More than half a century ago Andy Warhol posited that in the future we’d each get our fifteen minutes of fame. Andy never anticipated Moore’s law and the relentless increasing density of electronic circuitry, and so couldn’t imagine a future in which the sum of codified human knowledge and experience could circle the globe during that fifteen minutes. (Incidentally, Moore’s law predates Warhol’s dictum by a few years.)
More to the point, Andy never anticipated Twitter, social media, and the relentless shortening of attention and cheapening of discourse.
We’ve all seen pointillism, those pictures made of tiny dots that, up close, resemble nothing, but that are clear and vivid from a distance. We live in a pointillistic information space now, except that every dot is its own little microcosm of absorbing detail: fractal pointillism. We can obsess about one dot until the next catches our eye and we jump to that; we need never step back and look at the broader picture.
I think it leads to foolishness, to the very definition of foolishness, the combination of confidence and ignorance. We know so much about such little things, as our need for novelty and mental stimulation is met by ever more trivial events and people.
Stepping back, I wonder if we are at two inflection points.
I don’t have data, merely an impression, but it does feel like criticism of President Trump has changed in character over the past few months. It no longer seems that stories of chaos in the White House and his fundamental instability and incompetence dominate the criticism. Increasingly, criticism of this President feels like criticism of other Republican Presidents, which from the left takes the form of hyperbole and anger and accusations of reactionary excess. I admit that I don’t watch the news and so don’t know what his most strident foes are saying, but we all swim in the pop-cultural sea and it’s hard not to absorb some of it. Anyway, if Trump is becoming more of a mainstream Republican President in the eyes of his opponents on the left, that’s probably a good thing.
The other item is the press. I think it has finally lost the benefit of the doubt, and will find its influence diminished in the post-Trump political world. The willingness of previously respectable institutions to surrender any pretense of objectivity, however false and shallow it was, and become transparent organs of the Democratic Party will not be forgotten and, I suspect, can not easily be reversed — not when you consider the influence the new, ready to be triggered young employees have on every institution that makes the mistake of hiring them.
I think Trump is getting more normal and the press is getting more marginal. These things are probably not unrelated.