Social media feeds are the new sects
How our social media feeds are replicating sects, but in a degraded, anti-intellectual form.
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This document was prepared by @chima and does not reflect the positions of WCU as an organization.
Event Description
Online political life now does some of the work that sectarian organizations once did. A sect, here, means a small political group organized around a doctrine that treats loyalty to that doctrine as a test of political seriousness.
That habit has not disappeared. It has changed form. Instead of taking shape through political education, shared experience, and work inside organizations, it now often takes shape through social media feeds, content creators, group chats, and recurring rounds of online argument. People sort themselves into disconnected camps, form allegiances, and end up fighting with people they barely know.
The point is not to say that politics online is unreal, or that nothing serious can begin there. The question is what kinds of political groups these feeds encourage. Do they help people build durable organizations? Or do they more often produce audiences and habits that sort people by what they consume rather than by shared political commitments?
Core Discussion
Social media lowers the cost of expressing and consuming politics you align with. But it does not lower the cost of building trust, discipline, or the ability to persuade others doing shared work.
Someone can gather a lot of attention on social media in a couple of hours, but it teaches them the wrong lessons about how to organize - the need for sustained organizational memory, evolving structure, and repeated shared work.
How the Feed Recreates the Sect
Older sectarian organizations sorted people by their political doctrine and who they were loyal to. Social media politics does something similar, but through different mechanisms: algorithms, content creators, and the broader flow of online discourse. The result is familiar enough: rival camps, loyalty tests, and people fighting one another more often than working toward shared political goals. The difference is, in the modern day, all of this is centered around being a spectator instead of through political education and collective discipline.
Anton Jager describes the present as a condition of high politicization and low institutional affiliation. Adolph Reed Jr. once made the following distinction: a subscriber is not a member, and an email list is not an organization. A feed can gather followers, but it cannot ask people what real organizations ask of members: obligation, discipline, and shared risk.
Benjamin Studebaker identifies another part of the problem: online intellectual life is shaped by audience incentives. Content creators, especially those who depend on social media for their livelihoods, are under constant pressure to win attention, hold audiences, and generate conflict. Politics becomes a contest of spicy takes and positioning rather than a process of developing judgment through shared work.
This begins to resemble sect behavior, but in a thinner and more degraded form. Political priorities and decisions get filtered through online fandoms and mediated through online personalities and the parasocial relationships people have with them. What remains is people adopting slogans, hashtags, or deep feelings about something but without deep political education and without the real material stakes that might sharpen ideas through practice.
What Gets Lost
When politics becomes a way to belong, it gets harder to tell conviction from in-group performance. Freddie deBoer puts it clearly: “Politics gets stupid when politics becomes a way to belong rather than a way to do things.” Oliver Bateman makes a related point in cruder language: politics becomes “a consumer identity,” and “indistinguishable from rooting for a sports team.”
That shift matters even more in a socially hollowed-out world where people are increasingly atomized. When fewer forms of belonging are rooted in daily life, it becomes easier for a partisan tribe or creator fandom to fill the gap. That kind of identification may feel politically intense, but it is often organizationally thin. It mattered less when these kinds of camps were about Xbox versus PlayStation. But now everything is political, and there are real consequences to feeling highly politicized while remaining weakly organized at the same time.
What a Different Political Space Would Need
If the feed produces these various fandoms and camps faster than organizations, then the answer is not better branding. It is rebuilding places where people can think together, disagree without turning every difference into a split, and act with some continuity. That means unions, tenant groups, forums, publications tied to real work, and forms of study that are serious without becoming dogmatic.
Some recent writing describes this as the pre-political task. The phrase points to the civil and social work that has to happen before durable working-class politics can exist again. An event like After Hours matters only if it helps create that kind of setting, even on a small scale.
Discussion Questions
- What does the social media feed make easy, and what does real organizing still require that the feed cannot provide?
- What is the difference between an audience, a political camp, and an organization?
- When does online political engagement help move people toward real institutions, and when does it keep them stuck in spectatorship and performance?
- What habits does the feed reward (loyalty tests, conflict, branding, hot takes) that make durable politics harder to build?
- If WCU wants spaces like After Hours to become more than another event, what kinds of structure, follow-up, and shared work would that require?
References
- Anton Jäger, “Not a New Weimar, or New 1930s: ‘We Live in a Period without a Real Precedent’,” September, 2026, Not a new Weimar, or new 1930s: “We live in a period without a real precedent”. Interview with Anton Jäger.
- Benjamin Studebaker, “Bad Conversations,” Benjamin Studebaker, 2026, Bad Conversations - Benjamin Studebaker.
- Oliver Lee Bateman, “The Work of Rust Belt Politics,” Oliver Bateman Does the Work, 2026, The Work of Rust Belt Politics.
- Freddie deBoer, “Real Feelings for Fake Beauty,” Freddie deBoer’s Blog, April 6, 2026, Real Feelings for Fake Beauty - Freddie deBoer.
- Joshua Citarella and Dustin Guastella, “Doomscroll,” Joshua Citarella, March 25, 2026, Doomscroll: Dustin Guastella.
- as_a_worker, “Pre-Politics as Class Reconstitution,” 2025, Pre-Politics as Class Reconstitution.