The Dark Enlightenment has settled on an acronym: AAA. It was, yes, already taken--but when you are The Dark Enlightenment, you take what you want. AAA is the name for a plan that will bring about The End times for democracy. It stands for: Agree, Amplify, and Accelerate (it could have been AAaA--that would've been scary-cool).
What the heck?
The Heck
The Dark Enlightenment is a philosophical / intellectual movement that believes (among other things) that Democracy is doomed to an ever-leftward debasement which will lead to the collapse of civilization (or something worse). The thinking is that, given the dynamics of the media, higher education, and a general sheep-like populace, this disease (liberal Democracy) is fatal. It's unstoppable and the best you can hope for is euthanasia. The AAA strategy is basically next-level left-wing 'trolling' wherein the DE crowd throws their weight behind the goofiest left-wing ideas and conventions they can find in an attempt to bring down the Tower of Babel before it's hit by lightning from God*.
It could also:
- Convince Republicans to abandon Democracy altogether (which would hopefully recruit them to the DE's preferred enlightened monarchy solution to good governance)
- Expose the Cthulhu-esque nature of The Left, possibly breaking off more adherents to the Endarkenment.
The Omnivore is always in favor of artful trolling (Outside In invokes Poe's Law that absent a clear statement of the author's intent extremism and a parody of extremism is indistinguishable). Everyone is thrilled with the banned fake-twitter account Salondotcom which tweeted absurd fake headlines from the real (and very liberal) Salon.com that no one could distinguish from the (absurd) real ones.
Would This Work?
Well, there are three possible outcomes so let's see ...
1. Hastening the Collapse of Society
Problematically, society has not been getting worse. This is (or may be) an issue for The Endarkenment as a philosophy but it is also an issue for Republicans on more tactical grounds--specifically social conservatives. For the Endarkenment, the theory is that badness happened more than a hundred years ago (whenever the media became predominant and education flipped to lefists ... probably due to tenure) and the degradation is now ever growing. That's hard to show from the data.
For So-Cons the model is that more or less things got better until maybe the 1950's at which point hippies came along and ruined it for everyone. That is pretty much impossible to show (either pro or con) since we don't have the long-view yet (we can look at Coming Apart's data and, hey, who knows--but really, the jury hasn't come back yet).
The problem is that Agree, Amplify, and Accelerate isn't necessarily going to speed the 'march of progress' along. It's just the Internet equivalent of the Human Microphone. The Human Microphone was #OccupyWallStreet's answer to NYC's laws against amplified speech. It used a bunch of humans repeating what the speaker said in unison at the top of their lungs every few words.
It was just as annoying as it sounds and it never went anywhere. The Endarkenment providing a 'signal boost' to the most crazy elements of the Left won't, for example, make politicians think it's mainstream--it'll just annoy everyone.
2. Convince Republicans to Abandon Democracy
Uh--no. However, losing the 2016 elections combined with failing to pick up more than 5 seats in the Senate this year would probably do that by itself--no AAA needed. The roadblock here is that the alternative to Democracy (a technocratic monarchy run by uber-nerds) looks cray-cray to most Republicans and the lack of a concrete plan to get there looks unworkable to everyone else.
The second reason is that hard core Republicans are memitically vaccinated against the AAA weapon.
Huh?
Oh, you already know this--it's like so: a vaccine takes a non-virulent form of the virus and injects into you so your immune system gets used to fighting it / living with it. When the real thing shows up your guys are armed and ready. It works the same way for memes.
Today most every hard core base-voting Republican has already been told that the Lamestream media is against them, that voter-fraud is what wins most elections for the Democrats, and that the halls of higher education have been taken over by The Left (thanks tenure ...).
No only do they believe this, they also don't do anything about it. Their leaders (who play into this because it gives them tactical advantages when things go badly ... and, uh, because the mainstream media really is pretty consistently left) don't react as though the nation had already fallen. When they fail to react as though the nation has already fallen, it reinforces faith in the system (We'll get'em NEXT ELECTION!). When it reinforces faith in the system, the virulence factor is negated.
In other words, the Right's complaint since before the Clinton era is actually a vaccine.
Now, as The Omnivore said up front, that's breaking down--there are clouds on the horizon for Republican's faith in the system: The popular vote of the last five general elections, the last two Republican presidential candidates, the last Republican primary, and the hopeless nature of some Tea Party candidates (not to mention the latest R-on-R violence in Mississippi and Eric Cantors loss) has given rise to a new strain of revolutionary seen in the praise at the highest levels for rancher Cliven Bundy and his 'Whisky / Cattle Rebellion.'
But, in any event, it won't be the rhetoric that causes Republicans to abandon hope for Democracy--it'll be the ballot box.
3. Breaking Off Moderates
Signal boosting the loony-left could break off people from the middle and drive them to the right. That's certainly possible. The problem with a campaign of Poe's Law Trolling is that the barrier to entry for wide-spread readership is so low that everyone is doing it from all sides. For every radical there is an equal and opposite counter-radical.
Both are equally easy to hear no matter how marginal or misguided the voice.
Let's look at the recent Twitter phenomena: #WomenAgainstFeminism. This bit of #Hashtag Activism is comprised of tweets and the tumbler of (generally young) women holding up signs confusing radical feminism with feminism or deciding that there's no longer any such thing as sexism.
To quote one commenter on Jezebel:
Tuesday 7:33pm If I were a man and some woman piped up with "I'm not a feminist..." I would look her in the eye and say "Excuse me. MEN are talking here" and then ignore her for the rest of the evening.
I think this is the only time I've had penis envy.
It is in direct response to #YesAllWomen, which sprung up in the wake of the recent mass shooting to call out how 'all women' experience 'harassment.'
The point is not that #YesAllWomen was wrong (nor even that #WomenAgainstFeminism is wrong--although confusing radical feminism with mainstream feminism is a pretty weak and pervasive generalization on its part). The point is that if you go to either data-stream and swim around through it you'll discover plenty of stuff to be shocked or outraged about.
Gross generalizations, broad-brush accusations, provocative statements made with little or no back-up, and general jaw-droppers. Both of these feeds have received fairly mainstream, widespread acknowledgement: these are not dark corners of the Internet.
It's also pretty clear that they aren't likely to drive movement in attitudes. The whole A-A-A theory, that advocacy changes minds, is probably wrong. People likely fist-pump for whatever they believe and ignore things they don't. In any event, a real innocent who was easily persuaded would click on one, then the other, and then just give up in a cross-fire of Internet driven outrage.
In short, no--AAA isn't going to convince anyone. It just makes the noise louder.
Conclusions
The real problem with Let-It-Burn / Make-It-Burn scenarios is that no one has any idea what (a) burning looks like or (b) the recovery looks like. Perhaps the gray wastes of Canada's societal collapse lie in our future--or maybe the left-wing march will goose-step us to a literal Nazi Germany style fascist society--but we don't know. We can't: it's never happened and we have no good predictive model (the horror of rainbow wrapped gay hamburgers looms on the horizon though**)
A revolution without a plan is just a teenage rebellion even if it's casts in a way that'd be both ineffective and a lot of fun to watch!
* Gnon
** "When do we get a straight-hamburger, Daddy?"
"Every other hamburger is a straight-hamburger, son."
I really wouldn't call the American mainstream media left-wing. Not by my standards.
ReplyDeleteAnd as a general rule, dark corners of the internet are friendlier and more intelligent than the bright open spaces. Compare the comments here to the comments on YouTube or a major news website.
I agree with Ommie's bunkification / dismissal of the "AAA" theory (can we rebrand it as the Wilhelm Scream Gambit? Please?) on tactical grounds. Ask yourself this: if you disagree with, say, a blog post on general principles, how likely would you be to change your mind about it if its points were rendered in ALL CAPS, LIKE THIS?
ReplyDeleteFor me, amplification merely cranks up the annoyance / nutjob factor, not persuasiveness. Not to give away free tips to the Forces of Evil (bozo nightmare optional), but I find that if an opinion is well-crafted, spellchecked, and makes use of grammar which wouldn't disgust a high-school English teacher, I'm more likely to take it seriously. I didn't have much common ground with, say, William F. Buckley Jr., but - credit where it's due - the man was no fool. Most extremists, on the other hand, can't spell or punctuate worth a damn.
And if the foregoing has the trollers and crazies upping their game, linguistically speaking, why then 'tis said that a rising tide lifts all ships, innit?
-- Ω