Collin G Brooke

we distrust to the point that it becomes dangerous to be a judge, a Capitol Police officer, a doctor, a librarian, a poll worker, or someone installing 5G equipment—our civil society cannot function. The winners then will be those who try to rule by force rather than consent.

rhetoric is a metalanguage that describes and explains how language works.

As a result, the news and information ecosystem that is so important to a functioning democracy and civil society has suffered a double whammy. First, as we have seen, the social media platforms’ recommendation engines have promoted misinformation and disinformation. Second, we have now seen how programmatic advertising has provided financial

Discursive rationality is today under threat from affective communication. We allow ourselves to be easily affected by fast sequences of information. It is quicker to appeal to affect than to rationality. In affective communication, it is not the better argument but the most exciting information that prevails. Fake news is more interesting than

And stories make place.24 This means the metaphoric, allegorical, symbolic, and other devices that shape stories also move us and make place.

The hijackers, Democrats and Republicans alike, have acted as if the idea that self-government depends on people being able to count on independent providers of information is a quaint relic and that the new media channels present new opportunities that creative political operatives must seize.

Scale in its practice in humanist reason is thus both a concept and a metaconcept, insofar as it represents to us not only a theory of objects and a theory analyses, but an argument for the relation between objects and analyses, grounded in the claim that they both “have” scale.

It is this slackening that thinkers like Jodi Dean, Slavoj Žižek, Mark Andrejevic, Byung-Chul Han and others have warned of as a decline of the symbolic: a malfunctioning of socially sanctioned language, a sagging of meaning and norms.

Instead of leveling the field between small and large, the open Internet has dramatically tilted it in favor of the most massive players.