Like, share, collapse: The curious case of manufactured modern consent
Excerpt:
We agreed to everything. Even the crash. Especially the crash. That's the magic of consent in the age of capital: you won't even notice when you're nodding your way into ruin—with a selfie filter and a 'Let's Go Brandon' mug in hand.
There's something perversely elegant about a society that can manufacture both iPhones and ideologies with the same ruthless efficiency. Yanis Varoufakis [a Greek politician and economist], riffing off Chomsky's Manufacturing Consent, tosses us a neat little paradox wrapped in economic angst: that the more financialized our lives become, the more agreeable we get—and the more spectacular our breakdowns.
Consent, it seems, isn't what it used to be. Once upon a time, it had to be extracted—with religion, kings, or gulags. These days, it's delivered via push notification and monetized outrage. Capitalism doesn't just want your labour; it wants your belief system bundled in prime-time infotainment and Facebook Lives.
All dynamic societies, Varoufakis says, thrive on two processes: the making of surplus and the making of consent. The former fills your wallet (or used to). The latter convinces you that it's okay the neighbour got a fatter wallet for doing the same job. But somewhere along the way, as finance ballooned and factories vanished, this little duet hit a remix. Consent stopped being coerced and became curated. The age of propaganda gave way to the era of the podcast.
Enter Trump, stage right—red tie flapping, indictment count rising. A real-estate mogul-turned-cable news messiah who understood early on that if you can't manufacture consent, just manufacture chaos and sell it in trucker hats. His genius wasn't policy; it was narrative ownership. He turned politics into pro wrestling and got half the country to cheer the heel turn. The other half? They rage-tweeted, which was basically a form of engagement. The algorithm doesn't care why you're angry, only that you are.
And it's not just America. From Modi's WhatsApp bhakts to Europe's Hungary Games, the playbook is being photocopied at scale. Financial precarity? Blame the migrants. Sky-high inequality? Distract with culture wars. It's cheaper than redistributing wealth, and it polls better in the suburbs.
So we scroll. We shop. We 'stand with' whatever the feed suggests today. We nod along to leaders who promise to make things great again—no one quite asks for whom. And then, once every few years, the scaffolding collapses and we wonder how no one saw it coming. Maybe we didn't need to. Maybe deep down, we agreed to the fall too.
Late capitalism doesn't knock. It slides into your DMs with a 20% coupon, a righteous cause, and a man in a suit yelling on TikTok or those Meta platforms. All it asks for is your consent—and your complicity when the crash comes dressed as patriotism.
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