The Current Occupant is right, the media should quit whining. They should also stop giving him the attention he craves, and start doing journalism: what is going on behind this storm of circus ballyhoo? The other day, NPR’s All Things Considered featured several pundits puzzling over why they were puzzling over the man’s lies, damned… Continue reading The Great and Terrible Oz
A Hierarchy of Contexts
We speak and act within a certain set of assumptions about the world. These contextual assumptions are usually not questioned, and within one context the possibility that there might be a greater one containing the present agreed conditions does not usually occur to us. For example, in a football game, the context is winning the… Continue reading A Hierarchy of Contexts
The New Attention Economy And The Rise Of Authoritarianism
Sometime between the Presidential campaigns of 2008 and 2016 a paradigmatic shift in communications technologies took place that altered the balance of power for all humanity.
Public Atrocities as Crimes of Power
Individuals vying for power in the Attention Age do so on a scale measured in increments of momentary mass aggregated attention. This may account for the increasing horror of mass shootings in America, as the individual perpetrators compete for market share against the entire field of contenders, including the President of the United States. Since… Continue reading Public Atrocities as Crimes of Power
The Paradigm Shift
Until very recently the kind of event that could induce a similar brain-state in a group of people, binding them together in terror or jubilation, had to be something like a war. This is no longer the case: a "tweet" will do it...
