasting...I mean detente between three classes: the 5th estate, the wonks, and the loudest man , Prole! , in any room comes from having a journal of record. That seems to me to usefully be cable TV . My idea here has been that since Walter Cronkite, most of us expect each other to doubt the official secretaries. But the truth* needs some of us to be * social* do you dig? I think another competitor to the current cnn cnbc fox infortunately is liable to be Nth another 24 hours of special pleading, but another very editorially controlled new channel is what I say comes next. They will call it Univocal Nobody Knows Apocalypse Now. And it will feature 2 second segments of Apocalypse Now before going to crackly haphazard pretrnded end of the network interrupted commercials....aw, Local man does what?
I need to watch Network! I do get the sense that a lot of FOX viewers really believe anything that's said on FOX. But yes it's hard to imagine some centrist figure ever again having the bland consensus acceptance of Cronkite (or Peter Jennings or Tom Brokaw).
On your word I read Colin Woodard. That was the Americharacter book. The most injustice I have heard laid bare made plain and I see no daylight at all 2-3 hours later. I was already a fan of Lyndon Baines. Who clearly styled himself after FDR and all else is fire-lighted mercenary raids on the public purse. I am terrified. If I find a friend I discovered at work I like the sound of singing 'losing my religion' . ReM ya know, it comes out as a folksy protest song if you take out the production values. Network is my brightest hope, no waste of time watching that. It is Chris Hedges biopic...watch it and I will advocate for a Howard Beale moderated public forum utterly seriously...by the way: Woodard admits in three sentences the hippies were rabidly antigovernment. Those are my people, they must have been clinically depressed as a group to choose LBJ as an enemy, which they did.
I also feel fine. But less due to the structure and history and more due to how this system has resulted in so much fakery and lying. I know that traditional news media lying isn't new - what did Hearst say? "You bring me the stories. I'll bring you the war." But there's no use pretending that a large number of people haven't accepted that they tell the truth even if they know how to phrase this belief without sounding naive. (This being a blessing and a curse of the objectivity rule, which otherwise was one of that era's stronger suits: I don't agree that objectivity doesn't exist, just that it goes against the grain for certain people and journalists became good at finding ways to circumvent
it, like by simply not reporting on news that is inconvenient to them) Much as people like to gloat and say "pfff, ads don't work on me:" all right, then why do these companies pay millions to put out ads? It's because that's mostly just talk, and ads do work. The same with people's trust of the old news machine.
What Boomers in particular don't always get is that an influencer is a lot more accountable to their audience than a CNN host who has that middle-class job. There has been a lot of bs spread online, but there has also been a lot of the exact opposite: the very honesty and sincerity people wanted from mainstream media and never got. After having to just sit back and listen to a bunch of liars on the news, the ability and desire to directly support and influence information is almost narcotic to us. That's why we have the phrase "audience capture," a phrase that wouldn't mean anything in an objectivity-driven environment.
This moment is beautiful to watch, and I will enjoy watching the liars and their industry collapse. I hope this greater collapse eventually brings down the NYT after all they've done to unrepentantly enable the rise of the evil of Communism in the world, and of course the WMD lie: though I won't get my hopes up too high. But I do feel bad for my generation. This is one of those scenarios where it's easy to see how we were caught in the middle of a transitional time as well as a financial crisis. The Zoomers are truly the first internet generation. At least we're young enough to where the change won't hurt as bad.
Interesting Felix. I guess my concern about this moment is the tendency towards 'giantism' and monopoly. As the LA Times' of the world die out, the NYTimes just gets bigger and bigger; and internet discourse is basically run through a handful of platforms (X, Meta, etc). But maybe not. Maybe there are always cycles to this. The 2010s was an era of consolidation. It seems like this may be a moment of relative fragmentation - people leaving X and leaving Meta, people finding a variety of newer, smaller platforms.
Btw I saw in one of your posts that you identify as a "Traditionalist"? Interesting! I was reading a bit about Guenon and Evola recently, but hadn't met a Traditionalist in the wild lol!
I think you're right about fragmentation. Haven't been back on FB for a while, but from everything I hear it sounds like it's becoming emptier and emptier. Again: I feel fine.
Haha. I am a traditionalist in the manner of James Joyce but without rejecting the actual Catholic faith. That's the simple way of putting it. Naturally, I'll have to reckon with Evola's use of the term one day. Perhaps I'd better do that sooner rather than later: it might soon be illegal to buy his books. XD
Interesting, I just wrote a piece about the downfall of Pitchfork (sort of)!
The old model of a select few being granted a mass audience only seems to work when the pipeline to that stage is narrow and the pool to choose those select few is also small. Get too many qualified people involved, and the elites get exposed for being mediocre or biased and/or the outsiders just go and do their own thing. All the recent rage against nepo babies is partially about the rise in nepotism in coveted fields, but this has always been the case. But it's more about a bigger pool of people feeling that they're just as qualified, thanks to technology (e.g. easier and cheaper to make movies and songs yourself) and demystification of celebrity.
Maybe the dichotomy is if you want a world where writers and other artists can make a comfortable living, you can only have a few at the top and everyone has to accept that. Or you can have everybody with their own niche audiences, but then basically everybody has to do their thing as a side gig.
Hi Chris, yes I think the basic issue is in some fundamental sense the scale of a society. Once the pool is too large, too many people are out in the cold, and too many people become very suspicious of the 'social center' and its organizing mechanisms. So you end up with more clusters and more of an 'archipelagoized' society.
In practical terms, yes, I think almost everybody ends up having to do 'their thing' as a side gig - or at least not as their primary revenue stream. The point is seeing that more as an honorable or even desirable way of being as opposed to a boom-or-bust mentality of 'making it.'
I like how you pointed about that the last 150 years were the anomaly, not the norm. History can be so helpful!
What’s 150 years to a dogged journalist?! Thanks Anne!
Great piece, as usual.
I think the dissagregation of audiences is also related to the rise of identity politics, which has been both a cause and an effect.
As the idea of a singular monoculture is deprecated, previously marginalized voices and audiences are served.
The conservative reaction to this is to force a return to a nostalgic idealization of a utopia with three tv channels, which is impossible, so they’re ironically becoming their own niche audience.