The world is now connected by the news feeds of twenty-four-hour networks, and so together we watch the slow-motion, real-time disasters of Hurricane Katrina, Deepwater Horizon, and the Fukushima nuclear plant—as well as what feels like the utter ineffectualness of our leaders to do anything about any of it. CNN put up a live feed of the BP well spewing out its oil into the gulf and kept it in a corner of the broadcast continuously for months. The constancy of such imagery, like the seemingly chronic footage of Katrina victims at the New Orleans Superdome holding up signs begging for help, is both unnerving and desensitizing at the same time. With each minute that goes by with no relief in sight our impatience is stoked further and our perception of our authorities’ impotence is magnified.
Talk radio and cable channels such as Fox News make good business out of giving voice to presentist rage. Opinionated, even indignant, newsreaders keep our collective cortisol (stress hormone) levels high enough to maintain a constant fight-or-flight urgency. Viewers too bored or impatient for news reporting and analysis tune in to evening debate shows and watch pundits attack one another. The pugilism creates the illusion of drama, except the conflict has no beginning or end—no true origin in real-world issues or legitimate effort at consensus. It’s simply the adaptation of well-trodden and quite obsolete Right-Left debate to the panic of a society in present shock. What used to be the Left argues for progress: MSNBC’s brand motto encourages us to “lean forward” into the future. What used to be the Right now argues primarily for the revival of early-twentieth-century values, or social conservatism. Whether looking back or looking ahead, both sides promise relief from the shock of the present.
OCCUPY REALITY
The problem with leaving the present altogether, however, is that it disconnects us from reality. For all the reality shows, twenty-four-hour news channels, issues-related programming, and supposed information overload online, there’s precious little for people to actually rely on or use effectively. Are real estate prices going up or down? Who is winning in Afghanistan? Do Mexicans take American jobs? It all depends on who is talking, as the descent of what used to be professional journalism into professional opining generates the sense that there is no objective truth. Every day, thanks to their immersion in this mediated distortion field, fewer Americans agree that the environment needs to be protected or that biological species evolve. From 1985 to 2005, the number of Americans unsure about evolution increased from 7 percent to 21 percent,20 while those questioning global warming increased from 31 percent in 1997 to 48 percent in 2010.21 These impressions are formed on the basis of religious programming posing as news reporting and cable-channel debates about email scandals, while back in the real world, aquifers are disappearing and first-line antibiotics are becoming ineffective against rapidly mutating bacteria. In the relativistic haze of participatory media, it’s all just a matter of opinion. You are entitled to yours and I am entitled to mine. This is a democracy, after all. As even the jaded, former public relations giant Richard Edelman now admits, “In this era of exploding media technologies there is no truth except the truth you create for yourself.”22
The Internet welcomes everyone into the conversation. An op-ed in the New York Times may as well be a column on the Huffington Post, which may as well be a personal blog or Twitter stream. Everyone’s opinion may as well matter as much as everyone else’s, resulting in a population who believes its uninformed opinions are as valid as those of experts who have actually studied a particular problem. (I can even sense readers bridling at the word “experts” in the preceding sentence, as if I have fallen into the trap of valuing an elite over the more reliable and incorruptible gut sense of real people.) College students often ask me why anyone should pay for professional journalism when there are plenty of people out there, like themselves, willing to write blogs for free? One answer is that government and corporations are investing millions of dollars into their professional communications campaigns. We deserve at least a few professionals working full-time to evaluate all this messaging and doing so with some level of expertise in ascertaining the truth.
Young people are not alone in their skepticism about the value of professional journalism. A 2010 Gallup Poll showed Americans at an under 25 percent confidence in newspapers and television news—a record low.23 Pew Research shows faith in traditional news media spiking downward as Internet use spikes upward, and that a full 42 percent believe that news organizations hurt democracy. This is twice the percentage who believed that in the mid-1980s, before the proliferation of the net.24
As cultural philosopher Jürgen Habermas offered during his acceptance speech of a humanitarian award in 2006, “The price we pay for the growth in egalitarianism offered by the Internet is the decentralized access to unedited stories. In this medium, contributions by intellectuals lose their power to create a focus.”25 To be sure, the rise of citizen journalism brings us information that the mainstream media lacks either the budget for or fortitude to cover. Initial reports of damage during Hurricane Katrina came from bloggers and amateur videographers. However, these reports also inflated body counts and spread rumors about rape and violence in the Superdome that were later revealed not to have occurred.26 Footage and reporting from the Arab Spring and the Syrian revolution—where news agencies were limited or banned—were almost entirely dependent on amateur journalists. But newsgathering during a bloody rebellion against a violently censorious regime is an outlier example and hardly the basis for judging the efficacy of amateur journalism in clarifying issues or explaining policy.
If anything, such heroism under fire, combined with the general public’s access to blogging technology and professional-looking website templates, gives us all the false sense that we are capable of researching and writing professional-quality journalism about anything. In fact, most of us are simply making comments about the columns written by other bloggers, who are commenting on still others. Just because we all have access to blogging software doesn’t mean we should all be blogging, or that everyone’s output is as relevant as everyone else’s. Today’s most vocal critic of this trend, The Cult of the Amateur author Andrew Keen, explains, “According to a June 2006 study by the Pew Internet and American Life Project, 34 percent of the 12 million bloggers in America consider their online ‘work’ to be a form of journalism. That adds up to millions of unskilled, untrained, unpaid, unknown ‘journalists’—a thousandfold growth between 1996 and 2006—spewing their (mis)information out in the cyberworld.” More sanguine voices, such as City University of New York journalism professor and BuzzFeed blogger Jeff Jarvis, argue that the market—amplified by search results and recommendation engines—will eventually allow the better journalism to rise to the top of the pile. But even market mechanisms may have a hard time functioning as we consumers of all this media lose our ability to distinguish between facts, informed opinions, and wild assertions.
Our impatient disgust with politics as usual combined with our newfound faith in our own gut sensibilities drives us to take matters into our own hands—in journalism and beyond. In a political world where ideological goals are replaced by terror and rage, it’s no wonder the first true political movement to emerge out of present shock would be the Tea Party. This is the politics of PTSD, inspired by a no-nonsense brand of libertarianism espoused by Texas congressman Ron Paul. Taking its name from the Boston Tea Party of 1773, when American colonists dumped British tea into the harbor in a tax revolt, today’s Tea Party movement shares the antiauthoritarian impulse of its namesake and then expresses it as a distrust of government in all forms. While the Tea Party may have originated as an antitax movement, it has been characterized over time more by a disdain for consensus and an almost deliberate effort to remain ignorant of facts that may contradict its oversimplified goals.
Tea Partiers, such as Michele Bachmann, either misunderstood or intentionally misrepresented the concept of a debt ceiling as a vote to authorize additional spending (when it is actually a vote to pay what has al
ready been spent). The solution to the seemingly perpetual debt crisis? Shut down government. Healthcare system too complicated? End it. (Except, of course, for Medicare, which doesn’t count.) Russia and China are evil, Arabs are scary, Mexicans are taking Americans’ jobs, and climate change is a hoax. As Columbia University historian Mark Lilla has chronicled, the combination of amplified self-confidence and fear of elites is a dangerous one. In his view, the Tea Partiers “have two classic American traits that have grown much more pronounced in recent decades: blanket distrust of institutions and an astonishing—and unwarranted—confidence in the self. They are apocalyptic pessimists about public life and childlike optimists swaddled in self-esteem when it comes to their own powers.”27
If the Tea Party is to be disparaged for anything, it is not for being too conservative, too right wing, or too libertarian, but simply too immature, quick-triggered, and impatient for final answers. Traumatized by the collapse of the narratives that used to organize reality and armed with what appears to be access to direct democracy, its members ache for harsh, quick fixes to age-old problems—something they can really feel—as if fomenting a painful apocalypse would be better than enduring the numbing present.
More intellectually grounded conservatives and GOP regulars fear the Tea Party more than they fear Democrats, for they understand that this knee-jerk race to results undermines the very foundation and justification for representative democracy. As former George W. Bush speechwriter David Frum laments:
A political movement that never took governing seriously was exploited by a succession of political entrepreneurs uninterested in governing—but all too interested in merchandising. Much as viewers tune in to American Idol to laugh at the inept, borderline dysfunctional early auditions, these tea-party champions provide a ghoulish type of news entertainment each time they reveal that they know nothing about public affairs and have never attempted to learn. But Cain’s gaffe on Libya or Perry’s brain freeze on the Department of Energy are not only indicators of bad leadership. They are indicators of a crisis of followership. The tea party never demanded knowledge or concern for governance, and so of course it never got them.28
Representative democracy has a hard enough time justifying itself in a digitally connected world where representation no longer means sending someone on a three-day carriage ride to the capital. Having cynically embraced the Tea Party as a means to an end, Republicans now face erosion of party integrity from within. Meanwhile, as if aware of the role that the twenty-four-hour news cycle played in having generated this phenomenon, CNN partners with the Tea Party to arrange televised presidential debates. For the one thing the Tea Party appears to want more than the destruction of government is to elect Tea Party members to positions within it.
The impatient rush to judgment of the Tea Party movement is only as unnerving as the perpetually patient deliberation of its counterpart present shock movement, Occupy Wall Street. Opposite reactions to collapse of political narrative, the Tea Party yearns for finality while the Occupy movement attempts to sustain indeterminacy.
Inspired by the social-media-influenced revolutions of the Arab Spring, Occupy Wall Street began as a one-day campaign to call attention to the inequities inherent in a bank-run, quarterly-focused, debt-driven economy. It morphed into something of a permanent revolution, however, dedicated to producing new models of political and economic activity by its very example. Tea Partiers mean to wipe out the chaotic confusion of a world without definitive stories; the Occupiers mean to embed themselves within it so that new forms may emerge. It’s not an easy sell. The Tea Party’s high-profile candidates and caustic rhetoric are as perfectly matched for the quick-cut and argument-driven programming of the cable news networks as the Occupiers are incompatible. Though both movements are reactions to the collapse of compelling and believable narratives, the Tea Party has succumbed to and even embraced the crisis mentality, while Occupy Wall Street attempts to transcend it.
This is at least part of why mainstream television news reporters appeared so determined to cast Occupy Wall Street as the random, silly blather of an ungrateful and lazy generation of weirdos. As if defending against the coming obsolescence of their own truncated news formats, television journalists reported that the movement’s inability to articulate its agenda in ten seconds or less meant there was no agenda at all. In a segment titled “Seriously?!” CNN business anchor Erin Burnett ridiculed the goings-on at Zuccotti Park. “What are they protesting?” she asked. “Nobody seems to know.” Like The Tonight Show host Jay Leno testing random mall patrons on American history, Burnett’s main objective was to prove that the protesters didn’t know that the US government had been reimbursed for the bank bailouts. More predictably, perhaps, a Fox News reporter appeared flummoxed when the Occupier he interviewed refused to explain how he wanted the protests to end. Attempting to transcend the standard political narrative, the protester explained, “As far as seeing it end, I wouldn’t like to see it end. I would like to see the conversation continue.”29
In this sense, regardless of whether its economic agenda is grounded in reality, Occupy Wall Street does constitute the first truly postnarrative political movement. Unlike the civil rights protests, labor marches, or even the Obama campaign, it does not take its cue from a charismatic leader, it does not express itself in bumper-sticker-length goals, nor does it understand itself as having a particular endpoint. The Occupiers’ lack of a specific goal makes it hard for them to maintain focus and cohesion. The movement may be attempting to embrace too wide an array of complaints, demands, and goals: the collapsing environment, labor standards, housing policy, government corruption, World Bank lending practices, unemployment, increasing wealth disparity, and so on. But these many issues are connected: different people have been affected by different aspects of the same system—and they believe they are all experiencing symptoms of the same core problem. But for journalists or politicians to pretend they have no idea what the movement wants is disingenuous and really just another form of present shock. What upsets banking’s defenders and traditional Democrats alike is the refusal of this movement to state its terms or set its goals in the traditional language of campaigns.
That’s because, unlike a political campaign designed to get some person in office and then close up shop (as in the election of Obama and subsequent youth disillusionment), this is not a movement with a traditional narrative arc. It is not about winning some debate point and then going home. Rather, as the product of the decentralized networked-era culture, it is less about victory than sustainability. It is not about one-pointedness, but inclusion. It is not about scoring a victory, but groping toward consensus. It is not like a book; it is like the Internet.
Occupy Wall Street is not a movement that wins and ends; it is meant more as a way of life that spreads through contagion and creates as many questions as it answers. The urban survival camps they set up around the world were a bit more like showpieces, congresses, and beta tests of new ideas or revivals of old ones. Unlike a traditional protest, which identifies the enemy and fights for a particular solution, Occupy Wall Street just sits there talking with itself, debating its own worth, recognizing its internal inconsistencies, and then continuing on as if this were some sort of new normal. It is both inspiring and aggravating.
Occupy’s General Assembly methodology, for example, is a highly flexible approach to group discussion and consensus building borrowed from the ancient Greeks. Unlike parliamentary rules that promote debate, difference, and decision, the General Assembly forges consensus by stacking ideas and objections as they arise, and then making sure they are all eventually heard. The whole thing is orchestrated through simple hand gestures. Elements in the stack are prioritized, and everyone gets a chance to speak. Even after votes, exceptions and objections are incorporated as amendments.
On the one hand, the process seems like an evolutionary leap forward in consensus building. Dispensing with preconceived narratives about generating policy demands
or settling the score between Right versus Left, this process eschews debate (or what Enlightenment philosophers called “dialectic”) for consensus. It is a blatant rejection of the binary, winner-takes-all, political operating system that has been characterizing political discourse since at least the French National Assembly of the 1700s. But it is also a painstakingly slow, almost interminably boring process, in which the problem of how to deal with noise from bongo drummers ends up getting equal time with how to address student debt. It works well for those who are committed to sitting in a park doing little else with their days and nights, but is excruciating for those committed to producing results. Engaged with this way, the present lasts a whole long time.
Present Shock: When Everything Happens Now Page 6