#39 The Tyranny of the Timeline
How Baudrillard predicted our all-consuming obsession with a banalised present.
Since Trump’s decisive victory, Elon Musk has been flattering users of X with the repeated message, “You are the media now!” A hyperbolic claim, yet not without resonance. The much-discussed decline in mainstream media’s influence is undoubtedly real: the unfolding of the 2020 election was watched by 57 million people across 18 networks, while in 2024 the viewership was only 42 million. Meanwhile, the power of new media is rapidly growing. That X and podcasting played pivotal roles in the most recent election is denied by no one—witness the talk in Democrat circles of the grave threat posed by Musk, or liberals’ need of “their own Joe Rogan.”
While we online masses haven’t yet taken over all news media’s functions, have we not, in a sense, prepared ourselves for the role by giving ourselves over to its traditional obsessions: party politics and celebrity? We’ve come to think like the media. Not unrelatedly, this past decade has witnessed a dramatic narrowing of the culture. Culture’s come to be concerned, almost exclusively, with everyday politics and celebrity gossip, especially where these overlap. In short, with the demands and distractions of the present. To my mind, this is an accelerated version of the banalising process Jean Baudrillard (1929 - 2007) found at work in all modern societies. Baudrillard's oeuvre, for me, continues to be invaluable to any understanding of the extreme cultural and political phenomena of our time. Of course, conditions have changed greatly since the 2000s, so an imaginative reading is required (though arguably that’s always been true to some extent with Baudrillard’s “theory fictions”). Cultural impoverishment and banalisation, for instance, have gone quite a bit further since his time. We find ourselves condemned to a now-thoroughgoing “presentism”, a culture overwhelmingly obsessed with the present. Novelist J.G. Ballard, an admirer of some of Baudrillard’s work, anticipated this development decades ago in the introduction to his notorious 1973 novel Crash, a book on which Baudrillard would later pen a laudatory essay:
Just as the past itself, in social and psychological terms, became a casualty of Hiroshima and the nuclear age (almost by definition a period where we were all forced to think prospectively), so in its turn the future is ceasing to exist, devoured by the all-voracious present.
