> But what is more horrifying for me is that apparently this administration remains representative of a large section of the US population - with seemingly unshakeable approval by between 40% and 50% of the US adult population according to polls.

It’s possible that percentage counts dissatisfaction with the previous administration more than approval for the current one. That is, it might just count people wanting any change.

You should then be dissatisfied with both at the same time. When people wish 'any change' they actually wish a change into better, otherwise it's plain stupid.

It is disheartening to me to observe that the thing that broke the once proud USA, the final straw, the thing that disenfranchised hundreds of millions of people and made them rabid and reactionary (on both sides of the rage algorithm) was a black man in the white house and women on the presidential ballot. The retrograde prejudices so deeply ingrained in the country’s memome that we are still in the throes of an anaphylactic reaction to an acute melatonin allergy.

It doesn’t help that many of us (yes , I mean us, the technorati, the readers and contributors of this vaunted forum) actively and even knowingly participated in making poisonous systems, pocket prohistamines, amplifiers of fears and antagonists of rational thought.

We decry the world we have wrested from decency with our own tender, uncalloused hands, our minds sharpened to create beautiful weapons of mass confusion, elegant and brutal in their viral carapaces, eager to dissolve into the psyche of any unfortunate enough to fall into their dopamine sweetened viciousness.

We created this. Not the politicians, there have always been irrational, brutish, would be populists and morons in suits. That is not new. People with money willing to pay people to build or do malignant things, that is also an ancient malady that society has evolved to bear. We. We made the mind-killers. We, with our cleverness and desire for perfect symmetry manufactured social PCP, and now we are witnessing the fruits of our careless, avaricious labors, shocked and in denial of the damage we have done.

In our defense, we didn’t know. No one had built anything on our idea machines that hooked into the flesh of the human psyche like that before, and at first we didn’t even understand what we were building. But later in the fall, we knew better.

Our algorithms, nanowire sharp in their efficiency, honed to amplify fear and rage while suppressing rational thought, no, those were not made in ignorance, neither in malice, but more in a playful curiosity. The same playful curiosity that made the atom bomb, but at least the physicists could foresee and conceptualize the demon they would create. In contrast, we the technorati are still reeling with surprise and denial, not able to understand the beast that we have conjured from the depths of the human psyche.

We know there is a problem, we know that social media is not helping… so what do we do? We make lame attempts to make new social media platforms, lower in poison, filtered cigarettes. Precision strategic weapons of mass destruction. Low-fat butter.

We need to look in the mirror and get to work figuring how to fix what we broke. The future of humanity is at stake, and we are directly responsible for, knowingly or not, the situation our children are facing.

I think it's clear that the approval ratings Trump gets are more about disapproval of the rest of politics. When you have every politician getting rich somehow while your life gets worse and worse, a lot of people will want all politicians punished. Trump is that punishment, and many people are excited to see the political and professional classes suffer. That is the approval rating.