Of course, the biggest change we’ve been dealing with on this front has been the shift from analog media to digital media. Analog is smooth and continuous, digital is sampled and discrete. Analog was a broadcast era, emphasizing the power of the center. Digital is a distributed era, emphasizing the potential of decentralized outsiders.

Donald Trump works the Internet better than you do (whether he knows it or not)

Earlier this month, Donald Trump spewed a string of enraged non sequiturs for two hours straight on a stage in Fort Dodge, Iowa.

He suggested castration or the death penalty as the only appropriate remedy for the self-admittedly “pathological” Ben Carson. He claimed the U.S. plans to accept 250,000 Syrian refugees even though the Obama administration put that number at 10,000, citing “a pretty good source.” He insisted that in time, “I’ll be right,” as if the truth were some kind of interactive guessing game.

There was no throughline; no coherence; no reality. Even the crowd standing behind him seemed bored and fidgety through the contradictory mash-up of paranoia, wishful thinking, opinion masquerading as fact, and dehumanizing insults. It looked like a campaign implosion. Instead, Trump’s poll ratings went up a couple of points after the speech.

That’s because he’s leveraging a medium that is also, largely, a mash-up of paranoia, wishful thinking, opinion masquerading as fact, and dehumanizing insults. Donald Trump is the ultimate Internet candidate, in not just style but substance. He owes his success to more than just his keen ability to leverage the political economy of a digitally disrupted media space. His rhetoric and positions — such as they are — are also consonant with the underlying biases of the digital-media environment.