Stare down the barrel of US tech politics for too long, and you just might receive a targeted advertisement for the return of monarchy. Inauguration day is now behind us, and 2024’s vibe shift has quickly become 2025’s vibe cascade. From Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg to Jeff Bezos and even Bill Gates, all our so-called techno-feudal lords had already flown down to the palace in Mar-a-Lago to kiss the ring. All of them appeared in the inner sanctum for Trump’s big day; and, unlike the lowly lawmakers in the room, they had plus ones by their side.

To mark the shift, Zuck presented the world with his very own glow up: a transformation from cyborg robot lizard to late adopter of the Jake Paul Starter Pack. Curiously, the signifier here is that the curly hair and oversized rave t-shirt, screaming: “I don’t care about politics, I’m just a bro…” are the fashion version of his recent insistence, to podcaster Joe Rogan, that companies like his own have become too hostile to “masculine energy.” Which is to say that, in an era that’s forcing everyone to pick a side, the safest hedge is to blend in. Please don’t punish me for turning MAGA, Zuck is saying to the feminists who work for him, and anyone else worried about reproductive rights – I’m just a guy! Aesthetics aside, the sad truth is that you can’t expect him to act any differently – a CEO turning to the money is like a flower turning to the sun.

The dear-leader behavior only intensified during the pre-Inaugural weekend. As surely decided by some intern – or an intrepid reality-TV producer – TikTok began going dark just before Trump’s return to office, its 170 million US users cut off by a Congress that regarded the app as a surveillance apparatus of the Chinese Communist Party. While Musk and the mega-YouTuber MrBeast quibbled over who would buy the internet’s most addictive video algorithm, more than 3 million TikTok “refugees” flocked to Xiǎohóngshū, a Shanghai-based Instagram competitor whose name translates literally as “Little Red Book,” named for the manifesto written by Chairman Mao. That is, in keeping with Americans’ propensity for sticking it to anyone that tells them what to do, they opted to swap the alleged Chinese propaganda app for the genuine article. Trump, never one to be overtaken by head-spinning events, called on his own social media platform, Truth Social, for the TikTok ban to be deferred. This prompted a resumption of service in the US and earned the near-octogenarian an app-wide thank-you note on Zoomers’ favorite timesink.

That same weekend, when the incoming presidency would legally force Trump to hand over the daily management of his financial holdings, his team announced its own meme coin, $TRUMP, which soared from less than $10 per coin on Saturday morning to $46.93 twenty-four hours later, giving it a market cap of roughly $9.4 billion. While the details of the coin mechanics are still vague, what we know is that four-fifths of $TRUMP coins are owned by two businesses where Trump is the majority owner. Meaning, that the $2.3 billion that he made during his entire career as a real estate developer, TV star, and Trump University rector were dwarfed overnight by his new, most lucrative career move: taking his brand-name scam into crypto.

Beyond the sheer lunacy of a President shilling a memecoin, the weekend’s events suggest a new era of political theater. Where it was once an insult to describe US politics as a reality TV show with implications on the “world stage,” it appears that Trump has made the media carnival his entire MO, shamelessly adopting the model of politician-as-influencer whose primary role is to entertain. As the writer Geoff Mak likes to say, “You can get away with pretty much anything as long as you’re cute about it.” And the President that saves TikTok from the clutches of the stodgy libs is undeniably cute. It’s policy as performance art, politics as image creation. But it goes deeper than that, too.

As Gideon Jacobs wrote recently in the LARB, Trump’s command of the mass image – from his notorious prison mugshot to the Trump-in-McDonald’s epic to the post-assassination first-pump – suggest we’ve entered a moment in history when the contents of the images we see daily on our screens have become completely detached from underlying truth or reality. Just as Trump is not a McDonald’s employee, and plenty of people believe the assassination attempt was staged, TikTok might never have been under threat, and the memecoin has no underlying value – yet people don’t care. Jacobs argues that the reason for the cleavage – why it’s often hard to tell whether “real” images were created by AI or not – is that we’ve entered what Jean Baudrillard, in the 1980s, called “hyperreality”: an ontological condition where “realness loses its origins, the map precedes its territory, and signs can only point to other signs.” Trump won in 2016, Jacobs argues, partially because – like Barack Obama, and unlike Kamala Harris – he possessed the skill most important for winning the modern presidency: the suite of abilities needed to believably perform an image. Which is to say that, as Trump takes the mantle once again, the creation of images is the primary currency. And as Elon Musk suggested in a tweet from 2023: “The most entertaining outcome (as if we were in a movie) is the most likely.”

Another way to view the weekend’s events is an example of what internet theorist Daniel Keller has called “sloptimism.” In an era when AI threatens to absorb the vast majority of corporate productivity, Keller argues, the locus of wealth creation has shifted from making real products that people need toward the production of attention as its own commodity. If, in 2010, post-internet artists were creating memes in the form of statues, and the NFT era was about tying together financial instruments with the creation of memes, the era of sloptimism is about a form of commerce where the transaction itself is the meme. Think: Hawk Tuah creating a meme coin, or the twelve-year-old-boy who live-streamed his own meme-coin scam and made millions in the process. Sloptimism is the rise of the scam-as-performance-art, the complete elimination of corporate substance from the meme-art simulacra. For Keller, the rise of this moment of scamming is less a feature of media culture itself than a reaction to what we now know about the future of technology – that soon, human labor will cease to be a relevant form of production and value, at least for many of us.

Sloptimism is also surprisingly effective lens from which to view Trump’s new colonial projects, the takeover of Greenland and the Panama Canal. The generous read of such insanity is that the next four years will make manifest what Obama (somewhat) successfully hid under the surface: that the American empire remains an empire with territorial ambitions and a giant standing army. These will be the years when the fixtures of realpolitik become everyday facets of life, from political assassinations to corporate espionage and land expropriation. Of course, that time might already be upon us, if you believe the parents of Suchir Balaji – an ex-employee of OpenAI who went public about his employer’s exploits, then mysteriously found himself unalive – that their son was murdered. It’s a trend we should expect to continue as generative AI ceases to be perceived as a tool for creating videos of robots fucking and evolves into what it’s always been: the front spear of geopolitical competition.

In Joe Biden’s farewell address, he alluded to some of these problems. Six decades ago, he said, President Dwight Eisenhower, previously the commander of the Allies in Europe during World War II, spoke of the dangers of the military-industrial complex – a silent committee pushing the world into war for the sake of its own profit. Today, we’re facing the rise of a new tech-industrial complex, sucking up power from the government for the sake of its own mysterious designs, producing online conflicts to generate attention and ad revenue while distracting us from what’s really at stake. “The truth is smothered by lies told for power and for profit,” Biden said – a world of memetic warfare orchestrated with an army of untraceable bots.

But Americans remiss about the state of their country might recall that the American dream has always been, well, a dream. So, who needs doctors when you have AI therapy? Or IRL girlfriends when you can spawn new ones with a couple of clicks? Sure, we might be polarized, our cities on fire, reproductive rights at risk, and sponsoring a genocidal war, but think of all the lulz. It might not work out so bad! Trump might not be Benito Mussolini, but Richard Nixon, or maybe even Ronald Reagan. AI might cure cancer or let us keep some of our jobs. To conclude with a prayer from social media’s new favorite folk hero: “What a great time to be alive if you love the theater of the absurd.”

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