OK, great: so what do we do?
Creation, curation, and community.
To those of you who read last week’s cringe, absolutely apocalyptic newsletter, thanks for indulging. I wrote it knowing I was mostly shouting into the void. I really tried resisting the urge to spill my guts like that, but, hey it was kinda liberating to get it out there. And I never want to write like that again.
The truth is, not every thing I laid out will come to fruition. Or be as bad as “this is the end of democracy and truth.” The Trump administration will try, or at least want to, carry out assaults on the constitution, our government, dissenters, civil servants, the most vulnerable people among us and, yes, reality. That’s a certainty. Cruelty will guide their mission. It’s the point.
On the flipside, it’s worth noting that it will be a completely incoherent administration, which could slow down their march of terror. And everyone in Trump’s orbit—including the man himself—is an incompetent moron. Most of those morons currently in orbit, including sugar daddy Elon, will get too close to the sun. Their inevitable falling out is going to be one for the ages. Two narcissistic, megalomaniacs who want to be the main character on social every day? Yikes! There is no such thing as escape velocity in Trump’s solar system. Each moron will crash or burn. Try to find some humor each time it happens.
Bad things (we will soon hear the term “unprecedented actions” a lot) will transpire, to a lot of people, and I don’t want to sugarcoat it. The Trumps, Republicans, Elon—they are the swamp. They will seek to smother and drown a lot of different people, institutions, and ways of life while advancing the interests of white billionaires and autocratic heads of state.
We do, though, have agency. Smart, determined people, have agency and conviction that goes beyond the feckless “resistance” grandstanding of the past 8 years. It’ll be a persistent, dark, and painful fight. But a fundamental and moral one in the face of chaos and cruelty.
And then consider, again, that the people in this administration and their enablers are fucking idiots.
Here’s Chris Hayes from the other night for some additional perspective:
“It was a tossup race, in a bad environment for incumbents in a 50/50 nation that was previously ruled by a narrow but pro-democratic majority. I think it still has a pro-democratic majority in which a sliver of people just voted on other stuff… we got this outcome because three out of a hundred people switched their votes, in a nation that weathered a global pandemic and global inflation pretty well, but not well enough.”
That framing makes me feel a little less apocalyptic, although that such a sliver of voters will enable an inevitably transformative 4-years is a serious bummer. Here’s the Financial Times’ analysis of the “unprecedented” (but actually) bad environment for incumbents, but this chart does sums it up:
Essentially the first time in the history of democracy in developed countries that every governing party facing an election lost vote share.
I mean, look. People didn’t like the Biden presidency. He dropped out and there was no primary. Kamala didn’t or couldn’t run on breaking from the very administration she was still serving in. And so a consequential number of people voted for the other candidate (editor’s note: probably the first and last time I’ll refer to Trump in such a banal manner).
Jamelle’s take here seems pretty reasonable.
Turns out, violent crime is down, inflation is down, the stock market is up, and unauthorized border crossings are near the lowest level in the last few years. But the toxic Republican party and our toxic information environment combined to create an algorithmic, outrage-based alternate reality where none of the true things are actually true. And people who live in that alternate reality voted for Trump.
Last week’s Letter About The Apocolypse (again, sorry for that one) started to get into the toxic information environment, like how X is blueprint for MAGA governance and how the right-wing disinformationsphere works.
I think that’s where I—and this newsletter—might be headed next. Not necessarily to focus on the toxicity, influence, and dominance of the right-wing media ecosystem itself, although its pervasiveness will be inescapable. They already got the big utility platforms to align with their goals. The algorithm is theirs.
But, rather, I think it’s worthwhile to ask, to wonder, and to hopefully answer: what is the antidote? What is the counterbalance of media creation and consumption, communication, truth-seeking, and community-building outside of the dominant platform/algorithmic feed paradigm and, hell, legacy media (editor’s note: says the guy who included an MSNBC host and NYT opinion writer in this piece)?
If that all sounded squishy, unattainable, or downright fantastical, then good. It has to be. A reimagining of our individual and collective information ecosystems feels like a necessary requirement—and only one of many requirements—to come out on the other end. My hypothesis is that it will, and will have to, start with our 1:1 and 1-to-few interactions with each other and in our information gathering and sharing. Policy or some other positive, sweeping change is not on the horizon. This needs to be from the bottom-up. On us. That should give you hope that you can do something, right now.
One thing I’ve been constantly thinking about, that maybe you have been or might do—how to escape the algorithm. The eternal feeds, endless content, and enshitified systems that we’ve all unconsciously succumbed to. We’re already drowning in AI slop across the entire internet. It all makes human creation, curation, and recommendation feel like artifacts of the before times. Turns out, they might actually represent the answers we’re seeking, but with a new moral and political imperative.
We can try to boil the ocean with rage right now. Rage at the system. At those behind democracy’s perilous future. At the extreme bigots who enable(d) Trump. Or even at a neighbor who was sick of the political status quo.
Let’s still be mad as hell while consciously seeking joy. And when we rage, we have to channel it—to some end, for a real reason—because simply airing our grievances into the digital or IRL ether is meaningless.
“The resistance” was futile. But “the answers” might not be, if we can ask the right questions and inspire each other to wonder, create, and connect.