The Enshitification of Politics - Part 2

This is the follow up to The Enshitification of Politics - Part 1

As a reminder: https://ants-musings.beehiiv.com/p/the-enshitification-of-politics-part-1

Last time, I finished on the note that Fox News became a key political weapon, and yet neither party saw how this sort of tool could also become the route to hijacking it all…

What does this have to do with enshitification?

As a reminder, the core thesis of “enshitification” is that it’s actually everyday economic theory in disguise. When power is concentrated in the hands of the producer, this generally to the detriment of the user as they simply have fewer ways to express their unhappiness with the situation.

In the case of politics, the producer is the political parties and the consumers are the voters. The product? Government.

Is it a stretch to say that the the agglomeration of power in the hands of the producers since the 60’s has led to a worsening product, and consumers aren’t happy?

I’ll talk through how this happened, and particularly how media helped precipitate this shift.

So, to continue the story of how media become a tool for political monopolization…

The presumption across much of history, indeed the playbook of most every dictator of the 20th century, was that the state held extreme sway in communication and mastering the control of this was key to maintaining power.

In freer economies, it meant ensuring your message and image was managed and spread using the extraordinary power of government. The first radio/tv channels often were backed by goverments (the only power with the means or inclination to communicate across the natio) and even as early as the 1800’s, leaders like Napoleon were massaging their image using art and portraits of exploits and victories, ensuring they controlled the narrative and spread it far and wide.

In less free economies this was explicit and clear; outright propaganda, total control of communication channels and censorship of unfriendly channels and materials.

I’m not saying anything quite as sinister has been happening in the US in the 60’s onwards (until very recently), what I’m saying is the paradigmatic view that “he who controls the microphone controls the country” had filtered through to the parties in their approach to giving themselves unfair advantages to entrench their powers.

This was made most obvious when they increased the required polling numbers to appear in TV debates to 15%…an impossible chicken and egg (how, in the late 1900’s, could you have 15% polling numbers, or even a much recognized name, without being included in the debates, or a major political figure in the first place?)

In the 2000’s this became a very different story, and there was a particular weakness to this in the Republican party due to Fox News. Hijacking this part of the political apparatus was effectively how an outsider like Donald Trump found his way to the presidency in 2016.

To understand how this happened, lets dive back into the 60’s again…

One tv broadcast in 1960 defined modern America

We talked a bunch about Nixon’s win last time. This time, we’re going to go back to the 1960’s and another Nixon presidential run…his loss to JFK. Here, we see the germinating seed of how media as a tool exacerbates the issues of centralized power and starts to distort the product.

To make an analogy, it’s a bit like how branding became a big thing around a similar time, the Mad Men era, and at some point form could more readily replace substance. Noise, which makes it harder for the consumer to realize they’re watching things enshitify.

In 1960, we saw the first televised presedential debates between JFK and Nixon. It became immediately clear that this was the future of politics, and though by modern standards it was an incredibly thoughtful debate we also saw the early trappings of how form would overpower substance as a result of our media focused approach to politics.

JFK’s cool charisma shone through, and Nixon (who was recently ill and refused to wear makeup) looked like a sweaty mess…and that ultimately is one of the most remembered facts of that debate, over any individual answer or even sound bite.

Polling at the time suggested that radio listeners believed Nixon had performed better, while television viewers overwhelmingly favored Kennedy, underscoring the divide between substance (radio) and form (TV).

In our story of how modern politics has been subtly shaped, perhaps even more important in that moment than the men on the stage was the man behind the scenes, Roger Ailes.

At the time, he was Nixon’s media consultant. He’d go on to advise many other leading Republicans including Ronald Regan and George Bush (senior), but most important of all he’d go on to setup Fox News. Fox News was setup with the explicit and unabashed goal of being a conservative news source - though they’d originally gone with the slogan “Fair and Balanced”, which they later dropped.

Following the formative experience of that first tv debate and how Nixon fared, it’s fitting that Roger was later accredited with the quote…(though not directly attributed to this specific incident)

Inadvertently, this blueprint is also part of how Trump captured so much attention. What people had previously assumed would be considered blunders soon became free publicity for moments that only made him more popular as they reflected a disconnect between what the media considered embarrasing spectacle and the public actually considered to represent the views of many Americans or being “relatable”.

How did this let the fox into the hen-house?

This over-emphasis on the power of who controls the microphone, in conjunction with a disruption of the media landscape and a media-contorted bias towards form over substance was a perfect storm to open the door…they were so busy worrying about the other party, they neglected to worry about who was running THEIR party.

All it took was a candidate who could find other ways to generate massive awareness and popularity - enter social media, reality TV and frequent punditry - to spread their own message.

Pretty soon, the likes of Trump and even Farage in the UK became the tail wagging the dog, and what was created as a method of consolidating power and enshrining the kingmakers became a tool that could indeed be used to usurp power. Soon, even if Murdoch was explicitly not keen on promoting Trump, he simply had too much sway within the viewership and the organization for it to matter - Fox didn’t select the next candidate, Trump instead used Fox to secure his candidacy.

Is this unprecedented?

They say that history doesn’t repeat, but it rhymes. To me, the story of a ruling power creating institutions to entrench themselves, only to find it actually usurping them doesn’t feel as novel as it may sound; it has echoes of the Praetorian guard in ancient Rome around the time of Jesus, or the Jannisaries in the 1600’s Ottoman empire…

Sometimes a tool can develop a mind of its own, or even become an inadvertent weapon for others to weild or manipulate.

The main takeaway - form over function, enshitification in products where “brand” is more important than the product itself

Again, enshitification is at play and being magnified here by media…but mass-media does something else; it fundamentally has reframed part of the product.

We tend to talk about enshitification in the context of products that are relatively commodity and in this case “straight forward economics” applies, but there is a slightly more metaphysical sense to the product when the product is in fact opinion and culture. When this becomes the area of enshitification, the erosion is not just clearly in value output, but sometimes in a harmful reframing of what the product is.

In the context of politics, we had previously assumed that the value exchange with the consumer was good governance and effective policy in exchange for votes, but truly what the political powers optimize to is popularity and this is increasingly achieved by focusing on what will make people feel good, making them feel attached to your tribe, and not boring policy…to form over function.

It’s the same as the world of Mad Men…no business sells products anymore, because products are just a vehicle to a feeling, and sometimes the better way to optimize your product to impart a feeling is to work on framing and positioning your product rather than on how well it may function. You buy a Ferrari, not because it’s a “good” car (in many ways, it’s a bad one…not very practical or fuel-efficient, and even if it’s fast there are plenty of no-name/cheaper cars that are fast), but because when you say “I have a Ferrari” (even to yourself), we all know what that means…and what it means is something carefully manufactured by Ferrari and their marketing teams.

This is the relation to “branding” I had mentioned earlier, it’s fundamentally shifting what the value exchange is, which is also being enshitified by the agglomeration of power to the producer.

If popularity is the “profit” of the political game, a fundamental value exchange of good policy making and solid governance can be replaced with feelings of anger, tribalism and fear of the “other”. As we optimize to this, the aim is no longer to be popular on the basis of merit, but on the basis of emotional tampering.

Put another and more innocent way, it wouldn’t have mattered if Nixon’s policy wiped the floor with JFK’s, as long as he looked like a sweaty mess he wasn’t selling the right feeling. The problem here is that the producer is now consciously taking advantage of the consumer’s mis-optimization in the near-term for their own benefit, which will lead to progressively worse overall outcomes in the mid-term - like the car brand that invests more into brand than into making an actually good car.

We will soon be paying the price of this debt that’s built up.