Om Malik:
That’s why we get all our information as memes. The meme has
become the metastory, the layer where meaning is carried. You
don’t need to read the thing; you just need the gist, compressed
and passed along in a sentence, an image, or a joke. It has taken
the role of the headline. The machine accelerates this dynamic. It
demands constant material; stop feeding it and the whole structure
shakes. The point of the internet now is mostly to hook attention
and push it toward commerce, to keep the engine running. Anyone
can get their cut. […]We built machines that prize acceleration and then act puzzled
that everything feels rushed and slightly manic.
Crackerjack essay. Malik is focused here on the ways we’ve changed media and how those changes to media have changed us — as a society, and as individuals. But I think explains how the Trump 2.0 administration has been so effective (such that it can be said to be effective). They recognize that velocity is authority and are moving as fast as they can. It’s an adaptation to a new media age.
