16/ If the internet is real life now, the goal shouldn’t be winning it. It should, rather, be to create a place worth living in. And if that place is good enough, you might even persuade others to join you.

15/ The fact that “debate me bro” shows are popular with young and influential voters doesn’t automatically prescribe that the left appear on these shows or make one of their own. To influence culture you often have to change it, and that means offering something new.

14/ In the wake of defeat there is an urge to understand what the other side did effectively and to try and emulate it. This is how you end up in nonsensical places like finding the Joe Rogan of the left.

13/ When conservatives thought broadcast media was biased toward liberals, they didn’t redouble their efforts to engage, they attacked and undid the fairness doctrine and established conservative radio and Fox News. Are these also battlegrounds of ideas?

12/ But this doesn’t mean adopting or participating in a framework of engagement established by the opposition.

11/ X/Twitter being the “battlefield of ideas” is ridiculous on its face, but it's worth taking one assumption made by the critics seriously. For any political movement to grow, it does need to make an effort to persuade others to join.

10/ It’s no surprise then that after the election liberals and progressives finally fled the platform en masse. When The Guardian announced its departure last week, some critics took the opportunity to cast the decision by the outlet and others as “abandoning the battlefield of ideas.”

9/ If there was any doubt that Musk was turning the platform into a tool for the right, his use of it to broadcast (unsuccessfully) DeSantis’s campaign launch and his fawning, pre-election interview with Trump likely put that to bed.

8/ He started by removing status, eliminating the “blue checks,” then reinstating the banned accounts of the mostly right-wing agitators, eliminating moderation positions and guidelines and weighting the algorithm to promote his and other right-wing ideologies.

7/ It was the predominance of this culture that Musk sought to dismantle when he bought Twitter in 2022.

6/ And whether Twitter was ever representative of public discourse is mostly beside the point. For a while it was undeniably the locus of media and left-wing culture on the internet. For better or worse, it was where many influential people staked their ground.

5/ But it was still a for-profit tech company that made money by incentivizing engagement, which typically means rewarding the most extreme views. Trolling, disinformation, mob justice or “cancel culture” is all part of that.

4/ Before being purchased by Musk and rebranded as X, there was a notion mostly held by members of the media (and Musk) that Twitter was the digital equivalent of the public square. Its oversized influence on our culture and platforming of historically marginalized voices gave it a plausible case.

3/ Trump won. So maybe the internet is real life now.
But where does one live on the internet?

2/ One post-election take that appears to have staying power is that this was the first, true internet election. The Harris campaign had the advantage in traditional campaign measures like money raised and ground game. Trump’s campaign had the podcasters, Twitter(X), trad wives, and the manosphere