Against my better judgment, I think I knew it was over when Kamala was Brat. Charli XCX’s tweet was the final bit of pressure on the media floodgate that would unleash 100 days of edits, blame-shifting, graphic T-shirts, and continuous disappointment and confusion. @KamalaHQ, manned by the zillenials in this photo, made headlines in liberal media as the new frontier of political messaging and the official ushering in of Gen-Z into the voting class. With Taylor Swift songs (after she gave her official endorsement), clapbacks, and Walz thirst traps, the millions of likes garnered across platforms were used as a direct barometer for votes in the presidential election. But in haunting decisiveness, the Zynternet* constituency prevailed. For those backed into @KamalaHQ’s “side” of the internet, we were told with great certainty that their touch-grassroots campaign was the fresh beat the Democratic Party needed to survive another election cycle.The reality, however, is that the content produced by the campaign reflected its strategy—holding up a mirror to voters who didn’t need convincing, just more things to reshare.

It seems as though no discussion of echo chambers and algorithms, no consensus about how internet trends function and their relevance, can shift the narrative that virality and action are not directly related. This became clear during the campaigns and, after, with such discourse as the “4b Movement.” A separatist movement with “radical feminist” origins among Korean women has become popular lingo among young women who, in the spirit of polemic honesty, would hesitate to raise their hands in class if a boy spoke loudly beforehand. Incessant shares and takes, more likely from bots than from young American women, now funnel anger and legitimacy into rage-bait, leaving us trapped in a constant cycle of bad-faith discourse based on nothing. Always patronizing and deeply resistant to nuance or engagement beyond blind approval, viral political content obscures the desires of voters, transforming them into indigestible talking points that both sides gnaw on ceaselessly.

In the spirit of both-sidesism, this is not just a problem for the Democratic Party. The messaging of the Republican Party since 2016 has been built on solving non-existent viral problems (e.g., gender-affirming surgery on children) that they can point to and say, “See? Not a problem anymore.” However, now with the creation of DOGE, the new agency manned by Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy, government reform is promised to be decided based on virality. At this time, despite Musk and Ramaswamy’s incessant maintenance of the promise-making machine and liberal outcry, it isn’t clear whether DOGE will have a major influence on government spending, or if it’s Trump throwing these two a bone to keep them out of his way. But the idea of posting on X becoming a legitimate means of civic engagement could be the Trump administration’s/Silicon Valley’s most thinly

veiled attempt at stamping out political dissent to date. Given that content posted by Blue Check subscribers is heavily juiced, this supposed means of participation is akin to paying an admission ticket to the ballot box, only to find that the only option is reposting the proposed legislation.The push-pull across the political spectrum between understanding social media as comprised of corporate entities with public political interests and believing it to be a marketplace of ideas you must participate in to some capacity feels like a pressure cooker that may soon explode. To what result? I’m not sure. Between making a BlueSky account or going to a DSA meeting, maybe pick the DSA meeting.