The Problem is Bigger Than ICE
the machine is unbothered; what does disturbing it actually require?
Before Renee Good’s body, punctured by bullets shot from an ICE agent’s gun, could be removed from the snow-laden Minneapolis street, her name was trending online. Vertical cell phone videos shot by bystanders lit up social media feeds. Some called her a hero, a resister, others called her a bitch, a domestic terrorist. ICE shot another civilian, ICU nurse Alex Pretti. Billie Eilish posted a selfie of her pouting face and squinted eyes, “hey my fellow celebrities you gonna speak up, or?” She later used her Song of the Year acceptance speech at the Grammys as a platform to once again tell ICE to go fuck themselves. A popular left-wing Substacker told his followers to “learn how to operate a firearm.”
The American public has been enlisted into a war. Not as foot soldiers, but as spectators to a reality show of violence. Its cyclical nature means we don’t even need to see the latest video to imagine its contents. When we do, many of us stumble upon it accidently. A neck bleeding out on stage.
While being barraged with a proliferation of sensational spectacles, we are told that we need to #resist, we need to raise our voice and do something about it all. We can post an infographic, get into a fight on Facebook, and perhaps even show up to a protest. But far back in our conscience, we are left to wonder: what is really going on, and what can I actually do about any of it? Worse, we are haunted by the nagging question: is any of this even real anymore?
Five and a half years ago we marched for George Floyd or against mandatory vaccination. Now it’s Renee Good and Alex Pretti. Next week, who knows? But we can bet on more sensational events to continue propelling the hysteria cycle.
The bullets were real. Their echo online, however, was less so. The tragedy is that as citizens, we’re delegated to the realm of the echo of the bullets. We’re told to film ICE agents, but they film back. The footage is then aired out to the country on mass media platforms, which cut it for dramatic effect. Real human emotions are harvested by these profit-driven media platforms and spat back out to the masses: anger, disgust, outrage, fear. All of this is made possible by a state that no longer secures consent through democratic accountability, but through spectacles.
The Hyperreal Nature of Today’s Political Discourse
Our present mode of political discourse has become untethered from the real, or has rather become—in the words of French theorist Jean Baudrillard—hyperreal. According to his theory, the line demarcating reality from the representation of it has imploded, resulting in a state “more real than the real.” We are living, so he claims, in a simulated reality created by signs, images, and media narratives that have come to replace and redefine reality as it is. In the case of Renee Good, her death was real, yet it was immediately replaced by a sign, which became digital ammunition in the simulation.
These images or “maps” no longer function as representations of the real—they function as simulations that generate reality. We’ve reached a point, he warns, that these simulations have lost any concrete point of reference that precedes it. Thus, our experience of the real is now curated, manufactured even, by the series of images and media sensations with which we are bombarded, to the point that the map defines reality, and not vice versa. The simulation has become more real than reality itself.1
Despite having inspired the notorious film series, Baudrillard wouldn’t go as far as saying that we are living in “the matrix.” The “real” as portrayed as Zion in the film does not exist in such a pure form—this is yet another dangerous illusion. Reality remains in the present, the world we inhabit every day. When Baudrillard claimed in 1991 that the Gulf War did not take place, he knew full well that it did actually take place—and that people were killed, maimed, and homes were destroyed as a result. Rather his provocation was meant to draw attention to the fact that for those of us in the West experiencing the War through the mediation of a screen, it may as well have not taken place. Our experience of it—as with the shootings in Minnesota—was highly curated by mass media, who filter the reality of violence through narratives that are sorted and selected for us. We then become actors in a theater of resistance that was never meant to seriously challenge power. Power had already neutered the threat.
The fuel is real outrage, but the engine—the system’s ability to change—died long ago.
To be clear, none of this is to downplay the real outrage people feel. It’s to draw attention to a system that steals that grief and anger and turns it into engagement and messaging. Think of it like you’re driving a car. The fuel is real outrage, but the engine—the system’s ability to change—died long ago. Stomping on the gas revs the engine, but the car barely moves. The sound of the engine trying to start is used by elites as proof that democracy is alive. But what’s left is only the illusion of it. Instead of taking the red pill and looking for a way out of the simulation, we must do something much more uncomfortable, take what Žižek termed “the third pill.” Unlike the red pill, this one doesn’t transmit us to a secret rebel space, for no such thing exists.2
The Technocratic Elephant [and Donkey] in the Room
Behind this is something even darker: the state has become a bureaucratic, technocratic apparatus that can essentially function on autopilot. Funding for ICE is not a secret project of one political tribe; it has happened routinely since 2003, in a generic committee room, with support from both parties. It’s how the Obama administration could deport twice as many people as the first Trump administration. The automatic state hums on like the engine in a plane. The pilot changes, but he’s no match for the deeper machinery.
Obama’s rationale for deporting people was coated in technocratic language, he pledged to “ensure that everyone plays by the same rules.” An Obama White House factsheet from 2014 even mirrors Trump’s language, declaring to “prioritize deporting felons not families.” The difference is the technocratic liberal worldview—which includes almost all of the Democratic establishment—rests on the flawed assumption that such language still generates legitimacy. They bet on a return to this embrace of technocracy and the “rule of law” to swing the pendulum back to restore their power. To them, state violence is a conveniently neutral administrative process.
Trump rips the mask off this narrative. He tells his supporters that the violence is the point. To him, the automatic state has not only failed, it’s boring. He replaces the rhetoric of competence and the rule of law with a theater of disruption. Neither threaten the engine of the state. By turning deportations into reality show state propaganda, Trump gets people to engage with the machine. The illusion that any of this will materially change anything is beside the point—yet absent any other choice that feels “real,” many of us continue to turn on and engage with the spectacle. It’s what Žižek warns is the most dangerous feature of ideology: it persists even when it no longer commands belief.
The Futility of #Resistance Politics
Though commonly touted as an essential way to exercise our agency as citizens, Neil Postman dismissed voting as “the next to last refuge of the politically impotent.” Your opinion exercised through your vote will be submerged “in a Niagara of similar opinions, and convert them into—what else?—another piece of news.” Similarly, we may say that the impulse to #resist—to make your voice heard through posting an infographic or showing up at a protest—is the last resort of a people submerged in the abyss of the hyperreal, desperate to evade the terrifying fact that they’ve lost not only their political agency, but their relationship with reality itself.
The nature of today’s political discourse confirms Postman’s fear that the unmooring of political discourse from the concrete and immediate would leave us with “a great loop of impotence: The news elicits from you a variety of opinions about which you can do nothing except to offer them as more news, about which you can do nothing.”
Indeed, resistance is—for most of us—a cope, an opiate numbing us from the imperative to look at the elephant in the room: namely, that we have become miserably powerless. The erosion of mediating entities—of families and neighborhoods, community and civic organizations,3 unions and local politics—which once served as buffers against the inordinate centralization of power has allowed for it to drift away from the immediate to the distant, the concrete to the abstract, concentrating it into the hands of “faceless” entities who are too far removed to be held accountable—or let alone to even be recognized—by the average Joe.
Trump functions as a useful (or useless) pawn, more symptom than the sickness itself.
We can pin it all on Trump…or we can laud him as our savior from the “Deep State” bogeyman. But either way, he functions as a useful (or useless) pawn, more symptom than the sickness itself. He remains the mere facade masking a paradigm of power much greater—and much more powerful—than himself, distracting our attention from the fact that we are threatened by something much more sinister than just ICE raids.
Instead of addressing the root problem of technocratic overreach and the winnowing of local agency, we rest content with regurgitating the hollow scripts handed to us. We prefer the comfort of the cave to asking the painful question of who exactly is orchestrating the puppet show, of who is in the writer’s room devising the script, determining the next event to fuel the hysteria cycle and the set of responses with which we’ll be permitted to react. We’d rather continue performing—LARP-ing—our resistance according to the script than to take up the arduous effort of beginning from the bottom up…from attempting to recover our lost agency and acting as true protagonists of our own story.
The resistance of public figures like Billie Eilish is not only not a threat to those she claims to be resisting, but it is actively encouraged and desired by them.4 Such fervent sloganeering that conforms to the pre-set script is easily co-opted. Indeed, one could argue that it is designed precisely to get absorbed back into the media zeitgeist and thus to further reinforce the status quo. Our buying into these simplistic narratives and failing to think outside of the official story amount to a mere “controlled” form of opposition, which ultimately serves to undermine our ability to actually resist and only further cedes the little that remains of our corroding agency.
Resisting #resistance
Last Friday, activists prepared a national shutdown, with the tagline, “no work, no school, no shopping, stop funding ICE.” It proved the engine can still rev up, which is enough to keep the illusion of a functioning system alive.
Ultimately such demonstrations rest on a flawed assumption: that if the spectacle gets loud enough, the legitimacy of the state will break. But legitimacy is already gone. The technocratic state is on autopilot. It’s proven more than capable of absorbing the spectacle.
We are told that we must speak up and act now, lest we lose what is left of our democracy…or worse, be deemed on the wrong side of history. But the time has come for us to face the facts: whichever role we choose to perform in what has become our political theater, it will surely be used to further entrench the status quo—leaving us in the same position of impotence, polarization, and being unmoored from the very reality in front of us.
While the internet screamed to shut down for the day, a security guard checked his watch, buses hummed by and a woman shoveled her driveway. They were not “the problem,” they were the only ones left who were real. To join them, we must step out of the car with the revving engine, into the cold, still air of the street, and look around. Only in this silence can we see the territory, not the map. Can we break the illusion that anyone is coming to save us.
Whichever role we choose to perform in what has become our political theater, it will surely be used to further entrench the status quo.
Rather than propelling the hysteria further, our present moment of bewildering crisis calls for us to zoom out and—rather than to #resist—to take stock and contemplate what is really going on; to peer beyond the mask of the media spectacle and outside the scripts of the official narratives, and to look at the roots of how we arrived here. Only from such measured reflection and earnest questioning might we begin to recover our lost agency and—eventually—to discern what we can actually do about any of this.
Indeed, there’s something of a cinematic quality to sensational media spectacles—from ones as mundane as Mariah Carey having a breakdown on live TV, to ones as horrifying as 9/11—which Baudrillard insists was reinforced by the plethora of New York disaster films preceding the attack. There is indeed a script-like quality to the nature not only of the events, but of the public’s responses to them. Here, the hyperreal existed in the public consciousness before the actual event took place.
Neil Postman similarly observed in 1985 that news coverage was increasingly presenting a “discontinuous” stream of messages that had “no connection to that which preceded or followed it,” giving way to a “peak-a-boo world,” where one event, and then another “pops into view for a moment, then vanishes again.” Whereas news coverage once provided information that was “tied to the problems and decisions readers had to address in order to manage their personal and community affairs,” this new “context-free” information “need not be tied to any function it might serve in social and political decision-making and action, but may attach merely to its novelty, interest, and curiosity.” This rendered the news yet another form of amusement.
Postman goes on to posit that the spread of context-free information gave way to the emergence of “pseudo-contexts” and “pseudo-events,” taking place within structures invented by media outlets “to give fragmented and irrelevant information a seeming use.” While “endlessly entertaining,” the proliferation of pseudo-events engenders “a world without much coherence or sense; a world that does not ask us, indeed, does not permit us to do anything.” Surely, the dawn of social media reels and AI has brought this dynamic that Postman observed 41 years ago to new extremes.
Today, local political groups are increasingly chapters of national groups, such as No Kings and Indivisible. Thus, local politics become co-opted by culture war issues and national spectacles, further dividing neighbors and communities along manufactured, often partisan lines. Transcending this will requires spaces that are not merely political, but social. Rebuilding social infrastructure around sports leagues, art, and food and drink—communal spaces for people to gather and socialize is imperative.
The #resistance-coded fanfare of the lead-up to Bad Bunny’s Super Bowl performance is a prime example of this.
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