Our Posts Are the Ammunition

Guest Contribution by Annekathrin Kohout

Do you remember the scene from Jumanji when the dice lands on the magical board? At that moment, something is on the verge of happening that can no longer be stopped, you can feel it. Every move pulls the players in further, condemning them to their fate. That scene is 30 years old but it’s exactly what social media feels like in 2025, like a giant game, and once you’re in, you’re at its mercy. Every post, every comment, every silence becomes a tactic. The rules are virtually impossible to decipher, but the consequences can be felt virtually every day.

I analyse this dynamic in my book Hyper-Reactive: How the Battle for Interpretive Power Is Fought on Social Media. What began as an online tool promising democratic participation has developed into a culture in which feedback in no longer voluntary, it’s obligatory. The French philosopher Jean Baudrillard once described the mass media of the 20th century as “speech without response.” Media such as television, radio, or newspaper were linear and, thus, viewers and readers consumed content but did not interact, and only very rarely could they respond. As a consequence, they may well have been outraged, moved, or inspired, but their feelings were “left hanging”, as the philosopher of technology Günther Anders put it.

Social media provided an incredible alternative to this concept: finally, we could respond. Finally, we could react, comment, participate in debates, take control and express what we felt, it was a triumph for participation. Nothing had to be left hanging anymore.

And yet this breakthrough, this transformation of the audience into active participants – frequently referred to as democratization – quickly turned into the opposite. I refer to the current social media landscape as “response without discussion”, as a culture of reaction. The content hardly matters anymore, it’s all about what reactions it gets. The original “speech” – in Baudrillard’s words – whether it be video, text, or image, becomes a point of departure, a mere springboard. Summarizing my thesis in her column, in media res, Samira El Ouassil put it as follows: “the event becomes a footnote of its own reception”.

What’s more, reactions are often a more aggressive and confrontational form of communication than original statements. Reacting means having a concrete reference point – a provocation, an allegation, an attack. The reaction thus appears justified, even necessary, despite the fact it may be harsher than the original trigger. Reacting legitimizes its own severity: I’m not aggressive, I was forced into this. What’s more, every remark is up for discussion. From one moment to the next, you could be hit by a virtual tidal wave of interpretations. In my book, I refer to such instrumental and destructive reactions as “hyper-interpretations”. This behaviour is encouraged on social media and can be seen in the obsessive examination of every remark, video, and image for hidden agendas. The radicalization of suspicion this entails has become part of daily life.

The platforms train us, the users, to become strategists, sometimes without us even noticing. We calculate in private which holiday photos send the right message, which friendships to make visible, and which are better kept “private”. Content creators optimise not only their posts for better reach but also their supposed authenticity – even “honest” vulnerability becomes a calculated performance. Brands and influencers engage in elaborate personal branding in which every partnership, every political opinion, every instance of silence is scrutinized for its brand value and target audience appeal. When it comes to political activism, every statement is evaluated to determine if its correct, if it’s the right moment, if you’re is on the right side, or if it would perhaps be better to stay out of it and not leave yourself open to attack. Even solidarity has become a strategic decision: who do we speak out with? Whose posts do we share? Which hashtags do we use?

Strategy does not begin and end with individual calculation. The presence of (geo)political influence equally permeates social media. After all, these platforms are the technological arena of what is variously referred to as “soft power”, “culture wars”, or “information warfare”. Our feeds show us travel videos from North Korea with Western influencers lauding the “hospitality” of the locals, clips from Shenzhen celebrating progress in Chinese society, and threads decrying German politics as naive, the Western press as deceitful, and democracy an unaffordable luxury. As for the USA, they flood the place with absolute garbage, and this, in turn, is extensively discussed as a strategy to manipulate attention.

An equally dominant subject concerns the fact that while right-wing and authoritarian powers explicitly use hyper-interpretations or reaction-provoking memes as a weapon in culture wars, the political left is caught up between its reluctance to use irony, on the one hand, and a sort of virtuous seriousness, on the other. The right, apparently, have won the culture wars, because they make easily digestible and viral memes that are not laden with moral baggage. In contrast, the left – which, we are told, does not even exist anymore – is getting in its own way: they’re too critical of the culture industry, too woke, too moral. They prefer lengthy discussions as to what the best strategic reaction is. Should we be responding with memes of our own? Expose their tactics? Refuse to play the game altogether? Each of these strategies are weighed up in panels and podcasts. But is this really the point? Or is it just another strategic narrative that sidesteps the real question: who profits when we debate like this?

Hyper-reactivity has become a self-reinforcing machine? Every click, every moment of indignation, every well-intended explanation: it all feeds the algorithm. Everything becomes ammunition in the battle for narrative control.

It’s completely exhausting. The media scientist, Geert Lovink, describes this affective exhaustion extensively in his new book, Platform Brutality: “You’re far in. When comments flush through the veins, videos encircle your brain and symbols strangle the nerves, you realise the soul is cut. Alienated from your inflated profile, all selfies hurt. [...] There’s a need to get lucky in a way that is no longer possible.” This is not a peripheral phenomenon, but the emotional undercurrent of a culture steeped in strategic self-perception.

I think we need to accept the fact that there’s no easy way out of this, at least not one that would not itself be a strategic move. This does not justify resignation, of course. It is simply the act of recognising that strategic thinking is now so baked into our communication that even the analysis of these mechanisms becomes another move in the game, this text included.

The book “Hyper-reactive: How the battle for interpretive power is fought on social media” by Annekathrin Kohout is available in German language from Wagenbach Verlag. She presented the book at Publix on 23 October.

Photo credit: Valentina Seidel