The medium IS the message: RFK Jr. and the transformation of dialogue
Robert F. Kennedy Jr. came to my awareness for his courageous outspokenness in the face of creeping authoritarianism and suppression during the Covid years. He demonstrated a courage and willingness to dissent that has cost him significant social capital and in the years since, I’ve come to appreciate that he brings and symbolises a great deal more. In this and subsequent essays, I’ll consider the symbolism of his leadership as well as the significance of his campaign for a paradigm shift in communications that can transform and renew society by centring longform good-faith dialogue.
The Medium is the Message—Trump vs RFK: Memes vs Podcasts
Much of this piece was thought through in collaboration with the authors of ‘Belonging again’ Daniel and Michelle Garner (O.G Rose). You can view our dialogue from their farm in Virginia below. We began with the premise that democracy is and must always be more than casting votes, that when we reduce it to merely a voting process we are bound to lose faith as many younger generations have because democracy is something we must practice and experience.
Our dialogue received a surprising degree of engagement, indicating to me that there is a hunger for more conversation that delivers depth of insight below the noise.
Historically presidential campaigns have usually been governed by two candidates battling issues across the same medium of communication whether it be writing, speeches, radio or television. However, at a few very important junctures the communications landscape changes and one candidate comes to champion a new medium. We saw this famously in the 1960 Nixon-Kennedy televised debate in which radio listeners thought that Nixon had won and tv viewers, seeing Nixon’s extensive perspiration, preferred Kennedy’s performance. Thereafter, television had supplanted the previously dominant medium of radio used effectively by the likes of FDR in his ‘fireside chats’.
Media theorist Marshall Mcluhan’s idea of ‘the medium is the message’ is that, independent of the content of media (be it news stories, tweets or podcasts), the medium itself shapes our consciousness and redefines culture. Culture is always evolving in relationship to media at many levels. From terrorism to tourism, the arrival of new media creates new possibilities and unexpected effects. Mediums matter.
Today we face an unprecedented race in which three candidates represent distinctly different medium’s and approaches. As we spoke to in the dialogue: Biden-Harris represent a continuation of Obama’s tech savvy approach but in a way that appears increasingly both highly strategic, planned and controlled. This approach can produce a glistening campaign image but it’s artificiality also seems to be increasingly ineffective in a multi-polar uncontrolled media environment. With a free press, over-strategic leaders incapable of communication free from teleprompters and (tested) talking points can be exposed as calculating robots or puppets of powers unseen.
While the Harris campaign is still receiving a coordinated media boost of positive press. I argue that the Biden campaign’ss abysmal end represents the broader symbolic dying of a controlled over-strategic persona based communication style. The failure of this style is occurring in lockstep with the decline of the medium it is based upon: television. The 2020s, especially the covid years, represent a transitional moment in which podcasts (and memes) are quickly outgrowing traditional broadcast news networks in size, influence and impact. The podcast revolution represents an inevitable threat to those whose power is built on narrative control. For example, the viewership of Joe Rogan podcast now vastly supersedes that of all major ‘mainstream news networks’. Platforms like his, despite sustained efforts by government and social media platforms, were able to elude censorship and centralised narrative enforcement throughout the covid years. In a more complicated picture, the memetic (meme) landscape offers new avenues for sophisticated control and psychological operations—it is very difficult for us to know the true influence operations working on how global events are filtered through platforms.
The popularity of Trump’s unpredictable and highly instinctive style is in significant part a reaction to the ‘manufactured’ leadership style of Clinton-Biden-Harris in which every aspect appears strategised, controlled and on some level inauthentic. Where they go ‘high’ with strategised messaging, Trump goes ‘low’ with completely unscripted Kentucky derby showmanship. It is entertaining and captivating precisely because it cannot be predicted. Trump represents a base level moment to moment instinctiveness which most notably rewarded him greatly when he stepped out and proclaimed ‘fight, fight, fight’ after the attempt on his life.
With the decline of television, 2024 is most fundamentally a contest between memes and podcasts. Trump represents meme mastery, he is without question a highly memetic character who thrives on short form, rapid, attention grabbing bombastic energy.
Robert F Kennedy Jr.’s is the first presidential campaign to champion and master the new medium of podcasting and longform dialogue. He demonstrates a willingness and capacity to hold compelling, personable longform dialogue with vast range of differing people from differing backgrounds.
Trump rarely participates in podcasts, he’s never appeared on a Joe Rogan and tends to look for controlled or advantageous environments like the selected interview, debate stage or rally. The longform dialogue does not favour Trump’s style because it trains our attention for something different. Similarly, the Harris-Biden-Clinton style doesn’t thrive in the longform podcast environment because it is inauthentic and relies on prepared talking points more than actual dialogical thinking.
Mediums shape’s culture and consciousness
When we chose a medium of communication (through choosing a given candidate) we are choosing how we want our culture to be shaped. The meme, the strategised communications and the longform dialogue are each culturemaking forces which shape consciousness and what is possible. Each produces a different mind and different tendencies.
Memetic consciousness, operating at hyper speed with large hives of voices together has created what I call a “Schizo-megamind”. It can only hold attention and focus on any one thing for short periods of time, this laser attentive hive mind has a few benefits. For example, after the Trump assassination attempt it produced more analysis and conspiracy theories (of varying relevance) in a single week, than took us decades following the Kennedy assassination. However, as O.G Rose observes, the problem with the schizo-megamind is it lacks the capacity to discern and think dialogically which theory is truest. There will always be another, and each may be more salient and viral than the last. The info-wars of our time needs to be grounded down, into the earth and bodily intelligence, into a dialogue that can hold conflict and seek synthesis between a variety of perspectives including those with little virality or short-term salience.
The schizo-mega mind cannot hold depth or sustain a space of attention on any issue for a long period of time. Drawing on French theorist Paul Virilio, O.G. Rose argues that both Trump and the ‘schizo-megamind’ operate through a kind of “emotional synchronization”. Our attention is manipulated and we become drawn into an emotional synchronisation forming ‘tribe’ with others without any real rooted relationship or longform reflection. We are continuously being animated and activated by feeling but lack the capacity to wrestle or deeply think. As a consequence, we are easily gaslit and manipulated—unable to maintain a coherent remembrance of what has transpired. Those who wish to disable us need only saturate our attention with something new and we will forget and follow like a dog chasing a car. To become resilient now and in the next hyper-complex crisis we need a practice of dialoguing and think together in the context of sustained relationships in order to cultivate deep reflective capacity.
To slow down acceleration and maintain a sense of how things are unfolding over the years, we need something different. A medium and quality of communication that brings an ongoing cultivation and a sense of journey. The only way through this mess is to be able to explore at depth in the midst of overwhelming complexity. Longform dialogue is that medium.
Dialogical leadership, podcasts and cultural transformation
Leadership with integrity is an essential piece of coherence in society. We suffer increasingly in the western world from leaders who who lack integrity and thrive on charisma. They aren’t necessarily competent but have advanced through talking points and skilful manipulation of internal party cultures.
To be able to discern leaders with integrity we need to see how they move in a transparent and revealing context. That cannot be either the staged theater of television debate or the fragmentary landscape of memes. Our last best hope for leadership with integrity is to center the art of longform dialogue in the democratic process. With quality interlocutors, we stand a chance of exposing those who operate dishonestly under persona and lacking depth of integrity. We can begin to hold a complex understanding without collapsing into simple polarities.
This election can mark the long overdue transition from the useless theater of televised debate to longform dialogue. The corruption around the organisation of the debates, difficulty getting candidates to show up and exclusion of RFK Jr. from the debates have furthered this process. Be it now or in a few years, we will see a shift to all major candidates appearing on longform podcasts. That shift, and all that follows from it, can mark a turning from the current spiral of degeneration to a healing and renewal of democratic culture.
For a campaign that has centred real dialogue, it is only fitting that RFK and Shanahan are running under ‘heal the divide’. It is precisely and only through the work, and renewal of the capacity for dialogue, that the breakdowns between left, right, man and woman, old and young, vaxxed and unvaxxed, black and white, straight and queer can be healed. The fundamental unit of American culture, the family has been breaking down for decades and what we see culturally now is something like a national divorce. Both parties in the duopoly behave like a divorced parent that labels the other parent an asshole and liar without reflecting on their own shortcomings. The children of American have fallen into the trap of taking a side in a conflict in which there can only be losers. However, many are waking up into a position independent of these two parents, evolve in their recognition that must learn to live among one another.
As O.G Rose reflects, the Trump assassination could well have been the Archduke Ferdinand of an American unravelling. We don’t know what events could be set in motion domestically or in relation to foreign powers that push American closer to civil or national war. Such times beg the question who can lead us beyond civil war, and what form does that leadership take? When there’s nothing but conflict on the table, when families are torn, who brings the profound space for presence and mutuality beyond polarity? Where does real understanding become possible and how does faith in something better take root.
All sides briefly proclaimed the need to “lower the temperature”. However, this shift must occur both at the level of leadership and society. The social infrastructure of the liminal web, which O.G. Rose and I participate in, is an effort to generate the foundations for a common wisdom-oriented space for thinking and navigating our ‘liminal’ time. With a view to the development of these spaces in culture, the significance of RFK Jr. and podcast revolution is not an end goal but a part of a larger transition.
The RFK Jr. campaign is a signpost on the way, a lighthouse in a sea of schizo-polarity that can lead us to the shores of a new conversation space. It’s not about a perfect candidate but a movement to a space for a real conversation. A shifting of the culture from polarised passive consumption to longform dialogue is the first step. As we take this, we can further mature from consumption to participation in the myriad forms emerging across the liminal web, exemplified in places like Voicecraft and collective wisdom practices like dialogos. This revolution in dialogue will generate new capacities throughout society, shifting educational paradigms from systems designed to create obedient bureaucrats for a predictable future to fostering unique space holders and leaders capable of creating amidst complexity and uncertainty. Dialogue holds the power to re-weave reality in a culture of separation, growing a rooted and resilient space for wisdom and healing in culture.