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 until the disagreement seems to have edges that never move, and there is 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. Look for the writer and you find hands on every part of it and no hand on the whole.
What runs it is simpler and harder to fight. A feed keeps whatever holds your eye, and few things hold an eye like a fight you already have a side in. The whole can run on a pressure as plain as this, set and reset in offices and applied by machines many times a second: keep whatever keeps people looking. And what keeps them looking is often 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, set out a model of how it was done, and their model already left room for loud disagreement inside agreed limits. I think the feed keeps the limits and changes how they are held: certainty inside each camp, opposition between the camps. What the two camps come to share is less an agreement than a habit of taking the fight itself for the shape politics takes. The habit keeps people busy and keeps them apart, and it can spend their political energy on a quarrel that leaves the load-bearing walls standing.
And we take our seats believing we are on the stage. We pick a side and defend it, feel the stakes in the chest, the adrenaline, the loyalty, the contempt. The feeling of being in the fight can be the whole of our part in it.
Some of the fights on the feed have a body at the end of them. The argument about borders reaches the person three years into waiting on a visa, and the argument about the local school reaches the parent watching it close. The machine's cruelty goes past staging fights that settle nothing: it casts the fights that settle everything in the same furious scroll, until the feed gives spectacle and the blow about to land on your body the same face.
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 those the outcome will pass by: they can log off and be done with it, while everyone else logs off and waits, because the outcome arrives at the door whether anyone watched or not. Logging off does not, by itself, settle what happens at the door, and to the feed your absence is a rounding error; your disgust, while you stayed, was still attendance.
Swallowing the show will not do, and leaving the theatre or seeing through it will not do on its own: the show has a part for the critic too, and fills the stalls with people who know exactly how the trick is done. The rest is done by hand: refusing to let the feed decide which fights you spend yourself on, and asking of each one where it will land, who can still move it, and what the watching is standing in for.
And then the fights that will land have to be carried into the rooms where what reaches a body can be reached back: the meeting, the union, the queue at the door, and sometimes the thread on the same feed that gets people into them. Most exits from this theatre turn out to be other entrances; the ones that hold are the ones that take the fight with them.