META

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Sandra Braman
Strange Attraction
Trump and the Metabolic Consequences of Fake News
We know things are changing. We just don’t know yet what they are.
Details are clear. A man walked into the White House who uses electronic communications, both in (television) and out (Twitter), in transformative ways. It is not just that these media practices have produced turbulence — we have had turbulence for decades.1 What has changed is the metabolism of »the body politic,« the complex, always changing, interactive systems of politics and law, society and the state.
Theorists of chaos and complex systems had foreseen this as a possibility:

> …self-determination may well be compatible with unpredictability and even with randomness, provided that the motions are unstable and possess what are, in modern chaos theory, called strange attractors. (Bohm, 1987).

Constant instability, that is, can yield at least ephemerally stable forms, called »strange« because they are irregular. Around these forms, new systems can emerge. With Trump as strange attractor, the previously marginal, forbidden, and/or hidden have not only become more visible but now provide the frame, the players, and the dynamics around which, all else, at least for now, happens.
Complex adaptive systems are living systems in which metabolic processes unfold among elements as well as within them. Energy and resources are exchanged, change, and make things happen as they interact within and among themselves, and with systems both infra- and supra- to the environment of a particular system or cell, in biological, including social, systems. Two types of metabolic processes have been disrupted by Trumpean alternative media: those between symbol and referent (facticity) and those between the press and the government (press-state relations). This has taken place through a variety of activities involving how the state creates, processes, transmits, distributes, and uses information and how citizens are able to produce, access, communicate, and make use of information as well; both sets of processes are fundamental to an effectively functioning participatory democracy. Techniques being used range from the removal of scientific information on government websites to the dissolution of the diplomatic corps, with a number of stops along the way in the domains of education, choice of evidence to use as inputs into policy-making, and on.
Typically one would use communication theory to analyze developments such as this. Work in this area has been dominated by theories of replication: how many people receive a message, how often messages repeat, how messages influence public opinion, etc. We tend to think about biological entities in terms of how they reproduce themselves — replication processes. As Freeman Dyson (1995) has pointed out, though, biological entities are not only engaged in replication processes, but are also involved in the quite different processes of metabolism. Indeed, Dyson argues, metabolic processes are not only also important, but can actually sustain — or even create — life on their own. According to Dyson, it is through metabolic processes alone that interactions among non-organic molecules yielded organic life — life emerged out of that which is not alive. Focusing on metabolic rather than replicative processes of communication in complex social systems can similarly provide insights into emergent dynamics otherwise impossible to explain. The word »emerge« is important in both cases, for, according to complex adaptive systems theory, a new system can be said to have emerged only when it exhibits properties that cannot otherwise be explained by interactions of its elements.
The focus here is on the metabolic effects of Trumpean alternative media, how those effects are achieved, and how a government and society seeking stability and a resilient participatory democracy might respond. Let us start by looking at what we mean by »the facts,” anyhow.
Facticity
The concept of »fake news« is only available to us because modern societies are oriented around facts in a social, cultural, political, and economic formation referred to as »facticity.« In societies characterized by facticity, facts play a number of critical roles in governance, such as comprising the empirical and statistical data necessary for policy-making, and as evidence for the judiciary. In such societies, the »news« as distinct from fiction or history, is considered essential to governance; models of normative press-state relations are based on theories about how the news should function in interactions between diverse social, political, economic, and cultural systems. The concept of the »fact,« as first enunciated by philosopher John Locke in the mid-17th century and subsequently developed alongside sciences and industries also reliant upon facts, has been intertwined with political theory from the start. According to Locke, fact is created when a perceptual entity (whether biological, institutional, or other) senses the world; expresses to others what has been sensed; and discusses along with what all of those involved have sensed and expressed as facts. These political functions of facticity are key to the foundation of mainstream, or »objective,« journalism. And it has been within the frame of facticity that alternative news media have historically operated, differing from the mainstream on matters such as which facts are considered important or the methods by which facts to be reported upon are collected.
The cultural and social forms of facticity are various, and can be affected by a number of factors. The transition to an information economy, particularly in its representational variant, has created a context within which facts behave as capital and as power — capital as the ability to act over time. This provides particularly fertile grounds for the kinds of innovations seen in Trumpean alternative media. We look here at the dimensions along which diverse social formations vary in their facticity, and then turn to how those dimensions are affected by the representational economy and manifested by Trump.
The Dimensions of Facticity
Several specific features characterize facticity as a social formation: cultural orientation, functions, verifiable procedures, and certification of procedures and those who carry them out. Each of these is a dimension along which we can compare different communication environments and the various forms of mainstream, alternative, and »fake« news.
Cultural orientation.
Facticity is a cultural orientation characterized by distinctions among genres and actions according to their relationships to facts. We have historically treated opinion differently from data produced by way of rigorous scientific research methods. Postal services distinguished between »news« and »history« by evaluating whether or not the information would arrive in time for those who received it to effectively act upon an open conflict or issue rather than learning about something that was a fait accompli. We have different expectations of fictional novels and factual news reports. We embed various genres differently in rituals, events, and daily practices (Davis, 1983).
Functions.
In societies imbued with facticity, there are specific social functions for narrative forms that present themselves as factual. The field of statistics, for example, grew up after the French Revolution because it was considered necessary for those who govern a democracy to know about the population being served. The assumption that policy-making should be informed by empirical evidence has been associated with participatory democracy as a political form since its modern start (Desrosieres, 1998).
Verifiable procedures.
Facticity relies upon confidence and trust in the information provided. Over the course of the modern period, detailed, rigorous, and verifiable procedures have been developed for the production and/or collection of information of many different kinds, from those of the scientific method as used in, say, chemistry or biology, to those of professional journalists. The organizations that produce what we call »mainstream« media do so using well-developed and professionalized procedures for collecting, evaluating, and analyzing the information they present. Normative ideals for how journalists and journalistic organizations should relate to the government of a country involve standards for the kinds of verifiable procedures to be used.
Certification.
Another dimension of facticity is the certification of these information collection and processing procedures. Individual scientists are certified by their institutions of higher education when they receive their doctorates. The institutions doing the certifying must themselves also be certified (accomplished via accreditation). In some disciplines, journalism included, accreditation must also take place at the departmental level, typically by the pertinent professional association. Although in countries such as the United States journalists are not licensed, professional associations, news organizations, and journalists have historically paid explicit attention to the standards they use as they comply with journalistic norms.
The Representational Economy and Facticity
The transition from an industrial to an information economy has affected the nature of facticity because, while information has always had economic value, in the information economy that was more the case than ever before and in more ways than ever before. As the evolution of the information economy, and the ways in which we understand the information economy, keep developing, the importance of facticity relative to other key features of society such as, say, volume, has lessened. There have been four different ways of conceptualizing the information economy, all simultaneously in use today and continuing to reflect important dimensions of that economy. The most recent to appear, and the one with the most impact on the nature of facticity and the affordances offered to practices such as those of Trumpean alternative media, is the representational economy (Braman, 2011)
The information economy and sector proportionality.
The earliest way of thinking about the information economy to appear, in the early 1960s — still important in accounting and, therefore, regulatory systems — focuses on sector proportionality. From this perspective, this is an information economy because the information sector is now proportionately larger than other sectors, such as agriculture or manufacturing.
The information economy and the scape and scope of the economy itself.
Over the 1970s and 1980s, it was realized that the overall size of the economy itself was also growing, changing the scale and scope of the economic domain: This is an information economy because the economy itself has grown through commodification of types of information never before commodified.
The information economy and the nature of economic processes.
By the 1990s, transnational corporations headquartered all over the world had enough experience with the combination of computerized intelligence and electronic networks to experience a change in the nature of economic processes because of the information economy: TThis is an information economy because economic processes themselves are operating differently, with coordination and collaboration as important as competition for long-term economic success. Those who work from this last perspective think in terms of a »network economy,« as well.
The representational economy.
Most recently, becoming visible in the 21st century, is appreciation of the information economy as an epistemological shift: This is an information economy because representations have replaced empiricism as the knowledge upon which economic and policy decisions are made. In a »representational economy,« representations of something as a fact in itself has value, whether or not what is presented in such a way conforms with historical expectations of empirical referentiality. Theoretically, it should not be surprising that this possibility has developed, for technological innovation has affected each element of the fact as conceived of in Lockean terms, whether that is the nature of the perceiving subject (which now could be an autonomous network, a bot, or a corporate »fictive person« as defined by the law as well as a geopolitically recognized state or a biological human) or any other aspect of the elements and processes that comprise Lockean facts (Braman, 2012). The derivatives and subprime mortgage bundles that drove the global financial crisis of 2008 were prototypical examples of financial products possible in — and characteristic of — a representational economy.
Trump‘s administration offers numerous examples of manifestations of the representational economy as extended into the political realm. In an important example, there have been the requests to agencies and departments for specific statistical findings that the president would like to represent, irrespective of the actual data, with the responsibility for supporting the requested »facts« the job of those in the agencies — leading many statisticians to flee government in order to protect their integrity. The »facts,« that is, start with the representation; justificatory support, however creative, is expected to come after, not before, the facts are announced.
The implications of the representational economy for the news are several. In the minds of Trump and his supporters, the need for veracity — for truthful referentiality to empirically verifiable realities external to the mind of the speaker — is gone. Points asserted as facts need not be stable; indeed, reversal, mutation, denial, and evolution are all possible and irrelevant, for it is the mere fact of assertion that matters, not the content of what is asserted. In an economy in which the only criterion is assertion, the practices and standards developed in societies characterized by facticity over the course of modernity are not only undermined, but deemed irrelevant to decision-making. In the case of journalism, this precedent evacuates the normative goals for press-state relations that have previously been critical to both mainstream and alternative media.
Mainstream Media & the Government
What we call mainstream media was developed and practiced by professional journalism organizations in participatory democracies of the developed world and has been taken as a model internationally from the mid-19th century through to the early 21st. It has been referred to as »objective,« sometimes »scientific,« making clear that facticity was at its core even among those skeptical of the possibility of such a thing as »pure« objectivity in the social world.
Mainstream Media
Newspapers that published facts as the content defining the genre first appeared a few hundred years earlier, but the explicit concept of journalism as objective was trumpeted and modeled by The New York Times mid-19th century. The notion of objective journalism is useful as that against which media can be described as alternative because the model has endured and been emulated by so many influential news organizations around the world, is linked with theories and practices of participatory democracy, and explicitly speaks not only to the market but also to relationships with the government and to political responsibilities of the press. Mass journalism, news about and for everyone in society rather than about and for only the rich and powerful, became possible only after steam- and then electricity-powered printing presses were developed in the 19th century, making mass production fast and cheap enough to be practical and facilitating the development of mass literacy.
The New York Times was founded mid-way through the industrialization of journalism with an impress that idealized research methods in the physical and life sciences and had the explicit goal of publishing the news in a neutral manner. This was the same period in which social science emerged as a distinct discipline from philosophy with its focus on empirical observation rather than thinking in isolation. In both journalism and social science, the goal was to bring the rigour and objectivity of the scientific method to the study of society. For the newspaper, the commitment was literary as well as inspirational; The New York Times famously once corrected a mathematical error in a speech by Albert Einstein it was publishing, and personnel from the newspaper were involved in decrypting cuneiform tablets (see, e.g., Dunlap, 2016).
For both the social sciences and journalism, method was everything — care and attention were put into the procedures by which information was gathered, the sources of that information, the spatial and temporal range of information collection, the definition of the subjects of investigation, and how context is treated. Sociologists of journalism have documented how closely the procedures of objective journalism are tied to the bureaucratic rhythms of dominant political and economic structures of society, with reportorial beats geographically and temporally mapped onto organizational structures. News »breaks« when people or processes pass through specific points of bureaucratic decision-making (Schudson, 1978; Tuchman, 1978).
The New York Times became the model for other journalism organizations, and those that followed this model have been regarded as »elite«: what The New York Times did in terms of reportorial and editorial procedures set the standards for everyone else. These are the newspapers read by the decision-making classes, and these papers have served as quasi-official media for government release of information to the public. In the United States, a »newspaper of record« is a legally recognized outlet for required governmental communications with the public and is used as a trusted, respected, and procedurally convenient medium for transmitting other information as well. Historically, important government decisions were first reported publicly in newspapers of record. For long into the second half of the 20th century, one would first be able to read the texts of US Supreme Court decisions, for example, in The New York Times, as soon as the decisions were announced. Such a responsibility suggests a relatively close relationship between these professional news organizations and the government, and indeed there have been times that newspaper editors did agree to comply with government requests because they appreciated the importance of doing so. During the 1970s, for example, when the first rash of post-World War II international mass media-oriented terrorism took place with the airplane hijackings in the Middle East, leading news organizations diminished their coverage because they understood the potential of mass media attention to stimulate further terrorist activity.
It is important to highlight that news editors agreed with the government in such cases, and that such agreements took place on a case by case basis. This is quite different from the ongoing regulatory intervention into the operations of the news media that were proposed by the U.S. government in the 1930s when it was doing the same to other industries as part of a suite of policies intended to bring the country out of the Depression. It was in response to that immediate threat of regulation of editorial processes that the journalism community articulated its commitment to »social responsibility.« As most fully explicated in the 1947 Hutchins Commission report, this position was, in combination with the First Amendment, accepted by the government as adequate reason for not putting any industry-specific regulations on professional journalism organizations.
Simultaneously, though, professional journalism organizations have also long been understood, in a participatory democracy, to serve as »watchdogs of the government.« This role requires keeping a critical eye on government decisions and actions and passing that information along to the people, whether that is by serving as proxy observers (as in courtrooms, on the battlefield, and during political demonstrations and upheavals), or serving as the medium through which information about what the government is doing is made available, so that citizens, too, can keep an eye on what the government is doing. The importance of this positive and negative feedback to the government — functions key to the survival of complex adaptive systems — is reflected in references to professional journalism organizations as the fourth branch (»Fourth Estate«) of government, in the US joining the executive, legislative, and judicial branches as essential to the functioning of a participatory democracy, with the job of serving as a watchdog.
Historically, therefore, mainstream media were considered not only trusted conduits for the transmission of government decision-making to the population, but also trusted critics. The mainstream media was known to credibly represent their arguments, based on sound information, even if lines of argument, types of evidence, or conclusions, differed from those used by the government. This is not to say that all leaders always liked all of those in the media or that there were never efforts by particular politicians to quell media activities, but this was the model that was heavily relied upon in the courts, drove journalism training, and was the stuff of much thinking about theories of free speech and the press and the access to information necessary to exercise fundamental human rights in a meaningful and effective manner.
Of course for a long time we have known that it is not possible for any analysis to be »purely« objective. This was acknowledged within the trade media for those in journalism as well as among media scholars from the 1960s through the 1980s at least. All choices involve exclusion as well as inclusion, all frames require drawing lines. Sophisticated researchers, whether using the methods of journalism or those of the social sciences, take this into account. But in societies characterized by facticity, objectivity in the sense of reporting on the empirical in as unbiased a manner as possible remains the goal towards which the work strives. When courts evaluate whether or not there has been negligence on the part of a newspaper reporter, editor, or organization, they look at the extent to which those involved adhered to professional standards for information collection and analysis regarding such matters. These include the choice of which sources to consult, allowing the accused to provide their point of view, not publishing if there are significant questions left open, and compliance with a code of ethics.
From the perspective of complex adaptive systems theory, then, historically the media and the government in the secular democracies of the developed world and as modeled globally were relatively tightly coupled. Closely but not completely coupled — it was important to the value and credibility of professional news organizations that they drew on information from sources in addition to those of the government, and that their analyses were achieved independently. Only in this way, it was believed, could they serve their political functions for democracy. It is precisely this coupling between the media and government that has been undone by Trumpean alternative media and, interestingly, that distinguishes this type of alternative media from those that have come before.
Alternative Media
There have been many different types of alternative media. In the U.S., the »penny press« of the mid-late nineteenth century can be thought of as the first alternative media because it dealt with the average individual as the subject of, and the audience for, news, rather than only the socioeconomic and political elites who had been both subject and audience of the news since the appearance of the first newspapers in the mid-1600s. Important political and economic developments continued to receive attention in daily papers, but for much of the material they published, the facts relied upon were different in kind from before, because the subjects of reportage were often different.
From the 1890s through the 1920s, »yellow journalism« — at times actually printed on yellow paper — appeared as a second form of alternative news in the United States. This reportage drew public attention to issues of concern, many of which subsequently did receive legal attention. Yellow journalism, though sometimes lurid, was critical, and used facts about the subjects of concern that were alternative in the sense that they revealed aspects of processes, products, or events that had not previously been exposed. News production processes became more actively investigative, but facticity in the traditional sense remained the goal and civic responsibility and was most often the driving motivation.
In the 1960s and 1970s, news tagged as »alternative« was labeled such because of its critical content, experimentation with genre, and the use of different types of news production procedures beginning, importantly, with the choice of sources to be considered authoritative. Such differences in reportage on the same event can have revelatory outcomes. The New York Times reports on the 1982 election in El Salvador depicted routine and successful voting (during a period in which the US government was supporting the Salvadoran government), while new journalist Joan Didion saw body dumps and other evidence of the terror under which those in political opposition were living. Both believed their information was good and the stories they told were true. The New York Times leaned on the view as provided by the Salvadoran government; Didion reported on information provided by the people and as she experienced it herself (Braman, 1985).
The tactical media movement that began in the 1990s was the first fully articulated (theorized, expounded, shared, acted upon, discussed, analyzed) alternative media innovation in the Internet era (Critical Art Ensemble, 2001). Early tactical media practitioners and theorists took great care to distinguish themselves from the alternative media of the 1960s and 1970s, focusing on four dimensions of difference: the shifts from adherence to strict ideological positions to abandonment of ideology, from rejection of consumption to use of consumption for political ends, from rejection of aesthetics to use of aesthetics for political ends, and from a focus on the content of media to, as Marshall McLuhan (1964) put it, the medium as content.
Trumpean Alternative Media
Relative to the nature of mainstream media and the versions of alternative media that have appeared previously in the United States, we can identify several distinct features of Trumpean alternative media. These include the abandonment of facticity, marginalization of the center, a comprehensive other, and cellularization of content production and distribution.
Abandonment of Facticity
Previous versions of alternative media all operated within the context of facticity, differing from each other in the subjects about which, or whom, facts are presented, the procedures by which those facts were gathered and analyzed before presentation, and whether the realities portrayed by those facts support the politically and economically powerful, or not. Trump‘s innovation is to abandon facticity altogether.
This is manifest in several ways, beginning with significant fluctuations and reversals in the realities about which representations are being made; that is, something that was said to have happened on one day may be said never to have happened on the next, along with a refusal to admit that the first statement had been made. »Rigour,« as a standard for evaluating the procedures by which information is presented as factual, is irrelevant and never discussed. In its place, »newsworthiness« of outcome has become the key, seemingly often the sole, criterion of concern. The consequence is that it is the fact of representation, rather than the representation of facts, that matters — what matters is that something is said that receives a response. This feature of Trumpean media practices is very much the stuff of the representational economy, because of which it is not only possible but so successful. Historically, facts presented as official were typically slow to change, doing so only as a result of complex institutional processes and often at a rate considered infuriatingly slow or utterly resistant altogether by those focused on empirical evidence. It is another Trumpean innovation that »facts« asserted as official can change within minutes.
The focus here has been on the side of the processes of fact production. The same developments provide evidence that any perspectives that are not Trump‘s at precisely that moment are other, and anything presented as facts in support of those perspectives must be alternative, or false.
A Comprehensive Other
Alternative media can only be that if there is an »other« against which it is defined. During much of U.S. history, the other has been defined in political terms, but in various times and places it has been defined, for the media, in religious, or ethnic, or other terms as well. The Trumpean innovation is to bound the other not by category, but by that of an individual ego at a particular stage of cognitive development. Of course even mature adult egos shift in their foci and interests over time, even during a single day; for young children, though, rapidly shifting but always insistent attention are additional characteristics that we do not associate with adulthood.
How the other is defined — how the self is distanced from and relates to the other — affects the metabolic processes that are possible and those that take place. There are many distancing processes, and they may often be at work simultaneously. Jacques Derrida‘s ruminations in The Other Heading (1993) provides a seemingly exhaustive exploration of the possibilities as they arose within the context of the formalization of the European Union. Techniques of distancing determine the membranes, and membranes enact the techniques of distancing, of those groups as they metabolically interact. Applying this analogy between the biological concept of a cell and the social concept of a communicative cell through which information infrastructure and its content flows, we can use biological understandings of metabolic processes to analyze interactions between what happens sociologically and politically within the context of the membranes of a communicative sphere.
Marginalizing the Center
In any version of alternative news that we have seen historically, those who present themselves as on the margins have been those who are actually likely to be marginal, whether by representing a political position that is not dominant (a separate question from whether or not it is the majority position), or whose perspectives are those of genuinely marginal sub-populations who experience themselves as, or are seen as, alien in one or more important dimensions.
The Trumpean innovation has been to claim the marginal for the center. This characteristic of his media use importantly means that hierarchical concepts of press-state relations and organizational decision-making about the news and about making the news are not adequate for understanding the dynamics taking place. Metabolic theories of communication, on the other hand, provide some valuable paths down which to go.
Cellularization of Content Production and Distribution
U.S. presidents, like all leaders, have always used media to communicate with the public, from President Wilson‘s balcony and the backs of Lincoln‘s trains to Roosevelt on the radio, Kennedy on television, press-state relations with professional journalism organizations, and so on. Trump‘s innovative choice of Twitter as his preferred medium of mass communication requires us to think in metabolic terms in order to understand its dynamics, and its effects.
Research on Twitter is a growth industry. The least sophisticated analyses treat all messages as like in kind, irrespective of source. More sophisticated researchers treat messages from sources that are unusually productive differently, on the assumption that the difference in metabolism is an indicator that the sources are bots — software, not humans. These researchers will either exclude tweets from analysis when those tweets meet some quantitative criteria, or analyze the tweets that meet those criteria separately; either way an analytical discount is applied.
We are now learning, however, that a significant proportion, if not the majority, of messages in this category actually are produced by people who are collaborating via Twitter »rooms.« Musgrave (2017), for example, has documented how these rooms have been operating to propagate messages participants believe will support Trump, much of it either fake news or about fake news. In each room a limited number of people (at the time that Musgrave was writing about, a maximum of fifty) reach an agreement upon messages and memes and can then simultaneously send the content out via the Twitter accounts of everyone in the room, giving a single click extraordinary broadcast effect. In further coordination, rooms communicate with each other, both via regularly shared messages and memes and via the presence of the same individuals in multiple rooms.
If the question is communicative efficacy, in some senses it doesn‘t matter whether these high-metabolism messages come from bots or directly from people. Both types of communicators can take advantage of the particular features of the representational economy. Analogues between technologies and organizations have been made before and have been useful, particularly to those in organizational sociology and economics, and to those designing information management systems for organizations (see, for example, Stinchcombe, 1990). But whatever organizations and technologies may share with each other in terms of how they handle information, they are two very different things in terms of the dynamics of agreement on content, propagation, and change, and under the law.
Policy Implications
In legal discussions about options for minimizing actual or alleged distribution of false statements of fact about matters of public concern with damaging effects on society, legal options available to stop bots would be different from those that can be used against the speech decisions of people. As one example of why that is the case, legal liability for a socially harmful bot would rest on the single individual or entity that designed and launched the bot, but legal liability for socially harmful mass-distributed tweets propagated by groups of people deliberately collaborating over time would fall on each of the individuals involved. Laws or regulations attempting to diminish this type of damage by making participating in such activities costly on the personal level — the deterrence theory behind prisons — will be much more effective if directed at large numbers of people rather than at a very rare few. And as with crimes such as theft and fraud, deliberate collaborations in efforts extended across time and space can yield much more serious sentences upon conviction under, in the United States, conspiracy and racketeering laws in addition to those laws specific to their crimes.
Heading down this path brings one quickly to the problem of what it is that qualifies as the legal subject, the legally recognized entity towards which a particular law or regulation is directed and which has the responsibility of complying with legal rulings. Individual human beings are legal subjects, as are the fictive persons called corporations. Autonomous networks such as WikiLeaks, though, are not. It would be difficult to work with them if they were, since it is the very point of such networks to be anonymous, ephemeral and shifting in membership, and without records. During the Bradley/Chelsea Manning military trial for release of information to WikiLeaks, however, the U.S. government explored a number of ways of identifying and bounding that autonomous network as a legal subject that ranged from treating the principal, Julian Assange, as proxy for the entire network to, at the opposite extreme, including in the legally culpable network anyone who followed any discussion of, or sought information from, WikiLeaks on Twitter (Braman, 2014). Efforts by the United States Department of Justice for access of information about individuals who looked at a website that was used to coordinate political protests associated with the 2017 presidential inauguration is analogous.
The concept of membranes was not mentioned during the Manning trial, but it has been used by legal scholars analyzing problems such as the distinction between fact and opinion (Heidig, 1988), and appropriate rules and mandates for the passage of information from one professional community to another when the public good is involved (Freeland, 2007). It is a useful analog when thinking about the legal subject because biological membranes both enclose communities comprised of various types of interacting molecules that come and go in various combinations — and operate as communication systems in their own right, transmitting information around a cell via the membrane and determining how the cell will communicate with other cells (which information will be sent and received, where, and how). With social media such as Twitter, the software that is the electronic gateway through which one enters a particular network is the membrane determining what is within the cell and with which other rooms, or cells, or groups, information and members should be traded, transmitted, or shared.2 These are exactly the kinds of roles that membranes of biological cells play: what gets through and what does not, where and under what conditions something can go through, whether or not something has to change in order to go through or will be changed in the course of going through, and all of those same questions for what will be received and allowed to enter.
Brazilian poet Oswald de Andrade published the Anthropophagic Manifesto in 1928, inspired both by the European art movements of Dadaism and Italian Futurism and by the contemporary practices of tribal cultures thriving in his own country. Perhaps because he was a darling of Brazil‘s socio-economic elite, Andrade‘s celebration of cannibalism was translated into a policy principle as the country developed a unique approach to the cross-cultural transfers that are at the heart of »development.« The Brazilian approach was to literally consume things developed and built in other societies, such as sophisticated technologies — by ingesting, digesting, and making the objects and processes Brazil‘s own (Marques, 2005).
This notion helped fuel support for the import substitution process put in place in the 1970s. As the country sought to compete globally in information technology industries as well as supply themselves, reverse engineering became absolutely necessary (Marques, 2005). Even in the 21st century the Brazilian government was funding reverse engineering projects as if they were basic research on fundamental scientific questions of the type governments typically will support rather than the less prestigious research considered applied, most often undertaken by commercial entities for commercial purposes.
Of course some things are indigestible, some people have allergies, and both ingestion and digestion can cause disease. Elsewhere I have speculated about what the communication equivalents might be of kuru, the »laughing disease,« which purportedly comes from cannibalistic practices, or of prion, a wasting disease acquired from eating brains (Braman, 2011). A more immediate subject for an exercise in thinking through the policy implications of a metabolic communication theory is »fake news« as propagated via Twitter, where the metabolic concept of membranes can be useful because it provides a way to at least conceptually bound a grouping, however ephemeral or anonymous or shifting, as if it were a legal subject. This essay is the first step of such an undertaking.
Conclusions: Strange Attraction
It is among our problems that so many of us are mesmerized. In a long life that began with severe limits on television watching in the home (1/2 hour-week except for Mom‘s favorites Alfred Hitchcock and The Twilight Zone, and Walt Disney), I am watching more television than ever before. In a professional life in which checking email was fairly well under control, it is now the news headlines that need constant attention, at the cost of workplace productivity. We joke that trying to keep up with Trumpean news has given us all additional full-time jobs. We could treat it all as a joke except for the fact that the consequences of what we are mesmerized by already are profound, and already in a quickly growing number of cases, irreversible.
It has been fascinating to hear those who study political communication address the question of whether or how their theories and/or methods may be changing as a result of the enormous distance between so many predictions by social scientists and the election outcome. A surprisingly high proportion insist that everything they thought they knew, was indeed correct, and all of their methods were sound — it was just that one had to put an asterisk beside many theoretical and methodological assertions saying: »Except for Donald Trump.«
Frankly, this is not persuasive, but we do need some way of understanding the dynamics of what is happening. From what we know, at least theoretically, conditions are turbulent enough that any number of possible outcomes are still available. Once we see what has been uncoupled it is easier to see what the options may be. The disruption of press-state relations as it had been formally and informally practiced over many decades is stimulating expansion of the reporting corps and of their readers. There is no disconnect between talking about Trump as the strange attractor and assigning culpability to those who, fascinated and perhaps mesmerized by Trump, participate in the development and propagation of socially damaging messages. If Twitter rooms are understood as such cells for legal purposes then there is a subject against which legal and regulatory efforts to minimize or stop the damage to society from deliberate distribution of fake news can be directed in addition to whatever consequences, legal and otherwise, may ultimately accrue to the strange attractor. In the representational economy, this approach may be particularly useful.

FOOTNOTES
1 See, for example, the work of influential political scientists Keohane and Nye (1877), and Rosenau (1984).
2 There is interesting work to be done thinking through the many versions of Marxist cells from the perspective of their biological equivalents.
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THE AUTHOR
Sandra Braman is Abbott Professor of Liberal Arts at Texas A&M University and Fellow of the International Communications Association. Her research on the macro-level effects of the use of digital technologies and their policy implications has been supported by grants from the US National Science Foundation, Ford Foundation, Rockefeller Foundation, Soros Foundation, and the First Amendment Fund. Braman‘s book Change of State: Information, Policy, and Power, currently undergoing revision for a second edition, is in use around the world and is widely viewed as having defined the field of information policy. She conceived and edits the Information Policy Book Series at MIT Press, and is former Chair of the Law Section of the International Association of Media and Communication Research and of the Communication Law and Policy Division of the International Communication Association..