Clash of Conversations
Attempts to cancel Joe Rogan from Spotify mask a deeper battle, the last rally of corrupt legacy media against the insurgent counterculture of discursive, longform media, for the title 'Fourth Estate'
The recent attacks on the Joe Rogan Experience are being seen as another round in the cancel-culture circus, but there is a deeper story, anticipated in the article linked below, which I wrote three years ago in First Things.
Setting aside the largely redundant labels of ‘left’ and ‘right,’ perhaps the Internet’s most positive contribution to culture is that it allowed to re-emerge a discursive and exploratory form of media — long eradicated from the hectoring mainstream — chiefly using overlooked formats like talk radio and longform free-flowing livestreamed chats. This largely unseen revolution, appearing at first to offer no threat to any mainstream formats, enabled people with things to say to express themselves in a relaxed, intimate fashion, quietly attracting audiences of the starved and alienated, who had given up all hope of a media recovery of any kind. Gradually, this model of media, first air-tested on AM radio and YouTube, started subtly to encroach on the territory of the legacy media, while ‘journalists’ were busy thinking up ugly names to daub across the reputations and characters of their challengers. One day, everyone woke up to find that Joe Rogan had many multiples of the audience attracted by US network television channels, and no one was sure how it had happened.
The fight to remove Rogan is the final battle between the corrupt journaliars who have destroyed Western civilisation and their challengers who hope to talk their civilisation back to life. But that spat is a mere warmer-upper for a final confrontation, which only the newcomers can win. As this 2019 article intimates, this battle is not for the survival of a single maverick host — it is a battle for the right to be called ‘The Fourth Estate,’ for the roles of comperes and ringmasters of the democratic conversation.