It seems as though the singular event of the American executive power transfer - and its perceived failure by many in the republic - has ignited a galaxy of latent antagonisms, which have cascaded out in every direction. Granted, any further plunge in an already precipitous public trust will tend to do just this.
It will be difficult to ascertain the magnitude of the effects of this completed election cycle until after the dust clears. Though of course the outcome of the election cycle itself can be construed as yet another effect that is consequence of a complex historical process.
All too easy to get ahead of ourselves. For the moment, it is useful to focus in once again on the "fake news" phenomena, and the struggles contained in it, to trace the contours of this ongoing unfolding. Pardon the obsession, these developments are just too irresistible to me.
The establishment reaction to the fake news phenomena is already well underway, and this reaction will most likely further progress the system to the supercritical state mentioned earlier. This is because the system that has tasked itself with filtering out quality news and hence truth has in fact contributed mightily to the concentrations of power that have produced these distortions of truth in the first place.
This of course requires some unpacking.
Suddenly we have enthusiastic tech entrepreneurs and programmers, who having concerned themselves with the troubling proliferation of fake news outlets, have bravely faced up to the task of building filtering tools for browsers in order to warn users of impending fakeness. The problem is that these filtering devices have to draw from established lists of news outlets that have been reputed to produce low quality news, which of course is a political decision.
As an aside, it is curious that both a person spearheading the fake news push and a person spearheading the fake news filter push initiated their efforts as a cynical joke which then took off. It seems the ironic self-reference and self parody that accompanies the breakdown of overarching public truths and the onset of relativist epistemology is back in full swing. The breakdown of the political order is ushering in a recurrence of the postmodern electrical storm.
As for the political decision for the filter list, we are already seeing this decision being made; its results are all too predictable. CBS was one of the first news outlets to promote the anti-fake tool, and doubtless their name was on the good news list, along with other establishment media organs, despite the very visible degradation in news quality from these outlets, which has real consequences.
Of course a developer of a tool like this will want to ensure that the outlets that plug its products will be included on the good list. And all of the independent news sites that actually produce reliable news, and which lack the resources to pose a real threat, are being swept up in the net with the other fake news organs. So the public truth is indeed breaking down, as the public's instruments for maintaining those truths are themselves breaking down as coherent and reliable entities of efficacy. Here an image impresses itself: one is going into battle with a blade that is doing battle with itself.
And I assume the people who gladly consume the fake news are going to drop what they are doing and trust that the instruments telling them to stand down and respect the truth are indeed telling the truth! The circulation and build up of capital required to produce the instruments that vet the truth is simultaneously producing substantial power imbalances, which is in turn fostering the resent necessary for people to consume news media that is flattering to their sensibilities, regardless of its quality.
There is something profound that is happening here, and I don't believe I am giving it proper treatment at the moment, though the ground covered in this post makes for plenty of headway. This subject will have to be revisited, perhaps again and again, so that I may at some time properly convey it. Until then, plenty to think through for some time.
