How the Media Colonizes Your Mind
The cognitive media has replaced the self. It has replaced us.
The word “media” evokes images of reporters busily clacking away at keyboards in crowded newsrooms or presenting the news on-air in dazzling studios. But in today’s world of digital domination, the media extends far beyond a handful of news organizations and now encompasses giant information mills like Google, Facebook, Twitter and Apple that both directly and indirectly shape our lives.
Understood this way, the media is far more powerful than ever. In a certain regard, media is now the most powerful institution in history. The reason is that where Romans or Persians controlled vast swaths of geographic territory, levying taxes and raising armies, in the digital era the media controls endless tracks of intellectual territory—and its dominion is the very nature of reality as we know it.
In a certain regard, media is now the most powerful institution in history.
Once, church and state were the primary instruments for determining reality. If the church told us today is a holy day, for instance, that dictate didn’t just affect our behavior but our literal perception of the nature of the day. (For many around the world, particularly outside the West, it still does.) If the king declared the earth to be flat, then flat it was.
Today, fundamental questions about the nature of the world are shaped by the media. Whether Russia is a waging a war of regional aggression or defense; whether we are marching towards a “global climate catastrophe”; whether, even, the biology of sex can be changed by an act of will—these new facts of the modern world are determined almost solely by media.
Crucially, this extends to the domain of science since, for 99% of people on this planet, science is not the outcome of experiments that take place in labs, or theories developed on chalkboards, but the media reports that filter the raw science into set narrative. Many of us, for example, might fervently believed that climate change is causing a dire catastrophe. Yet almost none of us can produce the most basic data on warming (such as the precise numbers on how much warming is taking place each year).
That media is immensely, disproportionately powerful is something most of us realize. But what we miss in this debate is just how expansive and deeply entrenched in our lives media really is. DuckDuckGo, the privacy-emphasizing search engine, recently posted an eye-opening tweet soberly quoting digital rights activist Leah Elliott’s comic book, Contra Chrome:
“The Chrome Browser resembles a two-way mirror, You Think you are browsing the web... when in reality, Google and others are browsing you.”
In the tweet, DuckDuckGo (quoting Elliott) identifies Chrome as “one of the world's most used surveillance tools.” The reality is that with 70% market share and 2.65 billion users, it is likely the most used surveillance tool—save for Google.com itself, which has a 90% market share and 4 billion users, or more than half the planet. Throw Facebook and its roughly 3 billion users into that mix and we have near domination of the world’s attention by a couple gargantuan companies.
We’ve long known that Google (and others) uses clever branding to avoid anti-trust laws. By positioning itself as a tech company, Google puts itself in competition with other global tech titans, rather than revealing itself to be a search engine with a total (and potentially very thorny) monopoly on search.
But if tech is too broad a category for Google, search is conveniently narrow. In reality, Google, Facebook, Twitter and even Apple are media companies. They approach media in different ways—via search, social engagement, and hardware/software (respectively). But even these distinctions are blurred, as Google also makes hardware, Apple also sells content, and Facebook is essentially a giant operating system for our online lives.
In essence, these companies are packaging information—in other words, they are media. The news component is simply the most highly conspicuous, storefront manifestation of media. But whether it’s search results, posts of family barbecues or the latest episode of your favorite series, it’s all media.
“The media has replaced every institution,” Fran Lebowitz told Martin Scorcese in the latter’s 2010 documentary on Lebotiwtz, Public Speaking. In 2021, I identified this as the most prescient remark about our society in the last decade. And that was correct. But what I missed then is far more profound: the media has not just replaced every institution, it has also expanded the realm of the institution into every nook and cranny of our lives including, most chillingly, into our inner lives.
It is undoubtedly true, as Fran Liebotwitz noted, that analog media constituted by radio, news, TV and the early Internet did indeed replace every institution. But the media of search, social engagement, professional connection, marketing, purchasing, banking, planning, task-managing, storing, interpreting, chatting, dating, investing, grocery shopping, voting, analyzing, etc, etc—this media has fused with our minds.
In one of his great interviews with Joe Rogan, Elon Musk noted in an almost offhand way that we are already cyborgs. Hearing this, I balked at first. I’m still a capital-A authentic human, one who enjoys buying physical books, writing with good pens and gazing at old-timey signage at holiday markets. But it took only a split second for me to realize that Musk is right: my phone is an extension of my hand.
What I missed—and what I believe Musk was really saying—is that the modality of digitally packed information has become an extension of our minds. Though I would take this further and say, in many ways, we have become an extension of the network mind. “Today, our society has reached another tipping point,” Jonathan Haidt, in his buzzed-about piece about social media in the Atlantic, quotes Mark Zuckerberg as writing in a landmark memo to Facebook investors. Zuckerberg in his own words sought “to rewire the way people spread and consume information.”
On twitter, we frequently refer to the “hive mind.” But a hive is an organic structure in which every individual has a place, a role to play, a sense of common good—all the elements lacking in our collectivized cognitive media. Far from a hive mind, the cognitive media has made us more like cells of a jelly fish, all pumping mindlessly in no direction; all nerves, no brain; all reaction, no thought.
This is the media as far more degraded than institution—since an institution is, at least putatively, designed to serve human societies. Rather, the rise of the cognitive media made media into not just a reflection of self, but a replacement of self. The media has replaced not just institutions; it has replaced us.
The medium is no longer the message. It is, instead, the essence of our contemporary lives. It is us; and we, like it or not, are it.
I’ve got a lot more coming as I take on the media, history’s most powerful institution. Want to help me continue the fight against media corruption? Become a supporter. Just click here.