I’ve spent the last 24 hours visiting countless American media outlets, old and new, trying to find one political analyst, former politician, historian, media pundit, podcaster, host, or even a stand-up comedian who truly grasped why Donald Trump just won the U.S. presidential election. I wasn’t picky; I listened to voices from both left and right.
The results were – well, disastrous. Hollow mantras all around, as if I were listening to ChatGPT – no, actually worse. No matter the political leaning, these voices kept discussing issues in terms that have long since lost relevance, completely detached from reality and trapped in their own echo chambers. They talked about policy, economy, values, post-election polls… in short, basic political concepts that, on the surface, may seem logical, but unfortunately, no longer apply to the world we live in. What followed were remarks like, “Kamala Harris didn’t deliver a clear message to working-class voters hit by inflation,” “Trump managed to mobilize those who felt abandoned by the Washington elite,” “blue walls,” “traditional Republican/Democratic voters”…
Relics of the old world.
Nobody was questioning the framework within which this change was happening. The only people who fully understood the magnitude of the seismic shift reshaping the Anthropocene in the last decade were the writers of HBO’s show Succession. They identified every factor, every player, and accurately projected who and how would win, within a minor statistical margin of error. Given that this is one of the most critically acclaimed and award-winning series of the century, I can only assume that nobody truly understood it. Which, ironically, is completely understandable.
The key to victory in this election was forged by Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and Mark Zuckerberg in the fires of Mordor – sorry, Silicon Valley. It began with a semi-controlled mass production of a new kind of voter, or to put it another way, the rise of social media. By creating new voters, and by reshaping of the old ones. I’m not going to delve into conspiracy theories by saying this was some grand plan, actually – it certainly wasn’t at first. It was more of a series of randomized simulations that got caught by the gears of unrestrained capitalism in the early 2010s, generating unprecedented profit, which in turn attracted unprecedented investment. The idea of weaponizing Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter as political tools only came later, in waves, with careful analyses of each wave. Coincidentally (or perhaps inevitably, given the nature of capitalism), the first to explore the usefulness of the political power of social media were far-right extremists, aided by a generation of digitally illiterate politicians who, without a thought in their heads, accepted that Twitter was a “social network” – a term falsely defined as some sort of political equivalent to a public square. Falsely, because a ranting lunatic in a public square doesn’t have instant access to billions of users, nor does he benefit from algorithms that amplify and reward his extremism. Twitter had a prototype of that algorithm built into its code from the start. This phase, as I said, was dubbed an “experiment in the limits of free speech,” but it was actually an experiment in seeing how far big capital could go without any state oversight or regulation. Had there been even one digitally literate leader with enough political power and moral clarity in the U.S. administration, there wouldn’t have been a chance in the future for individuals or groups to rake in billions by exponentially spreading lies about vaccines and autism during a global pandemic. All it would have taken was a few key decision-makers recognizing that “social networks” are simply the same thing as traditional media, warranting the same kind of regulation and accountability, including criminal responsibility and restricted access for minors or anonymous users via ID verification. Today, it sounds unimaginable, right? But it was actually quite logical. And there were voices pointing this out. They were dismissed as “Stalinists.”
The first serious political tests of this technology’s power were the Trump and Brexit projects, like trial balloons. Steve Bannon and the conservative Breitbart circle laid the theoretical groundwork; Trump/Brexit was the empirical test of the hypothesis – had social networks already created a base of frenzied addicts, susceptible to micro-targeted campaigns that could sell any idea or product, even if that idea was Trump as president or Brexit as a rational and acceptable political option? A narcissistic con-artist like Trump, who made even George W. Bush look like Seneca, simply wouldn’t have had a chance in the “old world” and the old media-political establishment. In the new world, however, he’s the perfect candidate – because now, anyone can be the perfect candidate. Same for Brexit. Neither message nor messenger matter anymore.
And still, we hear so-called serious people talking about rational arguments, in vain effort to explain two fundamentally irrational phenomena.
The heart of today’s political game draws power precisely from the irrational – algorithms on “social networks” that maximize profit for the owners by luring users into increasingly extreme relativistic positions, identity politics, and trenches from which there’s no dialogue with people with different opinions – only snappy, 120-character retorts or trolling. People know less and less about life, about their fellow human beings, and yet, we have opinions about everything. Or rather, we think that these are opinions, but really these are mostly emotions, awoken in us by the “blue pill” from Matrix, in order to tribalize and split us into a million virtual trenches, by those few who own the Matrix. But now these profiteers aren’t satisfied with just the zillions of dollars they make, as that also becomes boring after a while. Now, they want to rule the world. And since they are products of the very machine they created, this mostly means they haven’t psychologically developed beyond adolescence, and their worldview is no deeper than a few Joe Rogan episodes and an e-book by Jordan Peterson. And so we end up with Elon Musk, one man wielding the power of a sizable country (within a country), unrestricted by laws, deciding to back Trump’s return because he was miffed that Biden didn’t invite him to the White House for an electric vehicle summit. So, he bought Twitter and started shaping the opinions of billions. His motivation sounds so trivial it wouldn’t work as a plot in even the cheapest film, but unfortunately, it’s all true. In a position of unlimited political power, in the most powerful country in the world, during one of history’s most complex periods, we get an incel perpetual adolescent nobody voted for, who simply wants to watch the world burn. Why? Because he finds it entertaining.
And that’s it. People voted for Trump because unregulated capitalism consciously and successfully turned them into morons. They voted for him because it seemed like good entertainment. Because that meme their coworker sent was funny. Because… It doesn’t matter, really.
The “real world,” the old world, no longer exists. We need to find a way to deal with this, and a way to move on.
Translated by Stevan Filipović
Peščanik.net, 08.11.2024.
