THE MEDIUM IS THE MESSAGE: The age of LOLitics.

For successful politicians all over the world and those who support them, this is precisely the time to joke around. The jokes are not necessarily ones that your grandmother or liberal arts students would enjoy. Practitioners of LOLitics go all in for toilet humor and the rejection of linguistic norms. The president of the Philippines, Rodrigo Duterte, for instance, accused a journalist’s wife of having a ‘smelly vagina’ and said that he wanted to eat the livers of terrorists. Brazilian president Jair Bolsonaro told a female politician she was ‘too ugly’ to be raped. Vladimir Putin claimed that he’d take out criminals ‘while they are on the shitter’. In Italy, Matteo Salvini once compared the speaker of the Italian parliament to a sex doll which needed ‘deflating’. The British Prime Minister, Boris Johnson, lambasted Jeremy Corbyn for being a ‘great big girl’s blouse’. The collected put-downs of Donald Trump could fill several volumes.

Few of these LOLiticians would be in power without social media. Technology scholars have long argued, as Neil Postman did, that ‘the form in which ideas are expressed affects what those ideas will be’. Social media changed what was possible for outsider candidates to achieve in politics. If these figures often appear vitriolic, then that’s because this is what social media is like.

A platform such as Twitter provides a sliced-up reality of contextless moments, grotesque juxtapositions, advertisements, controversies, insults, clips of dogs farting and explosions of emotion masquerading as thought. This never-ending flow of scraps has no visible logic, is bound by no historical context, includes no time for reflection and catharsis. It is both alarmingly stupid and incredibly funny.

In the age of LOLitics, politicians are no longer competing among themselves to get a clever soundbite on the TV news. They are competing against the internet: the entire superabundance of human knowledge available at any time, in any place. To thrive they have to become live entertainers, never breaking the rule that it is better to be hated than to be boring. Boring people don’t trend. Trump does not simply use Twitter all the time; he is actually like Twitter: instinctive, improvisational, perpetually generating memes.

Somebody really needs to write a book on the transformative, and often virus-like nature of social media.

(Classical reference in headline.)