ON COMPETITIVE HEGEMONY
discourse as sport
Corporate rebrand. Album cover. Merger. Tweet. Acquisition. Performance. Public trial. Ad. Shooting. Casting announcement. Leaked email. Mascot update. Invasion. Menu revamp. SomethingHappens. Celebration, backlash, critique, counter-critique, meta-critique. Nothing is resolved. Another SomethingHappens.
Things have always happened. People have always moved on. What’s changed is the in-between – a space that has thickened into its own arena: the discourse. But it never seems to resolve so much as it refreshes. No clear winner, no view that dominates, no popular consensus. And when there is no consensus, there is no sense of progress, no sense of regress, simply direction without movement. Gridlock. We find ourselves suspended in endless debate, constantly positioning, perpetually engaged until SomethingHappens again. And yet, swaths of people who’ve never been more inclined to disagree with each other and with institutions, remain under the yoke of a dominant power. So how does control persist if those subjugated have never been more oppositional?
In his Prison Notebooks, Gramsci developed a theory of cultural hegemony, explaining how in advanced capitalist society, the dominant group maintains power not primarily through force, but by making their worldview appear as common sense, as natural, and inevitable through the consensus-building mediums of cultural and social institutions. Most crucially, cultural hegemony works by being ideologically flexible: absorbing opposition and adapting to resistance. The system maintains itself not through rigidity but through its capacity to bend, to accommodate critique, offering minor concessions that feel like wins or progress in order to prevent more fundamental transformation. The advanced capitalist society Gramsci was writing from was the 1930s (lol). Still his lens has held strong, offering a strange sense of resolve in understanding why an “Eat The Rich” t-shirt would be available for purchase on Amazon. Why a can of soda might posture as a solution to police brutality. Why Raytheon Technologies partaking in Pride was just a symptom of why Pride would become an officialized observance. But lately, the comfort of knowing why has lost its grip. I find myself trying to reconcile how a consensus-manufacturing system absorbs critique when all that’s left is opposition that multiplies, but never coheres.
Consider how even the most radical or “outsider” views get absorbed.
When SomethingHappens, the sophisticated critique arrives immediately. Recuperation. Spectacle. Manufactured consent. The analysis feels coherent, I nod along. But maybe I see it slightly differently. Maybe I have something to add to SomethingHappens. The impulse arrives; to clarify, to contextualize, to contribute my particular angle. And if I did?
Cultural hegemony has mutated from a consensus-manufacturing system into a conflict-perpetuating system.
Where cultural hegemony once required enough consensus to stabilize power. Competitive hegemony no longer requires consensus at all, only continuous participation. It is a structural trap that catches everyone not regardless of their position, but precisely because of it. The system doesn’t need to minimize opposition – it celebrates it, proliferates it, fragments it into infinite competing stances. So while there may be more opposing takes than ever, there is no oppositional threat, because opposition itself has been dulled through diffusion. Neoliberal ideology (competition good, individual agency good) provides the logic and certainly created the conditions, but competitive hegemony is a structural mechanism that captures even the former’s most fervent critics. You can be explicitly anti-neoliberal and still get caught in the throes of competitive hegemony. Power no longer depends on agreement. It depends on keeping disagreement in circulation, through systems that reward visibility, novelty, and differentiation. Algorithmic feeds that privilege engagement, incentive structures that favor distinct or contrarian positioning, and social environments where identity becomes entangled with stance. Cultural hegemony required that opposition be contained, integrated, and ultimately reconciled into a broader consensus. Now its role has shifted from a problem to be managed into a resource to be exploited.
Gramsci offered a gradual, strategic solution through a “war of position” – he believed the path forward would be in winning consent within civil society, ultimately leading to the development of a counter-hegemony. The problem however is that within a competitive hegemony winning consent is impossible. Not because no one tries, but because everyone has thrown their hat into the ring. And if everyone is competing against each other, then who is there to win over or agree with? Consent requires an audience; competitive hegemony produces only contestants.
When there is no one outside the arena where victory can register, people reach for the fantasy of resolution.
Nowhere is the hegemonic shift more obvious than through the rise of platforms like Kalshi and Polymarket, which make betting on cultural outcomes possible. If competitive hegemony explains our conflict-perpetuating reality and the challenge of winning consent, predictive markets operate as our EPCOT: a themed version of the arena where resolution is available for purchase and always scheduled. So while you may never convince anyone of what SomethingHappens means, you can still bet yes/no on whether SomethingHappens ends in an apology, a firing, a resignation, etc…
Writing should, in theory, build understanding, persuade readers, and contribute to shared sense-making. But when it no longer does, Substack’s partnership with Polymarket starts feeling less random and more like an admission. It’s a pimple patch on a throbbing epistemic cyst: the inability to shape thought beyond one’s own, to move beyond perpetual contestation. If your analysis can’t persuade, at least it can help you wager. Prediction markets don’t solve the crisis of consensus, instead, they monetize our craving for a substitute.
The house doesn’t win because it has the right take. The house wins because it owns the arena. And the arena is most invisible when we’re busy arguing about what’s happening inside of it. Every specific example – every SomethingHappens you might have expected me to name here – would have done exactly that. It would have given you something to agree with or push back on. Pulled us both back onto the field. The structure only becomes visible when we stop participating as-is. It’s hard to imagine complete escape of the arena (I am writing on Substack after all), but we can at the very least think about agency under constraint.
This is what resisting competitive hegemony might look like: not disengaging from politics, not abandoning analysis or criticism, but refusing to let the discourse cycle determine what we attend to. Shifting focus from content (what happened, what it means, what’s my take) to structure (what is this pattern, how does it work, why does it keep capturing us). Moving beyond a position to win from, and towards a different way of playing.
We should keep thinking, we should keep caring! The question is how do we do so meaningfully? I’m still thinking through it. I’m interested in what you notice next time SomethingHappens – less what your position is, and more what the pull to position feels like. What the structure looks like when you can see it. How you’ll choose to play.