How did we get
here? (You know what I mean.)
I
have a grand unified theory, or at least a unified theory.
1.
The internet happened. Before the internet, all information was
centralized in institutional places like libraries, newspapers, home
reference books, three or four over-the-air television networks and
one cable news channel. You had a pretty good feeling that the
information you read or heard was true, because it had gone through
the layers of checking that these institutions provide (sure, there
were some urban legends floating around, but nobody put much credence
in them and they were repeated mostly for entertainment value).
Suddenly, all this previously accumulated information was readily
available at a moment's notice from a wire.
2.
Quickly, every single person who had internet access began not only
reading the information that had previously only been available from
institutions, but also creating information for others to read and
reading others' created information. Since the information created
from individuals or small groups of entrepreneurs or non-profits
wasn't being checked by layers of fact-checkers, it wasn't always
accurate. In some or even most cases, it was willfully and
intentionally misleading or outright false to advance some
money-making scheme or political view. The bad information was
formatted in such a way as to look exactly like the good information.
People had almost no way to tell the difference.
3.
Eventually, many of the purveyors of bad information grew and
prospered. The Drudge Report was an early example of this, and that
site begat so many other outlets. Left-wingers, right-wingers, sports
columnists, business people, scientists, and pretty much any niche
group saw the power of bad information and took to it readily. It was
easy to create, easy to post, and easy to get in front of people, and
lucrative to do so. People swallowed it up heartily.
4.
The online experience eventually became very easy to curate. You
could set up your online day to read only what you wanted to read
from the sources you agreed with and/or trusted. Friendster and
Myspace started the trend, and then the invention and widespread use
of RSS led to a proliferation of feed curation applications. Facebook
took over for Myspace and solidified the idea of a daily feed of
personally hand-picked news sources. Twitter was another shot of
adrenaline that baked in the feeling of instantaneous reaction to
news from people who shared your point of view and reinforced it in
real time.
5.
All throughout this process, information was becoming less and less
institutionalized and the bad information was far outpacing the good.
After all, 7 billion people could now create bad information while
only a relative handful of institutions can create good information.
Certain people, many of whom had done well but were getting older and
saw problems ahead, or who had lost a good-paying job to
globalization, or who were stuck in some remote backwater, or who
were simply predisposed to the concept because they were brought up
in religious and/or conservative households, started to buy in to the
idea far more than others that the old institutions were feeding them
lies and that this new age of information, mostly bad information,
was the real truth. The bad information, designed and chosen
especially for them, felt so good, while the old institutions were
always telling them what seemed in contrast to be bad news.
6.
The last presidential election where good information was supreme was
probably 2000, although we started to see rumblings in the widely
reported lie that Al Gore had claimed to invent the internet. Quickly
after that election, the horror of 9/11 happened and people rushed to
fill in details of the attack with bad information from the internet.
The George W. Bush administration was more than happy to supply them
with plenty of it as justification to invade Iraq. As Bush's first
term was ending, Karl Rove fully harnessed his delivery system of bad
information to engineer the Swift Boat Veterans For Truth, a
diabolically named organization that all but sunk John Kerry. This
was the first and most egregious example of a decent, reasonable, and
worthy politician being completely undone by lies proliferated by the
internet. It set a template for the next decade or so where anybody
who actually wanted government to accomplish something or had even
the mildest of "progressive" ideas could be undermined by
the most tenuous of fabricated bullshit. Of course, the internet also
served to upend people like John Edwards and Eliot Spitzer who had it
coming. It became very easy to decide that every politician was a
traitor, a liar, a bum, or an adulterer because of how easy it was to
expose them, whether it was true or not. Faith in government itself
began hitting record lows, and a completely avoidable housing crisis
and recession accelerated people's anxiety.
7.
In 2008, the bad information on Barack Obama was staggering in its
scope and depth. The fact that he was African-American split the
electorate along racial lines, and those who could not countenance a
black President began retreating almost solely into this new
avalanche of bad information in addition to the enormous cache that
they had been slowly and methodically accumulating for themselves
over the years. Obama won only because these folks were in the
minority in the large states where the Electoral College votes are
most numerous, but their numbers were growing. So was the bad
information, day by day, month by month. One of its leaders was
Donald Trump, who championed the pernicious idea that Obama was born
in Kenya.
8.
Prior to the 2010 election, the rise of these bad-information-only
voters was given a name: the Tea Party. Using their bad information
and the social networking capabilities that went along with it (smart
phones became commonplace and you could take your bad information
with you everywhere), they were able to organize all across the
country. Opportunistic business people who saw the power of the Tea
Party, like the Koch Brothers and others, bankrolled and focused the
group to take down politicians in local and state elections to give
the GOP the majority in the House and in state houses, which enabled
the GOP to gerrymander congressional districts after the 2010 census.
Their power increasing, and the bad information on which they relied
to sway others swelling exponentially, the Tea Party continued to
grow and win huge victories like Citizens United that opened the
floodgates to corporate political donations. They failed to take down
Obama in 2012, mainly because the GOP nominating process favored the
"next man up" mentality that had been in place for decades
and which resulted in a milquetoast candidate, Mitt Romney. Romney
didn't win, but the Tea Party made it closer than 2008 had been.
9.
Which leads us to 2016. The Tea Party was not happy with the choice
of Romney in 2012 and agitated from the beginning of the process to
put a more conservative candidate on the ticket in 2016. Into the
breach stepped Trump, long a darling of the bad-information-only crew
because of his tireless "birther" movement against Obama.
Trump was a perfect fit for the Tea Party, with his bluster, his talk
of "draining the swamp", his contempt for women and
immigrants, and his almost overt white supremacist leanings. Despite
all the major media institutions predicting that Trump could never be
nominated, the Tea Party pushed him to the top in state after state,
and he ultimately won enough delegates.
10.
Here we stand, the day before election day. Hillary Clinton is yet
another target of a tsunami of bad information, perhaps at an order
of magnitude worse than Obama, from Whitewater to Vince Foster to
Benghazi and the endless self-inflicted saga of the e-mail server,
plus all the bad information generated against her husband and the
Clinton Foundation. The previous institutions, such as the New York
Times especially, have done their best to expose Trump as a liar, a
serial sexual assaulter, a deadbeat, and a terrible businessman, and
they seem to have made some traction. However, the election is
certainly much closer than it should be and closer than 2008 or even
2012. Clinton may get through, but only by a hair's breadth. We'll
see.
Where
do we go from here? Let's say Clinton wins, for my own sanity. The
Tea Party will be strengthened by the closeness of the result. Bad
information and the methodology to share it will continue to
increase. I see no way the bad-information-only Tea Party, now often lumped together with something similar called the "Alt-Right", egged on by the GOP big donors who
seek to exploit it, won't eventually take over all three branches of
government. They have already cemented the House, and may keep the
Senate in 2016 and will definitely improve their advantage there in
2018. In 2020, unless Clinton manages some kind of economic miracle
in four years, the forces that are allied against her will have
solidified, and if the GOP can find a decent human being to run
against her that checks off all the Alt-Right boxes (a big if, to be
sure), she will lose handily. Soon after, the Supreme Court will be
the final branch to succumb to the Alt-Right. At that point, there
will no check or balance against bad information. The entire
government will be reliant on it to stay in power, and worse, may
actually believe it. The slippery slope to a decade or more of policy
dedicated to protect the wealthy at all costs, which has always been
the GOP's ultimate goal, will surely ensue. I can't imagine the
super-wealthy will allow large clamps on immigration or restriction
of trade deals, because they rely on these for their wealth. More
likely will be a reduction of taxes on billionaires and the
imposition of austerity measures on the poor and middle class, with
border control being stepped up and made more visible if not any more
effective. Climate Change will continue to be ignored and subsidies
will flow to the entrenched energy providers over new renewable
players, which could set back that movement for decades. Healthcare
will continue to get more and more expensive until good care will
only be affordable to a tiny minority, while the rest pay very high
premiums and very high deductibles and get sicker, or simply go
without and risk destitution for any mishap. Our infrastructure will
continue to collapse, with politicians spending on it only when a
crisis occurs, and always favoring cars over public transit. We will
likely see a reversal of Roe v. Wade, gay marriage and women's and
LBGTQ rights in order to mollify the Alt-Right and keep them engaged.
We'll put ground troops in Syria and Libya, and once again in Iraq in
an effort to stomp out ISIS while trillions in poorly accounted-for
cash will go to defense contractors. Essentially, we'll see the
policies of the George W. Bush administration on a far more ambitious
scale and much more difficult to unseat.
I
really fear the complete loss of the previous institutions. Libraries
and newspapers are already dying. Television is becoming so
fragmented that in ten years, there may be no national over-the-air
networks, only niche cable/streaming channels that exist only to tell
special interests what they want to hear. With all of that
fact-checking gone, all we will have is each other for our news, and
the world will become a giant game of telephone. Each retelling of an
event will become more and more sensationalized and removed from what
actually happened. At some point, truth will be completely fungible,
different for each person, each version recorded somewhere in the
cloud so that each of us can remember the past however we want to
remember it, or if we can't find a memory, we'll have our memories
sold to us by the most effective salespeople. This will inevitably
lead to the end of democracy because no large bloc of voters will
ever be able come to a consensus on what is real. Then the strongmen
will swoop in to fill the vacuum and decide what is real for
everyone. We're talking some serious Orwellian/Black Mirror shit
here.
Of
course, I'm posting this on the internet, so it's probably all
bullshit, too, and definitely just my opinion. Don't forget to vote!