Americans Are Trapped in an Algorithmic Cage

The private companies in control of social-media networks possess an unprecedented ability to manipulate and control the populace.

February 7th, 2025, The Atlantic

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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.”

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.

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