“Fiction is just as good, maybe better, in the attention economy”
The attention economy powers the internet. It made cable news a 24-hour affair. It makes talk radio infotainment. It makes “influencer” a job description. It makes YouTubers money. It makes TokTok TikTok. It makes Trump Trump. It makes us all stupider and more vulnerable to those who would deceive for their own ends.
It killed Ashli Babbitt.
God knows how A.I. will metastasize the attention economy. We can see it coming and as feel powerless to stop it as we were to learn from its past predations.
Michael Kruse interviews Abraham Josephine Riesman on the release of Ringmaster: Vince McMahon and the Unmaking of America on how professional wrestling has, as someone else observed of the New Age Movement, dissolved external reality. The result in liberal “choose your own spiritual journey” circles was to make conflict impossible, or at least unlikely. The result among black-and-white thinkers is just the opposite.
“Garry Kasparov, the Russian freedom activist, has said the point of disinformation isn’t to manipulate the truth, it’s to exhaust your critical thinking,” explained former Republican congressman David Jolly.
Reisman traces that devolution of thought to McMahon’s promotion of professional wrestling, itself having roots in traveling circus performances:
Kruse: Early in your book, you write: “This is the story about how a country built a man, and how that man reshaped his country. This is a story about evil and its uses, and what you can get away with when you sledgehammer down the walls between fact and fiction. This is a story about a heel.” This is a biography of Vince McMahon, but …
Riesman: I wanted to tease people with the idea that it’s also Trump. I wanted people to see the parallels. One of the most gratifying things that has happened in the response to this book so far is people feel like they’re discovering that it’s a political book.
All that matters now is spectacle. That is the difference between a House investigation run by Democrats and one run by Republicans. The latter could care less about facts. Fiction is just as good, maybe better, in the attention economy, as professional wrestling demonstrates.
Grabbing people’s attention is all that matters, says Reisman:
Can you grab people’s attention? And Vince figured out a while ago that a great way to grab people’s attention is just have people say the unsayable and do the unthinkable and toss out things that are true. I think the parallel is kind of obvious, and I hope that this is a moment where we can sort of wake up to the fact that the strategy of just fact-checking the other side doesn’t work. Because that’s not what fascism believes. It doesn’t believe in consistency. It doesn’t believe in all the truth or all the lie. It believes in total chaos. And that’s what we have under neokayfabe.
Political culture resembles heel and face wrestlers more than a debating society. The left pretends that the old normal still pertains when it does not for a large segment of the society.
“It pays to be the heel just as much or maybe even more than it pays to be “the face,” Kruse observes. Marjorie Taylor Greene built her political career on it.