It's really bleak. [No. 100]

I don't even know, man.

Former President Donald Trump just obliterated Vice President Kamala Harris and … uhh… where do we begin?

I’ve been oscillating between wanting to submit myself to every (thoughtful and/or insightful) “what happened” thinkpiece and stuffing my head so far into the couch that I simply become the couch and live the rest of my days with skin that turns into beige performance fabric capable of withstanding any crayon, chocolate smudge, or blueberry jelly that my kids definitely-purposefully try to stain me with.

It’s hard to process the horror and darkness setting in by the minute. But reading, writing, communicating—these are all a means to processing and emerging… at least somewhere different. But it’s hard to even conceive of emerging somewhere better at this point. THE WORST IS NOT EVEN CLOSE TO STARTING.

Because I don’t think any of us are prepared to bear the weight of what’s to come. The weight of having an avowed fascist who has already reshaped half the country to his image; who demands fealty from his party members, lest their lives be ruined; who has already packed the courts low-and-high to fulfill his and his party’s craven power needs, a dynamic that will only accelerate. The weight of legislation and law controlling the bodies and autonomy of non-white, Christian males; the weight of a legal, social, and political apparatus hellbent on suppression, violence, and vengeance towards the most vulnerable and at the slightest bit of dissent; the weight of a new era where truth, shared reality, and bringing truth to power are functionally meaningless concepts.

The weight of current and wannabe authoritarians and war criminals worldwide who just got the green light for their programs around the world; the weight of democracy dying.

If that all sounds impossibly dark, it’s because it is. I don’t know what else to say.

Anyways, I often look at current events and trends in terms of the technology, media, and culture dynamics at play. So, for now, here are a couple pieces that, yes, I’ve decided to read and I think are worth your time.

(I’m going to hold off on stuffing myself into a couch until 2026, when the secret police at the couch manufacturing gulag in Pennsylvania toss me onto the “raw materials” conveyor belt.)

Ryan Broderick, Garbage Day: “America, the final season”

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. Steve Bannon’s dream of “flooding the zone with shit,” finally realized. A zone of shit for everyone, algorithmically personalized and inescapable. An America where you can watch MSNBC’s Steve Kornacki deliver calming data points on a livestream like a zoo animal or an Info Wars stream on X hosted by Michael Flynn and the Papa John’s guy. As Musk wrote this morning, “You are the media now.”

He, obviously, meant this to be a good thing. But sit with the enormity of what that means for a second. Author and journalist Ned Resnikoff asked a chilling followup question this morning, “If conventional campaigns don’t matter, does anything?” And the answer is, no, and that’s the point. You’re on your own now.

Charlie Warzel, The Atlantic: “Musk’s Twitter is the Bluepint for a MAGA Government”:

What matters is that Musk has turned X into a political weapon in service of the MAGA movement. X, as I wrote last week, has become a formidable vector for amplifying far-right accounts and talking points; it is poisoning the information environment with unverified rumors and conspiracy theories about election fraud. The far-right faithful do not care that his platform has occasionally labeled pro–Kamala Harris accounts as spam, temporarily banned journalists, restricted accounts that have tweeted the word cisgender, and complied with foreign-government requests to censor speech.

Nor do Republican lawmakers seem to care that Musk is wielding his platform to get Trump elected, even after they spent the better part of a decade outraged that tech platforms were supposedly biased against conservatives. Their silence on Musk’s clear bias coupled with their admiration for his activism suggest that what they really value is the way that Musk was able to seize a popular communication platform and turn it into something that they can control and wield against their political enemies.