hypothesis -- besides it being a rehashing of the same...¶

The thing about Will's "media bias and TikTok teens" hypothesis -- besides it being a rehashing of the same tired arguments that have around longer than any of us -- is that it's actually half true. There IS considerable negative sentiment towards the economy on social media. He actually agrees with me: he just thinks this means that the Democrats need to find ways to reassert hegemony, while I think the building of proletarian culture is an unstoppable rising tide that will, one way or another, overwhelm bourgeois hegemony.

https://t.co/sTmyuvoD7O Where it falls apart is in the second part of his model: that this negativity is the result of craven opportunism, because "negativity sells."

The negativity bias is a real, observable phenomenon, with replicable data backing it up, and it extends far beyond media consumption. The key question to ask, then, is WHY we have a bias towards negativity. Why are our perceptions more easily colored by negative facts than positive ones?

A corollary question is: why is there still so much media cheerleading around clearly negative things? Why has coverage of the pandemic been so hegemonic in its positivity, despite the fact that COVID remains the third leading cause of death? Why has the perception that COVID is no big deal been so readily accepted by the vast majority of the population? Why do news outlets constantly highlight "progress" on climate change, when the situation has only ever gotten worse? Why do they use framing like "The IRA is the most ambitious climate action ever," when it legislates the annual leasing of 62 million acres for fossil fuel use? Why do they always dig for the same facile numbers Will pulls out to describe the "optimistic economy," instead of interviewing people who can't keep their heads above water? Why don't they talk about grotesque and growing wealth inequality, when such framing boosts ratings? We can answer all these questions by understanding the mechanics of cultural hegemony. This is the way in which the interests of the ruling class of a society come to dominate social perceptions and norms, through the use of the myriad institutions at their command. The primary aim of these ideological actors is to present every base element of the status quo as "natural." This permeates so thoroughly through the culture that it reaches places you don't even perceive as being open to culture-crafting, let alone the result of it. Such concepts as law, media, education, the family, democracy, gender, the nation, religion, and more are all outgrowths of the dominant ideology. In our society, these are all rooted in bourgeois norms -- those that naturalize the rule of the capitalist class. They're SO naturalized that you may not even be able to grasp that they're intentionally constructed in the first place. Like a fish buffeted by geophysical forces that shape ocean climate, without a conception of the water around them as anything other than "the way things are." The laws were written by the bourgeoisie. The economic relations they protect were forged by the bourgeoisie. Respect for and knowledge of the norms were taught in bourgeois schools, capital controls the disbursement of media that upholds it, and so on. Everything is filtered through the lens of these "natural" norms and values. Violence is waged to maintain it, villains are made of those who oppose it, personal success is predicated on allegiance to it. "Diversity" is permitted only as far as it can be managed within hegemony. Getting back to the role of social media and the negativity bias, we start to reckon with the primary countervailing force combatting bourgeois cultural hegemony: proletarian culture. Wherever there are oppressed peoples and classes, counter-cultures naturally emerge. The "counter" in these cultures can be deliberately constructed in active rejection of the dominant culture (think punk, think hippie), or they can simply be existing cultures that refuse to bow to the violence of imperialism (think Indigenous, think Black). Some countercultures, especially those built on facile notions of "rebellion," are eventually subsumed by hegemony. The aesthetic, if not rooted in material struggle, can easily be adapted into a form that is inoffensive to the dominant class. But they keep popping up. The cultural elements that present the most challenge to the notion of a natural bourgeois rule -- typically by directly contradicting particular norms, such as the dominance of the settler population or the immutability of gender -- cannot be so easily defanged and subsumed. They might try to appropriate aesthetics, they might tokenize, they might pass toothless resolutions of recognition. But they can't erase the material roots that spawned those more radical cultural currents without upending their own economic project. Over time, all currents of this emerging proletarian culture come to be dominated more and more by those elements which could not be subsumed or destroyed: those most rooted in material struggle against material oppression. The cultural positioning coalesces into maneuvering. We don't just make our voices heard to each other, seeding cultural cross-pollination through asserting our existence: we educate each other. We study. We practice. We organize. These threads of oppressed cultures transition from negative to positive. The so-called "negativity bias" observed by liberals, much to their consternation, is driven not by some innate human pessimism, but by a steadily rising consciousness. We are becoming less content with "that's just the way things are." It is harder to buy us off. The negativity is not a symptom of a society drowning in algorithms and a desire to be miserable at all costs. It is the final phase of the evolution of a cohesive proletarian culture before it builds its party and begins its march to war: a war that it will win.