The fake reality in which I’m right beats a real reality in which I’m wrong.
The human ability and endurance in forging realities of their own choosing is one of the most profoundly shocking way stations on my human understanding journey.
[And once it loses that ability, there’s no obvious mechanism to bring it back.]
The mechanism to bring it back is when the people involved decide they actually care about building something that works. The car dealership owners of the world[1] can enjoy conspiracy theories about Talarico because to them it's all a game. It doesn't matter. If it somehow begins to impact their ability to stock and sell cars[2], they'll start to care about why that is actually happening and what can fix it.
[1] Nothing against car dealership owners; I've just been told they're the core of the Republican party.
[2] By which logic the tariffs should start to make inroads on the movement... eventually, right?
This is the end stage of a cynical political project begin by Roger Ailes and Karl Rove a quarter century ago. Back then the right's base of media power and political power seeded things like the Brooks Brothers Riot and other astroturf to fake a base of power from the 3rd leg of the stool: "the people".
This evolved into the echo chamber described by Al Franken so many years ago and became a place where a selectively planted astroturf story can get picked up and amplified until those stories started coming in organically from zealots and now they could just farm them, but still within a controlled environment. For those they chose to amplify they could let the lie get around the world 1,000 times before the truth got out of bed.
Now they have trained an army of armchair conspiracy theorists and there is no more independent establishment political power or central media authority to filter them anymore.
I am old enough to remember feeling so frustrated in the early 2,000s by the efficacy of this machine and it is nice to watch the end results, which while more chaotic and therefore scary, are also less effective and blatantly weak without the guardrails online anymore.
With lucky 75% of the country will finally free itself of this fever.
The fake reality in which I’m right beats a real reality in which I’m wrong.
The human ability and endurance in forging realities of their own choosing is one of the most profoundly shocking way stations on my human understanding journey.
[And once it loses that ability, there’s no obvious mechanism to bring it back.]
The mechanism to bring it back is when the people involved decide they actually care about building something that works. The car dealership owners of the world[1] can enjoy conspiracy theories about Talarico because to them it's all a game. It doesn't matter. If it somehow begins to impact their ability to stock and sell cars[2], they'll start to care about why that is actually happening and what can fix it.
[1] Nothing against car dealership owners; I've just been told they're the core of the Republican party.
[2] By which logic the tariffs should start to make inroads on the movement... eventually, right?
This is the end stage of a cynical political project begin by Roger Ailes and Karl Rove a quarter century ago. Back then the right's base of media power and political power seeded things like the Brooks Brothers Riot and other astroturf to fake a base of power from the 3rd leg of the stool: "the people".
This evolved into the echo chamber described by Al Franken so many years ago and became a place where a selectively planted astroturf story can get picked up and amplified until those stories started coming in organically from zealots and now they could just farm them, but still within a controlled environment. For those they chose to amplify they could let the lie get around the world 1,000 times before the truth got out of bed.
Now they have trained an army of armchair conspiracy theorists and there is no more independent establishment political power or central media authority to filter them anymore.
I am old enough to remember feeling so frustrated in the early 2,000s by the efficacy of this machine and it is nice to watch the end results, which while more chaotic and therefore scary, are also less effective and blatantly weak without the guardrails online anymore.
With lucky 75% of the country will finally free itself of this fever.