immanence

Here’s a back-of-the-envelope hypothesis on the “new media regime” and some open questions that follow from it.

Two groups are faring best these days under the current (new) media regime.*

The first is surveillance capitalists, who have developed ways to monetize and harvest new data technologies directly for the accumulation of wealth. (That covers the Jeff Bezoses, Mark Zuckerbergs, Larry Pages and Sergey Brins. If you add software billionaires like Bill Gates, Steve Ballmer, and Larry Ellison, you have 7 of the 10 wealthiest individuals in the world.)

The second is conspiracy entrepreneurs (such as the Alex Joneses, al-Baghdadis, and Q’s), who know how to work social media into new forms of cultural capital (including millenarian cults like QAnon and the Islamic State), and the politicians who know how to work that capital into political capital (the Trumps, Putins, Bolsonaros, and Modis). There’s overlap between those two groups, and will probably be more of it, so I list them together. (Why conspiracy? Because in unsettling times people seek explanations, and in the new media regime, those explanations can be forwarded without much, if any, support.)

The hypothesis is that the overlap in interests between these two groups will shape a significant chunk of the landscape of global politics in coming years.

The open questions for me are these:

• Will this emergent set of interests coalesce into a reformed late-modern media-information regime that successfully comes to (once again) represent dominant political-economic interests (as some suggest is happening)? In other words, will they be reined it by the “powers that be”? Or will they continue to scramble the latter (as I suspect will happen)?
• How will alternative media regimes, especially China’s (which is attempting to retain its independence and state control), fare against this new/dominant one? Will they ultimately meld together, or will they develop into divergent systems of surveillance/control with different objectives, resulting in a combatively (geo-info-militarily) bi- or multipolar world and a new and protracted Cold War 2.0?
• How will these new forces align or realign with traditional geopolitical forces, such as fossil fuel companies and their post-fossil fuel (“renewable energy”) reinventions?
• What roles can and will social movements, especially the global climate justice movement, carve out for themselves? How can supporters of those movements maximize their capacities within this new regime?
• As climate chaos grows and geopolitical struggles intensify, how will the contradictions between all these forces and processes play themselves out?

If that’s our playing field in the years to come, then I’m glad I’m an optimist by nature. Others will be less so.

*Note: In speaking of a “current (new) media regime,” I am of course simplifying matters. The “new media” regime is different from “media regimes” more generally. The latter is a concept developed by Williams and Carpini in their 2011 book After Broadcast News, which argued that we, at least in the U.S., are moving toward a new regime that would follow the cable-network variant of the broadcast news regime, but that we are not quite there yet. Nearly a decade later, it’s easy to argue that a new regime has emerged, that it is rooted in digital media (“Web 2.0”) and is increasingly globalized, and that it is supplanting and incorporating the “old” regime (or the many nationally based “old regimes”). What’s not clear yet is to what extent it qualifies as a single, global media regime (not quite), and to what extent it is, as Andrew Chadwick has argued, a “hybrid” regime (which it definitely is).