Save this storySave this storySave this storySave this story
Kyle Monson, the founder of a creative agency, felt overwhelmed by the news in the aftermath of the 2024 election. So he and his wife turned to binge-watching the reality series “Vanderpump Rules,” which follows a rambunctious crew of waitstaff around a Los Angeles restaurant, as a distraction—“to flush our brains,” he told me. The two were not previously reality-television devotees—they usually prefer higher-concept streaming dramas such as “Silo,” on Apple TV+—but they were drawn to the show’s pleasingly low stakes. It’s “a bunch of people making bad choices with no actual bearing on our lives, or any kind of impact on the world,” Monson said. In the early days of the second Trump Administration, as the new-old President and his associates have sought to dismantle large swaths of the federal government, I’ve heard similar expressions of retreat from people who had previously been paying close attention to the news. Despite the severity of DOGE’s upheaval, there is a desire to tune in to something unrelated. My informal survey asking what such distressed-but-disaffected Trump opposers were distracting themselves with turned up other reality-TV shows including “Survivor” and “Culinary Class Wars” as well as nostalgic rewatches, such as the original “E.R.”
Others have taken up more analog practices: playing drums, crocheting, reading Irish literature. Carly Eiseman, an artist in Los Angeles, returned to an activity she had taken up at other moments that she felt in crisis, including after 9/11 and during the George W. Bush Administration: sewing together patchworks of vinyl-album sleeves. “I’ve also found myself organizing and listening to a lot of records to try and be offline and not doomscroll,” she said. The need for immersive distraction seems to rise in tandem with how relentless the news is.
This is a dramatic reversal from eight years ago, during the advent of the first Trump Administration, when social media instantly became a battleground, and closely following politics was cast as a civic duty. News media and digital platforms came together to broadcast a message of resistance. The so-called Trump Bump benefitted publications and independent voices online. (Long before the 2024 “podcast election,” January, 2017, saw the creation of “Pod Save America.”) The Washington Post’s post-election slogan of “Democracy Dies in Darkness” was a clarion call for paying attention. Twitter became a hub for real-time anti-Trump messaging and organizing, including the pink-hatted Women’s March. User-generated content on social networks fought against the deluge of distraction that Trump himself created: as one 2017 Vox headline put it, “Trump Picks Cultural Fights to Distract Americans from His Policies and Their Results.” At the time, social media could be seen as the signal amid the noise, the place to figure out what to focus on.
Now Twitter is X, and it’s owned by Elon Musk, who presents himself almost as co-President with Trump, appearing in the Oval Office and meeting with world leaders. Even as he exercises power in the government, Musk takes a posture of grievance on his X account, where he posts incessantly. (Bluesky, the platform most resembling old-school Twitter, has emerged as a hub of liberal politics, meaning that it often seems to be populated solely by journalists and lawyers.) Mark Zuckerberg has insured that Meta’s social networks toe the Trump line, disabling fact-checking and further slowing down moderation. Even TikTok, a haven of mindless scrolling for Americans ever since the pandemic, has been relentlessly politicized; in the midst of an ambiguous ban in the U.S., it was recently restored to Apple and Google app stores after a letter to the corporations from Trump’s Attorney General, Pam Bondi, assuring them that they would not be punished for hosting it. The id of the Internet has taken its place in front of the cameras, driving the news from Washington. There may be less of a need to log on.
Doomscrolling, as Eiseman referenced—the overindulgence in anxiety-inducing news stories and commentators shouting in text online—accomplishes even less than it did before, because Internet discourse lacks any coherent direction. There is no longer a clean division of anti- and pro-Trump; the field is crowded and the President himself can appear at times sidelined by larger forces. The Democratic Party and its organizations seem at a loss to develop any kind of unifying messaging in the short term. But that inertia may be intensified by how the social-media ecosystem has palpably decayed since the late twenty-tens, and not just because the politics of the platforms have shifted toward Trump. A.I. is rampant, algorithmic feeds such as Instagram’s have been known to favor posts from businesses and aggregators over individuals, and Meta’s social networks have suppressed political content by default. Online discussion is increasingly driven by independent “creators,” who publish podcasts, videos, or newsletters. The experience of using social media lately is less about interactive socializing than passively consuming broadcast content, which may intensify feelings of powerlessness. Fabio Hanelt, a student in Germany, told me that he turned to Reddit to observe political trends: it may not be wholly reliable for news, but the platform, where users react in real time, has a persistently human quality.
Jordan Fraade, an urban planner in Brooklyn, was a “super active” Twitter and X user, but only recently cut it off entirely, he told me. “I’ve pulled back considerably from social media and replaced it with a group chat.” The group-chat members create a kind of collective, personal filter for current news which is both less manic and more reliable. Donnie Berkholz, a technology executive in Minneapolis, told me that he has carefully pruned down his news consumption habits during Trump 2.0. He found himself reading local and international news outlets more often than national publications; he also set his news alerts to deliver only at certain times of day, before or after meals. There’s an irony to the intentional disengagement: this time around, the wreckage of institutions is much more immediate, without the buffer of the first Administration’s conscientious objectors, and Trump’s barrage of distractions perhaps more consequential.
As a journalist, I find it vital to follow the details of the second Trump Administration. But, when I try to escape for even a moment, I end up distracted from my distraction by current events. The latest buzzy prestige streaming series, “Severance,” about the capitalist splitting of the self in an austere dystopia, struck me as a little too pointed, as the U.S. government appears potentially on the path to becoming an A.I.-driven corporation. I tried to watch the Star Wars series “Andor,” but I realized that it’s about fomenting resistance against an extractive authoritarian regime taking over the galaxy. Part of the story involves a planet rendered uninhabitable by an imperial mining project. Just as I was watching, Trump was trying to bargain for half of Ukraine’s mineral rights. ♦
Sourse: newyorker.com
