Problem of Resistance Under Capitalism
American activist, radical feminist, and author Audre Lorde powerfully stated, “For the master’s tool will never dismantle the master’s house. They may allow us temporarily to beat him at his own game, but they will never enable us to bring about genuine change”. While Lorde warns that dominant systems reproduce themselves through their own institutional tools, the dispersed nature of neoliberal capitalism and its omnipresence in all parts of our life – from intimate to professional, from private to public – makes her statement even harder to enact.
As Mark Fisher argued, socialist politics often struggle because they appear external to the everyday structures through which neoliberal capitalism reproduces itself. Under these conditions, resistance must confront a difficult question: How can political movements operate through the very structures that simultaneously constrain them?
Similar to Fisher pointing to Hollywood movies’ anti-capitalist depictions, only to feel we’ve justified our stance by watching and agreeing with the movie, one could watch an influencer criticising on their Instagram account how Zuckerberg’s decision to end fact-checking on Meta was a clear result of platforms’ prioritisation of engagement over accuracy. It seems almost impossible to dismantle this system as it can absorb anything into profit, including those who are extremely critical of it. However, this could also create opportunities for strategic resistance within the very systems we seek to transform.
The internal dynamics of digital platforms and networked media create distinct, algorithmically structured audiences. Tufekci (2015) describes this shift in media as a shift towards ‘participatory media ecology’, where people with significant social media presence can reach a wider audience and disseminate information using social media affordances to capture attention and (in certain cases) mobilise their followers.
Political influence and visibility are no longer produced only through traditional media, but through participation in affective and culturally recognisable online moments and the ability to capture and mobilise attention. The question of democratic politics and strategies of resistance, therefore, becomes inseparable from platform structures where visibility is organised.
In The Human Condition, Hannah Arendt argues that meaning emerges directly from the spaces of appearance, that is, “the space where I appear to others as others appear to me”. In this sense, one’s existence becomes meaningful when it’s visible and recognisable by others. In today’s spaces of appearances, visibility is contingent on the algorithms that determine what people see and what remains hidden. Recently published MediaJustice (2026) report describes this arrangement as a single system in which ownership, influence and distribution operate together. However, even as contemporary media systems become sites of political struggle in itself, social media platforms also offer an opportunity reach wider audiences, disseminate knowledge, raise political awareness, and foster democratic participation. What I argue here is that at their most effective, these affordances can contribute to forms of organisational progress capable of transforming visibility into sustainable change.
Political transformation under these conditions faces a paradox: while networked media create visibility, wider reach, and the possibilities of mobilisation (and transformation), they also risk not being able to translate online popularity into sustainable structures of power, all while absorbing resistance into branding and profit for tech-oligarchs themselves. If today’s spaces of appearance are shaped by platform owners and their political agenda, the question becomes not whether to use platform affordances, but how to transform that visibility into organisational capacity and institutional power.
Beyond Visibility: Social Media and Organisational Capacity
Social media platforms are politically significant not simply because they disseminate information, but because they have the power to facilitate the transformation of political awareness into democratic participation, and participation into a movement with organisational capacity.
So far, we’ve seen social media’s role in mobilising large-scale democratic participation, such as the Green Movement in Iran in 2009 and Arab Spring uprisings in the early 2010s, Occupy Wall Street and the Spanish 15-M movement, and the Gezi Park protests in 2013.
These movements showed social media’s capacity to mobilise protests by circulating information, alternative narratives, critiques and enable citizens[1] to organise and participate in political action in the forms of protests and collectively organised civil disobedience.
However, while social media has proven effective at generating visibility and mobilisation, the translation of these movements into sustained political transformation and institutional power has been limited, if any. Yet the affordances of digital platforms do not necessarily translate into organisational capacity, which was the case in most of these movements. Here, I use organisational capacity to refer to the ability to convert informed citizenship and democratic participation into durable collective political power capable of influencing institutions and producing sustained political change. Organisational capacity then extends beyond mobilisation, but involves the development of structures, resources and collective practices that enable mobilisation to be translated into lasting forms of organisation and institutional change.
In the last decade, social media has gone through significant change. Currently, as the recent MediaJustice Report points out, these platforms are owned privately by small number of individuals who exercise considerable and largely unregulated political and economic power. Through their algorithms that determine who gets to be visible and under what conditions, platform owners exert significant influence over contemporary spaces of appearances.
The following section examines the cases of Zohran Mamdani and Zack Polanski to explore how political actors can strategically use mainstream social media platforms not only to mobilise supporters, but to build communities capable of exercising institutional power. In doing so, I look at how platform affordances can function as a mechanism through which informed citizenship and democratic participation could be translated into organisational capacity.
Building Organisational Capacity through Digital Affordances
Social media has become an important part of how we understand and participate in democracy. Influencers and accounts operating through these platforms serve as vehicles for campaigns that reach audiences in ways more intimate than traditional campaigns. As a result, rather than treating social media as secondary to political communication, campaigns increasingly operate through networked media itself.
Far-right actors have been particularly successful at exploiting the attention economy, often collaborating with influencers and podcasters whose content helps normalise their political messages by embedding them within spaces that audiences perceive as authentic and non-political. Yet the far right does not possess a monopoly on these techniques. The same infrastructures that amplify reactionary politics can also be used to build a democratic and socialist (alternative) reality.
Zohran Mamdani’s campaign is one of those examples that shows how socialist and democratic politics can strategically operate within tech-oligarch-owned infrastructures and contest those dynamics. By adopting familiar internet aesthetics, Mamdani’s campaign combined humour and relatability with political messaging. His achievement was not only in expanding his reach through his own account, but also in appearing on various social media accounts with differing follower bases that had already cultivated a sense of loyalty among their followers. During his campaign, Mamdani strategically appeared on mainstream social media channels, embedding himself in digital culture through influencer collaborations and meme-based content, including appearances on @nikitadumptruck or @abitfruity. Interestingly, not all of the accounts he appeared on were primarily known for their political content but were on entertainment and pop culture (e.g. @judgyseries).
Perhaps more importantly, Mamdani’s use of social media is a good example of how informed citizenship could be integrated into organisational capacity. While he cultivated a large following through strategic collaborations with influencers and use of internet aesthetics, Mamdani often uses his platform to engage with public outside of the online sphere. For example, the ‘Rental Ripoff Hearings’ that were announced on his social media accounts and website was an event organised to invite New Yorkers into a space to share their housing experiences in the presence of city officials to help shape housing policy in a face-to-face setting.
In a parallel fashion, Zack Polanski, the leader of the Green Party in the UK and a London Assembly Member, adopted a digital-native style that not only used social media platforms to amplify his visibility but also tapped into the culture itself, as in his collaboration with @mrcodydahler. He also appeared on @subwaytakes, a U.S.-based account with a global audience.
One important part of the Green Party’s campaign was making grassroot fundraising a central part of its political message. By openly asking supporters to contribute and by emphasising small donations, the party tried to distinguish itself from campaigns financed by wealthy donors operating behind closed doors.
Yet this approach was not only about transparency. Asking people to finance the campaign directly and relying on those contributions also served to reduce the vertical hierarchies that often characterise electoral politics. Rather than electing a leader who accumulates power through relationships with wealthy donors and lobbyists that voters may never see, the campaign aimed to create a more horizontal relationship between participants and a sense of collective ownership. Voters, donors, canvassers, and candidates were encouraged to see themselves not as occupying different levels of a hierarchy, but as participants in a shared political project with a common stake in its success.
Social media played an important role in this model. Using platforms to communicate directly with supporters meant that appeals for fundraising -and the reasoning behind it- could be shared widely. But more importantly, it transformed the role of supporters into active participants by sharing content, engaging in (online) discussions, and taking ownership. In this way, the same networks that facilitated donations, increased awareness, and encouraged participation also fostered a sense of community around the campaign, emphasising collective ownership.
In a recent post by The Economist, Zack Polanski and Zohran Mamdani were portrayed as “next generation of illiberal leftists” and labelled as “Gen-Z socialists made for the TikTok era“. The accompanying visual presented a stereotypical representation of Gen-Z culture, featuring a smartphone cover decorated with stickers – one notably depicting a watermelon associated with Palestinian liberation – as well as playful accessories decked with socialist slogans such as “Eat The Rich” and “Freeze The Rent“. The implicit, as well as explicit, critique they tried to give – both in the caption and the visuals they chose to use – appears to undermine and infantilise both the messages and movements these political actors advocate as childish and performative.
Polanski then strategically reposted The Economist’s post on his social media account, adding the caption: “The real fightback is against the multi-millionaires and billionaires, and the media that protect them”. This strategic reposting not only reframed the attack but also turned it against itself. While The Economist was trying to discredit the politics of both Mamdani and Polanski by calling them ‘Gen-Z socialists’ in TikTok era, the post actually, counterintuitively, proved the success of these actors that lies in being able to understand the demands of people who are rejecting the capitalist democracy that privileges democracy based on inequality and liberalism.
The Platform Paradox
If capitalist realism can absorb any critique, then these campaigns suggest that resistance cannot simply position itself outside those infrastructures. Instead, it must operate through them while simultaneously attempting to bring political change.
The campaigns of Mamdani and Polanski demonstrate that digital visibility can contribute to these outcomes when it is embedded within broader political organising rather than treated as an end in itself. Two lessons emerge from these campaigns. First, democratic movements must treat networked media and digital culture as a space of political resistance and transformation. Second, relying solely on visibility that depends on the non-intervention of platform owners is insufficient. Using algorithmic visibility tactically is only meaningful if it translates into informed citizenship, democratic participation, and organisational capacity.
The argument presented here should not be read as a defence of platform dependence. There is a clear need for the development of alternative spaces of appearance. Lorde’s statement remains relevant. Yet in a political landscape where visibility is increasingly organised through privately owned infrastructures, refusing these tools altogether risks political irrelevance. The central challenge for democratic movements is to transform the influence the networked media generate into durable forms of collective and democratic movements. In my opinion, Mamdani and Polanski offer possible examples of how that could be achieved.
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References
Arendt, H. (2018). The Human Condition: Second Edition. University of Chicago Press.
Fisher, M. (2022). Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? Zero Books.
MediaJustice (2026). Media Capture: Who controls the story controls the future – MediaJustice. https://mediajustice.org/resource/media-capture-report/
Tufekci, Z. (2015). Algorithmic Harms Beyond Facebook and Google: Emergent Challenges of Computational Agency. Colorado Law Scholarly Commons. https://scholar.law.colorado.edu/ctlj/vol13/iss2/4
[1] Here, citizenship refers not only to formal citizenship but more broadly to individuals who participate in and are affected by collective social and political life regardless of their voting rights or legal citizenship status. This includes permanent residents, visa holders, undocumented migrants and others who form society.
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Deniz Celikoglu is a PhD researcher at Dublin City University (DCU), based at the Anti-Bullying Centre and the School of Communications. Her research examines how parents and adolescent boys perceive and respond to manosphere content and the risks of digital radicalisation. Using qualitative methods such as interviews and focus groups, she explores their differing concerns and strategies, and how these are intertwined with the broader cultural narratives and the pursuit of a “good life” under neoliberal conditions.
The author would like to thank Joseph Foley and Daniel Balinhas Pérez for their helpful reviews.
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