Trump appears to some as too simulated, too much a spectacle. But all authorized politics is spectacle. He just does it in a different style. It's not conservative, its post-liberal. Rather than make hypocritical gestures towards the just, the good and the true, it's about making hyperbolic gestures about their absence.

I would describe myself as a writer and a student of media. If there's a central idea in media theory, it's to take media as form. It might grow out of philosophical aesthetics or the study of literature and visual art, but the various strands of media theory converge in treating all of those as subsets of the study of media as form.

We no longer have roots, we have aerials.

In some ways, the great danger for this commodified universe is our boredom with it ... There is this sort of dialectic that you could tease out, that even in this overdeveloped late-capitalist world, that boredom was still this kind of critical energy that you could work on and try to theorize and then act on, to find other kinds of belonging, other kinds of desire, other kinds of life.

You can trace a through-line from the eighties to the present, and in retrospect Trump was always one of the minor avatars of a certain business model, all through that time. One based on branding, celebrity, and exploiting certain quirks of media form for fun and profit. In some ways he is not all that exceptional.

What makes globalization even possible in the first place? One answer would be that it requires the regularization of some kind of media and communication infrastructure. When you have that, you might get globalized economic trade within some political or imperial framework, but it is likely you'll get transnational cultural flows as well. Globalizing trade can lead to a cosmopolitan culture, but also to all sorts of nationalistic or racist or patriarchal reactions to those as breaches of imaginary communities.

Trump appears to some as too simulated, too much a spectacle. But all authorized politics is spectacle. He just does it in a different style. It's not conservative, its post-liberal. Rather than make hypocritical gestures towards the just, the good and the true, it's about making hyperbolic gestures about their absence.