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Bernie Would Have Won
Bernie Would Have Won

AI summary: This article argues that Trump's 2024 victory represents the triumph of right-wing populism over neoliberalism, enabled by Democratic Party leadership's deliberate suppression of Bernie Sanders' left-wing populist movement. The piece contends that by rejecting class-focused politics in favor of identity politics and neoliberal policies, Democrats created a vacuum that Trump's authoritarian populism filled.

Here’s a warning and an admonition written in January 2019 by author and organizer Jonathan Smucker: “If the Dem Party establishment succeeds in beating down the fresh leadership and bold vision that's stepping up, it will effectively enable the continued rise of authoritarianism. But they will not wake up and suddenly grasp this. It's on us to outmaneuver them and win.”
There are a million surface-level reasons for Kamala Harris’s loss and systematic underperformance in pretty much every county and among nearly every demographic group. She is part of a deeply unpopular administration. Voters believe the economy is bad and that the country is on the wrong track. She is a woman and we still have some work to do as a nation to overcome long-held biases.  But the real problems for the Democrats go much deeper and require a dramatic course correction of a sort that, I suspect, Democrats are unlikely to embark upon. The bottom line is this: Democrats are still trying to run a neoliberal campaign in a post-neoliberal era. In other words, 2016 Bernie was right.
The lie that fueled the Iraq war destroyed confidence in the institutions that were the bedrock of this neoliberal order and in the idea that the U.S. could or should remake the world in our image. Even more devastating, the financial crisis left home owners destitute while banks were bailed out, revealing that there was something deeply unjust in a system that placed capital over people.
These events sparked social movements on both the right and the left. The Tea Party churned out populist-sounding politicians like Sarah Palin and birtherist conspiracies about Barack Obama, paving the way for the rise of Donald Trump. The Tea Party and Trumpism are not identical, of course, but they share a cast of villains: The corrupt bureaucrats or deep state. The immigrants supposedly changing your community. The cultural elites telling you your beliefs are toxic. Trump’s version of this program is also explicitly authoritarian. This authoritarianism is a feature not a bug for some portion of the Trump coalition which has been persuaded that democracy left to its own devices could pose an existential threat to their way of life.
On the left, the organic response to the financial crisis was Occupy Wall Street, which directly fueled the Bernie Sanders movement. Here, too, the villains were clear. In the language of Occupy it was the 1% or as Bernie put it the millionaires and billionaires. It was the economic elite and unfettered capitalism that had made it so hard to get by. Turning homes into assets of financial speculation. Wildly profiteering off of every element of our healthcare system. Busting unions so that working people had no collective power. This movement was, in contrast to the right, was explicitly pro-democracy, with a foundational view that in a contest between the 99% and the 1%, the 99% would prevail. And that a win would lead to universal programs like Medicare for All, free college, workplace democracy, and a significant hike in the minimum wage.
On the Republican side, Donald Trump emerged as a political juggernaut at a time when the party was devastated and rudderless, having lost to Obama twice in a row. This weakened state—and the fact that the Trump alternatives were uncharismatic drips like Jeb Bush—created a path for Trump to successfully execute a hostile takeover of the party.
Plus, right-wing populism embraces capital, and so it posed no real threat to the monied interests that are so influential within the party structures.
The Republican donor class was not thrilled with Trump’s chaos and lack of decorum but they did not view him as an existential threat to their class interests
The difference was that Bernie’s party takeover did pose an existential threat—both to party elites who he openly antagonized and to the party’s big money backers. The bottom line of the Wall Street financiers and corporate titans was explicitly threatened. His rise would simply not be allowed. Not in 2016 and not in 2020.
What’s more, Hillary Clinton and her allies launched a propaganda campaign to posture as if they were actually to the left of Bernie by labeling him and his supporters sexist and racist for centering class politics over identity politics. This in turn spawned a hell cycle of woke word-policing and demographic slicing and dicing and antagonism towards working class whites that only made the Democratic party more repugnant to basically everyone.
The path not taken in 2016 looms larger than ever. Bernie’s coalition was filled with the exact type of voters who are now flocking to Donald Trump: Working class voters of all races, young people, and, critically, the much-derided bros. The top contributors to Bernie’s campaign often held jobs at places like Amazon and Walmart. The unions loved him. And—never forget—he earned the coveted Joe Rogan endorsement that Trump also received the day before the election this year. It turns out, the Bernie-to-Trump pipeline is real! While that has always been used as an epithet to smear Bernie and his movement, with the implication that social democracy is just a cover for or gateway drug to right wing authoritarianism, the truth is that this pipeline speaks to the power and appeal of Bernie’s vision as an effective antidote to Trumpism. When these voters had a choice between Trump and Bernie, they chose Bernie. For many of them now that the choice is between Trump and the dried out husk of neoliberalism, they’re going Trump.
Maybe I will be just as wrong as I was about the election but it is my sense that with this Trump victory, authoritarian right politics have won the ideological battle for what will replace the neoliberal order in America. And yes, I think it will be ugly, mean, and harmful—because it already is.
#politics#elections/2024#people/Bernie-Sanders#dems#gop#influencers#trends#opinion#history#people/Trump
·dropsitenews.com·
Bernie Would Have Won
The Manosphere Won
The Manosphere Won
Trump used these podcast appearances to both humanize and mythologize himself. He used them to launder his extremist positions through the pervasive can’t you take a joke filter that propels the Tony Hinchcliffes of the world to stardom. Most important of all, he used them to get out the vote.
in 2024, shouting to a few thousand true believers has nothing on being anointed by Elon Musk on X and a cadre of right-wing influencers with collective followings in the hundreds of millions.
What Trump and his team understood is that “the discourse,” to whatever extent that means anything anymore, no longer happens in op-ed columns or on The Daily Show or even on Breitbart, and hasn’t for years. Kamala Harris seemingly did not. She did appear on Call Her Daddy, a stratospherically popular podcast with an audience primarily comprising young women, and her campaign enlisted a number of influencers as surrogates. But she skipped Rogan, Lex Friedman, and other mainstream-adjacent marathon podcasts.
the world of conservative influencers dwarfs their liberal counterparts in both follower size and impact. In the same way Democrats never found their own Rush Limbaugh, they don’t have a Steven Crowder or a Ben Shapiro or even, so help us, a Tim Pool. There are Democrats with followings online, but the cumulative gap in people paying attention to what they say is several orders of magnitude wide.
#influencers#politics#culture#internet#social media#identities/masculinity#generations/genz#trends#elections/2024#people/Trump
·wired.com·
The Manosphere Won
How Trump's election win was driven by targeted communications
How Trump's election win was driven by targeted communications
The surrogates Trump assembled were able to appeal to the "frat bro or finance bro culture," says Janfaza, because "to them, many of these men who have built these companies, ecosystems and media platforms, show them a version of success to work toward." "The way that Trump was able to include many of these male figures in his cohort was very impactful," she added. "And while yes, Taylor Swift, Lady Gaga and Beyonce also have massive, massive audiences, we have to understand that the way young people are consuming their media and entertainment just looks drastically different than it did for prior generations."
#trends#culture#politics#platforms#social media#generations/genz#identities#politics/political-correctness#elections/2024#identities/masculinity
·axios.com·
How Trump's election win was driven by targeted communications
Wow. BRUTAL words for her fellow liberals from Democratic strategist on CNN:
Wow. BRUTAL words for her fellow liberals from Democratic strategist on CNN:

“I’m going to speak some hard truths...We are not be party of common sense, which is the message the voters sent to us...When we address Latino voters...as Latinx, for instance, b/c that’s the politically correct thing to do, it makes them think we don’t even live in the same planet as they do. When we are too afraid to say that, hey, college kids, if you're trashing the campus of Columbia University b/c you’re unhappy about some sort of policy and you’re taking over a university and you’re trashing it and preventing other students from learning, that is unacceptable. But we’re so worried about alienating one or another cohort in our coalition that we do not know what to say when normal people look at that and say, wait a second. I send my kids to college so they can learn, not so they can burn buildings and trash lawns, right? And so on and so forth. When we put pronouns after names and say she/her as opposed to saying, you know what, if I call you by the wrong pronoun, call me out. I am sorry. I won't do it again. But stop with the virtue signaling and speak to people like they’re normal. There is nothing that I'm going to say to Shermichael that I’m not going to say to your or I’m not going to say to somebody else. I speak the same language to everybody. But that’s not what Democrats do. We constantly try to parse out different ways of speaking because our focus groups or polling shows that so-and-so appeals to such and such. That’s not how normal people think. It is not common sense and we need to start being the part of common sense again. Joe Biden is not responsible for that, neither is Kamala Harris. That is a problem that Democrats have had for years. I’ve been banging the drum on this for I don’t know how — probably ten years on this. We need to get back to being the party of common sense that people look at us and say we understand you. We appreciate what you say because you speak our language. And, until we do that, we should stop blaming other people for our own mistakes.”

#politics#politics/political-correctness#discourse#elections#culture#elections/2024
·x.com·
Wow. BRUTAL words for her fellow liberals from Democratic strategist on CNN:
That “Little Secret” Between Trump and Johnson? Here’s What It Could Mean.
That “Little Secret” Between Trump and Johnson? Here’s What It Could Mean.
The article suggests that Trump and House Speaker Mike Johnson's "secret plan" likely involves a strategy to manipulate the Electoral College certification process by having Republican-controlled states delay or refuse to certify election results, potentially allowing Trump to claim victory with fewer than the traditional 270 electoral votes needed.
To understand how this could work, you have to understand the 12th Amendment of the Constitution. Here’s the key language: “The person having the greatest number of votes for President, shall be the President, if such number be a majority of the whole number of Electors appointed; and if no person have such majority, then from the persons having the highest numbers not exceeding three on the list of those voted for as President, the House of Representatives shall choose immediately, by ballot, the President. But in choosing the President, the votes shall be taken by states, the representation from each state having one vote[.]”
I don’t think the Republican plan even requires them to get to a contingent election where the House chooses the president. I think the plan is to steal the Electoral College outright by getting states Trump loses to refuse to certify the results of their election. That’s because the 12th Amendment provides that the president is the person who wins the majority of the “whole number of Electors appointed.” That “whole number” is supposed to be 538. But one potential reading of the amendment is that Trump doesn’t have to win 270 Electoral College votes but just a majority of however many electors show up. Trump’s goal, I believe, is to decrease the number of electors appointed until he wins.
In 2020, Nancy Pelosi was speaker of the House. If states had tried to get cute and not submit their electors by the December 11 deadline, Pelosi would just have extended the deadline. But Speaker Johnson surely won’t. If electors are not submitted by December 11, he’ll likely declare the process “over” and say that the electors appointed by that date are the only ones allowed to vote for president. Crucially, Johnson can do this even if Republicans lose the House and Johnson is removed from power. The new House isn’t sworn in until January 3. As the violent MAGA people in your family already know, January 6 is when the House certifies the results of the Electoral College, but that is just a ceremonial day. By the time we get to January 6, the electors are supposed to have voted. December 11 is the deadline for appointing electors, December 25 the deadline for voting. Mike Johnson will still be in charge on both of those days.
November 5 is the last day of our pretend election. The real election starts on December 11, and Republican officials and judges will have to be forced to honor the results of the pretend election for Harris to have any shot of winning the real one.
#politics#elections#conspiracies#people/Trump
·thenation.com·
That “Little Secret” Between Trump and Johnson? Here’s What It Could Mean.
Bidenomics Is Starting to Transform America. Why Has No One Noticed?
Bidenomics Is Starting to Transform America. Why Has No One Noticed?
Biden is the first President in decades to treat government as the designer and ongoing referee of markets, rather than as the corrector of markets’ dislocations and excesses after the fact. He doesn’t speak of free trade and globalization as economic ideals. His approach to combatting climate change involves no carbon taxes or credits—another major departure, not just from his predecessors but also from the policies of many other countries. His Administration has been far more aggressive than previous ones in taking antitrust actions against big companies.
Another way of thinking about Biden’s approach is through terminology devised by the political scientist Jacob Hacker: it rejects redistribution as a guiding liberal principle, in favor of “predistribution,” an effort to transform the economy in a way that makes redistribution less necessary.
#people/Biden#economy#politics#govt/policy#infrastructure#public-life
·newyorker.com·
Bidenomics Is Starting to Transform America. Why Has No One Noticed?
Al Gore thought stopping climate change would be hard. But not this hard
Al Gore thought stopping climate change would be hard. But not this hard
In his decades of talking to the public about climate change, he says he’s learned a few things. You have to keep in mind a “time budget” that people will give you to speak with them, as well as a “complexity budget” so that you avoid dumping facts and numbers onto people. Finally, he says, you need to allot a “hope budget” so they don’t get too overwhelmed and depressed.
#politics#climate#sustainability#environment
·qz.com·
Al Gore thought stopping climate change would be hard. But not this hard
It's Time to Talk About America's Disorder Problem
It's Time to Talk About America's Disorder Problem
  • "Disorder" as distinct from crime, encompassing behaviors that dominate public spaces for private purposes (e.g., public drug use, homelessness, littering).
  • Despite decreasing violent crime rates in many cities, public perception of safety remains low, which the author attributes to increased disorder. Ex. retail theft, unsheltered homelessness, uncontrolled dogs, reckless driving, and public drug use.
Most conspicuous, in my experience, is the way that retailers have responded. It’s not just CVS; coffee shops seem to have gotten more hostile and less welcoming. This is, I suspect, because they are dealing with people who steal, cause a ruckus, or shoot up in the bathroom—disorderly behaviors that they have to deter before they cost them customers.
I increasingly think this is a more general phenomenon. Disorder is not measured like crime—there is no system for aggregating measures of disorder across cities. But if you look for the signs, they are there. Retail theft, though hard to measure, has grown bad enough that major retailers now lock up their wares in many cities. The unsheltered homeless population has risen sharply. People seem to be controlling their dogs less. Road deaths have risen, even as vehicle miles driven declined, suggesting people are driving more irresponsibly. Public drug use in cities from San Francisco to Philadelphia has gotten bad enough to prompt crack-downs.
Cities’ comparative advantage is agglomeration and network effects: concentrating people in one place can create innovation that yields ore than linear returns. But that only is possible if people have shared public spaces in which to interact. Community life, of the sort that makes cities worth living in, is harder to live in the presence of disorder.
A large share of disorder is generated by a small number of people and places—one drunk or one vacant lot, one uncontrolled bar or one guy shouting on the street, can ruin the whole experience for everyone else. Identifying these problem places and people, and remediating them—not exclusively through the criminal justice system—can bring disorder under control.
#public-life/crimes#public-life/third-spaces#ideals#stats#trends#americanism#community#culture#politics
·thecausalfallacy.com·
It's Time to Talk About America's Disorder Problem
Hurricane Helene brews up storm of online falsehoods and threats
Hurricane Helene brews up storm of online falsehoods and threats
increasingly, a broad collection of conspiracy groups, extremist movements, political and commercial interests, and at times hostile states, coalesce around crises to further their agendas through online falsehoods, division and hate. They exploit social media moderation failures, gaming their algorithmic systems, and often produce dangerous real-world effects.
Some of the largest accounts sharing falsehoods about the hurricane response – including those with more than 2 million followers – have actively engaged with other forms of mis- and disinformation and hate. This includes anti-migrant conspiracies, false claims of electoral fraud, and antisemitic discourse around the so-called ‘Great Replacement.’ Their role as amplifiers here reveals how diverse groups converge on moments of crisis to co-opt the news cycle and launder their positions to a wider or mainstream audience.
Falsehoods around hurricane response have spawned credible threats and incitement to violence directed at the federal government – this includes calls to send militias to face down FEMA for the perceived denial of aid, and that individuals would “shoot” FEMA officials and the agency’s emergency responders.
#discourse/counterclaims#conspiracies#climate#politics#misinfo#news#disinformation#social media#gop#internet#elections#people/Trump
·isdglobal.org·
Hurricane Helene brews up storm of online falsehoods and threats
The Return of Ta-Nehisi Coates
The Return of Ta-Nehisi Coates
That it was complicated, he now understood, was “horseshit.” “Complicated” was how people had described slavery and then segregation. “It’s complicated,” he said, “when you want to take something from somebody.”
He had also been told that the conflict was “complicated,” its history tortuous and contested, and, as he writes, “that a body of knowledge akin to computational mathematics was needed to comprehend it.” He was astonished by the plain truth of what he saw: the walls, checkpoints, and guns that everywhere hemmed in the lives of Palestinians; the clear tiers of citizenship between the first-class Jews and the second-class Palestinians; and the undisguised contempt with which the Israeli state treated the subjugated other.
The most famous of Israel’s foundational claims — that it was a necessary sanctuary for one of the world’s most oppressed peoples, who may not have survived without a state of their own — is at the root of this complication and undergirds the prevailing viewpoint of the political-media-entertainment nexus. It is Israel’s unique logic of existence that has provided a quantum of justice to the Israeli project in the eyes of Americans and others around the world, and it’s what separates Jewish Israelis from the white supremacists of the Jim Crow South, who had no justice on their side at all.
“It’s kind of hard to remember, but even as late as 2014, people were talking about the Civil War as this complicated subject,” Jackson said. “Ta-Nehisi was going to plantations and hanging out at Monticello and looking at all the primary documents and reading a thousand books, and it became clear that the idea of a ‘complicated’ narrative was ridiculous.” The Civil War was, Coates concluded, solely about the South’s desire to perpetuate slavery, and the subsequent attempts over the next century and a half to hide that simple fact betrayed, he believed, a bigger lie — the lie that America was a democracy, a mass delusion that he would later call “the Dream” in Between the World and Me.
The hallmarks of The Atlantic’s coverage include variations of Israel’s seemingly limitless “right to defend itself”; an assertion that extremists on “both sides” make the conflict worse, with its corollary argument that if only Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s Jewish-supremacist government were ousted, then progress could be made; abundant sympathy for the suffering of Israelis and a comparatively muted response to the suffering of Palestinians; a fixation on the way the issue is debated in America, particularly on college campuses; and regular warnings that antisemitism is on the rise both in America and around the world.
the overall pattern reveals a distorting worldview that pervades the industry and, as Coates writes in The Message, results in “the elevation of factual complexity over self-evident morality.” “The view of mainstream American commentators is a false equivalence between subjugator and subjugated,” said Nathan Thrall, the Jerusalem-based author of the Pulitzer Prize–winning A Day in the Life of Abed Salama, as if the Israelis and the Palestinians were equal parties in an ancient tug-of-war.
For Coates, the problem for the industry at large partly stems from the perennial problem of inadequate representation. “It is extremely rare to see Palestinians and Arabs writing the coverage or doing the book reviews,” he said. “I would be interested if you took the New York Times and the Washington Post and The Wall Street Journal and looked at how many of those correspondents are Palestinian, I wonder what you would find.” (It’s a testament to just how polarizing the issue is that many Jewish Americans believe the bias in news media works the other way around, against Israel.)
American mainstream journalism, Coates says, defers to American authority. “It’s very similar,” he told me, “to how American journalism has been deferential to the cops. We privilege the cops, we privilege the military, we privilege the politicians. The default setting is toward power.”
in the total coverage, in all of the talk of experts and the sound bites of politicians and the dispatches of credentialed reporters, a sense of ambiguity is allowed to prevail. “The fact of the matter is,” he said, “that kid up at Columbia, whatever dumb shit they’re saying, whatever slogan I would not say that they would use, they are more morally correct than some motherfuckers that have won Pulitzer Prizes and National Magazine Awards and are the most decorated and powerful journalists.”
When I asked Coates what he wanted to see happen in Israel and Palestine, he avoided the geopolitical scale and tended toward the more specific — for example, to have journalists not be “shot by army snipers.” He said that the greater question was not properly for him; it belonged to those with lived experience and those who had been studying the problem for years.
On the importance of using moral rightness as a north star for pragmatic designs
“I have a deep-seated fear,” he told me, “that the Black struggle will ultimately, at its root, really just be about narrow Black interest. And I don’t think that is in the tradition of what our most celebrated thinkers have told the world. I don’t think that’s how Martin Luther King thought about the Black struggle. I know that’s not how Du Bois thought about the Black struggle. I know that’s not how Baldwin thought about the Black struggle. Should it turn out that we have our first Black woman president, and our first South Asian president, and we continue to export 2,000-pound bombs to perpetrate a genocide, in defense of a state that is practicing apartheid, I won’t be able to just sit here and shake my head and say, ‘Well, that is unfortunate.’ I’m going to do what I can in the time that remains, and the writing that I have, to not allow that to be, because that is existential death for the Black struggle, and for Black people, as far as I’m concerned.”
#profiles#writing#politics#israel-palestine#culture#opinion#news
·nymag.com·
The Return of Ta-Nehisi Coates
How Elon Musk Got Tangled Up in Blue
How Elon Musk Got Tangled Up in Blue
Mr. Musk had largely come to peace with a price of $100 a year for Blue. But during one meeting to discuss pricing, his top assistant, Jehn Balajadia, felt compelled to speak up. “There’s a lot of people who can’t even buy gas right now,” she said, according to two people in attendance. It was hard to see how any of those people would pony up $100 on the spot for a social media status symbol. Mr. Musk paused to think. “You know, like, what do people pay for Starbucks?” he asked. “Like $8?” Before anyone could raise objections, he whipped out his phone to set his word in stone. “Twitter’s current lords & peasants system for who has or doesn’t have a blue checkmark is bullshit,” he tweeted on Nov. 1. “Power to the people! Blue for $8/month.”
#twitter#people/elon musk#tech#business#platforms#internet#misinfo#politics#business/models#bts#profiles
·nytimes.com·
How Elon Musk Got Tangled Up in Blue
Among America’s “Low-Information Voters” | The New Yorker
Among America’s “Low-Information Voters” | The New Yorker
“The important thing is that you’re informed on issues you care about.” Of course, finding good information is increasingly difficult. Decades ago, there were just a few channels on television; the Internet has broadened the choices and lowered the standards. “Now people might seek out information about a particular candidate on a particular policy and think they have genuine info, but they’re being misinformed or misled,” Kalla said. The decline of newspapers has led to a decrease in split-ticket voting: voters know less about the candidates in their districts, so they simply vote along party lines. This has helped to nationalize politics. Cable news, which voters increasingly rely on, “carries a lot less information than the New York Times,” Schleicher said.
#politics#culture#opinion#elections#trends#misinfo#journalism#gop
·archive.ph·
Among America’s “Low-Information Voters” | The New Yorker
Opinion | Bernie Sanders: Joe Biden for President
Opinion | Bernie Sanders: Joe Biden for President
Yes. I know: Mr. Biden is old, is prone to gaffes, walks stiffly and had a disastrous debate with Mr. Trump. But this I also know: A presidential election is not an entertainment contest. It does not begin or end with a 90-minute debate. Enough! Mr. Biden may not be the ideal candidate, but he will be the candidate and should be the candidate.
I understand that some Democrats get nervous about having to explain the president’s gaffes and misspeaking names. But unlike the Republicans, they do not have to explain away a candidate who now has 34 felony convictions and faces charges that could lead to dozens of additional convictions, who has been hit with a $5 million judgment after he was found liable in a sexual abuse case, who has been involved in more than 4,000 lawsuits, who has repeatedly gone bankrupt and who has told thousands of documented lies and falsehoods.
At a time when the billionaires have never had it so good and when the United States is experiencing virtually unprecedented income and wealth inequality, over 60 percent of Americans live paycheck to paycheck, real weekly wages for the average worker have not risen in over 50 years, 25 percent of seniors live each year on $15,000 or less, we have a higher rate of childhood poverty than almost any other major country, and housing is becoming more and more unaffordable — among other crises.
The Biden administration, as a result of the American Rescue Plan, helped rebuild the economy during the pandemic far faster than economists thought possible. At a time when people were terrified about the future, the president and those of us who supported him in Congress put Americans back to work, provided cash benefits to desperate parents and protected small businesses, hospitals, schools and child care centers. After decades of talk about our crumbling roads, bridges and water systems, we put more money into rebuilding America’s infrastructure than ever before — which is projected to create millions of well-paying jobs. And we did not stop there. We made the largest-ever investment in climate action to save the planet. We canceled student debt for nearly five million financially strapped Americans. We cut prices for insulin and asthma inhalers, capped out-of-pocket costs for prescription drugs and got free vaccines to the American people. We battled to defend women’s rights in the face of moves by Trump-appointed jurists to roll back reproductive freedom and deny women the right to control their own bodies.
Joe Biden wants to tax the rich so that we can fund the needs of working families, the elderly, the children, the sick and the poor. Donald Trump wants to cut taxes for the billionaire class. Joe Biden wants to expand Social Security benefits. Donald Trump and his friends want to weaken Social Security. Joe Biden wants to make it easier for workers to form unions and collectively bargain for better wages and benefits. Donald Trump wants to let multinational corporations get away with exploiting workers and ripping off consumers.
#politics#oped#people/Biden#people/Bernie-Sanders#elections
·nytimes.com·
Opinion | Bernie Sanders: Joe Biden for President
Three Telltale Signs of Online Post-Literacy
Three Telltale Signs of Online Post-Literacy
The swarms of online surveillers typically only know how to detect clearly stated opinions, and the less linguistic jouissance the writer of these opinions displays in writing them, the easier job the surveillers will have of it. Another way of saying this is that those who read in order to find new targets of denunciation are so far along now in their convergent evolution with AI, that the best way to protect yourself from them is to conceal your writing under a shroud of irreducibly human style
Such camouflage was harder to wear within the 280-word limit on Twitter, which of course meant that the most fitting and obvious way to avoid the Maoists was to retreat into insincere shitposting — arguably the first truly new genre of artistic or literary endeavor in the 21st century, which perhaps will turn out to have been as explosive and revolutionary as, say, jazz was in the 20th.
Our master shitposter has perfectly mirrored the breakdown of sense that characterizes our era — dril’s body of work looks like our moment no less than, say, an Otto Dix painting looks like World War I
#culture#memes#genres/shitposting#politics#writing#partisanship#internet
·the-hinternet.com·
Three Telltale Signs of Online Post-Literacy