If there is ever a peak of the fact-free dystopian politics we’ve endured over the last decade, it will come tonight when Twitter’s — er X’s — billionaire owner Elon Musk interviews billionaire Donald Trump on the social media platform known for the bubble of unreality it creates for users on the left and right alike.
The descent into fantasyland will be fueled by interlocking technological and social realities that have warped the fabric of our culture in the years since smartphones and social media made their debut early in the 21st century.
The first is an old phenomenon. The super-rich create a bubble of anti-reality around themselves by populating their world with a cadre of yes-men who cater to their whims regardless of how loopy they are. This has reached a peak as America has grown more than 813 billionaires, many of whom slather politics with gobs of money in hopes of insulating themselves further from any inconvenient facts, opinions or taxes.
Musk and Trump are two of those billionaires who happen to own social media companies worth billions that make their money by helping the masses obtain their own filtered existence, populated by the yes-men of each person’s selected tribe, whatever flavor of political extremism your taste runs to.
As these social media platforms have grown their audience, the cultural institutions that bring Americans together into a productive and grounded whole have withered. For many Americans, public schools are a cruel joke. Broad-based churches that do not cater to extremism have become increasingly irrelevant. Universities have turned into unipolar political enterprises revered by the tribe whose ideology they share and reviled by those who don’t have a higher education or who hold traditional values.
The centrist media whose job, like public schools and universities, is to create shared knowledge that reflects hard-headed reality have shrunk in circulation and influence, or strayed far from that centrist role becoming, like the social media that undermined their business model, purveyors of comfortable political ideology.
For most Americans who remain connected to reality through work, family and the remnants of social institutions that continue to soldier on in the cultural toxic stew these trends have created, the twisted reality to be put on display tonight by Trump and Musk is distasteful to say the least. That’s why the vast majority of Americans won’t watch, and only a shrinking minority will consume any traditional news about the event, learning of the billionaires’ powwow from snatches heard on talk radio, from Facebook friends or at the water cooler.
The disconnected have their own technological tools that divide them from the political tribes and from each other. Indeed, through smart devices and streaming media, the disconnected can entertain themselves endlessly in the popular culture of any decade from the 1950s on, in increasingly narrow niches rarely penetrated by any word from the world of today. Even Trekkies have a dozen choices of which era of Federation in which they care to cocoon.
Musk and Trump both hope to profit from tonight’s confab by keeping us divided and at each other’s throats while they scoop up millions of individual donations and subscriptions from their fans, who only want to be more and more protected from reality, regardless of whether it is by a demagogic politician or a digital dopamine peddler. Their most powerful opponents will serve up a slop of disapproval while at the same time serving a tribal audience who want their own reality drive by the same technological and social trends that gave us Trump.
Perhaps tonight’s display will be enough to get us all to wake up.
By DAVID MASTIO/Miami Herald
David Mastio, a former editor and columnist for USA Today, is a regional editor for The Center Square and a regular Star Opinion correspondent. Follow him on X: @DavidMastio or email him at dmastio1@yahoo.com