Basically, a guy in Kansas is becoming famous for creating humorous memes which make fun of Democrats and their policies and candidates. And this is a harbinger of the end times if some are to believed. It is a subject of great debate as to which will happen first in the next twelve years - the collapse of the climate owing to mankind or the collapse of the West due to humorous memes.
I saw the headline but did not waste my time reading the piece when it first came out. The return on reading opinion pieces by Ben Rhodes journalists is pretty marginal-to-toxic. Since the dose is the poison, you have to moderate too much intake.
However, Ann Althouse did read it and dresses it down - from The NYT's Charlie Warzel takes CarpeDonktum's silly Biden-massaging-Biden video and turns it into something aggressive, chaotic, toxic, and dark. by Ann Althouse.
Warzel got an interview with the "memesmith"* who calls himself Carpe Donktum, who seems like a perfectly nice man, so I felt queasy about the way Warzel undercut him:There are several themes developed or suggested through her post.
Yep, a grainy, edited parody clip of the former vice president... [is] a perfectly unbelievable and dispiriting artifact of our fractured and chaotic political media ecosystem, where politicking is conducted through viral memes and retweets.Chaotic? Dispiriting? It was brilliantly funny, lightweight, sweet and doesn't seem to take any position on how we ought to feel about Joe Biden. It was absurd — and hardly political at all. I think it's positively healing. Why is Warzel getting so heated up about it?
The entire event is at once silly, trivial, offensive and, thanks to Donald Trump’s Twitter feed, something we’re now begrudgingly made to pay attention to.Oh, spare me. You're already paying complete attention to Donald Trump’s Twitter feed. Warzel seems to hate the idea that CarpeDonktum may have "an indirect line to the Oval Office." Yes, isn't it terrible that an ordinary person, somewhere in flyover country, can just say something or show something, and the President might see it and take 10 seconds of his time to acknowledge that it exists and is funny? It's easy to imagine how wonderfully cool the same behavior would be if Obama, while President, had done the same thing with a video that made cute fun of Dick Cheney.
And his elevation — from a Kansas City keyboard warrior to right-wing internet fame as the president’s unofficial meme maker — is a telling example of how the internet has fully blurred the lines between meme posting and business of politics.MSM wants a strong border between the professional media and social media. They're overwrought about the cacophony of illegitimate voices in the discourse. Their entire way of life is threatened. If only there could be some kind of wall to protect them from the chaos of the invasion of the horde.
The anger and derangement of the mainstream media as regular citizens, via the medium of the internet, disintermediate the MSM.Sure, Warzel is angry because he is a Democrat on a losing streak. But Althouse is hinting that there is more at play and I agree. My suspicion is that there is a confluence of forces.
The classism of the Mandarin Class and the MSM.
The regional bigotry of the Mandarin Class and the MSM.
The MSM's inability to control themselves. Every set back is met with MSM reporting that invokes the Streisand Effect. They are supposed to be the communications experts and yet they constantly make rookie mistakes by rising to every bait, in turn destroying their own reputation and bringing attention to that which they wish to be suppressed.
The complete absence of humor on the left or by the Mandarin Class trying to protect their unearned privileges.
The unacknowledged reality that the left is violent to whomever it deems an enemy. The incivility is unidirectional.
The internet broke the traditional MSM business model and they are still trying to address that challenge. Costs rise, revenue fall, jobs plummet, the focus shifts from news to clicks. Their industry is pervaded by an existential angst.No Warzel is angry at in Kansas having greater access to the President and more of an audience than Warzel. I am sure it just doesn't seem right.
The Ben Rhodes phenomenon makes it easier and easier for there to be fake or misleading news, exacerbating the problem.
The youth of the reporters makes them not only less knowledgeable but also more likely to be fanatically ideological, exacerbating the problem.
The combination of the internet with always on connectivity means that not only is the business model broken because of lost advertising but it is also threatened by new free content from non-MSM suppliers.
The fact that the MSM is not a fourth estate constraining the government but is in fact a key buttress to the ineffective Mandarin Class establishment means that the global revolt of the masses against the Mandarins also threatens their social standing in a way separate from income.
Carpe Donktum and Charlie Warzel have both been on Twitter for about a decade. Warzel because it is his business as a journalist, Carpe Donktum for fun. Warzel is a professional, Carpe Donktum is a hobbyist. Warzel has made more than three times as many tweets as Carpe Donktum, 16,000 versus 5,000.
Here is where it gets embarrassing. Despite working at this full time compared to Carpe Donktum, Warzel's number of followers is only 117,000 compared to Carpe Donktum's 81,000. Warzel has produced 200% more content but only gotten 50% more followers. And it gets worse.
With all this full-time effort and large volume of output compared to a hobbyist, Warzel's number of likes is 14,000 compared to Carpe Donktum's 28,000.
A stay-at-home dad doing twitter memes as an hobbyist has engaged more of the nation than a full-time journalist and now has access of a sort to some of the most powerful and influential people in the country, up to and including the President. No wonder Warzel is existentially angry.
There is some interesting commentary and additional information in the Comments section.
I liked the Blazing Saddles allusion from Mr. D.
We've got to protect our phony-baloney jobs, gentlemen, and they didn't get a harrumph outta that guy. Give the Timesman a harrumph!
Althouse points out:
This is the top comment at the NYT: "It goes beyond shame that such vapid entertainment, from a total nobody, should find such widespread approval in this country. Then consider this: the NYT reporter had the professionalism and decency not to “out” him in print. You won’t find that behavior from Mr. Nobody and his fans.""Mr. Nobody" - the classism is strong in this one. Usually they try and be more discreet in their disdain for those outside the Mandarin Class.
On the anger of the wannabes complaining about the master.
Ron Winkleheimer said...And then there is this:
It's the old idea that Trump isn't presidential and is using his precious time to indulge in looking at social/popular media and then spreading the things that serve his political interests.
As my wife has observed, Trump's premier talent and skill is marketing. Which is what politicians and their consultants think they are good at. But they are mere apprentices and Trump is a master. Obama had a twitter feed, I believe. I'm not really sure. Which tells you something.
buwaya said...Mbunge has it right.
The attitude from the NYT commenter sounds like that of some partisan of an ancien regime, despising the canaille while worrying about the guillotine.
MBunge said...There is one final bit in Althouse's post which was highly suggestive to me.
This is part of the professionalization of elite status in America. Like any country, America has an elite for a long time. But the old money, blue blood, Ivy League boys were too few in number to run a country the size of the United States. They need to work with more merit-based elites from Texas, Iowa, Oregon, etc. So it was true that America's elite really kind of was elite because it was full of people who won entry to that class by genuinely being smarter or doing more than the average joker.
Now? Our elite is overwhelmed by administrative and media types who are not elite in any way. They simply put themselves on a certain career track and rose up through the ranks. I mean, does anyone think Ross Douthat got a job with the New York Times because he's the best conservative writer and thinker in the country? Does anyone think this Warzel doofus is smarter or understands the world better than a random plumber from Idaho?
We're ruled by functionaries and the hysteria over Trump is their reaction to us looking behind the curtain and realizing they're no wizards.
It's a simple process, and CarpeDonktum nicely shared a tip.CarpeDonktum is consciously trying to appeal to the largest audience possible - He is being inclusive. What a marked contrast that is to most of the Mandarin Class and the MSM who write pretty much only for one audience, a declining audience at that. And who are so exclusionary in their approach and so marked by bigotry in their characterizations of anyone outside the Mandarin Class.
[CarpeDonktum] tailors [videos] to an older generation of internet users. The elaborate memes feature footage from old Looney Tunes cartoons or depict Mr. Trump as a cowboy from an old John Wayne-style Western, slapping a man with a CNN or MSNBC logo across its head. “It’s boomer humor,” he said of his style of videos. “I’m not a boomer. But that brand of humor is most easily shareable by lots of people. So, I stay away from real violence, or overly sexualized stuff so it appeals to the largest amount of people.”"Boomer humor" — by a younger guy who sees its value. Gee, thanks. I hear him saying that he wants something more sweet and silly, but Warzel wants to use him to show that everything's spinning out of control.
This ties to one of the underlying mysteries of modern political dialog. To me, it is pretty obvious that free people engaged with one another in a free market making voluntary contracts with each other is both the most ethical as well as demonstrably the most progressive model for prosperity and well-being. It is a mystery to me why so many left of center pundits are so enamored with socialism and command economies. They obviously don't work and philosophically they are inherently based on state coercion not individual free choices. Everything they say they want is achieved by free people in free markets and yet their policies are all geared towards suppression and coercion. Kind of a mystery.
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