Donald Trump's victory has forced us to confront a difficult truth.

Last Wednesday, I stood in a stuffy Sydney bar in the early evening and watched as multiple screens, including the small one in my pocket, confirmed a staggering truth: Donald Trump would be the 47th President of the United States of America.

He'd won in a landslide that wasn't predicted by public opinion polls — polls that have now vastly underestimated his support for three consecutive elections. On televisions mounted on exposed brick walls, I watched him take the stage to address the American people. The sound was drowned out by the noise of lively post-work conversations; groups of inner-city professionals who saw Trump's victory as a dystopian nightmare. Or entirely understood his appeal. Or blamed the Democrats for failing to appeal to voters. Or claimed they had expected this — all of this — all along.

In my phone — that pulsating organ that is so rarely out of my hand — many of the people I follow were expressing their grief. This man, who during his last Presidency handpicked the Supreme Court justices who went on to overturn Roe v. Wade, ending the constitutional right to an abortion, would have another four years in power. This man, a convicted felon, who was last year found guilty of sexual abuse in a court of law, who faces so many other criminal charges it would be impossible to list them here, would form government. This time, he wouldn't have many of the guardrails that were in place during his first Presidential term. This time, he's better organised, he has a clearer agenda, and he has surrounded himself with more dangerous, more powerful people.

Watch: Jessie Stephens explains why we should care about the US election. Post continues after video.

Online, some women sobbed. They shouted. Many men, too, were angry. Bewildered. How did a reality star beat a prosecutor? Was America so sexist, so racist, that they would rather elect a criminal than a woman of colour? Was it that simple?

Immediately, my social media feed was like a transportation device that took me straight to the shattered souls of Harris supporters. For days now, I've watched the outrage and the devastation and the contempt towards anyone who voted for Trump. I've even started to see conspiracies that swathes of Democratic votes weren't counted, that it's simply not possible for Trump to have won every swing state, that there are important questions to be asked about whether this election was truly fair. 

It feels eerily familiar.

But mostly, more than anything, there's the anger. The 'Us Versus Them' binary. The certainty that the people who put Trump in the White House are dumb, cruel and morally bankrupt. 

Behind my cracked, smudged phone screen, I am being presented with an incontestable, black-and-white version of reality. It tells me that tens of millions of faceless Americans turned up to the polls and voted with the intention of harming others. They wanted to strip away women's rights, to restrict the freedoms of the LGBTQI+ community, to use their voice as a tool for oppression and bigotry. They filled in their ballots while laughing maniacally, chanting your body my choice, their devil horns barely concealed under their MAGA hats. They are not like us, my algorithm shouts at me. They are nothing like you.

This algorithm, the one that determines exactly what I see in the sickening number of hours I spend staring at my phone, is engineered not in the interests of social justice or progress, of platforming marginalised voices or spreading accurate information. It is engineered in the interests of capitalism. This algorithm wants me to look at my screen in the bar, at work, in bed, on the train, on the toilet, when I'm with my child, when I'm anxious or sad or confused, because as long as I'm looking at my screen, I am a product it can sell. It needs to steal my attention, to colonise my mind, so the platforms that created it can continue to grow. So they can make more money, through more advertising, through knowing more about me and what I might spend money on. It serves me content that will make me hungry for more content, that will turn me into a lab rat who has learnt to press a lever for a drug, whose reality is now confined to a corner of its cage.

Social media algorithms, in their currently known form, were introduced in 2009. In the years since, we have fallen deeper and deeper into them. Our phones have become extensions of us, they know us in ways we do not know ourselves, and as a result, we have been consensually constructing our own realities in private. We no longer consume a shared mass media. Instead, we live in a world created by an increasingly fractured and polarised online space — one where you are exposed to the opinions of people I have never heard of, and vice versa. 

I do not believe that, on the whole, the people who voted for Trump did so with malice. I do not believe they did so to outwardly hurt anyone else. I believe they did so to protect themselves, because they felt so much fear, so much shame, so much anger, that it seemed like the best option.

Trump supporters, like Harris supporters, are not a monolith, but it's possible to imagine some of the features of their reality. A reality where they looked at Biden and decided they were being lied to by the Democrats — that no one was telling the truth about the competency of their President. A reality where Trump was focused on immigration and the economy and Harris was focused on reproductive rights, an issue that is no longer a federal one, but a state-based one. This may not be your reality. It is not my reality. But it is a reality, and you cannot shout someone out of their own experience of the world. 

Listen to Mamamia Out Loud where Mamamia's US correspondent Amelia Lester joins Mia Freedman to digest the events that led up to the US election results. Post continues after audio.

The content we consume online purposely appeals to our most basic emotional instincts. As a woman, the conversation around abortion fills me with fear and shame and anger, just as a different set of issues might elicit the same response in others. This emotional residue is so thick, so sticky, that it is near impossible to remove. 

I do not know where any of this leaves us. As social psychologist Jonathan Haidt describes it, we are all trapped in our own moral matrix, where we instinctively seek out people who share similar matrices, resulting in us becoming more close-minded. This will continue to deepen so long as we live on social media platforms driven by capitalist goals. While there is money to be made from our attention. When the time we spend looking at our phones, trapped there because our screens know how to exploit our emotional vulnerabilities, is seen as an infinite opportunity for brands to advertise to us. 

The only suggestion I can offer is this. Perhaps it is foolish to search for answers in the same place the problems came from: deep in algorithms that have, as we've just seen, fractured the world's greatest superpower. 

Perhaps it is time for a reckoning. A moment to stop and wonder whether the real threat to progress, the thing that might truly turn us against each other, is not at the other end of a pointed finger, but in the palm of our hand.

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Feature image: Getty.