To the chagrin of the professional commentariat, the profession of Journalism has been suffering repeated losses over the last few months. The LA Times, among many other institutions as prestigious as the Atlantic and NYT, have been forced to liquidate large portions of their labor force. Taylor Lorenz, the aging girlboss face of regime apologia, took to social media to tell us about this alarming trend in the face of threats to our democracy. It turns out that the ironworkers of Michigan were not the only ones who needed to learn to code.
The media landscape appears to be of increasing interest not only to our scene, which has every reason to troll the depths of McLuhan for every morsel we can glean but also to the wider audience of keen observers of this we call the internet. Journalists, who had for the last century occupied the hallowed ground of a sort of secular priesthood of information, have begun to realize that their grip is not only slipping but will be totally eliminated at this pace.
Andrey Miroshnichenko in his groundbreaking work, The Emancipation of Authorship explains that
“Ten years ago the internet was seen as a useful oppertunity, a gift of progress. Now, it is increasingly seen as a threat. Moreover, this growing notion of moral untrustworthiness is not just about concrete content; it is about the Internet as a whole.”1
I think those on the right can all remember the vibe shift that happened around 2015-2016, when suddenly the entire political landscape felt different, when what some have called meme magic was unleashed. The right had been pointing out for decades how hostile the media was, but for the first time, they could get around it.
The media class had slacked on their McLuhan, and forgotten that the medium is the message. The internet had electrified this country and had connected previously closed nodes that caused them to recoil in horror as Donald Trump not only won the presidency but successfully circumvented their cabal.
In an interview last week with the MIT Press Podcast, author Lee McIntyre delivered a performance reminiscent of a haughty aristocrat on the eve of the French Revolution, explaining the key thesis of his book On Disinformation: How to Fight for Truth and Protect Democracy. McIntyre begs for censorship, that to protect the sacred class to which he belongs people like you and I must be silenced. There is perhaps some truth to this, but as Miroshnichenko points out later in his work,
“If free discussion is ejected from social practice, in the environment of free reaction it develops with three times the strength. If opinions are not freely expressed in the offline world, they take their revenge online.”
The Journalist class, so very drunk on the delusions of their underdog status, have only just perceived that it is they who command the institutions, and it is they who now desperately beg that their sinecure not face the technological judgment already rendered. And it goes beyond them.
As McLuhan points out, the printing press is largely responsible for the creation of the nation-state as the normative expression of political economy, and if we accept (as I believe is obvious) that the internet is as profound an invention as the printing press, we must similarly conclude that the political economy of the future will look very very different from the oligarchy currently sweating while slouching around Davos wondering ‘how to regain trust’. They could start by accepting that technology has passed them by and that their priestly sinecure is over. A modern Cromwell will come for their monasteries, the only question is how bloody the shock will be when he does.
The hard reality here is that technological innovation has rendered the current arrangement obsolete, and for journalists, this pain is particularly acute. Like their decadent forebearers, they believe enough censorship can stem the tide. But they cannot. Miroshnichenko further elucidates
“In a little while long-form reading can turn into something similar to Latin, a dead language of the great antique culture accessable to a few. This cultural transition, in and of itself, even if we disregard political and social changes, is capable of destroying and will destroy the old civilization. The changes in the semantic code of civilizatoin will occur in unison with the global change from the broadcast media model to the involvement media model, and with the replacement of the institutional principle of social structure with the network principle.”2
These hopeless reactionaries believe that if they simply shove enough Christiane Amanpour down the throats of the public they can keep their semireligious cartel going. No amount of foot-stomping will stop the fundamental transformation of geopolitics and political economy by the internet.
And here I believe is the important lesson we must take from Miroshnichenko’s work — the altered landscape that we inhabit has given us a great deal of advantages over the older, traditional power structures. The boomer-ism — ‘Twitter is not real life’ — should be totally excised from our understanding. Twitter, and social media at large, are very much real life, and are far more real than the cable and newspaper plantations. The question is not if elements of the traditional power structure are doomed, but how much of it is. And it is this question that should put a smile on our faces as we look to the future.
The Emancipation of Authorship, p.215
Ibid. p. 220