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The intensity of belief on the right has begun to vary inversely with plausibility. Precisely because the “threat” posed by the caravan is facially absurd, believing in it — performing belief in it — is a powerful act of shared identity reinforcement, of tribal solidarity.

Once that support system is in place, Trump is unbound, free to impose his fantasies on reality. He can campaign on Republicans protecting people with preexisting conditions even as the GOP sues to block such protections. He can brush off Mueller’s revelations and fire anyone who might threaten him. He can use imaginary Democratic voter fraud to cover up red-state voter suppression. He can use antifa as a pretext for deploying troops domestically.

Trump does not view himself as president of the whole country. He views himself as president of his white nationalist party — their leader in a war on liberals. He has all the tools of a head of state with which to prosecute that war. Currently, he is restrained only by the lingering professionalism of public servants and a few thin threads of institutional inertia.

Strong leader Senator Jellison (who is white) then asks former Shire founder Hugo Beck what went wrong, and Beck says his fellow hippies just never realized how great technology and laissez-faire economics were, and now all his old friends are dining on human flesh under the thumb of a scary black communist.

Today, Lucifer’s Hammer reads as a depiction of a post-apocalyptic war between Trump counties and Clinton counties, simultaneously promising American renewal even as it depicts unavoidable catastrophe. The comet acts as a cleansing, wiping away so much dead wood of civilization. (Feminism, too, comes in for repeated knocks.)

SDI was only one part of a larger right-wing techno-futurist project. SDI historian Edward Linenthal cites a 1983 interview with Newt Gingrich in which the young conservative Congressman predicted that SDI would not just destroy Russia’s Communists but liberalism, too. SDI would be “a dagger at the heart of the liberal welfare state” because it destroys “the liberal myth of scarcity,” leaving only “the limits of a free people’s ingenuity, daring, and courage.”

the media won’t give the same time of day or coverage to communities who are being targeted by hate violence. They are spending so much time humanizing white nationalists and humanizing white supremacy that in many ways the news media  routinely ignore the ubiquitous and every day hate that communities of color and other diverse communities experience in this country

a majority of white Americans feel they are victims of discrimination. What these white Americans have to do is unpack their own anxiety, discuss this rage, and understand that the project of civil rights, human rights, equality under the law are not an assault on their racial identity. I think for some white voters it is probably about what they perceive as waning demographic and economic power

The good news is I learned from my travels around the country that the survivors of hate, people who have lost so much, are not only rebuilding but they are coming forward and they are reclaiming their lives. These survivors are working with allies to stop the hatred, building community defense programs and are willing to engage in difficult conversations with people who see the world differently from them. And I think that is something to really admire. Given what’s transpired survivors of hate have every reason to turn their backs on this country.

Harassment and misogyny had been problems in the community for years before this; the deep resentment and anger toward women that powered Gamergate percolated for years on internet forums. Robert Evans, a journalist who specializes in extremist communities and the host of the Behind the Bastards podcast, described Gamergate to me as partly organic and partly born out of decades-long campaigns by white supremacists and extremists to recruit heavily from online forums. “Part of why Gamergate happened in the first place was because you had these people online preaching to these groups of disaffected young men,” he said. But what Gamergate had that those previous movements didn’t was an organized strategy, made public, cloaking itself as a political movement with a flimsy philosophical stance, its goals and targets amplified by the power of Twitter and a hashtag.

The hate campaign, we would later learn, was the moment when our ability to repress toxic communities and write them off as just “trolls” began to crumble. Gamergate ultimately gave way to something deeper, more violent, and more uncontrollable.

Police have to learn how to keep the rest of us safe from internet mobs

If you’re born now, your native culture is global, to an increasing extent. There are things that are unknowable for futurists of any stripe, be they science-fiction writing charlatans like myself or anthropologists in the employ of large automobile companies who are paid to figure out what people might want in ten years. One of the things that’s unknowable is how humanity will use any new technology. No one imagines that we’d wind up with a world that looks like this on the basis of the technology that’s emerged in the last hundred years. Emergent technology is the most powerful single driver of change in the world, and it has been forever. Technology trumps politics. Technology trumps religion. It just does. And that’s why we are where we are now. It seems so self-evident to me that I can never go to that Technology: threat or menace? position. Okay, well, if we don’t do this, what are we going to do? This is not only what we do, it’s literally who we are as a species. We’ve become something other than what our ancestors were. I’m sitting here at age 52 with almost all of my own teeth. That didn’t used to happen. I’m a cyborg. I’m immune to any number of lethal diseases by virtue of technology. I’m sitting on top of this enormous pyramid of technology that starts with flint hand-axes and finds me in a hotel in Austin, Texas, talking to someone thousands of miles away on a telephone and that’s just what we do. At this point, we don’t have the option of not being technological creatures.

You’ve taken to Twitter (GreatDismal). I have indeed. I’ve taken to Twitter like a duck to water. Its simplicity allows the user to customize the experience with relatively little input from the Twitter entity itself. I hope they keep it simple. It works because it’s simple. I was never interested in Facebook or MySpace because the environment seemed too top-down mediated. They feel like malls to me. But Twitter actually feels like the street. You can bump into anybody on Twitter.

Twitter’s huge. There’s a whole culture of people on Twitter who do nothing but handicap racehorses. I’ll never go there. One commonality about people I follow is that they’re all doing what I’m doing: They’re all using it as novelty aggregation and out of that grows some sense of being part of a community. It’s a strange thing. There are countless millions of communities on Twitter. They occupy the same virtual space but they never see each other. They never interact. Really, the Twitter I’m always raving about is my Twitter.

The Information World War has already been going on for several years. We called the opening skirmishes “media manipulation” and “hoaxes”, assuming that we were dealing with ideological pranksters doing it for the lulz (and that lulz were harmless). In reality, the combatants are professional, state-employed cyberwarriors and seasoned amateur guerrillas pursuing very well-defined objectives with military precision and specialized tools. Each type of combatant brings a different mental model to the conflict, but uses the same set of tools.

There are also small but highly-skilled cadres of ideologically-motivated shitposters whose skill at information warfare is matched only by their fundamental incomprehension of the real damage they’re unleashing for lulz. A subset of these are conspiratorial — committed truthers who were previously limited to chatter on obscure message boards until social platform scaffolding and inadvertently-sociopathic algorithms facilitated their evolution into leaderless cults able to spread a gospel with ease.

There’s very little incentive not to try everything: this is a revolution that is being A/B tested.

“Awesomeness” doesn’t necessarily have to mean “life-changing wisdom from the fountain of genius.” Sometimes it just means holding yourself to a higher standard in your day-to-day content and avoiding getting into a rut just for the sake of consistency. And wherever you produce content — videos, podcasts, blogs, ads, Facebook — it’s more important than ever that you focus on what you have to offer instead of searching for widgets and plug-ins and toolbars to help you offer it slightly better. The days when people would idly surf the Web, grazing on what they could find, are largely over. Today, we've largely surrendered the discovery process to our social networks, feeding off the great links our friends have found and liked enough to share. Which means that consistency and audience loyalty aren't going to be enough anymore. You're going to need to make sure that everything you create is erupting with potential to be shared. Then you'll find the process is all around a heck of a lot easier. 

a medium without a message is little more than static

The great turning points occur when new, more complex energy regimes converge with communications revolutions, fundamentally altering human consciousness in the process. This happened in the late 18th century, when coal and steam power ushered in the industrial age. Print technology was vastly improved and became the medium to organise myriad new activities. It also changed the wiring of the human brain, leading to a great shift from theological to ideological consciousness. Enlightenment philosophers - with some exceptions - peered into the psyche and saw a rational creature obsessed with autonomy and driven by the desire to acquire property and wealth.Today, we are on the verge of another seismic shift. Distributed information and communication technologies are converging with distributed renewable energies, creating the infrastructure for a third industrial revolution. Over the next 40 years, millions of buildings will be overhauled to collect the surrounding renewable energies. These energies will be stored in the form of hydrogen and any surplus electricity will be shared over continental inter-grids managed by internet technologies. People will generate their own energy, just as they now create their own information and, as with information, share it with millions of others.

the early stages of a transformation from ideological consciousness to biosphere consciousness

This new understanding goes hand-in-hand with discoveries in evolutionary biology, neuro-cognitive science and child development that reveal that human beings are biologically predisposed to be empathic.

When Devo formed more than 40 years ago, we never dreamed that two decades into the 21st century, everything we had theorized would not only be proven, but also become worse than we had imagined

May 4 changed my life, and I truly believe Devo would not exist without that horror. It made me realize that all the Quasar color TVs, Swanson TV dinners, Corvettes, and sofa beds in the world didn't mean we were actually making progress. It meant the future could be not only as barbaric as the past, but that it most likely would be. The dystopian novels 1984, Animal Farm, and Brave New World suddenly seemed less like cautionary tales about the encroaching fusion of technological advances with the centralized, authoritarian power of the state, and more like subversive road maps to condition the intelligentsia for what was to come.

a philosophy emerged, fueled by the revelations that linear progress in a consumer society was a lie

as research on “priming” shows, simply discussing race at all kicks up those effects among the racially dominant group. Or to put it more bluntly, in the US context: White people really don’t like being called white people. They don’t like being reminded that they are white people, part of a group with discernible boundaries, shared interests, and shared responsibilities

one of the benefits of being in the dominant demographic and cultural group is that you are allowed to simply be a person, a blank slate upon which you can write your own individual story. You have no baggage but what you choose

The power and privilege that come along with that — being the base model, a person with no asterisk — are invisible to many white men. Simply calling them “white people,” much less questioning the behavior or beliefs of white people, drags that power and privilege into the open

Culture of Fear argues that media and political fear-mongering teaches consumers and voters to see problems in terms of stories about heroic individuals, rather than about social or political factors.  The contexts get set aside, replaced with more relatable tales of villainous criminals and virtuous victims, which Glassner calls “neurologizing social problems” (217). There is also a curious, quietly conservative politics of the family involved.  Such fears emphasize stranger danger, which is actually statistically very rare.  Instead, they minimize the far more likely source of harm most American face: our family members (31).

fake fears reveal cultural anxieties, much as horror stories do

“news is what happens to your editors.”  By that he means “editors – and their bosses… [and] their families, friends, and business associates”(201)

Remember that for *decades* American violent crime has gone steadily down, but most Americans have been convinced we lived under a nightmarish crime siege. CNN plays a key role in that, as I and others have shown. CNN has continuously celebrated violent crime stories far, far out of proportion to their reality.

As an information source, CNN helped skew Americans’ sense of reality in terms of violent crime. As things got better, they took exquisite care to make sure we thought they were the opposite. Why does this matter?

remember that Trump won in 2016 in part by arguing that America was under siege from violent crime. Who do you think convinced about 1/4th of American voters of this idea?  Social media played some role, which is in the public eye now, but tv’s huge role is underappreciated

The effectiveness of psychographic targeting is one bet being made by an increasing number of media companies when it comes to interrupting your viewing experience with advertising messages.

“Across the board, articles that were in top emotional categories, such as love, sadness and fear, performed significantly better than articles that were not.”

ESPN and USA Today are also using psychographic rather than demographic targeting to sell to advertisers, including in ESPN’s case, the decision to not show you advertising at all if your team is losing.

The vast majority of the company’s content is apolitical—and that is certainly the way the company portrays itself.

But here’s the thing: TheSoul Publishing also posts history videos with a strong political tinge. Many of these videos are overtly pro-Russian. One video posted on Feb. 17, 2019, on the channel Smart Banana, which typically posts listicles and history videos, claims that Ukraine is part of Russia

the video gives a heavily sanitized version of Josef Stalin’s time in power and, bizarrely, suggests that Alaska was given to the United States by Soviet leader Nikita Khruschev

Now, I’m 16, and I’ve been able to reflect on how I got sucked into that void—and how others do, too. My brief infatuation with the alt-right has helped me understand the ways big tech companies and their algorithms are contributing to the problem of radicalization—and why it’s so important to be skeptical of what you read online.

while a quick burst of radiation probably won’t give you cancer, prolonged exposure is far more dangerous. The same is true for the alt-right. I knew that the messages I was seeing were wrong, but the more I saw them, the more curious I became. I was unfamiliar with most of the popular discussion topics on Reddit. And when you want to know more about something, what do you do? You probably don’t think to go to the library and check out a book on that subject, and then fact check and cross reference what you find. If you just google what you want to know, you can get the information you want within seconds.

I started googling things like “Illegal immigration,” “Sandy Hook actors,” and “Black crime rate.” And I found exactly what I was looking for.