Overencoded Narratives: Semiotic Osmosis and the Disappearance of Symbolic Density

Symbolism is dead, and we the capitalists have killed it.

This passage is dedicated to my high school English teacher Mrs. Sweezey, who helped me overcome my fragile masculinity and enjoy the sharp wit and wisdom-filled works of Jane Austen, renewing my interest in literature.

Through her reading list and teaching I first understood how stories stitch together past, present, and future (even if I vigorously refused to read anything other than sparknotes at the time).

In today’s passage, I examine how contemporary modes of information consumption and high-speed finance eat away at society’s symbolic understanding and depth.

The profit-driven acceleration of news, data, and markets fragments coherent narratives and hollows out meaning. Below is a structured analysis of key areas – 24-hour news media, “present shock” in digital culture, and hyper-fast finance – each illustrating how capitalist systems short-circuit symbolic continuity.

In short, we’ve forgotten how to tell stories and the lessons we should keep from them.

Relevant references, data, and quotations are provided for integration into the essay.

Fragmentation in the 24-Hour News Cycle (Postman’s Critique)

Modern news media, especially the 24/7 cable and online news cycle, trades depth and continuity for constant stimulation. Neil Postman’s classic Amusing Ourselves to Death presciently criticized how television news (a precursor to today’s incessant news feeds) breaks logical and symbolic continuity. Postman identified the ubiquitous news segue “Now… this” as emblematic of discourse chopped into incoherent bits. In a 24-hour capitalist media environment driven by ratings and ad revenue, this tendency is only amplified, making it harder to sustain coherent narratives or public accountability.

Key points include:

• “Now…this” and Discontinuous Narratives: Postman notes that “‘Now…this’ is a means of acknowledging that the world as mapped by the speeded-up electronic media has no order or meaning and is not to be taken seriously”. Each story is isolated; even the most serious events are swiftly erased from our minds by the next trivial segment . The newscaster essentially tells us we’ve thought about a story for long enough (mere seconds) and must now move on to “another fragment of news or a commercial,” preventing any deeper reflection.
  
  

• Loss of Context and Meaning: This rapid succession of unrelated news bits destroys context. “The phrase ‘Now…this’…does not connect anything to anything but does the opposite: separates everything from everything,” Postman writes, calling it a “compact metaphor for the discontinuities” of modern public discourse. Crucial background or follow-up information gets lost in the shuffle, undermining the symbolic weight of events. (For example, a grave political scandal might be treated on par with a lighthearted human-interest story, each quickly displaced by the next “breaking news” flash).
  
  

• Eroded Public Attention and Accountability: With no narrative continuity, it becomes difficult to hold onto facts long enough to demand accountability. Postman observed that television news taught viewers “the world lacks coherence and context,” so much so that even flagrant contradictions by leaders provoke little reaction – they are dismissed as old, boring news once the media has moved on . “What possible interest could there be in a list of what the President says now and what he said then?” he quips, noting how the public, bombarded by discontinuous news, grows indifferent to inconsistency. This fragmentation lets officials off the hook, since no one remembers or cares for long, weakening democratic accountability.
  
  

• Information as Entertainment – The “Best Entertained, Least Informed”: In a capitalist media market, news is packaged for constant engagement rather than insight. Postman warned that Americans were becoming “the best entertained and…the least well-informed people in the Western world”. Substance gives way to spectacle; being informed is replaced by being bombarded. He even called the result a form of “disinformation” — not falsehoods per se, but misleading contextless info that creates the illusion of knowledge while actually impairing understanding.
  
  

• Example – Rapid News Churn vs. Reality: Recent data illustrate this “attention deficit” effect. During the COVID-19 pandemic, media attention moved on even as real conditions persisted. In early 2021, the number of global COVID news articles published fell by 63%, and readership on COVID stories plunged by 93%, between January 31 and May 1, 2021 – even while actual U.S. COVID cases rose by ~24% during that time. In other words, once the story lost novelty, coverage and public focus dropped dramatically despite the ongoing crisis. This kind of disconnect shows how a fast-cycle news market dilutes context and symbolic continuity: sustained narratives (and the lessons or accountability that come with them) evaporate in favor of the next new headline.
  
  

In sum, the 24-hour news cycle – a product of both technology and capitalist media competition – shatters stories into attention-grabbing but meaning-light fragments. Postman’s critique underscores how this environment erodes the symbolic value of news events. When nothing is allowed to resonate (since we’re constantly told “now, forget that – look at this!”), the public’s capacity to derive deeper significance or maintain a consistent narrative is critically undermined. But media fragmentation is only the opening salvo in capitalism’s war on meaning. Next, Douglas Rushkoff shows how our very experience of time has become atomized into a perpetual “now,” stripping symbols of both depth and direction.

“Present Shock”: Always-On Information and Symbolic Overload (Rushkoff’s Insights)

Building on this, media theorist Douglas Rushkoff argues that our entire culture has entered a state of “present shock” – where everything happens so fast and so simultaneously that we lose the ability to derive meaningful stories or symbols over time. Under the pressures of digital capitalism (e.g. social media’s instant feeds, real-time analytics, viral content cycles), society experiences information overload and temporal disorientation. This leads to what Rushkoff calls “narrative collapse,” i.e. the breakdown of any shared linear story or context.

Key aspects to integrate:

• Narrative Collapse – Continuous Present: Rushkoff defines “narrative collapse” as “the loss of linear stories that explain our reality – the disappearance of goals that justify journeys.” In their place is “a continuous present of fleeting, unconnected incidents”. In other words, life and media become a mere sequence of now moments, each absorbing our attention and then vanishing, without accumulating into a larger narrative. Symbolic understanding suffers because symbols traditionally gain meaning through context and continuity (a past and future, cause and effect), which are increasingly absent.
  
  

• Assault of Instant Stimuli: Rushkoff notes that people today exist in a perpetual reaction mode. “Instead of finding a stable foothold in the here and now, we end up reacting to the ever-present assault of simultaneous impulses and commands,” he writes. From the ceaseless pings of notifications to the 24/7 news updates, we are bombarded by stimuli. This symbolic overload floods our minds with isolated bits of information or “symbols” devoid of depth, leaving little room for reflection or genuine emotional processing. We respond reflexively to trends, tweets, and breaking news, but often without understanding.
  
  

• Too Busy to Find Meaning: The frenetic pace of digital capitalism leaves us little time to ascribe meaning to what we experience. Rushkoff wryly observes, “Yes, we may be in the midst of some great existential crisis, but we’re simply too busy to notice.” . This poignant quote captures how the speed of modern life creates shallowness: even if society faces profound challenges (climate change, inequality, etc.), the torrent of momentary distractions keeps everyone’s head spinning, unable to pause and interpret the situation on a symbolic or existential level. In effect, we sacrifice depth for immediacy.
  
  

• Information Speed vs. Symbolic Depth: Under “present shock,” technology compresses time and accelerates expectations. Rushkoff identifies phenomena like “digiphrenia” (the anxiety of trying to exist in multiple time streams at once) and “overwinding” (cramming long-term processes into short bursts). These terms reflect how the capitalist drive for efficiency and instant results can overload our symbolic circuits. For example, social media trends rise and fall in hours; context is lost and discourse becomes shallow or hysterical. We get more information than ever, yet it often feels meaningless because it’s unanchored to a stable narrative or value system.
  
  

• Overloaded Symbols, Shallow Resonance: In a single hour of internet browsing, one might encounter a humanitarian crisis headline next to celebrity gossip, earnest political discourse alongside meme jokes. The juxtaposition (not unlike Postman’s “Now…this” effect, now supercharged) can numb our capacity to assign appropriate symbolic weight to events. When everything is “trending” and urgent, nothing truly matters. Sociologically, this has led to cynicism and confusion: people struggle to discern which narratives are authentic. (Rushkoff and others note that in this environment, conspiracy theories and “fractal” pattern-finding emerge as people grasp for any storyline in the chaos). The emotional and social meaning of events gets diluted when all events are presented in the same frenetic present tense.
  
  

• Example – Digital Presentism: We can see “present shock” in everyday life: the compulsion to check news feeds constantly, the feeling of being left behind if one disconnects even briefly, or the rapid churn of online discourse where yesterday’s viral cause is forgotten today. A concrete illustration is the news cycle around social media outrage: a scandal breaks on Twitter, sparks intense but short-lived symbolic reactions (hashtags, virtue signaling, performative gestures), and then is displaced by the next outrage, often with no resolution or lasting impact. This reflects Rushkoff’s idea of narrative implosion – without sustained story arcs, public emotions become hollow flashes. The net effect serves capitalist interests in a way: platforms maximize engagement and turnover, while the public’s deeper understanding or long-term memory (which could foster real social change or sustained symbolic acts) is minimized.
  
  

In summary, Rushkoff’s Present Shock framework emphasizes that the speed of modern information under capitalism produces a kind of symbolic shallowness. We live in a perpetual, commodified “now” that overloads us with content but strips away continuity, making it difficult to form the emotionally and socially meaningful narratives that Žižek argues we need. The result is a populace both overstimulated and disoriented – rich in data but poor in meaning.

Financial Hyperreality: When Derivatives Analysts and Fundamental Investors Pass Like Ships in the Night— Damned Mathematician with no understanding of the meaning of symbols

“It’s like talking to two boats passing in the night — each in its own ocean, never quite touching.”

Imagine you and I sit down with a quantitative analyst at a coffee shop:

• You: “I found a great business trading below my margin of safety. Its dividend yield beats the risk-free rate. I’m putting my money where my mouth is.”

• Quant: Eyes glaze over. He whips out code, running thousands of simulations in parallel: computing the skew across 1,000 option contracts, optimizing for a few basis-points of bid-ask spread efficiency, and back-testing tail-risk scenarios across every VIX regime since 1990.

After all that heavy lifting — the greeks, the correlation matrices, the micro-second arbitrages — his sprawling derivative portfolio still can’t beat Warren Buffett’s simple, concentrated Apple bet.

All that math just to underperform the guy who plowed everything into Apple. What a clown show.

That gulf between “I understand this business” and “I understand the numbers around this business” is the heartbeat of financial hyperreality. What’s even funnier is that this is no fictional story, this is a real conversation I had with a quantitative “trader” from Citadel. Perhaps you can tell I have a bit of an axe to grind with this fella.

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A. The Scale of the Absurd

• Derivatives Notional vs. Real Economy

  As of mid-2023, the total notional value of over-the-counter derivatives stood at roughly $715 trillion — about 7–8× global GDP (world GDP ≈ $90 trillion) .

• Betting on Bets

  This is akin to the value of bets on the weather or options on options dwarfing the actual weather patterns or underlying equity.

• Short-Termism on Steroids

  In 1959, the average investor held a stock for 8 years; by 2020, that had collapsed to 5.5 months . Today, many positions flip in minutes or seconds, driven by algorithms that treat shares like poker chips — disembodied from any story of “this company makes widgets.”

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B. Consequences for Meaning

1. Everything Is a Signal, Nothing Is a Story

   When derivatives outstrip the real economy, “value” becomes a purely symbolic construct — a number on a screen rather than a stake in enterprise, innovation, or community.

2. Markets Overrule Mission

   Corporations terrified of a fleeting tweet-driven sell-off will prioritize share-price gymnastics over long-term R&D, employee well-being, or environmental stewardship.

3. Zombie Symbolism

   As Žižek notes, the system keeps symbols alive even after their substance dies. In finance, this means repackaged, resold, algorithmically traded snippets of “value” that detach fully from any human-scale purpose — a perfect mirror of capitalism’s broader assault on the symbolic.

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By starting this section with our café-table caricature, you highlight the absurdity: vast mathematical edifices built around symbols of value, yet often less successful than a straightforward, fundamental investment. And that absurdity is exactly the point: capitalism’s hyperreal financial system turns meaning into an ever-faster, ever-thinner abstraction — just like its 24-hour news cycle and “present shock” in media.

Perhaps the most literal illustration of capitalism’s erosion of the symbolic is found in the financial sector, where abstract symbols of value – stocks, derivatives, algorithms – have proliferated wildly, often decoupled from the real economy they supposedly represent. In essence, capitalism commodifies not just goods, but symbols of wealth themselves, creating a financial realm that can overshadow the tangible world. This is analogous to a betting market becoming more significant than the game it’s betting on – a dynamic as absurd as “a betting market on a basketball player’s injury being worth more than the player’s own value.” We see this absurdity in:

• Hyper-fast Trading and Short-Termism: Along with sheer size, the speed of financial transactions has skyrocketed, further detaching value from human-scale meaning. The stock market, for example, has seen holding periods plummet as trading is driven by high-frequency algorithms and speculative flipping. In the late 1950s, an average investor held a stock for about 8 years; by 2020, the average holding period was a mere 5.5 months . During volatile periods this has dipped even lower (around 5–6 months or less) . This drastic shortening of time horizons – effectively making capital flow in micro-second cycles of buy/sell decisions – indicates that financial value is increasingly determined by immediate market sentiment and automated signals rather than long-term fundamentals. Profit is made by those who can act in milliseconds, which is a realm of meaning inaccessible to any human narrative or ethical consideration. As one Reuters analysis put it, investors today “surf wild market swings for quick gains,” and “information that may not be material” still triggers rapid trades . The symbolic implication is that money in motion matters more than what is being invested in – the concept of owning a share of a company (with all the symbolic resonance of shared enterprise or belief in its mission) gives way to shares as poker chips to be shuffled.

  
  

• Speculation Decoupled from Reality: Time and again, we witness episodes where financial symbols acquire a life of their own, undermining or mocking the real value they stem from. A notable case was the 2008 financial crisis: complex derivatives (like synthetic CDOs and credit default swaps) multiplied and re-packaged mortgage loans so extensively that when the bubble burst, the losses and bets far exceeded the actual value of the homes themselves – a clear instance of symbolic (financial) value eclipsing real assets. More recently, the GameStop stock frenzy of 2021 showed how internet-fueled speculation could wildly inflate a company’s stock price (and then crash it) with little relation to the company’s actual performance. As a Visual Capitalist report noted, the “r/wallstreetbets saga” demonstrated how markets can become “sensational and fad-driven”, since “long-term investing has much less to offer in terms of excitement.” . In that event, the narrative of a meme (the idea of sticking it to hedge funds) temporarily overpowered the company’s economic reality – a perfect example of capitalism “faking” a symbolic gesture (a populist rebellion, in this case) and commodifying it (many made quick profits or losses, treating the whole thing like a game). It was real money, but based on a hyperreal story.
  
  

• Finance as Symbolic Hyperreality: Philosophers like Jean Baudrillard described “hyperreality” where simulations become more real than reality; today’s financial system is arguably a hyperreal economy. Money itself, once a symbol for tangible value, now often begets money through complex self-referential trades – capitalism trading in symbols of symbols. Investment banks and funds create products that are several layers removed from actual productive activity (e.g. derivatives of derivatives, indexes built on sentiment). This can reach absurd proportions: for instance, regulators have considered banning certain prediction-market derivatives like bets on elections or even on sports injuries as these essentially turn real-world outcomes into chips in a casino . When left unchecked, capitalism will monetize anything symbolic – even human risks or tragedies – which both erodes the dignity of those underlying events and creates a distorted value system (what does it say if there’s more money riding on a player’s injury timing than on his salary for playing?).
  
  

• Consequences for Meaning: The dominance of the financial-symbolic economy means that signals from the real world can be lost or perversely amplified. Companies may be valued not for their products or social impact but for meeting short-term earnings targets or fitting some algorithm’s pattern. Governments and firms often feel compelled to prioritize moves that please markets (i.e. the abstract shareholders) over what might have long-term social symbolic value (like stable employment, innovation, etc.). In Žižekian terms, one could say the “big Other” of the market absorbs and neutralizes genuine symbolic acts – for example, a corporation’s gesture of social responsibility can be instantly offset by financial markets if it’s seen as hurting profits, thus discouraging any non-commodified symbolic stance. The relentless commodification of symbols in finance creates an environment where authentic meaning is hard to sustain. Everything has a price, and thus nothing is sacred or symbolically “thick” – a phenomenon that perfectly complements the cultural trends in media we discussed.
  
  

In essence, the financial sector provides a concrete metaphor for how capitalism hollows out symbolism: the map overtakes the territory. The vast edifice of derivatives and fast trades demonstrates capitalism’s ability to generate profit from pure representation, while often undermining or destabilizing the real, human significance beneath. It’s a realm where the sign (money, contracts, indices) can completely overshadow the signified (actual goods, services, human well-being) – vividly illustrating the essay’s thesis.

But these diagnoses aren’t the end of the story. In the final section, we’ll see how small, deliberate symbolic acts—gifts, rituals, even reading slower news—can begin to stitch back together the fabric capitalism has torn apart.