Its hard to get a handle on this but what strikes me about this is that while the 'information' element of the communication seems to be clear (the what or the new), the 'utterance' element (the why are I being given this information, which the receiver always must construct in her understanding) is totally unclear - that is to say that the reason why x person is backing Trump, or who they are and why we should care about their opinion/post/15 second video, is totally decontextualised and socially unmoored as communication - except as vibes, or to put in a more proper language, affect.
Not sure that I totally understood everything you wrote, but it seemed to address a whole new world. At 79, I’m wary of social media but have dabbled some. The one thing that stood out to me is the part about casinos and how the house always wins. The fact that the six-times bankrupt “businessman” couldn’t even keep a casino afloat should have been another disqualification for his candidacy. Maybe the TikTok users didn’t get that message?
The Medium Is The Message and everyone gets that but Orwell had a bit about how the mode of expression or thought you are exposed to or expose yourself to shapes and funnels your thinking.
I know this sounds like smug lib shit and maybe it is but:
I had a contract job overseas that almost entirely cut me off from watching TV and of course, US politics and Discourse. Came back after a year and it was like being chucked in an ice bath. The degree to which it is stupid and stupifying is literally incommunicable to anyone who hasn't also detoxed.
Likewise I got off Facebook over a decade ago, basically because I got annoyed at how people were on it.
Haven't been on any social since and every time someone shares some crappy little TikTok that tries to "explain" some issue in 30 seconds or less with a bunch of subsecond smash cuts, weird droning affectless voice over (AI? Be worse if it wasnt) usually a dance and of course zero sourcing for any claim - even when its something I know about and I agree with and support the conclusions the video comes to - I'm horrified by the idea theres a brain so starved or vandalised that it doesn't revolt at the idea of this being a format you would trust for information you should act or god forbid vote on.
Im an old old man yes my bones are brittle dust yadda yadda. But this shit is brain poison not in the content way that people mean but literally in the form. Its not sour milk its fucking arsenic. There's no good version or safe dose.
On the ground here in a purple district, I've noticed that everyone at my work is super reluctant to talk about the election for fear that a Trump voter will be an ass about it. So then instead of venting with each other, we're (probably, can only really speak for myself) seeking out this stuff online, which is sad to me because I feel like we're just retreating further into our algorithm-bubbles rather than making the in-person connections we desperately need
Other than the lgbtq work slack which is mostly just people talking about feeling bad without of course mentioning what caused it or why, you wouldnt even know we had an election. Other than walking through the parking lot morning of, a few people would like, dance around and allude to it like were mobsters discussing the lufthansa heist.
Universal surveillance might not have been a fair price for shitty apps on a little computer we can carry around.
I read an essay in college from the early 1900s about the end of frontierism after we reached the Pacific and how our economy would need to adapt if it were to remain based on growth. But then of course we moved onto international wars and free trade agreements and now with digital technology everything's becoming subscription-based or built on artificial scarcity with blockchains or just having us hand over our money with gambling apps. I sometimes feel like there's nothing left to monetize, but I figure the guy who wrote that essay couldn't have foreseen SPACs and Gene Roddenberry hadn't dreamed of the simultaneous advent of private space exploration and web3, so there'll probably be a new thing to extract more value from us after we've gambled away everything else.
I keep thinking about the truly undecided voters, not all without education, that I encountered in the last few weeks canvassing. I was struck by the poverty of their information—confabulated, incoherent, malleable. To me the problem that presented itself was finding traction not so much for a different propaganda but for vetted information and evidentiary standards. Reading this reminds that prevailing info systems—not just social media: even group chats, podcasts—are inhospitable to verification, they tickle other nerve endings, acclimatize participants to different standards of value. How to find and build info conduits that do not rely on libidinal reaction but build shared commitments to truthfulness, or at least a search for it? Maybe more a long game than 2028.
You're on to something with the gambling metaphor and TikTok creating an army of suckers, the key being the addiction aspect. It keeps everyone sitting at the blackjack table all night, just watching the feed in a stupor, their ability to do anything else getting chipped away. TikTok is the casino magnate - final boss of the attention economy
If I may -- I've written several academic papers on precisely this point. It's about audience demand filtered through platform affordances like recommendation algorithms.
Lots to unpack here -- as a small business owner and a digital strategist -- but I think mass media's focus on blaming channels rather than evaluating how to better cultivate trust with audiences is always telling. Brian Morrissey published some survey data from news publishers a couple of months ago about media's concerns with the months ahead, and only 3% said they thought "loss of audience trust" was the biggest challenge to building a sustainable business, while "news avoidance" came in at 18% and "traffic loss" was at 27%. There remains a significant disconnect between news institutions and those who they wish to reach -- and self-examination of news businesses and how they reach and influence people is not part of their plan at all.
Joe Rogan and manosphere influencers are no different from AM radio misogynists that supported conservative movements in the last century. They're backed by the same wealthy people.
And it doesn't help that if you hear a conspiracy theory on tiktok, you can easily find correlating support on the web. The right wing has a vice grip on independent digital communications in a way that "nonbiased" information providers have failed to develop because of their understandable skepticism of big tech. That's why I'm still big on web (and genAI) discoverability for quality information sources: people need to find good info for free-- thinking of that essay about how the truth is paywalled etc.
I also don't see much support for existing intellectual property law in a second Trump administration. But digital information businesses need more sustainable models for building audience trust across media, and it requires ripping up old assumptions about how journalism institutions operate and how they can incorporate new channels that people like to use.
I mean, also, there's misogyny, which no media source is going to destroy.
I think you're right about manosphere stuff, but also I know that I, as a younger teenage boy, had a set of what I now recognize as misogynist assumptions, and I didn't have a screen in my hand that helped reinforce those things into hardened beliefs.
The Piker argument is more that boys are entering into this stuff through their interest in other things -- sports, gaming, working out, etc.. and are sort of pushed along to more explicitly political content. Most aren't going straight to Andrew Tate or w/e (I have no idea if there is _data_ to support this)
Anyway, good essay, and I think you're right that making an army of left-wing influencers is not the way to go. But I can't help but feel like some of this demand should not be so easily met -- or reinforced through hyper-intelligent algorithms designed to addict you
This is good. I worry I’m veering into Midwest Diner Safari territory here but I think the Dems come 2028 are gonna need to find a way to pry a large number of young men who went for Trump. I don’t need Selena Zito or Chris Arnade getting lost in the zynternet. But something needs to be done. Thank God it’s a voter block that’s malleable.
Adjacent to this: You mentioned a few months back that Kamala Harris should consider being crypto-curious. I blanched at this not cuz I disagree but because everything about that world makes me squirm. I’m not doing a postmortem thing here but yeah, whoever carries the banner in 2028 is gonna have to engage with those kinds of things, even if it’s just as a passing acknowledgement.
Yeah, I feel pretty torn about this. For exactly the reasons articulated in this post I think it's pretty terrible long-term strategy to embrace crypto—both because it's ideologically opposed to the things Democrats should be for, and because you're effectively enabling and promoting a pyramid scheme designed to further enrich the wealthy and connected. But it feels like there's some needle to thread here, especially since for most of the marks the idea of cryptocurrency is identified with financial freedom, and you don't want to brand yourself as the party *against* that...
i would add another (third?) element to the tik tok/influence/small business framework: the multi-level marketing scheme. i had a baby last year and naturally started having more baby-rearing content fed to me (mostly on instagram). it felt like every post was someone trying to sell me their e-book: on starting solids, elimination communication, babywearing, etc. you can't really scale a business like that, but you can follow the MLM-adjacent model and become a coach: teaching people how to become influencers, then teaching other 'coaches' how to 'coach' and so on (see season 3 of Jane Marie's great podcast The Dream). MLMs are also famously aligned with conservative and evangelical politics (Amway being the moneymaker for the DeVos family, Herbalife and Bill Ackman, etc etc)
This new wave of tik tok is just taking the current status quo to its extreme. Users are siloed away from any real social graph that would actually grant them agency, in the same way a casino has no windows and force feeds you tequila sunrises.
Twitter has become a bizarro reimagining of legacy media where narratives are more grassroots in the sense that they’re coming from more decentralized pundits over legacy platforms. This makes the discourse wider, but also more hollow as it is less rooted in reality. In a hyper competitive information market infoslop peddlers have to pork barrel their stories, it’s a step above sensationalism; not only is there less of a focus on truth, truth is jettisoned because it is a drag on the rate of engagement. Move fast and break things (psyche, the social fabric)
Dropshipping the news is not a sustainable model. Eventually people will wise up to the fact that their views and opinions are all knockoffs.
Fanatical age of social media. Users aren’t small business owners, they’re fans that are staking their own emotions and personality. But under this there is a blunt self awareness; everyone is in on the con, thinking they’re early and not exit liquidity. It’s not a casino, it’s an incubator (casino with cult like characteristics).
i definitely take the point that creating dem slop-channels isn't going to convince young men to leave the right. but i've been thinking a lot about the ideological struggles on youtube during the 2010s. it does seem like creators who invested time in trying to reach the (mostly men) who were consuming reactionary gamergate and alt-right content were successful, at least sometimes. i know people who credit contrapoints with helping them break out of far-right rabbit holes.
i guess i'm hopeful that a reinvestment in genuinely thoughtful "counter-programming" — stuff that takes disaffected young men seriously without engaging in manosphere bullshit — can actually reach the bros who are voting trump.
Thanks Max. It's great to see the issues laid out so clearly. I can see how Trump, with his messages of fear, hatred and retribution, gained such a following - he has given the fearful a focus and he has promised to rescue them. The gambling metaphor is obvious (once you see it) and the addiction is so easy and so fast.
Its hard to get a handle on this but what strikes me about this is that while the 'information' element of the communication seems to be clear (the what or the new), the 'utterance' element (the why are I being given this information, which the receiver always must construct in her understanding) is totally unclear - that is to say that the reason why x person is backing Trump, or who they are and why we should care about their opinion/post/15 second video, is totally decontextualised and socially unmoored as communication - except as vibes, or to put in a more proper language, affect.
Not sure that I totally understood everything you wrote, but it seemed to address a whole new world. At 79, I’m wary of social media but have dabbled some. The one thing that stood out to me is the part about casinos and how the house always wins. The fact that the six-times bankrupt “businessman” couldn’t even keep a casino afloat should have been another disqualification for his candidacy. Maybe the TikTok users didn’t get that message?
The Medium Is The Message and everyone gets that but Orwell had a bit about how the mode of expression or thought you are exposed to or expose yourself to shapes and funnels your thinking.
I know this sounds like smug lib shit and maybe it is but:
I had a contract job overseas that almost entirely cut me off from watching TV and of course, US politics and Discourse. Came back after a year and it was like being chucked in an ice bath. The degree to which it is stupid and stupifying is literally incommunicable to anyone who hasn't also detoxed.
Likewise I got off Facebook over a decade ago, basically because I got annoyed at how people were on it.
Haven't been on any social since and every time someone shares some crappy little TikTok that tries to "explain" some issue in 30 seconds or less with a bunch of subsecond smash cuts, weird droning affectless voice over (AI? Be worse if it wasnt) usually a dance and of course zero sourcing for any claim - even when its something I know about and I agree with and support the conclusions the video comes to - I'm horrified by the idea theres a brain so starved or vandalised that it doesn't revolt at the idea of this being a format you would trust for information you should act or god forbid vote on.
Im an old old man yes my bones are brittle dust yadda yadda. But this shit is brain poison not in the content way that people mean but literally in the form. Its not sour milk its fucking arsenic. There's no good version or safe dose.
On the ground here in a purple district, I've noticed that everyone at my work is super reluctant to talk about the election for fear that a Trump voter will be an ass about it. So then instead of venting with each other, we're (probably, can only really speak for myself) seeking out this stuff online, which is sad to me because I feel like we're just retreating further into our algorithm-bubbles rather than making the in-person connections we desperately need
Other than the lgbtq work slack which is mostly just people talking about feeling bad without of course mentioning what caused it or why, you wouldnt even know we had an election. Other than walking through the parking lot morning of, a few people would like, dance around and allude to it like were mobsters discussing the lufthansa heist.
Universal surveillance might not have been a fair price for shitty apps on a little computer we can carry around.
I read an essay in college from the early 1900s about the end of frontierism after we reached the Pacific and how our economy would need to adapt if it were to remain based on growth. But then of course we moved onto international wars and free trade agreements and now with digital technology everything's becoming subscription-based or built on artificial scarcity with blockchains or just having us hand over our money with gambling apps. I sometimes feel like there's nothing left to monetize, but I figure the guy who wrote that essay couldn't have foreseen SPACs and Gene Roddenberry hadn't dreamed of the simultaneous advent of private space exploration and web3, so there'll probably be a new thing to extract more value from us after we've gambled away everything else.
I keep thinking about the truly undecided voters, not all without education, that I encountered in the last few weeks canvassing. I was struck by the poverty of their information—confabulated, incoherent, malleable. To me the problem that presented itself was finding traction not so much for a different propaganda but for vetted information and evidentiary standards. Reading this reminds that prevailing info systems—not just social media: even group chats, podcasts—are inhospitable to verification, they tickle other nerve endings, acclimatize participants to different standards of value. How to find and build info conduits that do not rely on libidinal reaction but build shared commitments to truthfulness, or at least a search for it? Maybe more a long game than 2028.
You're on to something with the gambling metaphor and TikTok creating an army of suckers, the key being the addiction aspect. It keeps everyone sitting at the blackjack table all night, just watching the feed in a stupor, their ability to do anything else getting chipped away. TikTok is the casino magnate - final boss of the attention economy
If I may -- I've written several academic papers on precisely this point. It's about audience demand filtered through platform affordances like recommendation algorithms.
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/1940161220964767
https://www.cambridge.org/core/elements/youtube-apparatus/36600D69788530F805C650B70976A585
https://computationalcommunication.org/ccr/article/view/114
Of course you may!
Lots to unpack here -- as a small business owner and a digital strategist -- but I think mass media's focus on blaming channels rather than evaluating how to better cultivate trust with audiences is always telling. Brian Morrissey published some survey data from news publishers a couple of months ago about media's concerns with the months ahead, and only 3% said they thought "loss of audience trust" was the biggest challenge to building a sustainable business, while "news avoidance" came in at 18% and "traffic loss" was at 27%. There remains a significant disconnect between news institutions and those who they wish to reach -- and self-examination of news businesses and how they reach and influence people is not part of their plan at all.
Joe Rogan and manosphere influencers are no different from AM radio misogynists that supported conservative movements in the last century. They're backed by the same wealthy people.
And it doesn't help that if you hear a conspiracy theory on tiktok, you can easily find correlating support on the web. The right wing has a vice grip on independent digital communications in a way that "nonbiased" information providers have failed to develop because of their understandable skepticism of big tech. That's why I'm still big on web (and genAI) discoverability for quality information sources: people need to find good info for free-- thinking of that essay about how the truth is paywalled etc.
I also don't see much support for existing intellectual property law in a second Trump administration. But digital information businesses need more sustainable models for building audience trust across media, and it requires ripping up old assumptions about how journalism institutions operate and how they can incorporate new channels that people like to use.
I mean, also, there's misogyny, which no media source is going to destroy.
I think you're right about manosphere stuff, but also I know that I, as a younger teenage boy, had a set of what I now recognize as misogynist assumptions, and I didn't have a screen in my hand that helped reinforce those things into hardened beliefs.
The Piker argument is more that boys are entering into this stuff through their interest in other things -- sports, gaming, working out, etc.. and are sort of pushed along to more explicitly political content. Most aren't going straight to Andrew Tate or w/e (I have no idea if there is _data_ to support this)
Anyway, good essay, and I think you're right that making an army of left-wing influencers is not the way to go. But I can't help but feel like some of this demand should not be so easily met -- or reinforced through hyper-intelligent algorithms designed to addict you
This is good. I worry I’m veering into Midwest Diner Safari territory here but I think the Dems come 2028 are gonna need to find a way to pry a large number of young men who went for Trump. I don’t need Selena Zito or Chris Arnade getting lost in the zynternet. But something needs to be done. Thank God it’s a voter block that’s malleable.
Adjacent to this: You mentioned a few months back that Kamala Harris should consider being crypto-curious. I blanched at this not cuz I disagree but because everything about that world makes me squirm. I’m not doing a postmortem thing here but yeah, whoever carries the banner in 2028 is gonna have to engage with those kinds of things, even if it’s just as a passing acknowledgement.
Yeah, I feel pretty torn about this. For exactly the reasons articulated in this post I think it's pretty terrible long-term strategy to embrace crypto—both because it's ideologically opposed to the things Democrats should be for, and because you're effectively enabling and promoting a pyramid scheme designed to further enrich the wealthy and connected. But it feels like there's some needle to thread here, especially since for most of the marks the idea of cryptocurrency is identified with financial freedom, and you don't want to brand yourself as the party *against* that...
i would add another (third?) element to the tik tok/influence/small business framework: the multi-level marketing scheme. i had a baby last year and naturally started having more baby-rearing content fed to me (mostly on instagram). it felt like every post was someone trying to sell me their e-book: on starting solids, elimination communication, babywearing, etc. you can't really scale a business like that, but you can follow the MLM-adjacent model and become a coach: teaching people how to become influencers, then teaching other 'coaches' how to 'coach' and so on (see season 3 of Jane Marie's great podcast The Dream). MLMs are also famously aligned with conservative and evangelical politics (Amway being the moneymaker for the DeVos family, Herbalife and Bill Ackman, etc etc)
This new wave of tik tok is just taking the current status quo to its extreme. Users are siloed away from any real social graph that would actually grant them agency, in the same way a casino has no windows and force feeds you tequila sunrises.
Twitter has become a bizarro reimagining of legacy media where narratives are more grassroots in the sense that they’re coming from more decentralized pundits over legacy platforms. This makes the discourse wider, but also more hollow as it is less rooted in reality. In a hyper competitive information market infoslop peddlers have to pork barrel their stories, it’s a step above sensationalism; not only is there less of a focus on truth, truth is jettisoned because it is a drag on the rate of engagement. Move fast and break things (psyche, the social fabric)
Dropshipping the news is not a sustainable model. Eventually people will wise up to the fact that their views and opinions are all knockoffs.
Fanatical age of social media. Users aren’t small business owners, they’re fans that are staking their own emotions and personality. But under this there is a blunt self awareness; everyone is in on the con, thinking they’re early and not exit liquidity. It’s not a casino, it’s an incubator (casino with cult like characteristics).
We’re founders manufacturing our own consent.
i definitely take the point that creating dem slop-channels isn't going to convince young men to leave the right. but i've been thinking a lot about the ideological struggles on youtube during the 2010s. it does seem like creators who invested time in trying to reach the (mostly men) who were consuming reactionary gamergate and alt-right content were successful, at least sometimes. i know people who credit contrapoints with helping them break out of far-right rabbit holes.
i guess i'm hopeful that a reinvestment in genuinely thoughtful "counter-programming" — stuff that takes disaffected young men seriously without engaging in manosphere bullshit — can actually reach the bros who are voting trump.
but perhaps that's naive!
Thanks Max. It's great to see the issues laid out so clearly. I can see how Trump, with his messages of fear, hatred and retribution, gained such a following - he has given the fearful a focus and he has promised to rescue them. The gambling metaphor is obvious (once you see it) and the addiction is so easy and so fast.