Trolling Democracy: The Transformation of Political Satire in Trump Era Media

Transmission 145: Interview with Mark Dery, Part Two

• The Weaponization of Irony: Modern far-right movements have co-opted the “tactical irony” once used by progressive culture jammers, using it as a shield to deflect criticism of radical policies.
• Orwellian Reality: We are living in a “farcical nightmare” where reality itself trolls the public, driven by a mixture of 4chan-style ingenuity and sociopathic “insult comedy.”
• The New Propaganda Model: While traditional media remains a tool of the elite, the rise of “bro-media” (Rogan, Musk) has created new sinkholes for disinformation that require updated deconstruction strategies.

American cultural theorist Mark Dery probes the intersections of media, subcultures, and societal rebellion. Known for coining “culture jamming” and framing “Afrofuturism” in his essay Black to the Future, in the anthology Flame Wars. Dery’s work often navigates unconventional cultural terrain. His books, such as  Escape Velocity and  I Must Not Think Bad Thoughts, critique the entanglement of technology, anxiety, and taboo. In  Born to Be Posthumous, he unpacks the enigmatic world of Edward Gorey. Dery’s insights appear in publications like The New York Times Magazine and Rolling Stone, spotlighting the strange undercurrents of contemporary life.

This is the second part of a longer interview exploring Dery’s intellectual development and critical perspectives and culture jamming, afro-futurism, cyberculture, identity and Otherness, and technology. Read the part one of the interview with Mark Dery

This interview is also published in issue no. 01 of our free digital magazine Retrofuturista.

Culture jamming is deeply rooted in irony and satire. Do you believe irony still has the same potency in political and cultural discourse today, or has its impact diminished in an era of ‘post-truth’ politics?

Well, you’ve hit the bull’s-eye: Does the radical Right’s use of irony and satire, tested on manosphere sites like 4Chan and perfected by Trump, blunt if not nullify the effectiveness of the tactical irony culture jamming has used, at least since the ‘60’s to expose the hypocrisy, corruption, and flat-out lies of the Society of the Spectacle, elected officials, celebrity influencers, and, more generally, official culture and the repressive aspects of the social order? (By “tactical irony,” I mean: subvertising, brandalism, media hoaxes, satirical memes, mock religions (The Satanic Temple, for example), the use of public meetings and official hearings to stage acts of political theater, and so forth.)

To be sure, irony, used to devastating effect by Jonathan Swift (“A Modest Proposal”), Voltaire (Candide), H.L. Mencken, Gore Vidal, and Christopher Hitchens, to name a few, is most effective when the target is ponderously earnest, weighed down by its inability to think outside the received wisdom of the bourgeois elite or act outside institutional traditions but most of all by its leaden humorlessness.

That humorlessness, so laughably self-important it crossed the line into self-parody, was symptomatic of an epistemological literalism that took the world at face value and so was blind to the Puckish mischief of social satirists: figurative language (wordplay, specifically double entendre), deadpan humor (most notably the put-on; in British English, the piss-take), and of course irony, which is all about saying one thing but meaning another, most often its opposite. Irony is often a distinguishing characteristic of coded languages designed to signal to those in the know while flying under the radar cover of official culture, as in the queer semiotics of the camp aesthetic or, more literally, in the pre-Stonewall subcultural slang known as Polari, used by gay men in the U.K.

Irony worked well enough as a tactical weapon when culture jammers were mounting a Groucho Marxist insurgency against corporations, politicians, talking heads, and right-wing culture warriors handicapped by their need to abide by discourse norms and pander to the conservative values of a law-abiding, god-fearing silent majority.

As your question presumes, Trump and Trumpism have turned that world upside down. Far-right Republicans have deployed Orwellian doublespeak at least since Newt Gingrich launched his party’s campaign to “[reshape] the entire nation through the newsmedia,” a postmodern strategy that relied heavily on buzzwords as “a key mechanism of control.” But Trump and Trumpism take that strategy to almost unrecognizable extremes. To be sure, Trumpism is the poisoned fruit of Gingrich’s conservative revolution of the mid-‘90’s but it’s equally an expression of Dear Leader’s personal psychology. Trump is a nihilist troll for whom everything, as we’ve learned to our horror, is transactional. He positioned himself, with diabolical effectiveness, as the agent of a reactionary backlash (against women’s gains in the workplace, Black and LGBTQ demands for social justice, the immigrant hordes massing at the southern border, etc.). But his real motivations are personal rancor, an unquenchable thirst for revenge, and a sociopath’s appetite for cruelty for cruelty’s sake, all rooted in a malignant narcissism that is also, paradoxically, a gnawing sense of inadequacy.

That said, he’s got the gleeful ingenuity of a 4chan troll when it comes to tactical distraction, misdirection, and disinformation, and irony—at its crudest, but irony nonetheless—and hatemongering “insult comedy,” a lynch mob’s idea of “satire,” are his go-to tactics. The New Yorker TV critic Emily Nussbaum brilliantly analyzed Trump’s use of stand-up comedy tropes in the service of a political agenda all too familiar from the beer halls of 1930’s Germany; his reflexive defense that every racist, sexist quip was just a “joke” the humorless Left was too “woke” to get. Trump’s degradation of language and nonstop gaslighting are case studies in Orwellian irony: Big Brother’s insistence, in 1984, that words don’t mean what the dictionary says they mean, and that you should deny the evidence of your eyes, not to mention the facts as reported by the newsmedia, in favor of Dear Leader’s “alternative facts.”

So, Trump has ushered in a world where reality itself seems to be trolling us, as I wrote in an essay on “the farcical nightmare of post-Trump America.” The question is: Is culture jamming’s tactical use of irony and sociopolitical satire dead on arrival in a world where Trump (and autocrats who’ve studied his playbook) have used social media, bro media (like Joe Rogan), and right-wing channels like Fox to frame reality in smirky, disbelieving air quotes? If by jamming we mean the neo-Situationist detournement of subvertising or the media-critical con artistry of media hoaxing, I suspect so—although the straight-faced pranks of the Satanic Temple, which demands that municipalities that install Christian messaging on their property also display its huge statues of the demon Baphomet, have been hilariously effective in pushing back against the evangelical assault on secular democracy in the States. But they’re the exception that proves the rule, at this point.

Even so, culture jamming, as Umberto Eco implied in “Towards a Semiological Guerrilla Warfare,” can turn its attention from the transmission of subversive messages—counter-myths, in the Barthesian ideological sense—to their reception. Jammers can use their deconstructive chops, which include a media-literate, historically informed knowledge of the political use of irony, to expose Trump’s doublespeak as well as the doublethink it’s designed to produce, a state of mind I’ve called “epistemological vertigo.”

This is especially difficult at a moment when faith in institutions of all sorts, from the newsmedia to congress to liberal democracy itself, is crumbling and Trumpism is dancing on its ruins. Still, jammers can turn the tables on far-right groups like Moms for Liberty, which bans books and bullies public-school educators, by publicly exposing their tactics and not-so-hidden agendas. Likewise, they can shed a spotlight on the complacency and complicity of the establishment newsmedia. Corporate media, which includes the overpaid political pundits and “news analysts” who parrot the received wisdom of the permanent ruling class (regardless of partisan affiliation) on op-ed pages and cable-news roundtables, are very much a part of the machinery that shapes public opinion and manufactures mass consent for elite agendas.

If that sounds like chapter and verse from Chomsky and Herman’s Manufacturing Consent, it absolutely is. Their propaganda model of the mass media may be a little creaky in the knees, and could undeniably use some updating for the age of bro-media podcasters like Rogan, Elon Musk’s transformation of Twitter into a sinkhole of fascist trolling, and The New York Times’s cynical pandering to MAGA America in an attempt to increase its market share. But their fundamental insight—that the declaredly “objective,” factually scrupulous “Fourth Estate” is in fact an instrument of powerful elites and their ideologies (for example, the free-market fundamentalism that is a state religion in the U.S.)—remains all too relevant.

Photo courtesy of Mark Dery

Matteo Damiani

Matteo Damiani is an Italian photographer and author. Curator of the sites Retrofuturista.com; weirditaly.com; china-underground.com and others