Media Laws of the New Right
Introduction
Welcome back to Deep Socks, the political self help book that will deepen your thought and enhance its penetrative power, giving you the kind of power you need to escape shallowland.
This week we are focusing on the field of media studies and the online right wing, a field plagued by a dearth of deep thought, cults of personality, and a plethora of media types and a pervasive countercultural attitude. We aim to examine the foundations of the charismatic right wing personality in the modern era—they are not known or experienced as our leaders anymore, rather they are known and experienced as a kind of political celebrity, distant from power, but abundant in popularity and renown.
Laws of Media Introduced
Media theory has a remarkable and potentially remarkably annoying leveling effect. People are egotistical, and love their talent and hate to be told they’re just part of a larger media pattern. We want to see our genius as belonging to ourselves, and not the result of massively abstract media patterns like “secondary orality.” When we hear Marshall McLuhan declare that “the medium is the message”, we hear that our own messages don’t matter. When we hear that our messages don’t matter, we might get mad, and we might start to attack media theory: it’s not scientific at all, we might say, there’s not Laws of Media.
Marshall McLuhan heard the haters and decided to identify the laws of media. He identified, with his son Eric, four such laws. According to the McLuhans, all media produce four basic effects: enhancement, reversal, retrieval, and obsolescence. To visualize these four effects, the McLuhans created the “Tetrad.” Here’s an example of the Tetrad of the four effects of the media of Booze.
Booze enhances our “private outlook, energy and zeal, aggressiveness.” When we drink too much, booze reverses into “depression, hangover.” Booze retrieves “group sentiment, songs.” and it obsolesces: “integral sensibility, private inhibitions.
When we drink, we become disintegrated and uninhibited.
A Quick History of Reactionary Media Innovation
The “the left can’t meme” meme illustrates a right-wing advantage in online information warfare. Even though as a rightwinger Trump is rather milquetoast and ineffectual, no one can deny the man was King of Twitter. This advantage is part of a longer history of reactionary media innovation. The ever-fascinating Gabriele D’Annunzio invents the political use of airplanes, develops the formal structure of the bombastic balcony speech, and broadcasts the entire fall of the Imprese de Fium. The Goldwater campaign utilizes direct mail. Watch this Nixon ad:
Today the right wing thrives online in a kaleidoscopic array of platforms, ranging from imageboards, forums, podcasts, newsletter platforms, mass-market social media, open Matrix-based Twitter-like platforms, proprietary vanity Twitter platforms like Gab or TruthSocial, and video streaming sites, ranging from YouTube to odysee to the miserable failures like cozy.tv. .
Broadly speaking, the online right, shallow or deep, peddles its message across five key media:
The Podcast
The Livestream
The Poast
The Telegram/Twitter Rant
Newsletters
Now we will go through and apply the laws of media to each of these, and see what we can learn.
The Podcast
Enhance: Deep Talk
Reverse: Parasociality
Retrieve: Intellectual Community
Obsolesce: Academies
Obviously you know what a podcast is: all the advantages of talk radio crossed with a less commercial, more open and discursive format. The barrier of entry is low, and thought policing much laxer than, say, twitter. This freedom allows for a greater depth of conversation, and here we arrive at the first law, Enhancement. Podcast enhance deep talk: that is, focused conversation on weight subject. When we listen to voices all day, we start to feel like they are our friends, and so podcasts reverse into Parasociality, aka, Internet Daddy Simulators. Once upon a time, this kind of intense intellectual community was very normal: these are what podcasts retrieve. Compared to the intensity of thought in podcasts, academies look obsolete.
The Livestream
Enhance: Charisma
Reverse: Distributed Cults
Retrieve: Community Participation
Obsolesce: Talking Head Punditry
And of course you know what a livestream is—but you may not know full well the scale of the undertaking. Livestreaming’s economics are driven, for the streamer, by superchats: a tip with a message that by custom the streamer reads or acts on. You pay to get attention from the streamer. The terms of the attention and reaction are negotiated on the spot, but the custom is that the message gets read. The result is an enhancement of Charisma: these aren’t talking heads, fully developed characters who have some mysterious power to attract viewers. A short stream, mind you, is one under 2 hours!
This charismatic intensity easily reverses into Distributed Cults. Familiarize yourself with Teal Swan for a case study. Of course people crave cults for a reason: extreme atomization. They’re bowling alone, as Robert Putnam said. In the face of this atomization, livestreaming retrieves community participation, that sense of being part of an intentional crowd.
Perhaps paying stars for reading your chat is a perverted or sick kind of association, but it is still intensive human association. “Gemeinsschaftgefühl.” The power of this human association is wedded to an unbounded, charismatic persona, usually attached to specific interests and hobbies, who has to really sing for their supper. The boundary of authority gets crossed when you're hanging out with someone when they have to go take a pee break or get drunk on camera and talk about their day job or profession. Once that boundary gets crossed, the old talking head model feels obsolete in a bad way, like compact discs, not in a cool way, like cassettes.
The Poast
Enhance: Countercultural Irony
Reverse: “Doomer”
Retrieve: Propaganda
Obsolesce: Social media
Poasting is shortform, deeply ironic content, the kind that gets you banned from Twitter and reduced to using one of your many alts. The methods include relentless satirization, mocking, humorous fake agreement, exaggerated caricature. The form enhances countercultural irony. What is countercultural irony? The media-apprroved image of the right wing-er is more or less a dork. Like Tucker Carlson, or sober Mitt Romney. The irony, satirization, mocking, is a PR effort in a sense, it's making the right wing seem funny and irreverent. This is the same magic that The Daily Show and The Simpsons worked for Democrats, they made liberals funny instead of sanctimonious and boring. Think about the change in public perception from Mondale to Obama—that wasn’t very many presidential candidates!
But the irony, pushed to reversal, becomes the doomer: absolute and complete nihilism, the whole world as a sick joke. The same dark ironic energy which powers the doomer also makes the Poast so politically potent: here is an effective form of propaganda retrieved for a seemingly unpropagandizable population. The anonymity of the poaster gives this propaganda more power, and also effects its obsolescing force upon social media.
Social media, properly conceived, is friendly, well-behaved, and normal. It’s normiespace at its finest, because everyone there is normal. You operate under your real name, or your identity is trivial to discern, tied to your face and hobbies and social network. Your family, social relationships, work relationships, ideally they can all exist there, and there is no bizarre layer of code switching. Basically, like a less crappy LinkedIn. It evolved from the desire to push people onto their own websites, from forums to centralized blogging platforms, and as it evolved from the personal site to MySpace to Facebook, centralization and the normiespace-iness of it increased. But as the user-retention model became more predatory, more addiction-forming, the doomscroll was invented. And now, normies are hooked on the infinite scroll, looking for a dopamine hit. The funny muscleman, the silly soyboy, this will move the needle more than the news, which seems to be out of tricks. The rogue poaster is turning the Internet’s overgrown tumor, social media, into 4chan.
The Telegram/Twitter Lecture
Enhance: Aesthetic and intellectual influences
Reverse: Wikipedia
Retrieve: Interpersonal education
Obsolesce: TED Talks
Irony is the brackish element in the estuary of online right wingers. The freshwater is then longer form content on platforms like Twitter and Telegram. This is the series of posts surveying a find, and interesting little Internet rabbithole, a topic of some interest, or an opinion with greater demands for space and attention. They serve to enhance the aesthetic and intellectual standing of the right wing personality online—showcasing the diversity of education, mindset, and interests. You ever want to learn about hypocausts?
The long posts and twitter lectures grow out of the need for this enhancement, you find them on Twitter because it is uncommon for the content to be explicitly objectionable. You find them on Telegram, because it has no particular character restriction, and is obviously not going to censor right wing voices, lest they lose their core customer base, Russophone Eastern Europeans.
These are often, at their best, a fantastic form of retrieval of interpersonal, social education. But should you continue to the logical extension of peer education and sub-institutional discourse, you meet their reversal at wikia.com, where an oligarchy of people with a lot of time on their hands and elite Shaolin Google Fu control the permissible terms of knowledge through esoteric policy and internal politicking. While this might seem like an extreme extension, consider what these kinds of discourses—common to both left and right social media—make obsolete, the TED Talk. Remember those?
Newsletters
Enhance: Intellectual freedom of a type
Reverse: 'Conspiracy theories'
Retrieve: Republic of letters
Obsolesce: Objectivity
You’re reading one right now, but we can include this to cover essays, blogs, and perhaps even books. These pieces serve their obvious purpose in establishing credibility, focused opinions and discourse on weighty topics, much like podcasting. What they enhance is the intellectual freedom of the subscriber and the writer, offering a platform that is typically less censorious than Twitter, more popular with the Anglosphere than Telegram. The subscriber is also free from the problem of association with heretical viewpoints, though they may or may not step up and learn about what they disagree with. This enhancement is bound up in the retrieval of the republic of letters, the model of civic participation via intellectual life once held to be part of the American civic life. Of course, this is a world where literacy is much, much more commonplace. With the retrieval of the republic of letters in the age of mass literacy, we come to the obsolescence of objectivity. The Internet’s democratization of letters and all previous media forms has created an awful problem—everyone is suddenly deeply, personally aware of being a citizen journalist, and the eternal crisis of objectivity facing the journalist. Even as far back as the 1960s, Hunter S Thompson desperately sought a refuge for journalism in Surrealist automatism, a drug-induced delirium he called ‘gonzo,’ where through an induced ego-death/waking psychosis the journalist might absolve themselves of the responsibility of subjectivity, and become a passive recorder equally as they were active participants.
Now, with a continuous drip of digital LSD in the form of the massive media opportunity available to us, we are all faced with Thompson’s crisis of conscience felt so acutely while writing Strange Rumblings in Aztlan. The lack of objectivity and the incredible subjectivity in media is known and felt and participated in by all. The lack of objectivity of course takes us to the reversal, the conspiracy theory, the tract, the windbag crank, an awful fate that one must always avoid.
The Gestalt!
And what unites these various pursuits? What meta-media exists that makes a career like Curtis Yarvin or Niccolo Salo stick together and cohere? They are not simply media personalities. And they are not political leaders, it is almost axiomatic among the online right that you might as well not even try. The feds are out to get you, and substantive action in the right is as likely a honeypot as it is a stupid idea. They are clout-chasers.
Clout, The Centralizing Media Metaform
Enhance: Countercultural element
Reverse: Mob Signals
Retrieve: Political Parties
Obsolesce: Canceling
Clout is the social currency, the cultural capital that exists amongst a group that is accumulated through efforts across media. This becomes a meta-media, a name for the continuous public performance of being an online right winger. It is politics separate from power, separate from parties, and separate from a unified leadership or command and control, the performance of politics as a media practice.
Clout serves a very functional purpose for outsider politics, it is used to enhance countercultural feeling, the status of being cool and hip. Being with it is important for outsider politics because it makes you imitable and desired—not only is being mimetic a powerful thing to have going for you, perhaps there is no more powerful force than mimesis in culture. What any veteran of the 60s will tell you is that being in the counterculture was being in the movement. This clout chasing, under these rulebound media forms, retrieves for the participants and viewers alike political parties, ones with meaningful ideological relevance for people.
While they are like political parties, these clout networks, they are not institutional, which takes us to the reversal, the vulnerability of media participants to mob signals. The famed 2 minutes of hate, the pressure for streamers to conform to what gets them superchats, to write what gets you engagement, to poast what gets memed—it’s not just the tyranny of the market, but the tyranny of the base impulses of a political base.
Ironically though, in spite of the 2 minutes of hate and a degree of mob tyranny, it is the formation of these durable clout networks that has made cancelling obsolescent. Consider: Alex Jones is still out there, making money, getting big, shilling BRAIN FORCE. Bronze Age Pervert got banned from Twitter—he came right back, and somehow no one at Twitter noticed or cared. Can still buy Bronze Age Mindset on Amazon. He’s still making bank off of Caribbean Rhythms.
These are privileges that can be taken away, and the Internet’s choke points can wage war-as-manhunt against any person, and probably make a real show of it. Those poor Canadian truckers got their bitcoin taken by the Canuck feds. But there is no force that is unconquerable. Twitter, legacy media, even payment processors, can’t destroy people completely. We live in a world where clout and resourcefulness can keep you warm, even when they try to freeze you out.