Digifesto

I got into an actual argument with a real person about Melania Trump’s “I really don’t care. Do U?” jacket. I’m going to double down on it and write about it because I have the hot take nobody has been talking about.

I asked this person what they thought about Melania’s jacket, and the response was, “I don’t care what she wears. She wore a jacket to a plane; so what? Is she even worth paying attention to? She’s not an important person whose opinions matter. The media is too focused on something that doesn’t matter. Just leave her alone.”

To which I responded, “So, you agree with the message on the jacket. If Melania had said that out loud, you’d say, ‘yeah, I don’t care either.’ Isn’t that interesting?”

No, it wasn’t (to the person I spoke with). It was just annoying to be talking about it in the first place. Not interesting, nothing to see here.

Back it up and let’s make some assumptions:

1. FLOTUS thought at least as hard about what to wear that day than I do in the morning, and is a lot better at it than I am, because she is an experience professional at appearing.
2. Getting the mass media to fall over itself on a gossip item about the ideological implications of first lady fashion gets you a lot of clicks, followers, attention, etc. and that is the political currency of the time. It’s the attention economy, stupid.

FLOTUS got a lot of attention for wearing that jacket because of its ambiguity. The first-order ambiguity of whether it was a coded message playing into any preexisting political perspective was going to get attention, obviously. But the second-order ambiguity, the one that makes it actually clever, is its potential reference to the attention to the first order ambiguity. The jacket, in this second order frames, literally expresses apathy about any attention given to it and questions whether you care yourself. That’s a clever, cool concept for a jacket worn on, like, the street. As a viral social media play, it is even more clever.

It’s clever because with that second-order self-referentiality, everybody who hears about it (which might be everybody in the world, who knows) has to form an opinion about it, and the most sensible opinion about it, the one which you must ultimately concluded in order to preserve your sanity, is the original one expressed: “I don’t really care.” Clever.

What’s the point? First, I’m arguing that this is was deliberate self-referential virality of the same kind I used to give Weird Twitter a name. Having researched this subject before, I claim expertise and knowing-what-I’m-talking-about. This is a tactic one can use in social media to do something clever. Annoying, but clever.

Second, and maybe more profound: in the messed up social epistemology of our time, where any image or message fractally reverberates between thousands of echo chambers, there is hardly any ground for “social facts”, or matters of consensus about the social world. Such facts require not just accurate propositional content but also enough broad social awareness of them to be believed by a quorum of the broader population. The disintegration of social facts is, probably, very challenging for American self-conception as a democracy is part of our political crisis right now.

There aren’t a lot of ways to accomplish social facts today. But one way is to send an ambiguous or controversial message that sparks a viral media reaction whose inevitable self-examinations resolve onto the substance of the original message. The social fact becomes established as a fait accompli through everybody’s conversation about it before anybody knows what’s happened.

That’s what’s happened with this jacket: it spoke the truth. We can give FLOTUS credit for that. And truth is: do any of us really care about any of this? That’s maybe not an irrelevant question, however you answer it.