https://www.garbageday.email/p/nothing-important-everything
"Last week, Texas Governor Greg Abbott released a statement which, idk about
you, definitely inspired me to start googling things like, “how do states
secede,” and “how do civil wars start +reddit”.
Abbott declared that he was invoking Texas’ “constitutional right to defend and
protect itself” from a border crisis that I just, very simply, don’t think
exists, but, oh well. Those kinds of details don’t matter in 2024."
[...]
"The most concise summary I’ve seen of the last few days was from X user
@souljagoytellem, who wrote, “Actually insane that for two years conservative
media has straight-facedly lied about a massive ‘invasion’ of illegal
immigrants and they’ve now been fully rewarded by having that lie become the
mainstream narrative.”
Though, the right-wing panic about the border has been going on a lot longer
than two years.
Fox News started their “migrant caravan” narrative in 2018.
They even have a topic page for it, which is now, of course, so long you can’t
even navigate it properly anymore. But what has changed in the last two years
is that it’s become virtually impossible to ignore the right-wing fixation on a
border crisis as some fringe conservative subplot.
Back in 2018, even with Trump in the White House, we still had a hybrid media
environment where still-somewhat-healthy digital publishers,
still-somewhat-searchable social networks, and fairly-large national news
organizations all competed inside the attention economy. What Semafor’s Max
Tani recently dubbed the “U.S. political-media-industrial-complex”. And before
the pandemic or Insurrection or the vibe shift — or whatever line in the sand
from the last three years you want to point to — if something inside of one of
those pipelines diverged too much from the others, you could tell simply by
consulting the others. Now that this information apparatus, as Tani concludes,
is collapsing, you can’t figure out what’s important because, in a sense,
nothing is. So in the case of Texas this week, without proper signals from a
“U.S. political-media-industrial-complex,” our politicians — especially
Democrats, it seems — are more than happy to rush through legislation to chase
something that feels important simply because there’s discourse about it. Just
like we saw with Washington’s TikTok panic last year."
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
