Social media, commons image
by Alan McGuire
In an age where the media is defined by algorithms, the rise of figures like Andrew Tate is no accident. Social media, once seen as a tool for cultural democracy—a space where all voices could find a platform—has instead become a theatre of hyper-performance, hierarchy, and manipulation. While it promised access and empowerment, what it has become is a system that amplifies spectacle over substance and pushed harmful ideologies in seductive forms. From the rigid masculinity of influencer self-help gurus to the staged wholesomeness of “cottagecore” and “trad-wife” content, identity online is increasingly shaped by what sells.
This essay explores how the digital commons has been co-opted and how the dream of cultural democracy has been commodified by algorithms that reward conformity to capital-friendly narratives. Capitalism has turned social media and other technology, which could be a cause for social progress, into another weapon to push ideology down the throats of citizens, thus reinforcing the narrative that capitalisms is both natural and the only option. Furthermore, we’ll look at how online culture often disguises and ignores structural inequality beneath the surface of individualism, offering users illusions of authenticity while subtly reinforcing the status quo.
Creating Caesars
In late 2022, an influencer got arrested because he posted a video of himself online, ranting and eating pizza in response to a childish feud with climate change activist Greta Thunberg. The Romanian police recognised the pizza box and arrested him for human trafficking, rape and sexual assault. He had also been accused of intimidating women to make porno videos. This above scenario brought Andrew Tate to prominence; the US-UK ex-kickboxer and misogynistic influencer who remains popular with young men. Most parents had not heard of him but when they asked their children if they knew who he was, most of them did, especially their teenage sons and their daughters too. Both very much for the wrong reasons.
He had become a social media influencer on Tik Tok and Instagram before this point. Much of this was down to the algorithms that feed the users videos of things they have searched for and liked in the past. If you like cat videos, you will get cat video after cat video. If you watch a video that appears to be about men’s mental health, getting rich or becoming popular, then chances are you will be fed a dose of Andrew Tate selling his coursees on his own online platform, called Hustlers University. On this online learning platform, he promises to teach teenage boys things from how to manage yourself in public, how to get rich with crypto, how to prepare yourself mentally and how to escape the matrix.
TikTok and Instagram are the most popular social network sites for young people in the 2020s. Here, Tate posts a series of videos ranging from positive and influential mental health speeches, about how to be successful in life, how to manage your position in society and how to get rich. But he also has a more toxic side that talks about keeping women in the house, saying that women are the property of men after their father has handed them over at the wedding, and also that women need to be abused and controlled.
Andrew Tate has turned toxic masculinity into a celebrity persona. Many young men feel that ‘he knows what he’s doing’, and because of the way he portrays himself on social media, with sports cars, working out whilst smoking cigars in a very elaborate fashion, it’s easy to see why his appeal to young men has been successful. The connection that he has with his audience, via the very intimate world of social media, leads many young men to defend him as if he were their best friend. Teachers and schools have complained about young boys imitating the way that he speaks and sits but also the way that they interact with female students and members of staff.
This is all very similar to Donald Trump and the American alt-right selling the idea that a liberal elite is running the world and cancelling anything that they don’t like. That they want to keep the rest of the world down, so that they can enjoy the riches of the world. Furthermore, it is also a reaction to liberal identity politics telling poor young white men with limited horizens that they are ‘privileged’. Both fail to address context and wider societal and class-based issues such as a lack of access to fulfilling meaningful work that pays well, access to culture that has a community, the ability to build a family and own a home; all of this was once taken for granted as the basic life goals that were achievable to everyone, but are now only achievable to people with access to the bank of mum and dad. But they don’t want them to know that.
There have also been other trends that promise to help people escape society. The female equivalent of Andrew Tate is Trad-wife. This trend promotes a traditional lifestyle to women, think 1950s suburban America. Seen as an alternative to feminism, it says that women should give up any ideas of progress and freedom and that they should submit to traditional gender roles and stereotypes. Things such as staying at home looking after children, cooking and cleaning the house, but more scarily, letting their husbands control their finances, make decisions and that they should be there to support their husbands in whatever they want.
The trad-wife lifestyle promises women the possibility of escaping work, mainstream culture, politics and having to fight against some of the smaller obstacles that women face every day that men don’t. By submitting to the ‘angel of the house’ stereotype, this trend promises a similar escape from society as Andrew Tate does. A lifestyle that is visible in films and series of times gone by, and today on heavily image-based social media. This trend also blew up on TikTok and Instagram with influencers sharing very aesthetically pleasing videos and messages of a happy life. Living like a traditional housewife giving advice on things such as cooking meals and keeping your husband happy. Essentially living a much easier life that goes against the resistance of the day. It’s not surprising that this movement has links with white supremacy, the evangelical church and the American far-right.
The trad-wife, taken from the magazine The Ladies’ Home Journal (commons image)
Now, while these two are both very extreme examples of things that have happened on social media, there are also wider trends that have come to influence mainstream society. ‘Cottage core’ is the idea that living in the countryside and having a much more simple, less hectic, more fulfilling life is something to aim for. It doesn’t sound bad and really it isn’t. It is aesthetically pleasing on Instagram and influences what high-street shops sell. From rustic sofa throws to leather laptop bags, the vintage outdoorsy look is cottage core.
It encourages people to live inside homes that are well decorated and to spend their weekends doing things like going for walks in the countryside, baking bread or painting a picture. Is this such a bad thing? In itself, no. But it does have things in common to wider trends such as hygge which comes from Denmark, which also promotes a cosy life and claims that people should to try and enjoy the smaller joys of life such as hot chocolate, cosy nights in and moments of serenity.
Whilst all these things are all well and good, they try to convince people to look inside for their own happiness rather than look outside for the source of their problems. It’s a wider cultural shift towards individualising peoples’ negative feelings and negative situations. Rather than looking for joint societal and structural injustices that affect people, we are told to use our own resources to fix situations. Even those vomiting-inducing positive memes that say ‘You are the best’ ‘Leave negative people behind’ ‘You can do anything if you want it’ are examples of a wider cultural shift which represents a hyper-individualisation of society.
The corporate wellness language of coporations has infiltrated our social media feeds, advertising and even the slogans we wear on our clothes. Live, Laugh & Love is more than just a slogan to put on your wall. It is becoming a way of life. Passive subjects that are ruled by technocratic governments that only really care about the economic digits that us mere mortals are too stupid to understand. It really is the economy, baby. All this comes at a time when climate change, economic stagnation, a decline in social cohesion and democratic backsliding are collective problems that cannot be solved with individual solutions.
Another World, But The Same Planet
Social media is a place where we can show we are individuals amongst a collective, in the middle whilst not being middle-class, and that we are on the path to success with a few bumps on the way. The great thing is we can choose to share these successes and bumps and hide all the rest. We construct an alternative identity, if we were to do this in real life we’d be as hollow as the personalities we see online. Yet there is more to social media, it’s a centralised but diffuse network of individuals that constitute a system, and it is only with those individuals that the system continues to replicate itself. Is this a projection of how the basis of our system works, or merely a construction of how we like to imagine it works?
When we say we live in a merit-based society, it leads to the illusion that we are all equal. The belief this embodies is that people earn power, wealth, and respect individually on merit. That people can attain what they want through their own hard work and determination, normally via educational and professional routes or by good old-fashioned hard work. However some have further to climb than others.
Whilst we attribute the worth of a person based on their job title, car brand or house size, we are also condemning others that have not achieved these ‘successes’, even though they may not have had the same opportunities as others. By continuing to judge people on a set of material attributes, we are also judging others on what they lack. The higher your class, the more opportunities you have. None of us are born into the same world. Often people will live in different areas and have variable access to education, money and social links amongst other things. They will also have certain things to deal with in the form of abusive parents, bullies, local gangs, crap public transport and lack of access to healthy food. We don’t all start the race from the same starting line. In fact, judging others has become so prevalent on social media that people are now paying lip service to ‘being real’, ‘appreciating what you have’ and ‘liking people for who they really are’. Yet, their actions go against their words when they continue to post pictures of their material wealth and sell your products to better themselves.
Taking pictures to post them on social media is currently the main form of content creation. Photo: Eyeofthebreeze used under Creative Commons
Even the more inward-looking people in society form opinions of themselves from how they are viewed by others. From childhood when we are given teachers’ reports to later in life when we are given feedback from our friends, family, and bosses. These opinions affect how we judge ourselves and others, social media is now apart of this for many people. The ideology which we are thrown into reproduces itself by imprinting on us and our children.
Epidemiological studies have shown that the bigger the income gap in countries, the gap between the richest and poorest in society, the more competitive and judgemental it is. Countries with a smaller gap have higher levels of trust and cohesion within the community. Feelings like anxiety, jealousy and self-esteem are worsened by neoliberalism. It is easy to see that this ideology pushes the narrative of individualism and egocentric thinking. It makes citizens living within these ideas more susceptible to mental health issues, social problems and have lower levels of empathy. This is not just for the poorer in society; it affects all people equally.
Furthermore, levels of depression and anxiety are higher in countries with higher income inequality. The bigger the gap between the rich and poor, the more people are likely to judge other people on how superior they are, or not, in comparison This is also directed at us as individuals and can change how we see ourselves. It is no coincidence that the countries with higher inequalities are also the countries that are ready to die for the mantra of the free market (which is far from free). You may think ‘yeah well, if it is a richer country, surely it is nicer to live in than a poorer one? Well actually, the better countries are the ones in the middle. In fact, the richer the country the more wealth just a few at the top have. Countries, where the wealth is more evenly distributed, have a higher quality of life for their citizens of all classes.
(Ref: Wilkinson and Pickett, The Inner Level 2019).
A homeless man in front of a store window. Photo: © Tomas Castelazo, www.tomascastelazo.com / Wikimedia Commons / CC BY-SA 4.0
Over-inflated or hyper-meritocratic values at their core encourage competition, and society’s validation of this spurs the search for profits and economic growth thus making capitalism appear natural. Overall, our communities will always suffer because of this and so will we. By putting individual achievements over common ones, it devalues our collective aims and achievements. It also makes it easier for people to individualise problems, such as climate change, that can never be tackled by a lone human being. This then reinforces the idea of it ‘not being my problem’ or there being ‘nothing I can do’.
Whilst there may be certain individuals at the front of projects or businesses, they do not do all the work. They are often supported by a team of people that have built up their knowledge from another group of people, oh and their father’s bank accounts. We would not be who we are if it were not for the surrounding society. The midwives that bring us into the world; the teachers that educate us; the friends we grow up with and help us to learn about ourselves; the bosses that dismiss us and the partners that leave us. We are who we are because of them. Neil Armstrong never put himself on the moon; Jeff Bezos never built his own fortune and I never wrote this alone.
Society makes progress possible, not individuals. For those individuals that are able to contribute something specific, we should thank them, but we should also thank the people that kept the world turning whilst they did their thing. During the covid-19 pandemic, we saw those very people: the working class. They are now the ones keeping the world spinning and always have been. Their merit and hard work made it possible for the rest of us to stay inside during the pandemic. They also make it possible for us to go on about our lives, so we don’t have to worry about sweeping our road, delivering a parcel or looking after relatives. Who really is the source of wealth on this planet? The eccentric CEO or the nursing assistant doing a double shift?
Are you staring at me?
We have talked about how social media distorts the real world by pushing the ideology of neoliberalism. But does it matter? Yes. With more than 60% of the world’s population using social media it matters. To understand how it works we need to flesh out a theory of how we respond to social media, and how it makes us respond to others.
Existential philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre is famous for writing — “Hell is other people”. After much speculation by the public, he elaborated on this theme from his play No Exit. He says that hell for us is judging our own lives based on the opinions of others. Hell continues if we persist in doing this, we become encrusted within the boundaries of others’ views of who we are. We become their opinion of us. This is called the theory of the gaze. This is what helps us to formulate who we are. The image we project onto the world is what we want others to see, just like on social media (Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 1969).
Jacques Lacan would take this idea further and theorise that it is our desire to be a perfect version of ourselves that we also want other people to see as we see ourselves as both a subject (a person) and an object in society. This way of seeing ourselves causes us to do things like buy new clothes, have surgery or change something about us to become our ideal-selves and then we project it into the world. This not only includes our image and hairstyle but also our personalities, achievements, relationships and more. However, the sad truth is whenever we get what we desire: something else fills that space.
This is why we get buyer’s remorse. The item of clothing we have been dreaming about doesn’t propel us to be our perfect selves. In other words, you will never take the perfect selfie. It is a mythical item that we will never find. Capitalism feeds off this desire and it is good at manipulating it. No wonder it was Freud’s nephew, Edwards Bernays, who invented the art of advertising and public relations.
Social media plays on this image of us and puts it into overdrive. This is confirmed by the boom in personal development with life coaches and personal trainers and posting pictures of bodily progress online. Not forgetting lip fillers, botox, teeth straightening, leggings that mould your ass into a shape and a boom in fashion sports where. It’s also no surprise that people become obsessed with controlling themselves at a time when people feel they have little say in how society is run and liberal democracy shows it is really a dictatorship of capital that has various teams playing, but no-one ever wins.
Social media is a structural extension of capital for our desires to be played out on. You can be anything on social media, as long as you have the talent, looks, money and time to consume and produce. It embodies the cultural logic of classlessness. A real playground that is an extension of our mundane world with hunger, wars, and climate change. At least you can block do-gooders and know-it-alls.
Capitalism divides us
But even off social media, capitalism divides us. We are in competition with our colleagues, family members and classmates. This is not always conscious but as we have seen from various pieces of research, the more unequal a country the more competitive people are. This often comes down to anxiety about out status in society, in the family and in the work place. We rely on the opinion of others to get a sense of who we are. We don’t live in an American blockbuster where the rugged hard man goes to live alone. But that’s the ironic thing, the typical story line in those films always shows us that even the most rugged individualist needs others. We are we in competition: for attention, resources, positions. The bigger the social ladder appears the more competition we perceive there to be. Because a select few own the companies, there is a lot less to be distributed between the rest of us.
The theory of the gaze has been expanded on by various thinkers. Simone de Beauvoir, feminist philosopher and Sartre’s life partner, developed the idea of the gendered gaze regarding how men look at women as an object. That is, white men become the norm and anything different to them is classed as the other. This includes people of different race, class, ethnicity, and disability. Furthermore, she expresses that women internalise the male gaze and the myth of femininity. Thus, aware of how they are viewed they try to live up to the idea of the mythical creature that is created by their own objectification. Women are objectified further; beauty standards are set higher (why do many women today have their makeup like a filter in Instagram?) and roles become more fixed. (Beauvoir, The Second Sex).
Frantz Fanon, the famous Marxist philosopher and colonial theorist, would also formulate the colonial gaze which separates Us (white ruling people) from the Others and aims to maintain colonial relations by dehumanising black people and putting them into the zone of non-being. He also formulated that black subjects would have to act and speak white. He said that even if a black Parisian learnt to speak perfect French as well as a white Parisian, then they would be shocked that the black person could speak so well. This shock shows how they think of the black subject as of lower worth and show surprise at the idea that the black subject can do something as well as or if not better than them (Fanon, The Wretched of The Earth).
Depending on your social media feed, the majority of stereotypes connected to race continue to be solidified and even exaggerated. In February 2019 millennial left-leaning online magazine Vice shared a cartoon of political commentator Ash Sarkar with a rocket launcher and black MP Dianne Abbot with a handgun facing off against three white male politicos, all whilst an effeminate and weak Owen Jones peers out of the background watching the battle commence. The aggressive overweight black woman, terrorist sympathising Bangladeshi and useless gay man are here being reproduced by what is meant to be a liberal media outlet. These stereotypes cynically reproduce ideas that are keeping an imperial lifestyle in place.
Photo: I See You by Pedro Soler Bueno, used under Creative Commons
Social media is a tool to amplify the legacy media owned by the rich. It reached its peak at the second presidential inauguration of Donald Trump with the owners of Facebook, Instagram, Amazon and Twitter all lined up behind the orange baby. The majority of people are not outwardly racist or sexist daily, but we all hold ideas of prejudice about one another, it would be naive to suggest that we are all colour-blind and have no bias towards gender, class or disability stereotypes, but the fact is that ramping them up and reinforcing them does not help anyone.
Social media is the gaze that recognises us, for us. Every like, retweet, follow and comment reaffirm that our identity is safe, or that they may need changing, even if we think we are going against the grain. Even if you don’t have social media, technology and these extensions of our communities reproduce the artificial construction that women are objects to be desired, black and brown people lives don’t matter, old people are not productive and disabled people should not be heard.
Weapons of the billionaires
Billionaires have increasingly weaponised social media as a tool to manipulate political discourse and engineer consent, exploiting its infrastructure to consolidate power and wealth. Platforms like Facebook, X (formerly Twitter), and YouTube offer not only vast audiences but also unprecedented data harvesting capabilities, allowing the ultra-wealthy to shape narratives, target voters, and sway elections with scientific precision. The Cambridge Analytica scandal revealed how personal data—harvested without consent—was used to construct psychological profiles and deliver hyper-personalised political ads, helping to influence key democratic processes such as the 2016 U.S. presidential election.
Far from being isolated incidents, these tactics part of a broader trend: the commodification of political opinion, where democracy becomes a market and we are treated as consumers of ideology. With few regulations in place, billionaires and their tech firms have turned platforms intended for public discourse into echo chambers and propaganda machines, all the while maintaining the illusion of open debate and cultural diversity.
Furthermore, social media is based on and is a further manifestation of our world and societal values. It is the gallery of achievement. Our lives become a spectacle lived on and offline. We all get caught in the competition whether we have the latest social media platform or not. Even wanting to be different, ‘get out of the rat race’ or live ‘the simple life’ is still aiming for an ideal. Thus, it is impossible to escape the gaze of the other. The logic of social media is the logic of late capitalism. Even making yourself different is going against what others expect. The gaze is a fact of life but standards and judgements behind the gaze can be altered. Making the world less competitive and cohesive is something to aim for, but that can only be done structurally and for that we need alternative structures that combat individualism.
Social Media Addiction, commons image
If cultural democracy were applied to social media, it could radically transform the platforms from tools of manipulation and surveillance into spaces for genuine collective expression and democratic engagement. Instead of algorithms driven by profit, platforms could be redesigned to prioritise community in the public interest. This would mean moving away from centralised, billionaire-owned platforms toward cooperative, open-source models that give users control.
An emerging example of this is Mastodon, a decentralised network of independently-run servers, where communities set their own rules and values. Though still small, it offers a glimpse into how social media could function under cultural democratic principles: not as a tool for harvesting attention and data, but as a participatory commons that supports users in a non alienating way.
Hell might be other people at times, but we do need them. We need community, networks, and knowledge. The internet has allowed us to build online networks to share information and meet new people. But while we turn to one thing, we must not turn away from each other. In fact, social media is at one of the key condtradictions we find in capitalism: the privatisation of knowledge for profit. The forces of production, in this case social media, are held back by the nature of the relations of production, in this case technology being in the hands of technology monpolies and at the beck and call of the most powerful far-right government on the planet. Technology is being limited for profit. If these relations were changed into public hands then the forces of productions could be used for public good.
Neoliberalism has decimated many communities, particularly those in former industrial regions, made work more precarious, and pushed us into an inward-facing existence. Now it is doing the same online. This atmosphere benefits reactionaries, racists, and fascists. The far right knows that in times of crisis, people are vulnerable, and they exploit the erosion of community bonds, fear of the ‘other,’ and societal breakdown to radicalize individuals.
Thankfully, as seen during the pandemic, many people are finding new ways to turn to community. This shows us that while social media may not replace real-world connections, it still draws us in with its ease, speed, and addictive nature. In fact, as of January 2025, a Kepios study showed that there are 5.24 billion social media users globally, comprising 63.9% of the population. With an annual growth rate of 4.1%, and 92.4% of internet users engaged in social media, it’s clear that the industry’s growth is bound to influence the political landscape.
Cultural democracy and social media
But what would cultural democracy on social media look like? Instead of the algorithms just pushing the loud or money-making stuff, they’d actually try to find and boost the voices that usually don’t get heard – different communities, proper diverse opinions, and stuff that’s actually good for people.
- Democratic control: Instead of these big platforms having all the control, the users and communities would have a say. Open-source programs and networks where different groups can set their own rules, and users having more control over their own info and what they see, like no advertisements!
- Debate: The platforms would be set up to encourage proper discussions, where people actually think and engage with different ideas, instead of just shouting and getting angry.
- Being Smart About What You See: Helping people understand how social media works, spot when they’re being played, and think critically about what they’re looking at.
- Putting People First: Thinking about social media as a public space, like a park or a library, and maybe finding ways to fund it that aren’t just about making loads of money for big companies.
- Find new uses: by making social media more open to change, people would discover, play and use social media in ways we have yet to explore. This would give power to people.
Getting social media to be more culturally democratic isn’t going to be a walk in the park. It means changing how these platforms are built, how they’re run, and even how we use them ourselves. We need to move away from just scrolling and liking, and actually get involved in shaping these digital spaces.
In a future where cultural democracy can thrive, however, social media could be reframed as a tool for collective empowerment and enjoyment, rather than as a vehicle for monopolistic interests and political manipulation. Cultural democracy emphasizes the right to share in the cultural and political processes that shape society, putting the power back into the hands of individuals and communities. If we can reshape how we engage with social media: prioritising inclusivity, equality, and open dialogue. We can use these platforms not only to share information but also to build resilient communities that counteract divisive forces. In this sense, social media could become a tool for a more democratic and equitable society.
