The Metaphysics of Power in the Digital Age
The World After Television:
We shape our tools, and thereafter our tools shape us. — John Culkin, paraphrasing Marshall McLuhan
For most of the twentieth century, a nation could be addressed all at once. At a fixed hour, the citizen sat before a single glowing rectangle and received, along with millions of strangers he would never meet, the same images, the same voices, the same authorised account of what had happened that day. The evening news was a civic liturgy. It not only reported on the world, but it also manufactured the very surface on which a shared world could exist. Whatever one thought of the men who spoke from that rectangle, one thought it together. Disagreement itself had a common object.
That world is ending now, and the manner of its ending is the subject of this essay. This essay attempts an answer in ten movements. It begins with the long history of persuasion, because almost nothing about the present is unprecedented, except for its speed and scale. It ends with the suggestion that we are circling back, by the most modern means imaginable, towards something very old — The future will awaken the ancient.
Excerpt: The influencer was a political actor who had not yet found a politics, a loaded instrument waiting for a hand.
And the hands arrived. The migration happened along a path so gradual that each step seemed unremarkable. A fitness creator begins to speak about discipline, then about the kind of society that rewards or punishes discipline. A gaming streamer, holding the attention of millions of young men for hours at a stretch, drifts from commentary on games to commentary on the world. A podcaster who began by interviewing comedians finds that the same long, intimate, unedited format is extraordinarily well suited to political persuasion, and that audiences trust the voice in their ears far more than they trust the institutions that voice increasingly mocks. Somewhere along this path the content creator quietly becomes a narrative authority: a person whose following turns to them for an account of what is true, who is friend and who is enemy, and what is to be done.
The structural fact is what matters here: the medium has produced a new kind of political actor who needs no party to nominate him, no broadcaster to platform him, and no institution to vouch for him. He is authorised directly by an audience, and he can be deplatformed by the institutions only at the cost of confirming, to that audience, the very story he has been telling them about those institutions all along. This is a genuinely novel position in the architecture of power, and the broadcast-era state has no settled idea what to do about it.
The internet reorganises people tribally, and then it keeps the tribes warm.
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