The New State Media

Courage is sometimes as simple as a willingness to name what you see, without fear or favour. In the US we are currently witnessing a bizarre coup, targeting our civil service and Treasury, instigated by the world’s richest man and a group of young men in his employ that I can only describe as a cadre of groyper termites. The fear that this has caused among those who are cursed enough to be well-informed and clear-eyed in this moment is beyond words. Even the briefest glance at social media, in the many moments when I fail to take my own advice, reveals a great sucking wound of terror. 

There is an immediate emergency before us, a five-alarm fire that has to be put out by any means necessary.

But, for the courageous among you, it may also help to both understand how we got here and how we might slowly pour a new foundation to rebuild on. Let’s begin with a bit of clarity about one of this crisis’ chief causes before we discuss solutions. All too much of it comes back to social media and, particularly, who owns it. Any strategy from here on out must be clear-eyed about this.

It is not a coincidence that Elon Musk is the man who has been empowered to vandalise our civil service and peep at the personal information of potentially every American who has ever interacted with the federal government. This state of affairs, twisted beyond parody or humour, is the apotheosis of a right-wing realignment of the C-suite. From Patrick Soon-Shiong to Mark Zuckerberg, and the likes of Jeff Bezos, Shou Zi Chew, Musk himself, Marc Andreessen, and others, Trump has been collecting compliant billionaires like it’s his latest hobby. 

What links these people is their stranglehold over new and old media alike: from Jeff Bezos’ increasingly censorious approach to the storied Washington Post, to Soon-Shiong’s even clumsier efforts to do the same at the Los Angeles Times, billionaire ownership of legacy media has striven to aid Donald Trump and mute opposition to him. In a manoeuvre so heavy handed it could’ve come from a political cartoon, the Post censored Ann Telnaes’ final satire for the paper: a cartoon depicting billionaires, including Jeff Bezos himself, genuflecting to a gluttonous Trump. 

Yet as worrying as these efforts are, the barons who control social media have done far more damage. TikTok displayed what amounted to an in-kind donation to Trump to its millions of users, thanking the man by name in multiple unavoidable landing-page messages: “"As a result of President Trump's efforts, TikTok is back in the U.S.!” Those “efforts,” by the way, amounted to Trump inviting Google and Apple to flout the law by allowing TikTok to remain downloadable. While neither took Trump up on the offer, it was prescient in its stated intention of illegally circumventing an act of Congress; brazenly ignoring Article I of the Constitution has turned out to be the theme of Trump’s first two weeks back in office. 

Meanwhile, Mark Zuckerberg’s bending of the knee has been well-documented already, including here. But the scale of its petty cruelties (like taking away trans and non-binary themed Messenger backgrounds), and its more obvious licencing of hatred of LGBT people—especially trans people—as well as the dramatic elevation of right-wing celebrities and politicos to high positions at Meta, all point to a desire to tilt the table in Trump’s favour.

And what of Twitter? The site had long ago become an especially fell megaphone for the far-right, with its algorithm now set to juice right-wing content at the expense of anything to the left of Himmler. The sense of swimming upstream against the whitest of whitewater rapids is palpable for people trying to use the site for left-of-centre politics or, indeed, for anything Musk doesn’t personally approve of that day. Meanwhile, his capricious banning of anyone he dislikes should put paid to any of his “free speech warrior” pretensions, which should long ago have been dismissed as an even worse joke than Musk himself. 

Add to this the fact that Musk seems to be trying to force government agencies to use Twitter—itself a deeply corrupt act that would force citizens to potentially sign up for a privately-owned website in order to receive critical missives from their own government—and a dark picture begins to take shape. A useful frame for that picture can be found in a recent study published by Wooseok Kim and his colleagues, whose analysis concludes with the chilling suggestion that media indoctrination, combined with the repression of civil liberties, is essential to the survival of autocratic regimes—more so, even, than mere physical repression. It is for this reason that Peruvian autocrats bribed TV station editors at a rate of over a hundred times that of politicians.  To the extent that the chaos of the new Trump Administration can be said to have a strategy, or at least a tendency, it is lurching towards those precise coordinates.

Musk and his oligarchic allies are putting their thumbs on the scale for Trump. Only time will tell exactly how deep their influence campaign ran during the 2024 election. After all, Zuckerberg deprioritised all political content on Meta platforms during the campaign, and then switched it back on after Trump won. It’s not hard to argue that it all benefitted Trump and made it even harder for Democrats to get their message across. A more controversial claim is that social media-driven narratives about the economy helped depress enthusiasm for the Democrats at the worst possible time. Evidence is starting to accumulate for the thesis, and it should come as no surprise. Right now it’s hard to say how much of this was deliberate versus what the political left tends to do to itself online, but it’s not difficult to see it becoming a strategy moving forward now that Meta, Twitter, and TikTok have pledged the most shamefully naked fealty to Trump.

Post-election, these commitments to the most naked bias have only deepened, along with an obvious attempt to redirect considerable patronage towards the pet projects of tech barons. Musk wants advertisers back on Twitter, and wants government contracts for xAI; he’s using his proximity to Trump to get both, and he’ll likely inspire bolder imitators.

It adds up to social media becoming state media, just as the legacy press is starting to be hollowed out by other oligarchs.

So, what’s one to do? Even before all this vandalism and looting in DC stops, there’s merit in considering the shape of resistance, after all.

The tenth amendment solution

There is absolutely no hope of federal regulation at this time, true. But the Tenth Amendment Solution remains available to us in a wide variety of areas; protecting our civil rights, first and foremost, as states like Illinois and California are trying to do. 

“The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people,” are words that will need to work overtime for the next few years. If people like Musk and Zuckerberg seek to become blatant partisans and apparatchiks, then it is incumbent on states with independent governments to subpoena them at every opportunity—there’s no question that the actions of Musk and his teen boy squad have profound consequences for every state, for instance, and his recent attempts to illegally deny payments to disfavoured groups should qualify. Make a spectacle of accountability here.

States must adapt to this terrain with a clarion message: if you abandon all pretence of neutrality, we’ll do the same. If the Zuckerbergs of the world will behave in a flagrantly partisan way (for instance, by suggesting that Texas-based content moderators would be fairer than California-based moderators), then so will every American state not under Trump’s thumb.

California excluding Tesla from its proposed EV subsidy is an excellent first step for punishing an out of control oligarch, but more is needed. Asset seizures, regulatory compliance investigations, and more can be undertaken to hack at the likes of Tesla and Twitter.

But what about more systematic measures? 

The California Consumer Privacy Act and the California Privacy Rights Act are models here that can and must be built on—for instance, now is the time for my home state of Washington to get its act together and pass its own version of this law. California alone has enormous weight in the Union, but imagine if every state with Democratic leadership took on Big Tech with tighter regulations that would ensure Elon Musk gets even less sleep than usual. It could be the beginning of a Blue State regulatory alliance whose primary aim is to punish those who try to curry favour with the new Administration by following Musk or Zuckerberg’s example. At the very least it can tie them up in litigation.

The primary focus for this Tenth Amendment approach should begin from a focus on privacy rights and, above all, instantiating a right to control one’s data—to know how it is being used and to withhold consent if at all possible. This can productively restrain current business models as well as the proposed next steps being taken with generative AI, whose potential is immense but is currently being channelled into truly destructive ends. Such regulations will not be lost as models for the rest of the world, particularly smaller, middle powers who can be inspired to work together in the manner of American states. (Not for nothing, but it also seems clear from now that Zuckerberg and Musk in particular want to use Trump as a battering ram to break down EU regulations; a united-front blue state fightback could help weaken such efforts, forcing the companies to fight on many fronts.)

Laws that focus on a citizen’s right to control their data and experience are a vital first step to erode the power of these companies. Indeed, their generative AI fantasies require the acquiescence of whole populations, never mind the individual rights-holders of certain intellectual properties. By modelling more consumer protections after the EU’s GDPR—and, perhaps, by being bolder and labelling such protections as basic civil rights in a digital age—we can chip one market after another away from the empires of Zuckerberg-esque monopolists. 

And then, on the morning after, when powerful governments like the US’s are back in the hands of responsible legislators, we can talk about finally breaking up those monopolies once and for all. 

Move like water

What about the rest of us, however?

Well, much as I dearly wish it, we can’t all just log off from social media entirely. What we can do, however, is get smarter about social media use and rebuild the counterculture that helped train this thing called the online left. It was not social media that first built that counterculture, but a loosely connected ring of forums, blogs, websites and more besides.

From proto-social-platforms like Livejournal to the proliferation of group blogs that served as grassroots news and opinion publications (like Questioning Transphobia, the place where I cut my teeth as an online writer 15 years ago) these networks were vital for establishing an un-jammable signal that provided both a counternarrative to the legacy media and mainstream politics, and a community-building exercise that forged new ties between disparate minorities. 

Substack isn’t it, but Ghost might be (disclosure: Liberal Currents is powered by Ghost, but I think that just makes my point, doesn’t it?). Substack’s failure to meet the moment is made manifest by their willingness to both-sides democratic backsliding—though I won’t tell you to not follow your favourite writers on Substack if that’s where they end up staying. I’d just encourage you to build platforms elsewhere; personal websites, Patreon, wherever you can.

For now, platforms like Bluesky also remain notionally independent and can be good places to gin up virality when that’s what’s needed. I remain deeply sceptical of Bluesky’s promises of being “billionaire proof” or whether true federation will be achievable or even desirable for most of the site’s users, but for now a flawed tool is better than one owned by Elon Musk or Mark Zuckerberg. 

And realistically, that’s the point here. To flow away from depending on these compromised platforms for getting the word out, organising, and simply thriving. There is no dignity or resistance in using Elon Musk’s Twitter. But, as he pushes to make it an unofficial organ of the government, the time has come to tar and feather it with the dread label of ‘establishment.’ We need to lean into the fact that by aligning themselves so closely with the government in power, none of these sites can be said to be part of any kind of counterculture—if they ever were. 

The risk of Twitter and Facebook being turned into party organs cannot be overstated; whatever fantasies one may entertain of using Musk and Zuckerberg’s platforms against them should be abandoned. It is very likely that on a scale never before seen, opposition will be stymied, downranked, and silenced on their platforms. A place where people cannot say the word ‘cis’ for fear of offending Elon Musk’s delicate anti-trans sensibilities is not a place where ordinary people can build power.

Regaining a sense of being the rebels who defend speech and human dignity against censorious, chronically uncool people will be critical cultural work over the next few years. It will be an important plank of messaging moving forward for any Popular Front that resists this Administration, and it will help build a reliable constituency of voters eager to throw the bums out. And the fact that our oligarchs have so firmly aligned themselves with executive power should make that work much easier.

How to fix a pipeline

But that loose and distributed network of blogs, websites, publications, and small-bore platforms also needs to be harnessed somehow. In all the ridiculous hand-wringing about how the left needs a Joe Rogan, what has been neglected is the simple fact that the American far-right media “floods the zone” because they’re being lavishly paid to do so. Sites that would never be able to support themselves on the basis of their popularity alone are propped up as memetic engines because of the investments of donors and billionaires.

If centre-left parties across the globe want to get serious about fighting this wave of incipient fascism they need to do the same. We need opposition media outlets that are independent of the influences of the far-right and corporate sponsorship. The reality is that the Democratic Party’s media strategy has been abysmal on this front; instead of cultivating influencers, they’ve floundered in a social media environment that is hostile to them on two fronts.

To the extent that there has been a “leftist Joe Rogan”—edgy, macho, costumed as anti-establishment and scenting as taboo—it has been left-wing media that is resolutely opposed to the Democratic Party, such as the Chapo Trap House podcast and its lesser imitators. Thus, while right-wing outlets like the Daily Caller work hand-in-hand with Republicans to batter Democrats and push memes and ideas that harm the party’s electoral chances… so does a lot of the left-wing online media ecosystem. This pattern needs to be reversed with immediate effect.

This is, obviously, a question about where big money donors can invest their considerable resources, but we also live in an age where small dollar donations from ordinary people have fuelled major campaigns; redirecting some of that truly public patronage towards indy media would be a good start. 

If big money donors and crowdfunders alike are looking for effective places to invest, they might instead try to finance such an opposition media network, sponsor online influencers, and get them working with the Democratic Party directly—a Party which rapidly needs to get over its allergy to such arrangements. For all the mockery directed at the likes of Chuck Schumer for making terrible skeets that read like suicidal zen koans about egg prices, this isn’t really the nub of the problem. The real problem is that we lack an opposition online media to pump lines that are favourable to progressive parties.

It may seem anathema to people like me who get misty eyed about truly independent media (like Liberal Currents!) and find the idea of a party newspaper distasteful. But it will be a critical component of a larger architecture of resistance to the Trump Administration. It is, after all, a pipeline that can connect people to a political structure capable of overwhelming the neo-fascists, and seed ideas and narratives where people actually live online.

It’s certainly better than the current environment that undermines Democrats from both ends. It won’t be easy to reconstitute, but it’s a better use of money than a lot of what was spent on the Harris campaign, to be blunt. Indeed, such donations needn’t come from the party directly, but rather from donors looking to maximise the efficacy of their big-dollar donations. Now is the time. And the net effect will also be to continue to break up the power of the broligarchs’ platforms. 

These are imperfect solutions that require a great deal of buy-in (in some cases, literally). But we are left with few alternatives right now as we try to lay the groundwork for ensuring people like Marc Andreesen can never again lay siege to democratic institutions. Trump’s duct-taped jalopy of a coalition is already starting to come apart as people realise that a lot of what’s now happening isn’t what they voted for. But there’s still so much more to do: even as we put out the fires there’s merit to pouring new foundations to replace what has been lost. Eventually, one day, in the Goddess’ good time, we’ll be able to implement federal regulations and get positive caselaw from the Supreme Court that will put paid to the monopolists and Gilded Age fetishist broligarchs. 

Until then, we need to use the levers at our disposal: state law, diffuse organising online, and a reinforcement of opposition media. We cannot break the broligarchs yet, but we can be the acid that dissolves the load bearing structures of their power, starting tonight.  

Featured image is Illustration of a printing press and a composing stick, Encylopaedia Britannica vol. 1 (1768)