In normal times, Inaugurations are gossipy affairs where the worst, and perhaps most fun, impulses of the political media get put on full display. We comment on hats worn by, say, Aretha Franklin or Ivanka Trump, and who has aged well or terribly in the past four years, and whose spouse looks bored. We read body language, interpret eye rolls, scan the lists of invitees to the various balls and parties for clues into who might hold influence on the incoming President. Compared with Donald Trump’s first Inauguration, which was covered gravely and with zero humor, his second, on Monday, seemed like business as usual. Among the guests, Shou Zi Chew, the C.E.O. of TikTok, drew notable attention after the platform’s temporary blackout over the weekend. He, along with Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos, Tim Cook, Sundar Pichai, and, of course, Elon Musk, were seated behind the Trump family during the ceremony, a powerful image that suggested Silicon Valley—which had previously been either politically agnostic, economically libertarian (but also culturally progressive), or slightly left-leaning—had switched their allegiances and would be instrumental in Trump’s “golden age of America.”

In the opening column for Fault Lines, I tried to update the core thesis of Neil Postman’s “Amusing Ourselves to Death,” from 1985, which, roughly speaking, argues that revolutions in information technology, particularly the rise of television, dictated the messages that were relayed through new mediums in much more powerful ways than we might expect. The defining characteristics of modern political discourse—deep polarization, escalating interpersonal conflicts, and the constant need to establish oneself as the anti-establishment figure—were more or less inevitable because of the speed of Internet communication, the inherently adversarial and mostly anonymous characteristics of online chatter, and the isolation that comes with staring at a screen all day.

What this means in the political realm is that social media is no longer just a tool for politicians to get out their message; politicians now have to shape themselves into optimized vessels for social media. In 2016, Trump became the Twitter President, but information technology has changed in the past nine years, and Trump, who always understood the power of catchphrases—“You’re fired!”—has turned himself into an ideal President for the short-form-video format that has proliferated on platforms such as TikTok. His long-winded rallies might have been derided by much of the press, but he has the same editing impulses as Twitch personalities, like Kai Cenat, and the podcaster Joe Rogan, who produce hours of content a week and capitalize on a seemingly counterintuitive dynamic, where an almost unbearably long-form original product gets chopped up and distributed as short viral clips. Only a few people watch this kind of content in full, but these viral-clip-makers have a similar outlook as vérité documentarians: if you just keep the camera rolling, something interesting is bound to happen. Trump, already the biggest star that social media has ever seen, is now onstage, in the director’s chair, and at the ticket booth at the same time. He also understood that the attention economy had shifted toward these celebrities and, apparently on the advice of his son Barron, spent much of his campaign talking to the masters of the algorithm. The Inauguration, which was attended not only by the tech moguls but also by a collection of influencers including Jake and Logan Paul and Rogan himself, was the ceremonial introduction for the new establishment media.

For us Postmanites, then, Big Tech’s drift toward the right should suggest that the mediums, whether Instagram, TikTok, Twitter, Facebook, or Google, have been temporarily captured by the right. We should expect those platforms, which have become the nation’s public square, to amplify the politics of the people who own them, just as we expect traditional media companies to reflect the beliefs of their founders. The only question left is whether these tech titans are fully on board with Trump’s agenda, or if they are simply acknowledging a tidal shift in American politics and making nice with the new President. Will they uphold a commitment to free speech, which all of them, in various ways, espouse, or is free speech just the pretext to undoing social, corporate, and political norms that might have restrained their companies from fully hijacking America’s attention? Will they fiddle with the knobs of their platforms, as Musk has done at X, to produce a chaotic agitprop machine? Or are they just happy they no longer have to pay for D.E.I. consultants or deal with an aggressive F.T.C.?

I imagine it’s a little of all these options. The more cautious platforms won’t go full Musk and will hedge their bets in case political sentiment swings back to the left, or, at the very least, they’ll cloud their intentions in vague missives about free speech. But the liberal-oriented measures that some of these companies have taken, however half-heartedly, in the course of the past decade—which included attempts to flag disinformation, fact-check political posts, and, most tellingly, limit Trump’s influence on their platforms—will disappear. In 2017, when Trump first came into office, the resistance lived on both social and traditional media. The two had a symbiotic relationship—Twitter discourse was dominated by “blue-check” accounts, many of which belonged to those working for news organizations. (Celebrities also had a role in this discourse, albeit more of a supporting one.) These posters and the outlets that employed them were almost uniformly liberal and entirely fixated on whatever Trump posted that day. They placed pressure on social-media companies to adopt new safeguards and ultimately ban Trump’s account.

Musk upended all that when he purchased Twitter, installed a pay-for-play verification system for blue checks, and suppressed outgoing links. (He also replaced Trump as the center around which all outrage discourse spins; apparently the quickest way to amass political power in America is to become the most hated person on Twitter.) Zuckerberg, in the announcements that he made earlier this month about ending fact checking and D.E.I. at Meta, indicated that the era of liberal influence in his company was over. Just those two alone should be enough to take apart the pipelines of the #Resistance. This, in some ways, is a good thing. Your online life might feel a bit more scammy and conspiracy-brained once these guardrails are lifted, but the attempts to control disinformation, bigoted speech, or Trump himself should all be seen as failures that only furthered the suspicion that the liberal establishment was trying to censor or suppress the beliefs of half the country, which, let’s admit, was kind of what they were doing.

But it also means that the resistance has lost its voice. In the past week, many outlets, including the Times, have written stories about the seeming lack of outrage and resolve among Democrats. I have noticed this myself since the election and, though I do think many traumatized liberals have shied away from the news, I wonder if the muting of dissent and the inability to organize mass protests like the ones after Trump’s first Inauguration might more reflect a forceful passing of the megaphone from the left to the right.

Most communities, especially political ones, are online now. Five years ago, a video of George Floyd being murdered by a police officer supercharged the entire liberal online infrastructure. Symbols of allegiance were widely shared—Black Lives Matter signs, solidarity posts on Instagram, iconic renderings of Floyd—and the online communities that activists had been building since the killing of Trayvon Martin, in 2012, took to the streets for weeks of protest. Progressives rely on socially distributed moral pressure, which used to be the lingua franca of social media. Maybe it seemed that “wokeness,” whatever that means, went too far during this period, that its views didn’t reflect the priorities and beliefs of the majority of Democrats. But that is an inevitable outcome for a medium that amplifies heightened commentary and discourse. Wokeness was nothing more than the maximalized version of a progressive affinity system, perfectly tailored for social media and rubber-stamped by the élite establishment and prestige news media. What happens to the angry Democratic voter when they are cut off from their social-affinity networks? One can only rage alone for so long.

A second Postmanite question: If a large portion of liberals, especially those comfortable enough to believe the worst of Trump will not harm them, fall into a weary sort of acceptance, will the mainstream media follow suit? Objectivity in journalism is a noble goal, but, like everything else, it’s shaped by some mix of cultural trends, audience preferences, and technology. The Obama years, for example, gave rise to a technocratic voice that was shaped by the rise of blogging. The triumph of electing a broadly popular, Black President demanded a voice that matched liberal enthusiasm and felt like it represented the technological, Internet-fuelled future. Blogging, in turn, had its own demands—namely, the need to post constantly—which necessitated faster access to authoritative sources. You no longer had the time to call five people to take the temperature around an issue and then cautiously hint at some conclusion. To keep up, you had to access Googleable information, either in the form of data or a historical anecdote that could be found in the depths of a Google Books search result.

These, for the most part, were welcome advances that broadened the scope of political commentary and opened audiences up to new forms of evidence outside the self-proclaimed objectivity and authority of the journalist. But liberal bloggers’ choke hold on the establishment came from their ability to adapt to new forms, be it social media or podcasting or TikTok, and these mediums changed much more quickly than they had during the decades when people got a newspaper in the morning and tuned into Peter Jennings in the evening. Consequently, technology had a larger role in how journalists thought about their influence.

Data and history might have worked well for blogs, but they don’t really fit into short-form videos. You can make all the charts and infographics you want, but, in the end, video requires interpersonal drama: fake beefs between YouTubers, two straight hours of politicians insulting their rivals at a rally, conspiracy-coded “rabbit holes” about Nikola Tesla and the Great Pyramid of Giza. This doesn’t mean that the bloggers who came to prominence during the Obama era are now irrelevant, but they have had to adjust like everyone else to these new forms, which will require a change in message to fit the new medium. (For what it’s worth, I’ve found in my career that the same people tend to be the first movers on every new platform, which is a talent.) In a recent column for the Times, Ross Douthat described the impending shift away from data and argued that we were returning to a narrative and dramatic form. “So as we enter into the Trump restoration,” Douthat wrote, “any auguries about the next four years need to be adequate to this mythopoetic landscape, and dramatically fitting in the fate that they envision for both the president and the United States.”

Can the liberal mainstream media tell a cinematic, mythopoetic story in a time when the information infrastructure of the “resistance” has been commandeered and turned against them? I am skeptical, mostly because I don’t know if any such story could survive the hostilities of the people who own the airwaves. If, in 2017, a Trump associate had given the same Sieg–heil-like salute that Musk gave this week at the Inauguration, every news outlet would have multiple stories offering frame-by-frame analyses. Historians would be called in to provide context, and every social-media app would be trembling with outrage. The liberal media’s response to Musk somewhat followed that template, but at a fraction of the scale. Some might see all this as a sign of progress; the politics of calling everyone a “fascist” did not work and it’s time for Democrats to move on to some other story, perhaps about economic populism or staunch centrism. I agree with that on the merits, but I see more capitulation than strategy in the tempered response to Trump’s second term. Most liberals, at least the ones I’ve spoken to in the past two months, have chosen to log off and wait until the next election cycle, which means they will not hear whatever story the Democrats start to tell. Who can blame them for not registering their outrage on the platforms of the men who lined up behind the Trump family at the Inauguration? The trolls won the medium and the country went with it.

But there is still hope for the Democrats because they, like the Republican establishment in 2016, are primed for a hostile takeover. In the midterms, will we see candidates crop up across the country who express anger at liberal institutions, at internal corruption in local Democratic governance, and at the selfishness of leaders such as Joe Biden who have put their own egos and legacy over the good of the Party? If so, these new candidates—I do not think we know who any of them are at this point—will be tapping into the most valuable commodities in both the new and old media: conflict and uncomfortable truths. Their specific policy positions will not matter as much as their willingness to call out everyone from Biden and Kamala Harris, to the tech oligarchy, to whatever failing mayor happens to be nearby. Social media will eat them up, Joe Rogan will admire their authenticity, the video clippers will spread their “truth bombs” across the Internet, and they might very well be able to ride that wave of discontent all the way through to 2028. The viral economy might have taken over our lives, but it is also fickle and always backlashing against itself. ♦