When you feel like you can’t do anything to change the outcome of a bad situation, you begin to act differently. If you gave up on politics achieving anything for you, how would you behave? What would you do if you had just a few days left to live? Would you start trying to get rid of your man boobs and cut our carbs, waiting for the end to come? In an unpredictable political climate, there are many reasons why people might act in a way which others find inexplicable, but perhaps what we’re witnessing is what happens when people lose hope, and when they realise they can’t imagine a solution. When you can’t see the benefits of traditional politics, perhaps people lose interest in being rational.

When you stop trying to alter what you can’t fix, how you act becomes instead a question of agency. The Labour Party seem to have acted differently in the face of near-certain failure. Rather than picking someone more electable than a Miliband brother, they gave up. Picking Jeremy Corbyn was like celebrating a diagnosis of Type 2 Diabetes by eating a deep-fried Mars Bar. Despite this, the echo chamber of people who see everything that happens as a victory for Jeremy Corbyn seems like a deliberate act of self-sabotage. Deluded commentators peddle a panglossian analysis to supporters willfully ignoring political realities. “Things could not look better for the leadership right now” one young Corbynite columnist wrote on Saturday. If the sun rises tomorrow, that will be a victory for Jeremy Corbyn. To a particular breed of commentator each passing day provides signs that we are entering a post-capitalist era in which the left will be ascendant. The act of supporting Corbyn, like Sanders in America, seems to be less a political calculation and more an emotional expression.

There is plenty to be pessimistic about. Wages are stagnating, February was the warmest month in history, and intergenerational inequality is a national scandal. Young people are having children later, owning homes later, and not earning as much as they should. Things are going backwards for a generation growing up to inherit an economic and environmental debt from older generations busy ensuring that their economic status is precarious. This and all of the recent government fallout should provide the perfect conditions for a resurgent Labour Party, but its supporters seem to have given up on the idea of winning, by choosing a protester over a potential Prime Minister.

The feeling of despair at the prospects of anything changing has been accelerated by the democratisation of communication. 10 years of Twitter has altered the tone of our communication: there is no real quality filter to political debate. If politics was ever the cool-headed discussion of pragmatic possibilities, it seems for an increasing number to be an emotional pursuit of nebulous dreams rather than specific goals. With the democratisation of political debate came briefly the illusion of influence, in some ways increasing the exasperation when those tweets into the darkness fail to achieve anything. For many cyber-campaigners, the passion of politicking for causes online has given way to trollish zeal as they see outcomes unaffected by their influence.

This means that whenever there is a genuine opportunity to influence something, from spending £3 to elect a Labour Leader, or voting to name a ship Boaty McBoatface, the uncorked exuberance of those who rarely have any significant influence, and who have given up on being able to effect real, meaningful change, results in the “wrong” outcome. Perhaps the gap between expectation and reality, the frustration of those who feel they have little to lose, means that people don’t look rationally and calmly at these opportunities: they click on Boaty McBoatface, or Jeremy Corbyn, desperate and thrilled at the chance to make a tiny difference, to be part of the outcome sustained by all the other clicks from people who just want to prod at a system which they feel ignores them. Corbyn has ended up being Labour’s Boaty McBoatface. For many, the EU referendum is a chance to "reclaim" a bygone Britain: they can’t take Britain back to the days of empire, they can’t change London’s ethnic mix, so pulling us out of the EU is the next best alternative. All of this is bad news for common sense and rationality.

If people want to feel things by participating because they have given up on politics achieving solutions for them, then political elections will change completely. Trump doesn’t provide solutions, he provides a way of venting anger: there are obviously many voters whose problems are so big and insoluble that they'd rather be angry or use their vote in a less than pragmatic way. All of this unpredictability in modern politics may just be a sign that people have stopped treating it as an answer to life’s problems, and as a form of entertainment instead. If they have, the results won’t be very funny.