The Algorithmic Cage

Shortly before President George W. Bush was reelected, in 2004, an anonymous Bush-administration source told The New York Times, “We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality.” Those in what the adviser called “the reality-based community” would be left “studying that reality—judiciously, as you will.” Then “we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out.”

Arrogant as this declaration was, I now wonder whether it was merely premature. Although Bush won the 2004 election, reality came crashing down rather rapidly—Bush’s agenda failed in Congress, the American people came to view the war in Iraq as needless folly, Republicans lost control of Congress in 2006, and the economy tumbled into the Great Recession in 2008, after which Democrats recaptured control of the White House.

Prior to the invasion of Iraq, many Americans were wrongly convinced, because of a “reality” the Bush administration had managed to “create,” that Iraq had played some part in 9/11 or that it had a large arsenal of weapons of mass destruction. But actual reality intruded. That was before Americans began to be dependent on social media or to see the world through their phones. Will actual reality ever intrude today? The private companies in control of social-media networks possess an unprecedented ability to manipulate and control the populace, to keep them in a kind of algorithmic cage divorced from reality.

[Franklin Foer: The dictatorship of the engineer]

The newly inaugurated Trump administration bears many of the worst hallmarks of the Bush era. Like the Bush administration, the Trump administration seeks to purge the federal government of dedicated, competent civil servants in favor of sycophantic loyalists. Like the Bush administration, the Trump administration has little regard for constitutional or legal barriers to its authority. And like Bush supporters once did, the Trump administration’s underlings speak of their leader in cult-like tones of reverence, with the single-minded dogmatism of zealots on what they believe to be a holy mission. No longer confined to the Emerald City of the Baghdad Green Zone, imperial life has come back to haunt the capital, the lawlessness of the post-9/11 Bush era returned in an even more grotesque, exaggerated fashion as the governing philosophy of that administration’s Republican successors.

This time, however, making reality falls within the confines of the imperator’s capabilities. The presence of Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, Google CEO Sundar Pichai, Apple CEO Tim Cook, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, and TikTok CEO Shou Zi Chew—dubbed the “broligarchs” by Scott Roxborough—at Trump’s inauguration was an ominous sign. Along with Elon Musk, the far-right billionaire and owner of X, who with Trump’s blessing appears to have illegally asserted control over parts of the federal government, these tycoons represent a tech elite that collectively controls the mediums through which Americans collect and assess information, and therefore determine much of what Americans see and hear on a daily basis. Before Trump was reelected, social-media companies had a profit motive to keep people attached to their screens as long as possible, which was bad enough. Now Trump has made clear with his threats that he expects them to use their power to prop up his administration. They have all, at least symbolically, demonstrated their loyalty. Bezos even interfered with the editorial independence of The Washington Post, the newspaper he owns, to prevent it from endorsing Trump’s opponent, and his underlings have proceeded to dismantle the institution piece by piece.

Although many Trump allies spent much of his first term and all of the Biden administration complaining about “woke capital,” or corporate capture by liberal cultural forces, it was obvious from the beginning that they were never interested in curtailing corporate power, only in controlling it for their own purposes. The purpose now is to impose their version of reality on the public, even as they pursue an agenda that is nothing short of ruinous.

They have said so in their own words. Musk, who in return for financing Trump’s campaign with hundreds of millions of dollars has been rewarded with unprecedented influence in the administration, has said that he wants to impose “some temporary hardship” on Americans by cutting federal spending to “ensure long-term prosperity.”

I speak billionaire fluently, so allow me to translate. When Musk says he wants to run the government like a business, he means that he wants to slash the benefits it provides. When he says the government needs to “live within its means,” he means it needs to cut taxes on billionaires and cut services for everyone else. And when he says “temporary hardship,” what he has in mind is that he and his friends will continue to live lives of inconceivable luxury while millions struggle to make ends meet.

[Read: A handbook for dealing with Trump threats]

When Americans begin to suffer—as Musk has said they will—the aim will be to use the tech industry’s control over what the public sees and hears to trick people into believing that things are not occurring as they are or that someone else is to blame.

Zuckerberg made his supplicant pilgrimage to Trump’s resort at Mar-a-Lago and then altered the terms of his social networks to make the distribution of right-wing propaganda on his network easier, defending the changes as related to “free speech” even as users of Meta apps reported left-wing content being suppressed. (Meta has insisted that it did not intentionally hide posts.) X has been a cesspool of racist, pro-Trump propaganda since Musk bought it, a fact that the so-called free-speech absolutist has tried to suppress with frivolous lawsuits.

Mainstream-media outlets have plenty of faults. Many of their business leaders are already capitulating in advance to Trump’s efforts to bully them into compliance, agreeing to needless but lucrative settlements in order to end Trump’s frivolous libel suits. News organizations get things wrong, make mistakes, and sensationalize material that need not be sensationalized. But by and large, they seek to tell their audiences the truth. By contrast, social-media platforms have one purpose, which is to keep people attached to their devices. It does not matter to them if what they are showing people is real or factual; what matters is that no one stops scrolling. The goal is to keep Americans in that cage. The purpose of this cage is to make companies a profit, but we are now entering an era when the government is pressuring them to keep Americans docile, obedient, controlled, and, in some cases, hopeless, “spinning on an endless hamster wheel of reactive anger,” as the journalist Janus Rose put it.

A nonideological example: One social network I use occasionally has figured out that I enjoy videos of big cats behaving like house cats. At first, the videos I saw were real, but soon, mixed in with those, was obviously AI-generated slop—artificially created videos of big cats that didn’t exist, many of which nonetheless received thousands if not millions of likes. To the network, it didn’t matter whether the videos were real or not. All that mattered was that I was still on my device, and would soon see another ad or share another piece of content that would bait someone else’s eyes to their screen. This is relatively benign, if obnoxious, but dip into the world of pro-Trump propaganda for long enough, and your feed becomes a twisted reality of his supporters’ creation.

This helps explain the gap between what Trump supporters believed that Trump would do—tame inflation, deport undocumented criminals, and redistribute spending from the undeserving (other people) to the deserving (them)—and what Trump is now doing, which is raising prices through tariffs, preparing to raid elementary schools and withdrawing status from immigrants en masse, and trying to drastically cut services Americans depend on. If you followed the campaign through credible media sources, you would have understood it was coming. If you were imbibing a flood of propaganda from pro-Trump influencers, you may be surprised, or have very strong powers of denial.

[Read: The white nationalist now in charge of Trump’s public diplomacy]

The platforms are not worried whether the content people are seeing is accurate—once a person starts down the pro-Trump rabbit hole, that’s what he or she will be fed. No wonder so many people have come away with a delusional understanding of the Trump agenda. Capital was not “woke” before Trump, and it is not “anti-woke” now; it is capital, and its incentives are always toward profit. But authoritarianism, by nature, skews those incentives toward subservience to the state.

The Trump agenda, if successfully carried out, will lead to misery on a massive scale. It will test the bars of the algorithmic cage—will Americans judge based on their own experiences, or by what they see on their screens? As Chris Hayes writes in his new book, The Siren’s Call, “Before you can persuade, you must capture attention.” Where Trump and his allies are at fault for hardship, they will seek to persuade, using the networks of communication they have captured, that someone else is at fault, that the debacles they have concocted are not occurring or are in actuality positive events. Where they cannot do this, they will simply try to bewilder Americans by clogging these channels with toxic waste, flooding “the zone with shit,” as the Trump stalwart Steve Bannon once put it.

Will Americans recognize what is happening, or will they be sufficiently distracted, pacified, or misled by their billionaire overlords into inaction? The answer to this question will determine whether those responsible for the misery to come will be held accountable.