We Would Have Lost the Revolution if We Had Social Media Back Then

We are back in the doom loop of someone telling you how 37,000 votes in Miami means the country is lost forever - “more access to information than ever before, and we are dumber than ever.”

I can imagine the father of the country, George Washington, taking to X on a crisp spring day in 1775 and unfurling this digital masterpiece:

Ah, ye brethren! How I wished it were so ye need not encounter the gunpowder of the righteous, yet it was not we who tread upon the rights of man in seizing our reserves.

Such an early “come and take it” style post would surely invigorate Washington’s southern base and anger those monitoring the Virginian from afar, but others, jealous of his inevitable rise and his appointment to Commander-in-Chief just around the corner in June 1775, would be itching to throw shade at him with a quote post. I can see Paul Revere chiming in:

So typical ye bluebloods seeking to speak for those of us who could smell the powder for ourselves. Why not tell the masses of your hidden desires to rule us all?

Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, and John Hancock all like or share the post, forcing supporters of all these men to question who stands where and with whom. Instead of the next four years of gruesome fighting and attrition being weathered by the new nation, infighting and jockeying for power and influence takes precedence, shreds the ranks, and all is lost.

Sounds satirical and far-fetched, right? I really don’t think so.

The Internet is simply a tool. It can be used for good or bad. People use it to research diseases and real estate, and they also use it to download pornography or get dopamine hits from digital notifications. Likewise, social media isn’t itself good or bad. While Substack has social media-like functions now, such as Notes, I don’t consider the newsletter functionality to be social media. If I did, I’d feel less and less like using it, and that’s not the case.

What is most definitely the case is how I feel about X. Recently, I became interested in the Ole Miss-LSU drama involving Lane Kiffin, who jumped ship from my alma mater to move to Baton Rouge on a whim despite leading the Rebels to the playoffs and a real shot at competing for the national title. I used X on my burner account used for research to follow the Kiffin saga, and within hours, my entire feed was populated with NCAA Football news and reports, as if I never looked at politics in my life.

Why then do you think it is that some people are excited about the Trump administration or positive Republican outcomes like the TN-7 special election last week, and then others are completely the opposite, parroting only bad news and insights from accounts who post from the safety of anonymity or reveal half-baked toplines? I have also written extensively about why bad news sells on X, and why some of your favorite online voices have absolutely, positively lost their minds and sold their souls for clicks and likes.

Bad news and outrage posts have a 40% greater reach than informative posts like mine focusing on long-term analysis and outcomes. The dopamine hits people receive from reading and responding to things that trigger them create algorithms of utter psychosis filling the brains of otherwise intelligent people with junk food for the mind. If you’re still with me, I need you to understand that this, and staving off addiction to social media platforms, is precisely why I stopped using X. There was a real cost to it:

When my X account was hot over the 2024 election cycle, I was pulling in decent bi-weekly ad revenue checks. If I would have stayed habitually glued to X and grown my following to several hundred thousand, I could potentially make six figures just from ad revenues, which aren’t difficult to calculate.

I refuse to provide clickbait, junk news, and outrage to my subscribers to generate revenue.

I made my reputation for myself on accuracy, precision, and bold projections against the grain of the popular narrative and do not consider it worth sacrificing that reputation to be the coolest kid on X, where everyone is now an expert. The cost is real - this newsletter is worth less on an annual basis than it was at the time of the November 2024 election. Hopefully it will grow again as the next election cycle unfolds, but I am moving opposite the revenue generation train to ensure my analysis remains the most important thing I do - not my ego. Note: free subscribers should check inboxes for an email last Wednesday offering a special Christmas deal.

Polymarket odds - I don’t see Democrats sweeping. Click image for detail.

The case can be made that the Internet helped the Great Awakening, and of that I have no doubt. Trump was a long shot of long shots in June 2015 according to betting markets, yet the grassroots and politically homeless ruined his opponents one by one by exposing their true platforms, allegiances, and backers. Trump himself commanded the Internet to drive his enemies insane and message in a way no one before him had the gall to do because it was so outrageous the way he did it.

Now, those same tools have been used for negative. Look no further than the recent X-based intellectual brainrot: