It’s four days since Donald Trump won his second term in office and there are dark times ahead.
The platform that so many of us relied on during the first Trump presidency and the aftermath of the Brexit vote is now owned by the man who’s helped Trump win his second term in office.
We haven’t even begun to reckon with what that means for the world. But one thing is clear: we need to find other ports during the coming storm.
And other ways to hold power to account. Because, if the election of Donald Trump shows us anything, it’s that the old ways don’t work.
Starting a newsletter fits in into the category of things I should have done years ago. I’m doing it now in a journalistic crisis that’s happening in the middle of all the other crises at a moment in which journalism couldn’t be more important. I’ll tell you more about that in another post.
But what I know is that if there’s anything that is going to get us through the next years, it’ll be other people. The re-election of Donald Trump, and the fateful hand of Elon Musk, is not just a tragedy and a coming disaster for America but the world. And what we will need more than ever before is networks, communities, comradeship and bonds of trust.
I don’t yet know what this newsletter will be. I’m undecided on the name and I haven’t yet got to grips with the platform, but I do know that with whatever comes next, we need to build and connect and create new ways of exposing and confronting power.
We need to understand this isn’t just Trump. It’s so much bigger than that. It’s a global playbook underpinned by global information platforms that have upturned our world. I’ve been reporting on this since 2016. And the companies behind it for much longer.
But I’m writing this on November 10, 2024, because the first wave of tech disruption is over. We’ve now entered a second, scarier wave.
This post has been syndicated from How to Survive the Broligarchy, where it was published under this address.