Opinion | Look Past Elon Musk’s Chaos. There’s Something More Sinister at Work. – The New York Times

all of Musk’s preening on social media obscures what is actually happening. That is what content is really good at doing. It feels transparent to see an influencer bake bread in her grandma chic retro kitchen or to see a billionaire storm a corporate headquarters to vanquish his enemies to unemployment. But content does not reveal the machinery of influencing — the deals signed, the NDAs issued, the metrics used to measure the dollar value of the audience’s emotional response. In politics, content can hide the money and power at play.
Content feels a lot like old school political spin, but unlike spin, it can be completely captured, its amplification manipulated and the response to it monetized. It can look like information while conveying little real meaning. But the problem with content isn’t that it is inherently empty or fake; it generates real emotion. But when it comes to civic life, it does everything in its power to keep you from taking any action beyond its economic interests.

It is fast becoming clear that this content-driven chaos is going to be the M.O. of Trump 2.0. Trump may have learned in his first term that there is a political price for not feeding your loyalists enough content. Governance got in the way of the content machine he built on the campaign trail. Since then, he has had four years to refine his strategy. Chaos is central to his deployment of unchecked executive power. But chaos has to be tended like a fire. It needs the right amount of constant oxygen to keep it going.
— Read on www.nytimes.com/2025/02/12/opinion/musk-trump-government-takeover.html