Re: <nettime> made for TV, made for social media

[Felix Stalder <felix@openflows.com>]

The point we can all agree on is that it is too early to tell.

I think there are two main open developments, in terms of immediate
political dynamics. that will decide the direction this takes.

The first is whether the republican party will fracture, because,
clearly, not everyone is having a change of heart suddenly. Yesterday,
after the house reconvened, the majority of republican representatives
still voted to reject the electors from Arizona (57%) and Pennsylvania
(65%). This was not enough to stop the certification process, but it's a
very sizeable number. And it represents the mood of broad swaths of the
public. A you-gov snap poll [1] indicated that only 60% see "the
storming of the Capitol building as a threat to democracy", and among
republicans, the number drops to 27%. That does not mean that the rest
openly supports it, but a vast majority of republicans do not see it as
a major event. Whereas 93% of Democrats do.

[1]
https://today.yougov.com/topics/politics/articles-reports/2021/01/07/US-capitol-trump-poll

Of course, this is a small poll taken in a very fluid situation, but it
doesn't immediately indicate that the politicians in their gerrymandered
districts have much to fear for now. Also, the stock market did not
signal immediate panic, further reducing short-term pressure.

The other question is if the democratic party, and Biden in particular,
is willing/able to use the new slim majorities to enact transformational
change. I think there is a strong inclination among the Obama centrists
who seem to be dominating the new administration to see Trump as an
aberration -- creating by the Russians, Cambridge Analytica or some
other force unrelated to them -- and go back to the status quo before
Trump. The only area where there seems to a real political will to
implement change, rather than simply 'restore decency', is climate
change, which, of course, would be a catalyst for much wider changes if
taken seriously.

But without deep change, the structural forces that created both popular
resentment at the decline of living standards and elites who feel they
don't need democracy any more, are not going away. And given the
extremely fractures media landscape, better messaging will not do the
trick.







On 07.01.21 19:25, Brian Holmes wrote:

> It's too early to tell. However there is an opposite interpretation.
> 
> In my view, far from being a harbinger of possibly worse threats to
> come, yesterday's events were the most positive thing that could have
> happened. I had hoped - dreamed - that we would see something exactly
> like this.
> 
> The reason why is that through these events, we as a country left the
> world of "harbingers" and "possible threats" behind. Simultaneously, we
> left behind the pretense that populist Republicans are "merely" engaged
> in political theater. The day began with the usual push-the-limits
> posturing from Senator Ted Cruz and his allies: yet another page from
> the rhetorical playbook developed by Newt Gingrinch in the early 1990s.
> But then the play-acting devolved into an ugly insurrection carried out
> by crude, stupid and very obviously manipulated people. They were
> directly incited by the highest powers, via social media for sure, and
> television, and radio, and print journalism, and above all by the
> hottest channel of all: live rallies. The theater had consequences. The
> possible became real. And so a choice between conflicting realities
> could finally occur.
> 
> Amazingly, no bomb exploded, no automatic weapons came out at dusk,
> there was no massacre. The pretense of "political theater" that fomented
> the uprising also took the place of, and disallowed, any serious
> planning for collective violence. Instead the entire country got a close
> look at an inchoate, yet very dangerous mob whose worldview is paranoid
> and delusional. Sure, we had seen these folks already, many times. Yet
> this time there was no equivocation as to who was leading. When Pence
> and McConnell took their last-minute stand in favor of the Constitution,
> Trump sent his thugs to oppose them. And with their actions, Trump's
> people - the real, unequivocal "deplorables" - finally lanced the boil
> of Trumpism.
> 
> When the Western forests burned and smoke hung for weeks over Seattle
> and San Francisco, it became obvious to a majority of Americans that
> climate change was real. Similarly, when the windows were shattered at
> the Capitol, it became obvious that a politics based on staged and
> calculated insurrectionary rhetoric leads to real violence and
> institutional breakdown.
> 
> Rather than subjecting it to a media-theoretic analysis, I think it
> would be realistic to see yesterday's electoral count event as a "total
> social fact." The phrase by Marcel Mauss refers to moments of collective
> ritual in which the pragmatic administration of functions coincides with
> the charismatic or magical expression of values. For Mauss this is a
> dynamic ritual with all the density, complexity and precarity of lived
> experience. It is a real force because it tests out the validity of
> social fictions. It is a total fact because it upholds, but to some
> extent also transforms, a society's core affective and cognitive
> assumptions about what the world is and how it works.
> 
> The pragmatic function of yesterday's certification ritual was to
> confirm the peaceful transferral of state power. Yet what it became,
> dynamically, was a challenge to and subsequent re-affirmation of all the
> procedures, values and aspirations attached to the society-wide practice
> of democracy. This was not a monolithic, mythical, predetermined
> ceremony, even though that was what everyone was fearfully hoping it
> would be. Instead it was dynamic, open-ended, touch and go, extremely
> vulnerable. And look at what it actually did.
> 
> It reconfirmed, in the evening, the about-face of political power that
> had occured in the morning, when the results from Georgia came through.
> In this way, it opened up the possibility for a Democratic
> administration to actually legislate: to move transformative laws
> through both the House and the Senate. Not just Trump, but three decades
> of Republican mendacity and opportunism were pushed aside. And that
> event did not merely happen over social media, or on talk radio, or on
> the Hannity show. It was not just another piece of calculated political
> theater. It was a society-wide event: a total social fact.
> 
> Not only that, but from the media-theoretic viewpoint, something
> extremely interesting did occur: Twitter censored Trump and blocked his
> communications for 12 hours. The anarcho-capitalist media took one giant
> step towards accepting their integration in the overall political process.
> 
> So we dodged a bullet yesterday, for sure. And something a lot more
> important may potentially have happened.
> 
> There comes a point where you have to be counter-factual, you have to
> engage in what Mauss calls "magical thinking." You have to take a role
> in a theater that really does have consequences. That tipping-point is
> now. I will participate in the collective actions of a society that
> starts to reverse the tremendous harms it has been committing for
> decades and centuries. I will help to transform the pragmatic
> administration of social functions.
> 
> all the best, Brian
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
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