Mason  🏃‍♂️ ✂️

IMO, identifying the IDW as fundamentally about growing polarization/SJW influence/etc. narrowly misses the mark: that w/ the mobile web, institutions lost the ability to redirect narratives arbitrarily & started compensating by pandering to "thematic truths" ever more recklessly https://twitter.com/jonkay/status/1142970381583704064 …

The nature of the extremism is volatile; tribes, figures, policies will wax & wane. The insanity is here to stay, because there are fewer & fewer shared truth verification protocols — as the overlap between our worlds recedes, we're losing the ability to have conversations at all

This genuinely isn't about a common enemy or a common object-level goal, which is why everyone else seems to care more about the "infighting" than the IDW itself does. It's about the fact that shared reality is spinning out & since the elites can't reel it in, they're chasing it

(I'm not asking you to take any particular position on the stupid hats. I'm asking you to notice the visceral reaction you have to a campaign wearable, to ask yourself where that's coming from, and to consider whether or not this seems normal.)

It isn't normal because Trump isn't normal. It's a property of the man, not the media landscape.

Yes, that is the narrative. Is it also a property of the man that if I were to have to wear that hat — or even a hat that could just easily be mistaken for it — I'd be worried that I might actually get hurt?

Symbols derive meaning from their referents. If you wore a shirt saying, "wetbacks and towel heads go home," the response would be the same. So yes, it's a property of the man. If you wear that hat, it means you support the violence against your neighbors that he is enacting.