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seaver:
you can have a highly coordinated political apparatus on the one hand and a huge diversity of positions amongst the population that is addresses at the same time.
it is not like politics/information routed through politics represents the totality of what anyone thinks or is.
it seems that at its most successful, a highly coordinated political apparatus can manage to shape discourse in particular regions--they can shape the terms of debate and/or interpretation--and people can pick up that discourse as if it was a kind of algorithm and effectively just run it.
what an apparatus can do to increase the uniformity of usage--not attitudes about usage, but usage of these frameworks/algorithms---is to create a separate media environment that folk can choose to enter into and which can (if it works) provide a fairly complete, mobile description of the world.
the american right has set up a version of such a system over the past 20 years or so, but it remains relatively open-ended--its borders are porous and people can shift in and out of it pretty easily because the american right does not dominate the media they work in, they simply have carved out a space within them--and frankly, they are pikers when compared with what the old school communist parties managed to do back when they were viable. i am not a fan of the american right---but i haven't seen anything quite as bizarre from them as the international celebration of stalin's 70th birthday (in 1949).
now *that* merited the "what the fuck?" response...
i might be drifting off point here: what i am arguing here is that to say there is a fairly centralized media apparatus that the right has set up==at great expense and as a function of considerable labor (it is quite an organizational accomplishment, no matter what you think of it) is not to say that everyone who finds what that apparatus says or shows to be compelling thinks in the same way.
on the other hand, when you find yourself in debates in a space like tfp (or any messageboard) on political matters, it often seems like all you see of more conservative people is the algorithms. but that's more the form, the boards, than anything else i think.
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a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear
it make you sick.
-kamau brathwaite
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