Laptop Politics

The unwillingness to engage with politics beyond the digital realm

Effective politics inherently involves in-person interactions—talking to real people, doing work with your own hands, etc.

Of course these activities are augmented, influenced by, and integrated with social media, email, data wrangling, and other things that can be done from a computer. And the effects of the digital realm are ever-changing.

You need both the physical and the digital realms, and you need them in different combinations to achieve different things.

However: most people who have political aspirations, whether those be influence or something else, cannot bring themselves to do anything beyond the digital realm. They’re afraid of talking to people, they’re afraid of actually having to justify and debate their ideas in person, they don’t want to get off the couch, they don’t know how to dress or present themselves (they think), they don’t want to consistently attend different kinds of meetings, etc.

This unwillingness to understand and attempt the importance of in-person politics by over-relying on digital action is called, no surprise, laptop politics.

And laptop politics falls short for the same reason that digital-only dating would fall short, or digital-only socializing.

Moving beyond laptop politics to integrate it with in-person politics is an obvious sign of taking politics seriously.