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- [00:00]
A
Marjorie Taylor Greene can become the liberal devil. That's the world that we live in. And so trying to apply existing frameworks, white Christian nationalism to Trump to maga, it's always gonna fall short because it's just fundamentally misdiagnosing what has happened.
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Hello and welcome to the four four Media podcast where we bring you unparalleled access to hidden worlds, both online and IRL. Four4Media is journalist founded and needs your support. To subscribe, go to Four4Media Co as well as bonus content every single week. Subscribers get access to additional episodes where we respond to their best comments. Subscribers also get early access to our interview series. Gain access to that content at four four media Co. This week we're joined by Whitney Phillips. Whitney is the author of several books about Internet culture and ethics, including this Is why We can't have Nice Things and the Ambivalent Internet. She's a professor of information politics and media ethics at the University of Oregon and also one of my favorite people to talk to and listen to because she's a genius when it comes to the kind of Internet culture and platform dynamics we report on every day at Four4Media. I wanted to talk to Whitney today because it's been a few years since we talked in depth about the state of the Internet and so much has changed in that time, sadly for the worst. And I really wanted some help in understanding the current state of things, as bad as they are. Whitney, thank you so much for coming on the podcast.
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A
Thank you so much for having me. It's great to see you.
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B
I want to start with your book, co, authored, we should note, with Brian Milner, titled Share Better and Stress A Guide to Thinking Ecologically about Social Media. Because I think we're going to use this framework to guide our discussion. Discussion what does it mean to think ecologically about social media?
- [01:58]
A
Yeah, the primary entry point into that is just whatever is happening right now is not all that's happening. And the natural world is really useful in thinking about how that's true. I mean, you could be standing anywhere in a beautiful vista or wherever you might be in the country or the world, and whatever is happening in that moment. There's so many other forces and factors, but both just meteorological, also human made, that are impacting what the world is like for you in that moment. And it's really easy to get kind of trapped in this feeling that where I am right now and what I'm seeing is all there is to see. But an ecological framework kind of forces you to remember that's never True. And it then encourages you to ask yourself, how can you triangulate yourself within the landscape? I mean, in the natural world, it's look up, look down, look all around, and online. There are three places. Or in the previous work that I've done, I've focused on three places. So how do you relate to or how can you understand yourself in relation to the technologies themselves, the actual material stuff and regulatory frameworks in which everything happens? How do you relate to or triangulate yourself alongside other people? Sociological kinds of dynamics, interpersonal dynamics? And then how do you relate to yourself, your own nervous system, your body, the way that you are in the world, not just as a mind, but as. As a body that's reacting to stress, which can very powerfully impact not just how you're communicating, but how you're cognizing. But recent work has really pushed me to think more about a fourth dynamic to this, which is historical thinking that we are in this moment because of recent trends, recent history. But a lot of my work has looked all the way back to the Cold War to think about where has specifically the figure of the liberal devil, like, where did we get this idea of the left and libs as this amalgamated kind of half of a culture war? That. That is a historical conversation that you can trace back many decades. And it's really important to understanding where, not just what is so challenging about our present moment, but why. So when you put all of those four things together, it is the equivalent of looking up, looking down, and looking all around. And you're able to then situate yourself in a way that you can better ask the question, what might happen if I post something? What might happen if I respond or don't respond? And there's never easy answers because the world is complicated, but it helps you kind of identify what's there beyond your immediate experience. And that is, I think, to me, the basis of all ethical inquiry. So it's using the natural world to think about how big things are and how we relate to those things.
- [04:55]
B
Yeah, I think that's a great explanation. I think another way I think about it and a reason that our work found each other, like the stuff that we were doing at the time at Motherboard and you were writing at the time, is we both were kind of growing up with and evolving with the Internet. And for a long time, everything, both in the thinking about it and what was happening on the Internet, was very reactive. And I think that is because of the nature of, like, the immediacy of this new media, of the Internet and what we wanted to do at Motherboard. And I think what your work does and what you just described is zooming out and seeing that it's not just what's happening in the moment. It's like all these systems and adding all this additional context which allows us to figure out what is actually happening. And the ecological metaphor, I think, works really well. And I'm very proud that you did some of that work on Motherboard at the time, because, I mean, especially now, when you use the ecological framework, it's easy to make the connection to pollution. And I think since we've last talked, there have been, I would say, the two major changes to the ecology or the ecosystem of the Internet, in my opinion. I want to know what you think. But it's like the two big events are Elon Musk taking over Twitter and shifting that platform entirely. And I think that kind of dragged social media overall outside of Twitter in a certain direction. And then roughly at the same time, the rise of generative AI and what we call AI slop. And if I try to, like, use the ecological metaphor there, it's hard for me to even come up with, like, a sufficiently severe kind of comparison. Like, initially I was thinking it's like, oh, it's like the Exxon Valdez oil spill or something. But even that, I think, is not as significant as what those two changes did to the Internet. It's like it's more like a meteor hitting the earth or something. But let's go through them one by one. How would you describe what has happened on Twitter and how that shifted the ecology of the Internet?
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A
I mean, I do think that Musk's acquisition is astronomically important. I also, though, would say that even though Facebook doesn't occupy the same role in terms of, well, different audiences engage, have engaged with different platforms, and Facebook has certainly been very powerful with certain audiences, not necessarily the same audiences that were on Twitter. But you can see within both Musk's acquisition and his overall trajectory, and also Mark Zuckerberg's overall trajectory and his attitude towards Facebook and how he's approached content moderation, or lack thereof on Facebook, they actually are mapping onto something that's a little. That's bigger, I think, than just the changes in Twitter themselves, because those changes happened because there was this. One of the ways that I talk about the last few years is I try to think about, well, what. What shifted because we were writing and talking about a lot of trends that were moving in a problematic direction 15 years ago. Right. But then things accelerated. At a certain point, and I've tried to pinpoint what is it. And as I understand it, I think about these different media dynamics that have pushed us to this moment. And one of the most important is the way that the sort of enemy other was coalesced around Covid. And I refer to that as a kind of great amalgamation because it's when you see a lot of the kind of already existing right wing discourses where journalists are the enemy and, you know, institutions or the various institutions are the enemy, but you start seeing that collide then with a bunch of other stuff that was all happening concurrently. So that was around the time people were freaking out about critical race theory. And it was the early days of people starting to freak out about groomer stuff. And obviously Covid gets sucked into that. Obviously QAnon is driving some of that, obviously. And Epstein, of course, is connected to that too. Then you've got the election and the aftermath, and then you have January 6th. So all of these things are coming together in this one moment and it creates a world in which Elon Musk, for example, the way he talked about the acquisition of Twitter, part of the reason he did that was because he had internalized this sweeping overarching enemy that was a threat to freedom and was making it impossible for real people to live, basically. I mean, that's how he talked about Cancel Culture and the sort of leftist the Woke Mind virus. That was his discourse at that time. And it corresponded also to his daughter coming out as trans. And so Musk then acquires Twitter not just on a personal whim, but as a response to becoming kind of sucked into this. This mode of amalgamation of all of these things being reframed, coded, encoded and decoded as left and liberal. And then he needed to fight back. So he was fighting back against what he saw was this, you know, a masked enemy that was a threat to what he saw as. As being sort of real humanity, the humanity that he cares about. And that's why he did that, you know, so. So you have to situate. He is a product of the overall media ecosystem that really took a radicalizing turn around 2020 to squish a bunch of stuff together that made a lot of people very angry and reactive, like in a way that hadn't quite. We were moving in that direction, but it hadn't quite happened. I mean, we forget. But back in 2020, you know, Zuckerberg was just getting a bunch of heat from the right wing because Facebook was taking as was trying to moderate Covid mis and disinformation it was trying to respond to election denialism. It was doing all of this stuff. Zuckerberg himself had been involved in election integrity initiatives heading into and in the immediate aftermath of 2020. And then again, the turn happens, and so he starts to get increasing pressure politically that all of the stuff he had been doing, which is not partisan. Election integrity is not a partisan issue. Misinformation around a global pandemic, not a partisan issue, but it becomes a partisan issue. It becomes a leftist, liberal thing. And over time, over that period of time, he starts to essentially exercise his liberal demons. That is how he talks about the shifts in Facebook's moderation policies. I forget, maybe it was right after the 2024 election when he's talking about, you know, they're moving their moderation teams to Texas because there was too much bias in California. You know, he's not making. He's not. We don't have to read the tea leaves here. That he's specifically saying Facebook got too woke and so we had to do something to stop it that we. We got out of control. And so these two men reacting to being influenced by the same forces are open the floodgates fully of the kind of pollution that we just. We'd seen a lot up to that point, but we hadn't seen anything like that. And so again, the ecological kind of approach is you can't just talk about Elon Musk and you can't just talk about Mark Zuckerberg. You've got to talk about all of these things that are coming together all at once, and then the cascading consequences of what happens with X and what has happened with Facebook. And then when you have AI added on top of that, we can talk about that separately. But, you know, it's a real. It's a recipe for a different kind of ecological disaster that we were building to. But we're on the other side of that, of that tipping point, and it's worse.
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B
Before we get to the AI question, you've done a lot of great writing about 4chan, and I think we can go back, like 10 years, 15 years, 20 years, and you can see, like all these different communities online, and not all of them look like 4chan, right? There's like a lot of really positive communities. We cover a lot of them. I was. I was part of a lot of them. But it just seems, if you look at the past 20 years, that things are trending in this way. Right? Like, things are trending to the right. They're trending towards. Reactivity they're trending towards, like this volatile, hateful, I don't know, posting culture. And now when I look at Twitter X, it looks so much like 4chan, like the vibe of it, the way people are posting, the conspiratorial aspect of it, the trolling, the brushing up of, as you alluded to, the occult. Right. People are speaking about things and people are demons and the enemy is from hell and things like this. Is there something inherently about this media, about the Internet that is making things trend this way, do you think? Or is it just like a chain of events that got us here or something that is downstream from politics outside
- [14:19]
A
of media, I would say. I mean, so in this case, the technological manifestations of, I mean, what you're describing. Yeah, I mean, we can talk about the affordances of the platforms and various network dynamics, and we should. And those have changed over time. And, you know, who owns media companies, how information spreads, all of those things are really important. But, you know, to the point of the embrace of. And the proliferation of like, devil language to talk about what's going on, that's where the historical lens really needs to come in. Because, you know, you can trace some of that language back to the 1950s and 60s, and it shifts over time, but it's been really building where it's not just talking about the devil, it's not traditionally religious. Instead, it's this kind of amassing of qualities that are designated as being leftist or liberal taking on this. This evil. People who, who are opposed to it. It gets amalgamated and squished together as kind of this. This liberal devil figure. And whether people are using religious terminology or not, very often, that is what people, especially on the. On the right, are reacting to. It's this. It's this totality of every threatening and also every annoying thing. And part of what my work over the last few years has been doing is to trace the historical origins of that figure and then to look at how it has infiltrated so many different levels and layers of society, not just the far right. And so I map it onto this notion, this specific notion of combat sensationalism, which is taking the existing kind of what we know about sensationalism, it's about hyperbole, it's about excess, it's about monsters, it's about, you know, the sort of combat tradition, good versus evil. But what it's doing is it's kind of overlaying it and all of the economic imperatives, the incentive and permission structures to engage in sensationalist activity because it helps you build your brand. It's what, it's what gets you eyeballs. Like it's insensitive, incentivized within the attention economy that, that, that has all gotten overlaid on top of this weird kind of squishy, historically bizarre culture war where it's not just about, I mean, you look at the Trump administration's comms, they're not just doing sensationalism, they're not just trolling, they're trolling this amalgamated enemy. Like they're, they're specifically going after a group of people that, I mean, using the idea of domestic terrorists to talk about people who oppose ice. And like every iteration of anything that could seem threatening or annoying to a Trumpist conservative, that's all subsumed within the left. That's all subsumed within antifa. It's so squishy and so weird. And the idea is to continually fight, fight, fight that. And so I think that what you see online is people are fighting an invented, conjured, amalgamated devil. And sometimes, very often, particularly the further right you go, they literally use the language of hell to talk about it. They literally talk about Democrats as being evil. Like that is not, it's not implicit, it's like explicitly stated.
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B
Let's get into that a little bit. You have a new book, it's called the Shadow How Anti Liberal Demonology Possessed Us, Religion, Media and Politics. I'm trying to think of, if we sit here and try to come up with the cliches for the left, how they're portrayed, it's things that come to mind immediately is the left is feminine because it's not tough and masculine. The left is anti capitalism because it's not good enough to compete in the market. It is anti border because it doesn't believe in America. It's like it's a weak enemy. But as you say, it is described now and uses the imagery of religion as portrayed as like evil, as in literally from hell. That doesn't seem like a natural fit to me. How does this happen? Why is it that the left is being portrayed as the devil? How did this start in our culture?
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A
Oh Lord. Well, I mean, you can trace it all the way back to Cold War sort of mid century discourses around liberalism. There were three different ways that people thought about or talked about liberalism. You had liberalism in a theological context, which is people who believed in a living interpretation of the Bible. They embraced the social gospel. It had to do with how you interpreted scripture, basically. And liberals were people who thought that the Bible was a living document and it compelled you to go out into the world and help the poor and help immigrants. Fundamentalists were not, they were very anti liberal in that regard and fundamentalist evangelicals in particular. So that's one sense. You have the consensus based, mainstream sense where liberal just was what people and institutions agreed with. And then you also have liberalism, which is kind of related, which is connection to a large federal government and the New Deal broadly. And what happens is you basically the conservative movement, it's a complicated story, but the conservative movement, which didn't really coalesce in the United States in the way we understand it now until like the 60s, it based itself off of opposition to all three of those versions of liberalism which get squished together. And in particular it gets infused with this evangelical influence which was really, really, really anti liberal. But in this very particular sense that was anything that was of the social gospel, anything that was in any way communitarian in its ethos was not only accused of being communist, which is, you know, fundamentally anti American. It was also equated with Satan, like literally with actual Satan. And so you have this infusing of all these different liberals that over time amass more and more stuff. So you've got the federal government, you've got people who care about immigrants, you've got all of these things that start to kind of create this fake that gets bigger and bigger over time. It accumulates more and more things over time and eventually it kind of casts off some of the explicit connections to evangelicalism. And then by the time you get to the 1990s, we're talking about the Church of Fox News, it's like the same enemy. It's just it had been really fundamentally secularized. So we take for granted that what a liberal is, is like, you know, a weak sort of beta cuck type, you know, environmentalists, they're squishy, they're non competitive, they're not capitalist, you know, titans. Like that's the picture that we sort of take for granted as being fundamentally what a liberal is. But no, no, no, that's a decades old historical process and what it creates. I mean, if you think about. All right, so you're talking about so many things in society that, that now are somehow regarded as liberal. That's how even though the figure of the liberal, especially in the right and within maga, they're cucks, right? Like they're, they're weak, especially when you're talking about a man and they control everything. So there's this really interesting way where the kind of maximalist masculinity that gets attributed to maga. That's all about, you know, they're thumping their chest and they're triggering and trolling libs and they take no prisoners. They don't care about anything. They're. They're just aggressive. Sure. And their lives absolutely revolve around all the terrible things that liberals are said to be doing to them. That, that. It's taken for granted that Trump is actually the center of the MAGA universe, but when you think about it in this broader way, historically, it's actually the liberal devil is the center of maga's universe. That's what they base everything off of. They would not, they, There would not be a combat plot if it wasn't for the liberal devil. So simultaneously, the lib is like this weakling, but also controls everything. And these like, big, manly MAGA men can't control. They can't. They're. They're subservient essentially to what the liberals do to them. And that's the whole reason you have to fight, fight, fight because it's, you're not fight, fight fighting them because you're winning. You're fight, fight, fighting because you're losing. And so it just means that everything gets to be interpreted as, as a threat. You know, if you encounter something that feels threatening, liberal, if you encounter something that's annoying, liberal, if you encounter something that's already regarded as liberal, you can assume it's going to be threatening and, or annoying. And so it just shapes our politics in a way that is really underappreciated. And instead the focus is often, you know, Trump is cult leader, but it's, it's weirder than that. Like our world is weirder than that. And then when you think in this sort of ecological way, it's not just every, all of those things I listed, it's technological, it's interpersonal, it's relationship to self, and it's historical. When you have a huge number of people who are fundamentally terrified of the lib that they also say is weak, that has an impact on people's nervous systems. That when the dev. When the enemy is that big and that all pervasive, everywhere you look, you're being silenced or attacked or potentially silenced. Silenced or attacked by a lib, you're not going to be approaching the world in a calm, prefrontal cortex kind of a way. You're going to be approaching it in a, we've got to fight our way out of this problem. And so the, the. That accounts not only for the intensity of experience among people who are especially anti liberal. But it also helps to explain, you know, why combat sensationalism continues to be so marketable. It really works. I mean, just tapping into things that people feel and fear and care about. And so the role, the rise of trolling in a political context, you cannot take it out of this broader historical context. You can't just look at how the White House is doing all of this incendiary stuff. You have to ask yourself, who are they responding to and how big is that enemy and what impact does that have on our politics More broadly,
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C
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B
When you talk about this paradox of the liberal being weak but then also being like this very dangerous enemy, that immediately reminds me that every form of hatred of racism is paradoxical, right? So it's like the immigrant is like this inferior person who is degrading our culture and our country, but at the same time they are somehow stealing all our jobs and we need to be protected from them, even though they're somehow like weaker and dumber and poor and all that. Your description of the liberal specifically is almost identical to kind of the paradox of anti Semitism where it's like this inferior race, they're so much worse than us, they're poisoning our gene pool. Then at the same time they're like the most powerful group in the world that is controlling everything. So all of that is familiar. I think the thing that I'm really stuck on is this point of secularization that you talk about, because the right wing in this country, probably all over the world, but specifically I'm familiar with it. But the MAGA movement is like this very strange alliance, right, where it's like there is this religious evangelical contingent, right? It's like a lot of these themes come from there. But the person at the head of this movement is, everybody knows Trump is like an extremely secular figure and a major portion, half, more than half than this coalition. I think they're very secular and their philosophy. But the overall effect of Their messaging and their ideology comes off as religious. Like, how does this happen? How are they able to hold both things?
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A
Yeah, yeah, it's. Well, I mean, it's. I think the existing paradigms that we have to talk about our politics are inadequate to describe the weirdness of this particular moment. So when people typically try to account for religious influence in the United States, they default to concepts like white Christian nationalism, which, you know, is about positing, we want a theocracy, we want to have, we want Christian rule, essentially. And a lot of people use that to sort of vaguely talk about maga with the kind of complication that, like, Donald Trump doesn't want that. Like, that's not. Donald Trump isn't a. He doesn't want a theocracy. He doesn't read the Bible. He's not a religious man. And so there's, there's already this just immediate kind of glaring, like you're trying to ascribe this framework to a group, to a movement that is actually not very religious, but they act religious. And part of the problem is the assumption when you're talking about white Christian nationalism, who's the center? What's the center of the universe? If you're talking about Christianity with God and Jesus, right? And so then the idea is, if you're talking about a movement that is motivated by white Christian nationalism, then then by definition, people's conceptualizations of self and their relationship to their religiosity would be through love of God and Jesus. And that has nothing to do with what we typically see in religious expression when we're talking about this very sort of secularized weird version, then instead this sort of paradigmatic flip where rather than talking about how does love of God and Jesus explain Donald Trump, which it clearly doesn't, how does fear and loathing of the liberal devil explain it? And so then instead you, you can then square the circle sort of where you've got a bunch of even people who go to church and identify as evangelical, who support a man who is very clearly just not a religious person, not a pious person. But everybody hates the same people. So it's not about sharing. It's not that they love the same deity, it's that they hate the same enemy. So what Trump does, and what Trump has been able to do is he's really good at and has been very successful in tapping into hatred of a, of a particular amalgamated amorphous enemy. And to your point about this is kind of similar to what we've seen before in anti immigrant sentiment, anti semitism where simultaneously you minimize the other and then you also make them really dangerous. The difference right now is that so if you're talking about immigrants or, or, you know, anti Semitism, you're talking about specific identity categories like an anti Semite hates Jews. And so like, being a Jew is one of the markers that makes you the enemy. Right? Being an immigrant is what makes you, what marks you as the enemy. But what happens when the devil doesn't actually have any consistent markers? So it's, it's taking all of those markers, but it's disconnecting them from the specificity of race or even the specificity of politics. I mean, look at what has happened to Marjorie Taylor Greene. You have these people who should not be in any way targeted by MAGA because they are all of the identity categories that you would think would protect them, but they're not protected because what this amalgamated enemy process does is it makes all the details totally irrelevant. And so it's basically, you know, Marjorie Taylor Greene can become the liberal devil. That's the world that we live in. And that's what makes it so strange. And so trying to apply existing frameworks, white Christian nationalism to Trump to maga, it's always going to fall short. It's never going to explain what we're dealing with because it's just fundamentally misdiagnosing what has happened.
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B
Two part question about that. One is, I know that you're a student of folklore, because we're talking about the right and we're talking about the secularization and kind of what I'm gathering is that we can call it religion, it could be organized religion. But it seems to me that none of us are freed from religious thinking, even if we consider ourselves secular. And we've been talking about the right and the left as a passive player here and a victim in a sense. But what is the left's role in this? How do you see them reacting? Or even to be devil's advocate, I suppose the theory that it takes two to tango. What is the response? Right. Cause it's like the left is not just sitting there and taking it. There is kind of a response. How would you define it? How does this fit into this? Like, religious thinking?
- [34:27]
A
Yeah, no, that's a great question. So in the current book project, so the previous book is telling the historical story of where does the liberal devil come from. The current book project, which I'm finalizing is the cultural history of the first year of Trump's second term. In talking about the liberal devil, part of the kind of underlying concept is the notion of demonology, where demonology in an anthropological context is this sense that there's this amorphous evil, you can't really place it, but you know that you're afraid and it's threatening all the things that you hold dear. So anti liberal demonology is that exact idea, but applied to the left or liberals, and in this really amalgamated kind of a way. And so the first book, historicizing demonology, the second book is explaining the popular demonology. How is it that a lot of these ideas about what a liberal is, what the left is, has been absolutely internalized and, and metabolized by people who identify as liberal. So the way that I approach it in terms of religiosity. So William James was a 20th century philosopher who talked about the varieties of religious experience and was really interested in the kind of, I don't know, prophetic experience, but also acknowledged that religion can be small. And he just was less interested in the small stuff. I'm more interested in the small stuff, the big stuff, the like, the very like. If you apply the idea of varieties of religious experience to varieties of demonological experience, which is how it's conceptualized in the book, you can look at someone like Pete Hegseth and he's like a fundamentalist, right? His religiosity is just camp, almost like high camp. But then you have people who express a kind of sympathy for the liberal devil. You see this a lot in news reporting where people will be. Journalists will be reporting on whatever thing Trump is saying, amalgamating all these different groups of people subsumed as liberal. You know, it's transgender for everybody, it's dei, it's xyz, whatever. And he just kind of refers to it all as liberals. And what these journalists do is basically say, like he's talking about a group of people, they sort of are co signing the actual insanity, the sort of simulogical psychosis of putting all of this stuff together. That's not, it's not partisan. A lot of it has nothing to do with each other. And yet that is what makes up the left. And when Donald Trump talks about it and other fundamentalists talk about it, a lot of people just kind of take it for granted that, yeah, that's what it means to be a liberal. And so you just sort of buy into it. So the, the, the reason that demonology is increasingly popular and I think, increasingly dangerous, it convinces a lot of people who identify as liberal that, yeah, they are in a cosmic clash. Yeah, they better fight back because they're attacking us. Like, it's the tendency to look at the crazy amalgamation of things that are not related to each other and saying we when talking about it. And I did. God help me, I did a close reading of the Hegseth confirmation hearings, and you saw several members of the. Of the Democratic Committee members. When Pete Hegseth would sort of talk about her, when they would quote, quote his book and his books, I had to read them. And they have all just the wildest list of things. And then you had people, you know, saying, like, how can we expect you to work with us when you talk about us in this way? And you're like, us. Who are you talking about? So there just is this lack of reflection on why the words we even use. And when we buy into those words, it just becomes so much easier for the. For this. For the nuttiness to kind of persist. And then everybody is walking around hyperactivated because you've got people who see themselves as liberals feeling threatened with good reason, especially after everything that happened in many. Like, there are reasons why people on the left, or liberals would. Would feel under siege, because they are. And so then, of course, yeah, you want to fight back. You want to push back. You want to call out the trolling. You want to react to what the. What the White House is doing. The problem is that doing so mints liberals. That when you're pushing back against the. When. If you are Liz Cheney, if you are Marjorie Taylor Greene, doesn't matter who you are, if you push back against Trump or against Maga, congratulations, you've created a new liberal. And that's actually what the administration wants through their trolling is all. Every successful troll that they do creates more liberals. And the more liberals there are, the more justification there is for to literally put troops in the streets. So, like, this is not just a conversation about rhetoric or it's not about words. It's about what the words do in the world and the world that these words sustain and make terrible.
- [39:18]
B
I just had an epiphany as he was saying that, that it feels like. And we don't have to, like, play around. Like, I identify as left, and it seems to me like the experience of the left is almost entirely about categories being imposed on you by the right and then trying to manage that categorization. Right? It's like you come to politics with your beliefs and convictions, but then somebody said, oh, you all think that trans women should be able to compete in sports. This is a story that we didn't cover, but it's like there was this teacher at some school this might have been in Canada. It was a trans woman. And she came to school and she had extremely large, like, comically large fake breasts. I don't know if you saw this story. And obviously it caused a huge controversy. And as a quote unquote liberal, with that label being applied to you from the right, your entire being becomes about managing the situation, which is kind of secondary or parallel to your politics. But it's like your entire being is about kind of managing these problems that are handed to you by the right that has painted you. That is all of liberal discourse. That is all of what the Democratic Party is doing is kind of managing those impositions. Right. And this is an unfair question to you, but I'm going to throw it at you. It's like, what do you do about that?
- [40:57]
A
Oh, my God. Yeah, No, I know. Well, I mean, I think that. I think that naming is always an important first step. It has to just be the first step. But what you're describing, it's something that I've thought a lot about. And the. There's a literary concept called synecdy, and it's the idea of parts for whole. So people who will talk about wheels when what they mean is car or the crown, when they're talking about like the British royals. And what you have is this really intense synecdotal. I don't know if that's the correct pronunciation or if that's a word, but it's. When you have one liberal thing, it's actually referring to all the liberal things. And so an individual liberal, leftist, whatever, never is just speaking for themselves, especially when they are speaking in public. It's like if one liberal or leftist says something, that is what it means to be a liberal or leftist. And you saw that play out really powerfully related to trans stuff in the 2024 election, where, you know, sure, there are some activists who have positions on trans issues, but it was like the fact that that got connected. The fact that that's true of some activists who would identify with the left. Well, then that means that Kamala Harris is for they them and not for you. Right. Like it. It. Kamala Harris was the recipient of and was this became for the right a sort of avatar of everything that was happening in every network of leftist activism that existed on the Internet. And you're like, kamala Harris didn't even really talk about trans stuff very much. But then it just became this orthodox position that all Democrats are like, all they care about is Trans stuff in a way that's very threatening and very annoying. And after the election, in the postmortems, you had so many Democrats then say, we have to purge our concern about trans people. We can't care about trans people. We're too woke. We're weak and we're woke. And we can't do that anymore. Because the fact that some people on the left take some positions means that everybody is responsible. All liberals and leftists are responsible for what all liberals and leftists everywhere say. I mean, you just think about comms, and it puts the Democrats or people who are anti Trump in such a difficult position in terms of how do you frame the Democratic Party, given that? So the. The synecity of it all is very challenging. And it means that a liberal is responsible for all liberals. And it means that when a right winger is, or when a. When Trump points at a particular issue, it's like you touch one part of the paracosm, the sort of, like, narrative landscape in which all of this happens. You touch one part of it, and the entire thing lights up. And so trans people in particular have become this, like, embodiment of everything that's liberal and leftist. And so. And so it's. And it's powerfully dehumanizing because not only are they basic trans people have been kind of reframed as being this, like, abstract noun. So the trans experience gets talked about as if being trans is radical indoctrination. Like the. That's not what a trans person is. But. But they get sort of amalgamated and. And dehumanized as this abstract concept. And then, worse, they get purged. They get. They get exercised from the party, not even as people, but as, like, religious fetishes, essentially. And so, again, like, the weirdness of all of this just can't. You can't really capture the weirdness of it without, you know, doing all of this kind of ecological, big, big overwhelming, terrible thinking.
- [44:37]
B
Were you tuned in to the discourse after the election about what the Democrats need as a liberal? Joe Rogan?
- [44:47]
A
Sure.
- [44:49]
B
What do you think about that idea, about, like, having some sort of, like, viral messiah that can kind of change the tone of the network? Is that a pipe dream? Is there, like, some structural reason or aesthetic reason in liberalism or leftism that makes it not possible? What do you think about that question or that idea?
- [45:11]
A
Well, I don't know what a liberal is, number one. So, I mean, doing this work, what it's really made me really think carefully about is how do I use language and how do I understand these kinds of things. So you know, I, if there were a liberal Joe Rogan, I mean, number one, I'd be sort of nervous because whatever positions that person took would then be because of this synecity kind of dynamic, then that would like, I guess be attributed to all liberal slash leftists. And I don't know if that would be necessarily positive. I mean, I think there definitely needs to be alternative channels for information dissemination. Right. But having a liberal Joe Rogan, that doesn't actually solve the structural problems. In some ways it might just, you know, create another facet of the rhetorical problem of like who the hell is a. Who could speak for liberals? I don't know what it is, I don't know what that would mean. But instead, you know what I would see as very beneficial. I mean it's what you guys are doing, but other, other sort of media companies are trying to do, which is create alternatives. You don't just have right wing capture of information and you don't just have sort of mainstream capture of information. Especially because so much mainstream reporting right now is really, really, really going hard into demonological framings. Like they're, they're doing a lot of this stuff and there have to be other voices, but hopefully there's lots of other, lots and lots of different voices to emphasize the idea that one person could never speak for liberals, one person could never speak for leftists and we wouldn't want them to. So give me a thousand pro democracy Joe Rogans. That's what I would actually call for rather than the messiah leftist.
- [47:00]
B
Yeah, I think that can work in a world where things are trending to an Internet and media that's more pluralistic and there's definitely signs of that happening, but it's not clear that things will break that way. Right. Like on the one hand you have people like us, like Hellgate, like Defector. There's this rising group of smaller publications with more voices that are not bigger than any one huge a media company, but altogether have quite a voice. But on the other hand, you have continued gigantic consolidation. The social media platforms are still huge and I guess that kind of like we went on a long and terrific detour. But to go back to this AI question, I see that as possibly a pressure on big platforms that could break them. But I guess what is your Internet consumption look like at the moment? I'm really curious and as a scholar of all this stuff, how have you experienced the last three years of AI slop? Like what has that done to your Internet consumption?
- [48:24]
A
I Do everything I can to protect myself from it. I mean, so to the point about media and media fracture, so kind of bringing these two threads together, you've got a lot of independent media outlets, some, some bigger, some smaller, that maybe they identify as leftist, maybe they just identify as an alternative to the right or an alternative to mainstream. So how you would even classify them might be a little bit complicated. In the sort of pro democracy space, you simultaneously though have a lot of that same kind of proliferation of, of smaller, medium sized outlets happening on the right. You know, you've got, and that speaks to the kind of MAGA civil war to the extent that that term is, is accurate. But you've got like a lot of factions over here and a lot of factions over here. And then you've got the sort of mainstream factions which are quietly also getting weirder because you've got media. You know, when you're, when you're talking about the acquisition of media properties by Trumpists who are installing people to basically do demonology at CBS News, like there's a lot of weird stuff happening. What that creates is where, and I see this a lot with my students, where are we supposed to get our information that to, to follow politics, you really have to try that. It's not going to come to you. And if it does, you're not guaranteed to get good information just because of the way that things have changed, even in terms of who has access to the White House briefing room. So it's more increasingly difficult to find your niche. Your niche exists, but how are you going to find it? It's just harder to be an informed citizen in the world because of all of this fracture. There's no center. And when there's not a center, that can cause problems. Now then you overlay the issue of AI slope and just the proliferation of so much more information that's just so much stupider. That's like confusing and redirectional and stressful and overwhelming. All of that gets back to this overarching conversation about a big plank of ecological thinking is what is my body doing? How is my nervous system reacting to this world? And I will certainly speak to my students. They don't always know where to get their information. And when they do get information, it's often overwhelming and strange. And if it's not the sloppiest of the slop, it's at least confusing about its origins. And so you know what you're, what you're talking about is a media ecosystem that is not like particularly geared specifically for radicalization although that does happen, but it's geared for setting people into a dysregulated nervous system scenario. And the more dysregulated your nervous system is, the more overwhelmed you are, the harder it is for you to parse good information from bad, and the harder it is for you to have motivation. And so when you think about all the people who just are desperately trying to escape this moment or just, I don't know, like, people aren't doing great, broadly speaking. And I think that the media environment overlaid with the AI sloperation is. It all kind of feeds into each other. Where if we're not okay here, like in our actual bodies, how are we expected to figure out how to navigate an objectively absurd, chaotic, often nihilistic, confusing media landscape? Like those things. A dysregulated brain does not do well in that kind of environment. And we have an environment that is geared towards dysregulating our systems. So that's where the question of, well, what do we do about it? I mean, the questions. And we have had this conversation off and on for a thousand years that part of the challenge is that the challenge is so big. And part of what has happened over the last few years is the. That those challenges have gotten bigger. Nothing has improved. Things have retrenched and gotten more confusing. The questions have gotten bigger, the solutions have gotten further away, and people's nervous systems have gotten more frazzled. So that's where we are in 2026. And we could have predicted it and it was like, moving. It was trending in this direction all the time. But, you know, being here is worse than. It's not that I expected it to be better, but being here is not great.
- [53:00]
B
I know that people love to say. There's this refrain online where people say, like, I'm exhausted, right? It's like you post something that's like a stupid video or like a Trump did something, and you're like, I'm so tired. And it's just like this thing that people say. But if I am to describe, like, the overall effect of the AI swap, it is exhaustion, I consider myself, and I'm sorry to pat myself on the back like this, but it's like a very savvy media consumer. I've been reporting on AI about deepfakes for years. I'm on the forefront of that stuff. I think I'm very good at figuring out what's real and what's fake on the Internet, but there is so much of it now, and you're doing it Basically every second, every post you see, you are using your brain to decipher is this bullshit, is this evil? Even a real image? And I can figure it out, but eventually it just drains your executive function. It's like there's a limited amount of energy that you have and it will tap you out now because it's so easy to create this fake stuff. And it reminds me of this was back at Motherboard, Sam wrote, and we did this in response to this feeling. It was called Every day is April Fool's Day now. And yeah, and it's just like April Fools is like this terrible day online. It started out as a fun thing. All these companies used to do these gags. But then over the years, it got really exhausting because it's just like, it's a bad day to be online because you're like, well, I can't trust anything because this is the big day of jokes. And now every day is like the big day of jokes. And it's extremely exhausting.
- [54:35]
A
Well, and when that is the only coherent policy coming from the White House is like embracing that and just trying to mess with people again because it's part of this broader comm strategy of minting liberals through trolling. I've been teaching a long time now, and my students don't know that this is not what the world has always been like. And so they have a nervous system that's sort of calibrated to this. And I have to remind them, like, guys, this is not. It wasn't even like this three years ago or four years ago. But they only know combat sensationalism, they only know slop, they only know exhaustion, they only know stress. And that I worry about a lot of things. But I think that the underlying worry that I have is the solutions, the way that we can think through this, the way that we could try to broker different kinds of conversations. Like it or not, this is a still at this time, a pluralistic democracy. We've got to figure out how to be in it together. You can't really do that when you've. When you've got this dysregulation and all of these media systems and structures that are essentially calibrated to keep people in a state of fight or flee or freeze. Because within a democracy, fighting, like excessive fighting is problematic enough for fleeing is worse because it means that people are not going to be having. Doing the hard work that is democracy. We can't do that in our present media environment. So I worry more than anything about bodies, because the body, if the body is not in a good spot, then all of the other thinking, all of the other solutions, all of the other problem solving becomes cognitively so much more difficult. And you experience this in an extreme way because it's your job to every second of the day have to parse what is real and what's not. But that's an experience that just an average college student has. That's what it means to be digitally mediated in this moment. And, and it's not sustainable. So I think that really taking seriously the dynamics that are at play and really, really understanding historically how we got to this moment and how difficult that makes comms, like, even if you know, okay, this is going to make me. Whatever it is I'm saying now, this is going to make me sound like a liberal. And it means that I will instantly basically become a devil trigger to another person. Knowing that, or at least anticipating that as a possibility, how can it make you think differently about your message? How can you try to connect to someone on a different way? Or how can you try to understand the bigness of that, of that enemy in someone else's mind? You know, we've got to take these things into account. And we haven't been, in part because our frameworks disallow us from actually like, getting to the root of what's happening. So we got to do that step one, and then we got to figure out how to take care of ourselves. And I think those two things go together and I don't know how to do it. So that's a very happy note to end on.
- [57:51]
B
Yeah, I guess if I can. One more question or maybe I'll try to squeeze in two even. But I was surprised by how pragmatic and specific your book is, again with Ryan Milner. Share better and stress less. I really recommend that people read it because I don't know what people are imagining. But there's like very specific, specific examples and thought experiments in the book about you're in a group chat and somebody does this. It's like, how should you react? And why do people have this effect? And it's rare for people to talk with so much thought and detail about the dynamics of something like a group chat. But that's our life. So it's like, I really recommend that people check it out for that reason. The reason I bring it up is the book is very focused on what you are doing in your life to make the ecology of the Internet around you better and to not be a polluter. But as you know, I'm sure In thinking about climate change, popular thinking in recent years has shifted from, oh, it's really important that you recycle to like, well, individual responsibility is not going to really solve this issue. And in fact, it's on. It's unfair and perhaps even like propaganda to make people think that their individual acts in their life can actually fix climate change. And I think the same is probably true about the Internet. Right? It's like, so what do you think about that? Do you think that the same is also true about the Internet?
- [59:27]
A
Yeah. No, Right. Like, not using plastic straws is better, but it's also not gonna solve climate change. Like, individual action is better if you're trying to be responsible, but it's not. Those are not systems and structures. I mean, what I would say, I think about this from the vantage point of a college, of an educator. I teach a media ethics class. And so much of the. It's actually taught through the lens of true crime, which subsumes a lot of sort of violent imagery. And so we talk about various kinds of things, not just podcasts, but like, Charlie Kirk's assassination and what happened in Minneapolis. And what do you do when you're confronted with images of the videos of violence? Like, is it always good to share? How do you think about what the right thing to do ethically is? And so that conversation, ecological conversation, is always front and center, but at the forefront of that is telling them how their brains work and explaining to them that if their brains are in this dysregulated state, they're not going to be able to think ethically about the media that they consume or produce, and they're not going to be able to engage fully in civic life. Those are the two things you can't do when you are dysregulated. And this matters because I'm teaching in a school of journalism and communication. These are future communications professionals. They're going to go into PR and marketing and journalism and. And media studies, depending on the path that they end up taking. But there are people who are going to be in the workforce who will be making the decisions. They'll be pulling the proverbial level levers at. Within institutions, within media companies. How do you get them to understand ethics in a way that is ecologically grounded? So it's not telling them, you know, don't ever post a meme that's problematic. It's. Understand how you relate to this environment and bring that into the workforce. And because the. What is gone wrong is at the. I mean, it's individual, but it's structural. It's at the level of companies and institutions and networks. How do we populate those companies and institutions and networks with a different kind of body, with a different kind of awareness? And that solution does not happen overnight. But you. But it's about education, it's about training, it's about helping people understand the role that they play in much bigger systems. And I think that that's the only way you can do it. But that's a long term goal. And the question is, are we going to have enough time?
- [62:01]
B
Got it. Yeah, that's what I wanted to hear. I basically just. I was thinking about my group chats and how some of them can be like, inappropriate, but also some of the nicest, most caring places that I have as a person. So it's good to know that we're still able to post the occasional spicy beam responsibly.
- [62:26]
A
It's also to that point, connection, friendship, support. These things are the kinds of things that help us down, regulate. And sometimes we gotta talk some shit and be silly and play with our friends. This moment also needs joy. It needs people who are connected to each other. And that can look a lot of different ways. So it isn't just about how do we fight this as individuals. That's always a problematic way of approaching this. But we are truly in this together. And if there's one takeaway from the idea of ecological thinking, it's that.
- [63:05]
B
Okay, Whitney, thank you so much. I could talk to you for hours more. We should do that again in the future. I will leave it here for now. As a reminder, four four Media is a journalist founded and supported by subscribers. If you wish to subscribe to four four Media and directly support our work, please go to four four media co. You'll get unlimited access to our articles and an ad free version of this podcast. You'll also listen to the subscribers only section where we talk about a bonus story each week. This podcast is made in partnership with Kaleidoscope. Another way to support us is by leaving a five star rating and review for this podcast. That stuff really helps us out. This has been four four media. We'll see you again next.