Trumped 4: swamping the brain
In which Simon says a couple of things
Not only in America
This, the fourth and final instalment (I promise) of the Trump trilogy, argues that the Ideas Era is a threat to democracy itself. (Yes, ‘trilogy’ is a lie but lies work; obvious lies work best; and it’s time I got on the bandwagon.)
In Trumped 2B: a country of two tales, I identified unique American vulnerabilities, but its democracy is not uniquely vulnerable or even uniquely silly.
Exhibit 1: Nigel Farage, the driving force for the own goal that is Brexit, was elected Member of Parliament (MP) for Clacton in 2024 with nearly twice as many votes as the Conservative candidate and three times as many as Labour.
Credit: Nigel’s own Facebook page. He hasn’t noticed everyone else is pretty grim.
Meanwhile “A majority of Britons who voted to leave the EU would now accept a return to free movement in exchange for access to the single market, according to a cross-Europe study that also found a reciprocal desire in member states for closer links with the UK.”1
A swift eras tour
Here’s an old joke: “Q: What was Number 1 in Canada when “Wake up Little Susie” was Number 1 in the US? A: I don’t know but 6 months later it was ‘Wake up Little Susie’”.
In the 1950s America set the pace. The assassination of the President in November 1963 gave pause and in February 1964 Cool Britannia eclipsed sunny California for baby boomers at least. Then there was Viet Nam and Watergate… But, even when it loses its way, America never seems to lose its lead. So it’s likely that its democracy is just a bit further down a road we are all travelling.
The threat to western democracy is the eclipse of analog not of American democracy because today’s news junkies everywhere share needles .
Blinded by the light
Q: What’s the first thing you do when you emerge from a dark room into bright sunlight? If you said, “Slip on my shades”, you’re cool - ditto. “Shield my eyes with my hand because I have my cap on backwards?” Wrong again. You’d already squinted unattractively and your pupils contracted from 8mm to 1. 5mm. You hardly noticed.
If you are new to Leading and Managing in the Ideas Era or haven’t been diligently reading back issues like a responsible subscriber, today each of us is centre stage at an idea rock concert because the historic filters of geographic proximity and authority no longer work. Confronted with a flood of light and sound, we the people (not just they, the American people) block “the glare and noise” and find the familiar.
I have squandered my resistance
For a pocketful of mumbles
Such are promises
All lies and jest
Still a man hears what he wants to hear
And disregards the rest
There is so much “familiar” to choose from we fall back on old habits. To understand what this means for democracy, we go back in time.
Displaced
The horror, the horror…
America was perhaps even more bitterly divided in the 1960s over civil rights and the Viet Nam War than it is now. But there is a difference between disagreeing, however violently, over issues and inhabiting separate antagonistic idea enclaves. We tire of issues, or they get resolved and wounds heal. Idea enclaves thrive on conflicts. They generate fresh conflicts and inflict fresh wounds.
75 Million Americans can’t be wrong
Seventy-five million Americans watched the Beatles first appearance on the Ed Sullivan Show in February 1964. (The same number voted for Kamala Harris.) Also appearing “were impressionist Frank Gorshin, acrobats Wells & the Four Fays, the comedy team of McCall & Brill and Broadway star Georgia Brown joined by the cast of ‘Oliver!”.2
Variety shows do not exist today. Beatles fans congregate online, safe from the annoying intrusion of acrobats, opera singers, and talking mice. It is possible to reside in a small town, work in the local mill, and inhabit an insular, online community. Insular communities are not new but online ones are more populous and less obvious than, say, religious sects with their Salem-inspired fashion lines. We can be outstanding in our virtual community without standing out in our local community. The problem is virtual communities easily become gated idea enclaves.
Locale means less: the medium is the membership
In opinion surveys, lines are drawn between genders and education but my guess is the real difference is how and where people consume ideas. Marshall McLuhan famously said The Medium is the Massage, now the medium is also the membership.
Democracy, howsoever imperfectly executed, is founded on place instead of personal identities such as race, religion, clan, gender etc. While it’s true countries go to war, worse happens when “place” is neither here nor there, viz the Holocaust, and apartheid where the instruments of the modern state are employed against selected inhabitants. The extension of the vote from propertied, white, protestant males to universal suffrage is the triumph of place over identity. The gravitational pull of place is that personal identities are not legally significant.
We used to be able to rely on place to provide a common news feed. Everyone shared the same information sources: gossip, newspapers and, until a couple of decades ago, a handful of radio and TV stations. Everyone had local interests in common. Social networks consisted of our families, neighbours, co-workers, community groups and small numbers of proximate authorities. Now place has lost its centrality. Anything digitized is globalized and individualized. Ideas are as easily shared internationally as with people who share a kitchen table, lunchroom, or area code.
Now we have real mass communication - not just mass distribution of curated ideas – and virtual communities have replaced place.
Worlds apart: share and share unalike
The virtual world has every idea and no place.
Today ideas are infinite, unmediated, and unmanaged, forcing each of us to choose among them. And that changes everything. Media is no longer the Ed Sullivan theatre. It’s a mall where we shop where we like, with whom we like, in the mall’s many esoteric shops. Social media connects us with so many mall crawlers globally that it fragments us locally. We feel a stronger affinity for people online who share our enthusiasm for roller coasters, vintage cars, puff pastry, or more exotic subjects, than for our dull neighbours. I searched “Victorian Post Cards” after I saw an amusing one and got 6.4 million results. Clearly that’s a community.3
People share information, ideas, and context with other people of whom their neighbours, colleagues, and families know nothing. Place is losing its power to organize issues for people. Because Information flows around the world, unbidden, unmediated, un-curated, and unverified, social media organizes people for issues. That this reversal of political polarity is obvious doesn’t make it any less momentous. We are living with its implications.
The Age of insolence
In 1983 Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s could confidently write, “Everyone is entitled to his own opinion but not his own facts.” I knew for a fact that Senator Moynihan had coined the phrase, but it turned out my fact was not factual. The phrase has circulated, in several forms, since 1918.
But, no matter. In the Ideas Era, entitled or not, we can have as many of our own facts as our opinions require.
Trust busting
During the Brexit Referendum campaign, Michael Gove, a pro-Brexit member of the Government, responding to warnings from economists about the negative economic consequences of Brexit, didn’t say the experts were wrong. Instead, he said “… the people of this country have had enough of experts.”4
Whatever was left of the age of deference that supposedly existed in the industrial era has given way to the age of insolence – where conventional authority is rejected for spite. A Trump voter explained is best when she said, “we voted with our middle finger”.
Although big government and big organizations still retain power and prestige, their position has, to say the least, diminished. We, figuratively and literally, don’t need authorities to tell us what to do. We can tell each other directly. We are no less prone to following “authorities”, but we have a much larger assortment – many of them cunning, convincing, and crooked. The truth is the only thing you can prove but half-truths are twice as convincing, and four times as engaging.
The formula for a successful political movement can be reduced to an equation: cogitate, congregate, fabricate, aggravate, aggregate.
It's all happening at the zoo
The post5 that kicked off this ersatz trilogy said,
Trump rode to power on a coalition of the credulous underinformed and the implacably misinformed corralled for him by the callously self-interested. But misinformation has always been grist in democratic politics’ mill. …The “amplification” is what is new. More precisely, the drowning out of competing voices…
It has always been easier to sell fantasy than explain reality but now that individuals can broadcast and narrow receive…”
“Narrow receive” is of course a reference to the term news nozzle6 that I modestly coined to describe our personal filter on the fire hose of information. At the time I was thinking of their individual application - like squinting and pupils contracting. I failed to appreciate that our primal communal nature causes us to band together and synchronize them - effectively creating a collective mute button. The even bigger problem than these gated virtual communities is their succestibility to becoming Idea Zoos - artificial communities where members are fed and “protected” from predators and poachers by the callously self interested.
Trumped: democracy in the Ideas Era Part 1 ended with a pessimistic poem. Here’s a song that was frolicsome in 1967 but now is darkly prophetic except that the zoo keeper is very fond of Diet Coke and he’s introduced a meaner breed of donkeys and they’re beating up the kindly but dumb elephants.
Somethin' tells me it's all happening at the zoo
I do believe it
I do believe it's true
The monkeys stand for honesty
Giraffes are insincere
And the elephants are kindly but they're dumb
Orangutans are skeptical
Of changes in their cages
And the zookeeper is very fond of rum
Zebras are reactionaries
Antelopes are missionaries
Pigeons plot in secrecy
And hamsters turn on frequently
What a gas, you gotta come and see
At the zoo…
At the Zoo by Paul Simon https://www.paulsimon.com/song/zoo/
After scanning a few blogs about Victorian Post Cards, a search of “quiet loner” returned a respectable 44,000 results, including “Otaku”. Otaku, an unfamiliar word to me, is a Japanese noun derived from “house”. An otaku is someone so obsessed with their hobby - typically a computer game or celebrity - that they never leave their home. Otaku returned 137 million hits and about 39,700,000 results so I decided I had better log off and go for a walk. But, before I did, I made a note “As work became more specialized and so did context.” When I returned, I added, “… and context is individualized, autonomous, and anonymous”.
For a scholarly article on the place of experts in public policy discourse see: “’HAD ENOUGH OF EXPERTS’” Intersubjectivity and the Quoted Voice in Microblogging” Michele Zappavigna https://www.researchgate.net/publication/321488082_Had_enough_of_experts_Intersubjectivity_and_the_quoted_voice_in_microblogging_In_Friginal_E_ed_Studies_in_corpus-based_sociolinguistics_London_Routledge_pp_321-343; An easier read is “Mark Carney defends Bank of England expertise from attacks by pro-Brexit politicians such as Michael Gove” The Independent September 28, 2017, https://www.independent.co.uk/news/business/news/mark-carney-bank-of-england-michael-gove-pro-brexit-experts-attack-tory-conservatives-brexiteers-a7971386.html .
I was writing about management’s problems in the Ideas Era but it applies to democracy’s problems as well, “The horizontal vector of information that makes us more dependent on teams makes it harder to hold them together. For one thing, vertical information from managers say, faces a lot more competition from horizontal information from everyone everywhere. For another, we have personal information filters - news nozzles. The upshot is that organizations can no longer rely on place and authority to create a shared culture.” -
Wow wow wow! Have just read all instalments of the “trilogy”. My inchoate thoughts were clarified, amplified and beautifully expressed in your articles.