Not true, but let's pretend it is: then pick the parent item that's affecting all of the child items: aforementioned faux democracy. Then everything else falls into place.

But based on your various comments here, you don't seem interested in solving the root issues.

https://hckrnews.com

for a slightly different take on the concept

Why would we intentionally narrow the discussion like this?

That's something that pretend political parties do to prop up the interests of the uniparty of capital interests while squelching actual progress for the majority.

Seems irrelevant to the original point.

It would certainly hurt a consumption-based economy, for starters.

https://thoughtmaybe.com/the-century-of-the-self

Then corporate social media took things to the next level.

Only a subset. HN is not a monolith.

This is a good start for brainstorming:

https://www.noemamag.com/the-last-days-of-social-media/

Considering they basically own and operate the uniparty and its media apparatus, they have enormous influence over the entire electoral process and peoples' thoughts to a degree that makes any notions of 'democracy' illusory at best.

It was bad for decades, and then corporation-controlled social media brought the corruption to new heights.

It doesn't intentionally insert dark patterns into the platform.

It's not without flaws, of course, but it's 1+ orders of magnitude better than anything else.

/r/ZeroCovidCommunity continues to be growing community for good reason.

> I also struggle to see how it can be that different Presidents with often directly contradictory policies could both be serving the same ruling class interests.

Using the polarizing topic of COVID (whose risks remain in 2026) as an example, we can answer both of your questions:

https://www.thegauntlet.news/p/how-the-press-manufactured-co...

Which ultimately led to:

https://web.archive.org/web/20240802024326/https://docs.hous...

This can be applied to virtually any topic. The party of "good cop" and the party of "bad cop" promise no change from the status quo. Of course, anybody easily distracted by the culture wars will not see the commonality between both corporate parties, by design. These people see a close election and use that as "proof" we still have a functioning democracy.

But those four puppets served the same ruling class interests, and they manufactured consent for each other the whole time.

It's so blatantly intentional, and rather convenient how it props up the illusion of a functioning democracy by having the vote be so close. But no, according to you, that's all tin foil. Cool, enjoy your shithole country you helped create.

Straight from the source:

https://ladybird.org/posts/why-ladybird/