The Flattening Machine

A wonder of the internet is that, from the right perch, you can watch information wash over people in real time. I happened to check X on Saturday only minutes after the attempted assassination of Donald Trump, and I experienced immediate disbelief. Surely the stills and live-feed screenshots were fake—AI-generated or Photoshopped.

But the sheer volume of information in a high-stakes news event such as this one has a counterintuitive effect: Distinguishing real from fake is actually quite easy when the entire world focuses its attention on the same thing. Amid a flurry of confusion and speculation, the basic facts of this horrifying event emerged quickly. The former president was shot at. He was injured but is recovering. For a brief moment, the online information apparatus worked to deliver important information—a terrifying shared reality of political violence.

Our information ecosystem is actually pretty good while the dust is up. But the second it begins to settle, that same system creates chaos. As my own shock wore off, leaving me to contemplate the enormity of the moment, I could sense a familiar shift on Reddit, X, and other platforms.

The basic facts held attention for only so long before being supplanted by wild speculation—people were eager to post about the identity of the shooter, his possible motives, the political ramifications of the event, the specter of more violence. It may be human nature to react this way in traumatic moments—to desperately attempt to fill an information void—but the online platforms so many of us frequent have monetized and gamified this instinct, rewarding those who create the most compelling stories. Within the first four hours, right-wing politicians, perhaps looking to curry favor with Trump, hammered out reckless posts blaming Joe Biden’s campaign for the shooting; Elon Musk suggested that the Secret Service may have let the shooting happen on purpose; as soon as the shooter’s name was released, self-styled online investigators dug up his name and his voter registration, eager for information they could retrofit to their worldview. Yesterday, conspiracy theorists pointed to a two-year-old promotional video from BlackRock that was filmed at the shooter’s school and features the shooter for a moment—proof, they said, of some inexplicable globalist conspiracy. As my colleague Ali Breland noted in an article on Sunday, conspiracy theorizing has become the “default logic for many Americans in understanding all major moments.”

[Read: The Trump shooting conspiracies outpaced reality]

An attempted assassination became a mass attentional event like any other. Right-wing hucksters, BlueAnon posters, politicians, news outlets, conspiracy shock jocks, ironic trolls, and Instagram dropshippers all knew how to mobilize and hit their marks. Musk let only about 30 minutes pass before he brought attention back to himself by endorsing Trump for president. It took just 86 minutes for Barstool Sports’ Dave Portnoy to post a link to a black T-shirt with the immediately iconic image of a bloodied Trump raising a fist. Trolls made fake online accounts to dupe people into thinking the shooter was part of the anti-fascist movement.

Some may wish to see the conspiracy peddling, cynical politicking, and information warfare as a kind of gross aberration or the unintended consequences and outputs of a system that’s gone awry. This is wrong. What we are witnessing is an information system working as designed. It is a machine that rewards speed, bravado, and provocation. It is a machine that goads people into participating as the worst version of themselves. It is a machine that is hyperefficient, ravenous, even insatiable—a machine that can devour any news cycle, no matter how large, and pick it apart until it is an old, tired carcass.

All of these people are following old playbooks honed by years of toxic online politics and decades of gun violence in schools, grocery stores, nightclubs, and movie theaters. But what feels meaningful in the days after this assassination attempt is the full embrace of the system as somehow virtuous by the bad actors who exploit it; unabashed, reckless posting is now something like a political stance in and of itself, encouraged by the owners, funders, and champions of the tech platforms that have created these incentives. Prominent members of Silicon Valley’s reactionary oligarchy have rallied around Musk’s purchase of X, the platform that functions as the beating heart of the machine. Nor is it shocking that tech investors, including Marc Andreessen and David Sacks (the latter of whom spoke last night at the Republican National Convention), are helping funnel money to Trump, the candidate who is made in the machine’s image.

In the hours after the shooting, the right-wing accounts that I follow quickly coalesced around a specific narrative that the mainstream media were refusing to acknowledge the attempt on Trump’s life. Influencers passed around screenshots from outlets such as CNN and The Washington Post featuring early headlines such as “Trump Escorted Away After Loud Noises at Pa. Rally”—headlines that were quickly updated once further information was confirmed. The images were offered as proof that the media lie to Americans. “The legacy media is a pure propaganda machine. ???? is the voice of the people,” Musk posted on Sunday, linking to an image of the headlines.. Similarly, Rogan O’Handley, a lawyer and a conservative influencer, posted a screenshot of what he claimed was a memo given to reporters “telling them to play down Trump’s attempted assassination.”

It wasn’t immediately clear where that memo came from, but its content didn’t actually show what he said it did. The opening lines: “Reminder to stick to facts, don’t speculate, editorialize, sensationalize or jump to conclusions when reporting on the Trump rally incident today. Don’t call it an assassination attempt unless authorities say it is.” In high-stakes breaking-news moments, reputable news outlets tend to approach headlines with extreme caution to avoid reporting false information. This has the unfortunate side effect of sometimes seeming absurd—especially in a televised moment such as the Trump shooting, where anyone can hear the pops of gunfire and see the former president move to the ground.

[Read: Stop pretending you know how this will end]

Saturday’s events demonstrated both how important these standards are and just how outmoded they can seem in a supersaturated information environment. At a moment dominated by attention seekers, on platforms that reward fast-twitch proclamations and bullshit, pausing to gather evidence is painted as suspicious behavior. Reckless opportunists have rebranded baseless speculation as virtuous truth-telling. This has long been a tactic of the far-right media ecosystem—in 2017, one conservative influencer told me that the reason hours-long livestreamed videos had become so popular among MAGA fans is the videos were deemed to be rawer and more authentic, unlike mainstream-media content, which they argued was filtered. Seven years later, reactiveness has become its own kind of trustworthiness. In that sense, perhaps the core of the fight over misinformation isn’t so much about the increase of fake news or alternate realities as it is about a societal devaluing of restraint, rigor, and other hallmarks of the journalistic process.

The overall effect of this transformation is a kind of flattening. Online, the harrowing events of Saturday weren’t all that distinguishable from other mass shootings or political scandals. On X, I saw a post in my feed suggesting, ironically or not, “I know this sounds insane now but everyone will totally forget about this in ten days.” The line has stuck in my head for the past few days, not because I think it’s true, but because it feels like it could be. The flattening—of time, of consequence, of perspective—more than the rage or polarization or mistrust, is the main output of our modern information ecosystem. The world around us erupts; our life changes. People know their role, take their place, play their part, and feel, for an instant, like they’re living in history. But then the window closes. The timeline flickers with something new—the appointment of a vice-presidential candidate, say, announced (where else?) on Trump’s own social-media platform—and the world moves on.