The other side uses "othering" as well. If the right blames "immigrants" for everything, the left blames "nazis". Which would not be a bad thing, except that today you are a "nazi" if you just carry an american flag, even if you are a true Bernie supporter:
> However, as he marched with fellow progressives, he says members of Antifa saw that he was carrying an American Flag and immediately ordered him to drop the flag, calling it a "fascist symbol". When Welch refused to comply, he says they tried to rip the flag from his hands, and then hit him in the back of his head with a club that was hidden in black fabric.
The thing that makes Americans so very weird is that they are intensely paranoid. They're the most powerful and wealthiest civilization the world as ever known and yet virtually all of them are profoundly afraid. They're not just afraid of foreigners, either -- they're extremely afraid of each other. It's gotten to a point where "Stand Your Ground" laws encourage armed civilians to shoot each other the moment they feel threatened. It's difficult for outsiders to grasp. (I've even spoken to South Africans about this and even they react with disbelief.)
The paranoid style [1] at work here is well documented but I don't think people appreciate the logical conclusion. As the world grows more and more connected Americans will grow more and more paranoid. You'll quickly reach a point where America has no allies: everybody is a threat, everybody is a competitor, everybody is an enemy conspiring against them. Nobody can be trusted. America becomes supremely hostile -- to new ideas, to trade, to dissent, to change. The result, as Nietzsche explained, is a kind of supreme decadence. People withdraw from the world, they retreat into paranoid fantasy, they embrace all manner of nonsense and conspiracy, they despise knowledge, isolation and delusion feed on each other and become all consuming.
In the end it's a self-fulfilling prophecy. The paranoiac develops paranoid technologies. Technologies designed to exclude, filter, hide, deceive, surveil, punish and divide (or "decentralize"). Technologies that are all-consuming, like his own delusions, they must provide rapid and never-ending alerts about new threats and plots, the more the better. Technologies that induce paralysis by leading people deeper and deeper into simulations of reality. Technologies that primarily walls or weapons, ideally both, to protect against the greatest threat of all -- other people.
[1] https://harpers.org/archive/1964/11/the-paranoid-style-in-am...
Xenophobia (which is not shared by the entire population) is not specific to the states either. Do you watch European news? What's happening in China with the Uighurs? In fact, I would argue that most countries are more xenophobic if anything, they just don't have to deal with as many foreigners who want to move there and people here are actually more used to immigrants than in other places where everyone is 'the same'. In Latin America, xenophobia is gaining ground as well with the Venezuelan crisis and this is an instance where the immigrants are people of the same race/culture.
> as Nietzsche explained..
Are you sure he wasn't talking about himself?
I think the investment hypothesis is a bit more subtle than that. It goes beyond mere xenophobia into a kind of devout isolationism. What we're interested in are technologies and trends that promote loneliness. Facebook can be pressed into service for classical xenophobia, but you need Twitter -- pure rapid-fire alerts, shorn of all social context -- to really draw in the paranoiac. Youtube with its never ending flood of videos about new threats, new dangers, and new outrages, all packaged neatly into 30-minute videos. Reddit is another prime example of "anonymous networks" that provide unity through division. When evaluating technologies that might appeal to the paranoiac we're looking for whatever helps people throw up walls, makes them more mobile, lets them hide, lets them engage in only very limited contact on their own terms. We really like robots of all sorts -- not just physical bots that deliver food but highly customized algorithms that can deliver fake news and sex bots that can deliver fake love... anything that reduces or eliminates daily contact with the dreaded Other (human beings).
Note: I'm not saying this is the same as the left/right axis, just that a lot of the horrendously dangerous material is dangerous lies being presented as fact.
(A personal example I was confronted with was watching a game-related video, where the entire sidebar was videos relating to the same game .. plus a livestream of Tommy Robinson. Why was that there? Does that imply there's a crossover between games videos and far-right videos? The system is too opaque to even tell me why it wrongly thought I would like it.)
The perceived threats of "irrelevance" and "uselessness" get easily diverted against other humans, especially through "othering". As jobs are taken by automation or offshoring it's easy to blame "immigrants". Keep up the social division for long enough and this can escalate to actual violence.
Amartya Sen's Nobel-prize-winning work on famine was to demonstrate that it was rarely due to an absolute shortage of food, but a deficiency in "entitlement" to it: both purely economic (not having the cash) and political (not being able to secure famine relief). That's the potential worse case of being "irrelevant and useless": starving to death because you can't get food from the "system" somehow.