Christopher Cotton, who teaches high school English in Illinois, wrote the following: 

 

It is all about the Id!

 

When people register their anger on Twitter, they are truly nasty. When the target is female, a large number of men become truly vile. It’s partly the anonymity. But many of the most despicable tweeters use their real names. It’s not just the rush of mob violence, ganging up on a defenseless victim, though that surely is a factor. Partly it’s because tweeting feels private; it feels like thinking. Partly it’s because of the quickness and off-the-cuff feeling of tapping thumbs at a tiny window. It’s often done standing up, on the move, multi-tasking: the superego is distracted; there’s no pause for reflection. This is the nature of the machine, of the interface of intellect and internet: it’s all about the id.

 

The power of Twitter is what it releases into the public sphere: the prehistoric reptile brain chained up by a thousand generations of human social organization. Now, much of this history has involved fierce repression—often cruel, sometimes stupid, and always changing. But as society progresses and the parameters change, what doesn’t change is the root idea that we need to control ourselves in order to coexist. We need a grown-up standing between the sudden thought and the spoken word. We need an armed grown-up between the impulse and the deed. That’s what Twitter tosses out the window: the very value of self-control….

 

Some people credit Trump for being some sort of genius: the first to see the possibilities, the game-changer of the internet. I don’t agree. He’s just your average dirty old man, just your run-of-the-mill scumbag megalomaniac narcissist billionaire. He’s just an oddly shaped peg that’s been swaggering through the world, bumping into people, knocking things over, and he just happened to tumble into a new and oddly-shaped hole in the universe.

 

So here he is, an avatar, but of the reverse type: he’s an avatar from the computer, now out in un-virtual reality. He’s a ragebot, lustbot, greedbot, egobot—released from the twitterverse and trolling the real world, looking for something to get mad at, to grope, to possess, to adore him.

 

Most of us never thought Trump had a chance to win the Republican nomination, let alone the presidency. He blew past mistakes that would have sunk any candidate in the past. But things are different now.

 

The world is a new place. We’re all strangers here. Except for the dirty old man. Turns out, he’s been living here for years. Hell, he bought property and put up hotels!