The blonde guy is probably going to win
Is he blonde?
0. Pre-Intro / Instructions for the Reader
I promised myself I wouldn’t write anything online about Trump ever again unless I could do it in a way that doesn’t feel annoying or dramatic.1 This isn’t only about Trump. It’s also about the American Left, which I identify as, mostly, but I’m maybe more skeptical than I used to be. I’m sure you’ll be able to pick up on it without my explicit mention of it there.
Anyway—
I’ve now read over this a few times and probably made a lot of mistakes that I’m not catching. But I’m not cringing every time I look at it, so I feel pretty good about posting it online. This is usually a bad feeling to have, and leads to no good.
I’m choosing to heavily utilize footnotes. There’s a lot of interesting stuff in there, probably about half the essay. So if you’re interested in my actual opinion, I would prefer that you read the footnotes as you’re making your way through this. If you would rather only read half of my opinion that I sort of arbitrarily decided to not put behind tiny numbers, I have left that option open to you by simply avoiding the footnotes altogether. I made sure to choose a platform where you can click the footnote number in the footnotes section to return to where you were in the essay. I also think you can hover over the footnotes and they’ll eventually appear. That is how much I care about you reading the footnotes. But you still don’t have to if you’d rather not.
I didn’t say it beforehand, but the footnote thing is Rule #1.
Rule #2 is that if you’d like to engage on anything you read here, use the comment section at the bottom. I don’t expect many people will read this since I’m probably just going to post it on my Instagram story and call it a day, but I do think public discussion is more productive than private discussion. Any thoughts or gripes or comments or opinions you’ve got, they have a nice home in the comment section below this essay.
That’s it, here’s essay #49494903248230498209347293874209387409237409872340972 about something adjacent to American politics.
I. Intro
Trump is going to win probably.
For a long time I didn’t think that I support Trump. In some ways, I know that I don’t. I don’t align with his policies, have never donated to his campaign, attended his rallies, nor tried to convince anyone to vote for him. I don’t even think he was a good president, or would be a good president in his second term. His brand of politicking is something that I find equal parts of-the-times and divisive — the antithesis to how we could, in theory, strengthen our country. However, I’m not convinced that many left-leaning progressives have considered how much, and in what ways, they actually do support Trump’s path to his second term. I might be one among them.
Ignoring Trump’s policy, ideology, ‘family values’, all of that — and ignoring them because I don’t think they hold much of an impact on swaying voters at this point — Trump is exceptionally charismatic. I don’t mean that as a compliment as much as it is an observation. He inspires people, for or against him, to speak up and be loud. There’s a pretty high likelihood that a randomly-picked United States citizen would watch any arbitrarily-chosen soundbite of him speaking, laugh, and say “he’s kind of got a point, though;” an even greater chance of just the standalone laugh without any vague pseudo-endorsement.
I say this not to convince you that Trump is a master comedian or actually an amazing, misunderstood hero. I say it because it runs in stark contrast to his competition, whose image is spiraling out of control by the day, with journalists, and Biden himself, doing a magnificent job of portraying him as a dementia’d out old dude who should be allowed to live out his few remaining years peacefully2.
So, setting the stage, you have two candidates who are far too old to reasonably have a grasp on the hardships of the coming generations of Americans. One of them is loud, proud, and funny, the other is in a state of disrepair. To a lot of voters, it doesn’t seem like their choice between candidates is actually much of a choice. Speaking of not having a choice to vote for, let’s talk about the American Left.
II. The American Left
The American Left hate what they believe America stands for symbolically. You can observe an up-to-date example of this with the Israel/Palestine conflict. It could be argued that this conflict is so present in the American mind, not because of the conflict itself, but because of the Western flavor that’s been prescribed to it. You can take a look at this list of current genocide warnings and ask yourself how many you’ve heard anything about at all, let alone seen public demonstrations for. Before you barge into my DMs, I’m not bringing this up for any reason other than to examine what spurs the attention of the American Left. In this case, and many others, that attention is finely tuned to circumstances which can be condensed into a colonial-settler dyad3, maybe more specifically a Western colonial-settler dyad4.
This colonist framework is most present in the minds of the American Left because it is the most obvious truth about America’s far-from-perfect past. With leftists uniting under this common worldview, and humans being strong pattern finders,5 it makes sense that this is where leftists have naturally drawn parallels. Israel is an extremely westernized society, especially considering their geographical location, and this makes it an excellent in-point for new or returning leftists who have a desire to extend their worldview and politics outside of the United States.6
The flip side is that Israel’s geographic location predisposes it and its neighbors to a complex and messy history of Middle Eastern conflict. This is a factor that, to the American Left, is too clunky to do anything with other than toss aside in the greater conversation.7 This is all to say, the American Left tends to use a rigid good-versus-evil lens to frame most issues, as it serves as a major boon for messaging and mobilization.8
In a broken, divisive system, like what we have in the United States, the American Left does not provide or permit a vocabulary for gray areas or ethical relativism.9 The only option provided to a newcomer is to “get onboard or get run over.” Although this mental framework contributes to the left’s ability to organize large scale protests on short notice, it is also a direct route to political isolation and further ideological splintering. It doesn’t need to be explained how isolationism puts many goals, however noble, out of reach10.
Put simply, the American Left has outgrown their internal model of Western society, and have a collective feeling that the system cannot be worked with any longer, so must be worked against. Because leftist policy focuses solely on resolving the dysfunction of Western ideology by creating something entirely new, it stands to reason that anyone they’re able to convince to move to their side of the aisle is going to be another disimpassioned voter who feels that turning up to the polls is pointless. Why participate in a game that you don’t believe in?
Indeed, for the American Left it might actually be pointless, as the hubris that comes with being left-aligned today doesn’t make room for voting for what is perceived as “the lesser of two evils”, even if that “lesser of two evils” may lead to marginally better outcomes long-term11. For American Leftists, who function on concrete morals defined by the party itself, it’s simply not worth the character hit of voting for someone who you don’t fully believe in.
III. Some Math and a Mid-Essay Check In
So here’s the math-
Every theoretical Trump supporter equals a vote for Trump. Every theoretical person onboarded to the American Left, and every disimpassioned voter12 equals a potential, metaphorical vote for Trump by omission.
Somehow, the specific blend of Trump/Biden has created a supernatural voter vortex that sucks in everyone’s opinion on one side and spits out Trump votes on the other side. Even worse13, publicly hating on Trump makes Trump supporters want to vote for him even more! This is not the case for Biden supporters14, who seem to be walking a thin line between barely casting a vote and avoiding the polls altogether.
To make matters more confusing, it’s hard to conceptualize anything Biden could do to increase his chances of winning. He’s made bad situations worse in a lot of ways. He fumbled the student loan forgiveness, probably the most directly-affecting part of his platform that would have been an easy-to-point-to “great thing” that happened during his presidency. Instead we ended up with the policy equivalent of a soggy piece of bread15.
He also lost the far left on foreign policy, not through any explicit actions, but a definite fumble on messaging. When the youth voter base would have preferred Biden to walk out onto the nearest stage and say something to the effect of “Free Palestine,” which he was never going to do anyway, he never could find the right messaging to express support for Israel while still appealing to the hearts and minds of young left voters. It’s not like younger citizens tend to vote en-masse anyway, but in an election where every vote is going to matter, it’s not good business to be alienating your potential voter base.
IV. Vibe Shift in Tech
I am unfortunately very obsessed with the developments in AI. I know that others know this about me because now people scoot away from me when I bring it up. I have an optimistic take on the technology, and see it as a necessary step in our evolution as a species, but I do acknowledge that there are many ways this new future could go horribly wrong16. Because of AI’s massive energy needs, and Trump’s outspoken willingness to fire up national energy efforts on all cylinders, we are seeing a massive “don’t say it out loud” shift in tech away from the democratic party, who is more likely to have a heavier hand when regulating AI.
This push for energy is going to become the most cash-flush effort in world history, and Trump has been meeting with all the tech billionaires frequently to assuage their energy ambitions. By all measures he seems to be completely on board, and Silicon Valley is ready to use their corporatocratic17 abilities to manifest him into the presidency.
Tech is diverging from the left pretty noticeably here, a big move from an industry that has generally aligned with artists, who are generally associated with the American Left.18 I believe that this rift will grow larger as AI becomes even more of a hot button issue, and the perception of tech companies push further and further to the right. This is an important shift to monitor because these tech companies control a lot. To varying degrees19 they control what we see, what we buy, who we like and dislike, and our core beliefs. These companies also have tons of money to throw around, and that money goes toward high level research on how to convince you to think, say, and feel the things they want.
In case you haven’t realized over the past fifteen years, we live in a corporatocracy, and virtually everyone’s livelihoods now rely on the well-being of those corporations. The basic notion of money in politics is nothing new or notable, but the fact that this money is going to be flowing from Silicon Valley is notable, mainly because these companies control everything digital that passes in front of your eyes.
The truth is that these algorithms are designed to be opaque in the face of any questioning20. The companies making them know21 that the general public is suspicious of how their algorithms choose content, but the algorithms are also abstract enough for them to never have to worry that anyone will figure it out. That obfuscation serves as a departure from truth in online communication, and for the vast majority of those with internet access, online social networks are the primary source of news.22
There is strong justification to believe that any content we see is being served to us with dishonest intentions. The case could also be made that these apps are weaponizing American citizens against their own country by encouraging and incentivizing anti-American sentiments,23 which doesn’t sound too far fetched when you realize that these strategies have been front-of-mind in Russia and China’s playbook for over twenty years now.24
V - I. “Hello GoodHumans!”
I spent a few years directing videos for the YouTube channel Jubilee Media. Amongst other things, they’re known for their unscripted debate-style shows that bring people from opposite sides of an issue together, and seek to find the areas where their points of view intersect. At one point they called their fanbase “GoodHumans.”25 Working there was actually very interesting, mostly because the hundreds of people you had to interview going into a season of a show exposed you to a huge range of world views.26 Think the most conspiracy-minded people you could possibly imagine, contrasted against adult babies, contrasted against furries, contrasted against the most basic, non-argumentative college PR majors, and everything in between.
Directing those shows left me with two main impressions that don’t feel entirely formulated yet, but I’m just going to word-vomit it out. If I don’t agree with this tomorrow or the next day or after an old coworker from Jubilee texts me about this and provides a better take, then I’m vocalizing that I’m open to that possibility.
Almost anyone can sit down and have a polite conversation face-to-face, but there’s a pretty high chance that those same people go home and continue shitposting online immediately. In other words, it takes a lot to change someone’s mind. A big impactful one-off conversation tends to feel big but have a small overall impact long-term.27
Media, especially video, is naturally and unfixably biased toward people who want attention. It cannot be underestimated how much this devalues the actual journalistic or anthropological merit of most media28. This is a problem not because these strong-minded individuals’ opinions suck, but because their opinions are intrinsically attached to the goal of more attention29.
Why am I ruminating on my old job? One reason is because I never really unpacked any of my takeaways in a way that feels like I did my thoughts justice, but two is because media reminiscent of what Jubilee makes is very popular right now, and it’s worth wondering why.30
On one hand, Jubilee is very vocal about its unbiasedness. I can speak from experience that they really try to remove bias not only in their messaging, but internally throughout the production process as well. There were many, many conversations that would happen throughout the editing process where we’d have to faithfully consider whether or not we were representing someone’s opinions in the way they meant to express them.
Sometimes this worked as intended, making people proud of the way they represented their point of view. Other times, more so when opinions were more extreme, it led to anger or distrust.31
Because Jubilee is a company headquartered in Los Angeles, CA, there will always be a left-leaning slant to what they make. Not only because of the unconscious biases of the employees, but also because of their casting pool. It is much easier to find an outspoken liberal in Los Angeles, and when you do find the conservatives they tend to be so outspoken that they’re basically a caricature of conservatism itself. The outcome of these variables meant that when someone felt we did them wrong in the edit, it was usually a conservative cast member; the reason they felt wronged was typically because an army had mobilized against them in the comment section.
So you’ve got a bunch of angry leftists, laughing at an angry conservative who volunteered to drive down to a studio and shout his opinion onto the internet for free. He’s mad and letting me know over email, and the leftists32 are having a party in the comments making fun of the guy.
This all begs the question, who is all this content even made for? And I’m talking about everything. YouTube videos, TikToks, Reddit posts, Tweets, Reels, Threads, whatever. Everything from everyone, who’s the audience?
The best answer is probably “people who already agree with everything you’re saying.” I wouldn’t go as far as to say it’s an unjust cause, making media for a social issue, or to bridge divides or promote understanding or whatever the corporate mission is at whatever media company, but I personally think it’s an extremely uphill battle to make affecting, opinion-changing media in the current cultural and technological climate.33
Algorithmically, we are now served only one of two things:
Content we hate, so that we can hate or make fun of it more.
Content we love, so that we can show our support and love.
Our consumption habits all boil down to maximizing engagement. Abstracted, soulless, backend-coded, obfuscated, machine-learned engagement34. Engagement that not only colors what you consume, but what you create, as our consumption contributes to our ever-evolving beliefs. We commit ourselves to noble causes because what option do we really have? You’re not a bad person are you? So why aren’t you saying anything? I noticed you’ve been doing self promo in the midst of this humanitarian crisis. Is that really how you’re going to use your platform? Did you really share that? That was a psyop to clog people’s feeds and distract everyone from what’s actually going on. POSTS ARE BEING SUPPRESSED. If you typ3 lik3 th15 th*n it will g37 p457 the f*173R5.35
If I had to choose one word to describe how I feel we are all acting now, it would be severe36.
V - II. Logan Paul
Have you listened to the Donald Trump episode of Impaulsive?
In it, he calls out Biden multiple times, saying he would never go on the Impaulsive podcast. It’s one of those “W Trump” moments where he’s undeniably totally right. It’s also worth noting how reasonable he comes off,37 and how many people are going to see this and think the same. Trump has seriously toned it down and honed it in since 2016. It appears that he’s very clued in to what demographics he needs to capture for the upcoming election.
A less exciting, but still notable podcast appearance by Trump. A lot of the fans of this podcast were reasonably upset about this appearance. I think it’s because of what I talked about in Section IV above. This appearance made a lot of people very aware that California tech money is going to be powering Trump’s election.
V - III. What Happened When Trump Was President Last Time?
There’s two categories of things that happened when Trump was president last time.
Actual Big Things
&
The Things That Made People Feel A Certain Way Every Day When They Woke Up In The Morning
“Actual Big Things” includes all the regressive policies, excessive culling of his administration, stacking of the supreme court. This is the actual badness that will have a lasting impact for a long time to come and will take a lot to reverse or fix.
“The Things That Made People Feel A Certain Way Every Day When They Woke Up In The Morning” includes when unemployed people were making $70k a year on unemployment and getting random checks in the mail that they could throw into an insanely bullish stock market. A lot of people walked away from Covid and Trump’s presidency feeling awesome about “The Things That Made People Feel A Certain Way Every Day When They Woke Up In The Morning” and much more exhaustedly about “Actual Big Things.”
Four years of a sleepy old man can make you forget how hectic things felt during the Trump years. But no one forgets having money in their pocket, buying a gaming PC with their stimulus money and getting to play Fortnite all day while Dogecoin surges. Those are seminal moments. If I had to guess, this probably helps Trump out in the upcoming election.
VI. Stupid Platitudes
There are two common relationship platitudes that are particularly relevant to the situation we have going on with the American Left. I am going to paraphrase them twice. Once from memory, and then once again to simplify the simplification, so I can use them to make a point.
“You have to love yourself before you can love someone else”, which I will oversimplify into “You can’t hate yourself into a better situation.”
and
"You can’t form a healthy relationship based off of mutual hatred”, from which I will again oversimplify a conclusion: “Misery breeds misery.”
These two statements do a better-than-average job at summarizing the current state of the American Left. I do identify as left, but I also happen to think that I’m in bad company. Amongst the roster of the American Left are people who argue in bad faith, perpetuate political isolationism, and do a wonderful job claiming an indisputable macro perspective without putting in the uncomfortable work of criticizing and challenging their own beliefs.38 The left is also inhabited by a large number of bullies39 who discourage critical thinking by passively forcing people into quarter-formed opinions on massive issues,40 for the sake of the good of the world.
This neurotic41 mentality is not good for anyone. It makes the left weaker as they can’t agree on or discuss effective, or even agreeable, policy without generating miscommunication and disagreement. The circles of the American Left do a lot to encourage in-group/out-group dynamics by rejecting anyone who doesn’t have a strong enough opinion on whatever’s hot at the moment. I did this myself, and probably still do.42 A story about me and my dad —
VII. Pre-Outro
If I was writing this eight years ago, I think this essay would have been very different. In fact, I know it would have been, because I can still see all the extreme, dramatic posts that my peers and I were posting online around that time. That whole period severely strained the relationship between my father and I, as I’m sure it did for a lot of families. My dad wasn’t even a Trump supporter, he was just a guy on the sidelines who was asking questions43 instead of being unabashedly upset like I expected anyone who actually cared about the things I cared about to be.
Looking back on that time, I find a lot of those posts extremely unrelatable, full of empty platitudes and calls to action that no one could or did reasonably follow up on. I cringe at the fact that I expected my seventy year old father to understand the plight of the young left in America, especially considering that those around me only had a puddle-depth, infographic fueled understanding of the situation. That’s not to say that I or anyone else were in the wrong for opposing Trump. I stand by the basic feeling of distaste that I had back then, and I still feel it now. But when I look back on that time period, when everyone was so quick to ready aim fire at their friends and family, I can more clearly see the complicity that being disagreeable, hopeless, angry, and inflammatory brought to the results of that election.
VIII. Fake Out - A Brief Set of Questions
So does Trump win?
Does friend #54 and friend #813 posting on their Instagram story that they’re no longer voting at all after Biden’s debate performance mean anything for the election results?
Is it better to have a selfish old man whose quick, or a generically-alright old man who’s slow in the White House?
Does it even matter?
I can attempt to answer these questions, but it will ultimately just be my opinion, which in reality probably doesn’t go for much.
Q: So does Trump win?
A: Probably. Trump supporters like Trump more than Biden supporters like Biden. Even the people who don’t like Trump find him funny, and even the people who don’t find him funny can admit that he has a fired up, charismatic fanbase. He’s also doing a lot of work to appeal to more moderate voters with his appearances on mainstream youth and left-presenting tech podcasts. I believe the effects of the above will be noticeable.
Q: Does friend #54 and friend #813 posting on their Instagram story that they’re no longer voting at all after Biden’s debate performance mean anything for the election results?
A: No, but they only posted that because a lot of people were discouraged by Biden’s debate performance, and that probably means something. I don’t think it could be overstated how many voters feel like there is truly no acceptable candidate, which is notable because of how many people already felt like their choice didn’t matter prior to the debate. It doesn’t help that the DNC’s “get out the vote” messaging is so desperately trying to come off as relatable and urgent.
Q: Is it better to have a selfish old man whose quick, or a generically-alright old man who’s slow in the White House?
A: Probably the latter. With the Chevron doctrine being overturned, it stands to reason that there is a lot of bad that a Trump administration could manage with four more years in the White House. Regulatory agencies may lose their ability to regulate entirely. Think EPA, NLRB, FDA, and regulators associated with healthcare, financial markets, transportation, consumer protection, education, immigration, and energy. This is a direct result of our previous Trump presidency, which stacked the Supreme Court against general human decency,44 for the foreseeable future.
I will re-use the above answer for question number four, “Does It Even Matter?”
IX. The Actual Outro
When considering your plans for the upcoming election, the question to be asking yourself is not “Who do I align with?” because there’s no answer to be found. It shouldn’t be “Who said the thing I wanted them to say?” or “Who is generally the most likable?” Unfortunately, the question can’t even be “Who do I kind of sort of like even a little bit and think is sort of capable?”
The only question to ask yourself, and the question I will be asking myself is:
“Four years from now, whose pieces do I want to be picking up?”45
Because you’re going to be picking up pieces no matter what.
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At least to me.
And to think I wrote this paragraph before the debate.
I’m choosing the colonial-settler talking point to focus on here rather than the apartheid talking point. Amongst the reasons that I find the comparison to the apartheid messy:
The Israel/Palestine conflict has a historical and religious significance that wasn’t present in South Africa.
Israel/Palestine has dense, competing historical narratives that complicate the issue, whereas the historical context of South Africa was more clearly defined.
Israel/Palestine has a complicated and long geopolitical history, with many global powers holding a significant vested interest in both sides of the conflict. (This includes global powers for whom it is serendipitous that the West is now totally focused on I/P)
Palestine has a complicated, distributed governance, making unified representation more challenging for Palestinians.
The Israel/Palestine conflict is largely focused on the issue of refugees rather than explicit segregation.
Israel/Palestine has a bilateral economic dependence (water, trade, labor, etc.) that stands as a factor in any potential solutions. In South Africa, due to the rigid segregation, the international community was able to implement comprehensive sanctions against the apartheid regime without directly impacting the livelihoods of the oppressed population to the same degree.
Israel/Palestine has an intense debate between one and two-state solutions, a dynamic that further complicates a resolution.
In this case, the definition of a specific Western settler-colonial dyad concerns itself with the spread of capitalism, industrialization, and a history of racial hierarchies that it still reckons with.
The left does have a history of aligning with unlikely allies. In the 1970s, leftists groups in Iran had well-documented “alliances of convenience” with Islamists during the Iranian revolution. These alliances ended abruptly post-revolution, as the left underestimated the Islamists religious motives (among other issues). Many leftist coalitions/leaders were subsequently banned and executed post-revolution, in a period that is now widely considered as a catastrophic miscalculation.
This argument has to be tossed aside to make sense as a social cause for the American Left, because the American Left accumulates allies when they share a similarly negative view of America as a whole. As pointed out in Michael Huemer’s essay “Why Do Progressives Like Islam?” —
“The idea that Islamic terrorists are crusaders for socialism and progressive causes as Western leftists understand them is a narcissistic delusion. Al Qaeda, Hamas, and other Islamic extremist groups don’t give two craps about American leftist causes. They are crusaders for Islam. Osama bin Laden attacked America because he wanted to end U.S. support for the Saudi government, so that he could depose them and establish a different, more extreme fundamentalist theocracy in Saudi Arabia. Many people fail to understand this because they can’t imagine a society having completely different issues and different belief systems from ours…What do far leftists like about Islam? They like that Islamic extremists hate America. That’s what really matters to them.”
As a general rule of thumb, it’s probably best to avoid situations where people express more of an urgency in you being loud than an urgency in educating you.
If you’re interested in the storytelling of politics and how assigning ‘punctuation points’ to circular conflicts is utilized by governments, journalists, and activists in order to establish a “beginning” to a tidy narrative, I would recommend “Pragmatics of Human Communication” by Paul Watzlawick (‘Pragmatics’ meaning: “the branch of linguistics dealing with language in use and the contexts in which it is used,” not to be confused with ‘pragmatic’ which holds a different meaning entirely and would make this footnote come off as too pretentious to actually include in the essay)
A relevant excerpt from the book—
“Discrepancies in the punctuation of sequences of events occur, of course, in all those cases in which at least one of the communicants does not possess the same amount of information as the other but does not know this…Generally speaking, it is gratuitous to assume not only that the other has the same amount of information as oneself but that the other must draw the same conclusions from this information…the decision about what is essential and what is irrelevant apparently varies from individual to individual and seems to be determined by criteria which are largely outside individual awareness. In all probability, reality is what we make it or, in Hamlet’s words, “… there is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so”…We can only speculate that at the root of these punctuation conflicts there lies the firmly established and usually unquestioned conviction that there is only one reality, the world as I see it, and that any view that differs from mine must be due to the other’s irrationality or ill will…We typically observe in these cases of discrepant punctuation a conflict about what is cause and what is effect, when in actual fact neither of these concepts is applicable because of the circularity of the ongoing interaction…From the pragmatic viewpoint there is little if any difference between the interactions of nations or of individuals once discrepant punctuation has led to different views of reality, including the nature of the relationship, and thus into international or interpersonal conflict.”
A visual demonstration of what I believe is another barrier for progressive legislation in general. That is, when you’re conservative, you’re moving toward preserving or reinstating well-known concepts. This is easy to rally behind, and it’s easy to message.
When you’re progressive, you’re moving away from those known concepts, and out into uncharted territory. This makes rallying around a central message very hard, as everyone seems to have their own bright ideas on what should take precedence and how it should be accomplished. Then you end up with situations like this. I wonder how much they were able to accomplish that day.
The American Left maintains an incredibly ambitious moral high-ground, preventing them from reaching moderate voters, who are generally more willing to accept compromise, which is required to actually pass legislation. In addition, their reluctance to work within systems, instead choosing to reject them entirely, alienates those who want things to get better, without them getting worse first, which tends to be the inevitable course of things when you choose to completely destroy something before building something new.
Same thing?
For those who don’t want a Trump presidency.
I couldn’t decide whether or not to put “supporters” in quotes, so I’m leaving this footnote here to let you know.
Spent a lot of time trying to think of a comparison that I ultimately feel pretty lukewarm about. Any better ideas?
There are many ways, and they are all outside of the scope of this essay.
Remember, the United States is only a democracy by name.
Unless you’re this person.
And almost certainly to a larger degree than you perceive or feel consciously, not to mention the flattening and homogenization of our opinions.
It’s unfortunate that “the algorithm” has become such a meme considering how serious of a mounting problem it is. Maybe it becoming a meme was planned by the algorithm?
If a corporation as a whole could ever be thought of as having a singular thought-process or motivation, one of the many reasons that Citizens United v. FEC is so bad for our democracy (corporatocracy?). Fun fact: David Bossie, the president of Citizens United was Trump’s deputy campaign manager for his 2016 campaign.
This is not even to get into the perils of having “news” as part of your diet. If you are interested in hearing about all the ways that news is bad for you educationally, psychologically, and spiritually, I invite you to read this great essay by Rolf Dobelli. I recently sent this to my old coworker, John. Are you reading this John?
An “anti-American” sentiment doesn’t have to be explicit for it to erode the country. It can be much more insidious and understated, such as demoralizing citizens from voting, lowering trust in our government and/or other citizens, promoting divisiveness and isolationism within political parties, promoting political nihilism, or instilling national shame.
I recently met and had a long conversation with a middle-aged man whose parents have worked for a three letter intelligence agency his entire life. While not saying anything I didn’t already know, or at least feel in some way, he expressed a very sobering opinion on the state of foreign cultural interference, specifically as it relates to TikTok and foreign money being used to influence our government, institutions, and citizens. Hearing such a doomed take from someone like that was very powerful. I believe this shifted my own POV on how actively or unknowingly we’re all being manipulated at all times.
This is probably too subjective of a descriptor to have a true/false value, but I generally found the vocal part of the fanbase to be agreeable.
Arguably the most interesting people I met were people who were too fringe or unpalatable to actually put on the shows I was casting for. Every once in a while I have dreams of a spinoff channel that only deals with that fringe population but I am almost certain that it would lose a lot of money.
This is a unscientific observation, but I could casually speculate on the reason for this. Casting for any show (from anywhere, not just Jubilee) is going to be naturally biased toward those with all-encompassing, identity-forming opinions. It makes sense that these individuals have more to lose by actually changing their minds. The types of people you’d probably respect for being honest about not knowing enough about an issue, aren’t really the types to go on blast to millions of people asserting their strong opinions on abortion or immigration. The bigger question, when it comes to the impact of media, is “What percentage of the actual audience falls into the strong opinions vs undecided/open-minded camp?” That I do not know. Although if the intense competition for YouTube packaging (thumbnails/video titles) is any indication, people with really strong opinions really like watching content about things that they really agree with.
I KNOW THAT THERE ARE EXCEPTIONS. THAT IS WHY I SAID “MOST” AND NOT “ALL.”
Every once in a while we would encounter the rare non-attention-seeking cast member. You could always tell that they were non-attention-seeking because they would email us after the shoot very concerned about the fact that they decided to participate in the video.
Or maybe it’s not worth it, but you’re the one twenty-nine footnotes into a small unpopular blog post.
For obvious reasons, this was never a perfect process. There were times where a rushed edit or a bad judgement call was our fault for the misrepresentation of opinion. The saving grace at Jubilee was that we knew we were trying and succeeding more often than not.
Or liberals or whatever you want to call them. I feel like the word “liberal” has come to represent a more conservative old-fashioned leftist as of late. Maybe it’s too millennial coded?
There is something very ironic about “debate-style” media posturing and marketing itself as controversial when it seems to only algorithmically surface in uncontroversial, agreeable contexts. It has a similar energy to someone saying “Yeah I totally would have beat them up if they came at me.”
For a more esoteric take on the matter, this essay by Sam Kriss will satisfy you.
An excerpt—
“For a while, it was possible to live your entire life online. The world teemed with new services: simply dab at an app, and the machine would summon some other slumping creature with a skin condition to deliver your groceries, or drive you in pointless circles around town, or meet you for overpriced drinks and awkward sex and vanish. Like everyone, I thought this was the inevitable shape of the future. ‘You’ll own nothing, and you’ll be happy.’ We’d all be reduced to a life spent swapping small services for the last linty coins in our pockets. It’s Uber for dogs! It’s Uber for dogshit! It’s picking up a fresh, creamy pile of dogshit with your bare hands—on your phone! But this was not a necessary result of new technologies. The internet was not subordinating every aspect of our lives by itself, under its own power. The online economy is an energy sink; it’s only survived this far as a parasite, in the bowels of something else.”
This could probably be an essay of its own, how conspiratorial people become about “the algorithm.” Not only is it definitely being used for things much more insidious and erosive to our wellbeing than shadowbanning posts about major world news, but there is also a 0% chance that it can’t discern between a “5” and an “S.”
I’ve also noticed that the people posting these sorts of things always have some sort of proof that isn’t actually proof. It reminds me of when it was a meme that people thought their microphones were recording them in order to serve ads. The actual way you get this information is just by checking local network traffic. Chances are your thoughts and actions and socialization is not as silo’d as you think they are. They’re simply taking the search results of someone you just had a conversation with, who Google’d the thing you were just talking about, and serving them to you as well, under the assumption that you two just had a conversation about it.
This is its own issue that’s tough to talk about without falling into the overplayed “Social Media Bad” meme. Regardless, I really don’t think we’re built to always be on edge like this.
Empathy is a good thing to have, as it helps us understand the nature and context of severity and suffering, but living inside of that empathy as if it’s a full dive VR simulation doesn’t put anyone in a mental space where they can come up with effective, well-thought-out solutions to actually end the suffering. I suspect there is a fair bit of dissonance between our desire to actually solve a problem, and our desire to fight for what’s right. For more on that, Footnote 37.
Compared to his 2016 campaign. We have to grade on a scale here.
A possibly tongue-in-cheek alternative to acting extreme is to do nothing at all. Here’s a short essay by Michael Huemer that explores that possibility. Although the essay is purposefully a bit obtuse in the realism of its solutions, for the sake of the argument, this bit stood out to me:
“Many people appear to care: they talk about what’s good for society, they go to protests, they get upset about presumably bad policies. There are at least two motives that could explain political activism:
A desire to help society.
A desire to portray oneself (to oneself or to others) as helping society.
These lead to almost identical behaviors. But here is one difference: If you want to help society, then you need true beliefs about how to help it. If you just want to portray yourself as helping about society, you don’t need true beliefs; you just need strong beliefs about what’s good for society.
So people with motive (2) could be expected to try to maintain strong beliefs, whether true or not; people with motive (1) would scrupulously try to root out errors in their beliefs.
Which description better matches most actual political activists? I think it’s the former. So one reason why we’re bad at solving social problems is that we aren’t actually trying to solve them.”
For lack of a better term, which probably exists if I cared to find it.
For more on this, another essay by Michael Huemer.
Here’s an excerpt:
”A large portion of America’s intellectual class has for several decades devoted their lives to attacking their own society. What I have in mind here is not constructive criticism aimed at promoting identifiable political reforms. What I have in mind are attacks that seem motivated by resentment and aimed at provoking shame and resentment in Americans—shame on the part of the presumably dominant groups and resentment on the part of the presumably oppressed minorities.
The virulence of these attacks is not purely a product of liberalism. It is also in part an accident of history, due to the ideological uniformity that has grown up in American universities in the last several decades. This uniformity has produced increasing extremism, as academics compete with each other to make ever more extravagant displays of fealty to the common ideology. Progressivism began with reasonable critique of our society’s failures to live up to its ideals. Take that through several generations of increasing extremism and you get people expressing naked hatred for men, for white people, and for America in general.”
I happen to like the word “neurotic” here.
If you’re my friend please call my ass out.
Okay, he was also playing devil’s advocate a fair amount, but I’m not going to pretend like the singular Facebook page of a seventy year old man was destroying the fabric of our society any more than me engaging in online text-based combat with him was destroying the comfort of our relationship.
Remember, reality has a well known liberal bias.
This is, of course, assuming that you plan to vote. Footnote 38 goes over your options if you’re interested in the more passive route.
I really enjoyed reading this Phil. In regards to the algorithm, the algorithm is now seen by the youth as something they created. Instead of noting the opacity, it seems that the youth have a feeling of ownership over their feed, often commenting "I built this feed brick by brick". It feels cucked. Having no control over the shitty situation but somehow finding a way to feel empowered by that. A lot of life is cucked. Voting is cucked. Buying a $5 coffee and the lowest tip option outside of a custom tip being $2 is cucked. But I vote and i buy the coffee and i tip and I love it.
Hi 🍔🍔🍔🍔