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A Very Roman Triumph
Why the appearance of so many Tech Bros at Trump’s inauguration was not at all how it was presented in the media
One of the wonderful things about human nature is that it is endlessly predictable once you understand incentives. Journalists have an extremely strong — indeed, over-riding — incentive to grab fickle eyeballs for a few monetizable moments and in a world of constant stimuli the only sure-fire way to do it is to manufacture vacuous sensationalism. As all journalists keep a close eye not so much on events as on how other journalists are reporting events, it is inevitable that a standard narrative emerges almost instantaneously without any need for formal collusion.
Hence we see a uniformity in the way all events are reported across all Western media. The only difference is in the degree of illiteracy exhibited by whoever is babbling on behalf of whatever organization.
We saw predictable uniformity of babble in our recently fashionable coronapanic and we’re seeing it today with the coverage of the mindless creature Trump’s inauguration. Endless column inches and hours of screen time are being devoted to the supposed influence the so-called Tech Bros will have as they slither around the center of power in Washington DC. The argument goes that because Trump is a mindless…