Welcome to the Age of the Algorithmic Snake Oil Salesman

In her clear-eyed and quietly blistering essay, “The ‘Mainstream Media’ Has Already Lost,” Helen Lewis paints a picture that should make any old-school news anchor break out in hives: a world where Joe Rogan has more political leverage than the sitting Vice President of the United States. Days before the 2024 election, Kamala Harris reportedly wanted to appear on Rogan’s podcast. He declined. Not out of spite or political protest, but simply because he could. That’s power. That’s the media landscape now.

The term “mainstream media” has become a wheezing relic, a dusty VHS tape of a bygone era. The networks that once shaped public consensus now resemble aging bodybuilders—still flexing, but under the blinding fluorescents of a Planet Fitness instead of the Mr. Olympia stage. Meanwhile, Rogan and his ilk bench-press audiences of millions, all while wearing hoodies and sipping from branded tumblers. He doesn’t need legacy media. Legacy media needs him—and it’s already too late.

Lewis reports that 54 percent of Americans now get their news from social media. Let that sink in. More than half the country is being spoon-fed their worldview by apps designed to addict, outrage, and silo. Instead of objective reporting, people now binge infotainment curated by opaque algorithms trained to fatten engagement at any cost. These feeds aren’t delivering news; they’re cultivating dopamine dependency.

Welcome to the Age of the Algorithmic Snake Oil Salesman. The modern grifter doesn’t stand on a soapbox in a public square—he livestreams in 4K from a ring light-lit garage, selling supplements, conspiracies, and cultural resentment like they’re Girl Scout cookies. Facts are irrelevant. Performance is king. These charlatans don’t have to be right—they just have to be loud.

Irony of ironies: these influencers wrap themselves in the cloak of “authenticity.” They curse, they rant, they “tell it like it is,” but their every inflection is calibrated for virality. Rage isn’t an emotion—it’s a marketing strategy. Performative outrage now passes for truth, and click-through rates replace credibility.

As the mainstream media limps into irrelevance, it takes with it a few other quaint notions—like science. In this brave new world, you don’t need peer review when you have followers. Why believe the CDC when a ripped guy with a ring light and an Instagram handle ending in “.truth” tells you that vaccines are a globalist plot? The return of diseases like measles and tuberculosis—once considered conquered—are just collateral damage in the war on expertise.

And with the fall of old-school journalism, our already threadbare civic discourse has collapsed into a gladiator arena of smug narcissists screaming at each other with all the subtlety of a demolition derby. Politeness is for chumps. Nuance is for cowards. The algorithm doesn’t reward thoughtful dialogue—it feeds on belligerence. Online, the dumbest guy in the room often gets the biggest microphone, because ignorance is loud, confident, and apparently good for ad revenue.

Let’s not forget critical thinking, that delicate orchid now trampled under the steel-toed boots of clickbait and tribal rage. The marketplace of ideas has become a black market of weaponized talking points. People are no longer consuming information—they’re huffing ideological fumes. And like any good addict, they don’t want to quit. They want a stronger hit.

Lewis doesn’t offer false hope. There’s no tidy ending where the media reclaims its place and truth triumphs in a feel-good montage. Instead, she suggests the comeback of reason, of trust in science, of civil discourse—will only happen the way all painful recalibrations happen: through crisis. It will take something even more catastrophic than COVID-19 to shock us back into reality. Only when the fantasy scaffolding collapses and we’re left staring at real, unfiltered chaos will the fever break.

Until then, we scroll. We rage. We share. We follow. We spin deeper into silos. And we continue pretending that Joe Rogan isn’t the new Cronkite.

But he is.