WTF

What the fuck are they doing? Spend five minutes watching the news, scrolling a feed or listening to people argue about whatever has gone wrong today and something peculiar happens. Everybody appears furiously different while doing remarkably similar things. Different faces, countries, parties, causes. Same recurring forms: threat, outrage, loyalty, betrayal, us, them, crisis, salvation. Tomorrow there will be new material. The structure will be much the same. This is not because everybody is secretly identical. It is because billions of different people are communicating through overlapping systems that teach us, by repetition, which forms are recognisable, which responses travel and which arguments reliably bring everybody back tomorrow. We have collectively built an enormous commercial and political machinery for circulating meaning, and none of us stands entirely outside it.

The machinery does more than carry information. Every act of communication changes the conditions for the next one. Attention has value. Conflict attracts attention. Money buys repetition. Put enough resources behind an idea and it acquires more routes back into circulation. Repetition makes it familiar; familiarity makes it easier to recognise; recognition makes another response more likely. A 2026 meta-analysis of 182 studies found a small but robust tendency for repeated claims to be judged as more true than new ones (Ye et al., 2026). None of this requires stupidity, conspiracy or even conviction. It requires recurrence. Yesterday’s lunacy becomes today’s controversy and tomorrow’s panel discussion. New story. Same orbit.

Populism loves this environment because it can turn a complicated world into a handful of durable ideas: us and them, ordinary people and elites, nation and outsider, common sense and madness. Excellent television. Terrible metaphysics. Description reduces complexity locally, but it does not abolish it. It makes something intelligible by selecting from a much larger field of possible relations and displacing the rest into context, ambiguity, interpretation, consequence and whatever comes next. Communication therefore narrows what is possible in the immediate message while generating new possibilities elsewhere: interpretations, responses, disagreements and further communication. That is the useful sense of entropy in this argument.

Not disorder. Optionality. Combinatorial communicative complexity: more ways for meanings, responses and consequences to relate, diverge and recur. We encode experience into words, images, categories and stories; other people decode them through histories and expectations of their own. Even a stable message generates variation as it moves. The trouble begins when the simplification becomes the template through which everything else is seen. Populism has long been analysed as a politics that divides society into morally opposed camps, typically “the people” and “the elite” (Mudde, 2004). Repeat those categories often enough and new events become easier to sort through them. The description starts changing the conditions under which later descriptions are made: people respond to the simplified world, and those responses become new evidence within it. The map simplifies the territory. Eventually the territory starts returning the favour.

Money matters because it changes which ideas get another lap. It buys distribution, prominence, repetition, access and persistence. Australian evidence is unusually clear: analysing more than 30 million articles from over 200 newspapers, Ananyev and Volkova (2024) found that changes in corporate ownership could significantly shift political slant. Nobody needs to ring the newsroom every morning with today’s approved opinion. Ownership can alter the communicative environment by changing which ideas are repeatedly selected, amplified and encountered. Power works perfectly well without a Bond villain stroking a cat somewhere upstairs.

It becomes dangerous when commercial selection favours increasingly extreme descriptions of the world. The direction is not intrinsically left or right. Any politics organised around absolutism, grievance, enemies, belonging and existential threat can use the machinery. Social identity research shows how readily group membership produces preference for one’s own group and differentiation from outsiders, while affective-polarisation research shows political identity becoming organised around distrust and dislike of the other side (Tajfel and Turner, 1979; Iyengar, Sood and Lelkes, 2012; Iyengar and Westwood, 2015). Again, nobody needs to plan the whole thing. Repeated differences become familiar positions from which to interpret events and oneself. Opposition then supplies fresh occasions to reproduce those positions.

The deeper problem is that unresolved difference is productive. A solved problem eventually stops producing copy. Very inconsiderate of it. An unresolved grievance can generate headlines, rebuttals, advertisements, identities, enemies and another day’s audience. Insecurity generates communication about insecurity, which generates responses, counter-responses and further insecurity. Every communication narrows something locally while enlarging the field around it: who agrees, who rejects it, what it implies, what it excludes, what follows and what has now become possible. Greater communicative capacity does not simply give us more answers. It gives us more combinatorial pathways through which further communication can occur. Generative AI is an unusually vivid contemporary example, but the structure is much older than the technology. Persistent order does not have to oppose this proliferation of possibilities. It can persist through it, because recurrence creates new situations in which the same underlying pattern can take another form. Work on dissipative structures establishes an analogous physical principle: organised structures can persist not by escaping irreversible processes and entropy production, but by being sustained through them (Kondepudi, De Bari and Dixon, 2020).

This is where the system gets slightly ridiculous. Millions of headlines, arguments and reactions can look chaotic in isolation while circling the same few relations: us and them, threat and security, betrayal and loyalty, crisis and control. The stories change every night. The argument can run for decades. Complex adaptive systems research describes how local interactions can generate higher-order patterns no participant designed (Holland, 1992). Those larger patterns then shape the environment in which the next local interactions occur. Description organises response; response changes the environment; the changed environment supplies new material for description. Identity can work this way too: not as a fixed thing carried intact through time, but as a pattern that remains recognisable because its relations recur even while its components change. We make the pattern. The pattern reorganises what becomes possible for us. Then we meet the result as though it had been sitting there all along. The system does not merely repeat. It keeps rebuilding the conditions that make another recurrence likely.

Timing matters. Communication unfolds through sequence and delay. Recurrence establishes rhythm; rhythm establishes expectation; expectation changes what gets noticed and what connects with what comes next. We become entrained without becoming identical: different people with different histories, learning the rhythms, categories and expectations of the same communicative environment. Nobody has to be programmed. Establish the frame strongly enough and some meanings arrive already half-decoded: the audience already knows the categories, the expected conflict and roughly where the next argument will go. Change frequency, prominence, delay or recurrence and you change which interpretations and responses are most readily available even if the sentence itself stays put. A slogan need not become more true to become more powerful. It just has to become easier to anticipate, recognise and return.

And disagreement does not necessarily break the pattern. Sometimes it is the pattern. Oswald and Bright (2022) found that ideologically dissonant material in a climate-sceptic online community attracted more commenting and that people engaging with it were more likely to return. Conflict can sustain connection as effectively as agreement. Awkward news for anyone who has spent an evening furiously correcting strangers on the internet. The system does not require consensus. It requires people to remain related strongly enough to keep supplying signals for one another. Every frame leaves something unresolved, and that unresolved difference creates another possible response, rebuttal or escalation. Us requires them. Threat requires security. Crisis requires response. The gap is generative because it keeps the relation active.

War is the obscene version of the same recursion. Fear produces protection; protection produces weapons, alliances and harder boundaries; those arrangements alter what everybody else must prepare for. Their preparation then becomes evidence that the original fear was justified. International-relations scholars call one version of this the security dilemma: attempts to become safer can make others feel less safe, producing self-reinforcing spirals nobody originally wanted (Tang, 2009; Jakobsen and Halvorsen, 2018). Conflict generates technologies. Technologies generate vulnerabilities. Vulnerabilities generate countermeasures. Everybody gets busier. Congratulations: the system has discovered evidence for itself.

Meanwhile, an astonishing amount of human intelligence sits outside the room. People know things, make things, notice things, solve things and live inside consequences that political communication eventually turns into a demographic, a polling category or somebody’s talking point. Everybody is different. Fine. The interesting part is how reliably billions of different people can still be channelled through the same small repertoire of fears, identities, desires and arguments. A system organised around what is loud, simple, repeatable and commercially persistent will statistically privilege exactly those things. Technology accelerates the process because every new channel creates more possible communication while the systems governing those channels select what most successfully recurs. The machinery becomes faster and finer; much of what circulates through it remains ancient: fear, status, belonging, enemies, desire, insecurity. More possible communication creates more material to select from. Repeated selection makes some forms recur more often. Recurrence then changes what people expect, recognise and produce next. The wheel does not merely turn. It lays more road in front of itself.

Which brings us back to the original question. “What the fuck are they doing?” is satisfying because it gives us a they. The people operating the machinery over there; the rest of us being operated on over here. Unfortunately, there is no clean line. Politicians, proprietors, journalists, corporations, platforms and advertisers have radically unequal power to shape the field, and concentrated wealth can buy an astonishing amount of recurrence. But the system persists through millions of smaller acts of attention, recognition, repetition, rejection and response. Even outrage can keep the hated thing moving. The machinery does not require monsters, although it can reward them handsomely. It requires relations that reproduce themselves through us. So after all the headlines, panels, arguments, algorithms, advertisements, enemies and explanations, the question comes back around. Only now the pronoun has changed. What the fuck are we doing?

References

Ananyev, M. and Volkova, E. (2024) ‘Media ownership and ideological slant: Evidence from Australian newspaper mergers’, PLOS ONE, 19(12), e0315137. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0315137.

Jakobsen, J. and Halvorsen, T. (2018) ‘The durability of the security dilemma: An empirical investigation of action-reaction dynamics in states’ military spending (1988-2014)’, The Chinese Journal of International Politics, 11(2), pp. 153-192. https://doi.org/10.1093/cjip/poy007.

Holland, J.H. (1992) ‘Complex adaptive systems’, Daedalus, 121(1), pp. 17-30.

Iyengar, S., Sood, G. and Lelkes, Y. (2012) ‘Affect, not ideology: A social identity perspective on polarization’, Public Opinion Quarterly, 76(3), pp. 405-431.

Iyengar, S. and Westwood, S.J. (2015) ‘Fear and loathing across party lines: New evidence on group polarization’, American Journal of Political Science, 59(3), pp. 690-707. https://doi.org/10.1111/ajps.12152.

Kondepudi, D.K., De Bari, B. and Dixon, J.A. (2020) ‘Dissipative structures, organisms and evolution’, Entropy, 22(11), 1305. https://doi.org/10.3390/e22111305.

Mudde, C. (2004) ‘The populist zeitgeist’, Government and Opposition, 39(4), pp. 541-563. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1477-7053.2004.00135.x.

Oswald, L. and Bright, J. (2022) ‘How do climate change skeptics engage with opposing views online? Evidence from a major climate change skeptic forum on Reddit’, Environmental Communication, 16(6), pp. 805-821. https://doi.org/10.1080/17524032.2022.2071314.

Tajfel, H. and Turner, J.C. (1979) ‘An integrative theory of intergroup conflict’, in Austin, W.G. and Worchel, S. (eds.) The Social Psychology of Intergroup Relations. Monterey, CA: Brooks/Cole, pp. 33-47.

Tang, S. (2009) ‘The security dilemma: A conceptual analysis’, Security Studies, 18(3), pp. 587-623. https://doi.org/10.1080/09636410903133050.

Ye, S., Attali, D., Ghazi, M., Cachia, A., Cassotti, M. and Borst, G. (2026) ‘Systematic review and meta-analysis of the evidence for an illusory truth effect and its determinants’, Nature Communications, 17, 3270. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-026-70041-x.