Trump, early on, dropped any last vestiges of what a modern political campaign should look like, continuing to stump in rallies across swing states, even after multiple assassination attempts forced the former president to encase himself in a cube of agony. He whittled down his campaign into a simple message: “I will make you wealthy and hurt everyone you hate.”

unlike the Harris campaign, he only relied on the internet for propaganda, following his son Barron’s advice, who reportedly was the one pushing him to spend his time doing manosphere podcast interviews. Meanwhile, his vice presidential pick, JD Vance, gave him an important line to Silicon Valley’s most radicalized CEOs and the country’s two most-brainrotted men, Elon Musk (metaphorical brainrot) and Robert F. Kennedy Jr. (literal brainrot).

In terms of what we can expect from Trump’s second term, conservatives have already laid out their blueprint online. They’ve spent the last four years reshaping the architecture of the social web to match their designs for American society at large. It has been easy to laugh off Musk’s purchase of Twitter and its subsequent drop into irrelevance. But irrelevance was never a bug, but a feature. Big Tech monopolists, many of whom are now congratulating Trump on his win today, have successfully created an internet of paranoid cul-de-sacs, where no one trusts each other and nothing can break through the noise.

Inside an online platform everything, even reality, is just content and content just begets more content. And in a world run by big platforms, a person’s post becomes discourse, discourse creates memes, memes inspire a fandom, and fandoms become social movements. And over the last decade, as platforms flattened everything into content, most news publishers, hiding behind antiquated ideas about objectivity and made desperate from vanishing ad revenue, allowed themselves to be flattened, as well. And now, even though they don’t think of themselves as a competing news fandoms, they absolutely are.

I don’t think the way people react to news stories in 2023 is all that different from how it’s ever been. Here are two great threads comparing funny mean-spirited reactions to the Titanic sinking to the similar memes everyone made this month about the imploded submarine billionaires. But now, if you don’t like what’s in the newspaper you can just write your own thing and get more readers than it did.

Can’t possibly comprehend that extreme levels of wealth created an environment of arrogance that led to a submarine vaporizing a bunch of guys in the middle of the ocean? Just tweet that that’s not actually what happened. The fact the Russian coup didn’t even last a full day and no one got arrested sounds suspicious to you? Easy. Just make up something else.

Eventually every platform wanted the same kind of content, but to fit specific algorithms and specific demographics, which no one would bother to do, so the same videos just got posted everywhere until none of the networks felt distinct from each other and every site just pivoted away from the whole idea.