Too Fast, Too Furious

“Seems like every time you turn around, there’s another hard luck a-story that you’re gonna hear” —Bob Dylan

As 2025 begins, the future seems bleak for nearly everyone. As islands sink, wars ravage the world, flooding sweeps away cities, income inequality widens, poverty worsens, and the most powerful democracy in the world crumbles, it becomes increasingly difficult to understand how we have resigned ourselves to this fate. Answers to this question abound amongst the left, from a lack of material power to voter disengagement to bad, unaccountable actors at the top. However, another answer remains underexplored: maybe we have, socially, become truly and fully desensitized, swept up fully in the tide of capitalism’s unrelenting cultural hegemony. This trend is deeply integrated with the moral and informational logic of digital capitalism. Quite simply, we may lack incentives for action as strong as incentives for sharing information, and we may exchange information too quickly to act.

If one thing becomes abundantly clear from a cursory look at political social media, it is that people do care. It takes only a handful of swipes through a For You Page to determine that serious people try their best to ameliorate the suffering they see in the world. This suffering, however, persists unabated. As critical theorist Mark Fisher famously argued[^1], this constitutes the viewer’s role in a dark moral exchange. The subject may feel like they did their part as long as they Like, Comment, and Follow! while providing the very drivers of vast swathes of global suffering (the capitalists who profit from social media engagement) with yet more money and influence.

While citizens are, apparently, largely conscious of the fact that this model of engagement is unlikely to produce significant results, it has come to supplant conventional modes of political engagement, much to the benefit of the data capitalist. This practice is not positive or even value-neutral but actively negative. It worsens the segmentation of the working class into multiple mutually-unintelligible groups sequestered into online rabbit holes. More pressingly, it provides tech corporations with ever more user engagement to develop vast networks of data surveillance (often shared with the police), planet-destroying data centers, and unsettlingly large political presences in postcolonial countries[^2].

Perhaps more damningly, it allows the subject to maintain distance from the object of their empathy. The equation feels simple—surely more information will lead to more awareness and then to more action!—and yet that action requires a subject itself. Theorist Lauren Berlant described this as a “class unconsciousness,” with images of suffering one of the darkest and most necessary buttresses of capital. Forgoing a confrontation with the relationship between their own consumption and global suffering, or between their own vague unhappiness and the violence they see on their screen, the privileged American subject can instead relegate global suffering to a “scandalous nugget in the sieve of memory… a squalor too horrible to be read in its own actual banality.”[^3]

Rather than eliciting a meaningful confrontation with the grim reality of war and exploitation, these images instead, ironically, produce a sense of distance as an entirely empty signifier of how a subject believes the world ought to be rather than a practice of making the world that way. After all, someone else is probably working to make things better….right? And surely their individual contribution wouldn’t be helpful anyway. Better to simply click those buttons, keep scrolling, and forget for a while.

Sharing how awful the world is via these platforms is not liberation but the entrenchment of a system of resource and labor extraction which disproportionately harms many of the subjects who information sharing is designed to help. This is not, however, to blame citizens for this form of politics. It is a perfectly reasonable response to the information overload which we have come to experience and, certainly, writing moralizing think-pieces about the problem is not much better.

Information, over social networks, is exchanged at such speed and volume that true activity appears almost impossible. You may encounter hundreds or even thousands of worthy causes and individuals who are deserving of your time, attention, and political engagement, yet actual political resources are finite. One effect is to produce a passive, complicit, and depoliticized citizenry incapable of acting on any individual cause. While certain events are sufficiently compelling to break through these background inhibitors on collective action (Black Lives Matter protests in 2020 and protests for Gaza in 2024 may be particularly salient examples), a vast majority of causes which spark moral outrage do not translate into actual action.

This fits neatly with the prolific media theorist Jean Baudrillard’s idea of information dissuasion[^4]. Perhaps more information about the world’s overwhelming suffering does not lead to more learning, persuasion, and action but less; perhaps knowing a little about everything is tantamount to knowing nothing. The speed at which we exchange information provides no time for the reflection or integration into belief systems that is necessary for persuasion but does provide enough time to exchange the social signal that you care.

However, this semiotic exchange is largely the point. For the American cosmopolitan, this is not just required but compelled: being a good citizen has come to require public demonstrations of civic virtue but does not appear to require actual civic virtue. There is little public reproach for failure to donate to the UNRWA, to organize within your community, or to perform work for causes you believe in; there is, however, public reproach for failure to act as though you do.

This performs a subtle sleight of hand in service of capital: the effect is to learn that the world is bad but not to learn about the complex and structural causes which drive that generic badness. Rather than directing our anger toward, for instance, IMF structural adjustment packages which compel free trade and poor labor standards, we direct anger at the mere fact of labor exploitation. Human suffering has been entirely depoliticized, appearing not as a consequence of the specific structures (read: capital) which induce it but as a tragic reality of the world. As such, specific political demands are not made or acted upon, at least for a majority of political issues; rather, they are shared and privately lamented.

A new model of engagement seems to be required, centering the actual power of citizens. Such a model can derive comfort from the great deal of success achieved by Black Lives Matter, the movement for gay rights, and other movements of the past decade. Such a model must, however, deprioritize the exchange of information on decentralized, violent, and fundamentally money-hungry social media platforms. It also requires a focus on displacing the tech titans which govern so much of modern political exchange. Centering community needs and direct action may not be a panacea and certainly does not resolve the problems which lace through our information economy, but it poses a better shot at actualizing real change.

[^1]: Mark Fisher, “Capitalism Realism”, 2: What if you held a protest and everyone came?, 2009, Zero Books. [^2]: Shoshanna Zuboff, “The Age of Surveillance Capitalism”, 2019, Public Affairs [^3]: Lauren Berlant, “The Subject of True Feeling: Pain, Privacy, and Politics”, 2002, in Left Legalism/Left Critique, Duke University Press [^4]: Jean Baudrillard, “Simulacra and Simulation”, 1981, The Implosion of Meaning in Media, University of Michigan Press