"Put bluntly: in the West, the smartphone is the platform of the new technocratic factory; the social-credit system and its leash. It doesn’t repress; it seduces. It trains citizens to self-surveil, to volunteer their desires, to labor for their own subjection in the attention economy. The attention economy is not a symptom of capitalism’s excess but its evolutionary form: a seamless fusion of work, entertainment, and obedience. What once required propaganda now requires only Wi-Fi.
Modern political “mobilization” actually works through such platforms and infrastructure; the old patronage networks of capital and ideology have simply migrated into the platform and attention economy. Wealthy actors such as corporations, political operatives, and foundations fund campaigns that live inside the same data ecosystems as consumer advertising. The boundary between politics, marketing, and behavioral design has evaporated. It no longer matters whether a financier thinks of themselves as left or right; the tactic is identical: stimulate outrage, capture attention, harvest data, convert chaos into capital or policy leverage.
The smartphone makes this frictionless. It’s the remote-control device of mass affect. One push notification and a few thousand people behave predictably: some march, some buy, some rage. None of this requires conspiracy; it’s just the logic of the medium meeting the logic of speculation."
