Mediacracy is evolving into Poastocracy, the new form of government. By John Carter.

Mediacracy — legacy politics, captured by the left:

Politics is decided by whoever informs the minds of the people. The people get their ideas from the media, therefore the media holds the power, since the media is not independent but owned by others, whoever is feeding narratives to the media is ultimately in charge. We’re told we live in a democracy, but it’s really a mediacracy …

In order to preserve the illusion of democracy, the media puts on a big show of being objective: the media reports the facts, and ensures that the facts are accurate. The media also presents itself as an open forum for free and robust debate in the marketplace of ideas. Naturally, that isn’t really how it works. The media decides which stories to report, which facts to emphasize, which political questions should be focused upon, and what the acceptable parameters of debate are. By defining both the frame and the contents of the frame, the media orients the attention of the public along the desired direction, and nudges its reactions towards the desired outcome. …

 

 

Poastocracy — the emerging politics, where the right rule:

The Trump campaign probably stumbled across memetic warfare tactics purely by accident. Anons on 4chan began spontaneously generating memes because they thought Trump’s ability to wind up establishment politicians by blurting out the unsayable was hilarious, those memes were then spread via Reddit and Twitter, and the Trump campaign more or less decided to let them cook when they realized how effective it was. The Trump campaign didn’t solicit the memes directly, but simply took advantage of their spontaneous emergence.

Memetic warfare required the Trump campaign to cede a large amount of messaging initiative to the amorphous digital swarm. Whereas the Clinton campaign remained committed to tightly disciplined messaging developed by professional public relations agencies and pushed out through official channels, the Trump campaign had to tolerate an unruly barbarian horde that was not at all above using the symbolism of cartoon NatSoc amphibians to get its point across, generating elaborate mythologies tying Trump to Nikola Tesla’s time machines and Jungian synchronicity (shadilay!), spreading black propaganda suggesting that the Clinton campaign intended to draft women for a war with Russia, or pranking the opposition by telling them to text in their votes.

Trump was under no obligation to endorse such uncouth behaviour, and the King in Orange probably did not even realize the scale of it, but he seems to have understood that to disavow it would risk extinguishing the enthusiastic fire of his most motivated online supporters, thereby killing the campaign’s momentum. He therefore adopted for the most part a policy of silence, though of course he was not above frogwhistling with the occasional dank Pepe.

In exchange for giving up centralized message discipline, the Trump campaign gained some powerful advantages.

• First was economic: where the Democrats had to spend millions of dollars developing and disseminating campaign copy, memes poured fourth at no cost to the campaign’s war chest and went viral for free.
• Second was efficacy: freed of the constraints of the focus group and the committee, and subjected instead to the ruthless Darwinism of the attention economy, memes could be punchier, funnier, and more truthful, and thus achieve much higher levels of virality.
• Third was agility: the Democrats could spend weeks carefully honing an ad campaign, only for the frog tribes of the fiber optic steppe to disassemble it, repackage it, and subvert it within moments of its release, using the Democratic Party’s own expensive ads against them; meanwhile, sudden developments in the news cycle could catch the Democrats flat-footed, scrambling to put their message together, whereas the anon horde would have its memes blasting out across the social networks within minutes. Meme warfare is cheaper, faster, and funnier than committee-driven public relations, and these advantages were well worth ceding a certain amount of control.

Now the poastocracy is in government in the US:

Eight years after Trump’s first electoral victory, the frogs of 2016 are older, wiser, and more experienced. They’ve been censored, shadowbanned, deboosted, account banned, doxxed, fired, and dragged into court on trumped up election interference charges. This is no longer a game to them, but a deadly serious war for the soul of their civilization.

Some fraction of these hardened meme warriors have found their way into the second Trump administration, although of course, being anons, we have no idea who they are. There are however signs of their presence within the Department of Homeland Security.

 

 

 

It isn’t just one-off tweets. Recently the DHS posted this absolutely incredible video (sadly taken down for copyright violations, lame), all of it artfully composed in such a way as to be perfectly deniable, but every frame of which, indeed right down to the choice of font, carries a self-referential memetic payload. …

 

 

The young men powering the new administration were acculturated within the free-wheeling environment of loosely connected online networks, in which irony and ambiguity is simply the water in which they swim, and the only hierarchy is the one established by informal influence and demonstrated ability. They are not accustomed to subordinating their activities to directives pushed down from the summits of rigid org charts. Their basic assumptions are individual initiative, freedom of action, and a magpie willingness to grab good ideas wherever they can be found and put them to immediate use without waiting for permission.

And it is not only the junior staffers and federal agents who have this mindset.

Importantly, at 41, Vance is a young man by political standards. His cultural assumptions are not those of network news, but of digital networks. When the Vance memes making fun of his weight, or riffing off of his remark to Zelensky that he never even said ‘Thank you’, started circulating, he didn’t get mad about them. He laughed, and rolled with it, because he understood that — coming from the online right — these memes were an expression of affection, the way you rib your friend by calling him a faggot and he pokes you back by calling you a fat retard.

Naturally the feminized left does not understand this at all. They think that these memes are humiliating to Vance and so spread the memes themselves, while interpreting the popularity of the memes amongst the online right as an indication that the base loathes him. As always, the left lacks theory of mind for their opponents. Imprisoned within the iron bars of their own ideological-managerial cage, the left has completely failed to learn the lessons of participatory media, and like a general staff doggedly trying to break the trench lines with cavalry charges, continues to try to fight the current war with the weapons they used to win the last one. …

Up the chain:

Any random small-account anon might come up with an absolute banger of post … so why shouldn’t they be able to come up with banger policies, too? Why limit themselves to adopting policies developed inside the long, tedious processes of bureaucratic committees and comfortable think tanks? If rapisthitler1488 has a good idea, well, why not use it? You can just do things. This attitude is at the heart of what Dudley Newright calls the ‘up-the-chain phenomenon’. … [Derek Chauvin is the cop jailed for killing George Floyd]

 

 

Treasury Secretary Scott Bessant was recently observed reading a tweet relating to Argentinian trade policy, originating from a small account, which had been sent to him by the Secretary of Agriculture. The matter under discussion is rather recondite and I don’t pretend to understand it, but the interesting data point here is that this illustrates that very senior members of the administration are drawing upon the social media hive mind for analytical insight. …

There appears to be a pattern of that suggests that the Trump administration — or more accurately, elements within the administration — are monitoring social media closely in order to stay in the good graces of the base, either responding to or inciting chimpouts, and occasionally appropriating good ideas from anons. …

Importantly, this is very different from the plan-trusting that justifiably got such a bad name during the first Trump administration, which was simply boomers befuddled by QAnon repeating that ‘the storm is coming’ to themselves like a mantra as the deep state ran circles around Trump, trapping him in one quagmire after another. …

A new form of government, is evolving, one that integrates the Internet into governing:

It’s commonly said that ‘The Internet isn’t real life’, and there’s some truth to this in that most people are not Very Online in the way that the politically engaged are. However, to be honest it’s mostly false. The Internet has eaten the world. Everyone is on their phones all the time; we spend at least as much time in hyperreality as we do in meatspace. …

Reach isn’t the only advantage of poastocracy. Another is engagement. It draws the base into the political process by making them active participants, thereby making them take ownership of politics in a way that mere ‘voters’ do not. This makes them far more culturally effective than people who simply turn up to the polls once every couple of years.

A poastocracy is also potentially far more agile than a mediacracy, as it can read the mood of the electorate more rapidly and accurately than polling enables, while harvesting ideas from the base in real-time, thereby making the overall system more efficient, responsive, and intelligent. …

What’s emerging is an entirely different kind of governance by media.

• The mediacracy of the television age was a tightly controlled, scripted affair, with the population in the role of passive receptacles receiving programming from central distribution points. It gave a small number of influential people the ability to decide what was important, what was true, and what was good. Politicians took on the role of actors in a scripted soap opera, reading lines from a teleprompter, playing roles of hero (liberal, socialist, progressive, atheist, Democrat) or heal (conservative, capitalist, reactionary, Christian, Republican), with everyone understanding that the good guys always win in the end. The outcome is never really in doubt, because the script has already been written: the arc of history, the tide of progress.
• In the poastocracy, politicians are not actors, but influencers. They curate a personal brand, they participate in online games to drive engagement, but they aren’t reading from a script. Furthermore, in the social media attention economy the distinction between influencer and influenced is so fuzzy as to blur out of existence when you try to focus on the boundary. This is entirely different from the actor/audience distinction, which cleanly divides everyone into active and passive roles. For all intents and purposes, everyone who participates in social media is an influencer, with the difference being one of degree (number of followers) rather than kind. Online, the only salient difference between a politician and an anon is follower count, and anons frequently have the politicians beat.

This represents a rather fundamental change in the relationship between politician and voting public.

• In a mediacracy, the politician’s best strategy is to make carefully curated public appearances during campaign season, and attempt to disappear as much as possible by avoiding any kind of controversy in between, hoping that the public will just forget about him. He is the occasional star of a televised drama, unless of course he annoys the people who own the media, in which case he will be cast as the villain and removed (unless of course his role is to play the loser villain).
• In a poastocracy the politician is a livestreamer, he needs to keep his audience engaged unless it loses interest, and the audience itself is a live, active thing: it can and does talk back, whether he wants it to or not, and indeed this is a crucial part of the show. The audience is not so much an audience as a layered mesh of active influence with a mind of its own. It has its own priorities, and if those priorities are not being addressed it will marshal its resources to direct attention towards those interests. …

Personnel is policy:

It is not that Trump or Vance themselves are spending several hours a day doomscrolling: they have people who do that for them, whose job it is to stay on top of that, and moreover, their staffs are full of young men who do this naturally in their free time.Senior admin are at the apex of a long chain of influence that goes from schizo_dogwhistle to Raw Egg Nationalist to Jack Posobiec to Erik Prince to Don Trump Jr to Elon Musk (“Interesting”) to the Big Man himself.

At their interminable celebrations of regime power, the left likes to chant “Show me what democracy looks like/this is what democracy looks like.” Well, on the Internet this is exactly what democracy looks like.

Casual informality:

Casual informality is both a weakness and a strength.

The weakness is that it can all disappear tomorrow if the staff are switched out for hardline progressive managerialists, who can simply choose to ignore the digital mob and refocus on the legacy media hologram and the World Economic Forum (although they may not like the consequences that follow).

The strength is that, as a cultural shift, it can’t be repealed by legislation or executive order: it’s simply an environmental condition that every politician will have to adapt to in one way or another. …

No mob:

Importantly, … the mob is not in charge. The people are participants in governance to a greater degree, but the overall structure is still fundamentally small-r republican. Individual decision makers are still in the loop. There’s no law saying they have to do what the mob demands, meaning that wiser heads can prevail. The really crazy ideas (which is most of them, if we’re honest) can be left in the churning schizophrenic compost heap. The social networks are there as a resource, as a new capability, not as a master. …

Huge resistance from the new-class/blob/globalists may yet prevail:

There is no legal mandate for governments to participate in poastocracy, and indeed there is massive resistance to this.

Underneath all the issues of mass migration, race communism, Net Zero, and all the rest is an ancien régime who have grown accustomed to a one-way lecture style of discourse management, and who are happy to do what the people want so long as they get to tell the people what to think.

The culture of the Internet is completely incompatible with that, and the first instinct of governing elites in Europe, Britain, Canada, and Blue America has been to do everything in their power to clamp down on the Internet. They

• close comments sections,
• turn off replies,
• censor misinformation,
• arrest people for speech they hate.
• treat the Internet as though it should be just another one of their tightly controlled one-to-many broadcast mediums,
• rely almost entirely on that broadcast media for their own messaging.

In the near future they intend to role out social credit systems, digital ID, and central bank digital currencies, turning the Internet into a control grid and the planet into an open air concentration camp overseen by machines of loving grace.

This is all very dystopian, but I think this is a losing battle, and that the unrest sweeping across Britain and Europe is a direct function of this refusal to adapt …

It is no accident that the nationalist right-wing parties that are rising across the West are, without exception, also the parties of the digital natives. …

Then there’s the robot problem. The Internet is already full to the brim with AI slop. Bot farms powered by LLMs could certainly be used to provide the illusion of a chimpout in order to try and drive public opinion and government policy in a certain direction, or to drown out a genuine chimpout by generating noise in the opposite direction. This is almost certainly happening already, and it will probably get harder to tell the difference between bot and human as time goes on. It is indeed quite possible that AI will ultimately make the open Internet impossible to use. However, as things stand people have gotten relatively good at smelling the odour of machine oil, and it may be that human judgment will stay one step ahead of the ability of AI to deceive, honing itself as AI matures in an arms race between neuron and logic gate. We shall see. Measures to reduce the activity of clandestine bots on social networks are certainly not unwelcome, in any case. …

A final hazard worth discussing is audience capture. In truth there are probably only a few thousand anons at any given time playing prominent roles in political discourse, and this is a small, fractious group that does not necessarily represent the voting public in the sense of being a statistically unbiased sample. If the administration plays to an audience that isn’t representative of the electorate, it could be led into a blind alley. This is precisely what has happened to the establishment liberals, who have allowed themselves to become cognitively isolated within a media bubble of their own curation, held captive by an activist base that has gone off the deep end; no doubt of course they would say the same of the nationalist, populist right. …

The many-to-many, bottom-up media environment of the poastocracy does not eliminate the power of Machiavellians to warp the public discourse. However, it does make it considerably more difficult than it was in the age of broadcast media.

Everyone knows the left can’t meme.

A long but very important article. Much more at the link.