Noam Chomsky and the End of Counterculture: Performing Dissent and 'Sunsteinization'

This article theorises the transformation of dissent in the digital age by examining the contemporary figure of the dissident intellectual within the political economy of platform capitalism. Departing from the twentieth-century propaganda paradigm articulated in Manufacturing Consent, the article argues that contemporary media systems no longer prioritise the stabilisation of consensus but instead actively produce, amplify, and monetise division, outrage, and moral conflict. This structural shift is conceptualised as Propaganda 2.1: a regime in which dissent itself becomes an infrastructural resource rather than an oppositional force. Through an extended analytical case study of Noam Chomsky, once emblematic of counterculture as an external critic of power, the article traces how dissidence is reconfigured into a form of performative visibility embedded within algorithmic attention economies. Chomsky's elevation as 'arguably the most important intellectual alive'—a phrase that originated in irony—illustrates how critique is converted into symbolic capital, while subsequent scandals and polarisation cycles demonstrate how controversy functions as a generator of engagement rather than a threat to power. Drawing on Cass Sunstein's concept of cognitive infiltration, the article reinterprets infiltration not as deliberate state action but as an automated process 'sunsteinization' performed by digital infrastructures that fragment interpretive communities from within. The analysis further integrates the notion of kayfabe politics to describe a media environment in which audiences knowingly participate in staged moral conflicts between 'righteous' and 'evil' actors, sustaining a dramaturgy of dissent that produces loyalty, identity, and revenue while leaving structural conditions untouched. The article concludes that contemporary counterculture no longer operates as an external pressure capable of destabilising dominant systems but survives as a conspicuous performance of opposition. Dissent persists, but as spectacle rather than strategy, signalling not the disappearance of critique but its full absorption into the operating logic of digital power.