The Age of (Dis)Information

Don’t want to be an American idiot
One nation controlled by the media
Information age of hysteria
Is calling out to idiot America

—Greenday, American Idiot

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What just happened?

Nothing.

Yesterday was a momentous election. The biggest, most important election of the century, of the past several decades, stretching all the way back into the last millennium. The American people made a collective decision about the future of their country, the future of the world, and perhaps—probably—the future of democracy. And they chose wrong.

For those hoping for a different result, the world we wake up in today may feel fundamentally different to the one we knew yesterday.

Yet, it is not.

The trajectory of history has not been decided over the last 24 hours.

The 2024 US election was not won on the fifth of November by the last-minute decisions of a few voters who overheard the exact right radio ads the day before. It was not a gerrymandered victory in which the people said “No” and some guys drawing lines on a map said “Yes”.

The election was won decisively, strategically, definitively, and seemingly including the popular vote. The first popular vote won by a Republican candidate in 20 years.

And despite that remarkable fact, yesterday’s decision changed nothing.

America’s past, present, and possible futures do not now differ from what they were. The only difference is that we have a better idea of what those futures are.

This situation has existed for a long time. Last week, last month, last year, this was the world we lived in still. It has been building and brewing for half a century. It has been building and brewing for half a millennium.

And the cauldron has boiled over. Spectacularly.

We have, essentially, just watched the 21st century’s most important poll. The question was, “Will you, America, vote for Kamala Harris over Donald Trump?”

And America responded, “HUH?”

Humorous, a tangential oddity perhaps, and not something to be taken as indicative of the whole election, but this search is not a one-off Google query from a few stupid people on voting day, but a steady rise in searches for this question in the past week despite Biden having dropped out six months before, showing a serious disengagement from the politics they are voting on.

This headline is just one apathetic thread in the woven tapestry of political strife that is 21st-century America. It was not the deciding factor in yesterday’s vote. These searches represent a group of voters so disengaged they didn’t even know the sitting President had dropped out of the race six months earlier, and they are just one symptom of a vast array of problems that have created this result.

The election ballot asked other questions as well.

“Do you abide by the Rule of Law? Do you believe in democracy, equality, freedom? Do you denounce fascism?”

Doubtless these questions were hidden to many voters, or some had incorrect beliefs about which candidate to check if they did. But there were simpler questions, even. Obvious, in-your-face issues that could swing a person either way.

“Do you reject racism, sexism, corruption and lies, and unfettered capitalistic greed?”

Still some confusion over which box to tick.

“Do you understand what is happening here?”

Ah, that one’s easy. A firm, and definitive “Donald Trump.” Check.

What else is there to know?

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America voted for change, yesterday. They don’t know what from. They don’t know what to. They don’t know how. But they know they want it, and Biden didn’t give it to them. Obama didn’t give it to them. Kamala Harris wasn’t going to give it to them either.

The Democrats can’t give it to them. Can’t or won’t, maybe, but at this point they definitively haven’t given it to them over and over again. They are too tied up in the establishment. Too beholden to the money they need in their election war chests. They are too crippled by America’s deformed democracy hunched over conventions allowed to erode and degrade beyond repair. The people who voted for Trump, even the people who disagree with him but didn’t vote at all, recognised something the left has been telling itself isn’t true for a long time now: the Democrats cannot, and will not, bring meaningful change.

I’ve read the articles describing how Harris could have started dismantling the Supreme Court majority and expanding the Electoral College to even out the numbers. I’ve seen the speculation over whether she would stick to her initial promises of fighting big money from before big money started donating so much to her campaign. I have mused how another Democrat term could possibly ‘fix’ things.

Even if the articles explained that she could, they never, ever convinced me she would.

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There’s a bright side to all this: New Zealand is not America.

The second Trump presidency will surely be a historic global political moment. It will make the rest of the world’s democracies question the surety of their own by comparison — a healthy question to probe at, in this day and age. And New Zealand’s democracy is nowhere near as weak as the US’s stagnated, gerrymandered, divided political scene, even though we are under very similar, very intense pressures.

There are several good reasons why we are so fortunate in this regard, and I believe I’ve identified one of the biggest: Sir Keith Holyoake, the man who kicked Rupert Murdoch in the teeth without even trying.

In 2019, as Deputy PM in the Sixth Labour Government, Winston Peters gave a somewhat hypocritical speech about the importance of our news media and its earliest protector, Sir Keith Hollyoake:

In 1965, he was the champion of the News Media Ownership Bill, designed to block Rupert Murdoch’s attempted takeover of the Dominion Post. Holyoake fought hard to protect the ownership of New Zealand media outlets.

He argued the dissemination of news media is something special, and it was more than “a biscuit factory”, as he put it. To quote him -“it is very much in our national interest that we have our own voice or voices to express our national identity and character.”

The barriers to protect the ownership of our media organisations were broken by this country’s neo-liberal experiment, for which we still pay the price today.

My party’s fundamental position always has been and remains that a fourth estate is essential, although sadly the news media is in dire straits.

He spoke inside the Beehive where, over 50 years earlier, Hollyoake had championed that very Media Ownership bill against then-Labour Opposition Leader Norman Kirk — and the future PM. Two giants of politics going toe-to-toe on New Zealand's future. Hollyoake's defence was described by biographers as playing "a more prominent and passionate role in the debate in parliament on this bill than on almost any other piece of legislation during his long career”.

This was Hollyoake's opening address:

I stand entirely on the principle that I believe in New Zealanders owning their own industry, all industry, wherever practicable, and this government has had the trade and development board lay down a series of criteria to that purpose. This country is growing up, and I want to see it owned and controlled by New Zealanders in every possible sphere. The Government has been working towards that end.

There is, of course, also an economic reason – the bleeding away of overseas funds and the paying of tribute to people overseas, in regard to the New Zealand industry in general. This has a special and greater reference to newspapers and news media than to any other form of industry, and this has been recognised by other responsible Governments.

The Australian Government took the oportunity of doing exactly what we are doing, with a limit of 20 percent and 15 per cent, in respect of television and radio, which are owned by the newspapers in Australia, and therefore affects them. More recently Canada, which has a closer neighbour – the United States of America – than any we have, has taken action to protect its people from overseas domination in the dissemination of news media. (...)

I, for one, want to see New Zealand mature, to grow up in its own sense, have its own soul, develop its own character, and have control of its own destiny in all spheres of economy.

I think the dissemination of news media is something special. It is greater tha the ownership of a biscuit factory, or a brick factory, or any other factory. This is my simple faith.

At the time, Hollyoake did not actually know who Murdoch was. But in his address, Hollyoake cites other nations moving to defend their media against overseas interests. Australia. Canada. The United States. He argues we should follow in their footsteps and work to protect our press. And his argument works. He wins the debate. His bill passes, and Rupert Murdoch was prevented from controlling the interests of his very first acquisition: The Dominion.

Today, Rupert Murdoch has a media empire spanning the UK, the US, Canada, Australia, Italy, China, Hong Kong and India, amongst others. The authoritarian media mogul in HBO’s Succession, Logan Roy, was based on him. He was described by President Joe Biden as "the most dangerous man in the world". And due to a combination of good timing and the impassioned defence of Keith Hollyoake, New Zealand is the only country that escaped his early bids for media domination which cemented the stranglehold he holds on today's (yesterday’s?) press.

There is bias and control in the media, and it is on the side of the moneyed, neoliberal interests that prop up America, and us and the rest of the world, too. But because of Holyoake and despite (perhaps because of) our smaller news market, New Zealand has retained a far stronger press than our neighbours and allies, and our constitutional conventions too have been more strongly protected as a result.

Change doesn’t occur without a catalyst. Trump winning this election proves to me that American democracy is broken. It is both stagnating and slipping into decay in a way that shadows eerily the political fall of Rome and mirrors the devolution of Germany in the post-WWI period which piled pressures upon her such that WWII became inevitable.

But this crisis offers an opportunity for America. One that I hope they will take.

And New Zealand needs to seize the opportunity it offers us, too. We must take definitive action to prevent us from following the US down this disastrous path.

We already walk it, under this intolerant, intolerable coalition government who won their election via lies and culture wars. Right now, David Seymour is using the cover of the US election to sneak his I-Want-A-Race-War legislation into Parliament, avoiding the planned demonstration that was to accompany it in protest. New Zealanders have resolutely rejected what it stands for but he is determined to do as much damage to our constitutional institutions and the Crown-Maori relations as he can in the meantime, including to the Waitangi Tribunal, which he is trying to de-power at the same time in a multi-pronged attack.

With luck, this will become a wake-up call for New Zealand. For our politicians, who must see how hidden the damage to democracy can be and the need to strengthen and iterate and improve upon it before corruption can corrode it away. For the left, who are incentivised to underreact to encroaches from the right due to their long history of calling us oversensitive snowflakes and insisting that we’re jumping at shadows when we see fascism everywhere — until too late, it’s here.

And for New Zealanders, who do not seem to realise (or perhaps know only too well and do not care) how closely aligned the New Zealand right has become with ideals contrary to those our country has held for the past 100+ years.

Over the next few months on this substack, I hope to explore where we [NZ, but also humanity] are on a political and anthropological timescale, why that is shifting into a new age with vastly different makeups, and why it is economically, historically and anthropologically necessary for us to evolve our democracy beyond its current simplistic form.

We are at a crucial point in history, an unprecedented point. That naturally comes with great anxiety for anyone experiencing it.

But at the same time I’m reassured that, for New Zealand specifically, the future does not look anywhere near as grim or difficult as it does for other nations. And I strongly, strongly believe that despite (or perhaps because of) this nightmare of a government ruling over us, timing-wise, media-wise, and democracy-wise, we are in one of the best global positions possible to steer our waka through this political chaos.

For now, I’ll leave you with a poem I wrote this week while mulling over a phrase I think about a lot.

whenever I see a news headline
turn on the radio, or watch the tv
I try very hard not to think about
the futures that might come to be

I just grit my teeth hard and remember
those men and women of great aplomb
who continued to live perfectly ordinary lives
under the fall of Rome

the sea ice is melting, our glaciers gone
the ‘global warming myth’ myth is no more
it’s a stark problem here in the present
to add to poverty, famine and war

our ships leak oil all through the Pacific
our machines rake through coral and sand
our minister for resources seems a little annoyed
that people are thinking of taking a stand

we’ve lost count of all the extinctions
forgot how to make glass once before
quick, photograph all of these creatures
washing up onto our shore

Canadian forests burn brightly
warming this island home
and I’m reminded that people lived ordinary lives
under the fall of Rome

there are hurricanes, mud slips and landslides
the only question left these days is where
we’re self-sufficient, self-driving, self-sabotaging
self-conscious, self-built, self-aware

our land’s being bought up for bunkers
by the people who made us this mess
each day they make themselves richer
while paying us out less and less

we can’t seem to stop global warming
as this hole closes in the ozone
and that’s how I know people lived ordinary lives
under the fall of Rome

the Medicis still own the money,
the governments still own the banks
the government’s owned by the people
and we’re still the ones driving the tanks

this lifetime of workweeks ain’t shrinking
how much more stuff can we own?
the politicians all hear what we’re thinking.
is that a dog whistle, bed, lead or bone?

our constitutional conventions are slipping
there’s fascists abroad and at home
and people lived perfectly ordinary lives
under the fall of Rome

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