This paper was researched and developed for the ‘#NoFilter Lecture Series’ and delivered by the author at the Zeppelin University on March 4. The series also featured lectures by Armen Avanessian, Cécile Malaspina & Hito Steyerl among others.
The series of lectures explores how the #nofilter mindset, emphasizing unfiltered immediacy and authenticity, permeates spheres such as social media, literature, and politics, and thus relates to the political populism emerging around the world. At the same time, it points to a paradox: staging and performance are often required to produce the sense of “unmediated” realness.
Populism is once again shaping the world.
Donald Trump’s election, and his treatment of constitutional America as an ancien régime, has put political populism at the front of everyone’s mind. But its rise owes as much to the global spread of social media platforms, the way those platforms make their money, and the digital content creators and influencers they have bred worldwide.
The signs are everywhere. Trump moved from legacy media to Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram during his first presidential campaign in 2016; no one illustrates the shift better.
Economic incentives from the platforms are only part of the story. Populism’s broader rise rests on the masses’ new capacity to shape public discourse across art, culture, and society, and to profit from doing so. As it spreads horizontally around the globe and vertically through the fields of human activity, its structure becomes possible to map.
The mechanism is familiar: a self-reinforcing cycle that rewards actors for simplifying complexity and casting themselves against existing power. It runs the same way in art, culture, and politics, through Donald Trump, Joe Rogan, or Taylor Swift alike. Is this cycle the whole structure of populism? I doubt it.
One clarification before going further. The dying movement labeled “wokism,” though it presents itself as the continuation of Western emancipatory progress, is another populism, born of a different political orientation and method. Woke culture began when liberal and centrist political and media institutions appropriated academic concepts to popularize particular forms of political, ethical, and cultural correctness. The movement set out to democratize theories drawn from the humanities and social sciences, turning them into accessible rallying points. Like every populism, it declared itself against established power, in this case traditional cultural hierarchies and normative frameworks. It gained momentum on social media, where simplified versions of academic arguments about race, gender, class, and colonialism spread fast and mobilized public sentiment. The lesson: populism cuts across conventional political categories. Whatever ideology it carries, it claims to speak for the marginalized against the institutions.
Think of a rising populism as a new pyramid of power resting on three supports: economic infrastructure, charismatic leadership, and historical precedent. To sustain itself it needs control over critical infrastructure and media platforms, a leader with real personal magnetism, and either a resonant historical moment to invoke or a utopian vision vivid enough to capture the public imagination.
Trump’s fall and resurgence show how elastic digital infrastructure is in the hands of someone with enough cultural or political capital. Thrown off the major platforms in 2020 and locked out of the mainstream digital sphere, he re-entered the public conversation by building his own channels of visibility, above all his own platform. The comeback ran on exaggeration and falsehood, repeated without apology until a fiercely loyal base was energized. Their support supplied the resources for new means of communication, and in the end enough influence to push political institutions, the Supreme Court included, into re-legitimizing him.
His trajectory exposes both the strength and the fragility of Big Tech’s filters. The platforms can exclude even the most prominent public figures; a large enough and loyal enough following can build parallel infrastructure, bypass the controls, or force accommodations. There is warning and comfort in this. Big Tech’s dominance is real but not absolute. The unsettling part is who can exploit the gap: only people who already command serious money and mass influence get to renegotiate the terms of platform capitalism.
Elon Musk applies the same logic to government. Cast bureaucracy, career politicians, and institutional checks as wasteful “filters” on efficiency, and governance can be reimagined without its mediating structures. The “Doge” phenomenon, played up as a currency of the people, is the symbol of this stripped-down capitalism, free of the mechanisms built to regulate corporate power. Under Musk’s influence, closing agencies and cutting oversight come to mean removing barriers, clearing the way for direct rule by businessmen. What this fantasy of frictionless administration ignores is what the “filters” are for: protecting society against political and economic abuse. Recast institutional process as obstacle, and capital reasserts its dominance in the form of unchecked power for those rich enough to disregard constraint.
At the core of most populist movements stands a charismatic leader whose personal appeal and rhetorical skill capture the popular imagination. Trump in electoral politics and Musk in the corporate world show what individual magnetism can mobilize.
These leaders work the platform algorithms to extend their reach and route around the old gatekeepers of mainstream media and political institutions. Their rhetorical trick is the feeling of direct connection: they present themselves as the genuine voice of “the people” against corrupt or useless institutions. The emotional bond this builds with supporters casts them as saviors, uniquely equipped to lead society back to an idealized past or forward to an envisioned future.
Here the tension inside digital infrastructure becomes visible. The leader rises on established platforms, but real power arrives only when he can build alternative networks or bend existing ones to his agenda. And the paradox returns: only those already holding great wealth or cultural capital can challenge or reshape the platforms, which gives the lie to populism’s promise of equal empowerment and authentic representation.
The third support is an idealized “golden era”: a past of stability, prosperity, or cultural unity, selectively reinterpreted for present political ends. Trump’s “Make America Great Again” points to an imagined America of national strength, economic success, and social cohesion, roughly the post-World War II decades. The idealized past gives the movement its rallying point; present troubles become deviations from an established norm.
In Latin America the same dynamics have played out repeatedly. Brazilian populism under Lula, and later Dilma Rousseff, drew on nostalgia for earlier waves of socio-economic reform and leftist governance. Lula’s first rise, celebrated as a progressive victory, answered a widespread yearning for the social programs and economic inclusion of earlier leftist initiatives. When later administrations failed to deliver that vision, populism swung rightward, toward national strength and prosperity told in conservative terms. In Mexico, Andrés Manuel López Obrador invoked the historical struggle against corruption and elite dominance, framing his administration as a return to the supposedly simpler and fairer politics of the Mexican Revolution of Zapata and Pancho Villa.
The nostalgia is not confined to the Western hemisphere. Xi Jinping glorifies revolutionary heritage and remembered national unity through tightly controlled narratives of China’s revolutionary and socialist history. He presents himself as the living embodiment of China’s trajectory toward global prominence and internal coherence, reading history selectively to legitimize current policy.
In every case the restored moment is chosen for emotional resonance, not accuracy. Leaders curate collective memory to shore up their legitimacy, and the idealization buries the inequalities and injustices those periods actually contained. The promise of restoration works as rhetoric and symbol. It unifies and motivates; it cannot bring back a past that never existed as remembered.
Which struggle gets invoked depends on national conditions. In Latin America, the authoritarian right-wing regimes of the past, the juntas of Brazil and Argentina, left openings for left populists championing workers and peasants behind charismatic leaders. In Europe, populism has historically run with authoritarian and xenophobic fascism, notably in Portugal and Spain. In the United States, Trump’s populism grew from ideological divisions reaching back to white supremacy and the Civil War.
Everywhere the ascendant leader claims authenticity while quietly courting the infrastructural powers, military elites, corporate financiers, party apparatchiks, that underwrite his authority. Populist movements are the residue of unresolved power struggles: one faction takes the institutions, and the disenfranchised energies left over are harvested by an influencer-like figure selling unmediated truth, himself dependent on the hidden machinery and gatekeepers of social control.
Iran and several Muslim-majority states run a version of the same game. Governments block sites and platforms in the name of political, cultural, or religious norms, and a clandestine market in circumvention tools grows in the shadow of the ban: VPNs, proxies, “filterbreaking” apps. Many of these tools are built or distributed by government-linked agencies, so the same authorities who ban content monitor the traffic and profit from citizens’ attempts to reach the open internet. The shadow market also lets the state collect data on its users’ true and taboo digital desires. Controlling both the filter and the paths around it, these governments manufacture a feeling of authenticity for anyone unaware of the twisted political economy underneath. Younger users experience unmediated access; they do not see how thoroughly the state’s infrastructural power decides what appears and what stays hidden.
How has the debilitated and confused Western left reckoned with all this? Badly.
Instead of devising a sounder, more pragmatic populism of its own, the left, with many art and academic institutions inside it, has micromanaged the tone and content of its populist messages, without paying even a superficial nod to free speech, populism’s alter ego. Hence the contradiction: the left postures as defender of the voiceless while obsessively vetting how the voiceless ought to speak.
Fixating on the message dodges the harder question. The project is doomed unless it reckons with infrastructural power, charismatic leadership, and a usable historical precedent or utopian future, the things that sustain any populism.
The left obsesses over the “how” of populism and ignores the who, the what, and the where. Economic and philanthropic gatekeepers sponsor diversity initiatives and inclusive exhibitions, and none of it shifts the basic condition: big money and Big Tech decide which discourses scale. Curated marginalized pain and identity confession become commodities, packaged for the woke cultural consumer market, a sub-economy serving the same infrastructural masters. And while collecting that revenue, the platform owners gaslight ordinary people into seeing the left’s woke populism as nothing more than filters clamped over their freedom of expression by economic and political elites.
In this world the museum curator, the conference organizer, and the editor of a progressive journal are dwarfed by algorithms operating invisibly at scale. Traditional institutions either adapt, producing whatever resonates with what’s trending, or accept irrelevance. Biennales chase trending themes for social media traction and cede curatorial authority to engagement metrics written in Silicon Valley. The savvy, political strongmen, attention-hungry celebrities, “unfiltered” artfluencers, seize disproportionate influence; even their brand of authenticity is shaped by the ad-driven infrastructure that decides how far any message travels.
Institutions that once considered themselves gatekeepers of taste, reason, and justice have become reactionary clients of the new overlords of data. The left’s program of “better and more effective gatekeeping” misses the point. Filters are unavoidable, and effective ones are invisible. Insisting on the correct filters backfires into a mere change of filters in the name of authenticity. Celebrating the two failed assassination attempts on Trump fed right-wing conspiracy theories about the true assassins, cemented Trump as a genuine hero in the American mind, and helped deliver his landslide. The other question the left refuses to ask is who owns the invisible filtering systems, and why.
The biggest obstacle to an emancipatory populism is the Western left’s reliance on state and media infrastructures, above all the digital platforms, whose filters shape all content while profiting from its polarizing effects. Ignoring that infrastructural power, the institutional left and the art world mistake their curated illusions of democracy for genuine expression of popular will. Wokism in politics, art, and culture was the left’s attempt to popularize high concepts from the academic humanities, and the attempt was botched from the start: imposed from the top down rather than growing from the grass roots, carried by the young and educated with only a thin minority of the older and less schooled, and never able to resolve the contradiction between the content of its claims and the institutional and technological infrastructure through which it sought an audience. It offered no authentic or charismatic leadership either.
The only path forward is to approach populism head on. Contest the private ownership of the platforms; challenge the monetization models that turn discourse into data-harvesting gold mines; and at the same time imagine how more democratic and emancipatory populisms might emerge, or be supported, in different historical contexts. Without addressing populism’s twisted structure, “resistance” stays a convenient Western myth, one that can no longer hide how completely leftist woke populism has failed to set the civilizational course.
The twisted structure of populism confronts democratic societies everywhere, and neither better institutional filters nor better rhetoric will secure cultural and political power in this era. High theory cannot save the left and the art world; woke populism already failed to. The figures winning the contest have mastered the formula: charismatic authenticity projected to mass audiences, combined with strategic collaboration with the private infrastructural gatekeepers of finance, technology, and even illicit power networks. Until progressive forces reckon with all three supports, infrastructure, leadership, and historical narrative, they fight at a structural disadvantage. Sophisticated ideas will not win the future. Command of populism’s twisted structure, turned toward genuinely emancipatory ends, might.