May You Live In Interesting Times … Part One
Thoughts on the seismic shifts we’ve experienced the last two and a half weeks
July 2024 is trying to compete with March 2020 as one of the craziest months. Thinking about how much has changed in the last 19 days is staggering. And yet, as
reminds us, a lot has stayed the same.It has taken me longer than usual to put together this newsletter. I’ve been taking notes since Trump’s shooting, his pick of J.D. Vance for Vice President, the GOP convention, Biden dropping out, the Dems coalescing around Harris as his successor, and the TikTok memes (I’ll admit, I had to look up what her being “brat” meant). Oh, we also had Silicon Valley leaders rallying behind both Trump and Harris while Sam Altman and Mark Zuckerberg were putting out thoughts on the future of AI vis-a-vis China.
During all of this time, I got together with two of my favorite groups of people. Cultivate the Karass (CtK) was formed in 2017 to help leaders develop the relationships and skills to engage with those who might think differently than them. I then hopped on a plane to TrustCon, where over 1,300 trust and safety professionals gathered to learn from one another and discuss the industry's future.
Unsurprisingly, I had over five pages of notes to make sense of, so I’ve split this newsletter into two parts. This Venn diagram is the best way I’ve come up with to organize it all. This edition will cover the election and the role tech has played. On Thursday, I’ll share part two covering trends in tech and how we show up for one another.
Politics/U.S. Election
There is a long way to go … and things will get crazier. If there is one takeaway from this entire newsletter, it is this. It will be a very long couple of months if you hang on to every new poll or signal that one candidate is losing or winning. It will take until at least September for the polls to recalibrate, and much campaigning is yet to be done. Brace yourselves. Find some ways to ground yourself.
Enthusiasm and the heat are turned up. Remember when I wrote about how this year felt “meh” around elections? Well, no more. In the U.S., both sides have gotten an adrenaline shot that has increased enthusiasm and attention on the election. The Democrats, in particular, have been awoken from a slumber. On one hand, it's good that people are excited about the candidates. Conversely, higher excitement means higher emotions and a higher likelihood of things boiling over. Let’s be honest. People will be a lot more upset if Trump beats Harris than if he beat Biden. Harris taking over for Biden has dramatically increased the risk vectors across many aspects of this election. A prediction: At some point, Trump will say something about Harris that, for many, crosses the line. Tech companies will be under pressure to deplatform him for it. They won’t.
Republicans are turning the democracy narrative back on the Democrats. Listen, the irony is not lost on me that the Republicans are calling on people not to demonize political disagreement when you have Rep. Jim Jordan going after researchers for studying the information environment, but I think it’s worth noting this line in Trump’s convention speech:
“And we must not criminalize dissent or demonize political disagreement, which has been happening in our country lately, at a level that nobody has ever seen before. In that spirit, the Democrat party should immediately stop weaponizing the justice system and labeling their political opponent as an enemy of democracy.”
He has a point, and he should also heed it himself. However, we need to be careful about politicizing the word democracy. It will have global implications if it loses all meaning as something spanning political ideologies.
Politics and Tech
Online platforms cement their role in political campaigning. If I traveled back to 2010 and told myself that in the future, the two nominees for President would make history-changing announcements all on online platforms, I would think we had achieved the dream. It might seem run of the mill now, but these weeks have shown that posting online is the fastest and most effective way to get news out. We had:
Trump getting shot and responding first on Truth Social.
Trump announces Vance on Truth Social.
Biden drops out by announcing on socials.
Trump and others respond to news on socials first.
What TikTok ban? The app becomes the place for candidate memes. The internet - especially TikTok - also became the place to react to all the news. It’s ok if you’ve forgotten that the U.S. Congress and the Biden White House signed a law banning the app that is now making its way through the courts. (Some interesting drama there, too, about what the DOJ is or is not alleging TikTok of doing that is worth catching up on.) Emily Baker White at Forbes wrote about a report from a new start-up called Zelf that has some staggering stats, including,
“Since Biden announced on July 21, 2024, that he would not seek a second term and endorsed Harris, TikTok users have posted more than 85,200 videos about Kamala Harris, amassing over 1.8 billion views. Harris’ boost is comparable to the boost that Trump received after the assassination attempt. In Trump’s case, the number of videos about him over a seven-day period from July 13, 2024, to July 20, 2024, increased almost eightfold, going from 50,000 videos in the seven days prior to the attempt on his life to over 400,000 the wake of the shooting.”Steven Overly at Politico has a great interview with TikToker/self-described Infotainer Quentin Jile, who said people like these memes over the “stuffy” interviews with mainstream media because it makes the candidates seem more human. (The first thing many of my friends said when Biden dropped out was how Harris should go on Hot Ones - that show where celebs heat progressively hotter wings. Trump went on pro golfer Bryson DeChambeau’s YouTube channel - this kind of infotainment resonates with people whether we like it or not.)
This will be the moment we look back on when TikTok cemented its role in U.S. political discourse - even if many candidates themselves aren’t on it.
A few side points to this are worth noting, including Zoom having a moment as the new place for online rallies. It’s also worth remembering how images - video or photos - are important to historical moments like this. While I know there were probably many reasons why Biden didn’t do his announcement via video, it was a lost moment for him. Finally, remember how, in 2008, all sorts of fan art were made to support Obama? I wonder if we’ll see an explosion of that now but with AI.Meta (sort of) has political regrets. During all this, the Information scooped that some folks internally at Meta were debating the merits of their no politics policy. Mark and Adam have doubled down on the policy, saying the usual lines that users have told them they don’t want to see politics in their feed. I think they’ve miscalculated as the vibes have shifted - hard. People always say they don’t want political content until they do, and it’s the thing they want to connect with friends on. Moreover, as Bloomberg’s Kurt Wagner commented in early July, politics can equal relevance. The only thing I want to be careful of here is to wait and see if some polling or stats show that most people want more political content. What we’ve seen so far in terms of increased media interest and content surges on TikTok suggests it is, but it may not be indicative of the population as a whole.
Be careful not to fall into the online trap. The first pollster I wanted to hear from after this crazy week was
. In a New York Times piece a few days following the announcement, Kristin makes two good points about the “very online” trap:
“Against Ms. Harris, Republicans could fall into the “very online” trap. It’s hard to overstate the extent to which Republicans view Ms. Harris as unappealing. If you only learn about her from conservative media, you’re most likely steeped in “unburdened by what has been” video montages and criticism of her laugh. Assume this is how most voters think of her — or that they will care about this slight awkwardness — at your own risk. …“Ms. Harris’s past efforts have also fallen into the “very online” trap. Ms. Harris is apparently the “meme candidate.” All well and good, and Mr. Biden struggled mightily with many younger voters, but in 2020, Ms. Harris’s campaign during the Democratic presidential primary season went fairly disastrously, reportedly in part because of young staffers who made the mistake of thinking that Twitter, now named X, was real life. (Most Americans do not use the platform.)”
It's a good reminder that what happens online does not necessarily indicate what happens in real life.
Part two coming tomorrow …
Please support the curation and analysis I’m doing with this newsletter. As a paid subscriber, you make it possible for me to bring you in-depth analyses of the most pressing issues in tech and politics.