How Was the Right-Wing Disinformation Media Able to Take Over America?
There’s a proverb I learned from my friend Izreal, that in turn was probably originally from someone like Mark Twain. It goes like this: “It’s easier to fool a man than to convince him that he has been fooled.” And that’s the logic of my explanation of the evolution of disinformation media, also known as right wing media here. Keep that in mind as you read.
How Right Wing Media Is Disinformation Media
It turns out that social media runs on a math problem that determined clicks equal conviction. And if you’re convinced, you’ll click and click and click. This simple little algorithm gave way to a hellspawn that I will call the disinformation media, as this formula was how the “new media” was born.
One way to think of the disinformation media is by contrasting it with the legacy media. Legacy media is the classic, old-school stuff that used to dominate TV. It’s classic, formulaic, and mediocre-like a frozen dinner. But it was designed to “inform” so kept generations going to it as a simple source. However, it often lied through what it omitted and, over time, became less and less trustworthy as a result.
Then there’s the disinformation media, which disinforms by whatever it can get you to click, subscribe to, provide monthly support for, or “ring the bell” for, if you will. This is quintessentially represented by the right wing. Right wing media has always been an alternative to the legacy media, and in a sense has been as big as legacy media since at least the ’90s, dominating the radio waves while legacy media dominated the airwaves-both wielding relatively equal power and technology during this era before the internet figured out how to normalize itself into our lives through the iPhone revolution.
With the advent of online media lacking a clear identity, a sort of Cold War for that identity played out online via the App Store (to oversimplify it). This led to social media’s success and, as a result, to other media outlets mimicking that success. Right-wingers simply bought out the spaces where the social media format worked best, culminating in figures like Trump and Musk effectively shoveling their constituents into an online cabal.
These technologies-legacy media, radio waves, and online sources-are all now interconnected in this cabal, and bottlenecked, and not designed to inform but rather to convince and then hook you. This is famously fueled by the “dopamine effect,” studied as an outcome of social media’s ability to make you engage and click. As a result, the structure of this type of media is not about informing people in a positive way for ethical participation in life, but rather the opposite. The metaphysical and epistemic structure of this media can be characterized as a form of disinformation media. It isn’t even unintentionally lying to you; the truth or falsehood doesn’t matter-simply participating becomes disinformation. And that’s what new media is basically.
The key is still choice. So, the question than becomes, ‘How does it work to get one’s choices “bottle necked” until they eventually are convinced?’ Simply put: those with power have shaped consumer choice (through quasi-monopolies and aggressive, bottle-necking advertising even at the individual level, again through algos), economic incentives (such as stimulus checks), and broader societal shifts (for example, racists being upset that Obama was president, with the Southern plan leveraging that outrage). Combined with all the factors that algorithms exert on a consumeristic society, America was for the picking. And a despot excels at picking off the masses, that’s what they do.
And that’s how Trump got America to give up its cliche traditional political empire-built on “truth, justice, and the American way”-in favor of Russian polity, Chinese militarization, fascist normalization, and converting America back into an oligarchy, as it historically was during the Gilded Age. Where one clicks, one is convinced-and there’s no going back. At least not for where you get your “media.”
Enjoy libraries, visit your local university’s research library, go on dopamine fasts. Or do what I do. Make it a point in life to touch grass quite literally as a normal practice. Enjoy the outdoors without media based technology. I call this the #touchgrass movement. So go, touch some grass. Ass, grass, and cash should never go out of style like being human. Even if our AI overlords disagree.
