Category: The Internet

My enthusiasm for the Harris/Walz campaign has cooled a little recently. Not enough to change my vote, obviously, but enough to make me less optimistic that we’re going to see the significant reboot of the US political system that I’d been hoping for.

The problem: it seems like whoever was the Harris campaign’s Authenticity Manager was brought in for a meeting with the Democratic elite and quietly let go. “Thanks for your service, I guess, but I think we can take it from here,” they said with condescending smarm, probably. “After all, we have been running Democratic campaigns for the past forty years, so I think we know a thing or two about elections. Why don’t you Pokemon Go on home?”

Do campaigns even have Authenticity Managers? I don’t know. But for a while, it sure seemed like the campaign was cutting through the bullshit and taking a definitive stand on a bunch of issues that Democrats have normally tossed around like a hot potato. I was even happy to hear Harris taking a stand on issues I don’t agree with (She said repeatedly, “We’re not taking away anybody’s guns,” and I’m like, “Well, you could take away some guns, certainly, seeing as how the problem is that there are too many?”) because it meant we were getting back into the realm of adults who can reasonably disagree on important issues. Instead of “my unassailable and infallible savior” vs “the demon who will destroy civilization as we know it.”

Over the past couple of weeks, though, it seems like the campaign has been settling back into the old familiar nonsense.

I understand that the Democrats are still traumatized by the 2016 election, and they want to avoid being overconfident. And I also understand that it’s in Harris’s best interest to play the underdog. But every day I see another message from the campaign suggesting that things have taken a terrible turn, they’re just barely hanging on, they desperately need our help, doom is upon us all. This isn’t the party that was coming in and energizing everyone just a couple of months ago; this is the party that’s spent the last decade with control of multiple branches of government and still shrugging and insisting that they were powerless to do anything. Wouldn’t it make more sense to be emphasizing enthusiasm and excitement? Saying “our message is really connecting with people,” reminding us that the GOP doesn’t have the overwhelming mandate it insists that it does, and giving us some hope that they intend to make a difference?

And seeing more of the same in terms of funding requests is particularly frustrating. Early on, we were getting reports of raising hundreds of millions of dollars within a week or two, which was hugely exciting as a sign that there was a clear mandate for Harris. After the announcement of Tim Walz as VP candidate, the enthusiasm and support took off again. Last I checked, the campaign had raised almost a billion dollars, mostly from first-time donors — meaning this wasn’t the usual Democratic machine grinding away, but genuine excitement that change was coming. But now, I’m getting increasingly desperate requests for donations from Harris, Walz (with increasingly strained football metaphors), and Barack Obama. We’re being outspent in battleground states! Ma’am, you’ve got a billion dollars! The Obamas have enough money to buy at least a dozen of me, outright! If you’re getting outspent, that sounds like a you problem, tbqh.

The ad that set me off in particular was something like “Do you want to wake up November 6th feeling like you could’ve done more?” Deliberately — shamelessly — taking advantage of the despair a lot of us felt back in 2016, when our anxiety over “why is the race this close?” turned into “holy shit, how did this happen?” I’ve already donated more money to this campaign than I have to any other political campaign, and that’s on top of trying to donate to hurricane recovery and humanitarian relief charities from the multiple disasters going on. And we all know that the most prominent Democrats are very wealthy (if not obscenely wealthy) people, and most of us don’t begrudge them that. But when the Obamas are coming onto my phone to tell me that if Trump wins, it’s because people like me didn’t do enough, that just strikes me as extraordinarily tone deaf.

It all makes me wish there were some way to get information about what is actually going on, from a source that’s not directly invested in any political party or campaign. It would be great if something like that existed in the United States.

Instead, we’ve got the most prominent newspapers and broadcast media all deciding at once that they’re bored with the same old journalistic malpractice they’ve been doing over the past decade, and committing to actively undermining campaigns and eroding our faith in our institutions.

I wish that were hyperbole, but there’s just no denying it anymore. It’s not even tricky to find examples these days; I just randomly went to The New York Times website, and right there at the top of the front page are multiple examples of misreporting things that I know to be true. Creating a false equivalence between Harris’s support for an actual child tax credit, Trump lazily repeating the old GOP cure-all of tax cuts for the rich (or people “higher up the income scale” in Times speak). Harris’s outreach to black communities spun as political maneuvering to “shore up” the Black male vote at the last minute, even though she’s made a point of talking directly to Black men for the duration of her last two campaigns at least. Reporting on Trump’s blatantly fascist speeches — in which he promises to use the government to punish his enemies — not with emphasis on what he actually said, but on the idea that his supporters don’t believe it’s a serious threat.

For the past several years, I’ve been making excuses for the Times and the rest of “mainstream media,” saying that they were driven by fear of litigation or an overabundance of caution over journalistic integrity. We saw it in the “both sides” coverage of the climate crisis, long after the truth was evident even to the most gullible person? We thought we saw it with the Clinton campaign, where they normalized the most lunatic fringe claims of the GOP, seemingly out of respect for political norms or some such. I find it impossible to be so charitable anymore, and keep giving them the benefit of the doubt.

I mentioned that I started using social media apps again once I noticed that the Kamala Harris campaign’s account had started firing on all cylinders, making politics fun and engaging instead of anxious and dreadful.

But what I hadn’t considered was that I’d also quit smoking around the same time. In retrospect, I was just trading one previously-reliable dopamine-hit distraction for another. And once I made that connection, it also helps explain so much of everything I’ve been turning over in my mind, trying to make sense of things that refuse to make sense, and wondering how we all ended up in this state.

There are several eerie parallels between addiction and this whole social/political dystopia we’ve made for ourselves in 2024:

• The distraction becomes the focus. For me, the “quick smoke break to clear my head” gradually turned into “I’ve got to finish this so I can have another cigarette.” This doesn’t feel that different from watching the glut of political media put all of their focus on the politicians and their campaigns, instead of the real-world problems that they were trying to address. People have been pointing out for years that the emperor has no clothes, which the political media has taken as a cue for incessant discussions about The Power and Significance of Nudity In America’s Fast-Changing Political Climate.
• It rejects the idea of ever having enough. In the 80s, it was 24-hour news channels. Now, it’s having to fill every pixel of every screen, and every nanosecond of the day, with content. Old-fashioned notions of relevance and newsworthiness were discarded long ago, because there always has to be something to focus on, something we can make seem important, even if it isn’t.
• It feeds off of self-awareness. I always felt like being aware of how much I was smoking was the same thing as being in control over it, but for me, it wasn’t.¹Respect to people who’ve been able to quit with willpower alone, but I never have been able to without chemical help. With media — traditional or social media — and politics, self-awareness is never used towards changing behavior, but reinforcing behavior. People on Twitter came up with the ostensibly ironic term “doomscrolling,” and then dove back even deeper into their phones and their imaginary, perpetually angry and miserable communities. And one of JD Vance’s least-harmful bits of weird behavior was saying that he had a Diet Mountain Dew and “people will probably say that’s racist.” The GOP is perfectly aware that they’re (with good reason) perceived as racist, but instead of engaging in any actual introspection, they’ve simply decided that the accusation is meaningless.
• It reinforces the same patterns over and over again, until it loses any resemblance to the original. It’s been over a decade since I actually enjoyed a cigarette; by the end, it became more of a burdensome obligation than anything pleasurable. I’m reminded of that when I see how political media took the necessity of fact-checking and turned it from actual journalism into the performative ritual that it is now, giving nonsensical rebuttals to obviously true statements, presumably just because they have to write something. So now, instead of being a reliable source of truth, they just reinforce the (false) notion that everyone is always lying to some degree or another.

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  Respect to people who’ve been able to quit with willpower alone, but I never have been able to without chemical help.

Previously on Spectre Collie, I presented my grand theory on the state of American politics in 2024, which is that nobody actually understands what the hell is going on. And more importantly: the more confidently somebody asserts that they do understand what’s going on, the more suspect they are.

With a few notable exceptions. After the past few weeks, the only people that seem trustworthy to me and insightful enough to say what’s actually going on are Harris, Walz, and Buttigieg.¹And a smattering of independent journalists In other words: I’ve become the guy smitten with politicians and extremely distrustful of the “mainstream media,” the New York Times in particular.

In other words: what the f@$#?!²Reminder: I promised my mother I’d stop using the f-word online.

I think the short answer is that everything has been allowed to get so weird and nonsensical that it requires a full reboot. I already thought that we were seeing a reboot of the Democratic party, but it looks like it’s turning into a total turn-the-entire-system-off-wait-30-seconds-and-turn-it-back-on-again to reset everything to the center.

And yes, obviously, it is the center. Maybe slightly left; it’s hard to tell anymore when they’re on stage at a Democratic rally saying how much they respect the Second Amendment. Everything in the Harris/Walz platform is just widely popular common sense. The only reason it’s ever interpreted anywhere as “dangerously leftist,” or even “boldly progressive,” is because corporate journalism and social media have failed us.

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  And a smattering of independent journalists
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  Reminder: I promised my mother I’d stop using the f-word online.

First I have to acknowledge that this post is entirely the result of my being too online over the past couple of weeks. I have been back on the centralized social media apps, and they are bad places that do bad things to people.¹Mastodon is still okay. It seems to be near-impossible to unintentionally “go viral,” and the lack of up-to-date topical news makes everything much calmer. Everybody got such a rush from so much news happening so fast, some people are now displaying withdrawal symptoms from having to wait for Kamala Harris to announce a VP pick.

Again, and I can’t stress this enough: always-on news channels and infinite social media feeds are a blight on humanity.

But since there are going to be tons of self-proclaimed political science and policy experts going online to offer their opinions, and since I’m apparently helpless to resist going back to read everything they have to say, I’ve just got one simple request: let’s stop acting like things are still the same as they were even four years ago, much less back in 2008.

What prompted this: reading multiple predictions about who was going to be chosen as Harris’s VP, which all sounded identical to conversations that have been happening for as long as I’ve been following politics.²And then getting frustrated and disillusioned and ignoring all of it until the next major election. “It has to be Shapiro, because they have to do well in Pennsylvania,” or “they need someone who will go against Trump’s energy,” or “America’s not ready for a gay Vice President,” etc. etc. It’s all so outdated and irrelevant that they might as well be talking about star signs or bodily humours.

It really stood out to me because I was guilty of it myself. When all the “elite” Democrats were going through contractions trying to squeeze out Joe Biden, my biggest concern was that there’d be no one to replace him, forcing the Democrats into reliving the contentious “Hillary vs Bernie” infighting that helped make me disgusted with the party. I have to admit that I’d immediately discounted Kamala Harris, because I immediately assumed that she was too “risky” and would never get the nomination.

What was that based on? Just years of seeing the Democrats be frightened of their own shadows, constantly playing to some mythical undecided strawman in Iowa that probably never actually existed, and always finding a way to be foiled despite being the most risk-averse people imaginable. Plus all the self-satisfied “social media leftists” in the Bay Area, who’d never shut up with the “Kamala is a cop” nonsense.

But we should all recognize that none of that applies anymore, assuming it ever actually did. Everything leading up to Harris’s nomination feels so unprecedented, it’s gotten to the point where it’s unnerving. When am I going to have to be cynical and disappointed again?! For now, though, it feels like we’ve got a candidate for President who’s actually someone who’d be great at the job. Who’s smart and capable, and personable. Not just an emergency fill-in, not just someone who was the safest of all available options, and not just someone who’d be good at getting votes.

It’s an exciting feeling, the thought of somebody getting into office because they’d be good at being President, not just good at strategizing through an election. And I’d hope that whoever is the VP candidate (and it goes without saying, but there are no outright bad options in the front runners), they’re chosen not just for strategy, but for personality, and the dynamic they’ll bring to the campaign.

And frankly, I’d hope that the campaign takes full advantage of their opponents absolutely shitting the bed, and of the Democratic establishment being too scared of the alternative for too much infighting, and continues running a campaign based on the right thing to do, instead of just the thing that “plays best in the flyover states” or “energizes the base.” Or whatever other nonsense the 24/7 political news cycle has poisoned us with. It feels like we’ve been given the chance to do a reboot, and we should take advantage of it.

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  Mastodon is still okay. It seems to be near-impossible to unintentionally “go viral,” and the lack of up-to-date topical news makes everything much calmer.
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  And then getting frustrated and disillusioned and ignoring all of it until the next major election.

The featured image in this post is a screenshot from CNN’s YouTube channel, where the title of a video promised “What the data is saying about who Kamala Harris will likely choose as VP.” It includes headshots of the front-runners, with a precise percentage value under each one. When you watch the video, you see that the “data” is gathered not from polls, but from people betting on the outcome.

In other words: nobody knows shit. (And also: 24-hour news channels were a mistake).

Over the past couple of weeks, I’ve broken all my pledges to be a mentally-healthier and better-functioning human, and I’ve gone right back to obsessively reading social media.¹Threads, Bluesky, and Instagram, at least. Twitter is still inexcusable garbage and everyone should delete their account immediately. The reason is because Kamala Harris’s presidential campaign is nailing it.

They came out swinging with two “channels:” first there’s the campaign, which releases official statements in response to significant events, with thoughtful takes that stay true to the campaign’s message of freedom, unity, and moving forward. Second, there’s “Kamala HQ,” which calls itself the “rapid response” team, and posts memes directly responding to whatever is the hot topic of the moment. It’s legitimately funny and fun to read, building on the unfamiliar sense of optimism that came with Biden’s endorsement and the start of Harris’s campaign, and somehow against all odds making it actually enjoyable to follow a US presidential campaign.

The only reason I’m not even more impressed with Harris’s social media team is because 90% of the time, they just post completely unedited clips and statements from their opponents. Over the past three-and-a-half years of a mostly functioning government, I’d forgotten just how bad the Republicans are at everything, and how much Trump and Vance seem so eager to just completely shit all over themselves on camera.

But again, I think Harris’s campaign has come out strong. And it’s not just because they have a social media team that’s young enough never to have used dial-up internet. It feels like more than any other Democratic campaign in my lifetime, they understand what a Presidential campaign needs to do: tell us what we want to hear and also what we need to hear.

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  Threads, Bluesky, and Instagram, at least. Twitter is still inexcusable garbage and everyone should delete their account immediately.