Toxic Chaos and Toxic Order: The Election, Legacy Media and the Alternatives

We have an active thread in The Bigger Picture chat inquiring into the US election, which you can join here. Breathing in Culture has almost sold out and begins next week, so if you want to join us, secure your place here.

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We’ve entered a new political reality, and nothing has changed. In a post-truth world, the old can become new, and the new is always out of reach.

For many who get their information from the alternative media, the result of this election wasn’t a surprise. Once again, the legacy media couldn’t see the coming landslide. These two media formats occupy different realities. The legacy media exists in a world defined by the rules of what came before, and a fantasy about what should be. The alternative media is treacherous and truthful in equal measure, but wild enough to channel the chaos of the times. 

The election of Donald Trump is too complex to attribute to one cause, but our changing media ecosystem is a significant factor. Yet another nail has been hammered into the coffin of the legacy media. However, our new information sources, from podcasts and X feeds to TikTok memes and Substack articles, are a mixed bag. You’re as likely to find a tangle of bad sensemaking and poor journalistic ethics as you are deep insights and solid reporting,  

Alternative media is just as compromised by vested interests as its counterpart. As Substack’s CEO Hamish McKenzie wrote recently, Elon Musk’s X has become a new version of the newspaper empires of the 18th and 19th centuries. A billionaire controls the parameters of the narrative, all the while claiming to champion free speech. It may seem like we’re in a different media reality, but as Katherine Dee told me in an upcoming podcast episode, all that’s really changed is the gatekeepers.

Weirdly, if you carry the radio tower in your other pocket it will cancel out the damage the phone causes to your sperm count.

Because of this, making sense of anything today requires intense discernment. This has been on my mind from the moment I woke up at 4am on Wednesday and started scrolling between legacy news outlets and social feeds, eating a ‘reverse media diet’ by absorbing articles and memes from different niches in the ecosystem. It was exhausting, and I was reminded again that the media ecosystem is as much a victim of the meta-crisis as our forests and oceans. Polluted, dying, with small pockets of beauty and coherence holding against the rising tide.

These pockets emit signals that can be heard more clearly in the din, because they repeat from multiple sources and are therefore amplified. I explored one of these in a recent piece, namely the idea that this was ultimately an election about the end of liberalism in its current form; a rejection of a globalised world order that prioritises capital over people and place. I suggested that Trump was the most likely to win because the destruction of that world order represents hope and novelty, while its continuation in the form of Kamala Harris represents an unchanging toxic order. The chaos offered by Trump is, despite its own deep toxicity, the more desirable option for people who have been let down and sneered at by the established order.

Another clear signal is the rejection of identity politics. As trends expert Sean Monahan has pointed out, we reached peak woke in around 2020 when we underwent what he calls a ‘vibe shift’, and the election is proof that it stuck. This election was a final middle finger to the institutionalised ideology that sees identity as the most important aspect of modern life.

But it’s unlikely to lead to a more connected and beautiful world. The toxic chaos offered by Trump is simply the other side of the toxic order offered by the establishment. The intellectual underpinnings of the Trump presidency, and particularly JD Vance’s worldview, offer a form of post-liberalism that rejects progressive social and cultural advances in favour of a return to Christian tradition. I’ve found myself wrestling with this a lot recently. Even though I think the anti-woke insurgency is correct that the worldview being espoused by progressive elites is morally-bankrupt, I see their proposed solutions as regressive and oppressive.   

Their desire to return to tradition throws an important baby out with the bathwater. The postmodern and postcolonial critiques about power that underpin the original concept of ‘being woke’ are vitally important, because they provide insights into implicit power relationships in society that were previously hidden. This insight should be carried forward, not ignored.

Unfortunately, the original critique is far removed from the version of wokeness that was adopted by the media, governments and corporations. This makes it hard to see the wood for the trees. In 2019, I wrote a piece arguing that woke ideology is a ‘simulated religion’ for the establishment, one that offers behavioural codes and the promise of purity without transcendence.

In my book, I expand on this to suggest that it is has become a tool to perpetuate consumer culture, drawing on the work of political science professor Adolph L. Reed, who argues that identity politics has been used as a smokescreen for class inequality. This idea has become increasingly accepted recently and Trump’s election is further proof that it is class, not identity, which is a more fundamental driver of social and political energy.

All of these factors played a role in the election. A polluted information ecology, class warfare, the war against woke, the madness of Trump’s post-truth reality, the weakness of Harris’ campaign and countless other factors. And yet, they are only fragments of the truth. The reality we’re living in now is too complex and contradictory to hold in mind, and the more I’ve tried to, the more I’ve found that it needs instead to be held in the body.  

There are always layers of implicit knowing beneath what we can see, and the body is where we sense these. If we want to make sense of what’s going on, and defend against post-truth madness, we can start by returning to the only place we can truly know is real: our felt sensory experience in this moment.

The silence of the body holds answers beyond the arguments and the noise. There are answers in your breath. In your beating heart. Embodiment doesn’t give us complete clarity, but it connects us to our inner truth and shows us where it meets the truth of the world. It opens up insights of a different quality than those we can find by explicit analysis. 

My favourite practice for this kind of insight is Somatic Inquiry. In case you haven’t come across it, Somatic Inquiry is inspired by the practice of Inquiry taught in the Diamond Approach. It’s a type of meditation in which we speak (or write) while embodying an attitude of radical curiosity, tracking body sensations, images and thoughts as they arise and allowing each to become another thread of inquiry.

I get a lot out of this practice and think it can be particularly helpful in times of upheaval. With that in mind, I’m sharing the ‘Guide to Inquiry’ instructional film from my New Ways of Knowing course, which I originally created with my friend Ivo Mensch back in 2019 at the height of the first Trump presidency.

Paid subscribers can find a somatic inquiry around the election below. As in previous pieces, I’ve made minor edits for clarity and left the text largely unchanged.