Hyperpolitics: Extreme Politicization without Political Consequences
- Author: Anton Jäger
- Page count: 128
- Started on: 2026/10/13
- Finished on: 2026/10/16
- Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
-
In Hyperpolitics, Anton Jäger explores how we got to the current state of politics: everything feels intensely political, yet very little changes. He does this by looking at four historical phases:
- mass politics (1914-1989, ending with the fall of the Berlin Wall) with its strong parties, labor unions, and other collective movements.
- post-politics (1989-2008, the financial crisis) with rapidly declining engagement and the rise of technocratic consensus.
- anti-politics (2008-2020, the COVID-19 pandemic ), where populist movements (such as Occupy) challenge the establishment.
- hyperpolitics[^1] (2020-present), where people engage with specific topics again, but without the lasting organizations to sustain that engagement.
In Jäger’s thesis, we’ve become better at expressing our (political) opinions and mobilizing around controversies, but we no longer translate that energy into building the institutions that traditionally would convert it into longer-lasting (political) power.
I learned about Hyperpolitics from one of Cory Doctorow’s posts. This book is pretty far from my “normal” reading, but It was fascinating to read Jäger’s analysis of each historical political phase and his take on the causes of the transitions. I just wish it had been written in a bit more accessible language, even if that meant increasing the page count.
[^1] I’m writing these terms as the author does, even though the inconsistency triggers my OCD.
