Politics of a Life Consumed

A man spends all day being robbed by his boss, goes home to a room he can barely afford, opens his phone, and is told that his real enemy is a refugee in a hotel.

His life has given him a wound, but the algorithm has told him who the assailant is.

The suffering is not in question. Everyone knows that rent is too high. Everyone knows that wages do not match the cost of being alive. Everyone knows the bus is late, the GP has no appointments, the landlord will not answer. None of this is new nor controversial. 

What is less obvious is that none of it automatically becomes politics. A housing crisis does not, on its own, produce organised renters. A low wage does not, on its own, cause someone to try and change it. Pain does not come with instructions. It needs interpretation. It needs somewhere to go.

Increasingly, it goes through the phone.

The Old Logic

For most of modern history, there was a rough and obvious logic to political alignment. Not a perfect one, but a legible one. Workers tended to vote for parties that promised to protect workers. The wealthy tended to vote for parties that would protect wealth. Tenants and landlords did not, as a rule, back the same candidates. This was not because people were smarter in some golden age. It was because there were institutions: trade unions, labour parties, co-operatives, churches, local papers, tenant associations, constituency offices, that stood between a person's life and their political identity and said "This is what your situation means, and here is what we do about it together."

Political identity did not spring automatically from how you lived. It was built and maintained by organisations that existed in your workplace, your neighbourhood, your town. They were rooted in the world you actually inhabited. They met you at work. They knocked on your door. They existed in physical space and real time.

What has changed is that these organisations have collapsed while a new one has taken their place. Union membership across the West has been falling for decades. Local newspapers have been hollowed out. Mass-membership political parties have shrunk into professional shells. Churches have emptied. Civic organisations have thinned. And into the vacuum left by all of this, the feed has expanded to fill every available hour of attention. Not because anyone planned it that way, but because platforms make money by keeping you watching, and everything about their design follows from that.

Research across over three hundred elections in twenty-one Western democracies shows the result: left-wing parties, once backed disproportionately by lower-income and less-educated voters, now draw their strongest support from the university-educated, while far-right parties pull from workers and small business owners. The old pattern, your economic life predicts your politics, has weakened enormously.

The Mechanism

A person experiences a wound. Falling wages, unaffordable rent, the sense that your town or estate or generation has been left behind. In an older political system, that wound might have been processed by a union branch meeting, a parish council, a tenant association, a local newspaper, a constituency clinic. These institutions were far from perfect, often patriarchal, exclusionary, and slow, but they connected individual suffering to people acting together. They said: you are not alone in this, and there is something we can do.

In the digital age, the wound is increasingly processed first by a personalised feed. And the feed does not create the wound. It merely interprets it. It gives the wound a villain, a story, a tribe. It offers a ready-made community of feeling, instantly, compulsively, in your pocket, twenty hours a day.

Your phone is intimate in a way older media was not. It is beside your bed. It is in your bathroom. It is on the bus. It is there during lunch break, after work, before sleep, during loneliness, during panic, during boredom, during the small dead moments when the self is most undefended. It does not address a public; it addresses you. It learns your hesitations, your shame, your fantasies, your rage, your curiosity, your need to belong. It does not simply show you politics. It builds an emotional weather system around you, and every part of that system is designed, from the ground up, to keep you watching, because your attention is what makes corporations money. Your worldview is a side-effect of an engagement metric, your politics a by-product of advertising revenue.

The feed is not a newspaper. It is not a public square. It is not a neutral window onto the world. It is a machine for ranking reality according to what keeps you there. And what keeps you there is not understanding. It is threat, novelty, conflict, humiliation, disgust, outrage, enemies, spectacle. A politics built inside that machine will naturally favour the forms of politics best suited to it.

This is not brainwashing. People are not empty containers. They bring their lives, their families, their fears, their wounds with them. But the feed does not need to change your entire worldview overnight. It only needs to decide what feels urgent. It only needs to decide which enemy appears again and again. It only needs to make one explanation feel obvious and another feel boring. It only needs to make solidarity slow and resentment immediate.

The deeper process is not persuasion. It is identity capture.

Persuasion changes what you think. Identity capture changes who you feel you are. The feed gives you a role. The patriot. The dissident. The anti-woke warrior. The rational centrist. The empathetic progressive. The fella who sees through all their lies. Politics becomes less a programme for changing the world than a self to inhabit while the world continues to get worse.

This is why online politics is so emotionally sticky. It is not just a set of opinions. It is a form of belonging. It gives people a tribe, a language, an aesthetic, a villain, a moral posture, a feeling of clarity. It tells them not only what is happening, but who they are for noticing.

And once politics becomes identity in this way, contradiction becomes easier to survive. A worker can support politics that weakens workers, because the politics no longer feels primarily about work. A renter can be pulled into anti-migrant narratives, because the politics no longer feels primarily about rent. A lonely young man can be recruited into incel culture, because the politics no longer feels primarily about loneliness. The wound remains, but the story becomes more emotionally real than the life it displaced.

That is why simply fact-checking it is not enough. Facts matter, but they do not automatically defeat a story. If a person's politics is giving them belonging, identity, explanation and emotional release, then a correct statistic dropped from above will often slide right off. You cannot defeat their entire sense of community with a well-cited pdf.

The Pattern

Across the West, the pattern holds.

In Germany, the AfD took thirty-eight percent of the working-class vote in the 2025 federal election. Thirty-nine percent among people who rated their own economic situation as poor. A party whose economic programme offers little that would materially empower those voters, no serious programme of wage floors, public housing, or worker’s protections, swept the people most damaged by the current economy.  The campaign was dominated by migration. Economic insecurity was real. The political translation of that insecurity was almost entirely cultural.

In the United States, the 2024 exit polls showed Trump carrying households under $100,000 and non-union households, while Harris carried union households and households over $100,000. A country in which the affluent vote progressive and the precarious vote for a billionaire property developer is not a country where politics is being driven by people's actual lives. It is a country where politics is being driven by something else.

Hungary is the most extreme case, and the most instructive, because it shows what happens when media capture becomes the way a government stays in power. Research on the 2022 Hungarian election found that left-wing parties were less popular among workers than among the middle class. Orbán's governing right drew support from both ends of the economic spectrum, inside a media system where pro-government forces controlled roughly eighty percent of the media landscape and public broadcasting had been reduced to a propaganda instrument. Hungary shows that the displacement of lived reality by identity-driven media is not just a passive side-effect of smartphones. It can be engineered, industrialised, made into a governing strategy.

The formula everywhere is the same:

real wound → false cause → emotional identity → political mobilisation

The Contradiction

In Ireland, the central fact of social life is not hard to identify. It is housing. It is the humiliating arithmetic of modern life: if I earn this much, rent costs this much, and food costs this much, then what exactly is left for me?

The numbers say what everyone already knows. Property prices were nearly forty percent higher in 2024 than in 2019. Over a quarter of households described their housing costs as a heavy financial burden. Only six percent of private renters said they actually wanted to still be renting in five years. In the 2024 general election, housing was the single most important issue cited by voters overall, and by a majority of renters. By any simple theory of politics, this should produce a mass movement of renters and workers demanding public housing and going after landlords.

Yet enormous amounts of political energy are dragged elsewhere: into anti-refugee panic, culture-war fragments, viral rumours, Telegram channels, TikToks about "unvetted males," imported American language about "wokeness," conspiracies about NGOs, and the endless hot diarrhea of online grievance. The Dublin riot of November 23rd, 2023, which followed a knife attack and an anti-immigration protest, was fuelled by social media incitement and accelerated by platform dynamics in real time. The Institute for Strategic Dialogue has documented how false and inflammatory claims about asylum seekers and migrants were inciting violence and arson, and how a twelve-platform disinformation ecosystem was being used to spread narratives, fund organisers, and monetise outrage.

The wound is housing. The story becomes invasion.

And yet, the ESRI's major study on immigration attitudes found that over seventy-three percent of Irish respondents felt positive about immigration. Irish attitudes were among the most positive in Europe. And people in privately rented accommodation were more positive toward immigration than homeowners. 

Housing insecurity does not naturally produce anti-migrant politics. Anti-migrant politics is a story told about housing insecurity amplified by a visible online minority, sustained by platform incentives, and enabled by the absence of any institution strong enough to offer people a different explanation rooted in what is actually happening to them. The wound is real. The story the feed tells about the wound is not.

This is not because people are stupid. That explanation is both lazy and politically useless. People know their lives are getting worse. They know something is broken. They know the official story does not match the life they are living. The question is not whether the pain is real. The question is who gets to explain it.

The far right does not need to invent suffering. It only needs to misname it.

The Slogan

The slogan "Ireland is full" is effective because it takes a real feeling, that life in Ireland is crowded, impossible, blocked, diminished, and gives it a false geography. It makes the problem seem like bodies arriving, rather than homes withheld. It turns a crisis of ownership, planning, state failure, landlordism and capital into a crisis of strangers.

But Ireland is not full in the way they mean. Ireland is full of vacant buildings, derelict sites, speculative ownership, hotels used as emergency policy, landlords extracting half a person's income, young people trapped at home, towns without infrastructure, public systems held together by duct tape. Ireland is full of bad choices made by powerful people and then explained as inevitability.

The far right takes that and racialises it.

It says: you have no room because they came. Not: you have no room because housing was turned into an asset. Not: you have no room because the state outsourced its responsibilities. Not: you have no room because landlords and developers were allowed to shape the horizon of your life.

The cruelty of scapegoat politics is not that it starts from nowhere. It starts from somewhere real and leads people somewhere false.

The Other Feed

It would be too easy, and too comforting, to pretend this is only a disease of the right.

The comfortable left has its own version. It does not turn pain into paranoia. It turns politics into taste. The right books. The right language. The right moral posture. The right way to say the thing everyone in your circle already agrees with. Sharing an infographic about housing to people who already agree with you about housing. Boycotting McDonald's and posting about it. Putting a flag in your bio. Resharing a thread. Making sure everyone can see that you are on the right side.

This is not a moral equivalence. One side points people toward scapegoats and violence; the other points them toward consumption, self-display, and the performance of virtue. But neither gives people power.

The tragedy is that this often happens among people who genuinely care. They are not pretending. They are horrified by the world. They want to be useful. But the platform trains them away from usefulness. It rewards speed over patience, performance over commitment, visibility over discipline, denunciation over persuasion. A person can have perfect opinions and no power. A person can post through the apocalypse and never once knock on a neighbour's door. Eitan Hersh calls this political hobbyism: politics consumed as entertainment, as self-expression, as content, rather than exercised as power through organisations that deliver concrete wins.

Mark Fisher identified something he called capitalist realism: the feeling that nothing else is possible, that the system is total, that alternatives are unimaginable. That feeling does not produce revolution. It produces a politics that feels intense without organising effectively. Fisher died before the advent of TikTok and short-form content, but the smartphone feed is the delivery mechanism for that feeling in its purest form: an infinite stream of content that simultaneously enrages you and convinces you that nothing can change.

Guy Debord said it fifty years earlier: the spectacle replaces lived experience with representations of it.

The feed makes everyone feel political while making politics feel impossible.

The Gap

I have no great programme or ideas on how to fix any of this. I am suspicious of anyone who claims to. The problem is structural, and structural problems do not get solved by individuals deciding to log off and touch grass, however satisfying that advice is to give.

However the answer is obviously not better content. You cannot out-post an architecture designed to capture every available hour of human attention. You cannot win the feed. The feed is not for you. The incentives are not yours. The house always wins.

And maybe that is the only honest thing to end on. That we are living through a period in which the basic democratic mechanism, people suffer, people identify the cause, people organise, something changes, has been short-circuited. Not by stupidity. Not by moral failure. By an infrastructure that intercepts the suffering before it becomes solidarity and converts it into content. The wound is real. The politics the wound produces are not. And the gap between those two things is where we live now.

Sources

Irish housing data: CSO Residential Property Price Index, December 2024. RTÉ/Irish Times/Ipsos B&A Exit Poll, General Election 2024.

Immigration attitudes: ESRI, Attitudes Towards Immigration and Refugees in Ireland: Understanding Recent Trends and Drivers, March 2024.

Irish disinformation ecosystem: Institute for Strategic Dialogue, Uisce Faoi Thalamh: An Investigation into the Online Mis- and Disinformation Ecosystem in Ireland, November 2023.

Germany: Friedrich Ebert Stiftung, Analysis of the Bundestag Elections 2025.

United States: Edison Research / National Election Pool Exit Polls, 2024 Presidential Election.

Hungary: "Class Voting in Illiberal Hungary," East European Politics, 2025.

Class voting and realignment: Gethin, Martínez-Toledano, and Piketty, "Brahmin Left Versus Merchant Right: Changing Political Cleavages in 21 Western Democracies, 1948–2020," The Quarterly Journal of Economics, 2022.

Political hobbyism: Eitan Hersh, Politics Is for Power (Scribner, 2020).

Theoretical references: Mark Fisher, Capitalist Realism (Zero Books, 2009). Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle (1967).