When things get bad, we call in the fixer
Will there ever be a more effective message than "everything sucks and I'm here to fix it"?
Last Monday, watching the inauguration speech of Donald Trump, our once and current president, it occurred to me that these days there’s no message more powerful than “the vibes are bad and I will make them better.” Americans may disagree about many things, but regardless of their lot in life the one thing they do seem to agree on is that everything is going to hell. So whether the core of that discontent is how much a dozen eggs costs, the effects of climate change, who uses what bathroom, or something else, a surefire way to get their attention is to validate that discontent, and a solid way to keep it is by promising to destroy the source of it.
It’s easy to make such a sweeping statement on the back of another 4-year political swing just to watch it age woefully by 2028, but I actually think this has some durability as the age of the Internet continues to mature. The smashing of media, entertainment, and politics into a fractured mess of strong feelings masquerading as discourse has created by far the most lucrative industry known to humans. If the key to owning a sizable chunk of this industry is to find, seize, and maintain attention, then it stands to reason that the biggest opportunists will do everything they can to find the message that most effectively secures it. Having secured it, the most rich or powerful of opportunists can then use their money or influence or both to paint a given picture of reality that best serves their interests. I don’t see that dynamic changing anytime soon.
This is probably starting to sound very conspiratorial, very anti-capitalist. That’s not really what I’m going for. Right-wing populists are really good at the game, but left-wing populists are too—so it’s neater just to say that populists are good at it. Besides, as a person simply processing a random idea he had by writing and publishing it on his blog/email newsletter to 125 subscribers, I have no real motive beyond simply observation. There’s no political statement I want to make. In fact I find it most interesting that this extraordinarily effective message—shit is fucked up and I’m here to fix it—often appears well outside of the purely political arena.
Take media, for example. Until quite recently, the slogan of The Washington Post was “Democracy Dies in Darkness”. Various journalists on Substack speak of their work as an antidote to the broken mess of legacy media (Ken Klippenstein’s Substack “is a response to the utter failure of the major media to tell the truth” and Taylor Lorenz writes User Mag because of “bosses who have zero understanding of the world I cover” and “legacy media companies [that] are also very rigid when it comes to the format my (or any reporter's) work can take”). Substack itself has long espoused the holiness of its mission to free writer/creators, readers, and indeed the entire Internet from the shackles of attention/money-hungry Big Social Media. If you frame the state of a given playing field as fundamentally broken, it’s pretty easy to follow up with a heroic solution that just happens to position you as the ultimate fixer.
This messaging absolutely can be problematic, especially when you don’t just frame a state of play as broken, but actively break it yourself so as to swoop in as a savior. Certain leaders, corporations, and other concentrated sources of power unfortunately can’t resist the urge to do exactly that. However, it’s not an expressly nefarious dynamic. Even the rare outfit that refuses a clean “they bad, us good” dichotomy in favor of something in the middle can’t completely escape its pull. The whole premise of Tangle, a political newsletter I admire and frequently invoke, is about presenting both sides of a given issue and a personal take that goes out of its way to call out biases. It is nothing if not ruthlessly nonpartisan, and yet its top-level marketing line suggests a fix for something deeply broken at the same time as underscoring its unique approach: “Tired of one-sided political news? Get a 360-degree view of the biggest stories.”
I am tired of one-sided political news! More so now than I was 4-5 years ago when I first subscribed to Tangle, as a matter of fact. But I think a “360-degree view of the biggest [political] stories” speaks for itself. I understand the need to hook people in by speaking to a problem they have—this is sales 101—but in my mind the real value of a solution is what its inherent positive potential is, and to what extent it can achieve that outcome. The world is littered with examples of empty solutions to problems no one has—a $400 juicer whose bags could just as easily and effectively be squeezed by hand, a $700 flawed attempt to replace the smartphone—and these were seemingly earnest efforts as opposed to straight up cons. So much time and money and space is wasted on creating the perception that something critical is deeply wrong, such that a poor or even itself broken solution to that negative perception can seem like sweet, sweet relief.
Here’s an idea: what if you didn’t have to say something, or everything, was total shit in order to offer positive change? Sounds radical, right? Sort of goes against the entire premise of a two-party political system and a culture of consumerism buttressed by various forms of sophisticated advertising, doesn’t it? Aha!
Look, no one is going to change the world with their blog, certainly not me, but it is a good venue for pondering this type of conundrum. The more I think about this sort of stuff, both observing and participating in the culture of the United States and the world, the more I wonder what it would be like to experience a society propelled by real, original solutions with inherent merit as opposed to ping-ponging along a chain reaction of expensive, consequential efforts that do little more than look around and say, “hey, that nonsense sucks—let’s do this instead.”
Such an experience very well may be too much to ask. The human condition, after all, includes a heavy dose of perpetual dissatisfaction. We get bored too easily. Real problems that call for an interesting shakeup don’t come around enough naturally, so we have to fabricate them. We desperately want to call in the fixer so they can tell us there’s something better on the other side of their solution. We want the fix. We need the fix. But ask yourself: what if we incentivized fixers to provide us with something deeper than the quick, reactive answer? What if we asked them to show us what they actually stood for? What if we refused anything less than honest, clear, original takes, regardless of how popular?
What a fixer-bullshit filter that could be.
Sorry I am late to the post Victor, but this is another insightful, well written and thought provoking piece. You won’t be surprised to hear that I particularly resonate with your discussion of the human condition as a root cause and the “heavy dose of perpetual dissatisfaction” we all feel. Ahhh, there’s a (the) problem to be fixed. I have some ideas…lol.
Does that suggest that the problem is with(in) each of us? And maybe, more broadly, whether that problem is a feature rather than a bug of our human nature? All of which is to say, I have no idea what I’m talking about.
Regardless, keep writing. You have the talent and mind for it.