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Really liked this articulation that someone shared with me recently:
here’s something you need to know about polls and the media: we pay for polls so we can can write stories about polls. We’re paying for a drumbeat to dance to. This isn’t to say polls are unscientific, or false, or misleading: they’re generally accurate, even if the content written around marginal noise tends to misrepresent them. It’s to remind you that when you’re reading about polls, you’re watching us hula hoop the ourobouros. Keep an eye out for poll guys boasting about their influence as much as their accuracy. That’s when you’ll know the rot has reached the root, not that there’s anything you can do about it.
That would be a really fun project! It almost reads like the setup for a homework problem for a class on chaos and nonlinear dynamics. I bet that as the model increasingly takes into account other people’s (supposed?) preferences, you get qualitative breaks in behavior.
Stuff like this is why I come back to postmodernists like Baudrillard and Debord time and time again. These kinds of second- (or Nth-) order “news” are an artifact of the media’s constant and ever-accelerating commodification of reality. They just pile on more and more and more until we struggle to find reality through the sheer weight of its representations.