Or ‘how the hot take contest poisons the information marketplace’. By Joshua Dabelstein.
“And today the great Yertle, that Marvelous he, Is King of the Mud. That is all he can see. And the turtles, of course . . . all the turtles are free As turtles and, maybe, all creatures should be.”
When I wake up in the morning, the first thing I do is look at my phone. It tells me the time, the weather, what I’ve got on for the day, and who killed who while I was sleeping.
It’s Sunday, 14/7/24. 8:38. 9ºC. Flea, tick and worm pill for dog; car rego due. Assassination attempt on Donald Trump.
I swipe to see a picture of the man himself holding his hand to his ear, a couple of streams of bright red run across his cheek like rain on the window of a moving car. Washington Post, New York Times, CNN, all of them say the same stuff – which is not much at this stage.
The voyeur in me wants to see as many pictures and as many clips of the breaking news as possible, from every angle available. And thanks to the crowd-sourced panopticon, I can.
Worse than the prison of constant surveillance we’ve erected for ourselves is the culture of ‘hot takes’ we’ve built around it. A man has been shot. There is blood in the water, and circling fins turn to thrashing sharks in comments sections all around the world.
Enter stage right, and left, thousands of hot takes to accompany this onslaught of media. I trawl comments sections, sitting up in bed. Hot takes vie for pole position as users on Instagram, X, YouTube, Facebook and Threads offer their two cents on everything from bullet trajectory to a stain on Trump’s blazer. Apparently, the stain could just as likely be blood spatter from his ear wound, a tear left from a bullet stopped by a bulletproof vest, or Cheeto dust.
Some commentary claims that the assassination attempt was staged to guarantee Trump support. Other commentary claims that this is all part of Israel’s plan, somehow. Another complains that the ‘rot’ in the left has culminated in this, an assassination attempt on Donald Trump, which is of course matched with the counterweight: that Trump ‘started it’ by inciting violence on January 6. Some claim that the attempt on Trump’s life is evidence for better gun control, others praise this episode as evidence of the importance of guns for self (or presidential candidate’s) defence.
The hot-takes stack like turtles in mud, each comments section’s ‘King Yertle’ usually sitting pretty with hundreds of likes for being nothing more than incendiary.
The cat’s meowing for breakfast and the dog has opportunistically used my distracted state to slink from her bed up and into mine, but I’m a quarter of an hour deep into the wormhole already. Everyone’s hot takes compete for likes and re-tweets, comments and claims are bolstered and buoyed by the pre-existing prejudices of those perusing social media this morning.
Fingers attached to humans, a species notorious for pattern recognition, retroactively fit already locked and loaded narratives onto whatever new evidence the phone screen wakes us up with.
This morning, there’s new, and particularly egregious evidence, for every different mutually exclusive hot take already in existence. That picture of Trump – the star-spangled banner, the blood, the skin, the hair, and that fist – says enough for one morning.
Our desperate desire to co-opt violence and tragedy and make it our own in tweets and comments sections threatens the attention that most mainstream media outlets have to pay to evidence. There was a time in my earlier years when I had cynically relegated ‘mainstream media’ to the dustbin—where I felt compelled to falsify anything ‘institution adjacent’ to the nth degree, and trust with blind faith anything ‘grassroots presenting’ or ‘people-powered’.
I spent much of my late teens and 20s campaigning for and against a litany of political or social justice causes based more on the mouthfeel of slogans gleaned from silver-tongued commentators than anything else. I know first-hand how easy it is for us to accidentally invest in the hot take market of comments sections, and to allow ourselves to be guided by an invisible hand expressed in ‘likes’ and ‘re-tweets’ away from some leviathan known flippantly as the ‘mainstream media’.
I was born in 1991, and am part of a generation that scrolled casually into an information revolution with no concept of media literacy. The closest thing to any media literacy education I received was learning the difference between a primary and a secondary source. 10 years ago I believed that 9/11 was an inside job. That boy, today, would have found the truth — that a lone gunman tried to assassinate the Republican presidential candidate — far less exciting, interesting, and believable than at least 10 of the explanations provided by various social media accounts this morning.
I shudder when I consider how many elections have been swung by the repetition of hot-takes on social media. I spent hours on construction sites in the summer heat listening to landscapers, smartphones in hand on smoko, tell me about how Dan Andrews was a Chinese spy and a paedophile. And then I remember last year’s referendum results.
As I’m about to call it quits and appease the cat, I see Jesse Duquette post a cartoon with Trump standing bloodied, fist in the air, and a speech bubble from the heavens that reads, ‘better luck next time’. Duquette, an illustrator from Massachusetts, has captioned his cartoon, ‘You miss 100% of the shots you don’t take.’
The post has over 15,000 likes, and the hot takes are replied to with hotter takes.
* Joshua Dabelstein has been an occasional New Matilda contributor for almost a decade. You can follow his work even more closely at his Substack here.