As the junk news process grinds on, I'd like to get down a few closing thoughts on the matter before I relax my fevered gaze on its unfolding.
We have the production of fake news, junk news, which is both morally and economically possible because of the general ambient background of the body politic. That same ambient background is also producing the junk truth-measuring instruments, whose purpose of sustaining truth is demonstrating the opposite function of destroying truth.
As a war transforms both combatants simultaneously by virtue of what takes place between them, the production of junk and anti-junk is only reinforcing the emerging patterns that are giving rise to them in the first place, and these emerging patterns are transforming the nature of our institutions and loci of human activity, such as the instruments for junk and anti-junk production.
The junk-producing right is drawing its political force from a domestic proto-fascism, whose raging fires, wounds, bad karmic cycles, or what have you, have been allowed to fester. Now I say "proto" because these forces aren't yet fully developed, and I say the "f-word" because it conjures the immediacy and focus one gets when pointing to a fire and saying, "hey, not good, that's fire." Technical fascism was specific to a historical period, and today we don't entirely know what shapes this new reactionary populism will take.
The anti-junk producing left - please excuse the simplistic right and left designations by the way, just devices for now - is drawing its political force from foreign proto-fascist fires that have been allowed - and even encouraged - to rage. Yes, much of the Russophobic paranoia that has accompanied the fake news witch hunts has been found to be most forcefully emanating from Ukrainian nationalist actors, trafficking in the same paranoid proto-fascist undercurrents as the far right in that nation.
Here a more physical analogue comes to mind, in which cultivated regions of poverty become vectors of diseases that were long since thought to be vanquished.
Both junk processes will produce similar results in the end. The ending of Hamlet also comes to mind, in which everyone busies themselves with poking each other with poisoned rapiers.
We keep looking for the monsters, the identifiable evil Mordor kingdoms, while it is all happening simultaneously, right under our noses. These are baffling patterns peculiar to the human capitalist era, which however unprecedented it may be in human social, technological, and economic history, is still similar to earlier historic patterns in which there is a dramatic accumulation of material power that grows and holds, and that proceeds to an equally dramatic dissolution.
Am I then some wise observer, perched upon a hill, unsoiled by the mud fights taking place below? Well, of course not. I am also a willing participant, who nevertheless has to learn to live by some kind of ideal in these barbarous times. That project to come, in time.
