Rethinking politics, populism and platforms – Open Democracy

If such rhetoric is to animate people they have to hear (or see, or read) it. And how that happens depends on the technologies used to augment it. Hearing a speech as part of a crowd of people in the House of Commons is very different from reading a pamphlet in the library of a constituency Labour Club, which is also very different from watching BBC Question Time at home. Each of these creates a particular and distinct relationship between speakers, audiences and ideas.

Today speeches, pamphlets and television programmes still convey political ideas. But digital media platforms YouTube, Reddit, Facebook and so on are creating new forms and new kinds of relationships between speakers, audiences and ideas. They are reconfiguring ideological and informational contestation in ways that have given rise to new kinds of populist politics. Indeed, many current forms of populist politics cannot be understood apart from the digital platforms through which they have been propagated.

Social, digital, media platforms make it possible for lots of people to become ideological entrepreneurs, making a living from producing and disseminating political ideas and arguments yet unconstrained by the obligations that come with representing a party or adhering to the codes of professional journalism. This has enabled ambitious people to consolidate and coordinate political outlooks previously too marginal and dispersed to be noticed, developing new ways for people to apprehend their political life simply by liking and subscribing.

The individualising nature of social media not least the fact that we mostly consume it on our own, the voices inside our headphones creates a very particular dynamic between speakers and audiences. Supplied with the daily data, producers can quickly and rapidly adapt to audience reactions, in search of a continued supply of subscribers and paying followers. Audiences can develop close parasocial relationships with their ideological entrepreneurs of choice and with each other.

Significantly such online political actors do not produce only 30-second videos or 280-character tweets. They produce hours-long videos and millions of words discussing and developing political ideas, analysing current events and proposing ways to mobilise. They are far more complex and detailed than any party political broadcast.

Digital platforms are locations for intense ideological-rhetorical action and for the cultivation of political understanding. This is where a lot of the work of translating needs and interests into hearable demands now takes place. But people also find there new forms of subcultural community to attach to, and charismatic ideological entrepreneurs promising to explain the world, to show you how to identify the baddies and the goodies, to give you rules for life.

All of this also takes place, however, in a political-economic context. For most of us occupational security, status and income have all declined over the past 40 years. The acceleration of technological innovation has abolished some kinds of work, deskilling and routinising others (including, perhaps especially, the once-grand professions such as law or education).

It has brought a new experience of economic vulnerability to those who thought that their numbers, skills or credentials protected them. Within the workplace, union power and collective bargaining have been replaced by individual negotiations governed by mechanisms of performance management, overseen by the formalities of Human Resources. In daily life, we must follow the rules and live by the decisions of those whose technical, scientific and intellectual knowledge is applied by various bureaucratic authorities. In our time off our leisure pursuits are shaped by the creative workers of the capitalist media and entertainment industries.

Our working lives are governed by impersonal rules which feel imposed on us from outside; in our private lives, our capacities for creative expression are dwarfed by the power of the commercial media. Meanwhile, in our public, civic lives what was once mainstream political rhetoric has long since failed to be either engaging or reassuring about any of these experiences.

Professionalised and mechanistic, using a bland language we all know because we are subjected to it by technocrats at work, it urges us to enjoy the disruption and experience it as liberating. Many repelled by or simply excluded from all this, have been attracted by political figures who break with and mock the conventions of such official rhetorics, and who, with their deliberate bad manners, blur the genres of political discourse with those learned from prior careers in, say, comedy, wrestling and opinion journalism and who promise to free us from the iron cages of late-modernity.

Online, this kind of populist opposition to changes in occupational class experience and cultural power is led by the Right and far Right. Across platforms, and especially on YouTube, new ideological entrepreneurs have achieved commercial viability by cultivating audiences to whom they offer an explanation of what has happened and why, translating general anxieties and expectations into demands contained with a claim about a fundamental antagonism. What they offer in great detail, through polemics that are both angry and comedic is a class analysis but one which concentrates on domination by a class defined by its possession of cultural and discursive rather than economic power. That rhetoric divides us from the them the administrators and managers (especially those in HR), the government bureaucrats and officials, the professionals and experts, the entertainers and journalists.

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Rethinking politics, populism and platforms - Open Democracy