The Digital Revolution: How it Started, How it’s Going

That Donald Trump will fail or betray his conservative white American supporters is a better bet than its opposite. But as it remains only a probability for now, at the moment I wish to praise him, maybe for the last time, for his under-appreciated destruction of “Barack Obama”—put in quotes here to indicate the failed psy-op and kulturkampf that we knew as “Barack Obama”, as opposed to just the enigmatic and opaque human kernel around which this propagandistic operation was built, the very human and very flawed Barack Obama. The public manipulation campaign “Barack Obama” was a covert revolution producing its own not-so-covert counter-revolution, Donald Trump’s “Maga”. The man whose epic rise set in motion this historical sequence still playing out, Barack Obama, was last seen slouching about the Kamala Harris campaign, noticeably diminished both physically and psychically, weakly slinging the rhetorical grenades about misogyny and black men with which his handlers had armed him before sending him out on—let’s hope for his sake—his last mission. Pity was the most charitable possible reaction and a stunning fall from grace was confirmed.

Needless to say I reject the charges that Obama controls the Biden Administration or the Democratic Party. I do not assign to him a sinister genius like many of his other detractors (an idea almost as silly as “Big Mike” and his giant penis), just as I never assigned to him the charismatic genius that his opponents and acolytes alike claimed back in the day, falling for the feel-good psychological operation that was “Barack Obama” in 2008 (were we ever that young?). Holding yourself apart from one of these domestic propaganda campaigns is all but impossible—one either falls under its spell or resists with effort; either way he’s manipulated and his rational self-interest derailed. And yes it is quite fitting that it was Obama who signed the repeal of the law against domestic propaganda.

My resentment of Obama is of another sort from those who see him as evil, and, yes, it is resentment I confess to, replete with the envy of the obscure man for the famous and celebrated man. Still, it resembles somewhat the resentment of Obama I see in Donald Trump, leading to his early opposition to the Obama presidency, long before the fateful escalator descent. From our wildly divergent vantages, one high one low, Trump and I both saw Barack Obama as a thorough-going fraud.

Donald Trump, who flirted with (and through others was flattered by) the idea of running for president his whole life, saw the mediocre and false Obama lifted on a wave of hysteria, and was affronted (both the obscure like me and the notable like Trump think the same thing when they see such a high-flying mediocrity: it should be me!)

And while Donald Trump may prove equally fraudulent, may have been equally fraudulent this whole time, I see in his political career human vanity working its traditional role as a confounding, random historical factor, in this case upsetting a meticulous, expertly constructed and massively funded operation in public manipulation:

Obama’s sudden rise in 2008 offends the vanity of Donald Trump, who then takes up the birther cause; this in turn offends Barack Obama (made megalomaniacal as he succumbs to the same propaganda directed on the public); Obama, along with his equally oblivious acolytes, indulges in a public humiliation ritual of Trump at the infamous and fateful National Press Club dinner; the traumatic experience compels Donald Trump to run for president in 2016; Trump wins and Obama’s revolution is derailed, his legacy in tatters; Obama’s last desperate foray against Trump on behalf of Kamala Harris—another token and fraud—end what remains of the Obama myth in a pathetic whimper. I wonder if it occurs to Obama or the masters of manipulation responsible for him, but it should: if only they had left Trump alone…

Trump, picking up on a crank conspiracy theory and setting out to expose Obama as a false citizen (as if his passive aggressive attitude toward the United States and its people would have been negated by legal status) exposed something more important, the false nature of his identity and the malice behind his myth.

“Obama is running the Democratic Party” is just more accidental cover for the people and money that actually run it. But none of this is really what I’ve come to talk about. Obama’s handlers took for granted a historical shift would be effected by young people on social media, and they further took for granted these young people would be doctrinaire in their leftist leanings and thus easily manipulated further, a willing herd.

I boarded this train of thought after reading this piece by David Samuels in Tablet:

Something big changed sometime after the year 2000 in the way we communicated with each other, and the means by which we absorbed new information and formed a working picture of the world around us. What changed can be understood as the effect of the ongoing transition from the world of 20th-century media to our current digital landscape. This once-every-five-centuries revolution would have large effects, ones we have only just begun to assimilate, and which have largely rendered the assumptions and accompanying social forms of the past century obsolete, even as tens of millions of people, including many who imagine themselves to reside near the top of the country’s social and intellectual pyramids, continue to imagine themselves to be living in one version or another of the long 20th century that began with the advent of a different set of mass communications technologies, which included the telegraph, radio, and film.

The time was ripe, in other words, for a cultural revolution—which would, according to the established patterns of American history, in turn generate a political one.

In 2008 things were still more in the old order than in the new. Old media was still in charge. Middle-aged columnists equated technological aptitude with use of email. Obama was presented as tech-savvy because of his attachment to his Blackberry. His campaign benefitted from its capture of Silicon Valley and held a clear advantage organizing via the internet. But nothing had really changed yet in how the public accesses and shares information. The old order still commanded the media heights, even if things seemed to move so much faster. “Print” was dying but the dynamics of top-down narrative control had yet to change, and even those who spoke of a new, democratic world of information took for granted this would pose no threat to the false idols of egalitarianism or any other means of control.

The new order was new, revolutionary, democratic, therefore benign and progressive-liberal. Wrongthink—about race, or Jewish power, or feminism—had so long been so effectively suppressed no one could imagine its resurgence via this youthful, technologically advanced—and thus “enlightened”—new order.

Most of the old guard—as they still do—saw nothing false about the contours of the post World War II order. And no one saw Trump coming.

What I did not imagine at the time was that Obama’s successor in the White House would not be Hillary Clinton but Donald Trump. Nor did I foresee that Trump would himself become the target of a messaging campaign that would make full use of the machine that Obama had built, along with elements of the American security state. Being physically inside the White House, it turned out, was a mere detail of power; even more substantial power lay in controlling the digital switchboard that Obama had built, and which it turned out he still controlled.

As I said already I don’t see Obama controlling anything, but Samuels’ point is correct: democracy, by electing Trump twice now, is in direct opposition to the powerful forces that now struggle to maintain control over information and opinion.

Samuels does not oppose top-down manipulation and control of opinion mind you. He cites approvingly Walter Lippman’s ideas about “manufacturing consent” (I learned by his article this was not originally Chomsky’s phrase but Lippman’s approving phrase for media control). In Lippman’s and Samuels’ view the right people would guide the dull mob to ensure order and continuity, if not by telling the truth then by creating a “metaphoric” facsimile of it:

What mattered here was no longer Lippmann’s version of “public opinion,” rooted in the mass audiences of radio and later television, which was assumed to correlate to the current or future preferences of large numbers of voters—thereby assuring, on a metaphoric level at least, the continuation of 19th-century ideas of American democracy, with its deliberate balance of popular and representational elements in turn mirroring the thrust of the Founders’ design. Rather, the newly minted digital variant of “public opinion” was rooted in the algorithms that determine how fads spread on social media, in which mass multiplied by speed equals momentum—speed being the key variable. The result was a fast-moving mirror world that necessarily privileges the opinions and beliefs of the self-appointed vanguard who control the machinery, and could therefore generate the velocity required to change the appearance of “what people believe” overnight.

Forget “democracy”, we should hedge our bets by having only a representation of representative government, “mirror[ing] the thrust of the founder’s design”. Samuels sees the problems as technical—the wrong algorithms. He laments a “self-appointed vanguard” using the speed and reach of the internet to manipulate opinion overnight.

Well that “vanguard” (more like the entrenched forces of old power than a revolutionary vanguard, but) still exists and still operates by creating (not finding) fads. Witness Brat Summer and the quick transformation of Kamala Harris from ridiculed Vice President to frontrunner by virtue of a media and internet full court press.

That sort of manipulation isn’t new, even if its dynamics and tools are different. What’s different is the popular and less controlled forces that defeated it and revealed the hoax portraying Kamala Harris as popular and capable.

To Samuels this probably looks like chaos. Samuels is struggling to here to lament what he can’t say outright: “we have lost control of the media.” Witness this week’s dustup between rootless billionaire weirdo Elon Musk and the populist element of Maga. If the populists lose this battle it won’t be because the forces of, yes, misinformation succeeded in creating the illusion of popular support for Musk’s position or of his position being in the national interest.

Trump and Musk will have to openly defy the popular will. It may not matter—they will get away with it—but it will not be able to mischaracterize it, because the consent part can no longer, at least here on the right, be manufactured. Musk failed in his effort to pose as a populist hero. While Trump has acquired his own “tech bro” faction, people seem to barely recall Silicon Valley’s role in the grand hoax that was “Barack Obama”; it was Silicon Valley that originally facilitated, as part of the Obama coalition, the “woke” revolution Musk makes a great show of opposing. Samuels:

The Obama Democratic Party (ODP) was a kind of balancing mechanism between the power and money of the Silicon Valley oligarchs and their New York bankers; the interests of bureaucratic and professional elites who shuttled between the banks and tech companies and the work of bureaucratic oversight; the ODP’s own sectarian constituencies, which were divided into racial and ethnic categories like “POC,” “MENA,” and “Latinx,” whose bizarre bureaucratic nomenclature signaled their inherent existence as top-down containers for the party’s new-age spoils system; and the world of billionaire-funded NGOs that provided foot-soldiers and enforcers for the party’s efforts at social transformation.

Obama campaigned on “change” but the only genuine change effected was the advent of woke rule and identity politics. Continuity reassuring to the elite reigned in the more substantial aspects of the world order: the wars raged on, Israel’s control over foreign policy continued, demographic and economic displacement continued apace. Another thing lost in this history I find amusing: Joe Biden was selected as Vice President to reassure a nervous elite that it could trust Obama, despite all the heady talk of “change”. What more conventional and pliable figure could they have found to sit co-pilot?

Samuels goes on to lament the woke revolution Obama wrought—very different from the revolutionary “change” he promised, as well as the serial hoaxes beginning with Russiagate, but it’s his obsession with the Iran nuclear deal, which, in his zionist interpretation, is self-evidently against US national interests somehow; he even sees the Iran deal as the first, formative campaign in the long war of misinformation against Trump

Having reported on the Iran deal made it easy to see that Russiagate was a political op, being run according to a similar playbook, by many of the same people. Familiarity with the Iran deal made it easy for reporters at Tablet, particularly Lee Smith, to see Russiagate as a fraud from the beginning, and to see through the methods by which the hallucination was being messaged by the mainstream press.

Samuels’ self-delusion or dishonesty thus works against the value we can draw from his otherwise useful analysis. But his combination of opposition to wokeness and a pro-Israel rightwing position is in line—maybe, maybe not deliberately—with a whole movement we’ve seen take off after Hamas’ October 7 attack. Indeed, Samuels’ own juxtaposition of a supposedly reckless Iran nuclear deal with the woke revolution and the war of misinformation against Trump wouldn’t survive the same critique he applies here generally. Unless of course you accept his apparent position that Israeli and US interests are one and the same.

I’ve written before about the post-October 7 campaign to bring the unruly Trump movement in line with pro-Israel and pro-Jewish sentiment by equating wokeness with opposition to Israeli genocide and “antisemitism”. This campaign reveals another aspect with Musk’s recent revelation as a pro-immigration extremist: his anti-woke pose works as if deliberately to lull immigration restrictionists into forfeiting their concerns and economic nationalism. Forget your displacement and join me in snickering at woke blue-hairs. I suggest not falling for it.

Don’t forget that Musk, while quick to tell you to “fuck yourself in the face” for daring to disagree with him on H1Bs, even to tell another oligarch “fuck you” regarding censorship, rolled over with a whimper when confronted by the ADL, and now combines censorship of disagreements over immigration with censorship of “antisemitism”.

Look for Musk to adopt the “woke right” angle of attack if he hasn’t already.

But hope remains. Despite Trump’s apparent alliance with Musk on H1Bs, his remarks were far from definitive, despite the New York Post’s characterization. Politics are about who gets betrayed. It’s entirely possible Trump can betray Musk before he betrays us.

But if and when Donald Trump betrays you he will have to do it openly, and he will have to weather the storm to follow. To repeat myself, the consent hasn’t been manufactured, and power—thanks to the irascible horde of conditional Trump supporters, the “subtards” and “antisemites”—can no longer front as if it’s doing anything other than defying popular will and national interest to appease money and greater power.

If Trump does in fact betray his base, let’s hope he has his own humiliating denouement a la Obama’s, at least.