The Social Dilemma.
Here are three observations about culture and politics as viewed through the prism of the last days of the Trump administration and the first days of the Biden one.
OBSERVATION #1: The Influencer Economy Has Produced a Base of Reaction
“Everyone is making media at all times,” CNN reporter Elle Reeve reported of January 6 capital siege. “It’s crazy. It’s like, ‘Were you there if you didn’t livestream it?’ And they’re all hoping for that viral moment that will give them more clout on social media.”
The commitment to posting even though this particular “viral moment” would ultimately provide authorities ways to track down the rioters shows the degree to which politics has been recoded, in the Trump Galaxy Brain, as some kind of media project. “Politics is downstream from culture,” Andrew Breitbart, founder of the eponymous hard-right web outlet, once said.
i mean, likeif you re a cooking video person and you get steered to diys, there s nothing wrong with it. but on a platform where there are extremists, it pulls people in and that s what happened to caleb. i have a six-year-old that is being pulled in. youtube bans videos glorifying nazi and things like the holocaust. but it seems like the nazi videos are more subtle than that. the far right has gotten very good at sort of gaming youtube s algorithm, and one of the ways they do that is they kind of cross genres. so they will appeal to, say, gam gamers, and while he s doing that, he ll talk about feminism
fast-tracked, and the president seems to be squashing it. thank you all so much. now to an important story about the way the internet and specifically youtube which so many of our kids are on all day can lead people down idealogical rabbit holes and transform them into political extremists by fueling hyperpartisanship and feeding them a steady diet of conspiracy theories. kevin bruce wrote this front page extraordinary piece titled the making of a youtube radical. kevin, congratulations. what a piece. i want to get to the youtube aspect in a minute, but first, some people could say, there is no way i buy in to some of these viewpoints. but what you profiled was not a radical extremist when he started. tell us how the road goes. this was a 21-year-old guy in west virginia named caleb cain.