Some of you will disagree with this. And perhaps the future will vindicate your criticism. But I don’t think we should be distracted by Trump’s nonsense about Greenland, the Panama Canal or bum rushing Canada into becoming a U.S. state. We’re all under the grip of that line: “When someone tells you who they are, believe them.” But that doesn’t always work with con men and pathological liars. None of this stuff is going to happen. At a minimum, we shouldn’t get pulled into these outrage cycles or pretending any of this is a thing until you see the U.S. deploying military assets in Central America or … Maine? (I’m not sure where your deploy military assets to menace Greenland but wherever that is, wait for that.)

I saw this CNN article about how Danish officials “fear Trump is much more serious about acquiring Greenland than in first term.” And I get it: the U.S. is a nuclear power and Trump’s a freak. I don’t begrudge them being concerned. But I restate the point. None of this stuff is going to happen. What’s possible is a bunch of bullshit followed by some negotiations in which the Kingdom of Denmark agrees to some minor changes to the existing agreement which allows the U.S. military pretty vast liberties to defend and operate in Greenland. (That’s the NAFTA model: bullshit followed by some discussions and then huge fanfare for marginal changes to existing agreements.) It is the same story that we’ve talked about in other contexts: the constant stream of threats and maybes, all of which create what in this case may not be a penumbra of fear so much as a penumbra of reaction. Absurd tempests in teapots, the effect of which is to have everyone else in a pattern of reaction. He acts — or really doesn’t act, he jabbers — and everyone else reacts. And spin maybe 12 of those things at any one time. And that’s life under Trump.

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As a follow up to my post below I want to return to a more technical point but one which is critical to understand as the baseline for any discussion about social media and “platforms.” “Network effects” are an inherent feature of the tech industry. You can go all the way back to what now seems like the quaintly primitive tech of VHS and Betamax. They are also embedded at the core of Silicon Valley/VC business culture in which 9 out of 10 investments fail but one (you hope) has staggering returns which make up for all the rest. “Hockey stick growth” is another side of this many-sided coin at the center of early 21st century capitalism. It is the hunt for a business proposition in which costs are chained to arithmetic growth and returns are exponential. If one of your ten bets holds something like that possibility, you can afford to invest in a bunch of dry holes.

I noted yesterday how Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg is rushing to jump on the Trump tech bandwagon. He signaled this again when he announced that Meta is getting out of the content moderation business and adopting Musk-Era Twitter’s “community notes” model. He further added that he would relocate the remaining content moderation operations to Texas where people are less biased — yes, he really said that.

I want to make a broader point. The issue here is that one of the richest men in the world and one of the very most powerful has made himself and his vastly powerful tech platforms appendages of the Trump political machine and dedicated himself to flowing money to the Trump family directly. But let’s not get too upset about his “content moderation” decisions. The content moderation pivot is an example of the former decision, a carefully timed signal to curry favor. But it’s not some big disaster. The whole existence of it was just a ploy to get out from under his company’s last PR disaster back in 2017 and 2018. And on a more specific level we should be agnostic at best about whether Meta does “content moderation” at all. We should always have been highly skeptical of any corporate-backed effort at scale to determine what is and isn’t accurate information. This isn’t a new thought on my part. It goes back to what I was saying in 2018 and before.

We’re seeing a lot unfold all at once today. It seems overwhelming and it’s meant to seem overwhelming. That’s the central point — not just a side effect of a lot of things happening at once. I think of it like being in an iMax theater. Maybe even one of those more immersive ones where there’s percussive sound and the seats shake. One of those movies where you’re on a roller coaster or maybe hang gliding. You know you are sitting in a theater, not in motion at all. But the visual stimulus is so overwhelming you cannot help gripping the arm rests like you’re a thousand feet in the air or in free fall.

Of course it’s not exactly the same. This isn’t just a movie. Something real is happening. A lot of real things are happening. We’re not just sitting in a theater. But the point of all of this is to create the apparently overwhelming and unchallengeable feeling that Trump is all-powerful, that his team is all-knowing and have everything figured out, and that nothing can stop him.

That’s simply not true. So don’t forget that, entirely by design, you’re being overwhelmed with sensory stimulus. It’s not real.

You’ve likely seen that Mark Zuckerberg, newly re-branded as Donald Trump’s fluffy lap monkey, has announced that Facebook and Meta’s other properties are getting out of the content moderation business. They’ll move in the direction of “community notes,” semi-functional community moderation which Elon Musk pioneered at Twitter. What interested me much more was the Axios run-down of the news: “Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg are of one mind. The most powerful global information platforms should be governed by free speech — and the people — not by the platforms themselves.”

Who are we kidding here?

I’ve always been wary of the whole concept of “misinformation” in the context of corporate platform moderation. Not against precisely, but highly skeptical that you can actually come to such open and shut definitions at scale. But it’s all basically an impossible skein to untangle because of the unavoidable scourge of the platform monopolies themselves. These are private companies, not any kind of actual public square. Let them do whatever they want. Don’t do them the favor of granting the premise that their advertising and data platform is a public good. And yet the freedom to spin up untrammeled monopolies makes the conceit half true. There’s simply no extracting a “free speech” from these engines since they’re algorithms all the way down.

But again, who are we kidding here?

From TPM Reader JB …

Trump has promised to do a bunch of things on day 1. Why aren’t Democrats taking the worst of them and raising the cost of doing them? It is political malpractice. The easiest would be to say that Trump is going to pardon the cop killers of January 6. No deep thinking, no multi clause sentences,  no saying there was or wasn’t an insurrection, just that he is going to pardon the violent cop killers of January 6. Over and over. Let him split hairs. He can deny it. Then direct the press to the officers themselves.  That mob killed Capitol Hill police. Tell the press to go talk to the Capitol Hill police who were there on January 6. Then say he is anti-police. He is with the criminals. Over and over.

Next: Tulsi Gabbard loves Syrian dictators who gas their own people. This is who is going to keep us safe?

We don’t have to win everything, we just need to push back where he is soft. He is flooding the zone. We can do the same. Cop killers and dictators who gas people…those are his kind of people.

The group is one big eye roll.

Through the spiked Washington Post endorsement editorial to the recent spiked editorial cartoon, it’s been difficult to get a precise read on Jeff Bezos’s cozying up to Donald Trump. As I wrote back in late October, there are very rational reasons for Bezos to want to avoid being on Trump’s shit list. Above all else, Trump isn’t nice. Amazon is a phantasmagoria of anti-trust problems. Trump wouldn’t need to break a lot of norms to sic the Justice Department on it. Amazon is also a major, major federal contractor. Same applies there. There’s no right to government contracts. Then there’s something that doesn’t get discussed much. SpaceX now has a dominant hold on satellite deployment and owns and controls like half the operating satellites in near-Earth orbit. But Bezos’s BlueOrigin isn’t quite an also ran. It still has a shot at being a competitor to SpaceX and Bezos reportedly now focuses most of his energy there. He at least needs Trump’s friendship to have a shot at that.

In that context came news last night that Amazon has agreed to underwrite and license a documentary about the life of past and future First Lady Melania Trump.

The defeated often hearten themselves with the belief that the verdict of history will be on their side. The reality is that history seldom has a verdict. It’s not like a trial where an unchanging judgment is handed down. That whole concept is mostly wrongheaded, and when there is such a judgment it is always contingent, subject to perspectives of future people we can’t hope to understand.

Today we’re seeing some commemorate the January 6th, 2021 insurrection as a shameful chapter of the past while we see a more consequential replay of the formalization of the 2024 election which looks more like a present-day vindication. Donald Trump refused to accept the results of the 2020 election, resorted to chicanery and eventual violence to upend the results of that election and to overthrow the republic itself. He failed, managed to evade legal repercussions for his actions and is now returning to power as the result of a subsequent election. Those seeking to commemorate that day four years ago as a shameful chapter upon which we are now hoping to close the book seem to ignore that we are beginning a whole new book written by the author of that shameful chapter.

A better way to look at all of this is that we remain in an intense, sometimes violent and close to deadlocked struggle over the future of the country. It is no more done today or tomorrow than it was four years ago.

Over the last four days, the bizarre Cybertruck fire outside a Trump hotel in Las Vegas has run from comical interlude to possible terrorist incident to tragic suicide of another veteran of America’s forever wars. Each of these descriptions still captures an important part of the story. As I noted yesterday, while Matthew Livelsberger appears to have had a series of combustible and likely abusive relationships going back many years he also appears to have suffered from PTSD and possibly a traumatic brain injury since returning from a tour of duty in 2019. (I’m tentative on the spousal abuse front only because for now the direct evidence for that that I’m aware of comes only from the friend of his ex-wife.) But at least for the moment there is a pretty striking lack of attention to the political motives he expressed in at least two documents or what I guess we might call minifestos that investigators found on his iPhone.

Those documents denounce Democrats and demand they be “purged” from Washington, by violence if necessary, and express the hope that his own death will serve as a kind of bell clap for a national rebirth of masculinity under the leadership of Donald Trump, Elon Musk and Bobby Kennedy Jr.

Did you miss that stuff?

Yeah, me too!