Donald Trump won the 2024 Presidential election with 77,284,118 votes, 2,284,952 more than his opponent. 63.9% of eligible voters voted, round about the average. From this distance and vantage point you can only wonder why any of those 77+ million votes were cast for a convicted felon, a bankrupt, a corrupt fraud, a vulgarian and, not least, for a vengeful, cruel, shameless and erratic old man. What were they thinking?

There are many explanations for why Trump won: Biden hanging on too long, poor campaign, wrong candidate, general distrust of government, a mood for disruption, and anyway he didn’t win by that much. All true no doubt. But it seemed to provide evidence of something more fundamental which is occurring. What were they thinking? Perhaps they weren’t thinking at all. Perhaps something had shifted in their consciousness. The need for entertainment had become much more pressing than any concern for governance.

What follows is inevitably conjectural. Not everyone is addicted to hyper processed food, not everyone pursues life as a TV show, not everyone watches the slurry on Netflix, not everyone spends all day on Tik Tok, not all students have AI write their essays.

But a lot of people do; and these things and their multitudinous like inevitably have an impact, a powerful impact, the most powerful impact that our ingenuity can manufacture … a shift driven by mountains of money heedless of consequences and well out of sight of regulation — because it’s just what happens these days. And I guess that’s the issue.

It was Steve Bannon that got me wondering.

“The Democrats don’t matter,” he told writer Michael Lewis [as long ago as 2017]. “The real opposition is the media. And the way to deal with them is to flood the zone with shit.”

• • • • • • • • •

Life as Bliss Point

And then we recently watched a show from SBS On Demand called ‘Irresistible: Why we can’t stop eating’. It is about ultra-processed food and its increasing prominence in diets world-wide.

Ultra-processed food is made by manufacturing companies. The top ten world-wide are Nestlé, PepsiCo, Coca Cola, Unilever, Tyson Foods, Kraft Heinz, Mondelez International, Conagra, Campbell Soup and General Mills, all but two of which are based in the US. Collectively these ten — there are many many more — had an annual turnover in 2023 of $US4.668 trillion (if a trillion is 1000 billion) and a world-wide reach. They are particularly active in Africa.

And what is it? It is often a slurry of cereal (rice, soy, wheat, corn) and/ or modified dairy products (whey permeate for example) with additives which allow it to taste, feel, smell, and SOUND (say ‘snap’ ‘crackle’ and ‘pop’) like something you’d really really want to eat. It can be baked, grilled, puffed, breaded, sauced, and reproduced endlessly. It can be frozen, reheated, micro-waved, deep fried. It can be made to look simply amazing and our supermarket shelves are full of it … bright, exciting, attention-grabbing.

And we buy it. And you buy it. And we all buy it. Not necessarily in large quantities, but when we’re in a hurry and blah blah blah. It’s just convenient. But there are some people, a growing number here as well as in the US, who buy it far more frequently and for whom it has become a staple food source.

Why would you want ultra-processed food?

A lemon cake you cook yourself with standard ingredients might cost you $4.60. It will have a shelf life of a few days. The same item produced in this different way, to all intents and purposes looking and tasting the same, will cost 40c and last for anything up to two or three months. I’m running a shop; what am I going to go for?

Vegetables and fruit especially have a short life once picked, they’re expensive to transport and relatively difficult to process. If I can offer you two lots of powder which will make yoghurt taste like it has got actual strawberries in it and some modified starch which will give it a delicious creamy feel on the tongue and some strings of colouring that seem like fruit traces, are you going to say no?

This process and its component additives have been okayed by regulators. (Well, self-regulators anyway.) As required by law the ingredients are listed on the packet. And of course all food consists of chemicals one way or another.

However as well as being ultra processed, these foods are made to be hyper palatable. They often combine fat and sugar in ways not found in nature which draw immediate and sizeable responses from the reward centres in the brain which say ‘I would like more of that and pretty much straight away’. They are often made soft so that they can be eaten quickly (or crunchy but dissolve close to instantly in your mouth. Think Cheezels, Twisties) with two results: you want some more because of the impact on your reward centres; your body doesn’t have time to produce its standard response that you’re no longer hungry and don’t need any more food.

This is compounded by encouraging the idea of eating as grazing. You eat all day, not just at mealtimes, to keep your energy up through that blast of sugar. You need a Snickers now. ‘You’re not you when you’re hungry’;  ‘A Mars a day helps you work, rest and play.’

But we’re not just talking about junk food or fast food or snacks. Any food you buy in a box — apple pies, fish fingers, frozen pizza, frozen roast dinners — is likely to have been manufactured in an interesting and sophisticated way.

These foods have been around for a long time. American supermarkets began stocking them in the 1950s. But the industry really took off in the 1970s not least because of Howard Moskowitz’s work. He believed in, and established in practical form, the idea of the ‘Bliss Point’.

“The Bliss Point for salt, sugar, or fat is a range within which perception is that there is neither too much nor too little, but the ‘just right’ amount of saltiness, sweetness, or richness. The human body has evolved to favour foods delivering these tastes: the brain responds with a ‘reward’ in the form of a jolt of endorphins, remembers what was done to get that reward, and makes us want to do it again.”

Moskowitz’s ideas took firm hold. They were later validated by MRI brain scans during some of which people ate various forms of chocolate ice cream which caused the orbitofrontal cortex, the ‘pleasure centre’, to ‘glow like a furnace’.

If there is a way of optimising food in that way, making it cheaper, more durable, tasty and attractive, food that people really want, what’s the issue? It sells. People are happy. Some make money.

The ’70s were also the time when the rates of obesity and its consequences began soaring in the US, more than doubling in 10 years. Some of the consequences of a diet heavily skewed to ultra processed food include higher rates of a variety of forms of cancer, cardiac disease, cardiovascular disease, hypertension, sleep disorder and, very commonly, Type 2 diabetes. You die earlier.

[Digression: Two adjacent Googled questions. 1) ‘Are Cheezels baked or fried?’ ‘Baked to crispy, crunchy perfection and smothered with deliciously cheesy flavor. Pop them on your fingers and eat them one-by-one for some finger luscious fun. Cheezels are a popular party snack for children.’ [And yes of course they are. That’s a key part of the deal. Train ’em up.] 2) ‘Are Cheezels healthy?’ ‘No, Cheezels are not healthy. They are high in fat, calories, salt, and saturated fat, and low in fibre and protein. They also contain high levels of artificial flavouring, colouring, and MSG.’ ]

You know the solution to these problems. Buy fresh food. Cook it yourself. That’s relevant but not why we’re here.

• • • • • • • • •

There are two things I want to point out. Firstly, how ingenious to be able to pull flavours apart and reconstitute them artificially. Brilliant. Astonishing. There is no end to human ingenuity. Secondly, this process has been driven by commerce rather than any wish to improve, or with much concern for, the quality of human and other life. $US4.668 trillion remember? That’s a lot of Doritos, and a lot of people eating them.

But that’s not the mission either. It’s more in this ballpark.

The current Vice President of the United States is having an angry debate with some of the Catholic bishops of America. ‘Speaking with Fox’s Sean Hannity, Vance suggested that efforts to provide charity to immigrants, which are favored by “the far left”, contradict Catholic teaching. “There’s a very old school — and I think it’s a very Christian concept, by the way — that you love your family and then you love your neighbor, and then you love your community, and then you love your fellow-citizens in your own country, and then after that you might consider the rest of the world.” He was apparently referring to St Thomas Aquinas’s idea of “ordered love,” or ordo amoris, set out in the “Summa Theologica” — an immense work, foundational to Catholic thought, that Aquinas left unfinished at his death in 1274. This is at odds, he suggested, with Americans’ care for immigrants.” (Paul Elie Vance brawls with bishops New Yorker 11/2/25). Vance isn’t just a hillbilly. He has law degree from Yale. Under the new dispensation he can propose fearlessly that selfishness is a fundamental tenet of Christianity.

James Martin, a Jesuit priest responded. ‘In its simplest terms, the apparent demise of #USAID is the result of the world’s richest man ending a program that helped millions of poor people. You don’t need a Ph.D. in moral theology to see why this is evil.‘

I think of Vance’s argument as something ultra processed. The second is simple fare, but food.

The mission is to think about what we’re currently feeding our brains, how that’s changing, and the contribution its consumption makes to the socio-political climate of which Trump is just one lurid peak.

• • • • • • • • •

Life as TV

What we consume shapes us, cognitively. What we do, and especially do repetitively, shapes us. Repetition, as every musician, dancer, scientist and dictator learns, trains the neural networks to make some thoughts and thought patterns more durable than others. They stick.

‘I strongly believe that the Gaza Strip, which has been a symbol of death and destruction for so many decades and so bad for the people anywhere near it, and especially those who live there and frankly who’s been really very unlucky. It’s been very unlucky. It’s been an unlucky place for a long time.

‘Being in its presence just has not been good and it should not go through a process of rebuilding and occupation by the same people that have really stood there and fought for it and lived there and died there and lived a miserable existence there. Instead, we should go to other countries of interest with humanitarian hearts, and there are many of them that want to do this. …

‘This can be paid for by neighbouring countries of great wealth. It could be one, two, three, four, five, seven, eight, 12. It could be numerous sites, or it could be one large site. But the people will be able to live in comfort and peace and we’ll make sure something really spectacular is done. …

‘The US will take over the Gaza Strip and we will do a job with it too. We’ll own it and be responsible for dismantling all of the dangerous unexploded bombs and other weapons on the site, level the site and get rid of the destroyed buildings, level it out. Create an economic development that will supply unlimited numbers of jobs and housing for the people of the area … do a real job, do something different.’ (D. Trump, press conference with Netanyahu, 5 Feb 2025)

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I know 78 year old men. I hang out with them. I’m in the ballpark of being one. I know they’re not 36 or 45 anymore. I know the way their thoughts aggregate, concentrate and lose range. I know that what they know is what they learnt some time ago. I know they become more absolute in those beliefs and less able to apply them to new contexts. I generalise, but Trump on Gaza is an almost perfect example of randomly reaching for the familiar in an utterly alien context.

He’s not a 4-D thinker, nor a master strategist, nor a diplomatic genius, nor a nonpareil deal maker. He’s an old man, a retired, and grasping, real estate developer and that is his default setting. I’m not sure he has many other settings.

Except one. He’s been a TV star.

He’s an entertainer. He knows how to attract and hold attention, and he’s learnt to forswear all shame, even the idea of it. ‘That’ll make great television,’ he muses out loud, as he sends Zelenskyy on his way and destroys the Western Alliance.

• • • • • • • • •

The man in front of you, it always seems to be a man, counts silently making large gestures with his fingers, … three, two, and in you walk. You’re on. Prompted by large flashing signs the audience — as one — welcomes you. As one. There are no naysayers here, no hecklers. The response is automatic, sustained, strong and warm. Basking in it and acknowledging it is the beginning of the show.

The show has a well-defined shape often according to a well-anticipated formula. It begins, it follows a scripted narrative arc, various anticipated things happen although there will be some sharp little shocks on the way to keep you watching. The characters will be drawn in heavy outline and act in predictable ways. Viewers can count on the routine comfort of catchphrases (‘You’re fired!’ ‘Drill baby, drill.’) and the prompt from a laugh or applause track to tell them how to feel. The formula, inviolate, will be worked through to a conclusion that will find the Bliss Point but which will leave you hungry for more.

The Apprentice, Trump’s show, survived on a certain amount of melodrama (contingent on Trump’s moods and unpredictability), glamour, and the underlying idea that your dreams, all of them, are achievable if you try hard enough. The show’s spectacle of suffering (another attraction to tune in for) came from people not trying hard enough and not being sufficiently obedient to the tenets of The Big Man. They were fired, and the audience roared for more.

It was a ‘reality’ show. It ran for 15 seasons, 2004-2017, all but one of which Trump hosted. That’s long enough for it to shape your understanding of how the world works, for it to become real in your mind. It was a reality show.

During his first Presidential stint, Trump played Trump as President. He made modest and sporadic efforts to do what Presidents do, to observe the protocols and conventions, to sometimes say and do appropriate things.

But in this second and so much darker series with so many more daily thrills he is playing Trump as himself, Trump as Roy Cohn trained him to be. He has mightily improved his script writers, the very best that the American Heritage Foundation can provide (through Project 2025). He has stocked his cabinet almost entirely with oddities who will guarantee attention, be utterly biddable and ‘look good’. ‘Trump understands, by instinct and through experience, that the line between entertainment and power in American life has effectively dissolved’ (Stephen Marche ‘America’s Cultural Revolution’ in The Atlantic 3/3/25).

As Megan Garber put it in the same journal (6/3): ‘In the context of history, this is an emergency. In the context of the show, however, it is simply one more twist in the story. Government by “reality,” like the TV genre, has no obligation to be factual. It has no obligation to be moral. It has no obligation to be anything at all. Wisdom, cruelty, accountability, democracy — in the bleak politics of “reality,” these things no longer exist. They can’t exist. Only one thing matters, as the show goes on: Is it great television?’ She could have added: And how is it playing with my audience?

You could see this as an unavoidable but chosen route to becoming hyper processed. How might an appetite for this sort of sustenance be constructed?

• • • • • • • • •

Life as Netflix

Including Vatican City and Palestine, there are 195 countries in the world. Netflix has subscribers in 190 of them, 283.2 million all up. Last year it generated $US33.7 billion in revenue, with a profit of $US5.4 billion. Those facts alone would make would make it worthy of attention. But it’s got more to tell us.

‘For a century, the business of running a Hollywood studio was straightforward. The more people watched films, the more money the studios made. With Netflix, however, audiences don’t pay for individual films. They pay a subscription to watch everything, and this has enabled a strange phenomenon to take root. Netflix’s movies don’t have to abide by any of the norms established over the history of cinema: they don’t have to be profitable, pretty, sexy, intelligent, funny, well-made, or anything else that pulls audiences into theatre seats. Netflix’s audiences watch from their homes, on couches, in beds, on public transportation, and on toilets. But most often they aren’t even watching.’

Genius or what!

The main source for this part of the story is an article by Will Tavlin in n+1. His primary interest is in showing how Netflix first ate up video stores, then dug its way into live broadcast television (especially as its streaming clones multiplied), then ‘brought Hollywood to the brink of irrelevance’ by shifting the ways movies get produced and distributed but, even more, changing the nature of what films are and what they might offer.

All that’s telling, but what interests me more are the remarkable parallels with the manufactured food story. Let’s talk hyper palatability.

The platform has an unimaginable amount of data about its subscribers. It knows what sorts of devices you watch on; which scenes you skip, pause, or rewind; and how long it takes you to abandon a show you don’t like or finish a season that you love. (These data created the option to ‘binge’.) It also has the capacity to know in granular detail what you and the other 283 million subscribers will watch.

Netflix now has about 17,000 or 19,000 items for you to watch, the vast majority Netflix Originals. (The figure is disputed. Netflix has only recently started releasing information about its operations.) But it doesn’t matter to you because you’ll never visit the labyrinthine chambers of its library. In an immediate and easy access process you will be served a selection of what it has been determined you will like. The algorithm, now with the assistance of AI, has spoken. You are in fact a member of one of approximately 2000 ‘taste groups’.

If you rely on subscriptions for your income as Netflix mostly does, you need to reduce ‘churn’, the rate at which customers cancel. So instead of acquiring films cheaply from independent film makers and out of date blockbusters, Netflix led the way in turning to safer, more uniform product that could be made in-house, and replicated and tailored to the tastes of their subscribers.

Tavlin talks about the Typical Netflix Movie. ‘The TNM covers every niche interest and identity category in existence, such as a movie about a tall girl, Tall Girl, but also Horse Girl, Skater Girl, Sweet Girl, Lost Girls, and Nice Girls. Seemingly optimized for search engines, the title of a TNM announces exactly what it is  —  hence a romantic comedy about a wine executive called A Perfect Pairing, or a murder mystery called Murder Mystery. … The characters’ dialogue is stilted, filled with overexplanation, clichés, and lingo no human would ever use.’

Netflix’s product is filled with overexplanation because the company has led the way in ‘second screen’ material, stuff you have on when you’re doing something else like knitting or cleaning the dining room or looking at your phone. There are some famous examples of this. One is from a shocker called Irish Wish. ‘We spent a day together’, Lindsay Lohan’s character tells her lover, James. ‘I admit it was a beautiful day filled with dramatic vistas and romantic rain, but that doesn’t give you the right to question my life choices. Tomorrow I’m marrying Paul Kennedy.’ ‘Fine,’ he responds. ‘That will be the last you see of me because after this job is over I’m off to Bolivia to photograph an endangered tree lizard.‘

This super-obviousness has newly infected mainstream cinema as though the makers and producers can no longer expect audiences, any audiences, to connect dots or to take time to make sense of more than trivial ideas. THIS is what’s happening the film shrieks, and we’ll not only show you but have a character say, ‘THIS is what’s happening.’ This comes into sharp relief somewhat startlingly when it doesn’t happen. We’ve just seen Francois Ozon’s new film Quand vient l’automne and it’s in the last few minutes or even after the film has finished when the light bulb goes on, and what a snakey startling light bulb moment it is. Fabulous. Because he respects his audience, he hasn’t been afraid to give it some cognitive work.

Then there’s one of my big beefs: the endless stuffing of landscape shots and plot reiteration to fill out the required eight hours for a series. If no one much is watching and no one at all is watching intently, economy and precision are not priority requirements.

Netflix has also discovered people don’t much like documentaries (unless they are about David Beckham or car racing). What do they like? ‘Grisly true crime, garish cult exposés, celebrity hagiography, sports and food miniseries, pop science, and pets.’ (Hey! Isn’t that what I used to see at the checkouts in supermarkets?) Yeah, that’s what we like.

Do I need to underline that the quest here is for hyper palatability, and that the consequence is hyper processed entertainment food in the service of making money from subscriptions that somehow you never remember to cancel?

Tavlin concludes: ‘Economists talk about so-called “zombie businesses”: companies that survive only because of the availability of cheap capital, who stagger along, refinancing debt, never failing — artificial, undead things. And I think about this concept when I look back at the tech world’s takeover of culture. That these business strategies, and this river of money diverted to bring them to fruition, created a sort of zombie discourse in our culture, one that appeared vital and real, and then — coincidentally or not, over the last few years — dissolved before our eyes.‘

And do I need to say just how ingenious to be able to pull aspects of film apart and reconstitute them quite directly according to data collected about the wishes of the audience down to the level of individual user preference, a process which itself would once have been deemed miraculous. Brilliant. Astonishing. There is no end to human ingenuity. Secondly, this process has been driven more by commerce than any wish to improve, or even with concern for, the quality of human and other life.

Soma: a drug that produces artificial happiness and keeps you at a perfect equilibrium between happiness and sadness. Aldous Huxley, 1984 (written in 1931) No news. But we’re so so much better at it now.

• • • • • • • • •

You also must have stimulation.

Life as Tik Tok

The US Government has had TikTok in its sights for years now on the basis that the Chinese Government is/was using it to gather data that will be useful from a security point of view (including from armed forces enlistment ads). Maybe. Who knows? (You can read the whole weird story here.) But one of the things that distinguishes TikTok from other social media platforms is the enormous amount of data that is made available about itself, its users, its product and especially its commercial impact.

Some things you may not know about TikTok.

• TikTok has 1,925 billion users globally, with 190 million monthly active users in the United States. It is still only the fifth largest social media platform (Facebook/Meta has more than 3 billion users). The TikTok app has been downloaded 4.92 billion times world-wide.
• There are 272 videos posted on Tik Tok every second, 16,000 videos posted every minute, 981,000 thousand videos posted every hour, 34 million videos posted each day.
• 70% of its users for whom age data are collected are between 18 and 34. A vast unrecorded group, estimated to be 44% of all users, are under 16 attracted by exactly the things that younger people might be attracted by.
• The slight majority of users (55%) are men. Men also access it considerably more frequently. (They’d like the pranks, men.)
• At April 2024, India was the country with the largest TikTok audience, with almost 680 million users. Indonesia was second. The US was third with around 121.5 million users. Brazil was fourth. The Chinese version, Douyin, had 380 million users.
• The average user opens the TikTok app 20+ times per day.
• In the US, kids who are on TikTok spend an average of 113 minutes daily using it, which is slightly higher than the global average of 107 minutes. That time has doubled since 2019.
• 61% of TikTok users discover new brands and products on the platform. 92% of TikTok users take action following the content they see on TikTok (share, comment, follow, like, etc.).
• In 2024, Khaby Lame, Senegalese-Italian influencer and the highest-paid content creator on the platform, made US$20 million through his posts on TikTok. He has over 162 million followers. He has never spoken in a post.
• TikTok earned an estimated US$18.2 billion in 2024.

I’m not a user of TikTok but for the purpose of researching this story I have watched several hours of YouTube Shorts, (You can too: YouTube Shorts) to all intents and purposes the same thing. The Shorts are capped at a minute, shorter than the cap for TikTok, but have very much the same content.

From the top left clockwise: crazy cute supermarket jokester; policeman asking arrested man why he’s so happy; car being chased by a cop car suddenly turns right in front of a truck, tricks cop car; family doing the same dance separated by six years; prone bloke throws a basketball the length of the court for an extraordinary goal, girlfriend doesn’t film it (irony: someone else is; kicker: girls are inattentive and stupid); set up so a stationary person on a platform is hit by the front window of a bus and travels through the entire body of the bus coming out unhurt. None of them should be missed.

What is the content of those 34 million a day videos?

The numbers refer to the number of billion hashtag views. That’s also about what the proportions looked like to me. One in four or five is an ad very carefully integrated into the flow and style of the other offerings. It is worth noting that 82% of views of ‘Beauty/skincare’ posts result in a product purchase.

I seemed to get a lot of DIY. But in addition in about 1 in 12 cases the algorithm gives me Donald Trump doing or saying something stupid. I imagine that would come under ‘entertainment’. It would also however be generated by nothing I’m doing on YouTube but on the way the cookies embedded in the sites of the New Yorker, The Atlantic, the New York Times and various other platforms I frequent read my viewing preferences.

I am data on the internet. I have a shape. My appetite is known. I am being fed.

I could have been there for hours. I was. There was unrelenting supply. They’re short. They require very little concentration. Fundamental advice to constructors: ‘TikTok’s format encourages quick, engaging content, and videos around 7 seconds can be easily consumed and shared, making them more likely to capture attention quickly.’ Slurp. (Cheezels!!) They start big with an attention grabber and stay big with plenty of OMG! Did you see THAT moments. And what will the next one bring!?! They slide down like sandwiches made from Tip Top Supersoft White. They melt in your mind. You scarcely notice. It’s just that that roll of fat round your capacity to discriminate might be getting bigger, and the idea of cognitive load is becoming a distant, and rapidly evaporating, memory.

For when you’re making your own TikTok contributions here is a list of ‘5 steps proven in 2022 by a group of scientists to generate viral videos’ (ones with several hundred thousand views or more in a 24-48 hour period). They include: find out when your audience is tuned in and post at least four new videos a day (and not more than 10); use captions; use close ups not mid or long shots; shoot using the point of view of the viewer — probably all excellent ideas if that’s the mission you’re on.

But Number One is ‘Be Popular’. ‘Cultivating popularity is at the core of TikTok’s virality. Building a loyal following and establishing credibility within the TikTok community are key factors for success.’ That would probably be correct. I remember the popularity phenomenon from the early days of Facebook. ‘She wants to be my Friend? Who is she? At school? Really? That’s 30 years ago. Oh look here’s Roger. I thought he was dead. How many Friends have you got? I’ve got …’

Another strongly associated tip is to ‘Discover Your Niche’. ‘Social affiliation plays a crucial role in going TikTok viral. Humans are inherently social beings, driven by a desire to connect with others with similar interests.‘ And apparently, in a surprising number of cases, with a desire to hate anyone who doesn’t share them.

Because this list doesn’t contain some of the most important and well established ideas for going viral: Be Enraged. Be Outrageous. Farm Engagement. What A Joy It Is To Spread Conspiracy Theories. I’ll say anything, JUST GIVE ME YOUR ATTENTION. And this is not TikTok, which in this context appears utterly anodyne: it’s Musk’s Twitter/X, it’s Zuckerberg’s moderation-free Meta/Facebook, it’s 4chan where among other horrors you can actually watch libtards being violently assaulted and many million other websites, an enormous proportion of active sites.

And it’s Alex Jones claiming the Sandy Hook massacre of school children was a fake set-up.

Went viral with that one. 👍👏👍

On the 24th September 2012 on his website ‘Infowars’ Jones claimed that the shooting deaths of 20 primary-aged students and six of their teachers was a ‘giant hoax’ and ‘the fakest thing since the $3 bill.’ Daily revenues to the Infowars online store increased from $48,000 on Sept. 24 to more than $230,000 on Sept. 25. Total user sessions on the Infowars site increased from about 543,000 on Sept. 23 to about 1.8 million on Sept. 24. Success. (President-elect Donald Trump contributed a message of support at the time and promised not to let him down: ‘Alex has an amazing reputation.’) Relatives of the victims who have been harassed and threatened by Jones’ supporters (! can you believe that?!!) have not yet received one dollar of the eventual $85 million settlement which in any case would hardly make up for their loss. (I use this ageing example because the lawsuit it gave rise to provided relevant data and because of its particular egregiousness. If you want an example happening right now, well … look anywhere, but try Turtleboy.)

Hatred feeds on itself and spreads its targets. Suspicion is an appetite that is never fully sated. It’s emotion that counts. These media provide the (mostly anonymous) chance to rant. Publicly. The louder and weirder your rant, potentially, the bigger audience you will garner — and the more satisfied you will feel, the more endorphins will be released.

And that’s how you discover your niche, how you find out who your friends really are. This process will provide confirmation of what you already think cementing your views into the hardest concrete. (And this is so comprehensively established I need no references. Look up Confirmation Bias.)

I’ve got a friend who (like 38% of people who vote Republican in the US) thinks, believes, is supremely confident, that Barack Obama was born in Kenya. Obama’s birth certificate, which has been posted on the Internet, shows that he was delivered in Honolulu on August 4, 1961, at 7:24 P.M. Confirmation of these facts exists in the form of birth announcements that appeared in two Honolulu newspapers, the relevant pages of which have also been scanned and posted on the Web.

This became an issue during Obama’s Presidential campaign when a blog of a woman objecting to the possibility of his candidacy went viral. Obama’s campaign aides set up a website in response called Fight the Smears. On it, they posted a scan of his birth certificate. ‘Next time someone talks about Barack’s birth certificate, make sure they see this page,’ went the text.

Do the job? When those who had been ‘talking about’ Obama’s birth certificate looked at it on the Web, they found exactly what they thought they would. Some blogs noted that if the scan of the certificate was enlarged several times a light halo could be seen around each letter. The crosshatched border on the document did not seem to match the cross-hatching on another birth certificate issued in Hawaii around the same time. The scan did not show the raised seal required of an official state document.

‘The image is a horrible forgery,’ a self-described ‘forensic computer examiner’ calling himself Techdude declared in a blog on Atlas Shrugs. ‘Enough work has been done by photoshop experts to show that this is not a real document,’ ClearCase_guy asserted on the site Free Republic. “And that begs the question: WHY?‘ As indeed it does.

Apparently still operating under the assumption that people turn to the Web for information, the Obama campaign tried again. It allowed FactCheck.org, a nonpartisan research organization, to inspect the document at the campaign’s headquarters, in Chicago. ‘FactCheck.org staffers have now seen, touched, examined and photographed the original birth certificate,’ the group’s website announced on August 21, 2008. ‘Our conclusion: Obama was born in the U.S.A. just as he has always said.’ Nine high-resolution photos accompanied the post, showing the raised seal, as well as a set of creases.

‘I, for one, of course, am not surprised,’ JM Hanes wrote on the site JustOneMinute. ‘I mean he’s had more than two months to find a better forger.’ When, on October 31, 2008, Hawaii’s Director of Health, Chiyome Fukino, issued a statement saying that she had ‘personally seen and verified that the Hawaii State Department of Health has Sen. Obama’s original birth certificate on record,’ she was dismissed as a plant (today, probably, a ‘DEI hire’). (This story is derived from an article in the New Yorker by Elizabeth Kolbert. Further evidence for its fake news-ishness?)

Nor has any of this had the slightest effect on the view of my very highly educated friend. He is a bit shocked by my credulity.

There is virtually no opinion an individual can hold that is so untethered, so crazy, that he or she will not find other adherents on the internet. ‘Views that would ordinarily dissolve, simply because of an absence of social support, can be found in large numbers on the Internet, even if they are understood to be exotic, indefensible, or bizarre in most communities,’ Cass Sunstein, a legal scholar and distinguished public servant writes. (The American Medical Association estimates that more than 85% of internet posts on cancer contain inaccurate or misleading information.) ‘The most striking power provided by emerging technologies is the growing power of consumers to “filter” what they see.’

He suggests, with evidence, that certain tendencies of the human mind interact badly with certain features of modern technology, much as certain prescription drugs interact badly with alcohol.

That was 15 years ago. What appears to have happened is that in a phenomenally crowded field the nonsense and worse, much worse, content has increasingly been validated by being mainstreamed, among other ways, through ideas about ‘Freedom of Speech’. After all measles can be sorted through diet and Vitamin A.

And after all — have I said this? Are you still there? — it’s only ATTENTION that matters. (HEY!!! Did you just see what that cat did with the ping pong ball and the fire hydrant! Holy smokes.)

Oh attention and um … well, the bottom line. ‘The content of these websites does not reveal the machinery of influencing, the deals signed, the nondisclosure agreements reached, the metrics used to measure the dollar value of the audience’s emotional response. It can look like information while carrying very little or no meaning. As long as it generates emotion the owners of the medium do everything they can to stop you taking any action that would harm their economic interests.’ McMillam Cotton in the New York Times 9/2/25.

There are two things I want to point out. Firstly, how ingenious the operation of the internet is and how extraordinarily it has drawn on popular creativity and given everyone a voice. Brilliant. Astonishing. Incredibly positive. There is no end to human ingenuity. Secondly, this process has latterly been driven by commerce rather than any wish to improve, or with much concern for, the quality of human and other life.

[Addendum, from The Everything Market Insider: ‘We are all drowning in this massive content space with podcasts, videos, and articles, among others. This will increase exponentially with Gen AI playing across content creation to delivery. Users will gravitate towards content that resonates with their interests and needs, and the social platforms’ continuous evolution of algorithms to focus on user behaviour, engagement, and preferences underscores this trend.

‘However, many brands are still not taking an audience-centric approach to creating content. Brands are creating content based on what they want to publish. While there’s a place and value for brand-voice content, brands will need to diversify their content strategies and content mix. With the rise of AI-generated content, it is not about producing more content but also considering the right content that aligns with the brand messaging while appealing to the nuanced preferences of your audience, ensuring that your content intersects with their FYPs.’ (For Your Page, a much sought after TikTok advisory for what you’d like.)’]

Life as Feels: a subset

From The Guardian, 3/3/25:

Visceral videos of people playing with slime or braiding hair soothe those who feel overwhelmed by in-person contact

‘Younger adults are increasingly overwhelmed by in-person interaction and soothing themselves instead with sensory online content, according to a report on the wildly popular online content known as ASMR.

‘ASMR – autonomous sensory meridian response – describes a particular sensory phenomenon that is triggered by specific sights or sounds, which usually begins with a tingling sensation across the scalp and results in feelings of deep calm and relaxation.

‘Platforms such as YouTube and TikTok are crammed with thousands of these visceral videos, in which ASMR creators play with squishy slime, role-play braiding the viewer’s hair, whisper loving affirmations or paint the camera lens with spit, all aimed at stimulating these “tingles”.

‘Now the award-winning behavioural insights agency Revealing Reality has published a landmark report on the phenomenon, interviewing viewers and creators of ASMR content and analysing thousands of videos based on common triggers – such as exaggerated whispering, breathing and mouth sounds, tapping and crinkling sounds, gentle or fluttering hand movements – which many people use to help them unwind and sleep.’

• • • • • • • • •

I can’t bring myself to write anything about this.

Life as AI

‘The proportion [of British tertiary students] using AI tools [to submit written work] surged from 66% in 2024 to 92% in 2025, meaning just 8% of students are not using AI, according to a report published by the Higher Education Policy Institute and Kortext, a digital etextbook provider.

‘Josh Freeman, the report’s author, said such dramatic changes in behaviour in just 12 months were almost unheard of, and warned: “Universities should take heed: generative AI is here to stay.”‘ ‘UK universities warned to ‘stress-test’ assessments as 92% of students use AI’ The Guardian 24/2/25

And what that means is that you have to learn how to use one of the AI apps, but that would be about it.

Not only will IT hyper process your diet, it will eat it for you too.

• • • • • • • • •• • • • • • • • •

Life as Something Else

In this story Trump is not the problem; he is a symptom. He was elected, albeit narrowly and with some voters at least expressing buyers’ remorse, because he was able to find a sufficiently large bloc of people living out their media lives, social and otherwise, as reality. He was perfectly tailored for this role, his shameless unfitness actually being a major drawcard. This is hyper processed food making itself hyper palatable at a scale difficult to imagine and with potentially dreadful consequences.

Alarmist? When radio was broadcast for the first time in the early 20th century there were critics who thought that it would generate confusion and hysteria. For the first time you could send unfettered material into people’s living rooms, a process which couldn’t be regulated or stopped. Then there were the issues with the advent of TV which I am old enough to remember. It would rot children’s minds. They would sit there in front of the idiot box (yes, the idiot box, you may remember) goggle-eyed, not do their homework, and go to bed with their head full of rubbish.

Is this situation different? Here are three reasons why it could be.

One is scale. It hardly needs saying just how big and diverse the social media phenomenon is, and how rapidly it is changing. In front of your eyes it expands in all sorts of directions and in ways you can’t anticipate. (TikTok, for example, began in 2016 but has only really been going bang for six years. Just wait for the impact of AI. You will not believe it.) And of course, although I’ve been focusing on the US, it is a world-wide phenomenon. From past work I remember that Indonesians are the heaviest users of social media in the world. You can find connection in the Brazilian rainforests and the Norwegian tundra, literally anywhere you’d like to look. And you can find the same sorts of things happening in Turkiye, Hungary, Indonesia, the Philippines, Brazil, East Germany, Holland, … and serious attempts going on to find that audience in Australia. (Not as developed yet Dutts. It will be.)

A second reason is the nature and distributed form of engagement. Television was thought to be a particularly a problematic case because it combined image with sound and was thus vastly more impactful. But even so it was just received. Now you can answer back. Immediately. And, if you want to be in the game, you must. Everyone is or can be a publisher; this time it really is unfettered, and extremely powerful ways have been found of building your involvement. An incredibly sophisticated understanding of your cognitive bliss point has evolved, so much of which is emotion and so much of which can be rage. Fox Media and Murdoch’s journals might light the fuse, but the explosion occurs in your head and comes out via your typing fingers.

And the last is the ways in which this experience is monetized. So many ways, so very many ways. Netflix subscriptions, iCloud storage, WordPress payments are too obvious. You’d forgotten Alex Jones’ merch, Belle Gibson’s cancer cure tonics and Gwyneth Paltrow’s vaginal candles. The impression left after reading quite a lot of material about digital marketing is that it has become another economy with its own identity and rules and in the end not a thousand miles away from the scam which is bitcoin.

Thinking about the past American moguls, you could travel on their railroads, you could use their banks, you could put their petrol in your car which they had made for you. But what’s the product you’re consuming here? It’s somewhere in the air. You have to be persuaded it exists, you have to be persuaded of its fundamental necessity, you have to be persuaded that it’s one of the core functions of your life. And of course that’s happened. Could you live without digital connection? (Lost your phone? Bloody hell. What are you going to do now?) You don’t have to be persuaded any more; you and your friends are doing the companies’ work for them. That transition has occurred, is well over. You WILL pay because you MUST.

• • • • • • • • •

I haven’t neglected the obvious point that I wouldn’t, couldn’t, be writing this and you wouldn’t be getting it without access to these technological miracles. I am not trying to make a moral point here, just here anyway. It is just something that has happened: clever boys have run wild, driven by vivid and striking imaginings. You can make a lot of money, that’s part of it; and, like any mogul you can accumulate a lot of power. But, like clever boys who have run wild, they haven’t really been thinking about what they are doing and the whole range of its consequences.

Musk’s Twitter posts provide an outstanding illustration. After reading them — they were a must read for the industry — a social media executive said: ‘The dominant reaction from all the threads I’m in is Everyone looks so fucking dumb. It’s been a general Is this really how business is done? There’s no strategic thought or analysis. It’s just emotional and done without any real care for consequence.’

In other words, like a reactive organism rather than a cognate and civil being. This is also the biggest impact for their customers. Some — not all of course, but enough to elect Trump — are being turned from cognate and civil beings into reactive organisms. It’s not the amount of screen time although that matters; its the new ‘language’, in the broadest sense, of the content, and its violence. The ‘Like’ button changed everything.

• • • • • • • • •

There are two precious things at risk.

I have long thought that rationality in the sense that I want to use it here is a very fragile thing. It’s not something that you grow into automatically. It’s like a foreign language that has to be learnt over time and with a great deal of practice. Even then its use might not become habitual.

What am I talking about? We leap backwards to the Enlightenment where, to the chagrin of the church, a number of ideas about rationality and rational process were established. In no particular order and just for example, how to investigate causal relationships, how to explore and identify patterns in data, how to use and talk about the relevance and usefulness of various forms of evidence, the very idea of a fact and the separation of fact and fantasy and fact and opinion, and the value and practice of objectivity. If you had to summarise, you might describe this as a search for truth, an explanation of the world around you in which anyone could have confidence. Science from the Latin scientia, ‘observing and understanding our surroundings’.

I don’t think these are natural or instinctive behaviours. They are hard won byproducts of formal education, and always need protection and support. They are now being associated with behaviour by the ‘elites’ … the untrustworthy ‘elites’ whose only purpose in life is to shore up their own comfort, ease and security in their gilded towers and who also try to force everybody to respect choice of pronoun, Welcome to Country and men changing in the girls’ toilets. You say you’re an expert … well so am I. IMHO I know as much as you do because I’m alive.

Do these notions of rational process matter? They are artificial constructs but they are functional to the point of absolute necessity. Forget making fighter planes or flying to Mars, do you cross bridges with confidence? Do you have electricity? Does hot water run out of your tap? How is the pipe that brings that water fabricated? How are the plants you eat grown and nurtured? How do you avoid measles? Vaccination would be my choice, but then you might have another idea. Freedom of Speech. By the way have you seen the TikTok with the dog counting beans?

The idea of objective versions of truth has no obvious purchase on Trump and his crew. Acting as influencers for the influencable, they consistently model the way it can be ignored. But, on the other hand, they are operating in an increasingly fertile and newly supportive ‘I have alternative facts’ environment.

The second is the disruption of the social compact, the set of taken-for-granted understandings by which, for example, you are polite to people you don’t know, that you take turns, that you queue, that you are generous to people who are clearly less well off than you are, that you win with grace and speak courteously of your opponents, that you respect people’s right to air their views, that as a default you look for common ground. There’s those ones, and then there’s ones like accepting the outcome of a fairly contested election, respecting the legislative process, not interfering with the rule of law, trying to promote peaceful and constructive relationships in both micro and macro contexts.

For decades, for the term of my life, those things have been left lie, understood as ways you probably should behave. It’s how you train kids at primary school — a very good marker. You don’t always follow through of course, but if you think about it you assume they’re the optimum position. And you think that without detailed investigation. It’s just how things are. Obvious. We need to bump along together. Two lots of supporters can go to the footy and sit next to each other without getting into fights. Who’s going to try to pick that apart? It’s good. It’s how we get by. That’s all.

[WHAAAAAT! You think that? You’re a fucking idiot mate. Tell me your address and I’ll fucking dox you and your fucking mother. #auntie_jean]

What if you say manners are rubbish, you can just ignore them? Or, who said you have to be polite, or thoughtful, or considerate? What’s the comeback? Well dear, it’s a convention we have. Everybody does it or should do it. You don’t have to think about it.

In an article ‘Why the Past 10 Years of American Life Have Been Uniquely Stupid’ now two years old, Johnathon Haidt covers some of the same territory as I have here. (Let me warn you, his conclusions are bleaker.) At one point he notes:

‘A democracy depends on widely internalized acceptance of the legitimacy of rules, norms, and institutions. Blind and irrevocable trust in any particular individual or organization is never warranted. But when citizens lose trust in elected leaders, health authorities, the courts, the police, universities, and the integrity of elections, then every decision becomes contested; every election becomes a life-and-death struggle to save the country from the other side.‘

We depend so much on stable assumptions and expectations which are rarely subject to contest. When the hammer drill of social media, some social media, is applied to them the whole situation becomes far more insecure. And YOUR side is just as guilty of this as MY side.

Haidt quotes a fascinating study of ‘America’s polarized landscape’.

‘It identified seven groups that shared beliefs and behaviors. The one furthest to the right, known as the “devoted conservatives,” comprised 6 percent of the U.S. population. The group furthest to the left, the “progressive activists,” comprised 8 percent of the population. The progressive activists were by far the most prolific group on social media: 70 percent had shared political content over the previous year. The devoted conservatives followed, at 56 percent.

‘These two extreme groups are similar in surprising ways. They are the whitest and richest of the seven groups, which suggests that America is being torn apart by a battle between two subsets of the elite who are not representative of the broader society.

What’s more, they are the two groups that show the greatest homogeneity in their moral and political attitudes. This uniformity of opinion, the study’s authors speculate, is likely a result of thought-policing on social media: “Those who express sympathy for the views of opposing groups may experience backlash from their own cohort.” In other words, political extremists don’t just shoot darts at their enemies; they spend a lot of their ammunition targeting dissenters or nuanced thinkers on their own team. In this way, social media makes a political system based on compromise grind to a halt.’

The ‘lefty’ ‘liberal’ ‘Cancel Culture’ warriors are at least as culpable for the current situation — and probably for Trump’s win — as ‘the MAGA base’. The content of the conflict is almost irrelevant. It’s the conflict and all its testosterone-fuelled thrills that count. Fuck the damage. Fuck the consequences. My-rocks-are-off.

• • • • • • • • •

I know. You don’t eat much processed food. Yeah I know that. Me neither. You watch the ABC, maybe a bit of Britbox. Uh huh. You’ve forgotten to cancel your Netflix subscription. Yeah. Me too. You’re not on Socials except for a bit of Facebook to see what the kids are up to, but you don’t spend much time on it. Digital news media? Oh yeah sure. A couple of feeds. You’ve got Foxtel too? Yeah but just for the footy. You watch Sky every now and again, heh heh, to be honest just to get furious with that poor old prick Andrew Bolt and those preening young girls they have on. Like Rita Panahi, who the fuck does she think she is! Peta Credlin! Tony Abbot in drag you mean! You spend a bit of time, I know surfing is an archaic term, an anachronism, but surfing, seeing what’s around. Quite a bit of time really. Check things on Google. Someone said the other day, ‘Remember when people didn’t know things?’ I do, but I’m a bit of an outlier. You?

• • • • • • • • •

I have mentioned the SBS program that set me off thinking about this business. Another prompt was the sight of an apparently demure 60 year-old Texan woman walking down a road wearing a cape embroidered with ‘Fuck Joe Biden’ in enormous letters.

This was a third:

According to a Pentagon study, more than three-quarters of Americans between the ages of seventeen and twenty-four are ineligible to join the armed forces, because they are overweight, unable to pass the aptitude test, afflicted by physical or mental-health issues, or disqualified by such factors as a criminal record. 

It came from an article about the shortage of personnel in the American armed forces. It surely couldn’t be right I thought. Couldn’t be. I chased the source and it came from Military News Daily, what appears to be a sophisticated and authentic recruitment news site connected to the military.

But, like, who knows? The Zone is flooded with shit.