Only a few weeks ago, President Donald Trump declared that “America’s Golden Age” had begun. It was the culmination of a groundbreaking political movement. A lame duck, “last ride” of sorts, with an epic succession battle worthy of the most dramatic TV adaptation. We even got a new black “MAGA” hat, with the movement’s rallying cry stitched in gold.
As the country and the world have acquiesced to his astonishing political comeback, we‘ve certainly felt the weight of the epic Trump sequel every day since its inception.
In 2016, Trump declared our common enemy. Illegal immigrants and indeed the “fake news media,” but also a certain circle of bipartisan “elites,” huddled in Washington to the detriment of Americans everywhere. He said in his 2017 inaugural address, “Their victories have not been your victories; their triumphs have not been your triumphs; and while they celebrated in our nation’s Capital, there was little to celebrate for struggling families all across our land.”
Two weeks ago, the wealthiest members of our society gathered at the U.S. Capitol to celebrate. Their VIP seats, punched with inaugural fund donations of $1 million apiece, certainly depict a scene akin to the one spoken of at length by Trump in his first inaugural. But I am not in the business of calling him a hypocrite — this strategy has yet to bear fruit in the struggle to cover him.
From social media to online commerce to the very hardware that hosts these platforms, this small and largely unchanged group has controlled the distribution of information for nearly a generation.
But today, this group comprises a “kitchen cabinet”, their traditionally unofficial power over our discourse made official in the Capitol Rotunda last month.
Mark Zuckerberg, Elon Musk and proprietors of the world’s virtual public squares are astutely aware of their power. According to Pew Research Center, 76% of people ages 18 to 29 use Instagram, and despite national security concerns and an impending ban, 59% use TikTok.
According to a different study conducted by Pew Research, 95% of TikTok users seek entertainment, and 45% report seeing political content on the app. Each day, a large share of people on these platforms are made to feel like their country is greater, like their president is stronger and being American is something to be proud of again.
This emergent American oligarchy is different from those of our adversaries. As Russia privatized critical assets to the functioning of the former Soviet state, business leaders seized control of the tangible: crucial natural resources, real estate and media outlets. Through corruption, they exploited the needs of the Russian people for a nation — one they built from the ashes of an empire.
The U.S. wasn’t born in 1991. But in these last thirty years, Americans — and to an even greater extent, its youth — have developed an acute and insatiable dependency on information and online entertainment. The youthful outrage over the imminent demise of TikTok, the pioneering platform that has for years fulfilled our desires for content devoid of context, only amplified our collective addiction.
Many of us have no idea what we would do with our time if one day social media vanished. The market for long-form written content, in books and newspapers, has induced anxiety in authors and journalists around the world who fear the collapse of the industry and the obsoletion of truth. Like the air we breathe, water we drink and gas we use to cook and fill our cars, we must come to terms with the fact that we cannot function without these platforms in the year 2025, and there exists no requisite replacement.
This January, an oligarchy, exploitive of our needs for information, not our technical survival, came together in the shrine to our democratic experiment. These oligarchs don’t work with the president to set prices or to bolster the value of their property in exchange for financial support. They first conspire to gatekeep our more pressing need — entertainment.
President Trump has assembled an oligarchy whose future is likely to endure that of Russia. He’s making a bet: that we might be able to cope with the unreported consequences of his policy decisions, but not without our screen time.
Musk and X. Zuckerberg, Instagram, Facebook and WhatsApp. Shou Zi Chew and TikTok. Jeff Bezos, Amazon and The Washington Post. Sundar Pichai and Google. Sam Altman and OpenAI. Tim Cook and Apple. An amalgamation of wealth and prestige that could persuade even the most powerful man in the world.
I do not know if these individuals seek to harm or even to enrich themselves personally. After all, these are men I have studied and admired, whose products I love and use on a minute-by-minute basis. They are the world’s greatest innovators, many of them, who have revolutionized the concept of civilization.
But the image is striking. The arbitrators of all our conversations, our culture and indeed the most precious thing of all, our time on Earth, appearing to worship at the altar of “America’s Golden Age.”
An oligarchy that can endure — not because of its political contributions, but because without it, the citizenry assumes a loss of identity. An understanding that threatens, in turn, to determine our political futures.
We have ceded much of our democratic power to these algorithms. But we must remember that beyond the noise, distraction and disinformation of the internet, it’s still up to us.
For a generation, these platforms have allowed us to put our most difficult conversations and democracy on autopilot. Many of us — likely you and I — feel raised by these apps. But it is now our duty to take back our power, our autonomy and ultimately, our republic.
Aidan Klineman is a Medill sophomore. He can be contacted at [email protected]. If you would like to respond publicly to this op-ed, send a Letter to the Editor to [email protected]. The views expressed in this piece do not necessarily reflect the views of all staff members of The Daily Northwestern.