I'm just some regular person (or a cellular conglomerate....or a conglomerate of cellular conglomerates) that does some things here and there. I'm not especially educated or well-read moreso than any other regular person. But I see some things here and there that give me pause. I'm also living in the first world with a smart phone in my pocket more often than not. That means I've got Reddit and TikTok RedNote installed on that little talking pebble. I've recovered from Facebook and Instagram by several years now and thankfully avoided the Twitter bug that seems to bang rage into the vein for so many. But still, it's enough to see what folks are thinking and saying so long as the algorithm deigns to throw it into my feed.
Plenty of content creators fuel their neuro-chemical cycles with commentary and "insight" focused on the United States's political climate. This has kind of been a thing since the advent of social media and raged out through various AM radio broadcasts for decades prior. But now it's at a fever pitch and we are all just watching some basement Frankenstein dump larger and larger voltage payloads into a shattered hobby horse (yeah, it wasn't ever alive, that's the takeaway here) while standing by fingers-crossed for enough of us suckers to pay attention long enough that the platform will shell out enough cash to cover the rent and maybe turn it into a profession.
It reminds me of Baudrillard's Simulacra and Simulation. If you're hoping for some kind of deep dive explanation here, it isn't coming. Click the link and read the wiki (or better yet, buy the book and read that). Re-read the second sentence of this page if you're confused.
Politics
I'm not smart enough to say definitively and authoritatively what stage of Baudrillard's theoretical march into collective insanity we're in. But my ignorant mind thinks we're in a third order simulacra. Where symbols in themselves are taken for reality with another layer of meaning having been shoe-horned into the recipe. Both MAGA and Dark Brandon are overt, and obvious examples of this sort of thing. Some folks want to Make America Great Again even though none of them have been able to explicitly articulate what that means exactly. Some of them say it's Project 2025 but Donny says he's not down with the plan. But whether any of that's true or not is irrelevant. The point is no one really knows what's underneath all that and there's a high likelihood that's because there isn't anything. It's just a self-referential void. Plenty of other folks shouting at you through your screen have already spelled out the details of that slop pile.
The other isn't much closer to real, though. Joey B shit the bed on live television in the middle of June. Something that surprised pretty much no one at all. It seemed like some of the pundits came prepared to spin alley with a speech calling for Biden's replacement. Then, minutes later, they brought in Donna Brazile to reassure everyone that it doesn't really matter because everyone already decided anyway and everyone continues to blindly support their guy. Donna Brazile doesn't live in the same reality with the rest of us. But that isn't new. I don't think anyone born after 1982 has ever lived in a time where representatives and their sycophants shared the same galaxy with voters.
But it's plain to see that most Americans don't really care for either option (I'm not calling them candidates. They're options. Not real people.). Robert Kennedy Jr. is an option too. Pretty feculent one. But we can't go more than a few minutes without someone reminding us all that he isn't perfect like Joey B or little Donny. God help you if you mention his name on a platform like Reddit. Or in a room full of people with social media addictions.
Some have suggested we start a meme campaign for Jon Stewart which is an excellent idea. Wouldn't it be nice to have a President that didn't actually want to be President but did it anyway out of duty? I don't think that's ever happened in this country before. And it probably won't. But we can hope it works while Joey B deteriorates and little Donny drives the lowest common denominator a little deeper into the mud.
Media
Sitting underneath that crusty, sleazy, layer of long rectangular wavy pasta lurks a matrix of broken up meat and cheese. Each little chunk of cow and ricotta could be taken to represent social media influencers and content-creators swimming in a scalding hot red sea of everyone else lurking on the various platforms whose attention drives it all upward from the soft wavy pasta layer below. It was pretty neat twenty years ago when it was fresh and tasty. But now it's just overcooked and hardly anyone notices the foodborne pathogens happily festering and multiplying in the space.
In there you'll find the aforementioned rage bait. The increasingly devoid-of-creativity surreal and absurdist "comedy." The reaction porn. The cute and cuddly animals. The silly animals. The advertising. The AI-generated attention farmers. The comically self-aware along with the comically un-self-aware. And probably a lot more.
It's all fine, I guess. People can do what they want with their time. But it's become self-referential to a point that even the end users are treating it like a turnkey business. Disregard the philosophical discussions around what people could or should do with their time. Or how any of that affects their psychological set. We have content-creators who make content about making content. It's like the self-help books that flew off the shelves into the hands of the emotionally and socially stunted, but in 3-minute intervals and through a cell phone screen.
Have you ever tried to make a beautiful, well-done video? It isn't easy. I'm not talking about putting your iPhone on a tripod or gimble and doing a little jig in front of it out on the sidewalk. I'm talking about something with nice framing, good and consistent coloring, multiple camera angles, and several cuts. It takes a minute. You've got to shoot the footage (probably multiple times), load the data onto another device, cut it, color it, edit it, then render it in a resolution that works for everyone. Then you have to upload it to whatever platform. Sure, there's automation, but if you're not already knowing how to do that sort of thing, you're losing days at a time to get it done. You need a staff. You need compute resources. You need storage. My point is there are plenty of folks earning a comfortable living doing that sort of thing and all they're really selling is a pile of shit. I don't know what that means or what it says about our culture and society. But I can say it feels pretty icky. But I guess if that's a way to scratch out a living and provide for those who must be provided for then whatever. It's a free country. Not one with guard rails and guidance for how to kick ass.
But sewn in tightly with all that political rage bait is a sort of unnamed genre I'm calling logic walkthroughs. You've probably seen them before. Where someone you've never heard of makes a sobering 5 to 10 minute appeal for everyone else to just get with it. They'll start off as we were all taught decades ago in school by stating a problem (like Project 2025, or Biden's too old), then take a step-by-step path through what any regular thinking person would think about it, then throw in some metaphors to really drive it home before closing it out with some simulation of a popular socially awkward mannerism. It's almost as if social media is the only place anyone born into the digital age can find any reasoned explanation for things that doesn't include a large leap from problem statement to conclusion with a caveat about questions being anti-American.
It might have been that television was the medium for such things years before we were born. When guys like Edward R. Murrow would lead us down an objective path to examine what exactly Joseph McCarthy was really getting up to. Now we're all pretty certain that there isn't a broadcast or cable network on Earth that isn't just trying to sell us shit in between commercial breaks.
Can't really wonder why everyone in Gen Y and Gen Z would really rather not tune in to anything that isn't social media.
Work
Underneath that botulism-infested sea layer of American media is a stale and static layer of first world jobs. Yes. Black jobs. Blue collar jobs. White collar crime. Gig economy scams. Multi-Level Marketing. Big Box Religion. And whatever else helps people scratch out the rent and groceries. And also the bogeymen coming for our jobs and our black jobs and our factories and our young white virgin daughters.
Plenty of real jobs exist. And plenty of folks exist that do real work. Without them, we don't have running water, electricity, fires that end before we all die, reliable communication systems, smooth roads, rough roads, mass-transit, potable water, actual art, relief from illness, and edible food. But it's such a small percentage of the whole thing. Most people just toil away for a salary.
We have achieved technological supremacy to a point where we can totally feed, clothe, and house everyone on Earth but we've just chosen not to. It's that simple.
Someone more educated and more intelligent might say it's more complicated than that. But my ignorant ass says we chose that too. We as in, all of us that existed 50+ years ago. The rest of us have just been trying to go along to get along ever since we spawned. We tried occupying shit to ask nicely for a an upgrade but that didn't really work (and it really never has). We decided we didn't have the stomach for dealing with figureheads the way they did in the before time (See: JFK's skull). So we just work. But not really. Most of us just "work." And now we're starting to lose that privilege because some wanker at Davos said America needed to increase poverty because all the other options for dealing with inflation weren't harsh enough. Now look at the new snake oil ingredient gauranteed to fix all the world's problems getting ham-fisted into every damn thing we see.
Artificial Intelligence was supposed to free us all up from toil work and let us live our lives. But it won't because we have already chosen for it to not do that. We're instead using it to create art that doesn't really have any actual artistic value. We're also using it to rip creatives out of corporations where they helped the big boxes skewer our self-esteem and attention with their advertisements. Personally, I would rather see creative energy channeled somewhere that isn't, you know, trying to fleece regular people out of their hard-earned cash in exchange for shit they don't need or really want organically. But it's one of those things where we'll cheer just because we're assholes until it happens to us at which point the others will do the same. Not really an ideal state of being for any of us.
That whole mess is just a quagmire of emptiness populated by a bunch of people who would really rather be doing anything else.