They Want Us Distracted & Traumatized
On executive orders, postmodern politics, and how to stay focused in the new Trump era.
On his first day back in office, Donald Trump signed over 20 executive orders on issues ranging from immigration, climate, public health, government reform, and trans rights. The sheer volume of new information drew the media and left-leaning activists in as many directions, with the usual infographic-makers and TikTok commentators scrambling to share information about everything from ICE raids, relocation and passport info for trans people, updates on the TikTok ban, and more.
In the online leftist political ecosystem, everyone has to share everything, all of the time.
It’s important to note, however, that an important part of political warfare in the post-truth era is overwhelming the public with information, both false and true, to attack truth itself. Pioneered in Russia, a major strategy of governments is not just to feed you with incorrect information, but to feed you with so much information—some real, some fake—that you get overwhelmed trying to determine what’s true. The point us to make you so stressed that you give up.
This is easier than ever in our increasingly fragmented media system where everyone is consuming their own news sources and algorithms push out the most enraging, terrifying content possible. Society has always been fractured on the basis of “left versus right”, but now we’re fractured at the level of the individual: everybody’s personal media-curation algorithm is feeding them slightly different bits of information with heavy editorialization. Ask your best friend, partner, sibling, or anyone else you’re extremely close with IRL to pull out their phone and compare your social media feeds side-by-side; you’ll probably find that despite sharing many of the same values as you, your feeds will be completely different. In this five-minute video posting on Trump’s inauguration day, Hasan Minhaj accurately describes the circularity of the media cycle and how it benefits nobody except the ruling class: so long as we keep arguing online instead of getting up and taking our power back through direct action, they will keep winning.
