Monitoring and outrage. What happens to democracy when everything is politicised

There was a time, not so long ago, when to get involved in politics you had to go out of your way to seek it out: join a party branch, visit a trade union, attend a meeting or a demonstration. Today, it is often politics that comes looking for us. It asks us what we think of a war, a film or an advertising campaign; it turns what we buy and the words we use into statements of position. Universities, museums, festivals and companies are called upon to take a stand. Even silence, in certain circumstances, can be interpreted as an act of complicity, cowardice or privilege. Not to mention a misplaced word, an old tweet or a photograph resurfacing from the past, all of which can haunt us years later. Anton Jäger has given this paradox a particularly apt name: hyperpolitics. His book, published in Italy by NERO in 2024 (Alfonso Berardinelli wrote about it in these columns at the time) and now published in English by Verso, is causing quite a stir in the English-speaking world. The subtitle of the English edition already sets out the thesis: ‘Extreme Politicisation without Political Consequences’. Jäger contrasts hyperpolitics with the mass politics of the twentieth century.

That kind of politics demanded commitment, discipline, time, meetings and even a certain willingness to endure boredom, but in return it transformed passions and interests into organisations capable of enduring. Our politics, on the other hand, works almost the opposite way: it mobilises millions of people in a matter of hours, produces powerful waves of indignation or enthusiasm, floods the streets and, above all, social media platforms, and dissipates just as quickly. It is intermittent politics: high intensity, little substance. The sociologist William Davies, in his review of Jäger in the London Review of Books, found an apt phrase: ‘easy to join, easy to leave’. A doubt remains, however. Are we sure that this form of politics has no consequences? The French historian Pierre Rosanvallon asked this very question, albeit in different terms, as long as twenty years ago in La Contre-démocratie. La politique à l’âge de la défiance (Seuil). Published in 2006, when Facebook was two years old and the iPhone did not yet exist, the essay urged readers not to mistake the crisis of political parties and representation for a mere withdrawal of citizens from politics. A new figure was emerging, he argued: the citizen who monitors, denounces, obstructs and judges. He called this set of powers, exercised outside the electoral process, ‘counter-democracy’ and had already intuited that the internet would be their natural environment. Reread after twenty years of social media, Rosanvallon seems to have glimpsed something that was then only just beginning. Today we carry in our pockets a tool that allows anyone to film an incident, make it public, report it and demand that someone be held to account – all within a matter of minutes. Never before have citizens had such a capacity for surveillance. And never before have we been monitored by so many other citizens.

It is difficult to argue that all this is ‘without consequences’. A campaign may not lead to the formation of a political party, yet it can still force a university to reverse a decision. It may not result in a law, but it can prompt a publisher to withdraw a book, a museum to rethink an exhibition, or a company to alter an advertising campaign; it can change the words we use and the social cost associated with their use; it can build and destroy reputations; it can determine – at least for a time – what it is necessary to speak out about and what has become risky to do so. Perhaps we are simply continuing to look for the effects of this new politics in the wrong places. Mass politics transformed mobilisation into organisation, whilst hyperpolitics often transforms it into social and cultural pressure. The former amassed members, offices, officials, newspapers, rituals and memories; the latter amasses attention, and attention is an immensely powerful, yet volatile, resource. Rosanvallon, for that matter, was not naively optimistic. He had also recognised the risk that a democracy founded on vigilance might become highly adept at monitoring, judging and preventing, but far less so at building a shared world. This is precisely the point at which his ‘counter-democracy’ converges with Jäger’s ‘hyperpolitics’. Perhaps this is the contradiction that best describes the present. We have formidable tools for denouncing, mobilising and sanctioning, but increasingly fragile tools for transforming that energy into lasting bonds of belonging. We have not become any less political. If anything, the opposite has happened: politics has moved out of the parties and into consumption, culture, language, universities, businesses and everyday relationships. In short, hyperpolitics is not politics without consequences. It produces many effects, and often very rapidly. Just as quickly, some of them fade away – and that is not necessarily a bad thing. Its strength and its fragility, in any case, share the same root: speed.