The book began in a lobby in Atlanta, in 2017, in front of a flat screen I had not chosen to watch. A cable network was running its afternoon block at low volume, and somewhere in the lower third a number appeared: an estimate that Donald Trump had received roughly five billion dollars in free, earned media coverage during the 2016 campaign. I stood there with a coffee getting cold and tried to make the number mean something.
Five billion dollars is the kind of figure that resists being held. Nobody had written a check for it. The airtime had been given, because the coverage paid for itself in attention, and attention is the currency cable news trades in.
That was the moment the question changed, from why he was winning to why he was everywhere.
I want to say what I mean by that, because the answer is the spine of everything that came after: the book, this column, the equation in the middle of it. The experience of political life in our moment is better described as flooded than as noisy, and the whole argument turns on the difference between those two words.
Noise is a byproduct. A street is noisy because cars happen to be driving on it. A feed is noisy because many people happen to be speaking at once. Noise is incidental, and the standard response to incidental noise (turn down the volume, walk to a quieter room, wait it out) works.
A flood is a decision. Someone opened a valve. The water arriving at your door comes from an upstream choice, often made by people who will not be standing in the basement with you. You do not wait out a flood. You find the valve.
The phrase I borrowed for the title was not mine. Steve Bannon, by now famously, told Michael Lewis that the real opposition is the media, and the way to handle the media is to flood the zone. The vulgar version of the sentence is the one that gets quoted; the strategic version is the one that matters. Bannon was describing a method. He did not invent it, and it does not belong to one political tradition.
The method works because attention is finite and outrage is cheap. Herbert Simon wrote in 1971 that a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention; he was describing the executive suite. If you accept Simon's frame, the political question of our moment has less to do with who holds the best argument than with who can run the meter on everyone else's attention until the argument no longer fits.
That is the diagnosis. The book is two hundred pages of working it out: where the strategy came from, what makes it accelerate, who benefits, what it costs, and what, concretely, can be done. The equation in the middle of the book (FTSeffect, the ratio of volume, frequency, emotion, contradiction, and amplification over time and rational deliberation) is a scoring rubric. It exists so that the next time someone tells you the news cycle is just overwhelming, you have a way to ask who is doing the overwhelming, and on what schedule.
I wrote a book because the essay kept failing. Every time I tried to compress the argument, something important fell out, usually the part where the strategy was older and more deliberate than the reader was prepared to believe. Hannah Arendt called permanent instability an instrument of rule. She was writing about the 1930s, and she was not being metaphorical. I wanted room to honor that lineage without flattening it into a hot take.
These notes (twenty-four of them, one a week, no hero images, sources at the foot of every post) are the long tail of that book. They are where I will keep working in public. Some weeks will be a close reading of someone whose thinking shaped mine. Some weeks will be a single case, examined slowly.
The sentence I want on the record this week is that somebody opened the valve. The work is to find out who, and what is coming through.
— J.W.B.
Note 01 of 24