Power is the only political party.
The news is currency, all presidents are liars, and death is the ultimate meaning-maker.
Part of my goal with The User is Content is to make sense of our media landscape.
In a digital world—especially in a recently quarantined digital world—the media landscape is also the psychological landscape is also the cultural landscape is also the economic landscape is also the political landscape. These planes all overlap; they are indistinguishable, inseparable, and unavoidable.
The phrase “The User is Content” comes from a prediction by the father of media studies, Marshall McLuhan, who predicted decades ago that once the whole globe is connected digitally by media interfaces, the difference between the user and the content itself will become blurred. We can see this most clearly in social media where companies make billions off of users being the content, and the only “content” the companies provide is the platform. The planes of real-life, digital life, self, and content all overlay one another. So how do we think critically about it?
The News is Current. Currency is News.
Another observation McLuhan made sticks with me today: currency is news, and news is currency. Of course, current and new are synonyms, but in our economic system, this is more than just a synonym or sly semantic observation; it’s a logical fact.
Our stock market is not based on anything other than the news. Our billionaire elite are rarely billionaires in the bank, they are billionaires in the stock market. This is why the richest man in the world on Monday is often not the richest man on the world on Friday. Usually, some bad news was released on Wednesday, sending their net worth in stocks plummeting. It’s only a short bridge to walk from this statement to understanding why we cannot trust for-profit corporate news.
In the case of CNN, it’s owned by Warner, which is owned by AT&T. Due to this connection, CNN has a vested interest in not rocking the boat for any of the companies, subsidiaries, or their powerful stakeholders. That’s not to say there is a conspiracy going on; that’s just to say that “editorial independence” is a pretty weak promise given what we know about humans.
The situation is analogous to a federal judge who knows a plaintiff personally, and instead of recusing themselves, they just pinky promise they will rule fairly. We all intuitively know it would just be better to remove the judge from the case. So then, how come we are trusting CNN and other corporate news networks to keep our democracy safe and expose tyranny responsibly?
As a member of the AT&T board of directors, CNN CEO Jeff Zucker regularly meets with the rest of the board, which includes people who also hold or have held executive positions at Tyson Foods, the FCC, Ford Motor Company, Berkshire Hathaway, Marriot, Revlon, Twitter, Monsanto, KeyBank, Aetna, and the Rwandan Government. In this man’s life, these are the people whose opinions and pleasedness he values. If they are happy—or if they at least owe him a favor—then he is happy.
Zucker came from sports programming and brought that style to CNN. He championed pre-games before debates and pitting Republican and Democrat pundits against one another in ESPN-style conversations. He has said explicitly that “the idea that politics is sport is undeniable, and we understood that and approached it that way.” This, of course, results in pitting both halves of America against one another. And so Zucker benefits from ensuring that these two teams become more outlandish and sensational. Let’s not get started on the fact that while at NBC, Zucker greenlit Donald Trump’s “Apprentice.”
Who Controls the Present Controls the Future
For the purposes of this post, it’s not important whether a cabal of executives are meeting and planning to manipulate the country or your mind. What’s important is that they have the ability to do so. It’s certainly not lost on them that today’s news can plummet or skyrocket the stock market. But as much as what is covered is important, we can often learn more from what is not covered. These were the front pages of Drudge Report, CNN, and MSNBC last week.
ProPublica, a multi-Pulitzer Prize-winning and more or less universally trusted investigative news organization, had just released an article that should have made waves through society. The article is based on years of tax returns belonging to Warren Buffet, Elon Musk, Bill Gates, and other people yet unannounced. Unsurprisingly, they don’t pay much in taxes. They didn’t do anything illegal, but there were some eye-openers: In 2016, Jeff Bezos—worth a cool $18 billion at the time— paid $0.00 federal income tax and actually claimed a $4,000 tax credit for his kids. Yes, the government paid him.
Oftentimes, when news like this clearly damages one political party (in this case, Democrats, who kind of claim these 3 billionaires as their own), I immediately check CNN and MSNBC and Fox. I do this out of morbid curiosity, usually knowing that they won’t be covering it.
You can see the headlines above—no mention, anywhere on either of the corporate media sites. They ran stories later but none were featured on the front page. Only Drudge Report ran with it. What are CNN and MSNBC saying in this omission, if not: “We don’t like this story because it will make us critique Democrats and their ideology.”
The same thing happened when eight Asian sex workers were murdered in Georgia by a deranged White guy. I immediately went to Fox News’ front page to see it buried two scroll pages down. There was, however, a featuring article about a Mexican immigrant charged with rape, a feature on how at-home learning was going to make children unhealthy and anti-social, and an article about how a Black murder suspect was part of a government-funded crime-diversion program. The message seems clear if I can translate: “Mexican immigrants are criminals, everyone is overreacting to Covid, and social services will not help Black people, so stop trying.”
But in Fox’s omitting the massacre in Georgia, I can also add to this translation: “Asian people, especially Asian sex workers, don’t matter and will not be mourned or discussed.”
When it comes to news, what is included, how it’s stated, and what is omitted is all up for critique.
There are no political parties, there is only power.
Some might say that ProPublica’s bombshell isn’t really a bombshell: we all know that billionaires skirt the tax code. Maybe the story isn’t being covered above the fold because they did nothing illegal and the leak of the documents seems like the bigger story. Maybe it’s not front-page news because it seems like whoever leaked their tax returns wanted to attack Democrats, and nobody wants to be duped into covering manufactured news. Maybe.
The Washington Post—owned by Jeff Bezos—ran with the story on the front page, but they could be seen defending their own with this gem:
Democrats have argued that the tax gap has widened mainly because big U.S. corporations have parked revenue overseas and wealthy individuals have failed to pay their fair share. They assert that the IRS, long understaffed and underfunded, has tended to pursue taxpayers of modest means more aggressively than high-powered businesspeople and corporations.
In this excerpt, we’re supposed to believe the laughable idea that an amorphous group who call themselves “Democrats” are out there, in positions of power, in total alignment with one another that we should reign in corporations, limit greed, and modernize the IRS. We, of course, know this is not the case.
Contrary to the Post’s argument, the reason that the IRS doesn’t go after big companies or billionaires is not because of lack of funding, it’s because both political parties have worked over decades to make tax evasion techniques codified and legalized. Society is controlled by what is made legal or illegal and by how these laws are evenly or unevenly enforced. What in the world does IRS funding have to do with anything? There were unlikely any crimes committed because these crimes were legalized—like lobbying is legalized bribery.
Tons of billionaires and corporate executives, and war-mongering corporation-loving politicians consider themselves Democrats. Democrats are made to believe Republicans are dumb and morally corrupt; Republicans are made to believe the same of Democrats. The fact is, those controlling this narrative, this sport-team dynamic, all remain deeply tied to systems that, on the whole, perpetuate collective suffering rather than collective healing. These systems include the military-industrial complex, corporate malfeasance, religious zealotry, racism, sexism, and all the other planes of rancid ideology we’ve been forced to interact with.
We on the Left have been propaganda-ed into believing these systems are the purview of Republicans only, and Democrats represent free lunches and rainbows. We see this as false when we umbrella all these systems as one easy-to-understand concept: power.
Here’s the hot take: There are no political parties, there is only power and the way power is distributed, used, sought after, exploited, wielded, and yielded. Each -ism and system is just another way of managing that energy.
Given our discord as a country and planet, our control (or lack thereof) over this power reminds me of an acupuncturist doing their best to manipulate and release the subtle body and its pathways—unable to admit it’s likely all too complicated and dynamic for a human mind to understand let alone utilize in any meaningful way.
Same Shit, Different Party
In recent years, AT&T donated $60,000 to the Democratic Senatorial and Congressional Campaign Committees and over $165,000 to the Republican Committees. This not only shows who AT&T thinks will protect their interests more (Republicans), but also winks and nods to Democrats that if they end up winning, there’s some money in it for them too. Analyzing this relatively small transaction reveals only one minuscule node in the web of power and how it protects itself at all costs.
I saw this dynamic most clearly when Barack Obama ran on a platform of transparency and reckoning. As a college student, I ran through the streets with classmates as we cheered for winning the first election we could vote in. Obama had hooked us by promising loudly at every turn that the people who botched the Iraq war and instituted domestic spying would be brought to justice. Much like Trump changed his tune on “Lock her up” after he was elected, so did Obama. Once he became president, not only did Obama say that there was no person in particular to prosecute, he signed into law legislation that absolved companies like AT&T and Verizon from wrongdoing, even though they violated every single customer contract by helping the government violate billions of people’s privacy rights in secret. These companies would have been ruined if we were allowed to sue them for the breach. But much like Obama claimed that some banks were too big to fail and needed protection, he anointed AT&T and Verizon with everlasting life as well.
Presidents bow not to citizens but to the maintenance of power structures.
If the banks and media companies and political parties and their decision-makers were held accountable for their wrongdoing and crimes, we are made to believe society would crumble. And when society crumbles, we are made to believe that we will turn to monsters and the world will be full of chaos.
But really, that storyline is just power telling you that it’s afraid to take on a new form. It wants just to keep doing its thing. Although the thought might fill you with dread—much like the thought that your body will one day die—banks, corporations, and governments can and should suffer natural deaths when the time is right. Just like relationships and trees and ice cream cones, phase changes are normal and should not be resisted.
Wells Fargo can die after it launders cartel money and causes a financial meltdown. AT&T can die when it violates almost innumerable contracts and laws. Why don’t we let them die?
Because, if you haven’t noticed: our society is afraid of death. We keep people alive and make their final years lame in nursing homes rather than expansive in nature, psychedelic journeys, or in otherwise peaceful and enriching ways. We (George W. Bush) make it illegal to show military coffins on TV because it reminds citizens about how much death results from our peacemaking.
Similarly, we revive companies that should have died long ago and play dumb now that we find ourselves in a landscape with Frankenstein behemoth corporations roaming the landscape, unsure of how to control them or where exactly we went wrong.
Stay Present
In a previous post, I tried to explore what real value is and how to make life meaningful. I concluded that on top of feeling grateful for life and being tickled at the absurdity of it all, one must also accept that after we die, life will go on, and in that sense, life needs nothing from us but to die one day. Death is the meaning-maker—without it, we are everlasting zombies—the insatiable living dead. In Buddhism, these are the hungry ghosts.
If the news is currency, it is by definition very present. All this power I have discussed lives and breathes through the news, through what is or is not said about it publicly. And, if we take the present moment and all of the value hanging on this instant—the lives, money, cultural power, stocks, companies, and systems—we can see that these things will only be truly valuable when they are understood in relationship to their own death. Otherwise, it’s all zombie power. Sure it lives forever, but what’s the quality of its life? Is it conscious? Are corporations really people? Not unless they can die.
Everyone and everything should die and disappear. I’m not saying we need to be excited about our own deaths or the deaths of the power and systems we have come to rely on, nor am I saying we should start a revolution to accelerate it.
But I am saying we should most definitely not try and stop it.
As always, I end my posts with a photo of my breakfast and a photo of my son.
