Another great piece by Ryan Broderick in his Garbage Day Substack newsletter, this time on Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s presidential campaign gaining momentum (although it’s now losing it, thankfully). But the main subject was on how so many so-called social movements are effectively bloated content farms in trench coats:
Inside an online platform everything, even reality, is just content and content just begets more content. And in a world run by big platforms, a person’s post becomes discourse, discourse creates memes, memes inspire a fandom, and fandoms become social movements. And over the last decade, as platforms flattened everything into content, most news publishers, hiding behind antiquated ideas about objectivity and made desperate from vanishing ad revenue, allowed themselves to be flattened, as well. And now, even though they don’t think of themselves as a competing news fandoms, they absolutely are.