It was called MSNBC. It stole Fox News’s playbook and changed the cheap conservative opinions into cheap liberal ones.
Millions of people watched it every night, convinced that they were being given the inside scoop on how the Trump Presidency would crumble.
Because MSNBC wasn’t a jar of mustard, it didn’t come with a short narrative about its values, so maybe you can’t blame its viewers for being ignorant of who was manufacturing their opinion.
But still.
The letters N-B-C appear in MSNBC.
And as everyone remembers, NBC was the broadcast network that aired fourteen seasons of The Apprentice.
The Apprentice starred Donald J. Trump, and it was on that show where he honed the skills of televised humiliation and abuse which he would use to win the Presidency.
His last episode aired on February 16th, 2015 AD.
He declared his candidacy for the Presidency on June 16th, 2015 AD.
Comcast Corporation, which owns NBC, made big money off Donald J. Trump before he won the Presidency.
And then they made money after.
And, look, I can’t judge any writer who gets paid by Rupert Murdoch.
I took money from Penguin Random House, and if I hadn’t had a huge commercial failure, I’d be no different than anyone else.
I’d still be there, just another haute bourgeoisie aspirant chasing my small piece of the global media landscape.
I’d be hoping to crawl through the window before they locked it from the inside.
And to put an even finer point on it: through media coverage which generated advertising revenues, I Hate the Internet made money for Rupert Murdoch.
I didn’t even sign a contract with the devil and I still work for him.
Now here I am, disgruntled, and I’m like those Science Fiction writers of the Twentieth Century AD.
I see the future.
If you look at the corporate history of publishing, it’s been the reallocation of assets from smaller pools of capital into larger pools of capital.
Within twenty years, at least one major American publisher will be majority owned by a conglomerate from either China or the Middle East.
Probably Qatar.
Maybe Saudi Arabia.
And then your moral instruction will come from writers who are cashing cheques signed by repressive regimes with long histories of human rights abuses.
Your opinions will come from writers who will be no different than New York University.
They will be founts of knowledge and they will be economically powered by hegemonies built with slave labor.
And you’ll still be more concerned about who made your mustard.
None of this would be of any consequence.
Regardless of what is printed on tote bags, in normal circumstances books have no impact on the governing of any society.
And neither does television.
Popular entertainment is meaningless.
In a sane world, I’d be using the example of publishing to illustrate the increasing consolidation of wealth and money in the hands of a transnational global oligarchy, and bitching about how this excludes freaks from achievement in the arts.
But something terrible happened in 2016 AD: the ghosts of one million dead Iraqis cried out for a just revenge against their killers.
And the world listened.
And so a rogue member of the Celebrity branch of American governance took over the Presidency.
And Penguin Random House publishes his books.
And so does Simon & Schuster.
And so does Macmillan.
And so does HarperCollins.
But not Hachette.
There’s still hope!
Ignore the arms dealing of its corporate parent!
Except:
La Librairie Hachette craignait, à juste titre, que les résistants n’appliquent à la lettre le programme du Conseil National de la Résistance (CNR) et ne nationalisent cet exceptionnel outil que les nazis admiraient et dont ils avaient envisagé de faire la base d’une énorme entreprise européenne placée sous leur contrôle… Obligés de céder, ils firent tout pour maintenir leurs positions au plus haut niveau dans la reconfiguration du capital envisagée. À la Libération, pour être sûrs que nul ne songerait à les accabler, ils firent réécrire une partie de leurs archives, en ajoutant par exemple qu’au cours d’une entrevue, Laval s’était montré glacial alors que, dans les faits, il avait été d’un commerce agréable, ou d’autres remarques que l’historien éprouve les plus grandes difficultés à repérer quand il consulte aujourd’hui ces documents savamment élagués en 1945.{Mollier, Jean-Yves. “L’édition française dans la tourmente de la Seconde Guerre mondiale.” Vingtième Siècle. Revue d’histoire 2011/4 (n° 112).}
Imagine a litter of three-month-old kittens. They are locked in a box. No light penetrates the box. There is a steady supply of oxygen. There is no food or water.
The kittens are kept in the box beyond the point of starvation and dehydration.
They shriek and they moan, and they rend each other with their claws.
They kill each other.
The dead are eaten by the living.
One kitten will survive the rest, nourished on the corpses of its siblings, but its suffering will be the longest and, in its final days, it will die the worst death, lacking even the analgesic numbness that comes with inflicting pain on another living being.
Because they are dumb animals trapped in the immediacy of a terrible situation, none of the kittens will ask the right question.
None of the kittens will ask: “Who locked me in this box?”
The defense mechanisms that you’ve been given as a member of a Western liberal democracy will not save you and they will not save your children.
It will take several decades, but your future, and theirs, is digitally inflected feudalism.
There’s a slow train coming.
Everyone knows it.
Your life, and your body, will have only one purpose.
You will make money for monsters beyond the Cash Horizon.
You will be the slave of HRH.
And because you will not kill the rich or mandate a wave of socialism, the best idea that you’ll have will be to exercise your franchise at the ballot box, where you will choose a candidate who’ll sell you down the river at the first flash of cash.
And your second-best idea will be to go out in public and fight with another poor person while a third poor person captures the action on a smartphone that they will turn into a monetarily profitable video for Facebook, Twitter, and Google.
And your third-best idea will be to become a cynical asshole who lies for money and writes thinkpieces to manipulate the emotions of naïve morons on the Internet.
And your fourth-best idea will be to become one of the naïve morons, and you will make money for your global overlords by pretending into devices built by slaves that the worst thing in the world is whenever a honky gas station attendant insults someone from Honduras.
And your worst idea will be to keep your head down and try to make a reasonably decent life while buying more shit and imagining that you have a special relationship with sports teams, the Celebrity branch of American governance, and intellectual property in which you have no economic stake.
None of this will save you.
If there are still historians in the future, and that’s a big if, and their histories are not sanitized at the behest of centralized organizations, my guess is that the Twenty-First Century AD will be seen as the time when all the reasonably decent ideas developed by the Left were co-opted and conquered by the Right.