Our political culture is littered with the unwatched pilots of new shows whose characters and plot lines bombed, whose audience never appeared, whose contracts got canceled. They’re memory-holed as quickly as a Netflix show that didn’t make it; instead, we go back to the homepage to binge or doomscroll, and an entirely different fable is there ready for you to consume.
Swipe! Swipe! Swipe! goes the smartphone screen.
Click! Click! Click! goes the TV remote.
Both Left and Right are now involved in a wrestling match for the narrative remote-control, one side wanting to switch to watching a show about Biden’s drug-addicted son, and the other claiming it’s bad movie not worth watching. ... Nobody is actually arguing about inarguable realities: it’s simply narrative warfare, a virtualized version of two speakers heckling each other, each claiming the stump in the face of a split but increasingly unruly audience, and the ruckus amplified globally via the totalizing Internet spectacle.
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