Reality Winners

Reality Winners'Reality Winners' is the final part of a trilogy of essays in this journal that sketch a history of the present focussing on the ways media and information in the digital epoch are operationalised to re-shape political and economic reality.The first of these concentrated on the forces at play in the election of Donald Trump in 2016 and the related Brexit referendum in Britain.The second explored the emergence of a new praxis of control speeding-up from 2007-2008. 1 Its emergence can be situated both in the continuum of informatic control that underpins histories of imperial counterinsurgency and the birth and expansion of the digital order; 2 and too in the contingent breakdown of the financialised system of neoliberalism and the efflorescence of a radical libertarian praxis bent on deconstructing government to foster security for capital.The present essay concentrates mostly on the period since 2001 and on what Peter Pomerantsev calls the wars on reality. 3 It was written towards the end of 2024.Together, the trilogy of essays explore how information and media in the new digital world of the Internet and platforms and social media and generative AI are used by specific capitalist/imperialist elites to shape reality and degrade the possibility of democracy as collective self-rule.Out of this manifold grows the recrudescence of fascism that characterises our present and determines our situation.These tendencies accelerate.* The year 1919 marked the key pivot point in the fashioning of a new practice and theory of the mediation and occlusion of reality to 'manufacture consent' to the political-economic order. 4 Roughly put, the praxis grew from the intra-imperial war of 1914-1918 and opposition to the Soviet revolution of 1917 to operationalise the dialectic of propaganda and censorship of information amid the staging of mediated 'pseudo-events' to shield and screen reality. 5 It grew together with the establishment of a 'state of exception' abrogating constitutional and liberal-democratic norms to secure the continuity of the prevailing political and economic order. 6Put concisely, the production and policing and censoring of media and information to shape reality entwined together with the repetitive 'inner and outer wars of empire' essential to capital and state power. 7

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