There are a lot of similarities between the 2016 and 2024 elections, but the media ecosystem we have today is fundamentally different from the ecosystem we had in 2015-2016, during the first stage of Donald Trump’s political rise and the MAGA-morphosis of the Republican party. The Twitter and Facebook of that time are long gone, as are many of the methods of digital resistance that people employed on those platforms during the first Trump administration. The power and visibility dynamics on multiplying digital platforms, from TikTok to Truth Social, have rearranged dramatically since then, the “public sphere” is way more splintered, and our shared digital (and physical) spaces are decreasing. Moreover, the Big Tech oligarchs and private tech companies that profit from surveilling us and siloing us in algorithmically curated echo chambers have thrown their full weight behind Trump, and they will have even more power in a second Trump administration to shape our digital present and future.

How are corporate, independent, and social media changing the terrain of politics today? What does digital activism look like in 2024, and can it be an effective means of resistance during a second Trump administration? TRNN Editor-in-Chief Maximillian Alvarez digs into these questions with world-renowned science fiction author, activist, and journalist Cory Doctorow.

Cory Doctorow is the author of many books, including recent non-fiction titles like Chokepoint Capitalism: How Big Tech and Big Content Captured Creative Labor Markets and How We’ll Win Them Back, which he coauthored with Rebecca Giblin, and The Internet Con: How to Seize the Means of Computation. His latest work of fiction, The Bezzle, was published earlier this year by Tor Books. In 2020, Doctorow was inducted into the Canadian Science Fiction and Fantasy Hall of Fame.