Mitch Therieau on the White House's agit-slop
Our next preview from Issue Fifteen
The protests against ICE’s brutality that have spread across the nation in the last week are a welcome reminder that there are still limits on how cruelly and unaccountably the state can exercise power without encountering popular resistance. In his contribution to our upcoming issue, Mitch Therieau suggests that the White House’s official communications — across videos, memes, and more — seek to erode such resistance by borrowing the anesthetizing style of low-quality internet content, hoping to lull viewers into mindless submission. “This is actually an aesthetics of weakness, not of unbreakable strength,” Therieau writes. Read the full Dispatch online today, and be sure to subscribe to receive the print issue in your mailbox.
Agit-Slop | The White House’s Numbing Aesthetic
MITCH THERIEAU
Ethnic cleansing ordered with a lazy smirk; questions about human rights deflected with a mute shrug; people kidnapped and filmed in abstracting close-up, blurred through a tissue of relaxing sound. The stultifying quality of the videos doesn’t just reflect the callousness of the politics — it is that callousness, distilled and refined.
