♪ ♪ good evening from new york. i'm chris hayes. as we inch closer to a new year and a new administration, there are still lots of questions about how the election turned out the way it did, and everyone has their pet reasons. it was inflation, sure. it was joe biden's age.

also. it was the democrats doing too much of this or too it little o that. for me the one piece of data that haunts me is this. just before the election the think tank data for progress surveyed a month's worth of poll respondents, more than 1,300 voters to see how much they paid attention to political news. it matched the overall result of the election favoring donald trump over kamala harris by 1%, which is how it turned out. data for progress singled out respondents who said they consume a great deal of political news. that group of voters broke for kamala harris by a six point margin. among voters who said they consume zero political news, none at all, donald trump took a 19-point advantage. conclusion you can draw from that data is the less attention americans paid to the news the likelier they were to be big trump supporters. we just entered a new environment in which the news as

a distinct entity is kind of crumbling. being replaced by the endless scroll of content, the thing people breathe into their lungs like you breathe in air and pollution at the same time. now you don't pay attention to the failing news media as it is called by critics, but getting information about what is happening in our democracy and what the government is doing, what the status quo is, what people are posing to do about it. the information people get about it is about as bad and degraded as i personally have ever seen it. there are a lot of reasons for that. we will be exploring the reasons throughout the special show tonight. one place where the bleak information environment is the most obvious is what used to be called twitter, now x. the social media site bought by far-right billionaire elon musk who clearly, intentionally manipulated the platform to

become a de facto pro-trump right-wing propaganda outlet and he succeeded. studies by the "wall street journal," "washington post" and ago demming organizations found that the site forced political content on users, that content was almost irveinably pro trump, pro republican and pro musk. he has also shared and amplified far-right conspiracy on the sites. all while musk, the world's richest man, called donald trump's co-president by some, including the former president, claims he is a creator of free speech. it is a vacuum left by a shrinking and distrusted legacy media. charlie, a staffer at "the atlantic" staffer of galaxy brain. kate is author of "character limit," how elon destroyed

twitter. great to have you with us. i'm with you and i have to take a send every once in a while. it feels familiar to me with the trajectory of trump. i have to take a step back and be like, this happening? i have watched it every step of the way, i have covered it every step of the way and every step it was like this is ludicrous, he is going to buy twitter because his girlfriend, wife didn't like a joke that was censored? now here it is like the domino meme, you know, with the little one and then the big one. it is like here we are now elon musk is sort of running the country. i just -- do you feel the same way, like how did we get here? >> yes. i think that there's a couple of maxims that i have to try to sort the world, and i always think that especially in the last decade that you have to bet on the dumbest outcome. like you just can't count out the dumbest possible outcome. you know, the thing about elon musk is he is a master of pseudo events, right? he throws out lots of trial

balloons, similar to donald trump. a lot of things don't come to fruition, but certain things do, right? he does sometimes follow through in these ways or sometimes, you know, a court will force him to buy twitter and then it will turn out that he has -- uses it to leverage his influence. it is, frankly, astonishing that we are here but we are definitely here. >> yeah. kate, you have chronicled this in a really well-reported -- and a great book that i recommend to people. i think i had the thought of like how much could this matter really, and i was wrong i think. like i think i undersold what it would mean to have him running this, this platform and what its influence would be. what do you think? >> yeah, i think that it is really easy to underestimate the power of twitter, or x i should say now, because it is used by so few people. so we think of it as sort of a peanut compared

to facebook or tiktok or these other platforms. but the reality is that it still dominates the political conversation, and the things that are being talked about on x end up playing out well beyond that sphere and having consequences in the real world. you know, we saw very recently with the budget deal. >> yes, i mean we are coming off of him killing a budget deal basically through posting. we should say, charlie, one of the things i'm always careful about in this conversation, right, is not to de historiciz too much. there have been wealthy people who used wealth to manipulate democracy and buy platforms forever. henry ford, a brilliant car manufacturer, a virulent antisemitic. musk does seem to be the richest

man having the most influential platform, if not the biggest, and having the ear of the president, which i don't think we have ever had before. >> there's also a quality right now to society, culture, politics in general. it is similar to the idea, you know, i think of like meme stocks or this idea where like you can get narratives to travel, and if you can get enough people to get behind them, if you can drum up enough enthusiasm you can kind of make things happen, right? there's a real power to that. the internet is definitely the cultural and political force for that. i think elon musk, you know, to his credit in this realm has realized that this is a way to really change political culture, to really, you know, he is the -- not only the richest man in the world but he is the main character on the platform that kate said is still incredibly influential. it is where a lot of, you know,

politics and media coalesce and where agendas get set. so in that way he's sort of the still -- like trump was in the early parts of the first presidency there, he's kind of the assignment editor for a lot of the media and people in politics. >> yeah, and i think the commonality there, which is distinct from ford who had a message he wanted to get out that jews are evil in that case, what is different here is that he wants -- like he and trump understand better than anyone else that attention is the most important resource and the most powerful one to capture and they've both gone about capturing it. i wonder, kate, how you understand -- because it seems in some way he was pushed into it. it was a joke he was going to buy twitter, he tried to back out and a chancery court forced him to go through with it. how strategic this is, how accidental this is, what is the goal? >> i think so much of this is

accidental. you know, musk really rushed into the deal without a lot of forethought, about what he wanted to accomplish with the platform. once he had it, he began to sort of wing up and come up with ideas on the fly of how he wanted to run things. but very early on one of his goals was to get trump back on to the platform and get him to start posting there again. that was something that was really important to him, not necessarily because he aligned with the maga movement at that time but because he thought that musk would bring eyeballs and attention to x -- or that trump would bring eyeballs and attention to x, excuse me. though he really wanted trump back on the platform and posting there, and that was the beginning of the relationship. now obviously i think he's seen other strategic partnerships that he can have with trump, other ways he can kind of leverage and harness the attention and the power of the presidency to bolster and stir his own businesses. >> yes, and there's parts of what he has done there -- i mean there's the kind of very direct way in which it has become kind of a pro-trump propaganda site

and a pro-musk propaganda site, where everyone is fed what he wants you to get. you have written about this in november, charlie, just like there's a slurry of real hateful garbage for lack of a more precise term on that site that he has unleashed. you said "x" is the white supremacy site, silly cultures, silly memes and celebrity accounts have been drowned out by hateful site. it is no long ira social-media site with a white supremacy problem, baugh white supremacist site with a social media problem. what do you mean by that? >> it is very difficult to evaluate a network like x or like twitter holistically. we don't have access to the internal things like that. there's less transparency now than there was in the previous

ownership days. but i think anyone who spends time on there is the types of voice elevated since musk has taken over, but really in the last six months of the election campaign, the types of people and accounts that have been reinstated including conspiracy theorists and other white supremacies, supremacists you see content that's enraging to certain people and delightful to others. >> yes. >> a lot of it is very racist. that stuff is more prevalent on this site now. >> yeah. >> and it is something that i think musk delights in because, you know, it triggers the libs, right, but it fits into his free speech maxim-less box which is to say anything that's truth offensive is worthy because, you know, it falls under that paradigm. >> well, and it is more than that too, kate. i'm curious what your perspective is based on your reporting here, which is that i have watched people -- it has

nothing to do with musk. i have watched people basically self-radicalize online. i have watched it happen. they just start looking at one kind of content and then they kind of keep going with it and pushing it further and further, and from an outsider perspective it looks like that is what has happened to elon musk. at first it is like there's a bunch of jokey memes about really extremist ideas and next thing you know maybe he has extremist ideas. >> yeah, i think that the platform has shifted his viewpoints over time. he has become quite radicalized by it and he talks about it himself, how much more time he spends on the platform, he doesn't get his news and information from anywhere else, it is just x. >> it is clear. >> you can see that in the rate he posts. >> oh, yeah. >> he posts all day, all night, sometimes sleeping three or four hours a night and the rest of the time he is on line. >> yeah. >> i think because he has really stewed himself in that environment he's now kind of living and breathing it and believing what he sees on the

platform. >> yeah, that is stewed. yes, it is a very, very, very well-cooked brain. very tender. sort of falling apart at this point. charlie wartzel, kate, thank you both. coming up, how can you separate the two? that's next. can you separate the two that's next. i pop on a pad and get a mop-like clean floor in just one swipe. wow! and for hair, try swiffer dry cloths. the fluffy cloths pick up hair like a magnet. swiffer. you'll love it or your money back.

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♪ ♪ when social media first really popped about ten years ago there was a saying you would hear a lot, especially in

overlapping circles of politics and media, that twitter isn't real life. it captured something important to remember, that if you were exposed to the videos that it could give you an impression they were a representative slice of the public at large. it was easy to fall into spending all day scrolling and think you were doing man-on-the-street interviews, but of course you weren't. we really create our own bubbles, people that post a lot on a site might not be at all representative of people at large and there was quite a bit of evidence that opinions on twitter didn't reflect public opinion at large but a small selection of the population was dominating an outsized share of the political discourse online. to some extent it is still true today, the data we have suggests that, but i have to say now days it feels like the line between online and off line or real life is blurred in a way it wasn't true even a decade ago.

there is no real life and there is no online. there is only the hyper reality of the fused world of our phones and what we consume on them and what we see in the world. i think you see this in the reactions to the shooting of the unitedhealthcare ceo brian thompson. there's been a much remarked phenomenon of people not only grimly acknowledging the health care realities which are deadly, but basically straight up cheering a cold-blooded murder. while i don't think murder has majority of support in the country, polling suggests it doesn't, it is the case that this gory news has become part of the way we form opinions now. writing on "the new yorker" it was noted that the whiff of anarchist in the air is salty, unprecedented and notably across the aisle. it is just a matter of where you locate the decay, in the killing

or in the response to it, or in what lead us here. it is good to have you here. >> good to be here. >> i love what you had to write about this as you went through the online phenomenon. first of all, what is your reaction to seeing the reaction online at first? >> i was not one of the people that was shocked and appalled at the reaction. i'm definitely in the camp of the fundamental depravity of the american health care system is the thing -- is the fundamental cause of all of this, the murder and the reaction. but i do think, you know, i do think that a lot of it was underneath it to -- was not necessarily, as you said, murder is good, we celebrate it, we love it, we're meming it to death, although it is how to see immediately it became that way, and all of my group chats i will fully admit. but i think -- i do think something fundamentally under it is people were saying like, brian thompson's life was

precious. he was a human. it should not have been taken. it should not have been taken in cold blood, you know, at 6:30 a.m. in midtown. >> right. >> but every single one of the people, millions -- maybe not millions, thousands of people who died because of not -- >> at the hands of the system. >> at the hands of the system. >> their lives matter. >> their lives matter as much, exactly as much. >> that is -- i'm going to say, you know, i'm a lot older than you and i think i was a little shocked, and not appalled actually a little bit about the celebration. i think part of it had to do with the fact that there is a kind of irony, glibness, casualness to the way we think about all of this online. it is like we are constantly seeing horrible things online. >> right. >> and i guess my fear is that that doesn't stay online. >> right. >> that that glibness starts to infect how we think of it. so if the goal here is at the end to be like let's reclaim how precious human life is --

>> right. >> -- it felt to me like it was pushing me in the opposite direction, because it felt like part of the vortex of glibness, about dark topics that is the internet if that makes sense. >> yeah, i think the thing that the surveillance capitalism and the attention economy does, i think when you log on to social media and it asks you to see other people fundamentally as instruments or impediments to getting you what you want, which is probably approval, attention, whatever it is. and like there's something about the entire ecosystem, the infrastructure of the internet where everything that is human about us is our desire to connect with other people, our desire to learn about the world, our desire to be loved, our desire to express ourselves, this is not taken as an end in itself as it historically has been but as a means to the end and the end is profit for these companies. i do think that the -- you know, the effect of at this point decades of this, two decades since facebook or whatever, it

has added up to we have been infected with this instrumentalization, this idea that people -- >> conditioned. >> yeah. >> i mean the other part of it too if i try to think of the sunnier aspect and you said this to me as we were having a conversation off air, like you could also look at it as you have different modes of speaking, right? formal and informal, other settings, you might make jokes to friends that are off color that you wouldn't make after a family dinner, right? >> i don't know what you're talking about, yeah. >> you could also say, look, this is just the argot of the sphere of social discourse. it doesn't mean people think life is cheap. it is not reaching into some deeper moral conclusions people are making. >> yes, and i think there's a way in which the internet has kind of, you know, the way that it has consumed, consumed so much of our attention and our life while being part and parcel of the same systems that

decreased our avenues towards civic action and direct action, even just ways to act upon our world and the structures that people are upset about. you know, it is given this sort of play pen, this play pen -- >> exactly. >> -- you know, where we -- >> where we act out, like, err, err, we do this like a little kid in the play pen. >> yes, because we've been taught that anything that you do, anything that happens transform it into a meme and react back and forth over and over. i do think that, yeah, i do think that something real, something truly interesting, the real sort of anachic, populist anger at insurance companies is emerging. on unitedhealthcare, on linked in they had to shut down comments. this is linkedn. this is not where people go to

make -- >> memes, right? >> this is where you post with your head shot and your full employment history linked to your employer, and people -- they had to shut down comments on the post about brian thompson's murder because people were ha-ha, cry laughing on it. again, that does indicate both like a real political sentiment, also the way that we think of other people through the internet. >> yeah. >> but it is also people kind of clowning. >> yeah, right. i think that line between like what is clowning and what is real is one of the other lines that's gotten harder to figure out. >> yes. i mean january 6th. >> yeah, that's a great example, yeah. >> that to me is my parody of life on the internet. >> that's a great point. you had another great piece about the sort of your body, my choice post, this trollish right winger who posted it after the election, and that went viral and sort of counter to it went viral. one of the things i am thinking is we are seeing a gender

polarization in ideology in politics. women are becoming more liberal, men are becoming either not more liberal but conservative to a degree. >> yeah. >> how much about it is the murder in the health care is like there's a real thing underneath it and then there's the vortex of how the internet deals with the real conflict? >> i've been thinking about this a lot because i mean this was one of the things, you know, the sort of immediate data at the polls was this shocking, especially in the swing states, this shocking divergence, women swinging -- young gen-z women swinging 20, 30 points to the left. gen-z men, 20, 30 points to the right. i think this is one of the cleanest examples of the internet jumping into real life. i think there's something to the fact that when -- like if you are 11 and you have a smartphone and you do not have any experience really with the opposite gender. >> yeah. >> outside of childhood, where

you're beginning to become an adolescent, a young adult, but you don't have what we had, which was in-person interaction where you learned, where straight people learned to fumble towards the other in this private kind of messy space, where the place where straight people learned to see their potential romantic partners, their actual partners as friends at equals. >> middle school dances, hanging out at people's house, like all of that stuff. >> where you are confronted with the unconfine ability of another person. >> yeah. >> if you are a middle schooler and you have this framework, and there's always a media divide, like young women are much more likely to get their news from tiktok, their news. >> right. >> and young men are most likely to get it there streamers, youtube and there's a divide there. >> right. >> i think if you learn these, the way that these platforms -- the most profitable way for people to put forward a theory of gender relations is, again,

this instrumentalization. how boys or girls will be useful to you, how they can serve you or be your obstacles, and this is the exact framework that has been profitable in other structures. but when it is about simply relating to the other half of the population, i think we're beginning to see. this is just the beginning i think of what happens when you learn these things in the evice you have in your hands before you get -- >> before you have developed the real world. >> that contradicts that. >> yeah. >> that shows you -- and if you are learning that first and that might become the way that you relate to the other. >> author of a fantastic book that i really recommend that it is called "trick mirror: reflections on devil eiffel memes." >> thank you for having me. one man knows how to hold our attention and what does it mean for the next four years of donald trump, next. of donald trump, next

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in some ways the defining feature of the last decade of political life and public discourse has been donald trump is the center of attention. he has dominated the headlines pretty much daily since he first came down that golden escalator in trump tower nearly ten years ago. that is often because trump has a kind of weird, feral genius for getting attention, board i think of a very broken part inside of him, but also and crucially he understands that our attention economy, he is more than any other politician i

have ever covered willing to embrace negative attention just to keep himself at the center of the conversation. there's a real question of what that does to the national discourse. also a real question of whether he can keep that up in a second term at the ripe, old age of 78 when his schtick is getting pretty worn thin. the answer to those questions will have a lot to do with how we in the press cover him this time around among other things. andrew andrew morantz, staff writer for "the atlantic" and author of a book call "the trump show." and he joins me now. that book you wrote which is about how trump emerges online in 2016 helps me think of trump as the troll presidency in many ways. the idea of a troll online is someone who lives off negative attention and in many ways he does. do you still think it is a useful framework for

understanding? >> yes, the basic mechanics -- look, as you know, writing about internet stuff even in a magazine article that comes out a few weeks later, the proper nouns can become obsolete but the basic mechanics have not changed, right? the sort of rules of attention that became clear to me as i was recording that book, you know, conflict is attention and attention is influence. i was going to the trolliest corners of the internet and how donald trump was able to hijack the aeconomy by using the rules of how we know attention works. it is not a mystery if you do a school yard fight or taunt it is exciting to watch. no one tried it in a presidential debate. >> well, and i think the reason they hadn't and i think it is a key insight, and the key difference is they don't normally seek out negative attention. they seek out positive attention

because they want to be liked. if they have a choice, they tend to choose no attention. >> that's how they're trained. >> you don't want to, quote, unquote, make news. >> right. >> if you make news about something. >> right. >> and someone somewhere may not like you. >> but if you first of all are coming from totally outside the system. >> right. >> and second of all are fighting against institutions, i mean one thing that happened sometimes with the attention stuff, and i don't think we're in danger of doing this but i want to point out sometimes the attention stuff is used as a kind of excuse for, oh, that must be the only thing going on. >> right. >> and, you know, trumpism must be about, you know, kind of fooling people and turning them into zombies and making them think whatever they want. i think it is a combination of that with the ideas actually having some genuine popularity. >> yes, totally. >> so what he ferreted out was these institutions are overripe for attack. >> yes. >> and it kind of doesn't matter how you attack them. >> right. >> if you just say the media is bad, congress is bad, there was a huge audience for that, and he doesn't have to win all of the

fights. he just has to pick a lot of fights. >> one of the things, you were at -- you were at the nsg rally and i think it was a perfect example where, you know, it was -- it was a circus, it was a carnival. there was negative attention because one of the stand-up comediennes said really offensive stuff about one of the groups, including that were in the room. they got groans in the room. >> the joke that traveled was the puerto rico joke but there was worse ones in that. by the way, i was there for many, many hours. there were many, many things that people said that were worse than that, but it was the one that traveled. >> but it didn't seem -- like in the end it was a perfect example of how the ledger works. >> uh-huh. >> because the old thinking is that if you hold the big rally right before election day where a mediocre comic makes offensive -- they're not even funny jokes. >> right. >> offensive jokes, that's going to hurt you. but like -- >> well a couple of things on

that. one thing is you were saying about the dilemma of the troll. it is really like -- >> right, you pay them or not. >> the first thing on the internet is don't be the troll. >> don't be the troll. you can't do that when it is a former president running as nominee in october. >> right. >> that's off the table. then you go, okay, how do you pay attention to this stuff? then you are put in the other dilemma which is comedian gets up and tells distasteful joke. then do you take the woke-scold position and say, now, now, don't tell that joke. that puts you into a corner where, of course, if you are a person who is tuning and you haven't paid attention, well, give the guy a break, he is a median. >> i guess so. >> and also it gets to i think there's a folk theory of elections that each election has its kind of dominant new media, 1960 famous was television with kennedy. you have 2016 was obviously the social media election. >> yeah. >> the argument has been made i think reasonably it was the

long-form podcast election. this median comedian guy is somo comes out of the world and as someone who listens to podcast, i know when you have a relationship with people in that world and suddenly these people in the media who googled his name seconds after are telling you that he is a racist, you have listened to him 18 years. >> i didn't even hear -- like i had issues but it was disappointing. >> if you go back to the para social world, that joke, he didn't mean it that way. like how are you going to believe? >> the big question for me, because the point you made early on was when you write about this stuff it gets -- you know, the dynamics change quickly, the platform changes quickly. the question now of what it looks like 2.0, he seems to be kind of a little bit of a spent force, trump, and the bag of tricks is -- >> rote. >> and it seems to me like musk

is actually -- like there's always talk about how vance was the next trump, you know. i fell like we're watching like musk do it way better in front of our eyes. >> yes. although musk may shine bright and blaze out in a blaze of glory, we'll see. >> i think that's also possible. >> and this is how the shows stays interesting, right? >> right, right. >> these are two of the shows that have a bunch of new characters, you never know what the arc will be. it seems totally unstable these two guys could stay friends for long, so there's that. also, it is not an accident that trump surrounds himself with fighters, i mean almost literally. like you think dana white, joe rogan. >> yeah. >> these are people who professionally fight or comment on fights for a living and that's not an accident. because watching people fight is like primordially entertaining. >> and that's a great, great insight. andrew, thank you so much. >> thank you. still to come, concerns

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weren't particularly literate to the role that radio and tv played in forming public opinion. now we have a new set of worries now. it feels to me there's something distinct, toxic and insidious of how we are relating to each other and learning about the world through the media and on the phones. is that the 21st version these days or is there something distinct there? is there a way to reform our online information culture in ways that earlier generations had conversations about? few people know this world as well as doug rushkoff, the first man to describe viral media in 1996. the media theater and digital economics at queens. he has written multiple books on humanity and hosts a podcast. thank you for being here. >> great to be here. >> i read this book, "present shock" which came out i think 15 years ago. you have wrote a book about gen

x years ago that i read when i was -- you have been thinking about and watching it for a long time. let's start with how you think about the -- everyone always thinks the new thing is bad versus there's something new happening here that's bad. >> well, i guess we're asking is it a question of degree or fundamental difference. >> right. >> so, yeah, people have been worried about this since -- i mean the public education movement in england was, you know, back in the 17, 1800s was people could be informed enough to vote, you know. >> right. >> i was just thinking as i was watching this show today, walter lipman, early 1900s, was a progressive, as progressive as any of us. >> yeah. >> and he got hired by woodrow wilson to run a campaign to get america to support the war after woodrow wilson ran on a peace

platform. it worked so well he was like, oh, my god. >> shocked and appalled. >> shocked and appalled at himself. >> he comes away and writes a great book called "public opinion." >> where he was saying basically, i think americans are too dumb to do democracy. >> right, or at least too gullible or too easily swayed. >> right. >> he writes another book in which he basically talks about, you know, he says -- there's a great line where he says, you know, my sympathies are with the citizen who have to try to have opinion. it is my full-time job to have a range of opinions on the issues that citizens have and i can't do it. >> right. >> so how is anyone supposed to do it. >> exactly, right. john dewey, who was at columbia teaching college was writing articles against his point of view saying no, we just need a good education system and a good press, good journalism and it will work out, but both of the institutions are crumbling right now. again and again we see the same thing. it was neil postman really came after that. remember, neil postman, i got to know him pretty well.

>> he wrote a very famous book called "amusing ourselves to death." >> right. >> which is about public discourse in the tv age, published in 1985. >> right. in that book he asked the question, why when the news comes on is there music? you know, the war in iraq. guilty as charged. >> we start every show. >> right, why would there be? why is there a sound track? he realized it is because it is entertainment. >> yes. what do you think we are doing here? >> it used to be a public service. >> right. >> in order to get an fcc license a television station had to do news. >> right. the postman critique cuts deep because we are on cable news and we start with music and i project a loud voice. all of that stuff saying basically news shouldn't be entertaining and entertainment and news are fusing, which i think is true. that's one step. guilty as charge. i need to keep people's attention to make this thing keep working. i'm fine with that actually. what has happened now is that news even -- like people are watching this, they know they're watching a news show, but even a news is a separate category with

some different kind of ethos, civic value. it is now obliterated by analogy -- an algorithm in which you get contact. here is someone dancing, here is an old football highlight, here is an old sitcom, here is something about maga, donald trump. at least in this case, right, the thing that postman didn't like, sure, but it is still a distinct entity. >> right, and i think that's the shiftd as we move shift, as we away to media-based to what we called a factoid based media. it is all reality tv, as if it is not true. it is fact-like. it is nonfiction style. now it is all nonfiction data coming at us and each piece of nonfiction data is crafted usually by an algorithm, sometimes by a person -- >> but experted through the

algorithm. >> that's the genius of the algorithm, human ingenuity coming up with it but finding out how it works. >> nielsen would figure out how well it did and we could change the news show to get morad jens. but now an algorithm is doing it instantly, so each person is getting their own feed by an algorithm designed to get engagement. >> the fact you are a critic of all of this, you have a kind of optimism about you, right? >> i can't help it. yeah. >> i want to read it because i thought it was interesting, july 17th on sub stack, the ex at which timing fascism, the totalitarianism polluting our consciousness may be less what is happening than ee action against what is happening. but, boy, it may kill us all if we're not careful. what i sense increasingly is a

breaking point and exhaustion where people do sense there's something amiss and are finding ways to rebel against it. >> i think so. i mean people are engaging live. you know, people are -- >> that's true. >> kids are rediscovering eye contact. >> right. >> or touching or anything. yeah, i do think there's -- it is like a nausea. i got it in the late '90s where i felt overwhelmed. once, you know, the internet went from the beautiful, slow, asynchronous internet, it was like chess by mail how slow the internet was. if you remember those days, the internet was a place where you kind of worried because you sounded so much smarter on the internet than you did in real life thaw were t you were afrai meet the people. could you imagine an internet where people acted better than they did in the real world? now it is like the internet is such a cesspool and we've seen, as you have just said, we have seen the stars of the internet are mean people. the stars of the internet are

trolls. that's what works. so if, you know, donald trump or elon musk are as good as it gets, then a lot of us are going to have to look somewhere else for the kind of attention we need and deserve. >> what do you think that looks like? >> a lot will be local, thank good. we need local papers, local economies, people buying local, educating people, doing favors for their neighbors. >> i think "the onion" started reprinting the newspaper again and mailing it out. you know, again, something slightly precious about that, something precious about i don't even own a tv, the upper west side parents of my youth would say, right. >> right. >> there's something that i like about it. there is something about getting this physical paper and reading it. >> yeah. people feel that way about letters. i do think there's going to be a movement towards rejection. it will start small, little

green shoots, but rejection of the oppressive nature. >> right. and that's on both sides. you know -- >> oh, yes. >> steve bannon was inviting me on his podcast to talk about the technocracy, the way big institutions are ruling us through technology. the left feels that way. we want to go back to the earth and perma culture and local communities and cooperatives, and the fact both sides are feeling that i think is in some ways a reaction against the abstraction of digital. it is like the abstraction of digital, the abstraction of capitalism, everything is a derivative, a derivative, a derivative, and it has so much more leverage than the real world. in some ways it is kind of that red state, back to the land, we are doing the labor, and the blue state is sort of i just want to go up to my commune and have an ex experience with people. >> yes, that land movement which gave birth to a lot of things, i

think we will see a version of that as a rebellion to digital reality now. doug rushkoff, great to have you. thank you very much. >> thanks for doing this. >> we will be right back. for dos >> we will be right back look. here. try secret whole body deodorant. it doesn't leave an icky residue. and it actually gives me 72 hour odor protection... everywhere. secret whole body deodorant. head & shoulders bare. clinically proven dandruff protection with just nine essential ingredients. no sulfates, no silicones, no dyes.

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for the past few years, i have been thinking a lot about the themes that we have been grappling with today, i have been working on a new book about it all called the sirens

call, how attention became the world's most endangered resource, and it looks at how our attention is constantly being extracted and commodified, often against our will, and how that works both our intimate parts of our private life and our entire public political discourse. that book is available to order now, it will be out in january. i am really excited to have it in the world, i hope it is useful for people. i will also be hitting the road, going to a bunch of different venues across the country to talk about it, from santa's code -- san francisco to boston to seattle to houston to pittsburgh to chicago and that is not all, even more dates and locations are in the works. you can either scan the qr code here on the screen or you can go to the website, msnbc.com/the sirens call to learn more and to buy tickets to one of those events, and i truly look forward to seeing you out there but that is all in tonight, have a great day. first and foremost, happy holidays to all of you, and congratulations for almost making it to the end of 20 24- bit it feels like