How political discord became a profitable industry and a threat to collective survival.
The Cold War never really ended. It simply changed its business model. The Soviet Union collapsed, capitalism declared victory, and everyone went shopping. Three decades later, Russia has discovered that destabilising the United States is considerably cheaper when American corporations are already doing much of the work. Whether or not Moscow actually controls the American president, the spectacle of a US administration repeatedly accommodating Russian interests raises an uncomfortable question about who won what. The ideological contest has become a commercial enterprise, with division, resentment and insecurity converted into revenue. Capitalism didn’t so much defeat its adversary as discover that the adversary’s objectives could be remarkably profitable.
The problem is that discord has become both the product and the means of producing demand for more of it. Political instability generates attention, attention generates profit, and profit finances systems that amplify instability. Foreign adversaries need only exploit the machinery already operating at industrial scale. Meanwhile, the institutions responsible for maintaining social coherence are progressively weakened by the conditions that make the business profitable. The resulting race to the bottom has no natural finishing line, because the deterioration itself keeps generating commercial opportunities. We have constructed an economic system capable of making money from dismantling the conditions of its own survival. Somewhere, presumably, a shareholder is delighted.
