Destabilized Saturday Edition #14
The attention war's escalation imperative, princelings and war crimes, Are You There God It's Me Cancel Culture, and "for your tomorrow, we gave our today"
In Meta-messages and the Internet, Part 2 I described how abundant content and scarce attention created a permanent battle to capture shares of that attention:
Once anyone could publish, the amount of available content exploded. This was great but created a problem: with so much content it was difficult for the average creator to attract attention. Because there was too little attention to go around, any creator who wanted it had to fight for it. That’s how the “attention war” started, as an obvious-in-retrospect second order effect of the internet democratizing publishing.
The fight for attention is part of the internet’s essential nature, rooted in the architecture that allows anyone to publish without permission. That is to say, it’s inherent; you can’t have the internet without the attention war.
Today I’m building on that idea by focusing on a related one: attention war incentives include the need for escalation. Here’s an example to illustrate how it works.
When initially leveled, accusations that, e.g., schools are teaching kids critical race theory provoke anger and outrage.
That issue persists, and may continue to be significant, but over time it grows familiar.
To keep people’s attention, therefore, Republicans need something new, and among the mix of new controversies thrown at the wall, those most likely to stick will be the ones that escalate by raising the stakes of political conflict.
In this case, the incentives ultimately lead to the “grooming” narrative, which instills fear and incites hatred on the right.
Eventually, though, it too starts to become background noise and Republicans once again need something more.
There are only so many charges more aggressive than accusing your opponents of “grooming” children, so they say directly that Democrats are pro-pedophile.
As the below tweet indicates, the people who succeed in popularizing the escalation are rewarded with more attention.1
Like the proverbial frog in boiling water, we the American people suddenly look around and realize we live in a country where one of our two major political parties accuses the other of being in favor of child sexual abuse.
It’s happened so fast the mainstream press seems to have barely noticed. As Josh Marshall recently explained:
[Y]ou have to step back to see the real picture. The new equation is that anything that doesn’t amount to a staunch defense sexual and gender traditionalism is just some form of pedophilia and “grooming” children for pedophiles. That is the governing equation that has exploded across the right really just over the last two months.
…This isn’t just from the far right. It’s become normalized within the mainstream GOP. That’s what that whole ‘soft on child porn’ thing was about during the confirmation hearings for Justice-to-be Ketanji Brown Jackson was all about. That’s what’s driving state legislatures and members of Congress all of a sudden to start accusing virtually everyone of “grooming” through every channel of communication. It is a very rapid turn of events by which the most outlandish and genocide-friendly features of the Pizzagate and Qanon movements suddenly became totally ubiquitous and mainstream among Republican officeholders from Capitol Hill all the way down to the local level. It turns out the Democratic party really is run by a conspiracy of pedophiles and child sex traffickers. And now you don’t have to go to 4Chan or 8chan to hear that. You can just open the emails from your Republican Senator or Member of the House of Representatives.
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It’s significant that the most important driver of the “groomer” slander going mainstream was the Florida “Don’t Say Gay” statute. The bill was pushed forward and signed into law by Ron DeSantis, the governor of Florida and one of the most successful Republican attention war combatants. In addition to the Don’t Say Gay law, DeSantis has passed a 15-week abortion ban and rescinded Disney’s longstanding special legal status as retaliation for its mild opposition to Don’t Say Gay. Since spring 2020, he has also been the most vocal governor in the country in opposing covid mitigation measures, including selling “Don’t Fauci my Florida” t-shirts and beer koozies on his campaign website.
Crucially, DeSantis’ strategy of appealing to the Republican base by attacking groups it dislikes and putting the power of the state behind its fears and resentments is working extremely well:
Ron DeSantis isn’t the only Republican in the country who wants to be president, and the others can see how effective his strategy has been. But it won’t be enough for them to mimic DeSantis’ strategy, to attract the attention they want they’ll have to escalate.
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In a November post called Internet incentives and GOP authoritarianism, I described how, on the right, attention war incentives often manifest as authoritarian rhetoric. I ended that piece with a prediction:
The key insight is that this isn’t an aberration… Because the attention war incentives created by the internet aren’t going to change anytime soon, our politics is likely to worsen considerably in the coming months and years.
That was five months ago. Five months ago was before the Don’t Say Gay law and the dangerous pedophile/“groomer” narrative. It was before the burn-it-all-down rhetoric of purging and subjugating institutions arrived in the Republican mainstream, and before the resurgence of open homophobia on the right. Our politics are indeed getting worse.
Republicans’ fascism-tinged rhetoric and increasingly authoritarian governance weren’t created by the internet – America’s long history of bigotry and decades of polarizing politics are its seedbed – but they’re boosted and reinforced by the incentives of the attention war, including the need to escalate.
That ongoing escalation will influence the trajectory of our politics, which I expect to continue to worsen in the months ahead.
My Work
When buy and hold investing meets democratic backsliding
The most important thing to understand is this: the risks of political turbulence and democratic backsliding are not yet priced in. It’s not priced in on the downside for financial markets broadly, and it’s not priced on the upside for companies that would gain from upheaval and disorder.
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[Ed. note: Interesting to revisit this article in light of Republicans’ legislative retribution against Disney’s mild opposition to the “Don’t Say Gay” law.]
Interesting Reads
Kushner’s record was mixed at best. He close to bankrupted his family with one big and (as it later proved) terrible investment. Gulf connections seemed to bail him out of that mess too.
It was clear to everyone that a $2 billion investment for a newly founded fund with a founder with limited and iffy experience was more or less absurd. As I wrote last week it is corruption on a scale I have never seen in a quarter century of reporting on American politics with a focus on public corruption and scandal.
Tweets of the Week
Extreme Weather Watch
Creeping Authoritarianism Watch
There’s a familiar Trump-era journalistic catch-22 here, where reporting on extremist rhetoric effectively rewards it, but at the same time it’s definitely newsworthy when a Member of Congress says the other party supports pedophiles.