What is so alarming now isn’t that an authoritarian president and a small cadre of right-wing tech executives want to take over. It’s hardly surprising that centi-billionaires like Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk would shift the messages in their social media empires to cater to Mr. Trump. What is truly surprising is that everyone else — the same people who once believed in the power of technology to strengthen our society and our democracy — is allowing them to get away with it. The same Silicon Valley leaders who used to trumpet their anti-authoritarian leadership style have gone ominously quiet.
I’m not sure why a man who wrote an essay about how silence (and later emigrating) did protect people in Russia would end that essay with this line. As for why people in Silicon Valley might have the attitude he criticizes - maybe they feel the way that I do? After Trump was elected the first time, I thought the country had made a terrible mistake. After Trump was elected the second time, I think the country knowingly voted for what it wanted - democracy in action. There is still a large minority of Americans who do not deserve what is going to happen, and fighting on their behalf is commendable but I wouldn’t say that it is morally obligatory or a good idea in practice.
A lot of the Obama / Trump / Biden / Trump swing has been propelled by the news cycle and the right-wing consolidation of media institutions. I see a panel full of CIA assets on MSNBC blabbering on about how Zohran Mamdani is going to persecute NYC Jews, and I’m told that this is the left-wing cable news channel of record? I get so many MAGAts blabbering on CNN round tables and popping up on NPR interviews that I’m left to wonder what corner of terrestrial news is safe anymore. WaPo is full of Ross Douthat clones. CBS is getting Bari Weiss as its Editor-in-Chief.
You’re dealing with a population that’s drowning in fascist propaganda. “Those stupid voters asked for this” is far too naive an assumption. People genuinely don’t know who they’re supposed to support. You’ll get folks insisting that Trump is “anti-war” and “pro-Palestine”, simply because that’s what Candice Owens told them. You’ll get folks insisting Kamala Harris ran a perfect campaign, and it was the insidious transgender voters who stabbed her in the back, because that’s what some corporate DNC flaks decided to tell one another on an episode of The View.
/r/The_Donald absolutely dominated Reddit in 2016. Four years later, it was wall-to-wall screaming at Bernie Bros for being misogynistic against Elizabeth Warren and “if you don’t vote for Joe Biden you are a fake black person”. Four years after that, it was GamerGate all over again, with the Conservative subs breaching containment and flooding the site with garbage.
Elon Musk straight up bought Twitter in the middle of all this and made a very bad site orders of magnitude worse.
How do you escape this suffocating miasma of reactionary ideology? Even Lemmy is full of people who are screaming “Tankie” at anyone who suggests The United Fruit Company and Coca-Cola might be run by some bad dudes.
If Democrats ever regain power, it needs to be scorched earth with regard to breaking up media monopolies. That would be a good start.
Then you are just another one of the millions that chose to let evil happen. With all due respect, fuck off.