This is a great article, but it wants to be book. Very heavy on (interesting) background, then never getting around to reintegration / light on conclusions. I also think it lost the thread on the very interesting question that was posed at the start, and never really returned.

Why are aesthetics in media and elsewhere converging towards a homogeneous blob of everywhere-consistent, but meanwhile politics has exploded into a kind of anything-goes mess where there is consensus on nothing? (If the answer is supposed to be "protocols", I guess you can make that work but that feels like a non-answer, similar to how "money" as an answer kind of works but doesn't directly explain much.) Maybe the two things are even unrelated, but the effects are extreme and concurrent, so it seems unlikely to be a coincidence.. and I admit I am kind of expecting an answer along the lines of "same process/forces at different stages". And thinking along those lines, converging on complete consensus in political thinking sounds even worse than zero consensus, probably looks like an accelerating slide towards fascism.