The power play of ‘Geometric politics’

What is a political idea, if not an abstraction, an actualizing object, albeit flattened, handled, spun, pushed, and rejected? In a digital era and environment designed to reward indexability over insight and perceptive rigidity over intellectual flexibility, all meaningful political content that tends to trend, largely lends toward trivialization and objectification. Actual ideas are no longer deliberated, only obfuscated. Little is understood amid the mass mid-witted chaos, political plots only parsed and passed between profiles like tokens and toys for clicks and ridiculous credulity.

This piece introduces a explanatory model that illustrates, in the simplest of perceptible geometric terms, how nominalization disfigures and denies political discourse. Nominalization refers to the syntactic process by which dynamic, contextual, or structurally embedded political understandings are turned into fixed but readily political predicates which can be tracked, opposed, monetized, neutered, and ultimately, if need be, neutralized. The resulting nominal objects become the fundamental units of online activist politics, feeding algorithmic control and the mass amplification of trivial and performative discourse where actual thought is flattened into inert formats.

To further aid comprehension and indulge a touch of sensible structural humor, I will illustrate the dynamics with three familiar shapes: the beach ball, the rectangle, and the triangle.

The «Beach Ball»: the popular, palpable position

Social media algorithms love rotund, feckless ideas. Concepts that bounce off each other and generate cheap friction. Mute labels like «conservative», «liberal», or «racist» carry no precision but immense mass re- and no-cognition. Their political kinetic potential is nearly limitless. The beach ball is tossed, spiked, caught, spun endlessly, and monetized through frictionless engagement. It is ideal substance made of emptiness, inflated with symbolic air, and easily transacted in the attention economy. Like sports, but with even more backward and mindless slogans.

In this very sense, the «beach ball» is the perfect online opinion and food for thought for plebeians and the true basic template of mass participation. It is the «basic bitch» approach to politics, ideologically vacuous, emotionally charged, and endlessly repackaged. Its value lies not in coherence or truth, but in its ability to float upward, to be thrown about, to be seen. A beach ball argument is inherently designed to provoke or project, not to dissect. It thrives particularly when bumping off other beach balls, resulting in a frantic simulation of free-for-all discourse where nothing is ever penetrated, nothing is ever resolved, yet all future potential and enthusiasms still well preserved.

In political terms, the beach ball is the nominalized object par excellence. Once a complex or contested issue, say immigration, is processed through the cultural machinery, it is inflated into a label like «racist» or «anti-racism», «good versus bad». It becomes ‘bounceable», a cheap power play that can’t move or pierce anything. It will surely float, spin. rebound back and forth between rigid factions with equal popular pull, but proportionate zero tangible depth besides its own kayfabe bounce. Always present, however, never decisive. Nothing but a recurring prop in a never-ending political show off.

The Rectangle: the rigid, putative paradigm

The rectangle is more a political format than an active position. A seemingly comprehensive containment grid. It presents as substantial by virtue of repetition and surface regularity. Aesthetic symmetry lends the illusion of depth. Its ideological content is inherited, templated, and flattened into reproducible elements: historical sentimentality, moral atomism, economic slogans. The monolith rectangle asserts and relies on conventional assumptions, and its main function is political filtration. What may enter is processed through institutional assertions. What exits is sloganized, stripped of conceptual force and agility. The rectangle rewards deference over insight. Its boundaries are fixed and guarded, epistemically and socially. When confronted, the rectangle flattens into compliance, offers its broadside as resistance, and feigns dynamic friction through stylized fragility. No penetrative potential, no traction, no real forward transformative movement. Only recursive repetition of format popularly mistaken for ideological stability and assured wisdom.

Hence, when the beach ball meets the rectangle, there is no possible political synthesis as the nominalized object does not pierce the paradigm, nor does the paradigm absorb or recontextualize the object. Instead, the ball bounces predictably and performatively. The rectangle offers just enough surface tension to simulate some form of resistance, while the beach ball retains its form. Nothing is learne and nothing is lost. But both are seen, sounds are said to be heard, somewhere. What is on display is not necessarily for sale, nor genuinely popular, but often not much more than a flimsy front. A wall of scanty mediocrity.

This spectacle of feebleness sustains the rectangle. It thrives not by merit, but by enduring mediocrity with the confidence of inherited authority. The more it absorbs meaningless impact, the more it appears serious to the masses. It collects passive allegiance through non-engagement and simulates ideological gravity while remaining an abstraction. .

But the rectangle cannot evolve. Rather, it revolves around rigidity without trajectory, orbiting its own flatness, sustained by ideological inanity and the illusion of further relevance.

The Triangle: the actualizing apex of edge

True and consistent ideas with structural consequence and conviction, function like triangles in this geometrical field of interaction. These true triangles can be symmetrical, but not blunted. Their angles remain honed for impact and exert pressure. A triangle cuts and punctures flat assumptions, destabilizes narratives, and provokes necessary discomfort.

Docile algorithms reject the triangle. To platforms engineered for repetition and reflex, the triangle is unsound. It does not yield to predefinition. It cannot be indexed, flattened, or looped into circular engagement farming. It offers no vacuous comfort, no affective dopamine, no frictionless monetization. Its virality is potent, but its niche too narrow. Most users cannot process its utility, because that utility demands structural recognition. The triangle is not a format but a form with internal direction. It signals incision, solidity, and hierarchy.

This is why real theory, conceptual clarity, and cutting analysis are absent from digital political life. Because they cut too deeply.

They cannot be spun or rebranded. They are not playable. A triangle cannot be converted into identity, lifestyle, or community. It remains recalcitrant and real. And so it is ignored, misread, or removed altogether.

Yet among all forms, it is the strongest, creates apt angles, concentrates the force of real ideas. Meanwhile, the ball bounces and the rectangle rests, the triangle carves; surely capable of slicing through both with precision and consequence, while itself remaining intact, only possibly sharpened by the very resistance that flattens the others

In digital environments systematically predicated on circulation, political thought ceases to function as structure. Conceptual pressure collapses under algorithms that reward pliability over confrontation. Actual forceful ideas, those requiring reflection or resistance, are necessarily not viable within the system. They get sifted or stifled due to the basic lack of surface velocity, political pliancy, and social liquidity.

A triangular idea, sharpened by internal coherence and directional thrust, resists platform rhythm, and its form is too dense to be filtered and too angular to be conveniently curtailed.

What swells into view and seeps upward in the social media slop pool are the replicable forms: the «beach ball» and the hollow «rectangle». One revolves around provocation without anchor. The other reflects a rigidity mistaken for depth. Together, they circulate without consequence, performing simulated collision without ever touching structure

The result is a suppressed ecosystem of simulated antagonism where arguments spiral, reflexes calcify, symbols compound. But beneath the churn, the political substrate remains still and strengthened as the labile ‘content’ of memes and mimicked movement retain massless stability.

Geometry as conceptual clarity

This «geometrization» of political discourse is more than a cringe metaphor. It is a functional abstraction in truth for fluently understanding why next to little of political value thrives or survives the algorithmic attention economy space. What appears as discourse is often wholly inflated simulation and mass manipulation. Different shapes do collide, bounce, and flux, but the true political crux and the sovereign decisions, the structural insights, the systemic threats, those are kept permanently offstage or pre-modelled, behind the vicarious veil of play.

Put perfectly plainly, «beach ball» reasoning multiplies itself, while rectangular paradigms mirror each other, feeding on vapid interaction and sustaining their own ideological stasis. Only triangle-shaped ideas introduce real contextual contrast: sharp, deliberate, and structurally involatile. They alone can pierce, dismantle, or reconfigure the other forms entirely, potentially synthesizing thought.

Which is why it wont go viral.

Social media has made stupidity more efficient, profitable and certainly visible. This is bread and circuses 3.0; memes, metrics, social self-branding and manipulative monetization schemes. General nominalization has geometrized cognition and popular politics into such predictable, manipulable forms, that it has rendered structural insight and supposed criticism into a non-playable, ineffective, sickly shape and state.

Which is why it must go viral. Because the show must go on.