At this point in time, it is evident that we are doing something wrong. And when I say we, I am addressing my generation, born in the 90s: the generation that has traversed the 2008 economic crisis, the Occupy movement, the decade of protests spanning from Brazil to Hong Kong, the COVID pandemic, Black Lives Matter, the war on Ukraine, Women, Life, Freedom, the wildfires in Los Angeles, the genocide in Gaza, the escalation of imperialist aggressions across the Levant, the deportation policies in the US. History has accelerated, despite reports of its demise, and a great deal has happened in less than twenty years.
I recall, even as a teenager, my parents’ worry during the economic crisis, but I cannot recall any form of organizing around it. What I do recall clearly from those years is that a computer entered my house for the first time, and since then, my time spent online, professionally and recreationally, has grown exponentially. The digital dimension of our lives mirrors the precarization of everything else. And because our political movements have never properly addressed the social consequences of neoliberalism, its interconnection with internet culture, and the systemic crises that followed, we keep doing something wrong, even as politics saturates every corner of our lives.
Scrolling Verso’s website, I came across Hyperpolitics, a slim but precise book by the economist and political scientist Anton Jäger. It doesn’t just diagnose, as the title suggests, the character of the political time in which we’re mired; it historicizes it. Jäger describes our current predicament as one of “extreme politicization without political consequences,” and his book traces how we got here across three political phases.
Under mass politics, which dominated discourse through the 1980s, party and union membership organized political identity from the top down: your class position told you which side you were on, and belonging to a party or union was a total commitment that fused your private life to your public one. “Post-politics”, spanning the 1990s and 2000s, is what happens when the market moves into the organizing role: neoliberalism dismantles unions and mass parties and replaces collective belonging with individual consumer choice, severing private life from public life. Politics becomes something you no longer have to think about; you're liberated from it, but only because it's been banished from daily life altogether. Anti-politics, emerging after the 2008 financial crisis, reverses that separation, but not by rebuilding the institutions the market destroyed. The internet recombines public and private life instead, flooding your feed, your attention, your private time with political content, but without any of the stable structures that once gave that recombination direction. Political feeling floods back into everyday life loudly and constantly, but it circulates rather than accumulates: it has nowhere to go and nothing binding it together.
Jäger observes that in our time “atomization and acceleration goes hand in hand: people are lonelier, but more excited; atomized but more connected; angrier but also more confused.” And, I would add, we are all politicized, but we are all individuals.
What sustains Hyperpolitics’ argument is a set of references drawn not only from sociology and political science, but from art and literature, too. The book opens with Wolfgang Tillmans’ photographs of the Berlin rave scene of the 80s and 90s, a generation discovering dissolution and conviviality at the zenith of post-politics, unrepresented and in conflict with the generation before it. From this dynamic, Jäger argues, the vote became a personal, emotive choice rather than a social, collective one, a direct homage to Peter Sloterdijk’s book Im selben Boot: Versuch über die Hyperpolitik (1993) (In the Same Boat: An Essay Concerning Hyperpolitics), in which one of the defining features of “hyperpolitics” is how the political subject in Western democracies came to treat voting not as active participation in democracy, but as a means of relieving oneself of the responsibility for its upkeep.
Bowling Alone, Betting Against Each Other
Jäger’s chapter on post-politics, its title borrowed from Robert D. Putnam’s Bowling Alone, sits at the book’s center. It traces how capital sought liberation from party-based democracy, and how politics itself transformed into public relations. To finance PR imperatives, parties turned increasingly to private investors rather than their own electorates, treating voters as a black box. Political organization becomes the domain of unelected functionaries: the Eurogroup, the European Commission, the Federal Reserve, the Bank of England. Politics becomes technocracy.
This matters because it is tempting, watching the far right rise across Europe and the US, to assume we are simply replaying the 20th-century totalitarian script. Jäger’s crucial caveat, however, is that none of this should be mistaken for a simple return to fascism. Paraphrasing his words: we are missing two crucial preconditions for the advent of fascism, a prerevolutionary working class about to take power and the experience of a total war from the population that justifies the violence inflicted on itself. For Jäger, the defining political trend of our era isn't fascism, it’s populism: a phenomenon that borrows fascism’s aesthetics of crisis and leadership, but lacks its organized mass base, its revolutionary opposition, and its will to totalize public and private life. Populism doesn’t need to seize the state through mass mobilization; it needs only to win elections through spectacle, then govern through the same technocratic and media apparatus it claims to oppose.
The Swarm
In the chapter on anti-politics—where Jäger argues we currently stand—he names, building on Byung-Chul Han, our characteristic form of collective behavior “the swarm”: mass, leaderless, and reactive, capable of gathering enormous numbers around a single figure or moment, but with none of the durability, accountability, or shared program of older mass movements. This is populism’s native habitat rather than fascism’s: the swarm simply gathers, discharges its energy, and disperses. Across the spectrum, activism today mimics “an abidingly ‘low’ form of politics: low-cost, low-entry, low-duration, and all too often, low-value,” with communities replaced by “swarms of individuals, firm commitments by fleeting passions.”
This low threshold has become the default shape of political commitment generally, including online and offline. Where being part of a union or a mass party once meant a durable—often lifelong—identity, dues paid, meetings attended, discipline accepted, being part of a movement or an activist group today usually means something closer to a subscription: you can join a group chat, show up to a protest, attend a few meetings, and leave whenever the group asks more of you than you’re willing to give, all without consequence or accountability to anyone. Nothing structurally binds you to stay once the feeling that brought you there fades. This isn’t a personal failing; it’s what happens when political belonging is organized around an individual’s voluntary choice rather than collective necessity. But it also means that a movement’s size at its peak, however large, tells you very little about what it can actually sustain, since almost none of that size was ever committed to being there.
We’ve never seen so many on the streets, which is good, but most of us were there together for the first time, and most of us return to individual life immediately after. The lowest-effort, most diffuse forms of participation happen online, as in the case of Black Lives Matter, when well-meaning people posted black squares to signal solidarity, but with no accompanying proposition, no political planning, no leader, no long-term demand followed. Merely the expression of justified outrage. And even though the internet briefly registered as a subversive tool during the Arab Spring, it has since been claimed by the entire political spectrum. Organizing there requires little accountability: a group chat can be abandoned quietly, unnoticed, observes Jäeger. There are no leaders, only facilitators—mostly bots—and belonging or exclusion is enforced through shaming and “cancelling”: sanitizing the space of difference before anyone is even allowed in. Jäger predicts these outbursts will remain little more than “postmodern renditions of ancien régime peasant uprisings,” oscillating between passivity and activity without shifting the underlying balance of power.
Beyond the Swarm
I want to argue that calling the current moment “populist” rather than “fascist” risks making the right’s politics sound as ephemeral, as swarm-like, as the left’s. I don't think it is. The right’s embeddedness in the institutions of Western democracies isn't a recent development, nor is it a strategic alliance of convenience; it is constitutive. Western democracies were built on racial capitalism, on the codified management of who counts as a full citizen and who doesn’t, on borders and carceral systems that long predate the present populist upsurge Jäger is diagnosing. What looks like the right suddenly finding its way into courts, police, and ostensibly center-right parties is really those institutions finding their way back to a project from which they were never fully separate. The right doesn’t need to build a swarm and then convert it into power, it already has the state’s machinery of exclusion available to it, machinery that was there before Donald Trump, Friedrich Merz, or Giorgia Meloni.
So the real asymmetry between left and right isn’t that one is organized and the other isn’t; both are shaped by the same neoliberal dissolution of mass institutions Jäger describes. The asymmetry is that the right doesn’t need new institutions to become consequential, because the old ones—courts, police, borders, property law—were never neutral to begin with. The left has no equivalent inheritance to fall back on. Whatever institutional power it’s (putatively) going to have, it has to build from scratch, in a political environment actively organized against it. And it is precisely into that absence that the internet has rushed to fill the gap, offering the left a place to gather without ever asking it to build anything that lasts.
Pharmakon, not Villain.
The internet itself isn’t the problem. It’s a pharmakon, both poison and cure: it responds to the end of mass politics and to the reconfiguration of politics into a populist base narrative, even as it deepens individual loneliness. It’s symptomatic of two things at once: an urgent hunger for change, and a corrosive lack of the friction and persistence that collectivity and democracy actually require. However, the internet, Jäger writes, borrowing from Mark Fisher's definition of online society as “utopian Stalinist”, is a highly ascetic, morally reactive space, with very little utopia left in it, a space that promises radical openness and horizontal community but in practice enforces conformity through public shaming and ideological purity tests, much like the show trials it borrows its name from. It’s there that “the social” has lost its historical role and acquired a mediatic one, hyperpolitics operating as a lubricant between public and private life.
In his closing note, Jäger points to the workplace, one of the few remaining spaces where we are bound to others involuntarily, where we don’t choose our colleagues. “The workplace, even if decollectivized, is the last social space where market dependency pushes for a forced socialization.” If the right’s power comes from institutions we did not choose and cannot easily opt out of, then maybe the left’s answer has to look structurally similar: not a swarm we join and leave at will, but something we’re bound to whether we feel like it on a given day or not. Voluntary, elective belonging, the kind our generation is fluent in, isn’t going to be enough to counter something that doesn’t ask for our participation in the first place. If the right’s politics are consequential because they're embedded, unavoidable, structural, the left’s politics will only become consequential the same way: by building something we can’t simply log off from.
In a world where we are no longer forced into anything other than work, where our political commitment operates entirely voluntarily, maybe it’s time to ask how we formalize that commitment in a way that binds us through responsibility, rather than personal satisfaction or moral righteousness. Hyperpolitics is essential reading for those who feel the time is high, not only for change, but for building the sustained infrastructure that change actually requires.
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