Seeking distraction from Trump 2.0
Social media has changed since 2017.
This is the personal newsletter of Kyle Chayka. You may know me from my Internet column as a staff writer at The New Yorker; my most recent book, Filterworld; my earlier book, The Longing for Less; or maybe even IRL. I do more riff-y newsletter writing in One Thing, which is about quality in culture. I post most often on Bluesky and Instagram.
Distraction seems to be flowing in all directions the last few weeks. The flurry of extreme executive orders and dramatic media moments of the second Trump administration is distracting from the mass layoffs and cuts that Elon Musk is making with DOGE. And disaffected voters are seeking distraction from all of it: Tuning out politics news is tempting, especially when it’s unclear how much of this chaos will actually be meaningful in a few months. I wanted to find out what people are doing to absorb their attention elsewhere, which is the subject of my latest New Yorker column:
The answers included binging reality TV shows like Vanderpump Rules and Culinary Class Wars — streaming is immersive and absorbing — as well as cutting back on news consumption, period, turning off phone alerts and relying on summaries. Social media is a different place than it was during the first Trump administration. There is less political resistance and less coherence, period, because the platforms themselves have changed:
Doomscrolling, as Eiseman referenced—the overindulgence in anxiety-inducing news stories and commentators shouting in text online—accomplishes even less than it did before, because Internet discourse lacks any coherent direction. There is no longer a clean division of anti- and pro-Trump; the field is crowded and the President himself can appear at times sidelined by larger forces. The Democratic Party and its organizations seem at a loss to develop any kind of unifying messaging in the short term. But that inertia may be intensified by how the social-media ecosystem has palpably decayed since the late twenty-tens, and not just because the politics of the platforms have shifted toward Trump. A.I. is rampant, algorithmic feeds such as Instagram’s have been known to favor posts from businesses and aggregators over individuals, and Meta’s social networks have suppressed political content by default.
My conclusion is that you can’t rely on social media or the endless stream of news updates for insight into what’s going on right now. It can be unproductive, better to watch that reality show for a while and conserve your attention for later without getting overwhelmed. The metric that I’ve been thinking about is, which choices or actions make things meaningful in the context of your own life? Taking a walk or supporting a local institution you love is more meaningful than doomscrolling.
Notes
Here in DC, where some distraction is very necessary, we recently went to a concert at the 9:30 Club (a great local institution) of three bands: Nourished by Time, Panda Bear, and Toro y Moi. Nourished by Time, a musician from Baltimore, has been one of my favorite new sounds of the last year or two. The track “Daddy” is kind of deconstructed disco, dance beats and Dadaist lyrics, with a gothic grandeur behind it. Very cool, very different.
I'm curious about how we can tune out without losing the ability to resist before it's too late.
For example, how do we avoid becoming like other societies where the majority voted for something that ultimately worked against them—Venezuelans who originally voted for Hugo Chávez, Britons who voted for Brexit, or Germans who voted for Hitler?