When Even Conservatives Hated Capitalism, Part 5

FAKE NEWS!

For anyone who’s been waiting (I think it was just one dude, really), this is the entry where we get into fake news.

I’m skipping the long wind-up because it’s getting too long, but if you’d like to catch up, here are the links to Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, and Part 4.

[Original image (sans text) by Dawn Armfield]

Once there were these halcyon days in which even conservatives had harsh critiques of the very industrial forces that enabled capitalism, and their critiques are still applicable to the very forms of late-stage capitalism that modern-day conservatives guzzle like a kid who’s got his grubby hands on the ICEE nozzle of infinite immediate gratification.

And, how, you might ask, do we get our grubby hands on the ICEE nozzle of infinite immediate gratification? Maybe you only ask because you need a new ultimate weapon for your D&D campaign, but regardless, I’m glad you asked because that’s today’s topic:

[3]. Mass production and mass consumption as isolating social forces

In his essay “A Critique of the Philosophy of Progress,” Lyle H. Lanier establishes, in no uncertain terms, that he is not impressed by mass production and consumption; his concern is that while it technically creates a social order in which more people engage in the same activities in predictable patterns, their sense of community is actually diminished. Let’s turn to one of Lanier’s many great zingers here:

The fact that along with ten million other persons a man eats potato chips made in Detroit is of about zero order of significance as far as the humanizing process of liberation of spirit in social interaction goes. (145)

He goes on to argue that sitting in a movie theatre collectively staring at a glowing screen with a hundred other people hardly constitutes community, and he contends that the kind of casual, fleeting contact people experience in cities is doing nothing to foster community either. Here, let me illustrate by showing you my favorite actual picture of Finns queuing for the bus (as first brought to my attention by @insaneworks).

[Finns at the bus stop. Source: Finnish Crash Course]

Look at all that community-building!

And before you judge the Finns too harshly... Hey, hey! You! *snaps fingers* Do I have you attention? Close your damn Tinder app because you ain’t getting any dates or hookups tonight, alright? The mass-produced commodification, appification, of intimacy is not building community. It’s giving you the illusion of a community of people who want to fuck you, but they really don’t. Instead, what hookup apps like Tinder are really doing is stealing your time, a lot of it, and leaving you alone on your couch all night to mastubatorily swipe left and right on your phone.

Now that you’re good and depressed about how mass-production is killing our sense of community, let’s cheer you up with some fake news. Just kidding: this is real news. If it were fake, it might actually be happy.

Fake news is just another example of a capitalist crash grab in a society built on mass production and consumption. When I talk about fake news, I’m really using it as shorthand for two things:

1. Actual fake news, which apparently has long-been anti-Semitic, and that taps into America’s id-like insistence that in daycares across the country in the 1980s Satanists were sexually assaulting babies in the name of the Dark Lord, and then later more Satanists were supposedly engaging in child sex trafficking in collusion with Hillary Clinton and the DNC (and the country of Turkey, somehow) in the non-existent basement of a D.C. pizza joint. (Jesus Christ, why do I even try to write fiction anymore? Reality is so much crazier and, improbably, less believable).

2. Donald Trump and the alt-right’s co-opting of the term “fake news” to criticize real, actual news (like CNN) that has a biased slant the alt-righters don’t like. (And for you CNN supporters out there, don’t tell me CNN is just objectively relaying the facts without bias because it’s not rhetorically possible to eliminate bias. And for you CNN haters out there, I am not taking your side by acknowledging that bias exists; get over yourselves).

So, yes, there is a distinction between fake news and biased news, and some news is more biased than others. But there is a key commonality between both fake news and biased news: mass production and consumption.

Biased news is peddled by large profit-driven corporations that are trying to sell you a product. They want you to consume, “to be informed,” they assure us. If we the masses consume their knowledge, we’ll be better citizens, not backwards, ignorant yokels. Personally, having watched a fair amount of MSNBC and the like and having listened to plenty of conservative talk radio, I think they are all pushing this message of keeping you informed so you’re not, according to them, stupid. But really, at the end of the day, they’re just interested in reaching the biggest audience they can to make as much money from ad revenue as they can. If you believe these corporations have your best interest at heart, then you have woefully misunderstood the ethos of capitalism.

Fake news is also trying to capitalize on mass consumption culture. They have to do it differently, though, because fake news tends to be spread by individuals or scrappy upstart companies. The idea is the same, though: go viral, reach a big audience, gain brand recognition, and make money. It’s that simple.

And what do we the consumers get out of all this? Surely not better, more properly-slanted information. No, we get scared and we get enraged. We’re all listening to the same bullshit, which on the surface sounds like it ought to bind us together through common knowledge and a common mission; instead, we’re suffering through Lyle H. Lanier’s dystopia of community erosion.

Thanks, capitalism, for enabling this mass production, mass consumption hell. There’s plenty of handwringing, plenty of weeping and gnashing of teeth, but nobody feels any more connected. Welcome to the Divided States of America: where we all consume the same mass-produced bullshit, but can’t stand even the sight of each other.