The Scrolling Eye

This essay is part of a series in which writers reflect on Zohran Mamdani’s inauguration as the mayor of New York City. 

In early October Sinn Féin, one of the parties supporting Catherine Connolly’s bid for the presidency of Ireland, posted a clip of her playing ball in the concrete backyard of public housing, and it became clear that she would win. Connolly had made an ill-judged visit to Assad’s Syria in 2018, in the company of two other left-wing politicians whose subsequent refusal to support the defense of Ukraine made them look either maverick or suspect. The public conversation about this, however, was eclipsed by the fact that a sixty-eight-year-old woman could keep a ball in the air using only her knees. She had skills, she was down with the young people, and she was now a meme.

The image was authentic to Connolly, who is a direct and idealistic speaker with deeply held personal values. It was more legible than the disordered arguments on X, more convincing than the newspaper articles, which were anyway ignored by economically excluded younger voters. The role of the Irish president is largely ceremonial, and the incumbents tend more liberal than the governments they represent. In the eighteen-to-thirty-four age bracket Connolly, who supports a United Ireland and is strongly pro-Palestine, polled at a whopping 83 percent.

Authenticity is judged by the scrolling eye in less than a second. My children, in their early twenties, use their phone cameras the way older people use language, sometimes answering a text with a photograph taken in the moment. These visual responses are self-aware and witty in a way that is hard to pin down. Graphics can be added but AI is despised, not just because it is fake and frightening but because it removes the edge between real and produced that involves the viewer in the joke. “That is so low effort,” they say, meaning that something spotted online is funny without appearing to try.

Connolly’s clip looks like it was shot by someone holding up their phone, and this handmade aesthetic also ran through Zohran Mamdani’s digital campaign. The memetic moments in his vertical videos played with those tropes on Instagram that celebrate ordinary delights. Mamdani’s account first got traction in January 2025 at the polar bear plunge in Coney Island, when he ran into the water wearing a full suit and tie and talked about rent freezes while still wet. The editing was both fast and playful. Other clips were shot on the streets of New York, where he never stopped moving: Mamdani was walking, in a taxi, on the subway, on a Citibike. He joked not just about the “haters” but also about being in a managed media campaign. There was a cringe reel of him repeatedly using the word “ultimately,” and of an attempt to keep his hands in his pockets because his team wanted him to stop waving them around.

Mamdani’s light self-ironizing made him real. This was video as self-expression. The values were of the amateur content creator; negative campaigning, of which there was relatively little, pointed to the fact that his opponent, Andrew Cuomo, used ChatGPT to draft housing policy and deployed AI-generated backdrops as locations in his ads. 

Most importantly, passersby were involved in the fun of filming, whether by answering vox-pops or posing for selfies. The posts referenced and sometimes collaborated with hugely popular Instagrammers who stop New Yorkers on the streets to talk about their clothes, jobs, workout schedules, or dogs, the message of both influencer and politician being that the city is a huge crowd of individuals, each of them entirely interesting for five seconds at a time. 

The question now being asked is whether Instagram is in itself a liberalizing medium, and whether the age of compressed text platforms like X is coming to an end. On “Mixed Signals,” the Semafor podcast, Ben Smith asked Mamdani’s media manager, Morris Katz, “Do you think, like, short video, in some, like, bigger-picture way, is, like, pro-socialist?” Katz judiciously replied that it is all about policies but also that the “benefit of the medium is this direct transparency and clarity.” 

Instagram’s algorithm is not transparent, so that “bigger picture” is up to Meta in the long run. The platform is equally available to a right-wing aesthetic that celebrates women in pretty aprons, gleaming children, and men in uniform. Whatever the politics, however, the visual energy is positive, the small screen keeps things less than monumental, and engagement is fueled by a sense of personal access to the producer, or star, or politician. There is something leveling about this and, in the right hands, perhaps even democratic. Governing is not the same as campaigning, of course, though the values of a medium can cross into real life—it could be said that Trump governs like he posts. This past year, Mamdani hit a digital sweet spot. As Katz said, “People are not scrolling through social media to feel worse.”