They did, however, begin to practice the harder art of making a majority without manufacturing an enemy — a practice that, in an age of algorithmic amplification and instantaneous frames, might be the most specialized skill of all.… He started with a spreadsheet and a sentence. The spreadsheet listed neighborhoods, hashtags, local influencers, and the times their followers woke up. The sentence was simpler: “We are under siege — not by tanks, but by indifference.” Say the sentence aloud, and the sleepy fractures of a city — commuters who never spoke, cafe owners who nodded past one another, members of the same planning board who arrived to meetings with their minds elsewhere — suddenly had someone to rally against. His name was Kaito. He was not a politician so much as a systems designer who had learned to read the small motions of social life the way other people read weather. He knew that people prefer to think of themselves as part of...