The revolution will be live

Turns out the revolution would be televised. And be live. All at once.

The talk lately is all of a coup. A takeover watched in real time as the tech-bro pluto-fascists strip the American state for parts and profit. It seems that somewhere in the phenomenon surrounding the clown presence of Donald Trump there was in fact an active intelligence. Not his, but the detailed prescriptions and action plans of Project 2025 now hitched to the mania of Elon Musk, the sociopathic malevolence of JD Vance and all the others.

And on they will push, running against the institutional boundaries of the country’s courts and Constitution until they reach an inevitable tipping point necessitating blunt defiance, from where, again inevitably, they will set those institutional barriers to one side and move on to reframe the state, upend to notion of its democracy and assert that will of that new absolute autocracy upon the world.

That last part … that’s the key, and a job well in hand before all this latest colour and movement.

It’s the extremity of these current events – the evisceration of the American public sphere - that make that kind of framing suddenly apparent, but it’s also a thing we should have seen coming.

All of this is only possible thanks to the technologies at the core of the movement, technologies that are now decades in to this ‘sudden’ transformation.

The recognition is made possible by the framing. We thought it was a revolution in communication. Turns out it was simply a revolution.

We watched the transformation of media in the internet age from earnest fourth estate to click-hungry engine of post-fact populism. We saw the effect that had on democratic politics: the impossibility of argument, the paralysis of policy, the constant play on anxiety and fear.

In the end that’s what the communications revolution brought us, the undercutting of democracy’s capacity to enact any broad social good.

We watched it. We’re watching it still. It’s been normalised by the tranquilising effect of slow, steady action.

It’s a coup, but one 30 years in the making.