Posted on 12/21/2024 11:14:47 AM PST by E. Pluribus Unum
If anyone in the future cares enough to write an authentic history of the 2024 presidential campaign, they might begin by noting that American politics exists downstream of American culture, which is a deep and broad river. Like any river, American culture follows a particular path, which has been reconfigured at key moments by new technologies. In turn, these technologies, which redefine both space and time—canals and lakes, the postal system, the telegraph, railroads, radio and later television, the internet, and most recently the networking of billions of people in real time on social media platforms—set the rules by which stories are communicated, audiences are configured, and individuals define themselves.
Something big changed sometime after the year 2000 in the way we communicated with each other, and the means by which we absorbed new information and formed a working picture of the world around us. What changed can be understood as the effect of the ongoing transition from the world of 20th-century media to our current digital landscape. This once-every-five-centuries revolution would have large effects, ones we have only just begun to assimilate, and which have largely rendered the assumptions and accompanying social forms of the past century obsolete, even as tens of millions of people, including many who imagine themselves to reside near the top of the country’s social and intellectual pyramids, continue to imagine themselves to be living in one version or another of the long 20th century that began with the advent of a different set of mass communications technologies, which included the telegraph, radio, and film.
The time was ripe, in other words, for a cultural revolution—which would, according to the established patterns of American history, in turn generate a political one.
I first became interested in the role of digital technology in reshaping American politics...
(Excerpt) Read more at tabletmag.com ...
The permission structure machine that Barack Obama and David Axelrod built to replace the Democratic Party was in its essence neither modern nor conservative, though. Rather it is totalitarian in its essence, a device for getting people to act against their beliefs by substituting new and better beliefs through the top-down controlled and leveraged application of social pressure, which among other things eliminates the position of the spectator.
That explains a lot.
bfl
Thus the "If you are against the Ukraine war you are a Putinista" demagoguery.
BFL
In other words, propaganda/indoctrination with peer pressure. They used a compliant press to advance absurd ideas and people often felt too intimidated to dissent.
I can’t believe I read this. I have no one in my circle to send it to. Only other FReepers would tackle this.
Likewise. Out of FR, I don’t know anyone who could understand this level of analysis.
Illuminating article—thanks for posting.
Not the press.
Looks good. I got to a quibble and will mention it now, before I forget:
“monopoly social media platforms”
If there is more than one, it’s not a monopoly.
They are all following the instructions of their government puppetmasters.
It's a government monopoly.
That was great! And invigorating!
When we look back in future years at the Obama/Axelrod/Jarrett era we may find that the playbook they used was less like Alinsky’s than it was like Chairman Mao’s.
Point taken.
“The new common wisdom was not a true “reflection” of what anyone in particular necessarily believed, but rather the deliberate creation of a small class of operatives who used new technologies to create and control larger narratives that they messaged to target audiences”
This is a far cry of the pursuit of truth.
“the potential distance between an underlying reality and an invented reality that could be successfully messaged and managed from the White House”
“The Hunter Biden laptop story, in which party operatives shanghaied 51 former high U.S. government intelligence and security officials to sign a letter that all but declared the laptop to be a fake, and part of a Russian disinformation plot—when most of those officials had very strong reasons to know or believe that the laptop and its contents were real—showed how the system worked.”
Again, there was no commitment to truth. Perhaps this would not have gone so far if we allowed the teaching of the Ten Commandments in our schools.
Which is exactly why they want to prohibit it.
I bookmarked this and read till I get saturated or distracted, both of which happen easily. To me, this is a profound article. I enjoyed the TV series MAD men, but never thought advertising (one economist called it “business propaganda”) could be important in any sinister way.
According to the article, the selling of the President has been going on for a long time in ways that often evolve with evolving technology.
The term “permission structures” is new to me. It seems obvious enough when I look at the liberals I know. I sort of snicker when someone tells me they believe something weird because they read it in the New York Times. However (horror), I may not be immune.
I keep finding shareable quotes. Here’s one:
“Needless to say, the model of politics in which operatives are constantly running permission structure games on the body politic, assisted by members of the press and think tankers eager to be of service to the party, has more in common with pyramid schemes and high-pressure network-marketing scams than it does with reasoned democratic deliberation and debate. At this point, it hardly seems controversial to point out that such a model of politics is socially toxic.”
If that does not resonate with you, perhaps it’s out of context. For context, read the article.
Have you considered posting a link to this article on X?
I’ve recently started using X. I find it more confusing and less satisfactory than FreeRepublic. That said, I assume it commands a larger audience. Also, there may be less “preaching to the choir.” I think our conservative voices are more than a match for people who are accustomed to FU as an argument.
Just ran across a pull-quote from the article:
“The effect of the permission structure machine is to instill and maintain obedience to voices coming from outside yourself, regardless of the obvious gaps in logic and functioning that they create.”
What immediately came to mind was: A) Anthropomorphic Global Warming and B) Anthropomorphic Climate Change. These are two different theories. They contradict one another when we get exceptionally cold winter weather. That could be climate change but definitely is not global warming. Few people recognize the inconsistency, or care, simply treating both theories as the same due to common enemies: CO2, capitalism, Republicans.
Why would anyone commit so strongly to these theoretical weaklings? Why? Because 97% of scientists think so. Fact checked!
There is a lot of content to this article. I think the discussion of permission structures is good. It was very profound for me as it was entirely new. Some other material seems doubtful to me.
“This was not always the case, though. Neither Greek nor Hebrew literature, which are the two great narrative streams out of which what we know today as Western culture was formed, appear to have any equivalent to what we identify today as internal monologue. Instead, they are filled with talking bushes, plants, and animals. Above all, they are filled with the voices of gods—including God—which talk to humans in nearly every physical location imaginable, from mountaintops to the Road to Damascus. Abraham, Moses, Ezekiel, Jesus, and Paul all heard voices. According to the Princeton University scholar Julian Jaynes, author of The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind, human consciousness did not arise as a chemical-biological byproduct of human evolution but is instead a learned process based on the recent development and elaboration of metaphorical language. Prior to the development of consciousness, Jaynes argues, humans operated under a previous mentality he called the bicameral (two-chambered) mind, where in place of an internal dialogue, bicameral people regularly experienced auditory hallucinations directing their actions.”
I doubt the bicameral mind accounts for the origin of the universe, parting of the Red sea, turning water into wine, and so on.
Still, it is easy for me to remember people who watched the “nightly news” or even a Michael Moore “documentary” and nodded their heads as though they were receiving truth and wisdom. Consciousness and reasoning are attributes that we should not take for granted.
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