The Pitfalls of Posting

T here’s a good chance you’re reading this article on your smartphone. And that, while you’re doing so, you’ll get a couple of push notifications, maybe a text message or two, and you may be lured to any number of apps — Instagram, Snapchat — before you finish. There’s also a good chance you feel guilty about it. Many people want to unplug from the technology-facilitated dominion of distraction — a desire occasionally indulged but typically suppressed, given its seeming impossibility.

Role models for digital moderation, much less asceticism, are in short supply. Some of the most prominent people in public life participate enthusiastically in digital modes of discourse. Consider Vice President JD Vance; Elon Musk, the richest man in the world; and Donald Trump, the most powerful man in the world. Their success would appear to vindicate their embrace of online life. But an examination of their respective digital presences raises questions about the desirability, or at least the replicability, of their chosen paths.

Start with Vance. He “has an X habit,” as RealClearPolitics reporter Phil Wegmann put it. In part because Vance, our first Millennial vice president, grew up accustomed to social media, he has had little compunction about using it as vice president. He has issued article-length statements on Ukraine, immigration, and more. He often rebuts critics. In Trump’s absence from the platform, he has become the administration’s X enforcer.

A defect has been lurking in his entire political approach from its beginning, however. In 2021, just as Vance was launching his Ohio Senate campaign, he explained why he had cottoned to the worldview and obsessive digital-engagement style of a particular segment of the online right. “Does a normal Ohio voter read Yoram Hazony and Mencius Moldbug?” Vance asked, referring, respectively, to an Israeli-American political theorist and a neo-reactionary blogger whose real name is Curtis Yarvin. He answered his own question in the negative but nonetheless asserted that those voters “agree with the broad thrust of where we think American public policy should go.”

Vance is a Pat Buchanan fan. His remarks resemble Buchanan’s defense of “conservatives of the heart” who “don’t read Adam Smith or Edmund Burke” but “come from the same schoolyards and the same playgrounds and towns as we come from” and “share our beliefs and convictions, our hopes and our dreams.” Vance’s online reading habits appear to have convinced him that today’s conservatives of the heart reject the tenets of the Declaration of Independence, as Hazony seems to, or believe that the American Revolution was a mistake, as Yarvin does. If Vance is convinced of these things that are bruited by the online right, then he risks succumbing to a right-wing version of the ideological blinders the left created for itself — with disastrous results — leading up to Donald Trump’s reelection.

For all his posting, Vance has been somewhat overshadowed by Musk in the early months of the second Trump administration. Musk’s leadership of the Department of Government Efficiency alongside his myriad nonpolitical exploits make this unsurprising. As does the fact that he actually owns X. Having purchased Twitter and rebranded the platform in 2022, he has made it more hospitable to right-leaning views — by not routinely censoring them or adding warning notices to them. And he has become one of X’s most enthusiastic users, posting there sometimes dozens of times a day. He has changed the nature and content of political discourse, all while being one of the most dominant figures in both political and economic life.

But Musk, too, cannot avoid the pitfalls of posting. He has been undisciplined in both his claims and the information he endorses. Despite his prodigious work ethic, politics seems to have distracted him from his other affairs. And his worldview, while useful in some ways, is rooted in a weirdness of the sort that Silicon Valley tends to incubate.

And then there’s Trump. When Ron DeSantis’s presidential campaign ended in January 2024, I criticized it for being too online. The campaign’s main flaw was to think of the niche online right-wing culture it embraced as an entity with an identity sufficiently distinct from Trump that one could defeat him politically by mastering it. Yet as I wrote then, “Trump represents something real that manifests online but was not born there” and he “remains a bigger and more persuasive force than any of his would-be ideologists or successors.”

Nothing that has happened since then has dissuaded me from this view. Trump is a living meme, a force of cultural and political potency unlike any of his contemporaries. He drives news cycles and even policy with his pronouncements. Though Vance, unlike Trump, is a digital native, Vance owes his digital (and political) stature to Trump. And though Musk is wealthier than Trump, Musk owes his supercharged political prominence to Trump, whose meme fiefdom Musk shares.

An unnamed Bush adviser boasted during the Iraq War that, because America is an empire, “we create our own reality.” Trump, too, can create his own reality. This is part of why, as Rich Lowry wrote earlier this week, it’s impossible to win an argument with Trump: He is simply too convinced of what he believes to be true in the moment to be dissuaded otherwise. That can go a long way toward reshaping the world around you. But it doesn’t always go all the way. Sometimes, reality is stubborn; sometimes it resists the whims of those who would seek to reshape it. Perhaps Trump can avoid the fallout. But not all in his orbit are so deft. Even success is a risk. Making the real world more like a narrowcast digital fantasy can make the former a worse place: angrier, more impatient, less reflective, and less fulfilling.

Even these three potentates of posting, then, cannot fully escape its dangers. Society and politics have always adapted to new technologies. Those technologies have always been tools, which can be used for good or for ill. But nothing will change the fact that any mode of living dislodged from fundamental truths about reality and human nature will entail difficulties. All of this makes the case for limiting our engagement with digital life, and not forgetting the importance of the physical world. So now that you’re done reading this article, I recommend you put your phone down and do something in the real world.