If you need a relatively “safe” political topic to get people talking, “polarization” is an easy one. The idea that people increasingly have taken sides on political issues is not new, but it certainly seems to have grown more acute in recent years. Not only have the battle lines been drawn more dramatically, but an interesting dehumanization of opposing viewpoints has occurred. It’s no longer a mere question of my views being “correct” and you being somewhere on the spectrum of regrettably misinformed, to low-grade ignoramus, my viewpoint has now taken on an air of religious infallibility, rendering anyone who disagrees an infidel that must be silenced, squashed, and one whose passing would not only generate little lament, but could be publicly celebrated.

It’s the metastasizing of certainty into dogma, and disagreement into “denialism” that’s a danger to our republic, however it’s probably the best thing that’s ever happened to an emerging class of politicians. Allow me to elaborate.

How marketing became surgical

If we want to understand how our politics seemingly went wrong, we need to understand some basic points about marketing as they’re inexorably intertwined. Marketing in the “good old days” that ran until the mid-2000’s was similar to warfare in WWII. You had a broad goal, for example destroy the enemy’s ability to produce the tanks, airplanes, and rifles to wage war. To do that, you knew you had to take out the factories building these objects, but the best tool at your disposal was a lumbering aircraft dropping bombs from high altitude, where “success” was dropping a 500lb bomb within a 1000′ radius of the target.

Marketing was similar. If you had a product to sell to active young men, you might buy some airtime during a football game, the equivalent of dropping your marketing message out of a B-17 from 10,000′ and hoping it landed vaguely near your target.

That all changed a bit over a decade ago due to two overarching factors. First off, we began to understand that marketing was less about traditional demographics (age, gender, geography, race, etc.) and more about a very specific archetype of the ideal customer that the industry dubbed a “persona.” Instead of targeting my product at “college-educated women in zip code 90210 with an income of $50,000-$99,999,” I would target my product to “Betty,” an Asian or Hispanic woman that went to college in the northeast and received a degree in mathematics, who shops at Trader Joe’s and spends 12% of her discretionary income on high-end athleisure wear. You might say that seems awfully specific, but with nothing more than a phone number or email address, I can get this level of detailed information on just about anyone in the United States from a variety of vendors.

Most of us know, but ignore, the fact that we’ve been providing these data to marketing companies for years, and social media has accelerated the ability for organizations to gather intimate details about or life, from nuanced spending habits, to which Kardashian is our favorite. What less people are aware of is the other incredible and terrible innovation on the marketing front: industrialized A/B testing.

Simply put, if I want to decide whether a specific group of people prefers red hats, or green hats, I can take an image of someone wearing a hat, and create two copies, one with a red hat and one with a green hat. I add a “Buy Now” button, and pay my favorite social media company or an aggregator to randomly display one of the two images to my “Bettys,” who I believe want to buy hats. That social media company can show my two hats to tens, hundreds, or millions of people that fit my criteria, and at the end of the day I know definitively which color hat the “Bettys” of the world want.

How politics became marketing

So who cares about which color hat some synthetic human wants to buy? Not me, but apply the same two concepts to politics. If I’m a benevolent politician who truly cares about his or her constituents, I could test two nuanced messages about an upcoming policy I’m putting forth, and see how people react to those messages, ultimately advancing the one that resonates with my constituents.

So far, so good. Let’s say I’m a bit less benevolent and facing a tough reelection campaign and I want to find out what gets my base really fired up. I might have a “sponsored” twitter account I control post “Opposition Guy is a misguided soul who otherwise wants what’s best for the country,” and another account post “Opposition Guy is a borderline fascist that wants to take away your rights and eats baby kittens!” I simply see which post gets the most retweets and go with that message. In a matter of hours I could even refine whether the “fascist” descriptor or the kitten eating gets people the most fired up, and tune the message from there. In the early 2000’s the old school pols were barely on their second martini while the upstarts that figured out how to use marketing techniques on their campaigns had refined their line of attack 300 times, and landed on the perfect set of keywords for each persona they wanted to address.

I don’t have any insider information on the political side of this, so my hope is that politicians started with using these near-magical powers for good rather than jumping right into the attack, but in either case, they tapped into an unexploited goldmine: dopamine.

Dopamine is the new gold

Most of us remember from high school biology that dopamine is the “feel good” brain chemical, and it’s essentially the way our lizard brain says “attaboy” when we do something that helps preserve ourselves or our species. Eat a solid meal when hungry, you get some dopamine. Go for a run (which might have been felling from a hungry saber tooth tiger), you get some dopamine. Reproduce (or at least practice), here’s your dopamine. Win a fight against an enemy coming after you or your tribe? You guessed it: dopamine.

What all the A/B testing of political messages eventually arrived at was pure magic. Our lizard brains are wired to reward us when we fend off “the enemy.” Therefore, if politicians could turn an otherwise reasonable human who just had a slightly different take on an issue into “the enemy,” they could become your dopamine dealer every time they launched a zinger at the enemy. Ever post something nasty, or share that snarky post about “the fascists” or “the libtards” and feel that tiny jolt of pure glee? It’s the same heady stuff that’s kept people engaged with everything from cults to political parties, and with the digital marketing tools now at their disposal, politicians, digital and traditionally media companies, and other less savory actors can refine those messages, put each of us into a custom-built ideological cage, and feed us dopamine to the point that we never want to leave.

Nice CAC, bro

This brings us to what I believe is an outcome no one really expected, but the ultimate reason we’ll never see the political or media class do anything to walk back rampant partisanship, and it all has to do with another marketing term: CAC or Customer Acquisition Cost. CAC is the monetary cost it takes to get you as a new customer, and it’s a cousin of switching cost, which is your cost of switching to another product or service. These two metrics are what industries like cable TV or cell phone providers live and die by. If I have a high cost of acquiring a new customer to my cell phone network, I want to make sure you have an immense switching cost so you stay on my network for years once I’ve acquired you.

In the old days of politics, CAC, in this case for a vote rather than a customer, was high. Each election I’d have to spend time explaining my platform, convincing you of my years of diligently representing you, and why my policies were superior to the other options. Your switching costs were extremely low. Unless you were a public figure, you didn’t have much of a “paper trail” of the positions you supported, and if someone came along with what seemed like a better policy, you could “vote you conscious” with minimal fear of retribution.

Now, it doesn’t cost me much to acquire you as a customer. The marketing companies can give me such a detailed profile of your habits and demographics I can quickly decide if you’re:

• Already in my camp
• Someone I can persuade
• In the other camp

I don’t have to spend any money on the first or last option, and I can probably hone in on what’s important to you based on the data I have, and keep bombarding you with different messages until I get your goat on something, and then pull you into my camp. Maybe it’s healthcare, maybe it’s guns, maybe it’s climate, or whatever, right out of the gate I probably know the two 4 issues, and then I just A/B test until I’ve sucked you in.

My CAC is incredibly low, since all of this is done digitally, and I don’t have to waste time coming up with fancy policies or even have much of a track record. In fact, it’s now a selling point that I haven’t done a damn thing while in office (assuming I’m an incumbent) because that would mean I’ve had to compromise with “the enemy.” If I’m running against an incumbent that’s actually done the people’s work and passed a law or two, I can tar that sucker with acquisitions of “selling out” and straying from the true path.

Even more awesome, your switching costs are astronomical. Have you spent five years retweeting all that stuff about “those pesky 1%’ers” but now that you’re making a few bucks feeling the sting of progressive taxation? You certainly can’t walk back what amounts to a lifetime of posts and “switch sides!”

Can we ruin the best job in America?

We the people have created what amounts to the best job in America. You get access to the levers of power, a government pension, a sweet and well-paid gig as a lobbyist should you mess up and get voted out, and supporters that laud you when you do absolutely nothing. All you have to do is occasionally appear on whatever media outlet roots for your team and bad mouth those sub-human ne’er do wells on the other side.

It’s not only a sweet gig, but the people that are most harmed by this arrangement are also the dopamine fiends with mouths agog and fingers on the twitter trigger, waiting for that next zinger they can be the first to retweet so they can get their hit when their “friends” on the interwebs nod in tribal righteousness. Nothing will happen until we break the dopamine addiction, which any heroin, booze, coke or other former addict to synthetic means of dopamine generation can tell you is not a trivial matter. We can wring our hands and gnash our teeth all we want, but if we return to our keyboards for our hit immediately after, we’ll never break the cycle.

Anti-social media

Try some anti-social media. It’s hard in the era of COVID, but step away from the device and have a chat with someone and really seek to hear and understand their perspective on an issue rather than trying to drop in that zinger you heard online followed by a touchdown dance after spiking the ball in their face. You might find that they actually want the same important stuff you do: a healthy and happy family, a clean and habitable planet, respect and reasonable treatment for people of every race color and creed; and any disagreement is nuanced rather than heretical. We’re not actually personas bumbling around and waiting to be manipulated into buying a half-baked product, whether it’s a physical good or a politician. Once we break our dopamine addiction, we can see this manipulation for what it is, and demand better of our politicians and media companies, by demanding better of ourselves.