I recently made a comic criticizing the American youth’s attempt to organize political change via social media.
It goes like this:
A girl swipes on her phone—“I’m upset about this political thing. Let me post about it on Instagram.”
A tentacled monster with the Instagram logo grins—“Yesss, let me profit off your revolutionary spirit by drowning your thoughts in an unceasing fog of digital noise.”
The girl again—“That’s literally what I’m doing right now.”
naturally I was called the Mossad, my intention was NOT to take away from political organization.
This was a comic made in one of the hottest weeks in geopolitics since 2020: ICE raids resumed, Israel and Iran exchanged missile fire, the richest man in the world and the President of the United States publicly argued on Twitter, and a military parade was scheduled on the same day that five million people protested across the country.
I was among the 50,000 who attended the No Kings protest in New York City. Despite the rain, thousands gathered with signs to denounce the Trump administration, ICE, the ongoing genocide in the Middle East that the U.S. directly funds, and a laundry list of other structural failures—chanted, written, screamed.
What struck me wasn’t the scale of the protest or its content, but how little impact it seemed to register in the broader cultural landscape. Not because mainstream media ignored it—some outlets covered it—but because in the stream of short-form digital noise, it evaporated instantly.
This is what led me to reflect more deeply on the act of posting your beliefs—your rage, your resistance—on algorithmic platforms and expecting anything to change.
Since around 2016, the political landscape in the U.S. has shifted into a kind of spontaneous revolutionary aesthetic, where participation in movements—whether through art, protests, or discourse—has become integrated into the same systems that are built to suppress them. Short-form content platforms like Instagram, TikTok, and Twitter (X) have become the primary means of engagement. But these aren’t public squares. They’re ad-optimized thought funnels.
These platforms are designed to show you whatever keeps you scrolling. Not what’s important. Not what’s urgent. Just what performs. And the result is a culture where an Iranian missile strike and a Roblox meme can appear back-to-back in your feed—equalized, decontextualized, and flattened for maximum retention.
It’s absurd to imagine this is a viable medium for political organization. These platforms don’t prioritize truth, solidarity, or nuance. They prioritize engagement. The logic is profit. The product is your attention. The resource being extracted is your consciousness.
This is the core of what I’m calling consciousness fracking—the process by which our deepest collective instincts, our unconscious culture-making reflexes, are extracted, refined, commodified, and fed back to us in algorithm-friendly fragments.
Art, music, speech, even the language of protest itself—all of it now either emerges from or is channeled through centralized platforms whose governing logic is monetization. Culture isn’t just influenced by these platforms; it’s confined by them. Nothing can become “real” to the masses unless it survives the algorithm.
Meanwhile, the political system we’re trying to challenge hasn’t substantively changed in over four decades. Since the 1980s, American governance has remained stuck in the mold of neoliberal capitalist democracy—obsessed with deregulation, market logic, and privatized everything. There’s been no structural evolution, just endless management of decay.
During that same time, industry migrated offshore. Manufacturing collapsed. Wealth concentrated. And what filled the void? Entertainment. Services. Platform capitalism. The United States doesn’t make anything anymore—its largest export is TikToks. That’s not a joke. That’s the logic of a society whose economic infrastructure depends on keeping people uploading and consuming culture in real time.
In this context, it’s not just political organization that suffers. It’s all forms of expression. Every act—whether in protest or irony or art—feeds back into the same infrastructure. My comic included. Posting it, even as a critique, still satisfies the conditions of the platform. If it didn’t, it wouldn’t be seen.
Which is why every expression, even one made in spite of the algorithm, ultimately reinforces its grip. It’s like trying to douse a fire with gasoline. Every attempt at resistance within the system becomes more fuel for it. We tighten the chains ourselves, just to be heard.
Until something else emerges. A different architecture. A new platform. Or an old one.
A blog.
Yeah. Follow the blog.