Don Moynihan argues that here has been a shift in the character– the instincts, the motivations, and thus the patterns of decision and action– of our government…
One of the strangest moments to emerge from the U.S. kidnapping of Nicolás Maduro was the flurry of images posted by President Trump on Truth Social. It felt a bit like a student who can’t decide which spring break photos look cutest, so they just upload them all.
The intent seemed to be to create an iconic image reminiscent of the White House Situation Room during the raid that killed Osama bin Laden—a gathering of stoic men (no girls allowed!) staring grimly at some unseen screen. The message: “Look how serious and important our work is!” Yet, the staged nature of these photos undermines that effect, leaving the whole scene feeling less like history in the making and more like an amateur theater production of a Broadway classic.
In one image, the Director of the CIA, the Chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and the Secretary of Defense are grouped around a laptop. Behind them, unmistakably, a screen displays a feed from X—complete with a prominent yellow emoji. In other pictures, “Venezuela” appears to be in the search box.
With the best intelligence systems in the world at their fingertips, they were checking X in the midst of the mission? Combined with the curtains separating some section of Mar‑A‑Lago from the rest of the President’s resort, the images create an almost surreal air. It felt as if a group of twelve-year-old boys in a basement had been handed control of the most lethal military in history—and were using it to boost their online brands.
Trump is undoubtedly the American president who has most effectively wielded social media: drawing attention, reshaping norms, and fueling conspiracy theories. The successful use of social media, for example, turned avowed MAGA isolationists into enthusiastic colonial imperialists overnight.
But I want to suggest that what we are witnessing from the Trump administration is not just skillful manipulation of social media—it’s something more profoundly worrying. Today, we live in a clicktatorship, ruled by a LOLviathan. Our algothracy is governed by poster brains.
It’s worth remembering that social media operates like a drug, feeding us dopamine and rewiring our brains’ reward pathways. The fundamentally unhealthy dynamics are worsened by the fact that standing out online often demands being awful—channeling negative emotions like anger and outrage, usually based on misinformation or conspiracy theories.
None of this is new. Indeed, there is a booming political science literature on the effects of social media on voter behavior. Chris Hayes and others have written persuasively about the how toxic attention farming is for us personally and for our democracy. But I want to make the case that we should also consider how social media it is affecting how policymakers use public power.
What I’m arguing is that the Trump administration isn’t just using social media to shape a narrative. Many of its members are deeply addicted to it. We would be concerned if a senior government official was an alcoholic or drug addict, knowing it could impair judgment and decisionmaking. But we should be equally concerned about Pete Hegseth and Elon Musk’s social media compulsions—just as much as their alcohol or ketamine use, respectively.
Overexposure to online engagement has cooked the brains of some of the most powerful people in the world. This is not exclusively an American phenomenon. President Yoon Suk Yeol seemed to have genuinely believed online conspiracy theories about election fraud, motivating his declaration of martial law and triggering a constitutional crisis, and his eventual arrest, in Korea.
But in the US government, poster brain feels endemic. The Trump administration is made up of a cabinet of posters. For many, that’s how they won Trump’s attention. The head of the FBI, for example, is a podcaster—that’s his main qualifier for the job.
They view the world through a social media lens in a way that is plausibly corrupting their judgment and undermining their performance. Lets think through how poster brain can affect how people in government operate…
[Moynihan explores, with illustrative examples, online bubbles, conflicts between professional and online indentities, the degradation of professional norms and work practices, and the altering of decision-making to be responsive to social media– to create content]
I’m just scratching the surface here. Pick any federal agency, and you can find examples of poster brains making important decisions. This trend is likely to only get worse as digital natives enter key government roles. And there are likely a host of other ways these patterns are undermining the professional behavior of people in government that I have not identified. In particular, the Trump administration represents the intersection of poster brain, personalism, and authoritarianism that seems especially toxic…
… The bottom line is that it we need to take more seriously how social media has rewired the brains—and behavior—of those running our country.
Your correspondent is headed onto the road again; so, with apologies, regular service will be suspended until on or about May 17…
… In the meantime, the remarkable Henry Farrell offers sage advice…
Last Thursday, Combinations (a publication of the RadicalxChange foundation), published a review essay that I wrote on Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson’s Abundance. I’m not going to repeat here what I say there; it’s available for free, so if you want to read it, just click on the link! [and one should read it]. Instead, I want to make the implicit argument explicit.
One of the big problems of American politics – and of politics in plenty of places elsewhere – is that we lack usable and attractive futures. The result is the current battle between the defenders of the present, and an incoherent counter-alliance that brings the cultists of an imaginary past and the evangelists of an impossible future into common cause.
Because I am weird, I think that the most immediately useful aspect of Klein and Thompson’s book is not its specific argument about how to get to the future. It is that the book has the promise to reorient the presentists around the prospect of an attractive future, and the different paths you might take to get there. On the one hand, as Dan Davies says (riffing on post-punk philosophizing), if you don’t have a dream then how’re ya gonna have a dream come true? On the other, no single dream is capable of foretelling the One True Path To Abundance (or, for that matter, any other desirable goal) so you want to have useful arguments between people with different dreams, and different plausible paths…
[Farrell discusses the book and its reception– the myriad reactions it has occasioned– puts the debate into an intellectualy historical context, then pivots to his advice…]
… One terrifying prospect for the U.S. is that the Trump faction wins again in 2028. Another is that the Democrats regain power – but that like Keir Starmer’s government, they trap themselves in a vicious cycle where universal expectations of less generate factionalism and political stasis, which further deepen those universal expectations.
That is why I think that abundance is important as a goal. We need to aim towards some version of abundance to escape the trap we’re in. That too, is why I think that disagreement about how to reach that goal over the next couple of years is valuable in two ways.
First, no faction on the left or right has any monopoly on the wisdom about how to get there. It is only through argument – and experimentation in those bits of the federal system and local politics where experimentation is possible – that we can figure out what to do when we can do it. Second, if we can get to a place where the major argument is about how to get towards abundance, not just between center left and centrists, but across the political spectrum, we – for a very broad value of we – will be halfway towards winning the fight we need to win. Far more is politically possible when we are disagreeing over how to get to an attractive future, than when we are struggling to ensure that we are as close to the top of the pile as possible in a horrible one.
We need usable futures that can orient current politics in fruitful ways. Abundance – in the broadest sense of that term – is the closest thing to a common denominator across such futures that I know of…
As we opt for optimism, we might send cautious birthday greetings to an example of what less-inclusive abundance can yield: John Warne “Bet-a-Million” Gates; he was born on this date in 1855. A Gilded Age industrialist and gambler, Gates was among the first salesmen of barbed wire. He parlayed his success into the manufacture of of the fencing; and success at that, into the manufacture fo steel. (He was instrumental in changing the steel industry’s production methods from the Bessemer process to the open hearth process.) He was the president of Republic Steel and later, of the Texas Company (an oil concern later known as Texaco) and of the Kansas City, Pittsburgh and Gulf Railroad.
Gates developed a taste– and a talent– for gambling at a young age. In his prime, he was known to host raucous, days-long poker games in his permanent suite at the Waldorf-Astoria. His nickname derived from a 1900 horserace in England on which he wagered $70,000 and was widely-reported to have won $1,000,000 (though it seems likely he won “only” $600,000).
… and how we do we create the conditions to encourage that learning? Industrial policy, one possible answer, is making a comeback. But as Henry Farrell explains, that raises another challenge…
… For decades, economists have argued that state policy makers lack the requisite knowledge to intervene appropriately in the economy. Accordingly, decisions over investments and innovation ought be taken by market actors. Now, the “market knows best” paradigm is in disrepair. It isn’t just that “hyperglobalization” has devoured its own preconditions, so that it is increasingly unsustainable. It is also that some goals of modern industrial policy are in principle impossible to solve through purely market mechanisms. To the extent, for example, that economics and national security have become interwoven, investment and innovation decisions involve tradeoffs that market actors are poorly equipped to resolve. There are good reasons why Adam Smith did not want to see defense policy handled through the market’s division of labor.
What we now face is a quite different kind of knowledge problem. We lack the kinds of expertise that we need to achieve key goals of industrial policy, or to evaluate the tradeoffs between them. This lack of knowledge is in large part a perverse by-product of the success of Chicago economists’ rhetoric. Decades of insistence that economic decisions be handed off from the state to markets has resulted in a remarkable lack of understanding among government policy makers about how markets, in fact, work. This has a variety of consequences. Policy mistakes are more likely. Market actors find it easier to manipulate the understanding of government policy makers, e.g. as to the extent and kind of subsidies required in particular sectors or for particular purposes.
One way to remedy this is to rethink the kinds of specialist education that public administrators receive, both to ensure that low and mid-level functionaries are better equipped to take the decisions they need to take, and to signal increased prestige for non-traditional forms of policy knowledge. As the sociological literature suggests, elite US policy schools such as the Harvard Kennedy School, Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies and Georgetown University (to name three entirely random examples) play a key role not simply in directly imparting knowledge through education, but in disseminating norms about the kinds of knowledge that are considered to be appropriate for policy decisions. These schools have by and large converged on a framework derived from a watered down version of neoclassical [indeed. one might suggest, neoliberal] economics. I argue that new skills, including but not limited to network science, material science and engineering, and use of machine learning would be one useful contribution towards solving the new knowledge problem…
As we retool, we might send thoughtfully calculated birthday greetings to Paul Collier; he was born on this date in 1949. An economist who specializes in development, he is a professor at Oxford and director of the International Growth Centre.
Collier is a specialist in the political, economic and developmental predicaments of low-income countries, and is probably best known for his 2007 book, The Bottom Billion: Why the Poorest Countries are Failing and What Can Be Done About It. His philosophy, developed there and in his 2010 The Plundered Planet, is encapsulated in his formulas:
Regulation often addresses real public needs/concerns. But the costs of compliance often favor the largest players in a regulated market– which can lead to consolidation. From the Oxford Martin School, a current example…
Exploiting the timing and territorial scope of the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), this paper examines how privacy regulation shaped firm performance in a large sample of companies across 61 countries and 34 industries. Controlling for firm and country-industry-year unobserved characteristics, we compare the outcomes of firms at different levels of exposure to EU markets, before and after the enforcement of the GDPR in 2018. We find that enhanced data protection had the unintended consequence of reducing the financial performance of companies targeting European consumers. Across our full sample, firms exposed to the regulation experienced a 8% decline in profits, and a 2% reduction in sales. An exception is large technology companies, which were relatively unaffected by the regulation on both performance measures. Meanwhile, we find the negative impact on profits among small technology companies to be almost double the average effect across our full sample. Following several robustness tests and placebo regressions, we conclude that the GDPR has had significant negative impacts on firm performance in general, and on small companies in particular…
As we seek balance, we might recall that it was on this date in 1969 that the U.S. officially withdrew $500, $1,000, $5,000, and $10,000 bills from circulation, pursuant to an executive order by President Richard Nixon. The larger bills had been used by banks and the government for large financial transactions, but had been rendered obsolete by the electronic money transfer system.
Those large-denomination bills were last printed on December 27, 1945 and are still considered legal tender. Indeed, (a version of) the $500 is still used in the game of Monopoly.
Take one isolated, High Desert town (John Day, Oregon), add an abused river, a dying timber industry, and a hotter, drier climate. Then mix in a local leader’s grand, out-of-the-box ideas about rural sustainability. What do you get?
One day in October of 2021, a handful of city leaders in John Day, a small town in rural Oregon, gathered to watch a crane operator set a new bridge. Fashioned from a repurposed railroad car, the bridge spans the John Day River, just blocks from downtown.
Not much else was there that day, aside from some heavy equipment, a freshly poured sidewalk, and piles of concrete and crushed mining tailings. But to the small group that came to watch, the bridge forged connections both physical and symbolic. It was a small piece of a grand vision called the John Day Innovation Gateway—an uncommonly ambitious, multimillion dollar blueprint for a town of just 1,750 residents.
The plan, several years in the making, aimed to restore the river, revive the town’s riverfront, and rebuild the local economy. In doing so, town leaders hoped, the Innovation Gateway would propel John Day into the 21st century with a resilient infrastructure that anticipates the massive changes and challenges brought by climate disruption.
For John Day and many other communities in the western U.S., those challenges include hotter, dryer summers, more intense heatwaves, and dwindling snowpacks, so crucial for water supplies during dry months. These trends are already worsening. In fact, a recent study found that the West’s 22-year “megadrought” is making the region drier than it has been in the last 1,200 years.
To prepare itself for this future, the city of John Day has acquired $26 million (and counting) for its various projects—a staggering amount for a town so small it doesn’t even have a traffic signal. A local newspaper article from 2019 listed no less than 23 projects in various stages, from sidewalk and trail upgrades to plans for a new riverfront hotel and conference center.
All of this activity has excited hope among many John Day residents. Others, however, have been alarmed at the scale of the changes afoot, and the way they’ve been handled. And, as projects have moved from the drawing board to groundbreaking, the protests are growing louder…
As we face the future, we might send foresightful birthday greetings to Vilhelm Bjerknes; he was born on this date in 1862. A physicist turned meteorolgist, he helped found the modern practice of weather forecasting. He formulated the primitive equations that are still in use in numerical weather prediction and climate modeling, and he developed the so-called Bergen School of Meteorology, which was successful in advancing weather prediction and meteorology in the early 20th century.
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