Donald Trump and the Sharding of the Real
摘要
Sharded media have produced a state of hyporeality, in which easily produced and personally curated information diminishes the attainment and significance of a shared, objective truth. The digital revolution has unleashed personal realities and individualised experience, forced upon us a much more complex process of sense-making and hyper-inflating our own voice and our own important opinions, all of which we try to force back upon the world. This chapter, instead of following the trend to see conspiracy theorists as somehow fundamentally different and deluded, argues rather that they are like us. Contrary to the Democrat’s never-Trumpism and Kamala Harris’ late-campaign rhetoric warning of Trump’s fascism and threat to democracy, for millions of Americans, in their realities, it was precisely that ‘democracy’ was the problem and Trump that was the solution. For many, given the 2020 ‘steal’, Trump was actually the president and this was merely the re-election of the incumbent. Hence he could campaign as simultaneously the real sitting president and as an outsider who would have run the country better. This chapter turns over the perception that others are trapped in unreal and deluded states, but rather is a result of the sharding of a broadcast era mass-consensual reality.