Aidan Vanhoof

Aidan Vanhoof

6 min read

Sep 5, 2025

I’m not the first to say social media divides us, makes us less social, and by and large alters the way people interact in strange ways. It’s not hard to see in everyday life: even some of my classes integrate social media and modern communications technology into lectures and assignments.

To explain how social media affects the social bits of our lives would make this essay at the very least unoriginal, at worst, exceedingly boring. So I’m not going to do that. The problem extends farther, deeper, to the economic base of our society, and will continue to do so as long as we allow and rely on the corporate world to mediate our social lives.

Social media has democratized the political process in ways never before imagined. Those previously silent or voiceless can shout and hear their voice echo back to them. Ideas once too radical for the mainstream media now have a home. On the surface, it’s an absolute positive for greater society and the individual alike. I wouldn’t be where I am, and I doubt you would be too, without it. However, what was previously rational, informed discourse (or at least as close as our society can get to it) is made diluted and confusing. In a massive shift from older forms of media, like a grenade, fragments of information come at us from all angles, helping some, hurting others. Those who previously had no interest in politics now have a platform, ideas spread (good or bad), extremism emerges, and with it, figureheads representing each group in what becomes a sort of ‘dialectic’.

From Social Media Effects: Hijacking Democracy and Civility in Civic Engagement by Bolane Olaniran and Indi Williams,

More specifically, the coherent discussion of ideas has been substituted with the spread of fragmented ideas, resulting in the spread of populism (Wirth et al., 2016). To this end, social media in political discourse are rife with a pathological form of democracy (Betz, 1994; Engesser, Ernst, Esser, & Büchel, 2017).

Through the internet, democracy loses its rational edge. Irrationality conquers, then by appealing to the internet’s radical democracy, the people grant populist leaders power. I’ve explored how populist ideology has changed since the 20th century, here. New communication technologies alter ideology and the ways it’s distributed. If we are to understand this, then it’s necessary to consider those who control said communication technologies, as those are ultimately, given they’re overseeing and facilitating the distribution and regulation of that information, the arbiters of contemporary ideology.

The media, more specifically social media, is wholly privatized, unleashing the hand of profit to guide what we see and how we see it. Social media is made profitable by the selling of advertising spots, so the higher the engagement, the more attractive the platform. Then, advertisers purchase user data to further curate and target ads to individual markets and consumers. Thus, engagement is a necessary component of social media profit.

To make engagement more efficient, each user’s data is harvested. Their feed is decided by algorithms watching over their shoulder, looking at what they linger on and avoid, what they like, comment on, click, tap, and so on. In other words, one’s social media experience is shaped by profit and specifically tailored, not so much to what one may want or need, but what farms the most attention, the most engagement, thus profit.

If information and media is turned into engagement data, and if that engagement data creates profit, then that information and media is turned into profit. It’s now a magnet for engagement, not a product of a person’s creative labor and a member of a social ecosystem. Thus, it’s abstracted into its exchange value. This data is then translated into profit and sold on a marketplace for other platforms to exploit. Both the creator and the consumer are fetishized: the creator has their information turned into data, thus their role in that platform is one of data; the consumer, by interacting with that platform, is also turned into data. To the platform and to the corporation running it, users are data and nothing more.

In this process, the average person is stripped of their status as a human being. They’re no longer a person with a mother and a father, who aspires and celebrates and mourns; who kisses their partner and feels love’s euphoria. To the modern capitalist, they’re no longer someone. Now, they’re an abstract collage of data and monetary values. We are seen as the industrial farmer sees livestock.

This is what Karl Marx called, in his seminal work Capital: Volume One, commodity fetishism.

When something’s prepared for sale, it’s translated from a product of labor, a thing with an identity, properties, and a use, to an impersonal batch of values, a vessel for profit. This abandonment of reality in favor of an illusion, a sort of supernatural veneration of value, of data, is a fetish: an elevation of an otherwise normal thing or property into something transcendent, the material object acting as a shell for some hidden world.

If fetishism wasn’t a fact of capitalism, capitalism would die. The producer needs it, as profit is necessarily fetishistic. And the worker needs it, as they’re paid by fetishizing labor and changing it into an exchange value, their role as a worker being one of a commodity obligated to compete for higher wages, higher productive value, and for jobs in a job market. This, of course, isn’t a nice experience for the laborer.

In this process, the worker is alienated from their labor — a separate concept from fetishism, but a direct evolution of it. In that, they are disconnected from both the process and the ends. Their labor feels foreign, like it’s not for anything except subsistence and profit for someone whom they’ll never see, meet, and who cares nothing for them. It’s repetitive, the product of their labor is beyond them. And because of the division of labor, the community and collaboration inherent to work disappears. The property owner benefits, the mass of laborers suffers.

Marx, of course, concerned himself with industrial labor. But we Americans progressed beyond industry, nowadays exporting such labor to poorer and developing countries. But the features inherent to capitalism haven’t gone away. They’ve only morphed, retreated to more subtle areas. Beneath the content we consume and create, the messages and moments we share; beneath the words plastered across each and every screen, inside each letter, print or pixel.

By rendering the user data, the creation thereof becomes data. In that, because the profit motive structures how media is shared, if that media is to be successful, it too needs to conform to profit. Thus, media, not just on the corporate side, but on the artist’s side, is fetishized. We can see this easily in influencer culture. Across social media, users called influencers project an image made specially for their platform. Their lives, their words, the products they use and the house they live in, is perfectly shaped for social media consumption. On YouTube, creators like Mr. Beast post content edited, scripted, and overall, conceptualized, around profit, growth, and absorbing the most possible views. These creators happen to be the most popular, thus influential, on their platforms. Because these platforms are hubs for culture, they’re deeply influential to culture. So, the corporate fetishism inherent to capitalism spreads like a disease to the whole population.

This contributes to a culture alienated in much the same way industrial workers were and still are. Art and media alike are made vapid. Commodification strips it of its human character. The division inherent to the internet, as described above, divides the population and renders a community otherwise united, divided — emulating the alienation of one from the collective caused by an exploitative division of labor. This leads to a population with capitalist fetishism flowing through their veins, enabling exploitative ideologies and systems, such as right-wing populism, to take power.

Why? Capitalism.

Marx’s, or more accurately, Lenin’s proposed solution was by no means perfect. To say otherwise is to reject history. But social control over both the means of production and communication isn’t impossible, and doesn’t demand a viciously totalitarian regime to maintain it. What perpetuates capitalism isn’t the will of the working class at large, as Trump exhibits. His populist message appealed to a sort of ‘liberation’, only he diverted the working class’ gaze to the wrong places, the wrong things, and the wrong people. What perpetuates capitalism is the will of the wealthy projected onto the poor — hegemony. And modern social media is the most powerful form ideological hegemony takes, it’s totalitarian yet free at the same time. It’s beautifully contradictory in the most fundamental way.