WHEN Taylor Swift's dark, angry new track, Look What You Made Me Do, was released, it broke the internet, setting a record for YouTube views. But the reaction to the single itself was far from positive. Swift had created what's often called a “diss track”, an attack on various unnamed celebrities that appears to deliver a history of all the public feuds she has had in one deadly punch. Targets, according to those who have dissected the record, supposedly include Kanye West (she mentions a “tilted stage” which featured in his tour), Katy Perry (shots of her in a leopard print coat in gold car, evoke Perry) and Nicki Minaj.

Critics described the song as petulant and petty, encapsulating the worst of celebrity narcissism and social media culture. They criticised Swift for being self-obsessed. But Swift happens to be the world's most successful musician, bigger than Rihanna or Madonna or Beyonce, with a net worth of £215 million. So perhaps the target of all this loathing is the fact we are caught up in the online sniping and tit-for-tatting that often serves as popular culture today. It's not so much Swift that we hate, but ourselves.

As an article in Wired put it, Look What You Made Me Do is “the kind of song intended to stoke social media chatter – a song made more for DMing [direct messaging] than for dancing". The internet is awash with theories about all the different clues that Swift's video contains. But honestly, who can be bothered?

Well, the internet reaction suggests lots of people can.

Diss tracks have been popular in hip-hop for decades, and more lately among American female artists from Katy Perry through to Swift herself. Yet there was something about this particular feud-driven number, which seemed too peevish, and which at a time of political tension in America, seemed to be making all too much of something rather trivial.

Meanwhile, the video looks like the vanity project of a grumpy god, or rather goddess, up on Mount Olympus, carping about all the other gods and goddesses, and whinging about what all those annoying mortals have said about her. As Michelle Ruiz put it in Vogue: “After an almost three-year break since her last blockbuster album, 1989, Swift comes back with a trifling revenge track that doesn't stick in your head for the right reasons – and a victim complex? For a star so big, it all feels too small-minded.”

Since the album's release, there has been a lot of media theorising about what the problem is with Swift. The Vulture online magazine ran a much-shared article by Mark Harris whose title describes the single as the “first pure piece of Trump-era Pop art”. The song itself contains no mention of Trump or his politics, though for many, Swift's silence around last year's election has been interpreted as at least a tacit support of the current regime.

Swift has her defenders. Some point out that there's a misogynistic flavour to many of the attacks on her. And there is undoubtedly some truth in this comment by Joseph Kahn, the director of her video: “If I plan something as a man, I'm a genius. If Taylor as a woman plans something she is 'manipulative'.”

Brian O'Flynn was also right when he wrote in The Guardian, that Swift has long been a victim of misogyny. There's something smart, as he observes, in the way her new video has reappropriated the misogynistic snake symbol once used against her, originally in a tweet by Kim Kardashian.

“It’s cool to hate Taylor Swift,” he writes. “She’s a social media pariah, the punchline of every meme, a living snake emoji ... She’s become universally despised to the point where it’s taboo even to admit to feeling sorry for her.”

But it seems to me that the Swift-loathing is not entirely driven by misogyny. What is bothering us is the climate Swift seems to embody. The problem is not really that she is apolitical, but that actually her music and social media are products of the kind of febrile internet culture that brought Trump to power. They come from the same source, the same explosion of narcissism, blame-society and social media attention-seeking.

Does Swift understand all this? Is she just smartly working it for her own gain? It seems quite likely. She may actually be a pop genius. She knows what sets us off, has seen what we don't like about ourselves, and her, and is quite happy to put the internet cascade of loathing in motion.

Her music, perhaps, is part-critique of all that. Her video even features an image of a snake eating its own tail. It's a symbol that seems to encapsulate where we are now – eating our tails in the seething snake pit that is our digital era. And we can't, in Swift's words, say: "Look what you made me do."

After all, no-one actually made us do it.