fidacura
Hyperpolitics is one of those books that names a phenomenon we've been talking about for years without quite nailing its definition.
The framework for the whole book runs on a two-axis diagram – politicisation and institutionalisation – from which Jäger extracts four eras.
Masspolitics (1848–1914 / 1973–1989): a world in which society is highly socialised and politicised; the eras of unions, parties, cooperatives, movements with actual infrastructure – organisations that connected individual experience to collective action, populated by identifiable social bases and ideologies.
Postpolitics (1989–early 2000s): speaks to a world that is both depoliticised and desocialised; a generation that had known neither history nor politics. The structures that transmitted political memory had been dismantled. Parties converged toward a technocratic centre, voter turnout declined, and people optimised for themselves because collective action had stopped delivering.
Antipolitics (early 2010s): High on mobilisation, very low on institutionalisation. Occupy, M5S, Passe Livre, Indignados.
And then Hyperpolitics – what happens when the heritage of Postpolitics political emptiness merges with the emotional intensity inherited from Antipolitics, and the whole thing running through privatised self-expression and the hunger for political participation. Politics are everywhere. Everyone has a team. Outrage spreads faster than argument. Nothing is being achieved. Parties are no longer attuned to the desires and demands of their constituents.
What fuels it, Jäger argues, is atomisation – the loneliness crisis and the political crisis being two sides of the same coin. The platform economy monetises that loneliness and lack of political community by routing it through non-contextual political content engineered to maximise engagement – though Jäger leaves much of this underdeveloped, and the platform/loneliness synthesis is more a natural extension of his framework than an argument he fully makes himself. The polarisation isn't incidental to the system. It's its product. The architecture is working exactly as intended – just not for the people.
The book reads more like a long essay than a book, and circles the same core claims, and leans on a narrow and repetitive set of references. There are interesting points throughout, but it is far stronger on talking about what went wrong than talking about what might replace the lost organisational and ideological infrastructure of politics. I finished it feeling like something was missing.
PS: The cover is a design masterpiece – which is funny. A book about how political emptiness gets routed through seductive surfaces having an object that seduces before the narrative does.
Jones aims to expose the hidden infrastructure beneath the shiny surface of the digital economy — it extends Marx's “hidden abode of production” into the present. The overall argument is a very important one, yet the writing is often very repetitive, and it touches the nerve of its subtopics without really pressing them, which felt frustrating, but it's a worthy short read nonetheless.
The book is a reminder of how Silicon Valley uses design, marketing, and vast amounts of capital to sell — often “offer” — dreamy, frictionless products and services, while at its core there's a labour infrastructure, hidden by design, built on populations devastated by war, civil unrest, and economic collapse; people excluded from anything that resembles proper employment.
At the core of the book there's a perverse irony exposed: one of the platforms that best embodies this hidden-labour reality, Amazon's Mechanical Turk, is named after an historical hoax; an 18th-century chess-playing “automaton” that toured the globe defeating grandmasters, before being exposed as a fraud: a cabinet with a grandmaster hidden inside, puppeteering its every move. Amazon chose that name knowingly. The overall picture speaks for itself.
A scientist creates the apocalypse out of mild curiosity; A prophet invents God because reality wasn't enough; A journalist takes notes the whole way down. Guess which one causes more damage — the whole human circus, destroying itself simply because it gets the chance to.
PS: Vonnegut makes sure you're laughing all the way down.