Stop crying over Trump: Start thinking about unchecked tech barons

The most important thing is to involve ourselves in politics more frequently if we really, truly believe that things are as bad as we say they are... in our grieving videos, writes Tom Tanuki.

NOW THAT Donald Trump has been declared the winner of the U.S. Election, I’m reflecting on what it was like in 2016 when the same thing happened.

Back then I was just as active in the Left and, therefore, engaged in the inevitable run-off from U.S. political news as I am now. The choices appear to be the same: self-flagellation or flagellating the leftie next to you.

Again, I am marvelling at all the repeat mistakes from a shrill, useless and performative centre-left, but so too am I now wondering about my own off-the-charts cynicism. I don’t know if finding a way forward involves either approach.

Both American liberals and (Make America Great Again) MAGA types have spent a year telling each other contrasting doomsday tales about the end of democracy.

The MAGA types told their stories better and louder. They’ve had ten years to build an incredible hyperpartisan far-Right media apparatus — after all, by now it is basically untouchable in its capacity to sway Americans (not to mention everyone else, the world over).

Campaign costs and donations are essentially unvetted in America, so people can – and do – spend as much on gaming elections via social media as they can. They don’t have compulsory voting over there, so to get people off the couch they must conduct their campaigns like the WWE promotes the lead-up to WrestleMania.

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Only last week we endured with horror Trump’s re-election to the U.S. presidency. Now we must face the inescapable fact that his return has emboldened fascists everywhere.

All of this means that we conduct the American election, too — from half a world away.

America’s wars and sanctions and spy bases and CIA operations and military bases affect us all enough to care about it with good reason. But that’s not really why we pretend to be American for six months every four years — we do it because we get sucked into the big-budget action movie of Seppo politics. Americans now spend so much on Cambridge Analytica-ing each other into submission that the entire world gets saturated with run-off behavioural manipulation overflow.

The local Right shows how gamed it is by wearing MAGA hats around Toowoomba shopping malls. Or, by assuming that the U.S. election result means it now gets to post racial slurs without consequences. (You’ll keep, Ralph.)

The centre-left does it, I think, by the same performative moaning that helped birthed the entire (social justice warrior) "SJW cringe compilation"-genre back around Trump Mark I.

The grand tidal wave of electoralism sweeps up the politically apathetic first. They get right into it, splooshing about on the crest of all this campaign advertising and hyperpartisan media melodrama. They lack the necessary blinkers to see how they’re being manipulated or conned. So, they come crashing very heavily to the shore on election day.

I’ve been getting sad messages from Libs who don’t like the Seppoland election results. It’s nostalgic for me because I copped much of the same back in 2016.

Australian media personality Abbie Chatfield is doing the rounds at the moment for a very teary video in which she asserts that Trump’s victory in America means that men now have permission – here too and not just in America, is the way to take it – to start being racist and sexist. She’s crying and impact-clapping all the way, so one must take her feelings seriously.

What I detest is the declarative announcement that everyone "has permission" to be racist and sexist. For one, do you not think that people already "had permission" to act in this way, from inside an umbrella culture with deep historical patriarchal and white supremacist roots?

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And isn’t it dangerous to talk that way? Do you think that hordes of opponents won’t use your theatrical pain for their next cringe comp, agreeing very much, that yes, actually, they now have permission?

It's like helping your enemies manifest a grander, more permanent victory than anything they managed to achieve at some stupid American ballot box.

I don’t mean to compile the sneering leftist equivalent of an SJW cringe compilation, either. Nor do I mean to fail to hold people’s grief. Donald Trump’s win endangers the very lives of refugees and queer and trans people in America, and it puts women’s essential reproductive rights in peril. All of that is happening right now.

The abovementioned video is only one of a million videos I’m watching from emotional Democrats – and their Australian equivalents, suffering from geographic dysphoria – insisting that one electoral defeat is not due to this or that diagnosable flaw or weakness, but rather because a sizeable chunk of the population is fundamentally and irreversibly evil.

And these tendencies infuriate me. When do we get to get on to diagnosis? When do we get on to action?

No diagnosis is of any use if it isn’t weighing up how social media and unchecked behavioural modification landed the U.S. Trump 2.0.

Tech writer Ed Zitron has it right, as he weighs up the fundamental role of the digital world, unchecked tech barons and gamed social media in all of this misery:

'It's time to accept that most people's digital life fucking sucks, as does the way we consume our information and that there are people directly responsible… We — users of products — are at war with the products we’re using and the people who make them. And right now, we’re losing.'

Influencers are equally at the behest of the demands of social media behavioural modification when they post theatrical moaning for reach as is any delusional MAGA chud.

Social media has rendered us into pokie addicts. Many people cannot tell when they’re actually agitating for political change versus prostrating themselves on Meta platforms for clout.

And I am so deeply, deeply cynical about all that. I fought for years of my life after 2016 to combat the grassroots far-right in Australia.

I expect the worst because I wade about in the muck of the political fringe enough here to apprehend how bleak it really is. So, I tend to post in an "I told you so" fashion about these big moments.

All aboard the Trump train

Pulled by a locomotive powered by misogyny, hate and retribution, this train will shortly leave democracy station, bound for fascism junction.

In fact, looking back at my years of activism since 2016, I really adopted the same posture way back since Trump I.

In an old recorded chat with Melbourne comedian and political activist Sean Bedlam about our old post-Trump anti-racist efforts, I joked about this position to him:

“If we lose, we don’t want people to know that we thought we were going to win. We’d better not be confident, just in case.”

I was affected by academic Ghassan Hage’s reflection on this posture recently:

I also felt that by continuously claiming to be "unsurprised by this" and "unsurprised by that", I was engaging in those immature fantasies of omnipotence of knowledge…

The idea that "I understand it all" meant that I had some power over the events I was understanding rather than letting them surprise me and outrage me. I could feel that it was a particularly male fantasy of power/knowledge.

I felt very exposed when I read that. I wondered if I had come to assume the mantle of my world-weary cynicism as a guard against the anguish of watching our real world sink into climate oblivion while our digital world becomes an unchecked, predatory behavioural modification minefield. We’re in the Wild West, more than ever.

I know there’s a happy medium here somewhere, wherein we do not collectively mourn and moan with uselessly performative proclamations about the eternal evil of our opponents, while also avoiding the position of sneering, rolling our eyes and "I told you so"-ing.

The most important thing is to involve ourselves in politics more frequently if we really, truly believe that things are as bad as we say they are in our grieving videos.

I don’t want to see people having another meltdown in another four years if they’ve essentially done nothing in between.

Tom Tanuki is a writer, satirist and anti-fascist activist, whose weekly videos commenting on the Australian political fringe appear on YouTube. You can follow him on Twitter @tom_tanuki.