Identity politics is a misnomer; it is rather a politics of identities. While it is (seemingly) left-wing politics that is mainly called out on it, in view of its focus on the protection of minorities, it can’t be ignored that the right-wing rhetoric of nationalism, chauvinism, or religion revolves equally around identitarian categories. It seems that identity is a hot topic, regardless one’s political stance. We might therefore ask ourselves, if this simple opposition, of those trying to protect minorities against those that try to protect hegemonial identities, is not actually part of a completely different dynamic, which is not primarily political, but economical. In this sense the two positions sketched above wouldn’t concern a politics, but rather different economies of identities. Seen in that light, the subversion that each ‘side’ likes to claim, either through the novelty of giving once invisible members of society a voice, or through the reappropriation of a fading hegemony, should be rather understood as parts of a dynamic that is inherent to the contemporary, neoliberal form of capitalism.

We can, on the one hand, observe a segmentation of the economy into specific markets, pertaining to specific target audiences, which we could call minorisation, and, on the other hand, the creation of territories or normative spaces, on which this segmentation can take place, which we could call majorisation. This double dynamic can be easily observed with Facebook: Even though it was once targeted at students, as several other similar social media platforms were before, it can nowadays not be said to have a target audience. Basically everyone uses it, so there is not one typical or standard user; it has undergone majorisation. While it was still minoritary, targeted at students staying in touch with each other, there was, one could say, a singular experience of using the site, with some individual nuances. But what has happened in the course of its majorisation is the dissolution of such a singular experience into a plurality, where even staying in touch with others can no longer be considered the primary activity; with forwarded links to news articles, followed sites of personal interest, staying updated on events, posting pictures of one’s travels, complaining about one’s job, and, of course, memes, are at your disposition. The feed, as much as the whole interface, doesn’t only show different content, it has altogether different functions.

This fragmentation is not one of a disorderly plurality, but should rather be understood as a segmentation of the experience according to different types of users with different interests — and an adjusted ad environment. The classification of users allows Facebook to predict who is more likely to buy what advertised product; so, whereas there is no singular ‘standard user’ of Facebook that could be delineated, there are, within this territory, specific target audiences, whose likeliness to click on specific ads can be predicted. This is what I call minorisation. But once such a specific market has been established, the next step is to draw a maximal profit, to integrate as many people as possible into it, to have it grow until the audience loses its specificity, where it becomes majoritary. We can therefore speak of a double dynamic: First you have the creation of a new market through minorisation, an act of what we could call sanctioned transgression, which then, to exploit maximally its profitability, starts to grow, until it ideally becomes majoritary; but then within it, new markets are created that once again become specific and profitable. One prominent recent example of such a sanctioned transgression was Nike’s campaign with Colin Kaepernick. Even though it was borne out of a genuine political gesture, it turned into a ‘tapping into’ a target audience that sympathised with said gesture and would turn them into an economically profitable group, activated by the backlash that qualified it as a transgression and that improved the campaign’s economic outcome at the same time.

Target audiences are crucial for investors to predict the profitability of a product, for the marketing department to decide upon the places and manners of advertisement, for the producers to accommodate to the user’s and consumer’s needs and desires. In short, the kinds of people that are likely to buy the product need to be found or delimitated. This is a complex process that includes data collection, psychological studies, corporate branding, and lots and lots of trial and error in accordance with a feedback loop driven by said data. It should therefore not be understood as a secret conspiracy by an economic elite to manipulate the masses, but comes along with obvious questions that concern everyone who wants to create a product. It is neither a purely hypnotic top-down instrumentalisation of subliminal mechanisms, nor is it an authentic bottom-up expression of a community of consumers. As these processes of delimitating well-defined target audiences become unquestioned common sense, as the dynamics that are set into operation become more and more invisible and systematic, as our tribal instincts are harnessed to intensify our identifications with specific groups, so does critical analysis of the real-life consequences become more and more urgent. Identity has become a hot topic because identification is nowadays a primary economic motor. Its primary function is economic: to absorb and realise surplus value, and thereby to avoid crises of underconsumption.

Identification, as much as a feeling of communality, is an act of branding, and thereby an inherently economic act. As an act of differentiation, it does not only segment the populace, but incites the emergence of a plurality of markets that incites the specification of audiences that are thereby becoming profitable. This logic does not only pertain to consumer goods, but it also pulls in, in an act of universal commodification, forms of identification that are traditionally considered existential, like genders, or political, like ‘being left’ or ‘being right’, that are no longer primarily concerned with political ideas, but become themselves pre-established identities. The emergence of targeted political ads on social media witnesses the segmentation of the political sphere, just as much as the emergence of new gender identities coincides with the tentative emergence of new economic markets; all this becomes part of an overarching logic of economic minorisation.

The question of minority

Once a market becomes majoritary, where it loses its specific audience, where it becomes ‘the norm’, segmentation takes place within it, which means that once again specific identities are set apart. The first smartphones were targeted at business users; and it was Apple’s revolutionary idea to reinvent the smartphone as a majoritary device, a device for everyone, but not for anyone, as it didn’t become a non-descriptive platform, but rather an interface that could be adapted to various well-defined types of users. At the same time, the general ‘experience’ of having a smartphone started undergoing segmentisation, in as far as the brand of one’s phone, of having a Blackberry, an iPhone, a Samsung, started to express of certain types of smartphone owners.

Brand identity can occur once relatability is involved. Even supermarkets, providing the most general needs, are portrayed as somehow representing specific personalities, or the affiliation with a certain social class. But when it comes to the question of identity politics, these created identities, like the affiliation to a particular subculture or brand, are not considered politically problematic. The question is rather about the established minorities: politically suppressed groups — specific genders, ethnicities, sexualities — that suddenly become the centre of attention. And indeed, the urge to express themselves in their suppression, of being given a voice, to be perceived as equal human beings, has been a genuine objective of political minority movements of the 20th century —for example anti-colonial movements, the Civil Rights Movement, Feminism. Structurally, therefore, when it comes to public visibility, the recent developments indeed seem to have followed the demands of the political minorities; public presence seems to abolish their minoritary status. But does that mean that the economic minorisation sketched out above, as the creation of new markets, is a direct continuation of the politicised minority movements, as the call for equality by suppressed groups? I would like to argue that they are complete opposites.