Zohran and the Audience Capture Crisis (An Update on "2025: A Vision")

A Real Update This Time

If you are a subscriber and you forgot what the hell this Substack is about again, I look at media, culture, politics and tech. I like to compare today’s media landscape with that of the past because time is cyclical and the past is prologue. If this ain’t your thing no hard feelings. If it is, please share and consider a paid subscription.

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It’s getting hot in here. Not only because it is summertime: we are in swimming in the magma of our decade’s inner core, smack dab in the center. COVID has become a faint nightmare. That’s why July 18 is not too soon a time for Ari Aster’s upcoming film Eddington (which takes place in 2020, during the pandemic) to be released.

The phrase “Nothing Ever Happens,” which was popular on 4chan as far back as 2014, has reached peak memetic ubiquity this year. Like with most memes, many different interpretations exist. A popular one: things literally happen like genocide, war, but no fundamental changes occur. Capitalism still exploits, media still distorts.

I don’t think that gets it. The sentiment fueling this meme is driven by the frustration with cultural stasis. Again, our turbulent times are being met with bubblegum dance pop on social (which we all quietly accepted as the new radio) and nostalgia-farming zombie IP retreads at the multiplex. Yes, we have now bombed Iran — we still need a dragon-training guide, apparently.

As I said in the title of this piece, I am writing an update on my predictions of 2025 that I wrote a day before New Year’s Eve. My hope was that 2025 would be the year in which the 2020s began culturally. I can humbly admit that I overpraised Friendship, but I still believe that we are starting to see the cultural sea change in movies first, before music even.

Rather than dryly checking off which predictions panned out, I want to jump to the most important part of the piece: the part about how this decade needs a hero. At the time I wrote it, Luigi Mangione was the hero of the time. This did not sit right with me, even though I understood it. Predictably, this deification enraged the media.

From 2023, when the Gaza movement started, there was a massive generation gap. The mainstream media, who up until then had no issue capitalizing on hashtag activism, were at a loss. They lined up Amy Schumer, Sacha Baron Cohen and other celebrities, to try to correct the narrative in a pro-Israel direction. It failed, so the rift between social and mainstream media grew larger. Luigi Mangione widened the chasm.

How about that Zohran Mamdani? I recently said Mamdani was the most dramatic example of the generation gap. His victory would be evidence that the media cannot convince us that anyone they don’t like is an antisemite. It didn’t work with Trump or Mamdani. The alt-left has reached a land speed record with Tuesday’s primary victory.

Up until now, the pressure for the mainstream media to capitulate to audience capture has not been this high. Gaza had its supporters, but was always a divisive issue, genocide or no genocide. Major media outlets focused more on antisemitism, often declining direct comment on the conflict. A few journalists for left-of-center publications, like New York and Slate, even published a few editorials critical of Israel. A few journalists like Taylor Lorenz acknowledge that they understood why Mangione did what he did.

But now Mamdani won the primary with a commanding lead in a major city. Someone commented on a recent Substack Note celebrating the win, saying New York is not a real place. I won’t play dim: I know they meant New York is not America. Here’s the rub though: New York matters to the establishment. What New York thinks now, the world thinks five years later.

OK fine, don’t mind my regional chauvinism. “The Mary Tyler Moore Show,” “M*A*S*H” and “All in the Family” were major hits. What you might not know: hit shows were canceled to make way for them. “Green Acres” and “The Beverly Hillbillies” were pulled because, even though they delivered audiences, they did not deliver the younger, urban audiences that advertisers wanted.

From Tim Wu’s permanently relevant classic The Attention Merchants:

Public broadcasting was not quite radical, but its growing strength came at a time when America’s networks had indeed begun a close flirtation with losing relevance—meaning, young audiences. Most of NBC’s, ABC’s, and CBS’s leading shows were still keyed to the tastes of the 1950s. If we examine CBS, in particular, we see that top shows of the 1960s were “rural” shows like The Beverly Hillbillies (about a backwoods family living in Beverly Hills), Green Acres (urban socialites take up “farm living”), and Hee Haw (a country music variety show). Innocuous, comforting entertainment, to be sure, and still capable of bringing tens of millions to prime time, each and every night, but hardly in sync with countercultural viewers. As ratings began dropping, the whole enterprise began to sag. Commercial television was surviving the late 1960s on sheer inertia—the lasting power of attentional habits is never to be underestimated—and the fact that the backlash, such as it was, was mainly in the younger demographics, and had not reached the whole population.

As the book thrillingly details, Fred Silverman, the head of CBS programming in 1970 (known, after his shows hit, as “The Man With the Golden Gut”) and new president Robert Wood took into account what Marshall McCluhan called “the dinosaur effect” —that media entities are often at their largest size right before extinction.

Not one legacy network, studio or label right now is at its largest size. They have all been fighting extinction. The networks that helped boost Mamdani’s message (TikTok, Substack) have grown in popularity. Meanwhile, CBS talk show host Stephen Colbert, asking Mamdani, running for mayor of NYC, what he thought of Israel, was club-footed and out of touch. Twenty years ago, Colbert was the revolution. Now he sits, eagerly waiting for his puppet strings to pull him up so he can stretch.

It can’t be said in good faith that a great social media campaign was the only reason he won. What can’t be ignored however is that TikTok, the only major social media platform not in bed with US politicians, as well as a platform that already has a huge pro-Gaza, as well as a huge leftist population, helped spread his message. On TikTok, the deluge of Israel gotcha questions backfired. So many expressed bewilderment at the relevance of global conflict to a mayoral race. Once again, TikTok has the youth and the major media players have the heartburn.

I do not expect the audience capture of mainstream media to clearly reflect the sentiments of the alt-left. No, that was a luxury enjoyed by the tweetniks of the 2010s #resistance era. In the sixties, films, music, and even books did often not directly relay the message on the streets. Some used innuendo, many simply expressed the raucous energy while singing either about sexual frustration (The Rolling Stones, “Satisfaction”) or mind expansion (Bob Dylan’s “Mr. Tambourine Man”).

This is one path anyway. The American mainstream media can also do what they did in the seventies, when they ignored punk as anything but a news story. Radio stations were terrified of The Sex Pistols.

So it was, the eighties pushing punk into the hardcore ghetto, where indie rock gestated until the grunge explosion of the early nineties. By this point, its political slant was far easier to contain. Cobain was a feminist and he opposed homophobia.

But I don’t see how this is a viable path frankly. Media was much easier to control in the seventies and the only thing as thrilling as Mamdani’s win is watching the liberal mainstream media once again oafishly stumble. Mamdani is popular. Colbert is not. Perhaps it seems cruel to laugh at the pained whimpers of a fallen dinosaur, but those in the media need to listen to the people, not the other way around. The people don’t make money listening to the media and the media certainly doesn’t get stronger by ignoring the people.