Description
This paper argues that a crisis of overproduction in US media has manifest in the emergence of a post-truth world. Drawing on a Marxist view of capitalist society, the paper examines how comedy podcasts and meme culture are a consequence of this overproduction crisis. In this view, capitalism has an inherent tendency to produce more goods than society can actually use or absorb. As such, competitive forces within the media industry have created too much content for the market, that is audiences, to meaningfully process. Legacy media, strained by collapsing business models and a dependency on social media platforms, has become an increasingly irrelevant node in a saturated media landscape. The paper focuses on two examples of this diversified media ecosystem. First, podcasts hosted by comedians like Joe Rogan and Tim Dillon, thrive by converting ambiguity and contradiction into long-form entertainment. Here, meaning is destabilised and ideology is interwoven seamlessly with entertainment, making confusion both palatable and profitable. Second, meme culture on X offers a parallel expression of the crisis. Humorous memes circulate as compressed ideology: affective fragments and inside jokes that atomise argument. They are central to how information is distributed and processed on social media. Elon Musk’s claim that the users of X ‘are the media now’ is emblematic of this shift in the production of information, argument and entertainment. This diversification of production in media is not, however, the democratisation of media. On the contrary, platforms for the production of media, such as Spotify, X and YouTube, remain the property of a small group of extremely wealthy individuals. As such, this crisis, while holding an opportunity for the radical re-envisioning of what media could be, also reveals how humour and ideology can be harnessed for profit and control.
