From "On the Internet, We’re Always Famous/What happens when the experience of celebrity becomes universal?" by Chris Hayes (The New Yorker).
September 25, 2021
"The rise of the liberal blogs, during the run-up to Barack Obama’s election, brought us the headiest days of Internet Discourse Triumphalism."
"We were going to remake the world through radically democratized global conversations.
That’s not what happened. To oversimplify, here’s where we ended up. The Internet really did bring new voices into a national discourse that, for too long, had been controlled by far too narrow a group. But it did not return our democratic culture and modes of thinking to pre-TV logocentrism. The brief renaissance of long blog arguments was short-lived (and, honestly, it was a bit insufferable while it was happening). The writing got shorter and the images and video more plentiful until the Internet birthed a new form of discourse that was a combination of word and image: meme culture.... Everyone had to shout to be heard, and the conversation morphed into a game of telephone, of everyone shouting variations of the same snippets of language, phrases, slogans—an endless, aural hall of mirrors.... [T]he people screaming the loudest still get the most attention, partly because they stand out against the backdrop of a pendulating wall of sound that is now the room tone of our collective mental lives...."
From "On the Internet, We’re Always Famous/What happens when the experience of celebrity becomes universal?" by Chris Hayes (The New Yorker).
From "On the Internet, We’re Always Famous/What happens when the experience of celebrity becomes universal?" by Chris Hayes (The New Yorker).
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Doesn't Chris Hayes have a TV show of some kind? Why do we care what he thinks of the competition? I am sure, if this is the same Chris Hayes, the snippet does not make me want to "read the whole thing", the same Chris Hayes who comes out with half baked takes in defense of the interest of the Democrat power elite in all things, then it's not surprising that long conversations where he was not in control bored him.
The internet truly has been a marvelous thing but the downside to me, outweighs the benefits by far.
Today, if a waitress is mistreated with a non-woke remark in a diner in Monkey's Eyebrow, Kentucky, within minutes it is known by 6 billions all over the planet and is all over broadcast news. A person's life is ruined but worse, the sense is propagated that this non-woke behavior is widespread and about to engulf everyone.
The result is that the internet has had a terrible effect on attitudes and thoughts over a nothing incident. This is killing us as a species. And similar effects can be seen every single day and hour over and over.
The memes really stick in his craw because the right is better at it by far. If it were a successful propaganda weapon of the left, he would be writing just as many words in their praise.
The internet made bad writing in the New Yorker stand out as bad.
The New Yorker has funny cartoons.
It is indicative of the sorry state of the blogosphere that we are reduced to using words like “pendulating” to get the reader’s attention.
“The brief renaissance of long blog arguments …”
There was a revival?
I have to say, after reading the article, I feel dirty even commenting here. But, the show must go on.
I thought it was, to my surprise upon seeing who wrote it, a good article. It could have been great had Hayes not so loved the sound and sight of his own words. (this coming from a guy who has always had a problem finding the short form.) The article goes on well past having made it's point. Per Hayes' own words "The brief renaissance of long blog arguments was short-lived (and, honestly, it was a bit insufferable while it was happening)." It's obviously still happening in magazine essays.
Anyway, I think what he states is essentially true and none of us are sure where it ends up. But what he didn't mention was the latest new twist of approved censoring of some of this excessive chatter. Those who control the mass media, also control what can but put out on the mass media. And they are just starting to get used to how much fun it is to cancel out those opinions that either they don't like, or that might affect their business arrangements (with a current administration, for instance). They are just getting their feet wet with this this new way of 'curtailing' some of the megaphone noise. Wait until they really ramp it up. And they will.
I remember there was a time when we had to read great magazines to find new thinkers or be introduced to great old thinkers and learn who these people were. We'd buy their books to learn more about how they thought. Some would affect how we think for life. Then came talk radio- the early days. And I was exposed to more new people, new thoughts that lead to new books and more information. But even then there was a governor on who got on, and some standard on quality.
Today it is just mass chaos. Everyone on earth with a phone or computer is vying for the attention of as many as possible. It is an impossible, futile, and stupid use of our energy. But from this mess....there are still gems that we find. It's harder though. It's harder to find those gems through the chaos. And the mob wants to steer you this way and that. You have to build up a reflexive barrier to being led by the mob or you may find yourself squealing with glee at kitten or puppy videos for 30 minutes before you catch yourself. It gets much worse than puppy videos, though. And I wonder when the younger among us will sit back and ask themselves if this is enough. TikTok videos of people doing weird shit for clicks. How life-sustaining can that be?
".... the brain-goring stupidity of Donald Trump’s pronouncements is uncanny. Trump is the brain-dead megaphone made real: the dumbest, most obnoxious guy in the entire room given the biggest platform. And our national experiment with putting a D-level cable-news pundit in charge of the nuclear arsenal went about as horribly as Saunders might have predicted."
After observing the Biden administration's performance for 8 months now, Chris Hayes writes this?????
Maybe the blogs sucked and the writers weren’t that good.
Chris Hayes is completely insufferable. I watch him and others on MSNBC from time-to-time to see how crazy liberals are.
For Hayes, everything is a crisis. He always looks angry and constipated. And, of course, a giant liar.
That's a good essay but I wish he had not mentioned Trump in it. It would have been challenging to leave him out, I admit, but it would be cleaner without the distraction.
New Yorker reader mad he is not the gateway to information anymore.
These legacy media institutions are just garbage sources of information.
“And our national experiment with putting a D-level cable-news pundit [Trump] in charge of the nuclear arsenal went about as horribly as Saunders might have predicted.”
But Trump didn’t start any wars. He never launched any nukes. What about all the peace deals in the ME? Trump crushed ISIS.
Hayes - being the fucking liberal idiot that he is - just focuses on Trump’s unlikeable personality; not his results. With Trump, the Border was under control. With Biden, we have chaos and 2m new people; not to mention all the drugs.
I totally despise Chris Hayes.
The lefties thought their windbag think pieces were to become the only 'conversation' and the great unwashed would hang on their every proclamation. Instead the libs were shocked those people they hate were a larger crowd than their narrow view of the world allowed them to believe.
Ah Chris Hayes. He's the MSNBC news reader/opinion voice with the Warby Parker black rimmed glasses with simple window glass for lenses--and a sort of owl eyed stare. That shows he's a serious smart guy. Or at least that's what he supposes.
I read his essay; not bad. But the tipoff that he sees himself as a Star or Master, was the sentence to the effect that "I can tell you that a thousand kind words can't overcome one criticism". You see he's the Master after all--a legend in his own mind.
And underlying it all is that Chris as a "Master of the Universe" and a big main stream media macher, doesn't like the fact that other people are wrestling for the metaphorical megaphone. Who do those peasants think they are?
Still I give him some credit for his essay. He touches on some significant points.
Ah Chris Hayes. He's the MSNBC news reader/opinion voice with the Warby Parker black rimmed glasses with simple window glass for lenses--and a sort of owl eyed stare. That shows he's a serious smart guy. Or at least that's what he supposes.
I read his essay; not bad. But the tipoff that he sees himself as a Star or Master, was the sentence to the effect that "I can tell you that a thousand kind words can't overcome one criticism". You see he's the Master after all--a legend in his own mind.
And underlying it all is that Chris as a "Master of the Universe" and a big main stream media macher, doesn't like the fact that other people are wrestling for the metaphorical megaphone. Who do those peasants think they are?
Still I give him some credit for his essay. He touches on some significant points.
The New Yorker should have stuck with On the internet nobody knows you're a dog and been done with it...
I used to love reading Asymmetrical Information - long gone, she's now at The Economist, right? Protein Wisdom - long gone, he now only tweets, I think. Belfort Club - he's still on at PJMedia but doesn't say nearly as much.
And Althouse soldiers on! Perhaps these posts aren't as long-form as some of those others were, but the comment thread makes up for it.
Neo will still do longer posts sometimes, but - as the piece says, I guess - I find myself less likely to read them with care. Could be my reaction to the culture; could be that I'm 20 years more of a curmudgeon than I used to be.
Memes allowed people who don't have access to the resources of the New Yorker to create editorial cartoons that are as effective as the original.
One thing that the left has done masterfully is to weaponize poor grammar. Trump would have been far better served by using what the French call "well punished" grammar. Not only does the left exploit the imprecise grammar of their enemies to put thoughts into their words that were never intended, but uses imprecise grammar themselves to create language that may be true if interpreted one way, but which imply something that they really want you to think, that doesn't comport to any objective truth at all. This is how they get Trump, who is not stupid, but he is a little careless, to appear stupid. They exploit his poor grammar to claim that he has said things he never meant. Once they made people hate him in this way, it was easy to get people to swallow the left's deceitful interpretations of his words.
"It would have been challenging to leave him out, I admit, but it would be cleaner without the distraction."
I just bought a book on copy editing, of all things, because I am working on a novel, and in the first thirty pages he brought up his hatred of Trump so much that I just tossed it in the trash. I had written in it already quite a bit, so I couldn't return it. It was called "Dreyer's English" I wish I had read the one star reviews first
https://www.amazon.com/product-reviews//B07LFK2F8W/ref=acr_search_hist_1?ie=UTF8&filterByStar=one_star&reviewerType=all_reviews#reviews-filter-bar
"We were going to remake the world through radically democratized global conversations."
Am I supposed to take seriously someone who actually thought this? What, pray tell, is the difference between progressivism and insanity?
Hayes is a Progressive cog in the propaganda machine.
Recommended reading: Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media by Edward S. Herman and Noam Chomsky. When Noam is right he’s not wrong.
Isn't it possible that there are really just six books which are dominating internet conversation? and the "noise" is caused by people shouting out opinions about those six books or linking events to the argument of those six books without directly stating the argument. For instance on the environment, Silent Spring by Rachel Carson. On Colonialism - Franz Fanon and Edward Said. On Black history in American history - Invisible Man. New left - Marcuse. One Dimensional Man. If you know the complete arguments from those books don't you recognize them being repeated, refuted, un-refuted, re-refuted, mocked, worshipped, mumbled, proclaimed on the internet? Silent Spring becomes Al Gore and the IPCC; Invisible Man / One Dimensional Man becomes both Martin Luther King and Stokely Carmichael, both BLM and Feminism. It's as if the air is full of spraying water, flashing drops, collisions, but you trace them back to six sprinklers. And the reason for these agitations being significant is the relation of these six long arguments, i.e. books, to the American elections. American elections are consistently reported as horse races and the state of these arguments are the way in which the candidates gain the lead. "Edward Said is dropping back after a serious injury in Kabul but here come Climate Change and Franz Fanon, jockeying for the lead.
Of course this is just the left The six books of the left challenge Western Civ which the right defends - the Bible, calculus, the American dream .... And there's a whole set of issues coming from the left, The Challenger, being in power and being incompetent and being led by a corrupt senile buffoon amid canned applause and being in decline. So that the right becomes in reality The Challenger, tracing strategies of attack back to Lenny Bruce so that Lenny Bruce is now fighting for truth, justice and the American way.
But I'm marring my clean argument. Six books make arguments which are the themes of most memes and arc about election chances.
Old world: ink on paper. Hard to cancel. Even the worst totalitarian out of Ray Bradbury's nightmares would struggle to round up every last copy. See also samizdat and the oral tradition among living breathing company.
New world: file not found. Dynamic overwriting of "corrected" records and then who is to know what had once been there? Gone.
This is not how human beings have ever lived. Yet here we are, in a helluva hurry, and the rate of change still increasing.
The New Yorker, standing athwart history and sniffing contemptuously.
Chris Hayes is complaining about the national discourse using a metaphor about a man shouting bullshit through a megaphone? Chris Hayes of MSNBC?
Yeah, OK Chris.
Trump is the brain-dead megaphone made real: the dumbest, most obnoxious guy in the entire room given the biggest platform.
Projection is a helluva drug.
I don't think it's the internet per se, or the trend of short tweets' replacing longer blog posts, that's responsible for ruining civil discourse. The more basic problem is that people on the left will not tolerate opposing viewpoints. Their totalitarian impulses lead them to view the internet as an instrument of social control rather than a virtual "public square" where everyone can come out and engage in free speech.
As for Hayes' lament over Trump's having been "given" a Twitter megaphone that he didn't deserve, since when HASN'T a president dominated the stage in terms of public discourse? FDR practically owned the national media when he was president (which is actually not that different from the Dems' control over the MSM, but I digress). To complain that Trump had a major platform on Twitter is not to argue in favor of the good old days, it's to argue in favor of further leftist control of the internet in contravention of longstanding civic norms.
Maybe the blogs sucked and the writers weren’t that good.
When the liberal points the blogs are trying to score are the same liberal points cable news and late night and The View and the Sunday morning agitprops are scoring, who will bother to read?
"We were going to remake the world through radically democratized global conversations.”
Remake the world is easy. Improve the world turns out to be beyond the ability — or even the vision! — of American leftists in the 21st century.
Jamie said...
"I used to love reading Asymmetrical Information - long gone, she's now at The Economist, right? Protein Wisdom - long gone, he now only tweets, I think. Belfort Club - he's still on at PJMedia but doesn't say nearly as much.
And Althouse soldiers on!"
I've made a few comments elsewhere recently about how much better the Internet was in the pre-social media days when people blogged primarily because they enjoyed it and had something to say. I understand the need to make a buck, but a lot was lost when blogging became more about clicks than quality.
I admire Althouse's work, both on a daily basis and as a long term corpus of quality.
I had to think a while before recalling which of the MSDNC soyboys young Hayes is.
Maddow is more manly.
"After observing the Biden administration's performance for 8 months now, Chris Hayes writes this?????"
As someone who is most definitely not a member of the Church of Trump, I have to say that did indeed take a great deal of forgetting for Hayes to write that. Whatever Trump's other faults are, getting involved in reckless military action isn't one of them. He was very careful about such things, even when the usual suspects were trying to goad him into doing something "dramatic."
Biden on the other hand, is a walking, talking cluster f*CK who has already gotten good people killed due to his (or more likely the inmates currently running the asylum) stupidity. As much as it pains me to write this, we were really safer with the real estate magnet with awful taste.
Memes made Facebook toxic. Prove me wrong.
"The New Yorker, standing athwart history and sniffing contemptuously."
That's only funny because it's true. :)
On the internet, no one can hear you scream.
Not if you mute yourself anyway.
Chris Hayes sort of has a point. Rightly or wrongly, people did take the left a little more seriously after the financial crisis. It wasn't that their ideas were likely to work. It was that they seemed new and relevant. Ideas and opinions tend to wear out and get dragged down by the internet, and once people seriously attempt to realize an ideology, the obstacles to realization and the ideology's own flaws become hard to avoid spotting. And of course, now all that has been subsumed by cancel culture. The left sputters out into personal resentment and "gotcha" games.
Note to Chris: Ditch the glasses, get contacts. The Buddy Holly thing doesn't work for you.
Also, when political discussion becomes a matter of supporting or opposing politicians in a partisan way it loses a lot in depth. The American Spectator was something of a reputable and worthy publication until it went all-in on the Clinton scandals. It was never the same afterwards. Something similar happened to CNN and MSNBC in the Trump years, if not earlier.
Hayes acts like Substack doesn't exist. Yes, I'll spend 15-20 minutes a day on Twitter, bit my follows are carefully curated...cheap hot takes get a block. But on Substack I'm finding once more what I loved about the early internet, people with some depth of knowledge who can compose an interesting argument.
If the garbage on the internet bothers you, there are plenty of options.
Rightly or wrongly, people did take the left a little more seriously after the financial crisis.
People who took “the left a little more seriously after the financial crisis” did so wrongly, of course. It’s not as though anyone left of center has the slightest clue about macroeconomics. This includes leftist professors who teach the subject.
"chuck said...
The New Yorker, standing athwart history and sniffing contemptuously."
He who smelt it dealt it.
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