The media we share has commodified our politics and destroyed our discourse

I spend a lot of time on Facebook. Entirely too much time, to be honest. Social media is the new television, and I’m a 2016 couch potato.

I spend so much time on Facebook, and have for so long, that I’ve started to lash out against it the way two friends who spend too much time together eventually get sick of each other. It’s the strangest thing. I’ve always been a liberal, and have always surrounded myself with liberals; but now, on Facebook, I find myself rolling my eyes at liberal points I essentially agree with, or taking time out of my day to write a comment challenging a post I don’t honestly have a very strong opinion about, just for the sake of going against the grain. Social media is possibly the only thing on the planet more partisan than the U.S. Congress, and so I have now become the only thing that can logically result from acting as a political contrarian against such an entity: I have suddenly, somehow, become a centrist.

How, exactly, did this end up happening?

People talk a lot these days about our political discourse, how it’s more polarized than it’s ever been, how the vitriol on both sides has reached unprecedented levels. Many will point to social media as a source of a wealth of evidence of this. But social media isn’t a display case of political polarization. Social media has helped to cause political polarization. It has given rise to an industry that has packaged the values and ideals of conservatism and liberalism, branded them, and pitted them against each other for profit.

We are all consumers on Facebook. In this social media economy, our cyber identities are the customers, clicks are the currency, and socio-political piousness is the product. In a universe where we neither see nor display voices or mannerisms, or have real-time small talk, the only way to build our identities is by the things we approve of and disapprove of, by what we agree with and disagree with, by the ideology to which we subscribe. Online media companies are aware of this, and have deftly exploited it. If the ideology to which you subscribe is social justice, then the Huffington Post, Mic, and Occupy Democrats populate your news feed daily, peddling outrageous anecdotes of bigotry and oppression for clicks. They’re preying on you, transforming your most deeply held beliefs into commodities. They’re selling righteousness. They are not interested in solving, or raising awareness of, injustice; they are interested in getting you to view, and share, their presentations of it.

Perhaps this is why I’ve started to write contrarian comments online, why I’ve begun to alienate myself from my peers: I’ve become frustrated that people share politically loaded content captioned with a pull quote (or simply the word “this”), staking a claim by association to the supposed wisdom of that content without, apparently, realizing or caring that they had just offered themselves up as fodder to the social justice industry. I can’t sit quietly watching someone display such smugness through an act that makes them at least something of a sucker. And, full disclosure: I can’t stand that I often do it, too.

I also can’t stand the extent to which this industry has simplified our critical analysis and fomented extremist groupthink among people whom I often know to be too smart to fall for such garbage. This wouldn’t work in other industries. Some people like Coke, others Pepsi, and some don’t care; but if the Coke people believed Pepsi was built on an ideology of oppression, violence and greed, and vice-versa, people in that third group would have a hard time finding friends.

You may never see someone on Facebook who both supports quitting coal in favor of clean energy and believes that late-term abortions should be limited. You may never see someone on Facebook who both thinks a $15 minimum wage would be bad for the economy and supports accepting a large number of Syrian refugees into the United States. You may never see someone on Facebook who both sees Eric Garner and Walter Scott as innocent victims of racist police violence and believes that a Florida jury took the correct legal avenue in acquitting George Zimmerman. These people exist, but in an online culture that lionizes strict adherence to ideology and commodifies the values within those ideologies, you may never see them. Whether it’s out of fear of shaming or because they’ve been trained to believe that these various opinions and positions are incompatible, these people tend to keep to themselves, or keep off Facebook.

What we’re left with is a social media-manufactured partisanship that is probably most acute today in the race for the Democratic nomination for president. I suspect that if Sanders and Clinton were matched up in 2000, more of Sanders’ supporters would view Clinton as “has some problems” or “doesn’t go far enough” instead of as a corrupt, calculating, power-drunk villain no less atrocious than Donald Trump. I suspect that more of them would view Sanders as “refreshingly principled” instead of as a singular beacon of purity and greatness. But no public figure can just be pretty good, or not so great, anymore. Instead, we’ve been trained to believe that holding anything less than the most extreme position possible would make us weaker warriors for our ideological camp. We’ve been molded into the cookie cutter of one side and are unable to imagine ever sampling the offerings of the other. In the case of my Facebook feed, we’ve become so addicted to the commercial product that liberalism has become that we we’re unsatisfied by even the most mildly diluted dose of it.

I, personally, support Clinton. At least part of the reason for my support is that I genuinely believe her to be the superior candidate; but I wonder how much of it is because I want, as an act of rebellion, to support someone the Huffington Post has placed outside the kingdom of pristine progressivism, someone who is despised by those who have bought into the pandering of NowThis. I aspire to hold ideologically conflicting viewpoints because I’d rather be complex than predictable. I write critical comments on clickbait posts because I’d rather be a troll than a sucker.