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 something larger, and that belonging often needs an opposite. Social psychologists call this tendency social identity: humans strengthen self-image by affiliating with a group and defining an out-group to contrast it against. When Kaito whispered “us” into the city’s square chatrooms and paired it with a clear “them,” the undercurrent of irritation that had been drifting across the neighborhoods took form.
Kaito’s first act was purely rhetorical. He paid a tired copywriter to craft the framing: the city’s problem was not boredom, not taxation, not even bad traffic — the problem was a culture of “comfort profiteers,” people and organizations that prospered on keeping everyone placated and atomized. The phrase was repeated, shortened, memed — and with each retelling it did what frames always do: it selected which facts mattered and made them salient, giving a lens through which every other argument could be judged. Framing, scholars have long shown, is how public discourse converts messy facts into a manageable political story.
Words were only step one. Kaito built a campaign of micro-gestures engineered for an algorithmic age. He seeded short videos with high emotional salience, timed posts to match when certain clusters of users were most active, and nudged sympathetic micro-influencers to link to each other so that engagement would cascade. Those cascades were not accidental: modern ranking systems reward interactions and salience, and by optimizing for clicks and reactions a message can multiply far beyond its original audience. The effect was familiar to platform engineers — content that crystallizes a shared identity and a named adversary propagates faster than nuance. Recent research into ranking and engagement shows how such dynamics can amplify polarization when platforms prioritize what holds attention.
At first, Kaito cared only about forming a majority — getting a quorum of citizens to sign a petition to reallocate the city’s advertising budget into youth programs. The tactic worked: where meetings had been scattered, now attendance rose; small, previously apathetic clusters sent messages of support; the mayor’s office felt the pressure of trending tags. But with success came the old patterns everyone knew too well. The “comfort profiteers” label hardened into caricature, and people who had once been part of the same working groups found themselves in debates that carried moral weight rather than policy nuance.
Kaito’s colleague, Dr. Hara — a sociologist who’d written about propaganda models and the manufacture of consent — pulled him aside. “Naming an enemy corrals attention,” she said, “but it also simplifies the story people tell themselves about reality. Chomsky and others observed how political systems and media sometimes need a visible adversary to mobilize consent. That works in emergencies, but it has costs in pluralistic governance.” Kaito felt the force of that warning in the private messages that flooded his inbox: threats and pleas, gratitude and the sudden discovery of old grudges long dormant.
Weeks later, the petition passed. The youth programs received funding. Playgrounds were repaired. In the small hours after the vote, Kaito walked the neighborhoods he had once only watched on a screen. He heard laughter at a corner pop-up concert and saw two former planning-board rivals sharing tea on a bench. He also found a barista who had lost a contract because a local vendor, now labeled a “comfort profiteer,” was boycotted by a newly united customer base.
Kaito’s victory taught him what the papers of his spreadsheets could not: an engineered majority can deliver goods, but the mechanism by which it forms leaves scars. The act of defining an opponent converts diffuse dissatisfaction into a purpose-driven coalition, which is precisely why movements and institutions across history — from grassroots campaigns to state propaganda — have used the tactic. But the coalition’s moral clarity is often paid for with a narrowing of the public imagination: nuance fades, demonization increases, and platforms designed to reward attention deepen the divide.
In the epilogue, Kaito rewrote his original sentence. It became: “We are not under siege by indifference — we are under siege by our own quick answers.” He set aside the spreadsheet and helped convene a new series of neighborhood salons where the first rule was to tell the story of an opposing view, in full, without interruption. Attendance was thin at first; algorithmic winds favor simpler storms over slow conversations. But some nights, a handful of people sat with coffee lamps and read one another’s essays aloud. They did not dissolve the divides overnight. 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.
All names of people and organizations appearing in this story are pseudonyms
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