Unlocking the echo chambers
The run up to Trump’s 2nd term, and why it has just increased the workload for all of us
AP PHOTO/ETHAN SWOPE/PRESS ASSOCIATION VIA AP IMAGES
Los Angeles has, all week, been plastered onto our papers and screens as a spectre of apocalyptic destruction where something as transient as the wind can carry in minute embers which bury themselves in sweeping vistas of expensive enclaves, bringing it all to the ground. Joan Didion said those in Los Angeles live with ‘more tolerance for apocalyptic notions’. We often critique the hedonistic excess of Hollywood but perhaps it’s that thin line between daily life and destruction that is why The Terminator and Blade Runner and Fear the Walking Dead and The Day After Tomorrow all emerged from there. Perhaps those dystopian fictions aren’t speculative at all, they’re nostalgic.
Tragedies slip by relentlessly, moving us but not really moving us at all. The photographs are intense, but intense in the same way horror films are, or thrillers or climactic, cinematic moments in Bond movies. We don’t raise ourselves ready to fight when we see these, and how are our brains, primitive and largely apathetic, expected to react so differently to two things supposedly of the same calibre? Logic says otherwise, the LA fires are of course more tragic, more cataclysmic but we’re not always driven by logic.
The type of action we expect to come from
this type of catastrophe doesn’t always arise. Why?
The entertainment effect, the visual intensity of these events makes them less actionable, more distant and akin to fictional narratives in films. The emotion resulting from a tragic photo creates a rapid-fire response. A tweet. A story. A re-post and, if you’re lucky, a donation.
The fires are largely being framed as an isolated event, rather than a series of worsening and compounding fires which people can act on in their own communities. (The area consumed by summer wildfires in central and northern California has increased by five hundred per cent during the past several decades and that “nearly all of the observed increase” is due to warming). This framing has allowed for a flurry of attention just as fickle and transient as the flames wiping away Los Angeles.
Have you ever heard of nominative determinism? It’s when someone’s name influences their life so significantly that they seem to align with the meaning or sound of their name, according to New Scientist. Little baby Usaine Bolt grows up to outpace everyone, or William Wordworth grows up to have a razor-sharp grasp of language, or Christopher Coke grows into a notorious Jamaican drug lord. Ironic then, that Mr Trump shares his name with the card in a deck chosen to ‘rank above the others, winning a trick where a card of a different suit has been led’.
The framing of these fires is the latest trump card in the deck being played to ‘rank above the others’.
The irony to those who can see beyond Trump’s populist narrative is that he is wracking up rage, stealing from a baby and then providing the pacifier.
Just this week Zuckerberg sat down with his new boyish trim and gold chain and announced the removal of fact checking from Meta, labelling it as too ‘politically biased’, and suddenly the politicisation of facts seemed interwoven in it all, the fires, the inauguration, the reporting and the response to both of them. The path Trump is laying now will determine the term to come. As Silicon elites crawl off their jets, one by one, and into Trump’s Mar-A-Lago mansion, I fear the bricks of flagrant fawning and flattery that even a feudal pontiff would be stupified by have already been laid.
In the emotion of it all, with the fact checking flood gates lower than ever, the stream of untruths around the LA fires began to come out and, with just enough kindling, became a political inferno. The Republican congressman Andy Biggs from Arizona repeatedly claims that Fema - the Federal Emergency Management Agency - had diverted money to migrants instead of natural disasters – a claim repeatedly proven untrue during the aftermath of the North Carolina hurricane. Elon Musk just boosted an hour-long propaganda video by right-wing conspiracy theorist Alex Jones who blames the fires on a large “globalist plot” to destroy the US.
Imagine this. You don’t usually tune into civic or public events. Then, these fires occur and you’re at home worried sick about your family in Palisades, go onto X for supposedly accurate and real time information or reporting, only to find the names and photos of Democrats, departments and individuals who are ‘to blame’. You interact with this content, out of rightful rage at what is happening and there, you’re embedded in the algorithm which shapes you more than you shape it.
I asked Cathy Newman from Channel 4 her thoughts on the upcoming presidency’s impact on journalism. On the media’s relationship with Trump, she said ‘he has joked about not caring if journalists get shot, so it's fair to say the media is expecting a pretty fiery relationship with him. It'll be challenging to get interviews with some of his inner circle, given their public disdain of so-called "mainstream media" but we'll redouble our attempts to hold them to account, whatever the obstacles in our way. And there won't be a quiet moment: every time Trump opens his mouth, he usually makes news. However, this time, we know what to expect. Whereas in the past, some media might have been less prepared to challenge false statements or misinformation, this time we're primed to call it out. And it's hugely important we do so.”
The appropriation of the value of ‘free speech’ is being used to quash any critics without regard for what may or may not actually be true. The effect for people like Musk and Trump? If you don’t like a journalist critiquing you and your ‘free speech’, slap a lawsuit on them. If you like their views, create an algorithm - a media palace - which coddles and nurtures them. We, therefore, need to diversify our media sources, consuming media incisively, skeptically but open-mindedly enough that something outside of our daily experience may be allowed to dismantle our preconceived beliefs.
Washington Post’s Marty Baron declared, ‘We’re not at war with the administration, we’re at work’. And the work to disentangle the real from the self-congratulatory has just begun, and it’s up to all of us.