Things fall apart; the center cannot hold

Turning and turning in the widening gyre;
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;

-William Butler Yeats, The Second Coming, 1919

In the far-distant past year of 2018, Irish intellectual Fintan O’Toole came up with the Yeats test, which states, "the more quotable Yeats seems to commentators and politicians, the worse things are." Well, comrades, it seems to me that Yeats is even more quotable today than he was when O’Toole proposed his test. Or, to quote Howard Beale in the 1976 film, Network, "We all know things are bad, worse than bad, they're crazy."

Turning and turning in the widening gyre;

The invention of the printing press was a major contributing factor leading to the Renaissance, but it was also the source of a lot of social upheaval. It enabled the widespread dissemination of ideas at a scale and speed never before imagined. What's more, it did this for anyone who could afford the technology, not just governments or institutions like the Catholic Church. Martin Luther used the printing press to spread his ideas about religion, leading directly to The Protestant Reformation. This transition was not bloodless. At one point his ideas even led to some religious zealots taking over the city of Münster and creating a short-lived mini-theocracy.

History is full of such periods of turmoil. Yeats wrote The Second Coming just after the first World War and just after a global pandemic nearly killed his pregnant wife. No doubt he was responding to the chaos of his time. The chaos of our time is not so different. A leap in communication technology has upended society. We can see this all over the world. The old rules no longer apply. Norms are meaningless, institutions have failed us, and the culture wars have become a life-or-death struggle to determine the shape of a new world order.

The falcon cannot hear the falconer;

As we all wrestle with this new and rapidly shifting technological environment, pundits have engaged in a lot of lamenting and gnashing of teeth over the loss of a shared reality. Things sure seemed better when Walter Cronkite was there to tell us all what to believe, so they say. But things weren't really better, not for everyone. They might have been simpler or easier to navigate, but not better. Never forget that hegemonic TV networks were happy to play along with the Second Red Scare, and so was Hollywood. Traditional news media still has a tremendous amount of influence on public perception today, but they can no longer control the narratives around any given topic as they once could.

But just because they have lost that ability doesn't mean we, the masses, have gained it for ourselves. Instead, that power has been captured by social media companies, who use their algorithms to decide what content gets the most attention. These are capitalist enterprises and as such they design their black boxes to maximize profit, with little or no regard for anything else. This means keeping your eyes on their screens, no matter what damage they might be doing to the fabric of society.

The use of these algorithms has the added benefit of shielding those who create them from blame. "We're a platform, not a publisher," they cry, as if that distinction makes any difference. Meanwhile, their algorithms push the most inflammatory content possible because that is what keeps people using their "platform." They have turned our relationships into data mines and our attention into a commodity. In the process they have herded us into information silos, each built for a single occupant, from which we launch vitriol at one another.

Where old media manufactured consent, social media manufactures outrage.

Social media replaced real-world communities with online communities. The validation we might once have sought from friends and neighbors has been replaced with a synthetic, digital approximation, severely lacking in any nutritional value for the soul. This leaves us starving and desperate for those tiny dopamine hits. Silicon Valley is happy to provide us all with that drug, so long as we keep giving them our attention. Not only do they get to sell that attention to advertisers, but their process for extracting it keeps us yelling at one another while they plunder the nation along with the rest of the ruling class.

Now our rulers are scared of the world they have created. They've made unfathomable amounts of money stoking our outrage, apparently never stopping to consider that some of that outrage may get directed at them. This is why Luigi Mangione shook them. This is why so many news anchors were big mad about his ascension to folk hero status. It's also why they are so shook about the death of Charlie Kirk. His assassination was just another in a long line of events signifying the shredding of the social contract, but he was one of them. Privileged, elite, white, pundit. Donald Trump is a manifestation of the ruling class's fear. They have allowed his particular brand of political cancer to fester in their desperation to maintain control.

But they're not in control. No one is in control, not really. Some people have lots of power, but no one has control.

Things fall apart;

When I was a kid, most adults I knew could remember where they were the day JFK was killed. For my generation, we all remember where we were on 9/11. I'm probably not alone in remembering exactly where I was the day Trump won the 2016 election. I remember the grim faces of news anchors as they tried to maintain that vaunted journalistic neutrality in the face of something they found terrifying. It was like 9/11 happened again, but this time they had to pretend we all just had a difference of opinion with the Taliban. In some ways, that's not far off.

By the time Trump won the 2016 election, Fox News, and right-wing radio before them, had spent decades decrying so-called liberal media. While you might take those grim faces as confirmation of liberal media bias, that would be a mistake. While individual anchors might have had liberal leanings, the people they worked for were the same soulless corporate types they work for today, people whose ideology amounts to little more than the worship of money. We see their amorality on full display now as they capitulate to the tyrant in the White House over and over again.

Yet even before the dawn of the age of alternative facts, the so-called liberal media was so afraid of bias allegations that they were pathologically incapable of meeting the moment. They treated Trump as if he were any other politician. They expected the scandal from the horrible things he said to end his chances at winning the Republican primary, let alone the general election. After he won, they continued to treat him like any other politician. They took his bad-faith rhetoric of Trump and that of the GOP at face value. They make excuses for every authoritarian move.

the centre cannot hold;

For years now, old media has been bothsidesing us up the ladder of an Orwellian water slide that dumps out in a toxic pool of fascism. Now we've reached the top of the ladder and we're halfway down the slide, and they still have not learned from this mistake. Masked, secret-police are snatching people off the streets based on little more than their skin color. ICE is deporting people without due process to punish them for using their free speech, sometimes sending them to a foreign gulag with a reputation for torturing people. The media calls all this "immigration enforcement", or an "immigration crackdown". Trump sends the US military to cities to intimidate and punish political rivals, and the media says he's "getting tough on crime."

Trump's 2024 electoral victory was largely accomplished through voter suppression. He is working to make the 2026 midterms even less democratic. The GOP has started a gerrymandering war, in a country that was already gerrymandered all to Hell. But old media still pretends our democracy isn't broken. The Supreme Court is packed with ideologues, 3 of whom Trump appointed, 2 of which are barely legitimate at all. This corrupt court continues to grant Trump unprecedented levels of power even as their credibility swirls down the drain. Now Trump is trying to classify anyone opposing fascism as a domestic terrorist. But old media continues to behave as if our government is still functioning normally.

This cannot continue forever.

Humans evolved to cooperate, so it is natural to seek a middle ground in conflict. But when you compromise with a fascist, they aren't compromising with you; they are accepting your capitulation, and will soon demand you compromise further. You become more fascist, but they don't become less fascist. This is why we shouldn't give them an inch, and yet we've already given them yards.

In closing, I'll leave you with this quote from MLK:

First, I must confess that over the past few years I have been gravely disappointed with the white moderate. I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro's great stumbling block in his stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen's Counciler or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate, who is more devoted to "order" than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice; who constantly says: "I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I cannot agree with your methods of direct action"; who paternalistically believes he can set the timetable for another man's freedom; who lives by a mythical concept of time and who constantly advises the Negro to wait for a "more convenient season." Shallow understanding from people of good will is more frustrating than absolute misunderstanding from people of ill will. Lukewarm acceptance is much more bewildering than outright rejection.

-Martin Luther King, Jr., Letter from a Birmingham Jail, 16 April 1963

Photo by Wallace Bentt on Unsplash