What does that even mean, “I fell down a link tree rabbit hole?” It sounds like an odd thing to say but it makes perfect sense in the context of today’s Internet.
You may have heard of Linktree, a site that lets you create a personalized page with links to your social media or to content you are promoting. Then you include the link to your linktree in you bio on your social media profiles, creating a web of connections. Anyone who comes to one of your profiles can easily find all your other ones. If anything changes, you only have to update the linktree page, not each and every profile bio.
It sounds like a great idea, and I’ve noticed people putting their linktrees in their bios so I figured, why not do it, too? I found the site, was surprised and delighted to discover that “stevebarrera” was not taken, and easily created an account. I started building my list of links, and that was when I tumbled down the rabbit hole.
Turns out I needed to make a lot of choices before my link in bio page was done! I had to pick colors and font for the links, decide if the thumbnails should be icons or images, and if there should be headers. I could put additional social media link icons on the top or bottom of the page. And then I had to go to the sites I was linking to, and figure out where to put the link back to the link tree on those pages, where appropriate.
Overall, I had to come up with a sort of branding for my Internet self – how I wanted to present myself how I wanted to prioritize the links. So here’s what I came up with – take a look: linktr.ee/stevebarrera
You can easily make your own link tree for your profile bios. There are other options out there as well, like AllMyLinks and Campsite, and many more.
Emojis at Work – How Social Media Infiltrated the Workplace
I still remember the excitement when the first iPhone came out in 2007; only a few people were using this new kind of mobile phone, but boy were they delighted with it. At the same time, everyone was jumping onto Facebook, which had just opened up to the general public in 2006.
Fast forward to a decade and a half later, and everyone has a touchscreen phone (I got my first one in 2014). Social media platforms have proliferated, and are a constant, pervasive feature of daily life.
Once, employers tried to prevent workers from browsing the Internet during the day, but such efforts have been abandoned. Everyone is on their phone all the time. In fact, the software used to officially collaborate in the workplace looks a lot like the apps we use in our personal lives.
At least, that’s been my experience as a white collar professional in a cubicle environment. I’m a middle-aged GenXer, and my career is split pretty evenly between the world before social media, and the world after. I’ll explore what that’s been like for me a little more in this post.
I joined Facebook in 2008, because all of my coworkers were doing it and I didn’t want to be left out. It was a clear case of FOMO (Fear Of Missing Out), a term then recently introduced, to explain how social networks stimulate compulsive following and mimicking behavior. I friended all of my coworkers, and had fun setting up my profile and exploring the site.
Do you remember those days, and how primitive the Facebook interface was compared to today? Your main profile page was called your “wall” and to post on it, you “updated your status.” If you look back at your posts from fifteen years ago, you’ll see how diffferent they were. They seem kind of awkard and tentative, like we all didn’t quite know what to do with this new way of communicating.
Back then, there was a site called “Please Rob Me” that tried to raise awareness about the dangers of sharing the fact that you weren’t home, like someone was wondering how anyone could be stupid enough to do that. The site is defunct now, and today it is routine for people to tag their locations when they go out, even though we all know we’re giving valuable information away to giant corporations (the ones who are really robbing us).
Back then, as employees found themselves sucked into their Facebook feeds, companies started blocking the website from their local intranets. They established policies about what employees were allowed to post on social media platforms, warning them against representing the company or divulging corporate information.
In the late 2000s, the world was just getting used to social media, and its implications. Today, a decade and a half later, social media is routine in our daily lives. Everyone accesses social media platforms from their smartphones on a more or less continuous basis, even while at work, and employers have no chance of stopping them.
One thing I’ve decided since those early days is that it is best to keep my work life and my personal life separated, where social media is concerned. I no longer send Facebook friend requests to my coworkers, as I did back when I first joined the site. But that’s just how I personally manage my online presence. For other people, depending on their line of work, it might be better or even necessary to network and post about work across all social media, and have less of a distinction between personal and professional social spaces.
A clever post about work I made on a social media app
That’s not to say that social media isn’t a part of my work life at all. There are, as you well know, work-specific social media sites, such as LinkedIn, where I do make sure to connect with my coworkers. The Intranet at the company where I work uses software that has posts and feeds that resemble those on any other social media platform, and while I’m not particularly active there I do browse, to get a feel for the corporate culture.
I also sometimes post about work on my personal social media accounts, but in a sly way. I don’t want to reveal where I work, but just say something about work that’s clever, maybe even vaguely subversive, hoping for likes and shares. I’ve included an example screenshot in this blog post. You can see that I got zero engagement.
Social media conventions have infiltrated workaday tasks as well, such as is in the use of emojis and reactions in online conversations. I have long been using messaging software in the workplace; I remember Skype being in place in the office back in 2002. I also remember that at as emojis started coming into use in personal messaging, I was hesitant at first to include them in work conversations. It just seemed somehow unprofessional to use a smiley face in a work related chat.
But, in time, it simply became a norm. On the messaging software I use at work now, there are emoji reaction options, and my coworkers and I routinely “thumb up” and “heart” one another’s messages. It’s just a way of signalling agreement or showing appreciation. Workplace communication has become more friendly and informal than in the past, and I think this reflects a preferred mode for today’s mostly Gen X and Millennial workers.
For me, a Gen Xer who adopted less formal modes of communication in the latter portion of his career, it’s been an adjustment. But for many of my coworkers, who are Millennials twenty or thirty years younger than I am, it must just seem like the normal way people communicate in the digital space. For Boomers, experiencing these changes at the tail ends of their careers, it might seem too informal or alien to their expectations.
I suppose I shouldn’t speak for others, especially if they are from a different generation. These are just my thoughts on the matter. There’s no denying that the proliferation of smartphones, along with ubiquitous access to the Internet and its software platforms, has changed our daily routines, including our work routines. Please feel free to share your own experience in the comments below.
On this blog I often write about generations, and when I do I often find myself writing specifically about the generations online. For example, I have posts about social media, where I’ve observed how different generations experienced social media at different life stages, thus having a different relationship with the technology. It’s like what I really blog about is the Internet, and that’s not surprising given that I spend almost of all of my waking life there, whether at my paying job or working on personal projects like this blog.
It’s nothing new; on my old blog, I had a background section about the generations, and it emphasized their presence on the Internet. For example, I noted that the GI generation did not have much Internet presence, and that it was members of the Silent generation who were typically portrayed as the older people just learning how to get online. Meanwhile, Boomers and Gen-Xers were the Internet entrepreneurs, and the Millennials had their own unique online portals. I was writing all of this in the early to mid-2000s, so a lot has changed. If you go to my old site, you will find that some of the external links still work, but many, if not most of them, are dead now.
Back then, I focused on “the web.” Web 2.0 was young, and social media was still evolving as a concept. You might note that in my background section, social media makes an appearance on the Millennial page, in scare quotes no less. Twenty years later, I think it’s natural to associate social media and the ubiquity of apps and crowdsharing with that generation; it goes hand in hand with their consensus-seeking peer personality. Now that social media apps, with their relatively closed platforms, are supplanting the more open world wide web, what has changed about the presence of the generations online?
Well, for one thing, everyone is on the Internet now. You can’t really talk about any particular”online generation” when the Internet is part of the background of everyday life. At best there’s the idea of “digital natives” to cover all the people so young that they can’t remember when there wasn’t an Internet. But I think all generations from Boomers on down are comfortable with life online.
I would say that, as a rule, different generations tend to congregate in different platforms. Facebook and Twitter, and what’s left of the old world wide web are where you find the older generations, while Instagram, YouTube, Reddit and TikTok are where the younger generations are. This assertion is based on no data at all; it’s just my impression. While all of the living generations are on the Internet, they have different reputations online and different presences as a generation. Let’s call the sum total of all that a generation’s Internet profile.
First, for the Boomer generation and older, I’d say their Internet profile doesn’t looks so great. There’s not much around specific to the Silent generation, except for pages that amount to encyclopedia entries. Boomers as a generation have a terrible social media presence, since they are mostly the butt of jokes. As I noted in an earlier blog post, there’s a Facebook group devoted to making fun of Boomers. And we all know about “OK boomer.” As individuals, plenty of Silents and Boomers are in command of their social media presence, particularly celebrities and prominent and powerful officials. I imagine that many elder leaders actually have teams of younger people managing their social media accounts.
The Millennial generation’s Internet profile is a bit of a muddle. For one thing, younger Millennials would prefer to disassociate themselves from their older generational peers and call themselves Generation Z. Articles about the gap between Millennials and Gen Z are generally silly fluff, but the real story here is that there is a reluctance among Millennials to embrace their generational moniker. Despite the fact that the term “Millennial” has become a commonplace and is ubiquitous in online discourse about the state of society, Millennial individuals are not keen on taking on their generational name as a brand.
This takes me to my generation, Generation X. Of all the generations, Gen X is the one which most willingly – eagerly, even – embraces its identity online. Gen X’s Internet profile is like a bold statement – don’t you forget about us! There are so many Gen X themed YouTube channels, podcasts, social media pages and accounts that I am not even going to list any here. Instead, I’ll pick that up in a future post. Suffice it to say that many Gen X individuals see themselves in terms of belonging to their generation, and a lot of what Gen Xers obsess on in their online content and sharing is nostalgia for their past. You know, that time before there was an Internet.
I joined Facebook in 2008. In the thirteen years since, I’ve “friended” a few hundred people, many of them people I know from social circles, but also extended family and old schoolmates that I haven’t seen in years or decades. In some cases reuniting with old friends has caused a new friendship to blossom, and in others it’s simply been a chance to catch up on what has happened in our lives since we graduated from school, so long ago.
In addition, in the thirteen years since I joined Facebook, some of the people in my friends list have died. Almost certainly, you have experienced, as I posted recently, learning about a friend’s death online. When a Facebook user dies, their profile will still be there online. Facebook, in fact, has developed a protocol for memorializing accounts. Because of the nature of the platform and its long term success, this protocol, like death itself, became an inevitability.
At this point in time, about 1% of my Facebook friends are deceased. I don’t bring this up to be macabre, but to point out that with the pervasiveness of digital life, we are witnesses online to every stage of the lives of the people to whom we are connected in our social networks, and that includes the final stage.
With respect to the very youngest generation, we begin to learn about them starting at the earliest life stage. Today’s children are online even before birth, in the form of ultrasound images posted by their expectant mothers. In childhood, before they have their own social media accounts, they appear in their parents’ profiles. Traditions have developed like the annual back to school snapshot, or the family Halloween group picture.
Today’s childhood generation is the first generation to exist fully on the Internet. It will encompass their lives from cradle to grave, like some device in a Black Mirror episode. For older generations, even early wave Millennials, there is some period of their lives before everyone was online. People my age and older experienced the rise of personal computing and then the Internet only as adults.
For early wave Gen Xers such as myself, joining social media has been kind of an enfolding into our youth, like getting into a hot tub time machine that takes us back to our connections and experiences from the 1980s. It’s as though the Internet, in its mission to envelop the world, is reaching into the past and pulling the pre-Internet timeline into the metaverse of digital memory. I’ve posted already about how, for me (and probably for other Xers as well) this has been an opportunity for reflection on our past and reevaluation of our future.
The Internet gives us an amazing power to connect with others and share our personal experience. It’s only to be expected that this would reach all the way to the end of life. I’ve seen posts from the terminally ill, announcing their remaining life expectancy, and I’ve found this off-putting. But upon serious consideration, I must conclude that if we are willing to engage with our social media connections as a daily custom, we should engage with them even as their days come to an end. Death, after all, is an experience we all share.
One day when I checked my social media feed I was met with shocking news. Someone I recognized had been killed in a terrible car crash, along with his wife. He wasn’t someone I had ever met personally, wasn’t someone I had known for very long, but he was a mutual follower and he was a really friendly guy online. He was always supportive and only said nice things, which you probably know isn’t how everyone behaves on social media. I felt sincere grief that this man had tragically died, and donated to the crowdsourced fund for his orphaned children.
I bring this up not to showcase my charitable nature, but to point out that even though this person was only an acquaintance on social media, I felt connected enough to want to help his family in need. Arguably, by being supportive on social media, simply by liking my posts, this man had created enough of a bond between us that I felt a social obligation to him. One might cynically say that he had “bought” my support with a few clicks and some brief comments. But that’s just a way of saying that, by being a decent guy and following the etiquette of social media, he was building social capital.
“Social capital” is a concept from sociology that I have looked at before, when reviewing the work of Robert Putnam. This succinctly can be defined as “the value of social networks in providing generalized reciprocity.” I think the example I have just given is undeniably a case of this principle at work. I would say that all of cases of crowdfunding to help those in need, are examples of how social media is helping to reknit our society and forge the bonds of social capital. The loose associations of people on social networks are acting like the kinds of civic organizations that past generations joined, but that then fell off in membership, as Putnam has documented.
They might not form the progressive ideal of a social safety net, but at least they are something.
I see a lot of complaining about how evil Facebook is and how much they’ve abused their power. But how can this social media company have any power at all? It’s really simple and obvious how to destroy Facebook – all its users simply have to stop using it. Then it will vanish and never plague us again. What does this platform provide that is in any way essential, such that its users are compelled to use it? Where is its power coming from?
A couple years back I wrote a post about when I first joined Facebook, mentioning how it had connected me to people from my past, and how it continues to connect me to people in my present. This need to connect, to have a place of gathering and belonging, is what drives the demand for platforms like Facebook. In this crisis social era, that demand is high. It’s why we all can’t just quit social media.
Remember at the end of 2020 when, after the election went to Joe Biden, Red Staters were announcing on Facebook how they were leaving for a new platform? They weren’t quitting Facebook to go off and be by themselves. They wanted to have their own social media platform for people like them, who shared their view points.
The mission statement of the Facebook company (now called “Meta”) is, in fact, to build community and togetherness. And a primary complaint people have about the Facebook company is the ways it has failed at this mission, and instead caused divisiveness. Or, if not caused the divisiveness, at least irresponsibly permitted its platform to be used by others to promote discord and even violence.
A related complaint about Facebook is that the platform allows the spread of misinformation. Never mind that different factions in our society have different ideas of what constitutes correct information. I wonder: is it more that people want the platforms they use to reinforce, rather than contradict, what they want to believe?
This complaint does raise the question of why the platform should have any obligation to be responsible for the veracity of its content. What I mean is, if such a site is simply a social gathering place, why shouldn’t people be free to post nonsense and lies? Not to say that harm hasn’t been done by misinformation on social media, but why is it the social media platform’s obligation to control the information? If I tell a lie on a street corner, does the town the street is on get blamed for it?
Now there is the argument that misinformation spreads much more rapidly on social media then it ever could by word of mouth. But even here, without some specific platform available, another could surely be found. If we did destroy Facebook in the way I suggested (on the count of three, everyone delete their account…1..2..), couldn’t people still spread their lies via, say, email chains? That’s how we did it back in the ’90s, and I’m pretty sure email providers are off the hook for whatever content is sent through their servers.
My point is that it’s not really the technology behind these phenomena, it’s the people. People are spreading the misinformation, as they always will, and just happen to be using the means that are available today. Putting the onus on a social media company for policing its content is understandable, and a popular stance, but it speaks as much to what people want from these platforms as it does to how they are run as businesses.
We want a way to gather safely, and we expect the providers of such places to exercise some authority in keeping those places safe. That’s the demand curve of this social era. The problem is, social media companies are profit-making enterprises that derive revenue from user engagement, however it can be acquired (“Attention Merchants” is what Tim Wu calls them). So long as this tension exists, where private enterprises maintain our public spaces, we will have reason to mistrust Big Tech and the platforms they provide us, even though we couldn’t conceive of leaving them.
This is a Twitter thread I posted comparing todays Culture Wars to the Religious Wars of the Reformation Era. I’ve only dabbled with posting Twitter threads (chains of linked Tweets) because I honestly don’t get much engagement on that site.
Reading up on the Tudor Era in England has me thinking about the Culture Wars today and the irrational beliefs people are willing to stake everything on, just as in the Reformation Era 500 years ago people were willing to kill and die over minor points of theology. 1/
This post is meant to capture the same text onto my blog since whatever I tweet technically belongs to the Lord of Twitter, whoever he is – one of the lesser known of the Great Technocrats. The numbers followed by the slashes at the end of each block are to keep track of the order in which the tweets are meant to be read, since by the nature of the platform, that information can be lost. Here are the 6 tweets:
Reading up on the Tudor Era in England has me thinking about the Culture Wars today and the irrational beliefs people are willing to stake everything on, just as in the Reformation Era 500 years ago people were willing to kill and die over minor points of theology. 1/
To me it seems absurd that people were once martyred over their beliefs about the doctrine of transubstantiation. Will future generations think it absurd that people today are dying over their beliefs about COVID-19? 2/
People are keen to know The Truth and once a belief is formed it is cherished and hard to release. 500 years ago this was a matter of faith; today we describe the same stubborn clinging to belief in psychological terms like “cognitive dissonance.” 3/
We call today’s conflict Culture Wars, not Religious Wars, but either way at the heart of it is differences in belief about what values should define how we live. Where political power is concerned, it’s not germane that those beliefs may not make complete sense. 4/
Just as in the Reformation Era, the set of beliefs to which one is committed ties one to a faction in a political conflict, and to recant those beliefs is a dishonorable betrayal of one’s group and one’s identity. 5/
And so we’re stuck in these Religious Wars between the Church of Woke and the Cult of Maga, with people as fanatically committed to their sects as the Protestants and Catholics of half a millennium ago. 6/
Do you remember life before smart phones? I sometimes have a hard time imagining what it was like. I mean, I was there; I should know. We had to write down the directions to drive places, since we couldn’t just bring it up on our phones. We had to have our music collections in some sort of recorded format, like tapes or CDs, and keep them in the car. You couldn’t just look up any fact you wanted to know in an instant. But you did know a lot of other people’s telephone numbers.
My BFF tells me I’m too dependent on my phone now. My little pocket assistant. I get lost driving without it. I’ve tried to navigate on my own; to challenge myself to get somewhere without using Google maps. Usually that doesn’t work, and out comes the smart phone to rescue me.
It wasn’t always like this, but through the fog of time it’s hard for me to remember those ways of life, from even just fifteen years ago.
One thing I do remember is that back in the mid-2000s, when Web 2.0 was still new, I had a pretty good Internet presence, if I do say so myself. Granted, it was a Web 1.0 presence: a static vanity web site, a blog. I did a little bit of manual search engine optimization, editing the metadata on my static HTML pages in my text editor. It was good enough for us back in those days. A Google search of my name ca. 2006 would have had my pages on the top of the search results; I kid you not!
Today, that’s not likely. My Internet presence is lost in a sea of like named people, because everyone has a smart phone and multiple social media accounts now. I’m no microinfluencer, not even a nanoinfluencer. I never realized how many people with my name there are out there; I thought it was kind of unique. I was used to being the only “Barrera” in whatever social milieu I was in, outside of my family. Now that my social milieu is all of humanity on the Internet, I’m discovering that my name isn’t so unique after all.
It’s the same with usernames. Technically, I was on the Internet as far back as the 1980s, since I had user accounts and email addresses at Virginia Tech, where I went to college. I remember my email address was “[email protected].” For a long time after that, I was used to being “sbarrera” or “stevebarrera” whenever I signed up with a new account somewhere. But no more; those usernames are always taken on any major site. I have to come up with something clever, or settle for a username with a string of numbers at the end.
As the global population continues to soar and the Internet continues to gobble up civilization, how will we have usernames for everyone? We’ll all end up named with numbers at the end, like in a dystopian sci-fi society. Like THX 1138. The future is here, I guess.
Don’t get me wrong; I love the Internet. I spend most of my waking time there. I’ve been fascinated by computers since I was a teenager, and chose computer work for my professional life. I’ve been on the world wide web since the beginning, and always had fun with it. The Internet is where I live; it’s surely where I’ll die. It’s always in our pockets, part of the background of life.
I’ve already brought up on this blog the idea that “cancel culture” is simply this era’s approach to building a social values consensus. I’ve tied it into Strauss-Howe generational theory, which describes a social cycle spanning four generations. In that cycle there is an era called an “Awakening,” which is a period when values are challenged and the social mood encourages moral transgression. Those who violate social norms are celebrated as visionaries. The last time we had such an era was during the “Consciousness Revolution” that started in the 1960s.
But we’re now at the other end of the cycle, in the “Crisis” era. Values are not being challenged but rather implanted, to guide the establishment of a new order. Those who violate the new social norms are condemned for backward thinking. That is what is happening to the prominent people who find themselves getting “cancelled” when they express views or engage in behaviors which go against the grain of the new values consensus. They can complain about “political correctness” all that they want, they are nonetheless going to run into the simple fact that violating social norms, at least in this social era, means being shunned by society.
Which is exactly the point made in this excellent opinion piece by Dr. Lora Burnett. She starts with an example from a movie, and then connects the movie scene with how appointees of the recent administration were treated in public. She then segues into her argument, that “there is no such thing as ‘cancel culture’ — there is only culture.” Meaning that this phenomenon of “cancelling” is simply the enforcement of cultural norms.
I couldn’t agree with her more. And I think that the problem that those who decry cancel culture have is that they are not happy with the new cultural norms that are forming. Which is their right, and it’s understandable to be concerned that the enforcement of norms can go too far. Is there a danger of a new McCarthy Era arising, where all dissent is suppressed? I think so, and that would take us to a new social era.
Although, truly, most targets of cancel culture don’t have their lives ruined, assuming they haven’t committed any crime. They simply face the scrutiny of the public when in the public space, which is to be expected. The video below from the channel “The Take” goes into all the angles of the phenomenon.
This video brings up the “letter on open debate” which was published in Harper’s magazine and signed by numerous authors and opinion makers. In it, the authors condemn “a new set of moral attitudes and political commitments that tend to weaken our norms of open debate and toleration of differences in favor of ideological conformity.” Again, it’s understandable that, as purveyors of ideas, this would concern them. But they’re missing the zeitgeist.
In the social cycle, we’re turning away from openness and debate and towards resolution and conformity. It’s needed to address the vast political and economic problems that our society has failed to address over the past several decades. Older generations find this disconcerting after a long, free-wheeling period of everyone thinking for themselves. But to get any traction on achieving real world change, we need agreement. So younger generations are likely to say, “get with the program or shut the hell up.”
The Red-Blue Network-Centric Wars, or, Clash of the Media Bubbles
In the late 1990s, with the Cold War just ended and the United States as the world hegemonic “sole superpower”, a new doctrine of warfare called network-centric warfare emerged. The gist of it: “use information networks to get an advantage.” It was an acknowledgement of the growing power of densely networked computers, such as the Internet which we take for granted today.
Meanwhile, a constitutional lawyer named Philip Bobbitt was writing his seminal book The Shield of Achilles, in which he argued that the constitutional order of the industrial nation state was giving way to a new order, which he called the informational market state. Securing opportunity and choice were the new functions of government, over providing welfare and solidarity.
Fast forward to 2020, and we are in the midst of Cold Civil War II, the battle between the red zone and the blue zone that I’ve been blogging about lately. The United States has abandoned the world stage, and is focused internally. A pandemic undermines the legitimacy of the new market state order, by both reducing economic opportunity and creating a public welfare imperative. And the power of the world wide computer network is something to be feared now; it lets bad actors, even foreign powers, manipulate public consciousness. Information runs amok and the Internet is a battlefield in a domestic war, with each side using the network to spread agitprop promoting its particular version of reality.
For example, in the red zone reality bubble, millions of votes cast for Joe Biden in the 2020 Presidential election were fraudulent. Personally, I think that’s BS – if it were true, Trump’s lawyers would explicitly make the claim in court instead of only in media statements. But I am a partisan of the blue zone in this war, so how could my words carry any weight with a partisan of the red zone? It seems we’re at an impasse – and it shows in the paralyzation of our government.
The problem is, with each side convinced of the veracity of its version of the truth, how is the consumer-citizen of the informational market state supposed to know which version is correct? If we are a really in a state, as Bobbitt argues, where we can choose from a menu of informational realities – will that be facebook, or parler, sir? – then how could we ever function as a polity? We need some common ground to stand on.
I am reminded of the time of the French Revolution, when rumors spread readily and people on either side easily believed the worst about the other faction. It was a mindset that pushed the people of that time to extremes of violence. I worried about this earlier in a book review. No, they didn’t have the Internet then, but that’s beside the point. An information network is there, regardless of the technology in use.
Ultimately, the chaos and violence of the French Revolution opened a path for an autocratic ruler to emerge and restore order. The people of the time were just glad for extremists on either side of the partisan divide to be put down. The moderates prevailed, but only because an authoritarian silenced the mobs. Trump might have been like Napolean and achieved this…but as it turned out, he didn’t.
I think the willingness of people to ensconce themselves in their media bubbles and stick with their partisan “zone” reflects a strong need for a consensus narrative, for a sense of collective purpose. We just need that purpose not to be at odds with the vision of a major segment of the populace within our same society. Maybe the United States is paying a price for becoming the sole superpower: there is no external power to unite us, as there was in the last crisis, so we’re left to fight each other. 9/11 might have been like Pearl Harbor…but as it turned out, it wasn’t.
So how will the center hold now? I honestly can’t say, but I suspect we’ll find out in the months to come. This will probably be my last red-vs-blue post for awhile, until some major change breaks. Meanwhile, I certainly will be watching my media bubble feeds with trepidation.
