What if the communication system is producing the politics we keep blaming on individuals?
Populism may not require a populist to produce it. There are plainly politicians, media organisations, commercial interests and states willing to manipulate populations, and some have become skilled at doing so. But concentrating on those actors obscures a larger and more disturbing problem. The contemporary communication environment already favours the conditions from which populism emerges. The manipulator arrives to find much of the work already being done.
The problem begins with scale. We inhabit a communication environment producing vastly more information than anyone can absorb. Something must select what receives attention. Digital systems intensify this because the response to one round of selection becomes information used in the next. What attracts attention is measured. What is measured is amplified. What is amplified becomes more visible, and visibility itself begins to look like significance. The system continuously learns from its own effects.
This creates a bias that does not require anyone to intend it. Complex explanations are expensive. They require time, context and tolerance for uncertainty. Simple distinctions travel cheaply. Threat, betrayal, outrage, identity, enemies and promises of restoration compress complicated conditions into signals that are immediately recognisable. Under severe competition for attention, these signals have an advantage. They need not be selected because they are true, or even because somebody wants them to win. They are selected because they reproduce more effectively through the machinery available.
Populism fits this environment remarkably well. It compresses enormous social complexity into a small number of powerful distinctions: the people and the elite, insiders and outsiders, authenticity and corruption, decline and restoration. Different people do not even need to agree about what has gone wrong. Economic insecurity, housing, migration, cultural change, institutional distrust and personal frustration can remain quite different experiences while becoming synchronised around the same political distinctions. The communication system does not require ideological consistency. It requires recurrence.
This changes the problem of manipulation. If manipulating millions of people required constructing these conditions from scratch, it would be an extraordinary undertaking. It does not. The communication environment is already sorting information toward emotionally powerful, repeatable and divisive signals. Manipulation consequently becomes much easier. The successful political operator identifies existing dynamics, attaches language to them and provides objects around which they can organise. The river is already moving. Political skill increasingly consists of recognising its currents.
Opposition does not necessarily interrupt the process either. Outrage, ridicule, correction and denunciation can increase recurrence. Supporters and opponents become organised around the same objects, giving those objects still greater communicative weight. The machinery does not particularly care whether attention is favourable or hostile. What matters is that something continues to produce response. Opposition can become one of the mechanisms through which the thing opposed is reproduced.
None of this means every society will respond in the same way. Political institutions, electoral systems, civic traditions, education, journalism and regulation provide different ways of absorbing, slowing and redirecting communicative pressure. Some societies negotiate these dynamics better than others. But national political systems no longer inhabit separate communication environments. Grievance, distrust, identity, fear and political simplification circulate globally, even when the particular objects to which they attach remain local. Australia is no more immune to those dynamics than anywhere else simply because its institutional arrangements differ.
The disturbing point is that much of this is automatic. Automatic does not mean benign or beyond intervention. It means that the aggregate behaviour does not require an aggregate intention. Platforms optimise locally. Media organisations pursue audiences. Politicians pursue votes. Advertisers pursue response. Citizens select what seems important. Algorithms learn from those selections. Each participant adjusts to an environment partly created by everybody else’s adjustments. Direction emerges without anyone directing the whole.
This matters because otherwise we keep looking for whoever is secretly operating the machinery. There certainly are people attempting to steer it, exploit it and profit from it. There are organised influence campaigns, propaganda operations and deliberate political strategies. But these sit inside a larger process whose existing tendencies make their work considerably easier. Someone who discovers a powerful current can steer within it without having created the current. The existence of manipulation does not demonstrate control. It demonstrates how readily the system can be manipulated.
Intervention needs to occur considerably earlier in the causal chain. Waiting for a populist to become electorally successful and then arguing about that individual is treating the visible outcome rather than the dynamics producing it. The more important questions concern amplification, recurrence, attention, compression and the conversion of communicative visibility into political significance. Ultimately this means changing the communication system itself: altering the conditions under which volatility, antagonism and compulsive attention are continuously rewarded.
Here the problem closes back upon itself. The organisations with the greatest capacity to alter that machinery are also among those deriving enormous commercial value from its present operation. Volatility is productive. Conflict generates attention; attention generates data; data improves targeting; targeting generates revenue. A calmer communication environment is not necessarily a better commercial environment. The behaviours destabilising collective political life are entangled with the behaviours that make the system profitable.
We are consequently trying to govern a communication environment whose most powerful participants can benefit from precisely the volatility we need to reduce. Governments can regulate parts of it, companies can modify particular mechanisms and citizens can change some of their behaviour, but every intervention occurs inside the system being questioned. Even reform can become another object of outrage, attention and commercial circulation. The difficulty is not simply that we do not know how to change the system. Powerful interests have substantial reasons not to change the dynamics from which they extract value.
The most unsettling conclusion is not that someone has taken control of mass communication. It is that nobody has, while some participants are making extraordinary amounts of money from the turbulence. Governments influence it. Corporations engineer and monetise it. Political movements exploit it. Citizens reproduce it continuously. Yet the behaviour of the whole exceeds the intentions of every participant. Populism is one of the recurrent forms an overwhelmed communication system can produce. Defeating the latest populist leaves the deeper problem substantially untouched. We have to change the machinery that keeps making populism such an efficient political form, while the machinery is working extremely well for some of the people with the greatest power to change it.
