The most radical act: Intellectual curiosity as political resistance

Imagine walking into a library. You pull a volume of Marx from the shelf, and instantly – every conservative thinker dissolves into mist. Burke, Tocqueville, Hayek – gone. You reach for Chateaubriand, and suddenly Luxemburg, Gramsci, and Fanon vanish without a trace.
    If a librarian did this, we would call it censorship. If a government did it, we would call it propaganda. When an algorithm does it, we call it personalisation.
    This is the political condition of 2026.
    The central ideological conflict is no longer simply left versus right. It is human complexity versus algorithmic reduction. The machines that mediate our public life operate under a singular economic imperative: maximise engagement. Engagement means time. Time means data. Data means profit.
    Nuance is a drag on this business model. Nuance slows momentum, introduces doubt, invites reflection. Outrage, by contrast, scales beautifully. So the algorithm learns: if you consume Jordan Peterson, you will want ten more Petersons. If you quote Judith Butler, the rest of the intellectual world should disappear from your feed. What passes for a public square is in fact a hall of mirrors.
    The right complains that universities and cultural institutions have become ideological echo chambers. This is not entirely untrue. Yet the right has simultaneously constructed its own digital echo chambers, where every crisis – from inflation to climate instability – is reduced to a single cultural scapegoat.
    The left warns that reactionary populism and conspiracy culture are metastasising across the internet. This is not entirely untrue either. But the left has also cultivated spaces where questioning certain orthodoxies brings swift excommunication.
    Both sides profess horror at polarisation. Both sides are exquisitely optimised for it. Algorithms did not invent tribalism – human beings were already formidable at that. What they did was industrialise it, transforming cognitive bias into infrastructure.
    Historically, intellectual life was built on productive friction. Orwell engaged both socialists and conservatives. Arendt critiqued capitalism and revolutionary dogma with equal severity. Baldwin dismantled liberal hypocrisy and conservative racism in the same paragraph. Today, the algorithm politely spares us such inconvenience. It determines that if you admire Baldwin, you must never encounter Sowell. If you quote Sowell, you must never read Davis. The result is not ideological clarity. It is intellectual atrophy.
    The deepest effect of algorithmic life is not merely polarisation but a peculiar form of secularisation. Not the disappearance of religion, but something more insidious. Traditional societies were bound by shared narratives – religious, philosophical, civic – that anchored identity in something larger than the self. The algorithm replaces these with micro-tribes, defined entirely by what you click, what you seethe over, what you performatively condemn. You no longer join a community; you subscribe to a feed. Feeds require constant stimulation. Outrage becomes ritual, scandal becomes liturgy, cancellation becomes excommunication. Welcome to the algorithmic church, where engagement metrics serve as gods and retweets as sacraments.
    The irony is exquisite. Both the radical left and the radical right cast themselves as resistance movements. Both are among the most efficient products of the system they claim to oppose. Algorithms reward the loudest voices, the sharpest insults, the simplest narratives. This is why thoughtful political thinkers rarely trend. A viral tweet is not the natural habitat of Amartya Sen or Isaiah Berlin. But it is the perfect habitat for ideological gladiators. The algorithm loves a fight – preferably one that never concludes.
    Defenders of algorithmic culture offer a familiar rejoinder: no one forces you to watch anything. Technically true. But the same defence could be offered for a library where half the books vanish depending on which volume you open first. Choice without exposure is not freedom. It is curated ignorance.
    The most radical act available today is deceptively simple: read someone you disagree with. Open Marx and Hayek in the same afternoon. Read Fanon and Burke. Let Baldwin argue with Sowell in your own head. The algorithm will resist this – it will try to pull you back into the familiar, the affirming, the outrage that keeps you scrolling.
    Resist anyway. Because the real danger of the digital age is not that we disagree. It is that the machines have quietly arranged it so that we never truly encounter one another. To break that arrangement is no longer just an intellectual habit. It is a political act. •

Source: Transcend Media Service of 25 May 2026

* Raïs Neza Boneza (born 1979, Zaire – now the Democratic Republic of the Congo) is a writer, poet, and peace researcher based in Norway. His life traces the fault lines he writes about: from eastern and western Congo to the Africans Great Lakes, across borders where history rarely stays still. Multilingual and transnational, he works across African and European languages, carrying oral memory into written form. He has collaborated with Johan Galtung, one of the founders of modern peace research, and continues to operate at the intersection of scholarship, activism, and artistic expression. Beyond his roles as consultant and lecturer for international NGOs and institutions, he is co-convener of Transcend Global Network, a global platform dedicated to peace, development, and environmental justice. His work moves between poetry and political analysis, exile and return, memory and resistance. Selected publications include Peace by African’s Peaceful Means (2005), Nomad: Sounds of Exile (2006), Nomad: A Refugee Poet (2019), White Eldorado, Black Fever (2019), Black Emeralds (2020), and Formless (2024).