I'll often try to explain the social media environment of the aughts and early 2010s by comparing it to a good coffee shop. It wasn't any one thing to everyone, it was defined by the people you experienced it with and the way you all chose to spend your time there. You could argue about politics or chat up a stranger or sit alone with your thoughts. You never worried much about who owned it because it felt like a shared space. It was community infrastructure.
If one were to make a definitive guide to internet folk wisdom from those days, there would be a handful of obligatory includes: dozens of Dril tweets with near-literary levels of linguistic influence, terms like "Milkshake Duck," and summary memes like "The Right is starting to get better at comedy and it's making lefties nervous."
Before that last one became an ironically deployed retort for painful attempts at conservative comedy, it was a genuine tweet in the late 2010s from one in a near-endless deluge of striving conservative wannabes playing Twitter pundit. The combined earnestness and inaccuracy of his statement turned it into an immediate joke and proof the right wing's lack of grasp on.
The internet of the last decade has been divided along very partisan lines (a side effect of the fact that we went from having thousands of isolated websites and forums to a handful of mostly-public social platforms shared by all) and for as long as those party lines have been drawn, the terminally online right winger's sense of humor hasn't been indicative of what people generally find funny.
There are plenty of reasons for this, not the least of which is that until the last couple years, many of the most ardent supporters of America's right wing were too old to know how to use the computer. Republicans over 50 operate on a humor wavelength that can best be described as "chain emails with lead poisoning" and unless you really like jokes about drinking from the hose and impact font memes of Don Draper, there's not much to laugh at.
In 2017, the right wing's online offensive was mostly led by the aforementioned deluge of chinless pundits attempting to declare total control over the culture. They tried the same neo-nazi stunts back then too, but were met with far more resistance than they'd planned. The online mobilization against that first Trump administration (for better and for worse) matched, and in many cases drowned out, their fervor. The original "alt-right" movement never shifted the cultural paradigm the way they'd planned to, they never got the satisfaction they were expecting.
This is part of why people latched so strongly onto the original post about the right getting funnier. The declaration that the right was improving at comedy was the same as an admission that they weren't very funny to begin with. It was an admission that the culture war that they were constantly waging was a losing one, that their view of the world didn't resonate with people. But now, something has changed.
In 2025, we find ourselves in a situation that seems similar to 2017 on paper but feels very different. The right hasn't gotten any better at comedy, but they don't seem like they care anymore. In what may be one of the most damaging instances of self-actualization in human history, the right has learned to embrace the fact that nobody likes them.
Whether it's the official White House twitter account's constant shitposting (including an AI recreation of a deportation in the art style of Studio Ghibli, a hulked-out Jedi Trump for Star Wars day, and of course the ongoing "Trump for Pope" saga) or Elon Musk's never ending quest to say one single funny thing, a picture is being painted of a cultural victory lap for an ascendant authoritarian movement that has realized that the culture war doesn't matter when you've seized the primary means of experiencing that culture. In other words, who needs hearts and minds when you own the internet?
Authoritarian movements want power. This parade of boring jokes and overconfident hotdogging is more about dominance than anything else. It's a way of puffing out their chests, it's tanks in the digital streets. Disrespecting art and culture, being confidently unfunny and unoriginal, is a natural progression of right wing thought. The result is an insufferable, authoritarian, Internet, one that's become a parking lot where angry virgins go to do donuts in hopes of impressing the visibly damp men in charge. If they can't be funny, they'll settle for having a gun leveled at the head of human progress.
But let's not confuse ownership for consensus. It's not that suddenly everyone loves right wing policy (the actions of this administration remain unpopular on the whole), it's that the lens through which our culture is viewed (primarily the internet but also news outlets and major media conglomerates) is owned exclusively by people who are either aligned with fascism or ambivalent towards it so long as their profits are untouched. This has allowed them to algorithmically tailor the media diet of the average American. They can send people down whatever rabbit hole is necessary to get them buying whatever products and supporting whatever causes are in the best interest of the platforms' benefactors. I don't believe it's a coincidence that about ten years into the construction of the Authoritarian Internet, we got our first generation of majority conservative young men since the immediate aftermath of 9/11.
And this is the real thing I'm getting at here and it's one that I believe ties into just about everything I've been writing about in the tech/internet culture space for the last few years, the internet is social media at this point and social media exists to sell products, farm data, and upset you. Years ago, we hoped that it was some sort of astral plane where you could gather up a group of likeminded individuals to storm the virtual bastille, but now it's four websites owned by three billionaires. It's a branded experience designed to get you to buy things or maybe kill yourself if they accidentally tweak your algorithm the wrong way. It's not our internet anymore. It hasn't been for a long time.
The right recognized that an internet where facts were readily available and people could easily confer with each other didn't bode well for their ideas, so they spent the following decade doing all they could to dismantle it. In that time, we've seen the end of Net Neutrality, the disastrous pivot to video, and the rise of AI platforms that openly confess to the largest single theft of copyrighted work in human history. We've watched the richest man in the world buy one of the biggest social platforms, use it to browbeat his way into the Trump administration, and then gut the agency responsible for keeping our food and water safe. At what point do we stop saying "damn that's crazy" and start seeing this as a systematic plan to walk back the freedom the internet once provided and transform it into a tool that is only good for rampant consumption or a more efficient subjugation of the working class and poor?
Media recreations of life under authoritarian rule paint a picture of a world in which everyone is either a goose stepping fascist or a rugged freedom fighter but in reality, the majority of people living under authoritarian governments do nothing. They live their lives, come out the other side, and think "dang!" regardless of the untold human suffering that may have just happened around them.
The saying goes that the road to hell is paved with good intentions but I'd argue it's paved far more with the desire to feel normal. It's paved by people who don't want to rock the boat too much, who hear something in a work meeting that unsettles them and manage to internalize it as normal by EOD. Our innate desire to maintain normalcy at any cost is one of the greatest assets of fascism. This is why it's important to say it plainly: the internet itself has become the right's most important tool.
That coffee shop we all loved is gone. The fascists kept getting kicked out so they bought it. Now it's full of emboldened fascists. The land it's on is owned by fascists. Security footage of every conversation that happens or has happened within is now firmly in the hands of fascists. Everything that makes the place work, from the water in the pipes to the wires in the walls, is owned by someone who only wants you there if you're on their side or willing to spend your money in silence. You can chase that desire to maintain the status quo and keep slamming overpriced Americanos, or you can leave.
You can decide that it isn't worth it to stay on a platform like Instagram, which contributes more to negative mental health outcomes for children than any other app. You can make the choice to stop scrolling away hours on TikTok, who made a public deal with Trump for their survival in the first days of his presidency. You can decide against spending time on X, whose feed now seems to be split between videos of racially charged street fights and out of context movie scenes played at 1.25 speed. There are very few parts of what's coming that we as regular people will get to have a say in but this is one of them.
I think about this tweet from Emo Philips a lot, from the moment in 2016 where we all realized (many for the first time) that cultural dominance on social platforms didn't equate to electoral or political power. It was the first time I really thought about what tweets are.
I'm embarrassed to admit that throughout the years of my mid 20s, when I had hundreds of thousands of followers and had been turned into essentially an adult iPad baby by excess dopamine exposure, I thought posting was really doing something. We're at the birth of a new medium, I thought, this is the front line of intellectual discussion and political change! I thought all this alongside various jokes like "they should call corn corb"
I'd known before 2016 that things weren't trending in a good direction (I've been proudly obnoxious since 2012 or so) but that election was the first time I recognized that the cultural cache of the internet didn't mean anything, that it could all be swept off the board like it was nothing. I'd be reminded of this fact over and over again in the years that followed, professionally, personally, and politically, as the internet's transformation into its current state sped up.
It's a tough pill to swallow, that something as all-encompassing as the internet must now be viewed as a tool of the ruling class, but the weather changes with or without our permission. Saying you can see the sun trying to peek out doesn't stop the rain. Pretending that things online are the same as they've always been won't protect us, only our communities can do that. But before we despair too much, it's important to remember that our ability to create and nurture those communities is much older than the internet. We can still know our neighbors, we can still share ideas and take advantage of the unprecedented level of communication modern technology allows us. The ability to take care of each other will persist long after the internet is gone unless we decide to cast it aside to follow our billionaire curated feeds on their path to oblivion.
Hey gang, thanks as always for reading. Here's this week's DANIEL REPORT (AKA the part where I tell you what i'm up to outside of calling computers the devil)
I. We're still in the pre-launch phase for our upcoming card game, Who's A Good Boy: The Game Where Dogs Can Sin. The game is a collaboration between me and my incredibly talented animator wife, Julia Glassman. You can sign up to get more info over at DogsCanSin.com before the campaign launches on June 10th.
II. Updates will be a little more sporadic over the next handful of months as our first child is due in late June. Subscribing to this newsletter is still the best way to hear about what I'm up to (and subscribing for money makes sure that lil baby stays rich in apple sauce).
See ya soon. Stay offline.
-Dan