As social creatures, we are constantly forging and reforging objects of communication, which then become trafficked in and fought over. That is, we tend to follow the path of least resistance when it comes to speech acts.
There are some important consequences to this tendency, but first it would be a good idea to flesh out what this means.
It helps to start with something easy. Terms like "fascism" and "totalitarianism" have taken an enormous amount of intellectual and social labor to fashion. The social organizations behind these terms had to have held for a long and sustained period, so that they could take on the coherence required to forge a label to describe them, which is to gain currency.
The label then has to be intellectually developed, so that it can useful when it is traded in the social sphere. That is, communication objects are forged so that we can navigate the world. We say to each other "fire" so that we can coordinate our responses to the phenomenon of fire, and we say to each other "fascism" and "totalitarianism" so that we can coordinate our responses to those things in turn.
But here is where things get tricky.
Because so much labor has gone into these things, and because these things achieve currency through usage, they now have the power to evoke, and they are instrumentalized for various purposes as a consequence. The terms "fascism" and "totalitarianism" are now widely used because they point to phenomena that are definite and coherent, and which evoke a powerful range of emotions. Liberals and conservatives alike call each other totalitarian and fascist, as part of an ongoing exchange of attack, to evoke the emotions of fear and disgust in whomever is willing to listen and respond sympathetically. Much of humanity's social landscape is a neutral and therefore suggestible medium, with various passionate minorities attempting to divert the medium towards their ends, through these speech acts.
It would take far too much labor to forge something new and entirely on one's own, and then have that thing gain currency. It is much easier to traffic in the same terms that have already been created, and which are currently in currency, which shapes the terms of the debate.
These communication objects are steadily degraded through their repeated usage, which generalizes and spreads and disperses. So labor has to continuously be put into them to maintain them as coherent tools, which can be used to approximate and navigate reality. So we have to continuously explain what fascism and totalitarianism really are.
In the same way, a firearm must be forged out of steel and composites and oils, the bullets out of brass and lead and gunpowder, and all of the tools forging these things have to be forged themselves. Whomever builds the firearm has an intention for it, and then when the firearm passes into circulation, so long as it is maintained, it comes into functions far past the original intent. Warfare takes on a unique shape, due to this path of least resistance. Warfare must now be built around the firearm, due not only to the firearm's power and abilities of material manipulation, but to the sheer amount of labor that goes into the invention, production, and maintenance of the firearm. It generates a channel through which affairs must flow.
So now we can turn once again to the current stages of the "fake news" phenomenon. "Fake news" has steadily caught on as a term of disparagement for several reasons. Much labor has gone into producing the phenomenon that fake news is, which happens to be a socially destructive phenomenon that concerns anyone who gives a smack about approximating reality, and anyone who cares about the destruction of this ability for that matter. And so much social labor has gone into defining and circulating the term "fake news."
Now everyone is calling everyone else's news "fake news." Trump himself has called CNN's coverage "fake news," a move that has liberals bellowing in protest. But how much more "real" than fake news is CNN's news coverage? A couple of degrees? Commercial media started it! For that matter, you could say that commercial news has taught the fake news hucksters everything they know. The practice of manufacturing news sympathetic to various ideologies and sensibilities for profit is no longer the sole property of commercial news media; it has become democratized.
The label itself becomes a focusing point, through which the steady destruction of the body that produces it is carried out. Marx argued in the Grundrisse that though production and consumption appear as binary opposites, they indeed form a unity through their duality. Production is consumption in the sense that it consumes to create, and consumption produces production, by virtue of developing an object of desire to be produced for.
In the same way, we are seeing a form of destruction that is being produced, by virtue of the principle of least resistance. The political and cultural ambiance is all in place: everyone is at each others' throats. And so everyone is desperately glancing around for clubs to beat each other about the head with. Aha! The "fake news" clubs have been produced; now we can get to work.
Here I should point to a lecture on a similar phenomenon at the later stages of the Roman empire. Caution is of course warranted on passing judgments on these complex states of affairs, but nevertheless, the parallels are striking.
