We Break Down the Internet’s Future Under Trump 2.0
Today on the show, WIRED’s global editorial director Katie Drummond joins Leah to talk about how the internet and online communities contributed to Donald Trump’s victory. Plus, one last look at Brat summer, the perils of the Trump-Elon Musk alliance and digital security under the next Trump administration.
Leah Feiger is @LeahFeiger. Katie Drummond is @katie-drummond.bsky.social. Write to us at [email protected]. Be sure to subscribe to the WIRED Politics Lab newsletter here.
Mentioned this week:
The WIRED Guide to Digital Security
Editor’s Note: What’s Next for WIRED by Katie Drummond
It’s Election Week. Brace Yourselves by Katie Drummond
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Transcript
Note: This is an automated transcript, which may contain errors.
Leah Feiger: This is WIRED Politics Lab, a show about how tech is changing politics. I’m Leah Feiger, the senior politics editor at WIRED. The 2024 election was fought and won on the internet. And the result has us thinking about the big picture, the very big picture. Many of us here at WIRED remember when the web was supposed to be a great engine powering democracy. In 2008, for the first time a majority of voters said they got their information about the campaign online. But in 2020, misinformation got six times as many clicks on Facebook as real information did. The January 6th Capitol Riot was organized online. And Trump, who has boosted disinformation constantly and posted repeatedly about punishing journalists and political rivals, used the internet to help get elected once again. So what happened? How has the internet changed? What does it mean during Trump 2.0? And is there anything we can do about it? Joining me today is WIRED editor in chief Katie Drummond. Katie, hi, welcome.
Katie Drummond: Hello there. Thank you so much for having me.
Leah Feiger: Thank you so much for joining us. It has been quite the week. I’m excited to unpack all of it with you.
Katie Drummond: Quite the week. So we’re recording this on Tuesday. It’s one week. It’s the one-week anniversary of the US presidential election. So happy anniversary to all of us. And a week ago at this time, I was thinking about what kind of pizza I was going to order for my family, because we would be at home that evening with our 7-year-old daughter watching the election, watching the returns come in.
Leah Feiger: A week ago, in fact, I was sitting on the couch in your office. I had taken my shoes off, and I think about 20 minutes later I was lying on the floor as-
Katie Drummond: You were lying on the floor.
Leah Feiger: Yes.
Katie Drummond: Where you stayed for much of the afternoon. Yeah.
Leah Feiger: And here we are. I’m so sorry to bring this up, but Katie, you wrote a post last week that said, “We’re voting for Kamala Harris. The alternative is a future to abhorrent for even the most dystopian imaginations at WIRED to contemplate.” That future is here. How are you feeling?
Katie Drummond: I think there are two answers to that question. I think one is a personal answer and one is a professional answer. I think-
Leah Feiger: Give us both.
Katie Drummond: … personally as someone who lived through obviously the 2016 Trump administration and was working as a journalist covering that as well, I am sad and worried. I’m worried about the country. I’m worried about so many people in this country who are not me, to be clear, I am a relatively well-to-do white woman living in Brooklyn. I’m not so much worried about myself, but I worry about immigrants. I worry about members of the LGBTQ community. I worry about so many people, anyone capable of reproducing, I worry about them and their rights. So I spend a lot of time feeling sad and worried about all of that. Professionally, I am invigorated. I am fired up. I think it’s the only way to be is to say, “OK, we are living through history in a very unique way. Our obligation and our opportunity is to cover this history as it unfolds and be prepared to meet the moment.” And I think the team at WIRED and myself, I think we are all very much ready and bracing ourselves professionally to meet this moment and to give our audience the most accurate information we can, to help our audience navigate what’s to come, to do the best investigative and accountability-driven journalism we can, and to give our audience hope and optimism wherever possible. Because I think that is a really important part of WIRED’s mission and I think it will be incredibly necessary in the years to come.
Leah Feiger: A lot of people, Elon Musks of the world, if you will, have been very down on WIRED for covering politics. Not only is this the week anniversary of the election, this is actually the year anniversary of me being at WIRED.
Katie Drummond: Oh, wow.
Leah Feiger: Yeah. A great thing to celebrate at this moment in time. How do you think that our mandate for covering tech and the future now intersects with politics under the new Trump era?
Katie Drummond: Great question. And I think to be clear, some people in the world and some people in our orbit have been critical of WIRED’s decision, my decision, ultimately it was my decision, to lean into politics as one of our verticals. We cover a lot, politics is one of the things that we now cover. I made that decision over a year ago. It was actually one of the first things I decided to do when I took over WIRED. And it was for a very simple reason, which is that, again, as much as I think some members of our audience wish politics and technology did not intersect, they simply do. And we can’t pretend that they don’t. So at the time when I made that decision, I was thinking about mis and disinformation, how they spread through online communities, how that inaccurate information conspiracies, how those things sort of metastasize across the internet. I was thinking about generative AI and the potential for generative AI to influence the electorate in all sorts of different ways. I wasn’t thinking so much about the potential for someone like Elon Musk to be in government, but that has been borne out in the last year-
Leah Feiger: To be shadow running the government.
Katie Drummond: To be first gentleman in some respects, some might say. So I feel-
Leah Feiger: Everyone was concerned we were going to have a first gentleman. In fact, Uncle Elon, I think [inaudible 00:06:05].
Katie Drummond: Uncle Elon is here to help. He’s here to help. He will find trillions of dollars in the federal budget. So I think my thesis has been validated and expanded upon as we’ve watched this election unfold and we’ve seen just how much overlap there is between some of the most powerful people in Silicon Valley and our politics. I think even if you set all of that aside, it’s very hard to imagine being a publication that covers the future and not take a close look at the institution of government in determining what that future looks like. So that felt at the time like a really important part of WIRED’s mandate. And I would say at this point in time, it feels even more important. I mean, you just can’t untangle these things anymore.
Leah Feiger: Absolutely. And the last couple of weeks, months, have very much shown that. I want to get into the internet. We are so online, that is our whole thing. We are covering what is happening in every corner and how different online communities are relating to each other. This was supposed to be this lovely democratized space for the world. It feels a little bit different these days. More fractured, more segmented. That’s become even clearer last week when Trump won the election and validated a lot of WIRED’s reporting about the rise of manosphere culture online, the podcast Bro Vote, influencers getting out the vote on different platforms. And of course, like you mentioned, Elon Musk’s influence both as a billionaire and as the owner of X. What tipped the balance here? Can we reduce the reason that Trump won to this fragmented internet? Is it a couple of different things together? What are you thinking?
Katie Drummond: I certainly don’t think we can reduce his win to just that. I think there were many reasons, all of them complicated and overlapping and intersecting, to explain what happened. I think the general malaise with the Biden administration was obviously a significant factor. I think the fact that the Harris campaign had something like I think 107 days to get her out in front of an electorate and prove that she was the better candidate. So I think there are all sorts of different elements here. I think people’s perception of the economy, their perception of inflation, all of these things factored in and certainly moved large-
Leah Feiger: And incumbents haven’t been successful this year.
Katie Drummond: Have not been successful. Exactly. So we’ve seen this very hard pendulum swing back to the GOP, back to Donald Trump ultimately returning to office. But I do think that the online dimension of this election was certainly more prominent and more pronounced in its influence than anything we’ve ever seen before. I mean, I think we published a piece last week about the manosphere. McKenna Kelly, of course, has been tracking influencers and their impact on the election, on the side of both the Harris campaign and the Trump campaign. And just how important these people were and their audiences were to swaying the minds of voters on either side of the aisle, on either side of this election. So we saw it as very important. I think other news organizations did too. And I think his win really only confirmed, especially when you look at something like young men, men in the Gen Z demographic showing up for Donald Trump.
Leah Feiger: Absolutely.
Katie Drummond: It’s very hard to look at that and say that online communication and podcasts and Rogan and all of these things didn’t have an effect. Of course they did. That’s where these individuals, many of them, were getting their information about the candidates.
Leah Feiger: I mean, I spoke to a number of parents this week who found out that their kids were paying attention to the election, but through the lens of Joe Rogan, the Nelk Boys, the Logan brothers. The Harris campaign, and really the Biden campaign that she inherited, tried to pretend that that was a little bit make-believe, that those weren’t going to translate into real votes. And I think we saw that happen.
Katie Drummond: We certainly saw that happen. And the Harris campaign certainly of course made efforts in those digital spaces. I think they ran a creative, clever TikTok meme game, which was in hindsight almost cute. But I think what they missed were these podcasts. I mean, Joe Rogan is the most obvious example and also a really good example. It is hard to overstate the reach and influence and the number of listeners that someone like Joe Rogan has. And so for Trump to spend several hours on that podcast-
Leah Feiger: And then Musk.
Katie Drummond: And Musk-
Leah Feiger: And Vance.
Katie Drummond: Exactly.
Leah Feiger: There are so many different parts of that.
Katie Drummond: So I think what the Trump campaign saw and targeted correctly, and we’ve reported on this, is that those podcast appearances, getting in front of those millions of people, was really tactically savvy. It was a really smart campaign decision. Whereas the Harris campaign was putting a lot into the ground game, knocking on doors-
Leah Feiger: Team Harris senior adviser David Plouffe, I’m still mad at you.
Katie Drummond: Turns out knocking on someone’s door and asking them to do something is much less effective ultimately than getting on a handful of really influential, really big podcasts and reaching millions of people wherever they’re listening. On their computer, on their smartphone, on their commute after school, whatever it is. It was the online election, and Donald Trump really proved that out.
Leah Feiger: I think you’re absolutely right. The idea of it being a strategy versus perhaps a cute online moment for the Harris campaign. They were so sure they were winning the internet: You had Brad, you had coconuts, you had the first week of Tim Walz as the VP candidate. In hindsight, it feels like it was actually just one very long viral moment and not actually this strategy of hitting voters over the head day in, day out. With not just one podcast, with not just one social media platform, but all of it together.
Katie Drummond: Absolutely. And I think one thing that people should also take note of is it’s not even just one podcast, because what ultimately happens with any publisher, if you’re the Rogan show or you’re WIRED, is you do something like what we’re doing. You record a podcast, you put it out, people listen to it. You clip video from that podcast recording, you put it on social platforms. And you’re able to seed that content and create that across the entire internet. So whether someone’s on Instagram or on TikTok or they’re on YouTube or they’re catching up on YouTube Shorts, which is YouTube’s short vertical video format, that content then just seeps across the internet. So these podcasts—a single podcast recording can have these ripples across digital ecosystems for weeks at a time.
Leah Feiger: Absolutely. I mean, Trump’s online persona this election was massive. And you and I talked about this I feel like all the time over the last couple of months. It was very jarring to turn on MSNBC or CNN and hear Harris campaign supporters talk about no one was at Trump’s rallies or he was dancing weird on stage and everyone didn’t care and everyone was looking at him as a joke. And we’re seeing this entirely play out differently where I’m like, my entire feed is just Andrew Schultz, Nelk Boys. It’s nonstop. It was wild to see that difference. And look, his online persona was massive, and I’m not saying that his Truth Social posts or any of these clipped videos are the fireside chats of our century or anything, but it does seem like he’s created this new form of political communication. And I guess that means not just for the Democrats but perhaps everyone, for media, for everyone looking into this, is it time to reimagine not just how we communicate online but how those messages are being received over and over and over again?
Katie Drummond: For sure. I think there will be, and there already is, a lot of media pontificating about what did the news media get wrong this time? What did the polls miss this time?
Leah Feiger: I love being told how wrong-
Katie Drummond: Right. And we could, and many people are, spending a lot of time talking about that. I think one of the most important lessons of this election was how little that IRL turnout matters and how much it matters what people are being exposed to on the internet. Then you start to get into conversations about who’s seeing what? Then you go down the algorithmic rabbit hole of, well, my TikTok feed is going to be very different than the TikTok feed of a 19-year-old boy living in Kansas City, Missouri, who loves Rogan, loves Logan Paul, spends a lot of time in that universe. That person is then going to be fed a lot of this type of content.
Leah Feiger: We’ll be right back after a break. Welcome back to WIRED Politics Lab. Katie, there’s only so much that I feel like you can put on the, “Voter or consumer,” in a way. We have to talk about these tech platforms, many of which I’m looking obviously specifically at X, but Meta also didn’t do a lot of great stuff this cycle either, and tech platforms that abdicated their responsibility during this election cycle.
Katie Drummond: And I think that was really across the board. We can’t even single out a single platform. Ultimately, I think what we saw first and foremost in this election was an abdication of responsibility. Essentially Meta is a great example. I won’t pick on them exclusively. But to say, with regards to threads or the Facebook news feed or whatever product it is that Meta owns, “We’re leaning out of politics. We’re going to be doing less aggressive moderation. We’re going to leave it up to consumers to choose their own adventure.” And so what ends up happening is, well, people are getting information determined by their algorithmic destiny essentially, based on their interests, their location, their age, their gender identity, whatever it might be. And mis and disinformation, which I think a lot of people coming into this election felt like, “Oh, that is so passé. That’s just the way of the internet now.” And that’s true, but what happens when a company like X or a company like Meta spends a lot less money and a lot less time moderating for inaccurate information is inaccurate information, again, seeps across the internet, seeps across these platforms and essentially goes unchecked.
Leah Feiger: Perhaps, and this is on me as well, and maybe I should have learned my lesson in 2020 and in 2016. I finally woke up this week and I went, “Right, these are companies that are here to make money.”
Katie Drummond: Oh, absolutely. Yeah.
Leah Feiger: And it’s what responsibility do they have to truth or making sure that this misinformation isn’t spreading? I don’t think that they care and I actually think that it’s probably in their best interest to have people angry or more split living in these bespoke realities, that’s better for their bottom line.
Katie Drummond: I think so. And I think you would like to think that their first and foremost interest is in a healthy and accurate information ecosystem. That’s a nice idea.
Leah Feiger: Lovely.
Katie Drummond: I think it’s just very plain to see, and just to acknowledge, not even with judgment, but just we live in a capitalist United States of America. That is what it is. We don’t have to start talking about communism. That’s the world that we live in. Money rules everything around us. That’s the deal. OK, so if you are a company like Meta or Google or X or whoever else, yeah, at the end of the day, it’s the bottom line. That’s what drives these businesses is a return on investment, is the stock price going up. Those are the big macro factors that then creep into and inform the decision-making across the board and at every level of a given company. Which is not to say that people working for these companies or even people running these companies don’t have empathy, don’t care about other people, don’t care about the outcome of the election. I’m sure they do. But at the end of the day, when you take everything else away, what it comes down to is money. That to me feels like like a foundational premise upon which to discuss everything else because that isn’t going to change.
Leah Feiger: And it’s important to be able to find that and find that analysis wading through the Silicon Valley bullshit, “We’re here to make the world better.” But at the end of the day, it gets us back into the idea of these bespoke realities and we’ve been in a situation for years where people are getting the information that they want and potentially nothing else. Everyone lives, like you were saying, in their own bubble, the algorithm decides what they see. Let’s just zoom out a minute. How did we get here?
Katie Drummond: We could write a book about that question. I will choose not to. But we could if we wanted to. The biggest factor for me, from where I sit in media and in news and what I have lived through, what we’ve both lived through and worked through, is this intersection between big tech as the means of distribution and news and information and entertainment. These big companies, these big tech companies basically control the pipes. They are the infrastructure by which information online is disseminated. When those big tech companies start to change their policies, start to change the rules of the game, start to develop more sophisticated algorithms to give people more of what they want and less of what they don’t, but all of the information, the news, the entertainment, relies on those big tech companies and those platforms and those algorithms, you start to see how the pipes get pretty screwed up. Because as soon as Facebook says, “Well, the news feed isn’t for news anymore, we’re backing way away from this.” All of a sudden that spigot for a lot of people gets turned off. Or when Google says, “We’re changing our search algorithm in this way, this way, and this way,” all of a sudden news organizations, entertainment organizations, anyone who publishes content on the internet scrambles to figure out how to reach an audience. Or when TikTok shows up and says, “We’ve got this very secret algorithm, you’re never going to know what’s in it.” It is a state secret in China, but it’s essentially designed to give people exactly what they want when they want it. And then the big tech companies scramble to compete with that platform that is becoming a very dominant player in the United States. You see how that ecosystem starts to get really muddy, really opaque, and how audiences start to essentially break off into smaller communities, smaller pockets, just based on what platform they’re using, what information is accessible to them on that platform based on an algorithm that is primarily geared towards serving their interests.
Leah Feiger: Absolutely. I mean, so many people like to look at generative AI as the dog that did not bark for this election. That’s not entirely true because-
Katie Drummond: Not entirely true. I really take issue with that.
Leah Feiger: I do as well. A Washington Post article this week found that gen AI really stoked the partisan divide this election. And even if it wasn’t people believing a video or a photo, which to be clear, people did all the time, this idea of creating the partisan divide, of deepening it, of separating these bespoke realities even further. So many different pieces.
Katie Drummond: Yeah. And it’s not gen AI’s fault, a very interesting technology in many different ways. But I think even if no gen AI content had been distributed during this election, which it was, but let’s pretend that it wasn’t, just the existence of the technology and what it is capable of doing was enough to be a talking point to stoke mistrust, outrage, chaos, uncertainty. It’s this idea of, well, how do I know if that’s true or not? Because this person is saying that the audio was manipulated or this person is saying that this photo was generated using AI technology. And how is a typical consumer, a typical voter, supposed to pull that apart, supposed to critically analyze what’s being said? People don’t have the tools for that. We work at WIRED, we barely have the tools for that.
Leah Feiger: That’s true.
Katie Drummond: The technology is so nascent, just introducing the possibility that something was generated using AI was enough, was really enough. And so I think the idea that generative AI was a non-factor in this election is so incorrect. I really take issue with that.
Leah Feiger: I agree. I think it’s a misread of what was happening online and how it was being utilized. And obviously we’re no longer in the election anymore. We’re gearing up for Trump 2.0. Let’s take a quick break and we’ll be right back for more with Katie Drummond and what could happen online during Trump’s second term. Welcome back to WIRED Politics Lab. Katie, we’ve been here before. This is Trump 2.0. We all remember #resistancetwitter from the early Trump years. Lots of self-styled authoritarian experts and accounts purporting to be alt government agencies. Do you expect a repeat of any of this this time around?
Katie Drummond: Wow, that takes me back. I think time will tell. I think one of the really interesting signals just in the last week since Trump won the election is in 2016 when he won the presidential race, there was a lot of really immediate resistance. Even on the part of big tech companies, employees at those companies being very outspoken about what this meant. And a lot more of a groundswell online of resistance-oriented activity. And I think one of the really interesting things, at least so far, again, we’re still very early in this, but has been the absence of that. That technology executives at the biggest tech companies in the world were very quick, very ready to congratulate Trump on his win.
Leah Feiger: They had their statements ready.
Katie Drummond: They had their exclamation marks ready. They were ready to essentially kiss the ring and say, “We look forward to working with you, a productive working relationship.” So it was this much more passive acceptance of the outcome of the election. These companies need to work with whoever is in office. So there’s a certain degree of these statements are being made just to smooth the pavement and allow for an easier road to work with the incoming administration. But I think even from within these big tech companies, we have not yet seen any sort of employee agitation, action, commentary-
Leah Feiger: No letters.
Katie Drummond: Yeah, it’s been very quiet, which I think is interesting and I think potentially points us towards an era of Trump 2.0 where we see a lot less resistance in some pockets, at least. Maybe it’s defeatism. Maybe for a lot of people it’s just like, “OK, I can’t believe we’re doing this again. I have been through a Trump administration, a pandemic that killed millions of people. I’ve seen war break out in Ukraine. I’m watching what’s happening in the Middle East. I’m exhausted. I just want to get on with my life.”
Leah Feiger: They also maybe are waiting for January 20th-
Katie Drummond: Of course.
Leah Feiger: … waiting for him to actually take office. Trump isn’t really waiting. He has spent the last-
Katie Drummond: He’s been busy.
Leah Feiger: He has been super busy. It seems that we have perhaps our US rep to the UN, Secretary of State. It’s a cast of characters, the Rubios, the Stefanicks, the Stephen Millers all coming back where you’re like, “I didn’t realize we were going to have to be saying Stephen Miller’s name again so frequently.”
Katie Drummond: I will just say, I mean the Stephen Miller news that he is expected to be named, I think, Deputy Chief of Staff really brought back for me just as a person, again, I’m talking about myself as a human being, what we saw with immigration in the 2016 administration. I will never forget those images, those videos, the reporting that I read at that time. I’m tearing up thinking about it.
Leah Feiger: We have to prepare ourselves for that again.
Katie Drummond: For a lot of voters, I think there was this idea of, “Well, he says all of this stuff. I’m voting based on what’s best for me and my family. My life has gotten a lot more expensive. I need it to get less expensive. I’m really struggling.” And I don’t dismiss those concerns at all, but I think in at least some parts of the electorate, there was this assumption that a lot of this is bluster. He won’t really do these things he’s saying he will do. I think what we’ve seen with his appointments to government thus far, even in the last few days is, yes, he will.
Leah Feiger: Oh, he’s thrilled to. And obviously like we’ve talked about earlier, the Elon Musk of it all. It looks like he’s going to be playing a huge role in the administration. We found out a few days ago, Musk was on that call with Trump and Ukrainian President Zelenskyy. The Starlink internet service is very important to the war in Ukraine. I mean the Trump-Musk alliance, with exit their fingertips, will be an unprecedented fusion of state and communications power. This is a different era. How are you thinking about this as we’re looking at this? Because from my point of view, as someone who is constantly looking at the online impact, this is way worse than in 2016.
Katie Drummond: From a communication standpoint, Elon Musk is more often than not, depending on how one’s net worth is assessed on a daily basis, typically the richest person in the world. He owns a megaphone in X and he is, to your point, at Mar-a-Lago with Donald Trump making really important phone calls and advising on really important decisions. I think that for me as of now, and again, this is Donald Trump, anything could happen, there are one of two scenarios. One scenario is that these two very, very, very, very, very outsized egos spend enough time in a room together that they clash, which Trump is known to do, which Musk is known to do. They break up, it’s ugly, and the Trump administration carries on minus Elon Musk, a real hater and a real loser or however Trump will decide to characterize him. So that break up scenario-
Leah Feiger: Obsessed with space.
Katie Drummond: Exactly. That’s certainly possible. The other possibility is that they form a really meaningful long-term relationship and alliance. And I think one of the really interesting things that I’ve picked up from covering Elon Musk, from reading books about him, obviously WIRED reports on him all the time, is that he is obviously a brilliant and very gifted person. I don’t think anybody is saying that Elon Musk is not smart. He’s almost supernatural in some of his abilities. And so what we have seen with a company like SpaceX or Tesla, companies that are incredible success stories by and large, we could get into all the different ways that those companies are led and managed and what that means for employees. We won’t. But there is real substantial skill there. I think looking at Twitter and X is maybe a better way to think about Musk’s potential influence on the US government. In the sense that running that company was so much less about hardware and infrastructure and making a machine go. It was much more about understanding human psychology, human behavior, how people interact. And I think that’s where Musk really fell down on the job. I mean, that company has lost a tremendous amount of value in the last year. And so if you think about the job of overseeing government agencies, agencies that service human beings, they are not in the business of making a car go faster or making a rocket ship more powerful. Government is a much messier business. And so I think that’s where of the many concerns I have about Elon Musk and his influence in government is just the potential for sweeping quick decision-making to obliterate this obliterate XYZ variable. He has promised to cut how many trillions of dollars out of the federal budget?
Leah Feiger: Enough trillions that don’t actually currently exist in that budget.
Katie Drummond: Exactly. So thinking about that very messy, very human business and Elon Musk and Donald Trump in a room making decisions about it, where you’re really not seeing a lot of empathy, you’re not seeing a lot of nuanced thinking about people and what people need. That is very stressful.
Leah Feiger: Absolutely. And on the X point, a slight devil’s advocate there is that it depends on what the goal was. If the goal was to actually keep X as this profitable business communications for the world, et cetera, then yeah, absolutely, he failed. If the goal was to get Trump elected and get himself into a seat of power, then who cares about that money that he lost?
Katie Drummond: Great point.
Leah Feiger: He won that back tenfold over the last week with Tesla’s stock and probably some upcoming government contracts and lack of regulations. Which I guess is into the, are you subsidizing your communications, your media platforms in order to pay the dividends later on? I don’t know, maybe we’ll be having a different conversation in a year from now if Musk is all of a sudden in charge of every US defense contract there is.
Katie Drummond: We certainly will. And that’s a great point. I mean, it’s essentially deficit funding what has become and is increasingly a right wing, conservative echo chamber that serves as a megaphone for the Trump administration and his acolytes, then job well done.
Leah Feiger: Yeah. On another note, Trump has vowed to deport millions, jail his enemies. And to carry out that agenda, his administration will exploit America’s digital surveillance machine. We just published the WIRED Guide to Protecting Yourself from Surveillance Under Trump, which has some steps you can take to evade all of this. Check out the link in our show notes, please. But besides reading that very handy guide, what more should individuals and institutions be doing or even just thinking about as they approach cybersecurity in the age of Trump? All of this to me is so related.
Katie Drummond: Wow, that’s a great question. And a lot of it is covered in this guide, which I would also add is published outside of the WIRED paywall. It’s important service journalism and we want to make sure as many people as possible have access to it. So please do go and check that out. I mean, I think this is a moment for individuals, whatever you do for a living, if you don’t work at a government agency, if you’re not a journalist, it doesn’t matter. I would not make any assumptions about your personal safety at this moment in time because the truth is you never know. You never know what circumstance you may find yourself i, where you would have wished you had been better about digital security, better about your online hygiene and your online communications. I think we have seen that play out in other parts of the world that are not the United States as of now, that a single post on a website can put you in prison. So I think it’s really important for everyone to take a minute and think about what they have out there on the internet, how they communicate with people they love, what is being shared to the cloud. The answer is everything on your phone. All of your text messages, all of your photos, your videos, everything you write down in your Notes app, your most personal details, your search history. Everything is out there and so this is a good moment to grapple with that. And even if it’s not because of an incoming Trump administration, it’s just good practice. And so if this serves as a wake-up call or a reminder for someone who has maybe become a little bit too complacent with how they conduct themselves in the context of digital security, this is just a good moment to reassess that. And I think for people and for institutions, I think it’s also an interesting moment to think about what your lines are. And for people, for families, for companies and institutions, I think this is a moment to really think about, again, whatever you do, whatever your institution does, whatever services you offer, what lines will you and won’t you cross? And what risks are you willing to take to protect those red lines that you have drawn? And that could have everything to do with providing access to reproductive healthcare for your employees. It could be about immigration if you employ immigrants on visas. Really thinking about, OK, we need to spend some time with our lawyers and talk about the worst-case scenario. I think everyone right now, the smart thing to do is think about every worst-case scenario that could potentially affect you, your family, the company you run, the company you work for, and be prepared for the worst possible thing to happen and hope that it doesn’t, but know that you’re prepared if it does. I think even internally at WIRED, that’s something that we are talking about is that obviously we intend to continue to do our journalism as we do it, but we all need to be prepared for what are the potential worst-case scenarios of this administration with regards to the media? And what are we going to do about it if that shows up at our parent company’s door?
Leah Feiger: Not to oversimplify, but the internet, wasn’t it supposed to be this great engine of democracy? The internet allowed Arab Spring, but here in the US we’ve ended up with this president-elect who is threatening to jail opponents and journalists and what have you. Does this election mean that the promise of the internet is dead? Or is there a path to a better internet here?
Katie Drummond: I think that that promise of the internet, the early 2000’s promise of the internet that I read about in WIRED, I was an intern here when we were doing a lot of that coverage. I think that that promise of the internet as an open forum that furthers the idea and the promise of democracy, that creates equal opportunities for anyone, no matter where in the world they are to find hope. I think that that has been dead for a long time. The internet is still an incredible place to find community. It’s still an incredible place to share ideas, to learn, to meet other people, but it happens in these smaller pockets. And one of the trade-offs of that that we’ve talked about is that these smaller pockets tend to be like-minded people finding other like-minded people. So you are going to surround yourself with people who think more or less the way you do. And that in some ways, and I’m putting on my optimist hat here, that’s a beautiful thing. That’s a wonderful thing to be able to find community, to find solidarity, to find empathy, to exchange ideas with people. That’s incredible. That’s said, it comes with, as we have seen, serious risks to obtaining factual information, to challenging pre-existing assumptions, to having the same conversation as everybody else in the country that you live in, to experiencing and understanding reality in the same way as your neighbor. Of course, it comes with rewards, but I think we just saw what some of those huge risks are and I think we’re going to continue to see them play out in the years to come.
Leah Feiger: Katie, thank you so much for joining us today.
Katie Drummond: Thank you for having me.
Leah Feiger: This was depressing but enlightening.
Katie Drummond: I’m very glad.
Leah Feiger: Thanks for listening to WIRED Politics Lab. If you like what you heard today, make sure to follow the show and give us five stars. We also have a newsletter, which MaKena Kelly writes each week. The link to the newsletter and the WIRED reporting we mentioned today are in the show notes. If you’d like to get in touch with us with any questions, comments, or show suggestions, please write to [email protected]. That’s [email protected]. We’re so excited to hear from you. WIRED Politics Lab is produced by Jake Harper. Pran Bandi is our studio engineer. Amar Lal mixed this episode. Steven Valentino is our executive producer. Chris Bannon is global head of audio at Condé Nast. And I’m your host Leah Feiger. We’ll be back in your feeds with a new episode next week. Thanks for listening.