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.
You stay, and the staging shows through. The same faces return to the same positions, performing a disagreement whose edges never move, 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. There are hands on every part of it and no hand on the whole. 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. The whole needs only one small decision, made over and over: 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 less enemies than its two halves, each keeping the other on the screen.
A century ago Lippmann named the manufacture of consent; Herman and Chomsky, long after, mapped the machinery. The machinery survived by changing what it makes. The old product was one consent, broad and shared; the feed manufactures consent in pieces, certainty inside each camp and opposition between the camps: keeping people busy, keeping them apart, spending 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, the adrenaline, the loyalty, the 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 machine's cruelty is not just that it stages fights that settle nothing, but that it casts the fights that settle everything in the same furious scroll, until spectacle and the blow about to land on your body become indistinguishable.
Which is why the usual advice rings false the moment it claims to be more than rest. Log off, it goes, tend your own garden, the real life is the one in front of you. As care for a body it is often right, and sometimes the garden is exactly where the politics lives. As politics it flatters: only the people the debates will never reach get to log off and be done, while everyone else logs off and waits, because the outcome arrives at the door whether anyone watched or not. And none of it troubles the machine. Your absence is a rounding error; your disgust is still attendance. More than 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, and neither does seeing through it: the show has a part for the critic too, and fills the stalls with people who know exactly how the trick is done. What is left is less satisfying. To refuse to let the feed decide which fights you spend yourself on. To ask of each one, by hand, where it will land, who can still move it, and what the watching is standing in for, the questions the machine has least use for. And then to carry the fights that will land out of the theatre, into the meeting, the union, the queue at the door, the rooms where what reaches a body can be reached back. The show has a part written for everyone who stays, the fan and the defector, the loyal, the disgusted and the lucid alike. The only exit that is not also an entrance is the one that takes the fight with it.