Reality has become absurd. Those of us who see it for what it is, who know its origins, and who know that it is constructed? We are the sane ones here.
What Doug relates here feels a lot like what I've felt since the mid-1980s, so here I'm giving myself away as an old dude, but whatever: In 1985 I was a very longhaired metal guitarist on the LA scene, who had also spent his life reading books: Chomsky, Zinn, Parenti, stuff like Karl Polanyi's The Great Transformation, etc. So let's be clear: I looked like what was assumed to be a lunkhead, but I sounded like some super voluble weirdo..."Where do you get this stuff? You sound crazy, dude! Is this Chomsky guy you were talkin' about just now some sort of conspiracy theory guy? So he's saying that the rich people...what was that term you used? Manufacture consent? Because they want to control the world? That's nuts, dude."
There was a point in which I pretty much gave up trying to talk to most people about these ideas. The advent of Facebook and (anti) "social media" felt like it was time to stay in my library and maybe try 'n ride this shit out. But it only got worse, as I periodically took the temperature of "social reality."
I've continued to read books heavily. I still play guitar, but for myself. Helps me think. And I suspect I sound as fucking nutty as possible to anyone who'd listen to me at a party. At least my book club members love me and think I'm the Wise One. But for Rushkoff: here's a guy who gets asked to talk about this stuff for people who never really liked reading any books at all...naw: YouTube and podcasts have all the knowledge ya need, right?
Doug's feeling of "I sound insane" just completely resonated with me. Thanks, man!
Dude. Literally an ex metal singer from LA feeling exactly the same. Spending too much time asking myself what I’m missing? How people aren’t seeing it?
Wow! I totally would love to be in a book club with you..and have no where read as you have.. but, I have felt exactly as you also.. and when factories were closing in the eighties and being in Nursing.. Older folks getting lost to Health Maintenance “insurance “ and the pain to mergers and pensions lost..I was in my twenties and trying to understand and wondering why no one was mentioning any of this.. our challenges we faced were by design..it was hard not to not get stressed by it all.. just try to raise my son.. question it all.. read when I could..and be encouraging to the next generation…
I’ve been on xanax all day after having spent last night reading about Venezuela, Greenland, the AI bubble burst, and the collapse of Europe as a result of a coordinated effort from Russia and now the US administration; I tried going on a walk but it just felt like a lot to deal with, especially that we think about it consciously once a week but we observe and feel it every single day. The anxiety is becoming unbearable. How do you live with the crazy, how do you go about planning your life and make sense of reality when what we’re experiencing feels like Weimar on AI steroids?
Maybe, by remembering we have choice in where we focus our attention, by trying to experience the other stories, told from a very different perspective to all that nonsense. There is still an unmeasurable spring of stories which resonate with the truths we carry inside us, deep and human: our ability to connect to nature, to each other, to the more than human, with empathy and compassion; and our ability to author our own stories. There are so many stories happening in the world, what the media selects to keep everyone scared is at very best just a tiny tiny fraction of truth. Changing reality is scary, it requires seeing how deeply our sense of self, our relationship with self and other, has been constructed with these lies, and how weve each forgotten our own part in this, because it helped us feel a little less vulnerable. Perhaps the best thing we can do is work on not succumbing to fear and letting it drive us. This is of course all much easier said than done, but there are plenty of people doing it, in different ways. You can find them. It's not possible to do alone - one of the worst aspects of it is the shrinking into separation. We cannot help but be deeply intertwined and connected; there are cultures who understand this - our ancestors understood this - and it is reclaimable.
I often find myself returning to Tyson Yunkaporta's quote "the seeds we plant now won't become old growth forest for 1000 years." This comes from a culture which has survived and carried the memory of itself, its deep interconnection with reality, its place as cocreators and custodians of reality, for tens of thousands of years, through many ecological disasters. It's a culture which knows just how resourceful humans can be, and just how honest we need to be, just how important truth is, truth which comes from the heart and the earth, not the extremely limited, fragile, manipulable, hypocritical conception of truth and authority which only works when backed up by the threat of violence, which we've been brought up with. From this indigenous viewpoint, i find some relief from panic.
Can we observe our minds creating extra panic, disaster, despair? What are the hidden stories underpinning that? We have choice in how we respond to what we experience, although it's not necessarily easy, because it requires us to reckon with all the aspects of ourselves - our fundamentally interconnected, porous, vulnerable selves - which we've colluded in hiding away, to escape the pain and trauma. That's 1000s of years of trauma, of separation from context - which is our greater self.
It's certainly left me feeling torn and on the brink of destruction. But luckily I have some deep faith in my sense of the falsify of the ego's tricks (partly from an early encounter with the words of Krishnamurti). And I'm always falling back on a mythological view, which also just *feels* so much healthier, to help me understand the immense feelings of being torn into bits in a context of stories of descent into the underworld and return. The hero's journey gets some flak but it's still very important in my view. People have been doing that for a very long time. There are more and more people around assisting and guiding others, which really really helps - in fact it's not possible without a tribe of some sort to return to - that's the bit of the hero's journey that often gets left out, but its actually the mot important, ad often the hardest part. And now we have to be torn apart, put ourselves back together, and find, and form, the tribe nearly from scratch, all at the same time...
~ grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change; courage to change the things I can; and wisdom to know the difference
The Serenity Prayer may sound hokey, but that opening verse is the only way to surf. Not enough people surf the Internet any more. The Platforms constructed by the Attention Economy just want to stick a hose in your mouth until you drown. Prove to yourself that you have better things to do than that, by doing them.
Could not agree with you more, there is still beauty and wonder and joy around us if we just slow down a moment to notice, but the forces attempting to monetise our attention, create fear and division, commit eco/genocide and destroy shared truths are formidable. We need to realise and understand what is happening and focus on what we can do to maintain meaning and joy in our lives. As Bob Dylan once wrote, 'Señor, señor, let's overturn these tables and disconnect these cables, this town don't make sense to me no more'.
That Dylan line always reminds me of Tristan Tzara in the Dadaist manifesto: “I destroy the drawers of the brain and of social organization: spread demoralization wherever I go and cast my hand from heaven to hell, my eyes from hell to heaven, restore the fecund wheel of a universal circus to objective forces and the imagination of every individual.”
I’m sitting at my desk at my job for my evil health insurance company because I can’t afford to take off staring at my fucking screen because everything is worthless and bullshit. I hate it here.
Your anxiety and fear are a natural reaction to the insanity we see around us. It's not you; it's the world these days. That being the case, it's good to narrow your vision a bit. Try to control what you can in your life and let go of what is out of your control. A all order, I know.
I have to agree with you. The essay had my stomach in knots with anxiety, and then I scrolled to the top, and it felt like a gut punch of betrayal. Rushkoff is still my most cited and most read media theorist (who I mostly take for gospel), so it heightened that minute disillusioning.
I can't afford to be annoyed with AI images online. They are not going to cease appearing, no matter how I feel about them. Occasionally I find one I like. But mostly, I know to scroll.
For some reason, Internet stimuli have never upset me that much. I just move on. As Rushkoff implied, the point is that The Screen ISN'T Reality. It's a remote-order representation. (The only first-order reality of someone gazing at a phone screen is someone gazing at a phone screen, regardless of whether or not it's powered on.)
The reason this occurs goes far deeper than just greed and survival. It goes to the apparent meaningless of life in the face of death and the immensity of space and time. Religion has tried to address this in various primitive and incomplete ways, but hasn't really succeeded. Ancient elites like the pharaohs developed the illusion and mythology that they could ascend to godhood and immortality by their power and wealth and fight termination. This elite choseness was made manifest by the sheer fact of their power and wealth, no others need apply. The billionaires now are in their own way also declaring for godhood and immortality to allay this existential dread, making us buy into their illusion. Meaning does exist and goes far beyond what billionaires and religions can offer, but to say so risks being thought crazy.
The crazy part of this is that my intent, though maybe misguided and probably futile, is to alter the narrative we have of existence. Thanks to those who have responded.
I sometimes find myself reminding people that with an average I.Q. Of 100 in any population (by definition) and with 75% of people below 110 I.Q. (by Normal Distribution) and when the average I.Q. is 115 for getting a place in University for a first Degree (statistically demonstrated), then most people really do not understand what the fuck is going on.
And in America there is also the statistic that 21% of Americans (three to four times any other developed country) are functionally illiterate and innumerate; can't read the instructions, can't write, can't add up to 20 without taking their socks off.
But they can watch TV, can probably vote, and can make babies. Such is life.
So yes, we live in a bubble. So do the 110%, many of whom have no more idea what's happening to them than sheep queueing for their moment at the abattoir. I don't write for them because I don't have the toolkit for that. It's not arrogance, it is a simple lack of my ability. Mea culpa.
Inevitably we write for people that have a level of understanding and experiences similar to our own. If I was mega wealthy I would probably be writing for an audience of other mega wealthy people, because of shared experiences and abilities and concerns. If I was more intelligent perhaps I would be discussing quantum maths, and if I was more interested in making more money I might be discussing crypto investment strategies rather than dismissing it as a Ponzi scheme! Each to his own.
In short, write what you think, say what you like, and don't worry about pleasing all of the people all of the time. The dumbfucks will never understand you, the geniuses and already-know-it-all's will never listen to you, and you will speak to the ones that want to listen to you.
The thing is - the “fix” has been in for well over 50 years. What is happening is not new. It is the logical evolution of a system based on Wall Street speculation, where the ever-expanding monster always needs more food to eat, more fuel to burn. Once we weakened and eliminated SEC regulations and antitrust laws, as the Reagan gang did and subsequent regimes continued, we left a gaping opening for theft of every public asset. This was set in motion decades ago. But everyone with their ounce of greed wanted their “piece of the pie”. Hundreds of thousands of well-educated Americans on both sides wanted their piece of the pie.
We can blame the uber-wealthy and mega-corporations all we want, and they deserve blame - but we could have stopped them from creating this current horror if so many of us had taken organized action decades ago rather than going along with the undermining of our communities and our democracy for the chance to make more money.
It could have gone a different way. Now here we are. We who have any ounce of privilege - from education, profession, resources - need to own our part, even from neglect or ignorance. It’s going to take a whole lot of honesty and effort to push our nation out of the muck and greed.
three essential texts that support the history of what you've summarized:
The Politics of Rich and Poor, by Kevin Phillips (1991) (free to read on archive dot org)
Hot Money and the Politics of Debt, by R. T. Naylor (1986; 1994) (free to read on archive dot org)
America: What Went Wrong? Donald Barlett and James B. Steele (1991)
It sounds like an evasion for a Boomer like me to say this, but it's truth: in the 1980s, it was the WW2 and Silent Gen who had the weight of the power on these matters. (I speak of governmental power.) The problems were often staring them in the face. To the extent that Baby Boomers went along with the standard paradigm of neoliberal materialist consumerism- "the top priority is the lowest price"- yeah, that's the primary Baby Boomer role in that process, which began in earnest in the late 1980s, as an aspect of globalization. That uncritical assent to shipping so many manufacturing concerns offshore. Although frankly even if the offshoring was widely deplored and resisted, the decision was out of the hands of consumers. It has to be said, there was often a steep decline in retail prices for goods of equivalent quality- but was it worth it?
Also, Mass Criminalization of users of illicit substances is not to be underestimated as a way of controlling public discourse and the hoarding of power by the status quo, functionally stifling the input of the Criminals and disqualifying them from running for elected office. (A government official concealing their own illicit drugs use is not resistance; it's a condition of submission, and potentially a catastrophic liability.) I mean, The Richest Man In The World is still required to assent to mandatory drug tests.*
Recognizing that the flourishing of the neoliberal paradigm began in the 1980s, it's still important to realize that it was the Computer Age that has really provided for the expansion of financialization, Attention Economy sharp practice, outsourcing/H1B sharp practice, and other methods of sharp practice-- and in consequence the Olympian level of wealth stratification indicated by the growth in the numbers of billionaires. I don't recall the exact number of billionaires cited by Phillips in his 1991 book, but it was less than 50. Now there are over 800 American billionaires, and around 2500 globally. To think that once upon a time, the founders of Google were ready to sell their business for $1 million. But since they had no takers, they instead eventually entered the billionaire class. Thereby losing all perspective on human-scale reality, in my opinion. They could have gone back to school and learned about, say, oceanography, or botany, or American economic history. Something enriching. A double major. The road to the Polymath ideal.
But no-o, Larry and Sergei entered the Richie Rich class, and now dabble in politics. Especially when the effort aids their private ends. And they aren't even worst of the New Jacks of Silicon Valley. Or the most ambitious of the lot.
[ *long story short about Federal drug test policy; unless someone is an addict, there's practically always enough advance notice to wash drug intake out of a system and pass the test. Unless the drug is THC, which is stored in fat tissues and not water-soluble. And anyway, Elon...at that level, he gets the conditions he wants. The whole point of User Criminalization is to replace a regime of natural rights with power privileges. And in the case of ordinary citizens with no record of (other) legal entanglements, the primary motivation for random drug testing is to send the message. Effectiveness is secondary. https://www.propublica.org/article/drug-testing-thresholds-child-welfare ]
It's just desperately sad that this is where we are. The news is frightening and chaotic and relentless. And the billionaires, those maladapted misanthropic hoarders apparently canmot be stopped. The real failure of democracy has been the inability to stop the rise of these new monarchs. We are already being ruled and it fucking sucks.
You see the structure. You can't unsee it. Then you're told: stop saying you see it.
Standard penalty for pattern recognition in systems that depend on collective non-recognition.
The gaslighting loop: clarity becomes evidence of dysfunction. The person who sees the pattern gets pathologized. "Paranoid." "Cynical." The diagnosis protects the system.
Your question: how could narratives shift to make shared sense-making possible?
They can't. Not at scale.
Shared sense-making requires shared epistemology. We don't have that. We have competing infrastructures that validate different observations.
The shift you're asking for would require dismantling arrangements that benefit from fragmentation. That's not a narrative problem. That's a power problem.
What remains possible: small-scale networks where pattern recognition isn't penalized. Where you can say "I see this" and others say "yes, I see it too."
Not reform. Just finding the others who already see what you see.
The isolation isn't a bug. It's how the system maintains itself.
Amen! Especially this bit: “The shift you're asking for would require dismantling arrangements that benefit from fragmentation. That's not a narrative problem. That's a power problem.” YES.
Many people have domains where they are 300 steps ahead of everyone else - maybe in their professional field of interest, or their personal hell of lived discrimination.
When it comes to collapse awareness, the sheer scope and significance of it is already enough to drive you mad.
The ostracism of sounding like a madman is the rancid cherry on top. Classic Cassandra situation.
Explaining how things work to people who don’t know, don’t care and aren’t curious to learn is an unwinnable situation. That it deeply affects them and their children’s fates somehow doesn’t register. This also goes for otherwise clever, conscientious people.
"The only reason people do not know much is because they do not care to know. They are incurious. Incuriosity is the oddest and most foolish failing there is." — Stephen Fry
I guess what they need is something huge, immediate and visceral to shock them out of their stupor. I shudder to think of what that’ll be.
How to stay sane in this situation has been the biggest challenge of my life. I spent three years in a depression about it and still get triggered on a daily basis, because the whole world and everyone in it is goddamn insane.
But then, it was always like this.
"Three great forces rule the world: stupidity, fear, and greed"
— Albert Einstein
I’ve ranted plenty against billionaires in my posts. The truth is they, along with unethical elites and strongmen suffering from the worst possible psychopathies are an inevitable outcome of our system plus our fallible species that keep forgetting we’re merely animals governed by simple drives.
Socrates explained why democracy contains the seed of its own destruction: ignorance is the rational choice for the uninformed voter — hello game theory — but clueless voters shouldn’t be voting on how to steer spaceship Earth. But then, quis custodiet ipsos custodes?
History cements how all civilizations collapse; all the cognitive sciences eventually converge on the same conclusion. Thinkers of all types saw this coming long ago.
Physicists might be the surest of them all, for they can lean on the laws of physics themselves to explain why there is no escape. (Tom Murphy and Sid Smith come to mind). My father was one, and I have never known a human being so certain about anything as him regarding his domain. When someone teaches you how reality works, and knows it for a fact, the thing to do is shut up and listen.
I wonder if people will ever listen. I have my doubts.
Oy, what a messy stew this is. I think people are so afraid of facing the depth of how they've been manipulated, and how much they've colluded with this, that they would much rather continue with the illusion (and their own powerlessness), suppress the dissonance, and reinforce the splits, inner and outer, from their own sensed truth, from any notion of a soul which can guide them.
At least, that's what I hope is going on, because it means they are in some way still a little human, and there is a chance, and I'm not totally surrounded by vampires...
It's hard to face how much agency and power one has given away, and how deeply and intricately the patterns of illusion and extraction are woven into almost every basic material and relational aspect of life, and how much willpower is needed to come back to some kind of healthy balance. It's going to take us a very long time. But we have the memories of every resource we need inside us. And the mantra has to be: "I CAN!"
The vast majority of my friends have never even heard of Peter Thiel. How am I supposed to even begin to explain all this to them? I suggest them to read Quinn Slobodian, but when I see them typing his name in ChatGPT I know I lost them already.
Same here. Sometimes I say something about Thiel/Karp/Yarvin to friends/acquaintances and get a blank stare. Most often I don't "explain" anything, since 1) Im not an expert, 2) somehowl I would come across as patronizing and weird, even if recounting only Wikipedia basic facts. Frustrating. Love the Slobodian reference!
I recall interviewing you for the BBC World Service around the release of Team Human and you did not sound crazy to me nor I hope to the listeners.
I think the forces that you are describing are too large and complex to be taken in all at once. It's overwhelming. But I also think enough people are interested in knowing more.
What Doug relates here feels a lot like what I've felt since the mid-1980s, so here I'm giving myself away as an old dude, but whatever: In 1985 I was a very longhaired metal guitarist on the LA scene, who had also spent his life reading books: Chomsky, Zinn, Parenti, stuff like Karl Polanyi's The Great Transformation, etc. So let's be clear: I looked like what was assumed to be a lunkhead, but I sounded like some super voluble weirdo..."Where do you get this stuff? You sound crazy, dude! Is this Chomsky guy you were talkin' about just now some sort of conspiracy theory guy? So he's saying that the rich people...what was that term you used? Manufacture consent? Because they want to control the world? That's nuts, dude."
There was a point in which I pretty much gave up trying to talk to most people about these ideas. The advent of Facebook and (anti) "social media" felt like it was time to stay in my library and maybe try 'n ride this shit out. But it only got worse, as I periodically took the temperature of "social reality."
I've continued to read books heavily. I still play guitar, but for myself. Helps me think. And I suspect I sound as fucking nutty as possible to anyone who'd listen to me at a party. At least my book club members love me and think I'm the Wise One. But for Rushkoff: here's a guy who gets asked to talk about this stuff for people who never really liked reading any books at all...naw: YouTube and podcasts have all the knowledge ya need, right?
Doug's feeling of "I sound insane" just completely resonated with me. Thanks, man!
Dude. Literally an ex metal singer from LA feeling exactly the same. Spending too much time asking myself what I’m missing? How people aren’t seeing it?
Needed this today. From both of you.
Really? Wow. Weird. Delightfully so.
Rawk on, Liz, despite the current horrors.
Wow! I totally would love to be in a book club with you..and have no where read as you have.. but, I have felt exactly as you also.. and when factories were closing in the eighties and being in Nursing.. Older folks getting lost to Health Maintenance “insurance “ and the pain to mergers and pensions lost..I was in my twenties and trying to understand and wondering why no one was mentioning any of this.. our challenges we faced were by design..it was hard not to not get stressed by it all.. just try to raise my son.. question it all.. read when I could..and be encouraging to the next generation…
I’ve been on xanax all day after having spent last night reading about Venezuela, Greenland, the AI bubble burst, and the collapse of Europe as a result of a coordinated effort from Russia and now the US administration; I tried going on a walk but it just felt like a lot to deal with, especially that we think about it consciously once a week but we observe and feel it every single day. The anxiety is becoming unbearable. How do you live with the crazy, how do you go about planning your life and make sense of reality when what we’re experiencing feels like Weimar on AI steroids?
Maybe, by remembering we have choice in where we focus our attention, by trying to experience the other stories, told from a very different perspective to all that nonsense. There is still an unmeasurable spring of stories which resonate with the truths we carry inside us, deep and human: our ability to connect to nature, to each other, to the more than human, with empathy and compassion; and our ability to author our own stories. There are so many stories happening in the world, what the media selects to keep everyone scared is at very best just a tiny tiny fraction of truth. Changing reality is scary, it requires seeing how deeply our sense of self, our relationship with self and other, has been constructed with these lies, and how weve each forgotten our own part in this, because it helped us feel a little less vulnerable. Perhaps the best thing we can do is work on not succumbing to fear and letting it drive us. This is of course all much easier said than done, but there are plenty of people doing it, in different ways. You can find them. It's not possible to do alone - one of the worst aspects of it is the shrinking into separation. We cannot help but be deeply intertwined and connected; there are cultures who understand this - our ancestors understood this - and it is reclaimable.
I often find myself returning to Tyson Yunkaporta's quote "the seeds we plant now won't become old growth forest for 1000 years." This comes from a culture which has survived and carried the memory of itself, its deep interconnection with reality, its place as cocreators and custodians of reality, for tens of thousands of years, through many ecological disasters. It's a culture which knows just how resourceful humans can be, and just how honest we need to be, just how important truth is, truth which comes from the heart and the earth, not the extremely limited, fragile, manipulable, hypocritical conception of truth and authority which only works when backed up by the threat of violence, which we've been brought up with. From this indigenous viewpoint, i find some relief from panic.
Can we observe our minds creating extra panic, disaster, despair? What are the hidden stories underpinning that? We have choice in how we respond to what we experience, although it's not necessarily easy, because it requires us to reckon with all the aspects of ourselves - our fundamentally interconnected, porous, vulnerable selves - which we've colluded in hiding away, to escape the pain and trauma. That's 1000s of years of trauma, of separation from context - which is our greater self.
It's certainly left me feeling torn and on the brink of destruction. But luckily I have some deep faith in my sense of the falsify of the ego's tricks (partly from an early encounter with the words of Krishnamurti). And I'm always falling back on a mythological view, which also just *feels* so much healthier, to help me understand the immense feelings of being torn into bits in a context of stories of descent into the underworld and return. The hero's journey gets some flak but it's still very important in my view. People have been doing that for a very long time. There are more and more people around assisting and guiding others, which really really helps - in fact it's not possible without a tribe of some sort to return to - that's the bit of the hero's journey that often gets left out, but its actually the mot important, ad often the hardest part. And now we have to be torn apart, put ourselves back together, and find, and form, the tribe nearly from scratch, all at the same time...
Keep breathing! Good luck! There is a way
~ grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change; courage to change the things I can; and wisdom to know the difference
The Serenity Prayer may sound hokey, but that opening verse is the only way to surf. Not enough people surf the Internet any more. The Platforms constructed by the Attention Economy just want to stick a hose in your mouth until you drown. Prove to yourself that you have better things to do than that, by doing them.
Could not agree with you more, there is still beauty and wonder and joy around us if we just slow down a moment to notice, but the forces attempting to monetise our attention, create fear and division, commit eco/genocide and destroy shared truths are formidable. We need to realise and understand what is happening and focus on what we can do to maintain meaning and joy in our lives. As Bob Dylan once wrote, 'Señor, señor, let's overturn these tables and disconnect these cables, this town don't make sense to me no more'.
Indeed.
That Dylan line always reminds me of Tristan Tzara in the Dadaist manifesto: “I destroy the drawers of the brain and of social organization: spread demoralization wherever I go and cast my hand from heaven to hell, my eyes from hell to heaven, restore the fecund wheel of a universal circus to objective forces and the imagination of every individual.”
Love it! Thanks!
Well said ,I am returning on a similar path to find ways through, thank you.
Faith, my dear. There is another reality...a spiritual one. Trusting in a loving God.
that was crucial for me. I have to make note of that.
Try Marcus Aurelius and Seneca. They have helped me dampen emotional response to external events and set a personal course for right action.
I’m sitting at my desk at my job for my evil health insurance company because I can’t afford to take off staring at my fucking screen because everything is worthless and bullshit. I hate it here.
Your anxiety and fear are a natural reaction to the insanity we see around us. It's not you; it's the world these days. That being the case, it's good to narrow your vision a bit. Try to control what you can in your life and let go of what is out of your control. A all order, I know.
.
But I prefer Parsifal’s response. Yes indeed.
I wish you wouldn't have undercut this otherwise spot-on analysis by using an AI generated image to illustrate it.
That was kind of the point. That even the ai visualizes the word this way. But I take your point too
Yeah I thought you might have been going for something along those lines but I have knee jerk revulsion when I see that style of graphic
I have to agree with you. The essay had my stomach in knots with anxiety, and then I scrolled to the top, and it felt like a gut punch of betrayal. Rushkoff is still my most cited and most read media theorist (who I mostly take for gospel), so it heightened that minute disillusioning.
Especially in the context of Team Human.
AI visualizes the world in any way that you tell it to.
No need to make a wish, just ignore it.
I can't afford to be annoyed with AI images online. They are not going to cease appearing, no matter how I feel about them. Occasionally I find one I like. But mostly, I know to scroll.
For some reason, Internet stimuli have never upset me that much. I just move on. As Rushkoff implied, the point is that The Screen ISN'T Reality. It's a remote-order representation. (The only first-order reality of someone gazing at a phone screen is someone gazing at a phone screen, regardless of whether or not it's powered on.)
Its a pretty weird time to be alive and halfway able to critically think/feel/perceive.
The reason this occurs goes far deeper than just greed and survival. It goes to the apparent meaningless of life in the face of death and the immensity of space and time. Religion has tried to address this in various primitive and incomplete ways, but hasn't really succeeded. Ancient elites like the pharaohs developed the illusion and mythology that they could ascend to godhood and immortality by their power and wealth and fight termination. This elite choseness was made manifest by the sheer fact of their power and wealth, no others need apply. The billionaires now are in their own way also declaring for godhood and immortality to allay this existential dread, making us buy into their illusion. Meaning does exist and goes far beyond what billionaires and religions can offer, but to say so risks being thought crazy.
The crazy part of this is that my intent, though maybe misguided and probably futile, is to alter the narrative we have of existence. Thanks to those who have responded.
I sometimes find myself reminding people that with an average I.Q. Of 100 in any population (by definition) and with 75% of people below 110 I.Q. (by Normal Distribution) and when the average I.Q. is 115 for getting a place in University for a first Degree (statistically demonstrated), then most people really do not understand what the fuck is going on.
And in America there is also the statistic that 21% of Americans (three to four times any other developed country) are functionally illiterate and innumerate; can't read the instructions, can't write, can't add up to 20 without taking their socks off.
But they can watch TV, can probably vote, and can make babies. Such is life.
So yes, we live in a bubble. So do the 110%, many of whom have no more idea what's happening to them than sheep queueing for their moment at the abattoir. I don't write for them because I don't have the toolkit for that. It's not arrogance, it is a simple lack of my ability. Mea culpa.
Inevitably we write for people that have a level of understanding and experiences similar to our own. If I was mega wealthy I would probably be writing for an audience of other mega wealthy people, because of shared experiences and abilities and concerns. If I was more intelligent perhaps I would be discussing quantum maths, and if I was more interested in making more money I might be discussing crypto investment strategies rather than dismissing it as a Ponzi scheme! Each to his own.
In short, write what you think, say what you like, and don't worry about pleasing all of the people all of the time. The dumbfucks will never understand you, the geniuses and already-know-it-all's will never listen to you, and you will speak to the ones that want to listen to you.
And that is exactly as it should be.
The thing is - the “fix” has been in for well over 50 years. What is happening is not new. It is the logical evolution of a system based on Wall Street speculation, where the ever-expanding monster always needs more food to eat, more fuel to burn. Once we weakened and eliminated SEC regulations and antitrust laws, as the Reagan gang did and subsequent regimes continued, we left a gaping opening for theft of every public asset. This was set in motion decades ago. But everyone with their ounce of greed wanted their “piece of the pie”. Hundreds of thousands of well-educated Americans on both sides wanted their piece of the pie.
We can blame the uber-wealthy and mega-corporations all we want, and they deserve blame - but we could have stopped them from creating this current horror if so many of us had taken organized action decades ago rather than going along with the undermining of our communities and our democracy for the chance to make more money.
It could have gone a different way. Now here we are. We who have any ounce of privilege - from education, profession, resources - need to own our part, even from neglect or ignorance. It’s going to take a whole lot of honesty and effort to push our nation out of the muck and greed.
May it be so.
three essential texts that support the history of what you've summarized:
The Politics of Rich and Poor, by Kevin Phillips (1991) (free to read on archive dot org)
Hot Money and the Politics of Debt, by R. T. Naylor (1986; 1994) (free to read on archive dot org)
America: What Went Wrong? Donald Barlett and James B. Steele (1991)
It sounds like an evasion for a Boomer like me to say this, but it's truth: in the 1980s, it was the WW2 and Silent Gen who had the weight of the power on these matters. (I speak of governmental power.) The problems were often staring them in the face. To the extent that Baby Boomers went along with the standard paradigm of neoliberal materialist consumerism- "the top priority is the lowest price"- yeah, that's the primary Baby Boomer role in that process, which began in earnest in the late 1980s, as an aspect of globalization. That uncritical assent to shipping so many manufacturing concerns offshore. Although frankly even if the offshoring was widely deplored and resisted, the decision was out of the hands of consumers. It has to be said, there was often a steep decline in retail prices for goods of equivalent quality- but was it worth it?
Also, Mass Criminalization of users of illicit substances is not to be underestimated as a way of controlling public discourse and the hoarding of power by the status quo, functionally stifling the input of the Criminals and disqualifying them from running for elected office. (A government official concealing their own illicit drugs use is not resistance; it's a condition of submission, and potentially a catastrophic liability.) I mean, The Richest Man In The World is still required to assent to mandatory drug tests.*
Recognizing that the flourishing of the neoliberal paradigm began in the 1980s, it's still important to realize that it was the Computer Age that has really provided for the expansion of financialization, Attention Economy sharp practice, outsourcing/H1B sharp practice, and other methods of sharp practice-- and in consequence the Olympian level of wealth stratification indicated by the growth in the numbers of billionaires. I don't recall the exact number of billionaires cited by Phillips in his 1991 book, but it was less than 50. Now there are over 800 American billionaires, and around 2500 globally. To think that once upon a time, the founders of Google were ready to sell their business for $1 million. But since they had no takers, they instead eventually entered the billionaire class. Thereby losing all perspective on human-scale reality, in my opinion. They could have gone back to school and learned about, say, oceanography, or botany, or American economic history. Something enriching. A double major. The road to the Polymath ideal.
But no-o, Larry and Sergei entered the Richie Rich class, and now dabble in politics. Especially when the effort aids their private ends. And they aren't even worst of the New Jacks of Silicon Valley. Or the most ambitious of the lot.
[ *long story short about Federal drug test policy; unless someone is an addict, there's practically always enough advance notice to wash drug intake out of a system and pass the test. Unless the drug is THC, which is stored in fat tissues and not water-soluble. And anyway, Elon...at that level, he gets the conditions he wants. The whole point of User Criminalization is to replace a regime of natural rights with power privileges. And in the case of ordinary citizens with no record of (other) legal entanglements, the primary motivation for random drug testing is to send the message. Effectiveness is secondary. https://www.propublica.org/article/drug-testing-thresholds-child-welfare ]
It's just desperately sad that this is where we are. The news is frightening and chaotic and relentless. And the billionaires, those maladapted misanthropic hoarders apparently canmot be stopped. The real failure of democracy has been the inability to stop the rise of these new monarchs. We are already being ruled and it fucking sucks.
Yep. The world has gone bananas and you’re nuts if you join them and nuts if you don’t.
Bananas and nuts. It’s what we started out with and it’s how we ended up.
Oh well.
You see the structure. You can't unsee it. Then you're told: stop saying you see it.
Standard penalty for pattern recognition in systems that depend on collective non-recognition.
The gaslighting loop: clarity becomes evidence of dysfunction. The person who sees the pattern gets pathologized. "Paranoid." "Cynical." The diagnosis protects the system.
Your question: how could narratives shift to make shared sense-making possible?
They can't. Not at scale.
Shared sense-making requires shared epistemology. We don't have that. We have competing infrastructures that validate different observations.
The shift you're asking for would require dismantling arrangements that benefit from fragmentation. That's not a narrative problem. That's a power problem.
What remains possible: small-scale networks where pattern recognition isn't penalized. Where you can say "I see this" and others say "yes, I see it too."
Not reform. Just finding the others who already see what you see.
The isolation isn't a bug. It's how the system maintains itself.
Refuse the isolation. Find the others.
They're there. They're just not broadcasting.
Amen! Especially this bit: “The shift you're asking for would require dismantling arrangements that benefit from fragmentation. That's not a narrative problem. That's a power problem.” YES.
Many people have domains where they are 300 steps ahead of everyone else - maybe in their professional field of interest, or their personal hell of lived discrimination.
When it comes to collapse awareness, the sheer scope and significance of it is already enough to drive you mad.
The ostracism of sounding like a madman is the rancid cherry on top. Classic Cassandra situation.
Explaining how things work to people who don’t know, don’t care and aren’t curious to learn is an unwinnable situation. That it deeply affects them and their children’s fates somehow doesn’t register. This also goes for otherwise clever, conscientious people.
"The only reason people do not know much is because they do not care to know. They are incurious. Incuriosity is the oddest and most foolish failing there is." — Stephen Fry
I guess what they need is something huge, immediate and visceral to shock them out of their stupor. I shudder to think of what that’ll be.
How to stay sane in this situation has been the biggest challenge of my life. I spent three years in a depression about it and still get triggered on a daily basis, because the whole world and everyone in it is goddamn insane.
But then, it was always like this.
"Three great forces rule the world: stupidity, fear, and greed"
— Albert Einstein
I’ve ranted plenty against billionaires in my posts. The truth is they, along with unethical elites and strongmen suffering from the worst possible psychopathies are an inevitable outcome of our system plus our fallible species that keep forgetting we’re merely animals governed by simple drives.
Socrates explained why democracy contains the seed of its own destruction: ignorance is the rational choice for the uninformed voter — hello game theory — but clueless voters shouldn’t be voting on how to steer spaceship Earth. But then, quis custodiet ipsos custodes?
History cements how all civilizations collapse; all the cognitive sciences eventually converge on the same conclusion. Thinkers of all types saw this coming long ago.
Physicists might be the surest of them all, for they can lean on the laws of physics themselves to explain why there is no escape. (Tom Murphy and Sid Smith come to mind). My father was one, and I have never known a human being so certain about anything as him regarding his domain. When someone teaches you how reality works, and knows it for a fact, the thing to do is shut up and listen.
I wonder if people will ever listen. I have my doubts.
Preach
Thank you, it really is like being the only sane people in a free range insane asylum out there.
Oy, what a messy stew this is. I think people are so afraid of facing the depth of how they've been manipulated, and how much they've colluded with this, that they would much rather continue with the illusion (and their own powerlessness), suppress the dissonance, and reinforce the splits, inner and outer, from their own sensed truth, from any notion of a soul which can guide them.
At least, that's what I hope is going on, because it means they are in some way still a little human, and there is a chance, and I'm not totally surrounded by vampires...
It's hard to face how much agency and power one has given away, and how deeply and intricately the patterns of illusion and extraction are woven into almost every basic material and relational aspect of life, and how much willpower is needed to come back to some kind of healthy balance. It's going to take us a very long time. But we have the memories of every resource we need inside us. And the mantra has to be: "I CAN!"
The vast majority of my friends have never even heard of Peter Thiel. How am I supposed to even begin to explain all this to them? I suggest them to read Quinn Slobodian, but when I see them typing his name in ChatGPT I know I lost them already.
Same here. Sometimes I say something about Thiel/Karp/Yarvin to friends/acquaintances and get a blank stare. Most often I don't "explain" anything, since 1) Im not an expert, 2) somehowl I would come across as patronizing and weird, even if recounting only Wikipedia basic facts. Frustrating. Love the Slobodian reference!
I recall interviewing you for the BBC World Service around the release of Team Human and you did not sound crazy to me nor I hope to the listeners.
I think the forces that you are describing are too large and complex to be taken in all at once. It's overwhelming. But I also think enough people are interested in knowing more.