Who rules the cyber?

In my last post I wrote about some earnest, well-meaning, but kind of lame efforts of the San Francisco startup scene to do something to fix politics. This was formally nonpartisan, but obviously leaning towards the left.

Today, let՚s look at what the other side is doing:

• They conducted a masterful Facebook ad campaign
  
• They՚re using Mechanical Turk to recruit an army of low-paid workers to churn out a torrent of bullshit
  
• They are building a public black list of supposedly left-wing academics, with a page where anyone can nominate a new victim.
  
• They are using memes and chaos magick in the service of Trump and alt.right shittery in general.

I am beginning to suspect that despite the overwhelming support of Clinton among hip people, smart people, tech people, and educated people, it is the other side that has the deeper appreciation of how the new computational media work and how to use them effectively.

Certainly the people involved seem to think so, and the fact that they won the election works in favor of that opinion.