Low-cost digital expression pulverizes radical politics in the absence of parties.

Evidence

Beneath such structural constraints lie questions of strategy. While the internet has radically lowered the costs of political expression, it has also pulverized the terrain of radical politics, blurring the borders between party and society and spawning a chaos of vaguely mandated online actors. What Hobsbawm called “collective bargaining by riot” remains preferable to postpolitical apathy. Yet without formalized membership parties, American protest politics is unlikely to return us to the superpolitical 1930s. Instead, it may usher in postmodern renditions of ancien régime peasant uprisings: oscillations between passivity and activity trailing presidential media cycles, without ever reducing the overall power differential within society. — Anton Jäger, Hyperpolitics, 24

Categorization

• XREF: Directly feeds the reader’s goal of explaining why total politicization produces little durable change; connects to Hobsbawm and Gramsci. — connects to: Digital light-touch organization suits today’s disorganized democracy — Arthur Borriello and Anton Jäger, The Populist Moment: The Left After the…, 83; Radical media technology and democratic structure mutually require each other — Alice E. Marwick, Status Update: Celebrity, Publicity,…, 104
• DEFINE: Foreshadows the hyperpolitics definition: everything politicized, nothing organized.