Jose Marichal has spent two decades studying what social media has done to politics — not just how campaigns use it, but what it's done to the way people relate to each other and to their own sense of political identity. In this conversation, Alexis and Jose trace a line from the early Facebook groups of the Obama campaign to the concept of \"ontological enclosure\" — Jose's term for the algorithmically constructed environment that walls off dissent and mistakes that narrowing for freedom. They also get into philosopher Byung-Chul Han's distinction between \"things\" (layered, resistant, worth sitting with) and \"non-things\" (smooth, optimized, immediately digestible), and what it means that we're building platforms — and selves — that reward the second kind. Jose's key provocation: the work of politics has always required moving someone 10% toward your position, and we've built an entire media environment that makes that feel both harder and less satisfying than simply performing rightness.
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