Megan Garber - On Misdirection: Magic, Mayhem, American Politics

ATLANTIC EDITIONS draw from The Atlantics rich literary history and robust coverage of the driving cultural and political forces of today. Each book features long-form journalism by Atlantic writers devoted to a single topic, focusing on contemporary articles or classic storytelling from the magazines 165-year archive.

Magic, Mayhem, American Politics

MEGAN GARBER

ON MISDIRECTION by Megan Garber

Copyright 2023 by The Atlantic Monthly Group

Introduction copyright 2023 by Megan Garber

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Manufactured in the United States of America

I still remember the first time I connected to the internet. The modem screeched, the hulking computer practically shuddered with effort, and the pixelated images took approximately five lifetimes to load. It felt like magic.

For a while, the internet remained like that for me: It was a portal to the world, giddy and pulsing with possibility. It was connection to other people. It was knowledge. It was fun. The essays in this collection are, in one way, attempts to explore what happened in the internets aftermath: how something with so much magic could bring with it so much menace. The essays are not directly about the web; most of them, instead, focus on other mediums (print news, TV news, books, the NBC sitcom The Office). But each is an attempt to make sense of the media environment that the internetand, in particular, social mediahave created: one in which people are empowered to broadcast themselves and their experiences in ways never before possible but in which, too, they are often flattened and dehumanized, treated not as people at all, but as characters in ongoing melodramas.

The internet is a medium of exposure. Every day it compounds our awareness of each other, bringing new information and stories and opinions, all of it spinning and blurring and tangling. These essays consider what it feels like to live within that churn. They consider how people cope with the tumult. And they acknowledge how tempting it can be, in a world of ceaseless more-ness, to seek refuge in easy distractions. The essays unifying theme is misdirection, and the terms double meaning is, I think, illustrative: Misdirection suggests both the workings of magicsleights of hand, cunning diversionsand paths gone awry. It suggests all the ways that people can be convinced to look through the things that are happening right in front of them. And it suggests, too, the dire consequences of all those averted eyes. Misdirection, to me, is a reminder of all that can go wrong when people are able to look at the world without really seeing it.

These essays give shape to those failures of vision. They examine, in particular, how people in power have engaged in strategic sleights, distracting us and beguiling us and doing all they can to keep us from acknowledging what is plain. One essay, Boredom Is Winning, written during Donald Trumps first impeachment, looks at the ways apathy was summoned, during that trial, as a political argument. Another, How to Look Away, studies the tactics that politicians and pundits used as they told people not to care about the children who had been torn from their families at the southern border. Such grim illusions are becoming more and more common in America. They treat people as spectacles, and judge human events solely according to their capacity to entertain. They warn of a society, as the collections final essay argues, that risks collapsing under the weight of its own cynicism.

This collection covers a range of dates. The first essay, a consideration of the work of the great and newly relevant media critic Neil Postman, was written in 2017. This is not long after Donald Trump, assuming the presidency, brought a new strain of nihilism to old notions of political theater. Subsequent essays explore life lived under that regime, considering, among other topics, the rise of QAnon, the dark lexicon of the Fox News Channel, the presidential election of November 2020, the Capitol insurrection of January 6, 2021, the Big Lie, misinformation, Tucker Carlson, Britney Spears, Harvey Weinstein, Pete Buttigieg, Marjorie Taylor Greene, The Masked Singer, and Attila the Hun. But there is a method, I promise, to the madness. Making sense of this political moment requires a consideration of this cultural moment, too. The essays reflect that. They examine a cultureand, with it, a political environmentthat too often confuses reality and delusion.

Propaganda, too, is a theme here: The essays, together, argue for a more expansive appreciation of what political manipulation can involve. Propaganda, in the age of the infinite scroll, encompasses much more than Orwellian inversions and outright lies; it has now taken a postmodern form. The deceptions that angle to mislead us are often refractive and self-reflective and maddeningly difficult to capture. Sometimes, still, they lie out loud; just as often, though, the manipulation works insidiously. Propaganda, the essays suggest, can play out as irony. It can play out as performative apathy. Often, today, propaganda is merely a means of unseeing the obvious, whether facts or feelings or other peoples pain.

I was one of the many who, in the aftermath of Donald Trumps electionand in the aftermath of Kellyanne Conways coinage of alternative factsrevisited the writings of Aldous Huxley, Hannah Arendt, and George Orwell. I came to agree with the argument Neil Postman makes at the outset of Amusing Ourselves to Death, the book revisited in this collections first essay: The dystopia that most accurately forecast our fate is not Orwells Nineteen Eighty-Four. It is Huxleys Brave New World. In Huxleys vision, Postman noted, no Big Brother is required to deprive people of their autonomy, maturity, and history. The means of their deprivation is instead, in some sense, themselves. Huxleys great insight is that, through technologies that soothe and distractdelights that keep a public in a ceaseless state of misdirectionpeople will come to love their oppression, to adore the technologies that undo their capacities to think.

I shudder, still, when I read that line. I think of the profound exhaustion that can settle in as the world whirs around me, and of my own deep desire, when trying to make sense of it all, to turn the channel. And then I think of another dystopia that helps to explain us to ourselves: