We live in times of insta-politicization. The neo-publics of (a-) social media are increasingly less pluralistic than anti-public, ademocratic, segmented echo chambers – whose collective narcissism is their only common denominator. From right to center to left, people only form in bubbles that are homologous to those of the financial market: the more you invest in a bubble, the more valuable, powerful, inflated, and self-relieving it becomes. It is just that the bubbles of opinion-forming do not collapse as easily as those of finance – namely, inner workings are invested in the former. They are places of direct subjectification. The form of subjectivation of the bladder, however, is that of monadology: encapsulation is the name of the new fetish. Nobody wants to talk to anyone anymore, and that’s something that people are proud of. Everyone’s identity is theirs Ingroup, every speech act regulates, every permission an act of granting: whoever belongs to it, rises morally above the others, whose normative devaluation remains synonymous with self-constitution.
In this decomposed anti-public of Insta-politicization there are no more arguments, only more identities. The position completely determines the validity of a view. The fact that people no longer speak to certain other people, can neither speak on their own nor even want to speak, is revalued and thus upgraded: from narrow-mindedness to progressiveness. To no longer listen to the content of a speech, but to the appearance of the person speaking, declares itself to be a new privilege. Avoiding contact with people who think differently is not regarded as dangerous small-minded, but as sublime empowerment. The old friend-foe political understanding is thus postmodernized into a subcultural lifestyle. Minorities appear in the appearance of the majority through technologically generated schizophrenia – through psycho-spatial disassociation – as which resentment can and should fully live out. Separatism is becoming universal. An infinite multiplication of the parallel societies is established ‘from below’ in order to hijack the last remnants of public reason.
In all of this, the consistent regression of political liberalism – as the privatizing relativism of ‘opinions’ – adds up to its capitalist basis. What adds up, what is regressed into, are atomization, antagonism, war of all against all and Destruction of reason. The degenerate form of bourgeois discursiveness has thus arrived at what has long been economically prevalent. But that is what emerges here Divide and Impere of diversifying marauding capital: that Divide and conquer a syncretizing exploitation of the world. Confronted with the need for joint action based on solidarity in the face of climate change, hardly any ideology is as devastating as that – currently becoming hegemonic – of total particularization. Insta politicization is the latest iteration of liberal apoliticity.