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We comment on hats…, & who has aged well or terribly in the past 4 yrs, & whose spouse looks bored. We read body language, interpret eye rolls, scan the lists of invitees to the various balls & parties for clues into who might hold #influence on the incoming #POTUS. Compared w/ #Trump’s first Inauguration, which was covered gravely & w/zero humor, his 2nd, on Monday, seemed like business as usual.

Among guests, #ShouZiChew, CEO of #TikTok, drew…attn after [its]…blackout….He, along w/ #MarkZuckerberg, #JeffBezos, #TimCook, #SundarPichai, &, of course, #ElonMusk, were seated behind the #Trump family during the ceremony, a powerful image that suggested #SiliconValley—which had previously been either politically agnostic, economically libertarian (but also culturally progressive),or slightly left-leaning—had switched their allegiances & would be instrumental in Trump’s “golden age of America”

In the opening column for Fault Lines, I [Jay Caspian Kang] tried to update the core thesis of Neil Postman’s “Amusing Ourselves to Death,” from 1985, which, roughly speaking, argues that revolutions in #information #technology, particularly the rise of #television, dictated the messages that were relayed through new #mediums in much more powerful ways than we might expect.

What this means in the political realm is that #SocialMedia is no longer just a tool for #politicians to get out their message; politicians now have to shape themselves into optimized vessels for social media. In 2016, #Trump became the Twitter President, but #information #technology has changed in the past 9 yrs, & Trump, who always understood the power of catchphrases—“You’re fired!”—has turned himself into an ideal President for the short-form-video format…proliferated on platforms….

#Trump’s long-winded rallies might have been derided by much of the press, but he has the same editing impulses as Twitch personalities, like Kai Cenat, &…Joe Rogan, who produce hours of content a week & capitalize on a seemingly counterintuitive dynamic, where an almost unbearably long-form original product gets chopped up & distributed as short #viral clips. Only a few people watch this kind of #content in full, but these viral-clip-makers have a similar outlook as vérité documentarians:

if you just keep the camera rolling, something interesting is bound to happen.

#Trump, already the biggest star that #SocialMedia has ever seen, is now onstage, in the director’s chair, & at the ticket booth at the same time. He also understood that the #AttentionEconomy had shifted toward these celebrities &, apparently on the advice of his son Barron, spent much of his campaign talking to the masters of the algorithm.

The Inauguration, which was attended not only by the #tech moguls but also by a collection of #influencers including Jake & Logan Paul & Rogan himself, was the ceremonial introduction for the new #establishment #media.

For us Postmanites, then, Big Tech’s drift toward the right should suggest that the #mediums, whether #Instagram, #TikTok, #Twitter, #Facebook, or #Google, have been temporarily captured by the right.

We should expect those #platforms, which have become the nation’s #PublicSquare, to amplify the #politics of the people who own them, just as we expect traditional #media companies to reflect the beliefs of their founders.

The only question left is whether these #tech titans are fully on board w/ #Trump’s agenda, or if they are simply acknowledging a tidal shift in American #politics & making nice w/the new President.

Will they uphold a commitment to #FreeSpeech, which all of them, in various ways, espouse, or is free speech just the pretext to undoing #social, #corporate, & #political norms that might have restrained their companies from fully hijacking America’s #attention? Will they fiddle w/the knobs of their #platforms, as #ElonMusk has done at X, to produce a chaotic #agitprop machine? Or are they just happy they no longer have to pay for #DEI consultants or deal with an aggressive #FTC?

@anarchic_teapot

Hopefully the answer was as obvious to others as it was to you

@Nonilex Well, if between the two of us they still haven't got it, there's no hope for them.

Seen what the Sentient Toilet Brush is trying to do in the EU right now?