Last month’s meltdown of the electrical grid in Texas left dozens dead and did tens of billions of dollars of infrastructure damage. As the crisis was still unfolding, politicians and their accomplices in the media jumped into the breach, primarily not to try to understand what happened or suggest solutions to the problem, but to do what our current politics demands of them: develop and advance a culture war narrative that confirms the priors and righteousness of their faction.
In the not-too-distant past, narratives were set more or less consensually by the New York-based media establishment (assisted by its Washington-based enablers). But as Martin Gurri and Bruno Maçães have shown, the narrative-setting days of elite media are now over, and we live in a world of fractured narratives proffered by Extremely Online factions that interpret reality—or jettison it entirely, in favor of constructing their own “unreality” (Maçães’ phrase)—primarily through the lens of their own self-justifying and unfalsifiable narratives.
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