Is Chaos the Actual Strategy? Looking Beyond Digital Outrage

Ioulex for The New York Times

Sometimes an analysis comes along that crystallizes what you've been trying to get your head around. Tressie McMillan Cottom's brilliant New York Times piece about Elon Musk does exactly that by revealing how "content" has become a powerful strategic tool.

Her insight isn't just that political actors create chaos - it's that they're using content in a fundamentally new way. When Musk turns bureaucratic takeovers into dramatic narratives or frames complex issues as video game quests, he's not just creating confusion. He's generating emotional connections that make his supporters feel like participants in a larger story.

This resonates deeply with what I explored in my recent Big Think piece about the crisis of strategic thinking in our institutions. What traditional organizations see as tactical disorder is actually careful orchestration. The content itself - its pacing, its emotional triggers, its game-like qualities - serves strategic purposes that our conventional frameworks struggle to recognize.

While institutions respond with data analytics and instant reactions to each new crisis, they miss how modern power operates through digital performance. Content doesn't just communicate - it shapes reality for its audience while obscuring the actual machinery of change. This is precisely why maintaining human strategic capacity becomes crucial in an age of digital disruption.

This pattern extends far beyond politics. Whether facing environmental disasters, technological disruption, or institutional breakdown, organizations often miss how content shapes perception and drives engagement. They focus on tactical responses while missing the strategic reshaping of reality happening through carefully crafted digital narratives.

The challenge isn't just developing better responses to digital chaos - it's understanding how content itself has become a strategic battlefield. As I've argued, real strategic thinking requires seeing patterns beneath apparent chaos. McMillan Cottom shows us exactly what those patterns look like in our content-driven world.