Open any feed and the fight is already underway. Two sides clash across your screen, each certain, each aghast, the timeline pulsing with fresh outrage by the second. Somebody is wrong and somebody must answer for it. This is democracy breathing, we tell ourselves, the argument a free society is meant to have with itself, out loud, at full volume.
Watch it long enough and the staging shows through. The same faces return to the same positions, performing a disagreement whose edges never move, plenty of heat and very little light, and a strange courtesy underneath the fury: each side needs the other to keep turning up. It looks scripted, and the reflex is to ask who wrote it, who is funding the production, whose interests the show serves. But there is no writer in a booth somewhere. No one is running it. That is the unsettling part.
What runs it is simpler and harder to fight. A feed keeps whatever holds your eye, and nothing holds an eye like a fight you already have a side in. So the thing needs no plan. It needs only to keep what works, and what works is opposition, repeated, escalated, dressed each morning in fresh grievance. As far as the feed is concerned, the two sides are its two halves, each keeping the other on the screen, rather than enemies.
Half a century ago Lippmann, and after him Chomsky, described how a society manufactures consent, how agreement gets produced where there ought to be questioning. This is the mirror of that. It manufactures disagreement, division where there might have been common cause, and it does the same quiet work. It keeps people busy and keeps them apart, and it spends their political energy on a quarrel that leaves every load-bearing wall exactly where it stood.
And we take our seats believing we are on the stage. We pick a side, defend it as though something of ours hung on it, feel the stakes in the chest, real adrenaline, real loyalty, real contempt. The feeling of being in the fight is genuine. It is also, for most of us, the whole of our part in it.
And yet not every fight on the feed is hollow. For the person three years into waiting on a visa, the argument about borders is no performance. For the person halving the insulin to make it last the month, the health debate has teeth. For the parent watching the local school close, none of it is abstract. The cruelty of the machine is not only that it stages fights that settle nothing. It is that it files the fights that settle everything into the same scroll, in the same furious typeface, so that from the inside you can no longer easily tell the show from the thing about to land on your own body.
Which is why the usual way out rings false. Log off, the advice goes, tend your own garden, the real life is the one in front of you. Good advice for whoever can afford it, which is mostly the people the debates will never physically reach. Walking away is not refusal when the outcome arrives at your door whether you watched or not. And the flattering notion that the system fears your silence, your indifference, your sheer disengagement, has it backwards. Indifference is exactly what a machine like this digests without trouble. It does not need your belief. It needs your attention, and it will happily take it in the form of disgust.
So neither swallowing the show nor leaving the theatre will do. What is left is harder and less satisfying: to stay in the seat with your eyes open, and to refuse to let the feed decide which fights you spend yourself on. To sort, by hand, the quarrels staged to be watched from the ones that will reach somebody's body, knowing the sorting is the one task the machine has no wish for you to take up. The show has a part written for the fan and a part for the defector, for the loyal and the disgusted alike. The one figure it has no script for is the person still watching closely, and refusing to be cast.