This is incredibly fascinating, albeit morbidly so.
The fake news phenomenon has to be taken in conjunction with Trump supporters' desire for an alternate reality. For precision, let's speak here of the alt-right's desire for an alternate reality.
It isn't so important that the alternate reality is a lie; the observation in the Stone article that this alternate reality is a function of the authoritarian leader's power is very prescient. There are parts of this reality that are indeed coherent and sensible: the distrust of establishment politicians and institutions, the distrust of capital (at least liberal capital), the distrust of free trade, the distrust of immigration policy, etc.
The alternate reality does take its power from this coherence and correspondence, but it then distorts the picture with xenophobic and domineering nonsense, as a function of the reactionary's instinct to power. This ends up decoupling the alternate reality from an inclination towards harmony and justice, and towards a delineated and separated sphere of power that ends up progressing the entire system to a supercritical and destructive state.
This alternate reality requires manufacturing, which is something that capital is very good at for obvious reasons. Like the processing of refined sugars, corn syrups, and enriched flours, the alternate reality is manufactured by the breaking down and recombining of living bodies, their most appealing components distilled and combined in the greatest number, so as to be irresistible to some isolated organ, regardless of the effects on the rest of the body (or body politic). Because of this constructed quality, a business can be built around intentionally manufacturing facets of this reality. One doesn't have to wait around for reality to assert itself and provide the scoop; one can simply construct an appealing reality to be taken up.
So a fake news story takes off and all of those seedy entrepreneurs smell blood. There is a feeding frenzy in which everyone is constructing their own fake news outlets, and the frenzy attracts the attention of advertisers and even Facebook, which has allowed the fake news stories to flourish on its networks for want of a cut of the advertising money.
Evidently Google has tried to suppress these fake news sites, but there are many more advertising networks waiting to get in on the action. Could this be an instance of ominous foreshadowing? These tech companies are still large and powerful, but we saw what happened to both the Republican and Democratic establishments...
This could very well be an indicator as to why the right is enjoying such a rapid ascendance around the world, against all odds. As a radical leftist, it would be very wonderful if capital suddenly started flooding in to attend to my prejudices, but alas, the money spigot has turned away from my kind.
The constructed mythos of the left is suppressed by money power at every turn because it is actually threatening to money power. The right's tribal alliances on the other hand are shared with members of the ruling class, and the prejudices of this alliance are manifested in the right wing mythos, so that it is steadily amplified by capital flows.
The fake news is junk yes, but we are no longer talking about some form of information that is supposed to aid in regulating the body as a whole. We are speaking of a sort of catalyst or enzyme within an altogether new metabolism, a metabolism that does not progress towards the maintenance of some stable relation, but its precise opposite.
