The student walkout against One Nation points to a larger problem: the affective politics of cultivated antagonism that has become disconcertingly effective as a technologically-mediated, commercially-leveraged narrative system.
Power without responsibility is not merely a political failure. It is the central pathology of the attention economy: influence is purchased, outrage is amplified, incompetence is rewarded, and when the consequences arrive, everyone points at the voters as though the stage built itself.
Having watched the world’s most powerful nation fall backwards into the plumbing of populist discontent, Australia now seems oddly determined to follow.
