![]() The United States exists in a structural contradiction, one drawn from being both a democracy and an imperially inclined superpower: since the 1980s, the federal government has increasingly exchanged domestic welfare programs for mass incarceration and permanent war, rewriting the social contract in foundational ways. In short, there is a “crisis in crisis” today, one that I think is diagnostic of twenty-first-century American capitalism. Put differently, if we were to remove crisis talk from our public speech today, what would remain? And if crisis is now an ever-present, near permanent negative “surround,” as Fred Turner ( 2013) might put it, what has happened to a normative, non-crisis-riven everyday life, not to mention the conditions of possibility for positive futurisms? The power of crisis to shock and thus mobilize is diminishing because of narrative saturation, overuse, and a lack of well-articulated positive futurities to balance stories of end-times. In the United States, a 24-7 media universe offers up endangerment on a vast range of scales, making it so ever present as to dull consumer senses. Yet the configuration of the future as an unraveling slide into greater and greater degrees of structural chaos across finance, war, and the environment prevails in our mass media. On any given issue-disease, finance, war, or the environment-there are specific historical moments more violent than today. This raises an important historical question about how and why crisis has come to be so dominant in our media cultures. News of infectious disease outbreaks (Ebola, antibiotic-resistant illnesses, measles outbreaks among purposefully unvaccinated children) wars in the Middle East, Africa, and Eastern Europe as well as new stages in the multigenerational US campaigns against drugs and terror talk of a new Cold War between the United States and Russia, or maybe one with China the elimination of privacy to surveillance programs (run by both corporations and the security state) financial contagions, fears of economic collapse, and new extremes in global inequality species die-offs on an unprecedented scale megadrought, megasnow, megacold, megaheat proliferating toxicities and corruptions racialized violence (state driven, terroristic, individual) stand-your-ground laws ocean acidification, the near-eternal longevity of plastics peak oil, peak water smogocalypse in China arms races (nuclear, biological, cyber)-the everyday reporting of crisis proliferates across subjects, spaces, and temporalities today and is an ever-amplifying media refrain. If you tune in to the mass-mediated frequency of crisis today, it quickly becomes overwhelming.
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