CW: Media Ecology, thread.

There’s a school of thought, which says our social and political structures are strongly influenced by the structural tendencies of our communication technologies. (I happen to subscribe to it, but not uncritically.)

Harold Innis argued that light media (like paper or telegraphy) tended to foster societies that were bureaucratic and expansionist. (Like Rome or the British Empire.) Heavy media tended to foster socio-political structures that were priestly and dynastic. (Like ancient Egypt.)

Of course, it’s always more complicated. And media ecology is rightly criticized for oversimplifying things. Most societies use a mixture of heavy and light media, e.g. most empires have a fixed imperial core with a strong sense of history.

But as a heuristic, it applies extremely well across most cases you apply it to!
https://mediatropes.com/index.php/Mediatropes/article/view/27166

The question this discourse has been struggling with since the 1970s is: What will be the socio-political paradigm of our still-dawning age of networked digital communication? I think we’ve begun to see the answer: globally networked localism.

Globally networked localism echoes the morphology of digital communications media and infrastructure. Ultra-heavy hubs (exchange point & data center; city & province) and myriad ultra-light channels of communication between myriad nodes (individuals, institutions, other hubs).

Under this new paradigm (in the USA), power devolves to mega-cities like New York and some states/regions, which assume greater autonomy from the federal system.

This occurs less through legal mechanisms, and more through the new ability to act independently which is afforded by digital communication technology. And by the failure of federal power to act, which has been reduced by this new techno-communicative paradigm.

This dynamic has become more visible in recent week, in part brought into relief by the stressor of COVID-19. Appropos this: https://twitter.com/RomancingNope/status/1246234872663945217

And this https://twitter.com/DrEricDing/status/1246332551502991360?s=20

Again, it’s not a simple 1:1 correspondence. Things are messy. New social, political, and technological arrangements are layered atop old ones. Inertia and brute force keep old ways going to the point of brittleness and unsustainability.

But the affordances of the new tech enable new ways of acting, which offer advantages to some socio-political arrangements, while discouraging others. ymmv

Trump is a creature of digital media. It’s why he’s so effective at undermining the stability of federal power and global cooperation—which are morphologically similar to the telegraph, telephone, and mass broadcast technologies of the federal golden age (1868-2015 lol).

But he is both the symptom and the cause of the federal system's reduced power to act. For one thing, digital communication technology leads to the election of executives like Trump, who seize upon digital media's preference for the outrageous and disruptive.

For another, the immediacy of ultra-light, ultra fast digital communication destroys the deliberative window necessary for strong federal governance. Insurgents enjoy greater power to disrupt and drive the deliberative conversaiton (for good and ill).

All of which has tended to make the Trumpian moment a mostly—maybe purely—destructive one. That is, both in terms of our psychotic public mood, demagogic leadership, and a legacy political apparatus out of step with the emerging techno-communicative paradigm.

What comes next, who seizes the moment, wrests & wields power—and if the outcome is sustainable or catastrophic—will come about largely as a consequence of how well they understand and can exploit these dynamics. Who can route around the damage.
https://twitter.com/jason_a_w/status/1246475931700449280?s=20
/fin