Zohran Mamdani was the right amount of online

Yesterday's off-year election dominated certain parts of the news cycle, no more so than Zohran Mamdani's decisive win in the New York mayor's race . The Mamdani campaign has been the rare ray of light in a year that's been dominated by a much broader continued slide into authoritarianism in the U.S. and Mamdani, at 34 years old, has shown what a truly online campaign that doesn't descend into the cynicism preferred by algorithmic mediated platforms.

Over at The Verge, Adi Robertson argues Mamdani understood that being "extremely online" doesn't have to translate to disaster

Mamdani’s best trait as an online communicator wasn’t knowing how to use the internet. It was understanding when not to use it. In an era of terminally synthetic politics, New York picked the candidate who still seems capable of looking away from his screen.

It's easy, and correct, to clown on the Cuomo campaign's ham-handed boomerishness but his campaign's utter ineptitude points to a deeper dysfunction with campaigning, and being, online today: AI slop. Cuomo's campaign couldn't help themselves when it came to leaning into the grotesque aesthetic of genAI video .

The video, while quickly deleted, was a perfect example of synthetic politics. Start with a fairly normal, if well-worn accusation: my opponent is soft on crime. Then, render it through a machine designed to reproduce perfectly distilled stereotypes, making the whole thing not only a fictional scenario from the get-go, but one lacking even the nominal humanity you’d have gotten with live actors or an animator. Sprinkle in a digital puppet version of your rival with a reference to a niche social media micro-controversy. Finally, post it on said social media site. The result is something stripped of nearly any connection to physical reality — whether you agree with the central premise or not.

As Robertson notes, this cynical slop could not be more different than the authentic and personal videos the Mamdani campaign became known for on social media . While Mamdani's videos have the easy, if polished, feel of a social media influencer, they took a great deal of craft to create, as Corey Atad details in this excellent piece for Defector.

We're a full decade into living with the reality of platform-based media being turned against the institutions that made the post-war world possible. It's often felt completely overwhelming, but it's not inevitable.