Hi pals,

On Election Night, I decided to go to the movies to escape election coverage. I convinced a friend to come along. We went to see Smile 2, a recent horror hit that’s been getting surprisingly good reviews. The film is all about a demonic possession that pushes people to kill themselves in front of other people, so that the demon then spreads to the person who witnesses the death. I love horror and slasher films, so I was pretty excited about it. Plus, the main character is a pop star, so I was also excited about the prospect of new, made-for-movie fake pop hits. 

But wow oh wow, was I disappointed. I hate to admit it, but the film was too gory for me. Blood, and cutting, and mutilation, and a demon crawling out of a woman’s stomach, and a man sawing his own jaw off. I spent a good third of the film shielding my eyes with my baseball cap. And to make matters worse, in the middle of the movie, a man sitting in our row pulled out his iPhone to check election results. (He got a stern talking to.)

The film left me both underwhelmed and disgusted, even though those fake pop songs were good, and even though some moments in the movie were quite brilliant. As I left the theater and powered up my phone, I quickly realized that Donald Trump was well on his way to win the presidential election. It’s a result I didn’t expect, one I think a lot of people didn’t expect, and I have to admit, processing it after having a rather unenjoyable film experience was a lot. 

In spite of my dislike of Smile 2, and the way it did not at all meet my expectations, the film has been a roaring success. It’s already made over $100 million dollars at the global box office, and it only cost 30 million dollars to make. Whatever my take on Smile 2, it didn’t matter –– this film is a hit, whether I like it or not. The very things that turned me off about this movie – the excessive gore, the torture porn –– may actually be what made it such a resounding success. 

And so it might be said about this week’s election results. I, and I am guessing many of you, are surprised that the guy who won actually won, even as his most recent campaign for higher office was more crass, offensive, and chaotic than his previous two. His sensibility seemed off-putting to many, but in fact, those same traits help explain his appeal to some 70 million voters –– a majority of the electorate this year. I’m not saying that I or anyone can or should draw conclusions about politics from movies, but I do think the story of Smile 2, as well as Donald Trump’s election this week, reveals a truth about entertainment, culture, and politics: Just because you don’t like it doesn’t mean someone else can’t. Your taste is not everyone’s taste, and there’s a whole big, wide world out there more vast than your personal proclivities.   

This is what I was thinking about when I taped this week’s episode of my show, featuring journalists Elise Hu and Taylor Lorenz. We looked back on some of the biggest tech stories of 2024 (AI, Elon, TikTok, and more!), and one of our throughlines was that the internet ~we~ experience is not the same internet everyone else does. Taylor pointed out that the political and cultural right has constructed a new media internet universe that flies under the radar of the left, but is more powerful and far-reaching than legacy media. And we also talked about how our algorithms, across just about all of the internet we consume these days, are giving us an experience tailor-made just for us, an experience possibly quite different from our neighbors' or some stranger we interact with online.

The issue now with life online isn’t just that my taste might be so different from others’; it’s that the world I am viewing most days online is created just for me and my tastes, and is giving me a view of the world that might not be as true-to-life as it should be. And that affects what I expect from our nation’s politics, and can sometimes mean the expectations shaped in my little bubble of the internet might not always become reality. The movie I want to see, the one I create in my corner of the internet — it may not be the film that’s actually a hit in real life. 

With that, a question for those who’ve read this far: What media are you consuming these days after the election, to get your mind off politics for a bit? Reply to this email and let me know. I’ll also leave you with a recommendation: go see Conclave, that new Pope movie starring Ralph Fiennes. It’s very, very good and beautifully shot, and there’s not a bit of gore in it at all. 

Happy weekend, and enjoy this week’s show. Talk soon! 

-Sam