The other day, Andrew Torba was scheduled to appear on the
Tucker Carlson show so I figured out how to find it off the underground TV
system. I no longer have a TV subscription, so I have to rely on the dark web
for this stuff. Cord
cutters can say what they like about services like Kodi, but it
is a hassle compared to regular cable. So much so, in fact, that I rarely watch
television. Instead I download movies and TV shows and binge watch when the
spirit moves me. I watched Deadwood last month, for example.
Anyway, I found a stream and tuned in to the show. I did not
know when Torba’s segment was scheduled so I had to sit through the whole
thing. Watching Tucker interview some old guy, who looked vaguely familiar, I
felt like I had gone back in time. I have not watched these shows in a long
time. I get my news on-line. I skip the Blue Team – Red Team hooting that makes
up political banter in the mainstream press. In fact, I barely notice most of
what passes for current events discussion. I just don’t care that much.
The Torba piece was short and I got the sense that Tucker
Carlson spends little time on-line. The things Torba said about Twitter and
FaceBorg zapping bad-think on a daily basis were obviously news to Tucker. He
was genuinely surprised when Torba explained the realities of who controls the
internet and the power they have over speech. The reason for this is no one in
the mass media understands any of this stuff. They live in the media bubble and
the sorts of things we experience on-line are alien to them.
This is not a new phenomenon. Back in the olden thymes when
people were coming home every night to a dozen CD’s in the mail from ISP’s
offering a free month of internet, the mass media was unaware the internet
existed. I recall laughing myself silly one night, watching a couple of
airheads on the local news in Boston, talk about “the mysterious underworld of
the internet” as if it was the back room at Rick’s
Cafe. They carried on like the internet was an opium den. The
astonished look on their faces was priceless.
It is another example of the gulf between the people in the mass
media and the public. We are at the point now where most everyone under the age
of 50 is getting their news and information from on-line sources. The median
age for the TV chat shows is mid-60’s and the age for traditional print
publications like magazines and journals is 70. The people working the chat
show circuit are people who came into the business from newspapers and
political magazines. Even the young people on TV are living in the old mindset.
That’s the thing. When you consume news on-line, you scan the
high points until you land on something of interest. On a daily basis, I visit
maybe fifty sites. I don’t read every word of those sites. Often, I just skim
and move on. Social media provides a feed to skim what others are skimming.
Information about the world is now a stream and you can dip your cup into as
you see fit. Since you can absorb vastly more information by reading, the
on-line experience is more informative and more customized to your interests.
News consumption in the information age, for most people now, is
on-demand. You take what you want, when you want it, at the speed you want. The
old model was an on-supply model. You got what they gave you, on their schedule
and their pace. Sitting there watching Tucker and his guests plod through each
segment was painful. I no longer have patience for the banter and mugging that
is traditional television. I just want the facts and don’t have any interest in
their attempts to color it with their personal touch.
It’s not just an age issue, but that is certainly a big part of
it. The young people you see in the mass media are just are fogy-ish as an old
fogy. They are positive that the old model is still relevant. They create the
news and supply it to you in doses they believe you can handle. Meanwhile, most
people have consumed the stories via their social media accounts long before
they turn up on the chat shows or big shot news sites. People tuned into see
Torba inform Carlson about what was
happening with speech on-line.
The people in charge get this to some degree. That’s part of why
they are berserk for cracking down on dissident speech on-line. Trump was
elected because an ad-hoc army on disaffected people went on-line and drove the
news cycle, while the people in charge were selling that old hag Clinton on TV
chat shows that no one under the age of 60 bothers watching anymore. Their
efforts to match this have resulted in memes like “How Do You Do, Fellow Kids?” where
the old thinkers are made to look ridiculous.
It’s tempting to cast this as a bad development. The Fake News
phenomenon has simply been met with a guerrilla version of it. Mike Cernovich
peddling PizzaGate on twitter is just as corrosive as the New York Times making
up stories about Trump. It’s important to remember that the news has always
been fake. In the 18th century factions had their newspapers promote false
narratives in favor of their faction. It is the source of the Sally Hemmings
stuff. Yellow Journalism was a thing before radio existed.
The only question today is the impact of the speed and volume.
Fake News delivered by town crier can be mulled over and debated. Propaganda
posing as news in the daily paper only comes in once a day. For people glued to
their computers and mobile devices, being immersed in a solution of fake news,
agit-prop and craven nonsense is a fact of life that is new to our age. Maybe
it cancels itself out and all of it becomes background noise or maybe is erodes
public trust and begins to set off panics. Or something else.
