\n<\/p>\n
This weekend\u2019s attack on Venezuela produced plenty of indelible images. The one burned into my brain was shared by President Donald Trump on Truth Social. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth is sitting in front of a laptop at a makeshift command center in Mar-a-Lago. He\u2019s monitoring the raid with a grave expression on his face, eyes intently focused on something out of frame.<\/p>\n
At first glance, the image has all the trappings of a Serious Tactical Raid Photo, \u00e0 la Pete Souza\u2019s famous Situation Room snapshot, which showed President Barack Obama and his national-security team tracking the raid on Osama bin Laden\u2019s compound. But then you see what\u2019s behind Hegseth: a large screen displaying an X feed. The photo is blurry, but it seems to show Hegseth and company using X\u2019s search function to monitor tweets about the raid. On the screen, hovering over Hegseth\u2019s left shoulder, is a giant face-holding-back-tears<\/em> emoji (\ud83e\udd79).<\/p>\n The photo quickly spread around the internet on Saturday\u2014mostly as a way to mock just how terminally online the Trump administration appears to be. \u201cThey monitor the situation just like how we do,\u201d one person who works in crypto wrote on X. On Bluesky, I watched others make fun of Hegseth, Trump, and Secretary of State Marco Rubio as part of a \u201cpodcaster-occupied government.\u201d<\/p>\n It is no secret that the Trump administration is social media\u2013addled. Over the past year, most of the government\u2019s major online accounts\u2014especially on X\u2014have become megaphones for cruel and racist shitposting, not unlike what one might see from a garden-variety troll on 4chan. These accounts have shared deportation ASMR; an AI-generated, Studio Ghiblified version of a real photo of a crying woman being arrested by ICE; a post comparing immigrants to the alien vermin in the Halo <\/em>video-game series; and Nazi-coded \u201cDefend the fatherland\u201d memes. And who could forget the AI-slop video of Trump in a fighter jet dropping what appeared to be human feces on protesters in Times Square. These official government communications are a key part of how the Trump administration does its job. It is governance through content creation.<\/p>\n This is why the Trump administration is staffed with former reality-show stars, cable-news hosts, and popular podcasters. It is why the government allows friendly camera crews to accompany ICE raids, why former Congressman Matt Gaetz is given a Pentagon press credential along with Laura Loomer, and why Vice President J. D. Vance spends his days trolling people on X. It\u2019s why Kristi Noem staged a photo op in front of a cage full of men at El Salvador\u2019s Terrorism Confinement Center, and why the administration has allowed YouTubers to make videos there. It\u2019s why an assistant attorney general at the U.S. Department of Justice is on X, grousing about her follower count stalling at a paltry 1.3 million and asking, \u201cWhat kind of content do my folks want to see more of to like and share?\u201d And it\u2019s the reason that Katie Miller\u2014who left the Trump administration to work for Elon Musk and then left Musk to start a podcast\u2014posted a photo on X on Saturday showing a map of Greenland colored as an American flag with the caption \u201cSOON.\u201d The U.S. government is concerned first and foremost with spectacle, engaging in both fan service for its most extreme supporters and the constant trolling of its enemies. The goal, above all else, is to elicit a response.<\/p>\n The Hegseth photo from Saturday and others like it confirm this dynamic. Why would the men in charge of the most powerful military and intelligence services in the world be monitoring a popular X account called \u201cOSINTdefender\u201d if they weren\u2019t performing for an online audience? (The White House did not respond to a request for comment on the matter.) Perhaps one could defend their scrolling as potentially useful data gathering on the grounds that, during the bin Laden raid, early tweets from local citizens began to break the news well before the mainstream media caught on. But such posts are low-level intelligence, a kind that is arguably far too trivial for a Cabinet secretary or president to pay attention to. The simplest explanation is that everyone in that room at Mar-a-Lago wanted to observe the spectacle created by their actions.<\/p>\n \u201cI watched it literally like I was watching a television show,\u201d Trump said in a phone interview Saturday with Fox News. \u201cIt was an amazing thing.\u201d His description suggests military invasion as personal entertainment\u2014a reality show with stark geopolitical consequences that the president can produce and direct via his whims.<\/p>\n Trump is obsessed with ratings, and social media provides ample opportunities to watch numbers go up at the same time as other politicians, media members, and onlookers respond. And so you get not only an invasion and a press conference but a slew of posts. In the first day after Nicol\u00e1s Maduro was seized, Trump or official government accounts had shared:<\/p>\n The more I watched the fallout from the invasion play out online, the more futile any effort to make sense of it felt. I felt like I was trapped in a recursive loop of a very specific style of internet content: the reaction video.<\/p>\n Reaction videos began on YouTube in the mid-2000s, and they are now a hallmark of online content. As the name suggests, they show people responding to other media. In the early days, these were typically gross-out videos like the infamous \u201c2 Girls, 1 Cup,\u201d and as The New York Times<\/em>\u2019 Sam Anderson wrote back in 2011, their appeal was allowing \u201cpeople to watch this taboo thing by proxy, to experience its dangerous thrill without having to encounter it directly.\u201d<\/p>\n Over time, reaction videos became far more interesting and varied\u2014a way to experience something vicariously for the first time or to share the joy of something you love with others. As Anderson noted, the videos are best at capturing surprise: \u201cthat moment when the world breaks, when it violates or exceeds its basic duties and forces someone to undergo some kind of dramatic shift.\u201d<\/p>\n Today, the world feels like it\u2019s breaking in any number of ways\u2014so perhaps it makes sense that the logic and structure of the reaction video pervades media, culture, and politics. Some of this feeling has to do with the structure of social media, where timelines are no longer sorted chronologically but algorithmically, feeding users a steady stream of content that\u2019s likely to elicit a strong reaction. The algorithmic internet has always been chaotic, but as the platforms have matured and evolved, the culture they produce and behaviors they provoke have become insular and inscrutable\u2014at least to people who don\u2019t spend huge chunks of time online. Especially on X, algorithmic culture is characterized by ceaseless iteration: Everything that\u2019s happening is piled atop all the things that just happened.<\/p>\n When any given event occurs\u2014a raid in Venezuela, say\u2014the trolls, pundits, know-it-alls, and shitposters flood in immediately. Discourse<\/em> is a gameable phenomenon now; people know how to play their roles by heart. These days, one doesn\u2019t experience the news on these platforms before<\/em> seeing the memes and reactions\u2014the reaction and the news are, in essence, one thing now.<\/p>\n By the time I saw the news of the raid, a photo Trump had posted showing a blindfolded Maduro in a Nike sweatsuit had already become a meme. Just a few minutes later, that meme had mixed with a dozen others. In a few hours, I stumbled upon a split-screen generative-AI slop video of Maduro DJing in the sweatsuit in one frame while, in the other, Trump\u2019s face was superimposed onto a clip of Jon Hamm blissed out and dancing in a club. An image of Maduro in handcuffs wearing a blue sweatshirt and giving a thumbs-up was followed immediately by a marketing meme posted by that sweatshirt\u2019s manufacturer; scroll more and there\u2019s the same photo, now with Maduro\u2019s face replaced by Charlie Kirk\u2019s.<\/p>\n The result is essentially insane and postliterate. But it is also pretty much legible for those steeped in online culture. It is coherent incoherence, everything reacting to everything else, all at once. The same thing happened after Kirk was shot. The memes, commentary, and speculation became a culture unto itself, a loop of ironic posting, information warring, and commentary on commentary\u2014all before his shooter was identified or Kirk was even pronounced dead. This process is nihilistic, and it has a dehumanizing effect. Stories about people or countries in conflict become abstract, buried under a pile of memes and recursive references that exist for little more than scroll-by entertainment. Over the past decade, online performance for others has evolved out of popular culture and media and become a primary means of communication for everyone\u2014mass shooters, meme makers, and POTUS all included.<\/p>\n Trump has been rightfully called the Twitter president in the past, and a crucial part of that legacy is the skilled exploitation of this information environment. His administration\u2019s chief output is online shitposting. It\u2019s not an actual form of governance, nor is it a kind of policy, but it is performative speech that\u2019s supposed to signify action and, in the case of the Venezuela raid, strength. The resources of the most powerful military in the world are being marshaled in service of making memes declaring, \u201cTHIS IS OUR HEMISPHERE.\u201d All because the country\u2019s leaders think it\u2019s good theater, and in a postliterate political era, the spectacle is propulsive. It gives so many of the entities of our media, political, and cultural ecosystems what they crave: something to react to.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" This weekend\u2019s attack on Venezuela produced plenty of indelible images. The one burned into my brain was shared by President Donald Trump on Truth Social. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth is sitting in front of a laptop at a makeshift command center in Mar-a-Lago. He\u2019s monitoring the raid with a grave expression on his face, eyes<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":40652,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[55],"tags":[9419],"class_list":{"0":"post-40651","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-social-issues","8":"tag-reacting"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/40651","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=40651"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/40651\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/40652"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=40651"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=40651"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=40651"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}\n