Manufacturing consent? What consent? What manufacturing?

It’s as if the more we’re active online, the more plugged in we are, the less power we have over the real world. And the assholes who run this place, old and decrepit as they are, seem to grasp this.

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The NEFARIOUS RUSSIANS LIVE! event on the death of journalism is gonna happen tonight at 7pm at the KGB Bar. With the war that Donald Trump unleashed on Iran last night, we’ll probably be tweaking our focus just a little bit. The attack on Iran, the genocide in Gaza, the political nihilism, general powerlessness of journalism…they are all connected.

We were out last night at a friend’s comedy show, and I heard the news afterwards and then saw Trump’s press statement at a bar. My first thought was: These fucking ghouls. And my second thought was: They don’t even need to manufacture consent for war anymore. They don’t even have to make a pretense to convince people that this is necessary and right. They just do it and know that there’s nothing we can do.

I remember how back during the build-up to the Iraq War, the media spent months and months buttering Americans up with fantastic tales of WMDs — it was wall-to-wall coverage from every cable news channel and every respectable newspaper and magazine. There was the “reporting” on how Iraq was developing nuclear weapons, the “weaponized anthrax” vials at the UN, the ridiculous stories of Iraq funding Al-Qaeda and helping Hezbollah penetrate America to run a blackmarket cigarette market in order to finance terrorist attacks. It was all entertaining in its own way. And it was a bloodbath and a disaster, killing millions.

On one level, it feels like we’re on a repeat of the Bush years. But there is a big difference between then and now. Now they don’t even think we need to be convinced. That famous Chomsky bit about manufacturing consent? They didn’t even try this time around.

To me this change shows that a big disconnect has happened in our political life in the last few decades — and at the center of this disconnect is the internet.

The internet was supposed to be empowering, and information has never been more available than it is now. We are all free to go online and express whatever opinions we want. We’re able to get news and learn about real-time events from all over the world — from perspectives we’d never be able to get in the past...things that they’d never show to us on cable news during the war Iraq invasion build-up. Information is supposed to be power. But it doesn’t seem to matter. We can tweet and Twitch stream and Substack as much as we want. We can go online and rant without restriction…we can expose the truth. And yet all this access to info and freedom to speak is about as effective as screaming into a well. It has no effect on power — it just echoes and echoes and then just peters out. It’s as if the more we’re active online, the more plugged in we are, the less power we have over the real world. And the assholes who run this place, old and decrepit as they are, seem to grasp this basic truth. They don’t even bother trying to manufacture consent anymore. They just let us blabber. They let us vent our frustration. And then they do what they want. “Are they hungry? Let them eat free speech!”

This dynamic — more information, less power — fits into what I’ve been saying about the Vampire Castle and the politics of the internet. And it fits right into the talk we planned to have tonight: about the death of journalism.

So…come out if you can. We’ll talk about what’s happening, keep each other company in this end times gloom, talk about what we can do, and show Evgenia’s short film about a journalist who goes on OnlyFans to cheer us all up.

—Yasha

PS: And maybe we can talk how Elon Musk is feuding with his own AI because Grok isn’t being kind to Catturd2.