Donald Trump is a pathogen evolved to thrive in an attention-maximization ecosystem

My latest Locus column is The Engagement-Maximization Presidency, and it proposes a theory to explain the political phenomenon of Donald Trump: we live in a world in which communications platforms amplify anything that gets “engagement” and provides feedback on just how much your message has been amplified so you can tune and re-tune for maximum amplification.

Peter Watts’s 2002 novel Maelstrom illustrates a beautiful, terrifying example of this, in which a mindless, self-modifying compute...