This is where the information economy starts to eat itself. If every message arrives pre-saturated with irony, critique, and self-awareness, then no signal can rise above the din. Warnings, reassurances, satire, and sales pitches collapse into the same register. The audience isn’t persuaded or misled so much as numbed.
It sounds like you are describing an unfolding future where all communication us ultra-processed.
I have posted about this a couple times, but ever since I saw Jon Stewart a while back describe modern propaganda as ultra-processed speech. It’s engineered for reaction and engagement. It’s like you said, everything collapses into the same register when there’s a BOMBSHELL headline every day.
But the ultra-processed thing has been reaching much further into our media and culture than political speech for a while now. Like I dunno, everything that has half the people’s faces buried in their phone in public.
tover153@lemmy.world 1 week ago
Yeah, “ultra-processed” is a really good way to put it.
What Stewart was pointing at fits this exactly. The speech isn’t meant to persuade or inform so much as trigger uptake. Reaction density over substance. When everything is engineered for engagement, it all collapses into the same flavor.
And you’re right, this escaped political speech a long time ago. It’s in entertainment, advertising, workplace language, even how people narrate their own lives online. Everything gets intensified, smoothed, and pre-digested so it can move fast.
The phone part matters a lot. When attention is constantly fragmented, communication adapts. Messages stop assuming patience or continuity. They become short, sharp, emotionally saturated enough to punch through distraction. That isn’t a plot. It’s selection pressure.
What that means, though, is that anything deliberately slower starts to feel wrong by default. Not boring, wrong. Out of sync. But that slowness can be doing work of its own, creating space where meaning has time to accumulate instead of spike.
That’s the part that worries me. Once we train ourselves to expect everything pre-processed, we lose our tolerance for forms of communication that unfold rather than hit. And those slower forms are often where thinking actually happens.
snowboardbumvt@lemmy.world 1 week ago
What’s our way forward? I don’t know and I’m struggling to figure it out, but the more I get into it, the more I come back to ideas like curiosity, authenticity, and connecting with people outside our comfortable social groups.
I really feel like the world we’re living in now is the result of engineered propaganda and the only cure is related to authentic connections among everyday people.
tover153@lemmy.world 1 week ago
Yeah, that’s very close to where this thread kept pushing me too. Because of the back and forth here, I tried to consolidate some of it into a longer Substack essay. The link to my Substack is already above, and the new essay was just posted. No answers there either, just a slower pass at the same questions.
snowboardbumvt@lemmy.world 1 week ago
I appreciate your efforts, one thing I’m sure of is that, “I alone can fix it” is the antithesis of what we need right now. It’s going to take a lot of open, compassionate people to make things better.