19:42 « I bought the goods, laid them out on the kitchen counter. I was hungry, I was inspired. »
20:03 « The revolution had begun. »
21:16 « Who would’ve thought that roughly 2000 years after the first pope was appointed, I would be watching hours of conclave prediction content on TikTok, and Gen-Z compilations of the hottest candidates in the race for the papacy? »
00:00 « I wished I could eat Peppa Pig. »
19:42
I got back from the supermarket with an appetite.
I didn’t know how long it would take to cook Caldo Verde. What I did know was that it’s difficult to dislike the Portuguese staple. The soup’s various greens and thick broth aren’t just comforting; they can even « cure any sickness ».
That’s according to the overly enthusiastic cook I watched on TikTok, who led with the soup’s healing powers. There was good reason to trust my digital chef: he knows how to compress what I assume to be a somewhat prolonged cooking process into a mere minute.
Every second, another ingredient magically changed shape. Whole onions turned into thinly chopped bits. Entire chorizos disintegrated into thick slices at the blink of an eye. I think I spotted some minced garlic.
Under any other circumstance, I would have gone through my standard motions: find a great recipe on TikTok, add it to my crowded recipe folder, and forget about it. But not today.
I bought the goods, laid them out on the kitchen counter. I was hungry, I was inspired. One more rewatch on the app to get the proportions right. Leaning on the kitchen counter in close proximity to some chorizo and kale, I scrolled.
20:03
Back on my personalized feed, I was greeted by another chef. « I would simply shred Peppa Pig and serve her with white onions and pickles, » TikToker Josh Scherer broke down how he’d cook Peppa and her family on the first video that entered my feed today. I chose not to engage; my soup would now be vegetarian.
I scrolled.
« Trump and Epstein friends? No. Their relationship was strictly basketball. » An excerpt of a twenty-minute documentary produced by The Onion. Next up: Israel’s newest ceasefire violations, and then a fiery speech by a Member of the European Parliament about a declaration of an opinion on a bill.
I scrolled.
« My family will not be pleased with my culinary decisions, » according to TikTok user ZAQ_Makes, on day 301 of his perpetual stew project. I occasionally stumble across his videos, last I checked, he was on day 275. His stew was almost a year old by now.
I scrolled.
Jean-Luc Mélenchon, the leader of the left-leaning La France Insoumise party screamed at me, through my feed, about what I presumed to be the revolution. While I could escape his presence by a mere swipe now, his electoral success defined a significant portion of my life, that is: my summer of 2024, long before I ever attempted to make Caldo Verde.
Lost in Paris’ sweltering mid-June heat, I was working my way through an « authentic Berlin Döner Kebab » I had purchased on Rue Oberkampf in the 11th arrondissement, when my feast was interrupted. First, it was a few distant screams, which only stood out to me in the city’s center because they grew louder. Then, small groups of people — mostly students — chain-smoking at one of the many terraces along the street, sprang up and hugged each other, phones in hand.
I was already (positively) surprised by the « authentic kebab » — which as a German-Turkish tourist I felt qualified to judge — and the sudden bursts of ecstasy surrounding me added to my astonishment. My francophone compatriots, who had insisted that I try the kebab, were quick to translate the cheers: the revolution had begun. My meal had ceased.
Le Nouveau Front populaire (a coalition of center-left to far-left parties) had won the parliamentary elections that day in June of 2024, and had given me a glimpse into a leftist utopia. It felt as if all online (sub-)echo chambers, Twitter threads, niche Reddit subgroups and faces behind think pieces had come together to celebrate along with the supposedly alienated working class in one large mélange, eventually pilgrimaging to Place de la République, just down the street from where I was eating, so I joined.
A young boy was juggling flaming torches, having climbed onto Marianne, the statue on the square. He was surrounded by keffiyeh-wearing men hoisting a gigantic French flag, which, as I later found out, was hand-sewn out of different colored small cloths representing the Republic’s diversity. That symbol was backed up by the surrounding reality, as I heard French, Arabic, Turkish, Farsi, and gazed at veiled women laughing next to flamboyant Gen Z-students joyfully reciting the admittedly catchy slogan « Macron, démission! » (Macron, resign!). I couldn’t help but feel like this was too good to be true.
Which it was. President Emmanuel Macron refused to appoint the Left coalition’s candidate for prime minister, worrying that the potential government would struggle to find voting majorities. The coalition itself later succumbed to internal friction. France has had two, maybe three (is it four?) prime ministers since. I remember seeing something about it on an Insta infographic.
The driving force behind Le Nouveau Front Populaire’s success was La France Insoumise, the political project of Mélenchon, the man on my phone shouting at me. A big political presence, whose intellectual influences are deeply embedded in Neo-Marxism. La France Insoumise roots itself in « Lacan, Chantal Mouffe and other post-Marxists, » I was later told by Theo Aiolfi, a populism researcher from the University Bourgogne Europe, over a Zoom call.
That day in Paris, I didn’t know anything about Mélenchon’s proclivity towards Lacan. In fact, I didn’t really know anything about French politics. I could say that I stood in that crowd out of curiosity or journalistic rigor, but I mainly stood there for hours for a far simpler reason: the vibes were good.
How does one communicate a good vibe? About a decade prior to the celebrations in Paris that day, cultural theorist Lauren Berlant wrote on vibes and political communication during « intensely political seasons » in her book Cruel Optimism (2011).
It is in these periods of civil unrest or significant political change that « people imagine alternative environments where authenticity trumps ideology, truths cannot be concealed, and communication feels intimate. » Berlant published Cruel Optimism in the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis, but large-scale migration, Covid-19, Gaza, and wars in Ukraine and the Middle East have since added to the sense of poly-crisis that creates the demand for what she calls « the feeling of being political together ».
She identifies this feeling as noise, essentially the affect that wraps a political message and makes it appealing, or as she puts it: « the lived intensities and desires that make messages affectively immediate, seductive, and binding. »
That day in Paris, the message was that Le Nouveau Front Populaire won the election. Great, but the reason I stood in the crowd for hours was the noise around that: the torch-juggling child standing on a historic monument, the creative posters and dances all around, the music, the multitude of languages, the feeling of witnessing significant political change, without speaking a word of French.
These days, this feeling of « being political together » seems to, at times, overshadow everything else.
Belgian political theorist Anton Jäger illustrates this relationship between noise and message in his book Hyperpolitics (2023), « In the years after 2008… from Occupy Wall Street in the United States to 15-M in Spain and the anti-austerity fervor in Britain — movements began to emerge… Across this populist explosion, organizational alternatives to the old mass party model proliferated. »
The Flemish Christian Democrats have lost more than half of their members since the 1990s, the German SPD counted 365.000 members in 2025, but used to have over a million in 1986. Similar trends can be seen in The Netherlands, Italy and elsewhere in Europe.
Throughout the 2010s, according to Jäger, a new form of digital political participation developed as an alternative to traditional mass party membership and formal organizing, outside of the « formal realms of politics ». This includes populist parties like La France Insoumise or Podemos in Spain, but also alternative forms of digital political discourse. Granted, what I felt on that square in Paris was not digital. I was there. I remember hearing the protest songs and smelling the perma-cloud of cigarette smoke that hovered over the utopian crowd.
But I had felt equally connected, albeit briefly, to my many digital revolutions, like the Gen Z-led revolution in Kathmandu in September 2025. This revolution was brought to me via Instagram meme slideshows, which featured screenshots of Reuters headlines announcing the end of the Nepalese government as well as Gen Z-protesters doing viral dances next to burning tires. An interim leader was eventually voted on via the platform Discord, most notably used for online gaming.
I felt the same proximity to the protests in Istanbul in March of 2025 — their memes and songs made it to similar campaigns abroad. During a prolonged scrolling session in Turkey’s protest season, I saw from three or four different angles how someone dressed in a Pikachu costume dodged water cannons and a bunch of unathletic police officers in an ecstatic chase through Istanbul. A day later, protest signs of Pikachu drawn to resemble Che Guevara popped up in the city. Another 24 hours after that, Pikachu hats were all over the daily protests in Tbilisi.
Of course, I too despised the Bulgarian government’s new budget bill, at least I assume it was bad, given how many people I saw protest it on Instagram, and I certainly followed the debates around the appointment of Lina Khan, former FTC chairperson, as part of Zohran Mamdani’s all-female transition team working to prep his formal inauguration as mayor.
I don’t know what the FTC is. I live in Brussels. When does Zohran sleep? God, that smile.
Point is, in the 2020s, everything is political. Perfect conditions for noise and vibes to proliferate. Jäger, still writing in Hyperpolitics, isn’t a fan. « Every major event is scrutinized for its ideological character, producing controversies that play out among increasingly clearly delineated camps on social media platforms and are then rebounded through each side’s preferred media outlets. Through this process, much is politicized, but little is achieved. »
Did I, too, get carried away by the vibes in Paris? Could I have stopped the Bulgarian budget bill if I shared more stories about it? Is it time to dust off the Pikachu costume?None of this made me any less hungry. I hadn’t even begun to chop those ingredients. The last time I had so much as a chuckle was while scrolling past an esoteric video by Armenia’s Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan staring into the camera with a look devoid of any discernible joy as Frank Ocean’s Nights echoed in the background of his office. I needed motivation, energy, I needed — Pope John Paul II.
21:16
« I am lost, I am lost. » The lyrics to The Irrepressibles’ 2010 hit In this shirt accompanied a video on my TikTok feed that listed, according to the caption, « Top 3 best acting performances », I’m assuming of all time? Every single clip in the short edit featured a screaming man. Adam Driver in Marriage Story, Jake Gyllenhaal in Nightcrawler, Hugh Jackman in Prisoners.
After a few more scrolls, I saw a parody of the video. This time, a man covered In this shirt acapella, while performing an Oscar-worthy rendition of the roles listed above, except that he added Anthony Hopkins in The Two Popes.
This stuck out to me for two reasons. One, there was no screaming in the video, and two, it reminded me of my feed after Pope Francis died. Who would’ve thought that roughly 2000 years after the first pope was appointed, I would be watching hours of conclave prediction content on TikTok, and Gen-Z compilations of the hottest candidates in the race for the papacy?
But here we are. The Vatican has undergone extensive rebranding in the past decade. Anthony Hopkins blessed the aforementioned Netflix production, Ralph Fiennes lured me into the Vatican’s inner workings in Conclave (2024) and Pope Leo XIV’s blessing commences Catholic raves in Slovakia.
Just a few decades ago, Pope John Paul II made global headlines: his role in Poland’s
Solidarity Movement, which upended communist rule, echoes through Europe’s post-communist countries to this day.
« He coined the phrase, ‘Don’t be afraid.’ This sense of hope was a huge catalyzing moment, » historian Dr. Ferenc Laczo from Maastricht University explained to me recently.
« In Hungary today, Peter Magyar quotes him constantly. The phrase ‘Don’t be afraid’ hasn’t just defined his campaign but has become a slogan for the idea of change. »
At the time of writing, Magyar leads the polls. He is the only challenger to Prime Minister Viktor Orbán in years who has stood a chance at winning an election, and is far from a left-leaning contrast to Orbán.
He was a member of Orbán’s Fidesz party up until 2024. Now, defected and happily at home in his own party, the self-declared « conservative liberal, critically pro-European » Magyar largely supports a continuation of Hungary’s flagship strict migration policy. And he likes the pope.
« Hungary had supposed enemies for fifteen years. First, Fidesz said it was the migrants, then the homosexuals, Soros, the EU, the liberals, » Laczo continued. « This is all based on fear. With Magyar, people still understand that there are ‘threats’, but they can stand up for their own dignity. »
A political campaign based on a sense of dignity and hope, daring to imagine an alternative to a long-established status quo, sounds a lot like –
the successful New York mayoral campaign of Zohran Mamdani, or the (so far) successful tenure of Zach Polanski as head of the British Green Party, which saw it gain a fifty percent rise in memberships in a month, or the unsuccessful leftist utopia in Paris, or the relentlessly growing popularity of the imprisoned mayor of Istanbul, Ekrem Imamoglu, who ran on the promise of « imagining an alternative », or any one of the examples I was following online, from Kathmandu to Tbilisi.
How is it that the campaigns of a critically pro-European conservative Hungarian and a Neo-Marxist French fan of Chantal Mouffe and Jacques Lacan both disseminate noise, both share hope and the feeling of being political together despite their ideological differences?
Well, Berlant argued that more than any single political outcome, the desire for the political is a desire for an « intimate sociality », which she understands as a response to the constant mediatizing of crises.
That could explain why, for the better part of three months in 2025, my morning routine consisted of a mix of homemade granola (a recipe I actually followed for once) over Greek yoghurt with banana and honey, some peanut butter, coffee, and a solid thirty minutes of scrolling through Zohran Mamdani content on Instagram — as someone living in Brussels, notably not in the jurisdiction of a New York City mayor.
A few months into his tenure, Molly Fischer from the New Yorker characterized Mamdani as the « Everywhere Mayor » in an analysis of his online presence. « Mamdani’s approach seems intended to project a new relationship between New Yorkers and City Hall, one that relies on insistently personal terms and emphasizes care and communication. »
A common joke in the vibrant comment sections under Mamdani’s videos is the phrase « That’s my mayor. (I live in [insert place that isn’t New York]) » Despite an awareness that this relationship won’t impact them, millions still follow the everywhere mayor. Berlant would have pitied them.
While difficult to measure, following the noise can have some impact. Molly Fischer in the New Yorker admits to it herself as she compares the promises Mamdani made in his elaborately staged videos and his short tenure as mayor: « Before ‘performative’ became a buzzword meaning ‘only doing something for show’, it meant, essentially, the opposite: saying or doing something that actually changes reality. »
Another example is the Turkish protest movement of 2025, following the arrest of Istanbul’s mayor. In one rally I covered, I stood in a sea of hundreds of thousands of protesters, from all walks of life, from communists to liberals to ultranationalists, demanding that the jailed mayor, facing an estimated sentence of over 2430 years, be freed.
Since then, countless other mayors have been arrested under bogus charges, the tightly controlled media landscape was further consolidated, and the transition from President Recep Tayyip Erdogan to his likeliest successor, his son, was constitutionally prepared.
Despite a widespread (and much communicated) awareness that the Turkish normative political sphere is a shrunken, broken, or distant place of activity among elites, Turks consistently return to protest, campaigns, activism.
Cruel, yes, but not pointless. The movement helps to build community and increase the popularity of alternative (non-governmental) media channels. Now the movement lives on in its own, odd way: on the occasional doomscroll, I encounter the still-jailed mayor, speaking by the Bosporus, in public parks, or standing by mosques — in entirely deepfaked videos that reach millions.
Sometimes the noise, even if imagined, constructed, AI-generated, foreign, and fundamentally distant from the spectator’s position, is enough to satisfy the desire.
Sometimes the imagined sociality can be felt by simply watching someone else. Someone who makes soups effortlessly, who manages to, every second, magically change ingredients, turn whole onions into thinly chopped bits, and entire chorizos into thick slices at the blink of an eye.
00:00
Caldo Merde.
I wished I could eat Peppa Pig. I scrolled. Lebron James recorded his first non-double-digit basketball game since 2007. An AI-generated cat wished me good morning. It was late now. I ordered pizza.
