Buffering...

Staying politically informed and engaged is getting harder and harder to do, which seems weird. I guess there's something to spreading out the sources of information, where it sure seems like the old system with like three networks, local newspapers and one CNN, we would have been way more likely to be duped or lied to on a mass scale. The voices on those platforms were culture-wide to the point of ubiquity, so if they wanted to fuck with us, they would fuck with all of us at the same time. Way more ripe for exploitation it seems like than the current fractured--atomized, really--way information (or, as I like to call it, "information") is disseminated, but I'm old enough to remember the 1980s. I suppose they could have tried to convince us our political enemies stole children and tortured them in order to generate and then harvest a magic elixir from their blood that they would then drink, but that had to wait to get an airing until after the information revolution. Instead the system just gave some unattractive people a way into a kind of show business who then spent a bunch of time trying to talk us out of Vietnam and stuff.

Let's be clear here: this is not a nostalgia piece. The media did plenty of whoopin' and hollerin' to whip up that whole war business in the first place and provided a lot of cover to the politicians (at the highest levels) peddling half-truths and un-truths to justify the entire enterprise. Well, I guess some aspects have been consistent.

I don't even know where to get news or information reliably anymore. I use HuffPost right now just because it's a convenient collector of headlines, but I don't have any attachment or trust in its motives, direction, ownership, personnel, integrity or aesthetic (moral or HTML). It's weird, I'm considering this for the first time as I type it here and I've hit a new low of culturally derived depression. I've tried using more down-the-middle professional news organizations like Reuters or the AP but even a ready-to-wear snob like me is let down by the utilitarian presentation and the lack of sprinkled in bits about how, like, Chandler from Friends openly calling for Keanu Reeves' death. The conditioning has been comprehensive: if you're not servicing my dopamine production, I'm afraid I'm just not a reliable customer for you.

There are a million more outlets now (literally as many as there are people really, with access to something as minimal as a smartphone), but instead of losing everything in the thunder of endless churn, sometimes the droplets coalesce into a formable-something and distinguish themselves as a recognizable force in a sea of content. I'm not really a sailor, but I think the last thing you want to encounter on any kind of sea is a) something you can pick out against the horizon, especially when it's b) headed right fucking at you.

A nice glassy waterscape on which to operate is a dream of yesterday. Between the rejection of the Fairness Doctrine and the conglomeration of news organization under the umbrella of for-profit megacorporations (both starting in the hoary heyday of the Reagan Administration, now easily recognized as Ground Zero for the explosion into the hellscape of the Boomerization of American Culture we are all baking in now), even at a fraction of the fracturing into Facebooks and Twitters and whatever else, we were always going this way. Rush Limbaugh was doing alright way before there was YouTube or a Spotify.

So it's not really the technology that's depressing, it's the fact that the messages, distressing as they increasingly can be, are more or less an accurate reflection of what people think and feel. It's just now, we get to fucking hear about them.

It's getting more and more dangerous. People are showing up armed in all kinds of places, not just in public schools, like we're used to. In Arizona, fuckers harass people using voter drop boxes, to catch "vote mules" that not only don't exist, but never have. A squad of embarrassing Rambo fantasists post up outside drag queen story time for children, ready to do... something. But these people have found their truth, through a source of their liking, and they wholeheartedly believe it. What are the things that would compel you to harm or kill another person, assuming you're a non-psychotic person? It would probably be if you knew a child--not even your own one!--was in mortal danger and you were the only one available to stop it, probably (local and state police in and around Uvalde, Texas, obviously excluded). Unfortunately for us, actually being psychotic is not exactly a bar against entry for any of these groups. If anything, you'd be the guy tapped for the social committee to organize all the ice cream socials.

So I'm not struggling to stay informed because there isn't enough information or that I've become a nihilist to the degree that my despair has overtaken my impulse to participate. I'm going to vote, certainly. But I think the short-term answer is to actually turn off some shit and give myself five minutes of quiet to think about it. By myself. With no dopamine promised. Scary, but civic duty is civic duty.