The Infotainment Behemoth

The brilliant essay below was written by David Roberts and was posted in a thread to his Blue Sky account (This Link).  I am re-posting Roberts’ essay here with his written permission.

After reading this, try reading it a second time where you replace the IRA (Inflation Reduction Act) with preventing the collapse of global industrial civilization and sixth great extinction. He pretty much nailed it.

The political theory behind IRA was roughly as follows: We have lost control of the information landscape and can no longer win rhetorical or purely political battles; however, if we make substantive policy progress that directly touches voters’ lives, they will notice and reward us.

In other words, changes on the ground, changes to the material reality of voter lives, would cut through the information haze, overcome the information asymmetry. That was the theory. I heard people involved say it explicitly, more than once. It failed.

What many of us warned, & what is unavoidably clear now, is that there is no privileged sphere of “real life” that is sheltered, separate from the information environment. It’s narratives all the way down — even to the point that they shape *how people experience their own material circumstances*.

If a voter has never heard of IRA, doesn’t know it exists, then the fact that a factory is getting built in next county, employing them & their families, does not auto-magically lead them to credit Dems. Facts are inert without narratives & worldviews to render them legible.

People render this point glib & shallow when they say, “oh, Dems should have talked about IRA more.” I mean yeah, sure, but the problem goes *way* deeper than that. They could talk about it til they’re blue in the face — their words simply do not reach most Americans.

Dem words reach Dem voters through the hostile filter of MSM political reporters. They reach GOP voters through the hostile filter of Fox et al. They reach disconnected, “apolitical” Americans through the hostile filter of memes & TikToks & bro podcasters. Dems have no direct audience of their own.

For 20 years now, I have been saying, “the right is building a giant, explicitly ideological infotainment behemoth, sucking up viewers, sucking up local papers & stations, sucking up radio, sucking up social media, dominating the info environment. Dems aren’t. It’s gonna be a problem!”

But I & others saying that were ignored, the growing radicalism of the right was ignored, sanded down, dismissed, Dems continued communicating primarily through MSM reporters who hate them, they continued to imagine that technocratic policy tweaks could shift politics for them, and so here we are.

Again: the theory of IRA was that policy could cut through politics. It was proven wrong. It will be proven wrong the next time they try it too. They are going to figure out how to win in this info environment or they’re going to keep losing.

“But Dave, *how* do they win in this info environment?” I don’t know! The right spent decades patiently building institutions, patiently buying up properties, patiently eroding the public’s trust in real journalism. Fighting back against that — starting 50 years too late — is going to be tough.

But it seems to me that step one is acknowledging the problem & vowing to *try*. Instead, mainstream Dems seem to think if they shrink enough, get “moderate” & inoffensive enough, stick to safe positions that poll well enough, they can “play dead” to survive through this. It’s futile.

Today’s information environment is spectacle. It’s about attention. The way to win in that environment is to genuinely believe what you believe, to believe in yourself, to *actively try to draw attention*, to showboat & peacock & find gimmicks & excuses to highlight the fights you want.

You have to get out there and make noise, find fights, generate buzz, DO shit. Trying to be even more safe, even more mild, even more blandly moderate, just cedes the spotlight & paves the road to fascism.