Oh, the great gnashing of teeth! How can so many Americans favor this felon, low-rent authoritarian, swindler, sexual predator, and singularly unfit former president over Kamala Harris? And also push the House and Senate into red dominance? The analyses run the gamut, from late outreach to young men, the effective use of podcasts, ineffective Democratic messaging, a postmodern normalization of sexism and racism, and the lingering impact of inflation captured by the new phrase, “the lived economy,” which is a way of side-stepping actual economic indicators and focusing on individual anecdotes for reading-out unease.
But perhaps the most interesting to me is the suggestion that there are two abstractions that contemporary “conservatives” have recently excelled at (adding in scare quotes to give the RINOs and Never Trumpers a way to gnash their cheeks): aesthetics and archetypes. Brand differentiation and identification is critical for low information voters, and the archetypes and surrounding aesthetics serve as proxies for a vision of who should be a ruler and why. Democrats are too focussed on dry little policy ideas like increasing childcare options or improving housing affordability. The MAGA Republican has Tradwives, podcast bros, and gun gurus.
In 2003 I developed a social media platform called Planktown that I thought radically improved upon the kinds of political discussions, arguments, and trolling that I saw in the comment sections of online newspapers and other platforms. In Planktown, you would create a page for yourself or your party or coalition, etc. and then drag and drop interests and policy points to populate your page. You could link to news stories, other pages, and the whole system would be monetized through advertising and paid subscriptions for pros and campaigns that could get additional analytic tools. There would be games, quizzes, history, and other time-wasters to build additional engagement.
Planktown was a very simple technology built with PHP, some middleware, and a MySQL back end, which is how many web properties operated back then. I still have the codebase archived in Dropbox because I am a digital packrat. I moved in a different direction around the same time, though, working on a way to encode online retail product descriptions and make them better searchable.
But here’s a path forward for our contemporary political zeitgeist, I think: gamify politics. Academically, the idea is fairly young, but there are already cultural and media critics who are actively looking at the implications of gamified politics.
There is of course a concern that the participants are granting the platform itself access to their alignments and interests such that the platform profits off their “playbor.” The games can potentially be manipulated to allow the tech titans to shut down or alter public participation. Hmmm, sounds like X and Meta already! More, there is the question of whether such mechanisms generate genuine political change. The opportunities inevitably will be explored and the social science and criticism updated, but the only way to advance the understanding of the upside and negative effects of a more gamified political landscape is to start implementing it and see the consequences.
There has to be something more compelling in there than Tradwives and gun gurus.