Visit Whitehouse.gov today, and youll be greeted with a full-bleed video of President Donald Trump stepping back into the White House as fighter jets fly overhead. When it ends, youre left with a big photo of Trump smiling and pointing toward some unseen fans with big text: America is back! Neat. Theres just one little thing missing: The U.S. Constitution web pagewhich, as Redditors have noted, is now a 404 error.Intentional or not, the moment is a symbol of Trumps new world order thats been realized overnightnot in our cities and towns just yetbut across some of the most important spaces in the online world.[Screenshot: whitehouse.gov]The deletion of digital resourcesTrump is preternaturally attuned to the power of his digital reach. In the hours after taking office, he deactivated the core functionality of the CBP One app. This is an app introduced under President Joe Biden giving undocumented migrants the ability to legally seek asylum in the U.S. These people could use the app to sign up for orderly appointments at border crossing checkpoints. Under Trump, you can still download the app, but it no longer takes appointments, and all existing appointments have been canceled. This update appears on the U.S. Customs and Border Protection website, a digital action made years faster than the presidents border wall can be built.[Screenshots: CBP One]The new administration has also abruptly deactivated reproductiverights.gov. Again, this is a Biden administration initiative taken after the Supreme Courts decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Womens Health Organization in June 2022 essentially overturned Roe v. Wade. The site offered legal, plain language resources on rights to emergency care, contraceptives, and abortion. Today, this site is simply gone. Load it in your browser and you get a black screen, as if the domain never existed. The Internet Archive is the only place you can see it.[Screenshot: reproductiverights.gov]And beyond the elimination of the Constitution on the White House website, the administration has also deleted the White Houses Spanish version along with its Spanish X account, in what seems like an intentional snub to the Latinx community.Any marginalized group throughout history will tell you that erasure is far from a new phenomenon. But the scale and speed at which its happening now has been supercharged by light speed communications and despots that have architected our digital world. These moves cut far deeper than Trump superficially issuing an executive order to rename the tallest peak in the U.S. from Denali back to Mount McKinley, or calling the Gulf of Mexico the Gulf of America. When the internet is our lived environment, Trump is significantly reshaping our infrastructure with electronic swiftness.By contrast, the erasure of physical spaces is often lengthy and difficult. It requires all sorts of ordinances quietly passed to shift laws that will eventually break concrete. The historic redlining and reconstruction of thriving immigrant neighborhoodslike those in Los Angeles, San Francisco, Detroit, and Miamirequired years of bureaucratic malevolence, followed by high-dollar investments and physical manpower to demolish and rebuild these spaces anew.The modern version, enacted online, is shrewd in its instantaneousness. No one is pretending the decision is simply about building a highway anymore. Organize the right mob, light the right match, strike the right key, and its just gone. All thats left are the survivors who insist, really, something great was here.The flex of social medias political power brokersThis phenomenonthe mass terraforming of our digital spacesis not simply the work of Trump, but of the other power brokers in his orbit, too. On X this week, many users have been welcomed by posts at the top of their feeds showing Elon Musk basking in attention from the adoring crowd at a post-inauguration rally. On Facebook, Meta founder Mark Zuckerberg popped into user timelines alongside spouse Priscilla Chan saying hes optimistic and celebrating [flag emoji].These social media moments are more than political victory laps; theyre portraits of deeper decisions at play. Any user of X can attest to its shifting right-wing agenda since Musk took over Twitter and rebranded it. Zuckerberg announced the elimination of fact-checking across his platforms after taking a cultural pulse post-election, arguing, We try to have policies that reflect mainstream discourse. Since the inauguration, many Meta users have found that the algorithm suggests accounts for Trump and Vice President JD Vance, while some even noted the service had temporarily blocked the ability to search some democratic hashtags.We have fewrights on Facebook, Instagram, or X. We sign them away in countless pages of terms and conditions when we agree to converse in the spaces of major corporations. And so when these corporations want favor with Trump, of course the algorithm will project Trumps vision of America as the status quo. Mainstream social media is now a vast propaganda machine, while legacy media is maligned. The digital world is shouting harmful, hateful fictions and that are, through sheer numerical dominance, becoming our reality.In an environment constructed upon vendettas and fictions, its difficult to see a productive way forward that honors veracity, that cares for the people who require our care most. There are no checks and balances in a world that can be deleted with a keystroke. But its worth noting that this supreme digital power is also a massive design flaw: The malleability of the digital record will always be sand shifting under our feetjust ask TikTok, which dodged its own grazed bullet last week.If our previous reality could disappear on little more than a resentful whim, then this hateful empire can, too. Control is never a permanent state.