Trump, Tech Weirdos, And The Republican Crusade For Cultural Dominance

Make changing your relationship with social media a New Year's resolution.

On Monday December 16, a 15 year old girl named Natalie Rupnow (known to peers as Samantha) murdered a teacher and fellow student at Abundant Life Christian School in Madison, WI, then killed herself, leaving six surviving victims wounded.

The episode was quickly sorted into our rote and intermittent mass shooting discourse and just as quickly flushed out of the national news.

But there was something about this tragedy that chilled me after I read about it, even more than other, deadlier school shootings we’ve lived through.

Like millions of teenagers, Rupnow seems to have spent a great deal of time on social media, but in her case (and presumably in many, many others) it facilitated contact with white supremacists, neo-Nazis, their ideologies and their hero figures. She’s obviously not the first American mass shooter to leave a digital trail of hateful ideas and associations. But, stepping outside the moment and thinking back on the past decades, I was struck by how frictionless and casual this all has become. There was no need to comb through obscure message boards to find the warning signs everybody missed. They were floating freely on X, Elon Musk’s online engine of bigotry and provocation.

“[L]aw enforcement is examining an X account and others related to the shooting,” according to an ABC News affiliate. “Several mentions of previous shooters and violence can be seen on those accounts. On an X account believed to be used by Rupnow, a post shares a video from a 2015 attack at a school in Trollhattan, Sweden. That post was dated Dec. 7. The two most recent posts were shared minutes before the shooting took place; one was a post with the hand gesture ‘OK,’ followed by a locked Google Doc link.”

This is the hand gesture. And the 2015 attacker in Sweden? He used a knife to target victims with immigrant backgrounds.

I don’t spell this all out to imply or assert that social media radicalized Rupnow into committing an act of murder-suicide. That’s a job for investigators. I mention it for three reasons. First, to note that social media quite obviously didn’t help. Second, that we’re so awash in online celebrations and threats of violence that we no longer wonder whether they reflect anything happening in the physical world—at least until they cross the threshold into real-life. Third, that the free association between young people and extremists was less common and more difficult before Musk—a degenerate in so many ways, but also a fundamentally strange, broken man—bought Twitter and invited the worst of humanity out of hiding.

Naturally, those same cretins sloughed off association with yet another gruesome killing by (once again) spreading a false rumor that Rupnow was trans, and blaming the attack on a defenseless community of strangers. A repugnant new circle of death.

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Many of us think of algorithmic social media as something that began harmlessly enough, maybe even benevolently, before greedy tech investors grokked its revenue-generating potential, and bad actors identified it as a hub for recruiting manipulable people.

In this telling, young technologists like Mark Zuckerberg did nothing so innocent as reinvent the rolodex for the internet age, and only in future iterations did his creation and its cousins begin to poison our society and others.

There’s some truth to that interpretation, but I don’t think it adequately captures the foundational problem with social media, much magnified now that these guys and their friends evolved from clever app developers into corporate titans and ultimately corrupt oligarchs.

That problem is as follows: Social media was never entirely utilitarian, even in its earliest forms. It was invented and popularized and refined by social misfits and weirdos—people who would never thrive on the basis of interpersonal skill—for the purposes of devaluing qualities like social capital, grace, and emotional intelligence.

Even in its earliest iterations we were invited to enter their world, where social interaction is atomized, digitized, and frequently anonymized. To spend more time alone, nurture purely virtual communities, and build reputational clout on the basis of carefully constructed avatars. We didn’t recognize it a couple decades ago (or at least I didn’t) but the antisocial qualities of what we call social media were there from the jump. The initial harms were just small.

Today we attribute an epidemic of loneliness, particularly among younger men, to algorithms, and the easy availability of algorithmic forms of entertainment (gaming, streaming services, social media) that are both addictive and require no human interaction. The algorithms know our habits and tastes. They can make solitude feel fast paced. And because they’re also ubiquitous, they make it harder for truly sociable people to find companionship, as well. Too many of their potential companions are busy scrolling.

We fixate on this epidemic for the harm it might do to people’s mental health, and perhaps to their politics. But an epidemic of loneliness, or of choosing to be alone, necessarily implies a disturbing sequela: the lost muscle memory of pro-social behavior.

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I can’t claim even a square inch of moral high ground above any reader—I spend a lot of time on social media, too. In my defense, I began my professional career in 2005, in a line of work that social media more or less cannibalized a few years later. It’s where newsmakers and news writers gather virtually, and it’s thus become difficult to understand any political story fully without running down its online components.

I’m also just kind of an addict.

But I’ve made two strides that have helped me reduce screen time. Most recently, I’ve moved away from Twitter. More generally, and over years, I’ve also changed the way I think about what I’m doing when I choose to use social media as a form of entertainment. I try to remind myself that I’m helping to fortify a novel culture, one that’s scarcely compatible with important values like pluralism, democracy, and common good. I’m playing into the hands of bad people in a way I never would if it cost me money or required me to be physically present somewhere.

Before the right began its crusade to build, buy out, control, and intimidate mass media, its mantra was that all politics is downstream of culture. When that idea first caught on, conservatives seemed at a loss over what to do about liberal cultural hegemony. They flirted with making right-wing coded movies, and right-wing coded music, and right-wing coded late-night comedy shows, and right-wing institutions of higher learning, almost all of which have turned out to be spectacular failures or grifts.

But through social media they managed to establish a real counterculture without having to build much of anything. All they had to do was forge symbioses with ultrarich, misfit Silicon Valley weirdos, and commit to filling the internet with their ideas—whether by posting like mad or courting creators who’d do it for them.

The resulting counterculture is so much worse than the flawed one its replacing. It’s the infusion of propaganda into everything online, fed to millions of people every minute, through a distribution mechanism that’s as chemically addictive as opioids. It’s a counterculture of incitement, flagrant lying, fantastical conspiracy theories, specters of chaos and disorder.

The embattled mass culture of television, music, movies, etc. has generated plenty of its own nonsense and vileness. But it is forged in shared environments where collaboration and tolerance are necessary, and being in tune with human emotion is essential. The resulting content tends (more often than not) to reflect those pro-social values.

Now that culture is at least bifurcated between what you might call the pre-social media “shared-experience culture” and a modern day “culture of solitude”—where we only feel appreciated when we go viral—we’re seeing that the rightist slogan about culture and politics contained real insight.

It’s not just that people spend their time online creating things or replicating things for the approbation of strangers. Taylor Swift creates things for the approbation of strangers. It’s that these creations are often shameful, unfit for group consumption, by contrast to books or acting performances or athletic feats that generate camaraderie and shared joy. Swifties will regale you for hours with their experiences at Eras Tour concerts. Nobody will chat with a colleague in the break room about the hours they spent the night before scrolling through videos of black people committing acts of violence or the unhinged ravings of Alex Jones.

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We are not likely to boycott social media into collapse, and I applaud embryonic liberal efforts to fill it with less-noxious ideas and truer information, so that the zone isn’t only flooded with Steve Bannon’s figurative shit.

But we should endeavor to use it less and more mindfully. We should associate it with the kinds of physical spaces that would make us feel gross to inhabit—Nazi bars and Klan rallies and trap houses and CPAC—and try to match every minute we spend on these platforms with a minute doing something productive in a real community. Ideally, we should spend the time we save by retreating from social media to create spaces like that—permanent places where other people can seek refuge from the dread-inducing experience of the infinite scroll.

If algorithms continue to cannibalize more and more of our attention, and pro-social alternatives continue to erode, I think we’ll have little left but the forlorn hope that social media eventually implodes, or that the people who control it come to see it as a danger to themselves. Only when it shakes the foundations of their sad lives, or threatens to destroy their wealth—when we reach a mutually assured destruction-like equilibrium—might they change or degrade social media enough to reduce its collective harms.

Reaching that point will be harrowing. Elon Musk apparently spends most of his time playing video games and tweeting, even when he’s acting like he belongs at Mar a Lago. When people mocked him for spazzing out on Donald Trump’s rally stage, his mother scolded them for picking on someone (one of the most powerful people in the world) with a “developmental disorder.” It is all but impossible to imagine him detoxifying the cesspool he’s built unless the power it’s given him blows up in his face. He certainly won’t do it on his own, through introspection and empathy. Perhaps Trump will abuse the powers of his office to harass Mark Zuckerberg and Zuckerberg will transform Facebook into a billion-person forum for backlash to Trump and Musk alike. A man can dream.

But however this story turns, it was a mistake for anyone to assume these guys, particularly an aggrieved, over-compensating loser like Musk, were capable of ushering humanity into a tech-utopian future. Utopia is a place we inhabit together, blissfully. They’ve built places where power and relevance stem from the ability to flourish in solitude. Where those who can’t hack it end up losing their health and happiness and, as in Samantha Rupnow’s case, their minds.