You can never truly go back

The following is a paid ad. If you’re interested in advertising, email me at [email protected] and let’s talk. Thanks!

Silence Your Spam Calls Today

You've probably definitely noticed an uptick in spam calls and texts, right? Have you ever wondered how they get ahold of your info? Well, it's data brokers. They sell your address, phone number, Social Security Number, family contacts, and more, to anyone willing to pay. And, yes, it's totally legal. On the bright side, you can always opt out of these sites yourself and stop the spam. BUT... doing all that on your own is frustrating and can take hours.

That's why you should use Incogni instead. They'll remove all your data from over 200 data brokerages and people-search sites automatically, so you can kiss spam goodbye.

Better yet, they're giving our readers 55% off with code DAYDEAL, which you can use by clicking here. Never worry about being tracked on the web again. Here's that link one more time!

The Age Of Influentialism

I recently joined a book club. It’s called the Difficult Book Club and we’re currently reading The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich by William L. Shirer. I’m still only a few hundred pages into the massive tome, but I’ve been playing a game where I screenshot anything that starts to remind me of President Donald Trump.

So far in my camera roll, I’ve got a passage with undeniable echoes of Project 2025, where Shirer argues that no one took Adolf Hitler’s rantings in Mein Kampf seriously, even if he outlined in “appalling crudity” the exact kind of ethnostate he would eventually build. Another passage about the pseudoscience grifters the Nazi party aligned themselves with early on, a “weird mixture of irresponsible, megalomaniacal ideas,” that the party’s opponents were “too busy, or too stupid to take much notice of.” I’m sure RFK Jr. would have loved them. And a passage where Hitler, starting his second campaign for the Reichstag, boldly proclaimed in a speech, “in the Third Reich every German girl will find a husband!” Elon Musk would have probably loved to have personally helped them with the birth rate.

Comparing Trump to Hitler is, obviously, not new and, as I continue to read Rise and Fall, actually a bit myopic, even if it might do numbers on Bluesky. Sure, there are plenty of uncomfortable echoes we can point to, but history doesn’t tend to repeat. The European fascist movement that helped leaders like Benito Mussolini, Francisco Franco, and Hitler take power in the 20th century was specific and deeply contextual. It was a direct response to the political and economic realities of the moment, and, most importantly for us, here, looking back at it from the 21st century, it was an ideology born from a then-new mass media landscape. One that is, currently, dead or dying. Shirer dedicates significant space in the early chapters to the Nazi party’s use of, first, newspapers, and then, later, book publishing, music, fashion, film, and radio. An explosion of new forms of communication that allowed political extremists to create the illusion of consensus and amplify ancient and evil ideas to unprepared masses.

In Century Of Self, a 2002 documentary by British journalist Adam Curtis that I also watched recently (I’ve been in a dark place lol), he argues that this early-20th-century media boom was the moment we shifted from a “needs-based culture” to a “desires-based culture,” and, politically, the moment “the citizen” became “the consumer”. And he goes on to lay out how, following World War II, public relations firms, corporations, and, later, politicians, created a new form of democracy for managing these consumer-voters. One where mass media — and our new TV-friendly leaders — did not disrupt politics, as they had in the chaotic and violent first half of the century, and would, instead, safely carry us toward the End Of History promised to us by good establishment liberals like Francis Fukuyama.

But history did not end. And the establishment was disrupted. And we’ve now found ourselves amid another shift in mass communication. One where algorithms successfully replaced ink and airwaves. And, just as 20th-century mass media created the concept of the consumer a hundred years ago, so too has this current shift redefined how we interact with the world. And accepting that this shift is permanent, in the sense that we can’t simply reverse it, is, I’m convinced, the only way forward. We are now either influencers or influenced. Trump and his cronies understand this acutely. The Democrats, clearly, still do not.

“I'm Facebook friends with several former high school classmates who are yuge MAGA fans,” history professor Seth Cotlar recently wrote on Bluesky. “None of them had any interest in politics before 2016. Now it's almost all they post about. They follow politics as if it were WWE or a reality TV show.”

This connection, between Trumpism and Facebook use is well-documented, but I find that it’s also often hand-waved as the result of mysterious algorithms. As if something in Facebook’s code is brainwashing Americans. But journalist Charlie Warzel, in a 2021 New York Times piece following the January 6th insurrection, offered a much simpler explanation for why Facebook users turn right: It’s good for engagement.

“The influencers amass followers, enhance their reputations, solicit occasional donations, and maybe sell a few T-shirts,” Warzel wrote. “The rest of us are left with democracy buckling under the weight of citizens living an alternate reality.”

Thanks to large, under-moderated social platforms, anyone can write their own Mein Kampf now. Or, more likely, film it with their phone. Which is exactly what journalist Max Read noted last year, following Trump’s second win. He argues that the effect that Warzel observed back in 2021 has now turned normal internet users into a new “petite bourgeoisie.” “Influencers are, at bottom, small-business owners, and small-business owners love Trump,” Read writes. “He’s going to lower your taxes and limit the worker and consumer protections that hold you back (a genuine concern for medium-sized streamers and influencers!).”

Which is how Democrats ended up sleep-walking into the election last year, assuming they were still selling a product — former Vice President Kamala Harris — to consumers, i.e., us. While Trump and the Republicans correctly understood that they were platforming an influencer — Trump — to either other, smaller influencers or parasocial audience members (who, of course, would probably love to be influencers, themselves). And I know, first hand, exactly how unprepared many Democrats were for the eventual blood bath at the polls last year. In December 2023, I was invited to the White House to meet with former President Joe Biden’s digital team. The meeting was off the record, which I’ll honor, (and I paid my own way) but I can tell you that while some in the administration were beginning to worry, I did not leave with the sense that Democrats, as a whole, really understood the way the wind was blowing. Jon Stewart’s recent exasperated interview with Democratic Leader Hakeem Jeffries, who seems pathologically incapable of comprehending that the era of managerial democracy is over, makes me think that is still very true.

Replacing the institutions that managed our democracy are platforms and, within those platforms, personalities. And, last year, guided by his son Barron, Trump finally fully embraced the new digital influence machine in a way he never had before.

Bloomberg released an excellent investigation outlining the role of YouTubers and podcasters in Trump’s campaign. A universe of white, male internet personalities activated around Trump, flooding the internet with right-wing content leading up to November 4th, and this ecosystem is continuing to operate, as Aaron Ginn, the co-founder of a right-wing think tank, told Bloomberg, as an “alternative press corps.” Though, not so alternative anymore, considering many of those same podcasters are getting actual spots in the White House Press Corps, while the Associated Press has been banned indefinitely.

Do I think that Joe Rogan episodes and Adin Ross streams convinced 76.9 million Americans to vote for Trump? No. And as Bluesky user @schul.dev, who I cribbed the title of this essay from, pointed out, not every American is dreaming of being an internet celebrity. But there are enough of us acting like one for those interviews to have drowned out Harris’ increasingly sauceless Ellen Show-era redux. No matter how Brat she felt. And Trump has continued to break through the digital static by transforming into a true influencer-in-chief upon entering office.

As I wrote last month, Trump’s current use of executive orders is a clear evolution of how he once ruled via tweet. And it’s an evolution that illustrates how different things are now from where they were in 2016. During his first presidency, he influenced the country’s politics via a livetweeting loop, where he would watch Fox News, tweet his random thoughts, and wait to see which ones would make it into Fox broadcasts the next day, and, subsequently, Republican policy. But like all influencers, he’s now landed on a much more direct relationship with his followers. He signs an executive order and even if it’s blocked by courts — and many of them are, thankfully — he can still claim it as a win. And the other members of Trump’s regime are operating the same way. If Trump is MrBeast, he’s turning our government into Lunchly. A source inside the Republican party, in a recent Semafor piece, described the current Defense Department as, “30 blogging, podcasting, isolationist ideologues.” As we speak, the Trump administration is trying to negotiate the release of Andrew and Tristan Tate. It’s influencers all the way down.

And what’s left of the media, and the huge swathes of random internet users that have replaced it, are having trouble contextualizing this new content-as-governance strategy, either overstating its impact or dismissing it entirely. I ruffled more than a few feathers on Bluesky earlier this month when I argued that Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency should be thought of, first, as a propaganda outlet, and a federal agency second. I mean this literally. It is not an actual department and is, instead, classified as a “temporary organization” within the US Digital Service. But it, also, has very little legal authority to do anything. Now, you can say that laws don’t matter in Trump’s America anymore, but if you honestly do think that, well, you’ve already lost the game. While we still have some semblance of a society, you should treat it as a rogue group of private contractors who are only succeeding in accomplishing anything because our clueless lawmakers are letting them. That doesn’t make DOGE any less dangerous, of course. Musk clearly has a plan to install his own shadow government within our own, powered by his shitty AI and run on the X social platform. But we are still early and these influencer-oligarchs that have installed themselves in Washington are still, thankfully, more concerned with the illusion of power and impact than they are the actual work required to truly capture it.

But because of how information works in our new world run by digital platforms, the difference between the illusion of power and the real thing is vanishingly small. And in an attention economy, they effectively become the same thing over time.

“We gaze into our phone-portals, paralyzed by the trance of the doomscroll, reacting and swiping from one news article and hot take to another,” journalist Janus Rose recently wrote in 404 Media. “Authoritarians issue frightening proclamations that may or may not be legally enforceable, seizing our attention and energy and ensuring that the process will repeat, ad infinitum.”

So what are we meant to do? Well, if you spend enough time on liberal and leftist internet spaces, you will see the same lukewarm solutions to the coup tearing its way through the US government: Get off social media. Call you lawmakers. Attend protests. These aren’t necessarily wrong, but they also betray a fundamental lack of understanding as to what Trump has been selling voters. I spent much of the 2010s outside of the US covering elections across Europe, following far-right protestors, and generally reporting on the “far-right populism wave” that brought us here. And like many, I naively believed it had been thwarted by Trump’s loss in 2020. And, more broadly, I made the same mistake many are still making, assuming that because the majority of these extremists were demanding a “return” to something, they weren’t offering something new. That they weren’t evolving to meet a new technological landscape. But they were. The hatred may have been old, but the transmission was genuinely novel. And you cannot fight that by going backwards. We need new stories to tell voters, the building and embracing of new, genuinely mass appeal technologies to reach them (sorry fediverse), and new politicians to lead, or rather, influence them.

And I do believe that it will happen, with or without the Democrats. The only variable is how long it will take. And how many will have to suffer before it arrives. Happy President’s Day.

***Any typos in this email are on purpose actually***