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Peter Coffin - Custom Reality and You

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471 views153 pages

Peter Coffin - Custom Reality and You

Uploaded by

Selene Abraldez
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
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CUSTOM REALITY

AND YOU

PETER COFFIN

Copyright © 2018 Peter Coffin


All rights reserved.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENT
S
A massive thanks must go to everyone who made this book even
remotely possible. To my patrons, whose support is utterly vital to have the
time to do this. To friends who have listened to endless rambling and
offered feedback. To Penelope Iremonger, a gracious and detail-oriented
editor who brought the book up several notches on the dial, as well as
Oliver Thorne for the extremely helpful notes. To my parents, Joe and
Carol, for raising me to think critically and for their love. To my children,
Harrison and Gemma, for making it very hard to write a book, but being
great sources of joy and inspiration. Finally, thank you to my beautiful wife
and partner, Ashleigh, for your intellect, your conversation, your time, your
love, and your patience. ♥
1. INTRODUCTION

E
ither I was an artistic genius, or my art teacher was a bit lazy. My
money is on the latter. Older teachers tend to come from a tougher
time, or at the very least, view themselves as such. They may have
lived through Vietnam or a World War, and they may have even directly
dealt with the horrors of those conflicts. I can’t say I’ve experienced
anything like that, though there are young people who have, but it seems
like they would be hell. Teachers that either directly or indirectly saw hell
were more likely to be tougher on students.
Though my art teacher was old, she went pretty soft on us. She also
really liked Picasso. People only needed about a third of the time she would
allot to complete a project and when we were done, we were allowed to do
just about whatever we wanted until the deadline. She was a nice person
and very encouraging to everyone. I would say it was a good experience for
me. A light workload and a legitimately supportive teacher make for a class
made up mostly of students who don’t rush and actually try to do well.
I had art in my second class period of the day, after
homeroom/advisory/whatever your generation calls it. So, if I was not
working on a project in my second hour, I had two hours to not think that
hard. Which is good, because I was often up until 4am playing video
games, which isn’t smart but is relatable!
Anyways, I had an hour to take it very easy followed by an hour to take
it pretty easy. At this point you should probably discard the possibility that I
am an artistic genius. I wasn’t then and I’m not now. It was at least a fun
class, though.
If 9/11 hadn’t happened while I was in art class, that would be all there
is to my memory of it.
To be clear, the first plane hit about fifteen minutes before second period
art. They had a TV set up before 9am, though, when class started. Upon
walking in a minute or two before class officially started, I didn’t
understand what was on the screen. By 9:03am, more students were in the
classroom than were supposed to be. They’d been filing in because it was
one of the only classrooms with a television, and it was very clear
something very big was happening.
The next fifteen minutes of the broadcast were intense. The channel we
were watching had a close-up of the first tower burning when the second
plane hit at 9:03. So, we didn’t actually see it live, but the anchors were
narrating the scene. The one talking kind of trailed off and the other let out
an “oh my God!” After a moment of regaining composure, they noted there
was what appeared to be another plane hitting the second tower.
Another fifteen minutes passed and it was 2003. We all aged about two
years in that fifteen minutes, and I was no longer in art class. I was starting
a program at the local community college that would last just a bit less than
twelve minutes before I dropped out. Another war in Iraq was underway
and health savings accounts were the hip new thing. Everything was totally
normal. For sure.
Not so much. To many of us, reality was changing, fracturing further
beyond the borders of its latest traumatic wound. Personally, that fracture
lead me to heavily question my role as someone shortly entering adulthood
in America. What was “the American Dream?” Why do these people hate
us? We’re just normal people living our lives… What did we do to them? It
made no sense to me, and for good reason. I didn’t understand reality.
I wasn’t the only one. From the liberals torn between capital and their
own morals to the conspiracy theorists, reality was behaving like a cracked
windshield that you don’t get replaced because you can definitely still see!
In any case, it’s 2018 and we’re still taking the side roads to avoid
getting a fine. This doesn’t work forever, though. We’ve gotten one before
and with many broken reality windshields. We’ve caved and replaced it
more than once. This particular windshield had been mostly intact for
several generations, though, and we were beginning to think that would be
the one that protected the inside of our car from the friction of moving air
forever.
9/11 changed each of our individual realities in different was, and
cemented the Middle East as an ongoing topic of discussion for reasons (I
can say that, I’m a millennial). I want to quickly summarize a principle that
has, mostly outside the view of our everyday lives, driven a large fraction of
the sweeping changes in the 20th century:
If you have oil, we will come democratize your ass with some serious
freedom. That’s the military reality.
To accomplish this, the United States Armed Forces employ a wide
variety of weapons. Some of them are autonomous, while others are piloted
by kids in a military arcade where they get medals and PTSD, instead of
tickets and pizza. One can’t trade them in for prizes, either, and will
constantly remember how one killed some people at a wedding when you
try to sleep.
Do you ever think about this stuff? Doesn’t it bother you that what I am
describing is not even something anyone would dispute? Did it feel normal?
Did it feel real?
I mean, aside from the arcade imagery. I am more than willing to
acknowledge there aren’t a lot of arcades anymore, but I thought it made
my point pretty well. Not everyone has read Ender’s Game, though that
would have worked, too. The way we frame information changes the way
we interpret it, which is something I want you to heavily consider as you
read.
Not just this book. Anytime you read.
In January of 1996, someone said “Google is a great name for a
company” and filed the paperwork. Almost 20 years later, they realized it
was a bad idea and changed it to “Alphabet,” which is… I guess a less bad
name. Anyways, the company created an unprecedented search engine that
I won’t try to make sound cool because it’s a search engine. It was still quite
impressive, though. Instead of ranking pages based on the number of times
it mentioned keywords (as its competitors did), it checked the amount of
times a website was linked elsewhere.
That is to say, if you searched “butt,” it figured out how many times
pages containing the word “butt” linked to each other and ordered the
results based on this. If something got linked to more, it was more likely to
be useful. In theory, this discouraged gaming the system. Previously, by
simply making a page with nothing but 100,000 instances of the word
“butt,” that page would be determined relevant to the word “butt.” But
checking backlink volume supposedly discouraged tag loading and required
a page to be connected elsewhere to be relevant. You supposedly couldn’t
control how many other pages linked to you. Challenge Accepted.
People figured out that if they made multiple websites all over the place
linking to the website they want to rank, it would rank. Google kept trying
to develop new ways to rank that were less easy to manipulate, but in the
end people always manipulated them. People like the idea of ranking well;
it’s how you win. Winning is supposedly important in life, and you can’t
win if you don’t play.
However, when you play the game in a way the game makers don’t
expect or appreciate, they tend to create rules to stop it. In a vast,
anonymous, unregulatable expanse of virtual space, it’s kind of hard to
enforce rules and people don’t care much for them anyway. In fact, that was
a lot of the point of the internet.
So instead, game makers must build systems that create the result they
want. Now, if I told you I knew everything about how Google ranks pages
after many years of conflict and observation, I would be telling you a lie. I
do, however, know that there are three words that sum up the result that
scares me the most: “best for you.”
What is best for you? What exactly does that term mean? Does it mean
something that helps you? Does it mean what keeps you healthy or expands
your mind?
Does it mean something that fits your taste? Does it apply to everything
you search or just some things? Does telling you what is “best for you”
mean withholding other information that might contradict it? Could that
other information be true? Does that mean “best for you” might be false?
Could they both be true? Is it mutually exclusive? Are algorithms the only
thing that do this?
When you became an adult, there were probably things you ended up
believing that contradict the ones you were raised on. You may have been
raised Catholic and become an atheist. Hell, you may have become a
Mormon. The environment we’re socialized in is our built-in social
network. Just like the social networks created and maintained by massive
corporations we all spend our days on, it curates reality for us.
For instance, it is not terribly difficult to see that both Fox News and
CNN are simply different interpretations of the same things much of the
time. Both selectively withhold information to make the assertions they do,
and they cater to the lifestyle the viewer perceives themselves to be.
As a quick warning, one of the following two paragraphs is going to
make most Americans reading this book uncomfortable or angry.
Someone who watches Fox News considers themselves conservative;
they perceive themselves to be traditional and Very Rational™, meaning
they believe that their decisions are not influenced by emotions. The set of
facts that were fact in 1950 are the foundation of a healthy life in these
people’s opinions, meaning they’re still influenced by certain ideas. For
instance, the Red Scare their parents were terrified of. They might
understand somewhere in the depths of their minds that the world has
moved on from that point, but rather than acknowledge this as development,
they tend to believe that the world has lost its way. They think we need to
go back to The Good Old Days™ and whether they know it or not, that
usually makes them bigots or unwitting accomplices to bigots.
Someone who watches CNN or MSNBC probably considers themselves
“liberal.” They consider this specifically to mean “the opposite of a
conservative,” despite the fact that other than the evangelicals and ethno-
nationalists who have injected their views into conservatism, both
conservatism and what a lot of Americans call “liberalism” are founded in
liberalism. What we call liberalism is center-right to center-left. This person
believes themselves to be socially tolerant, but won’t admit to themselves
that our country is built on a power structure that exacerbates inequality and
other problems they think can be just solved by getting people to accept the
idea that they need to talk nicer. They’re sanctimonious, they believe in an
elite but they don’t call it that, and they think they really like science. What
they actually like, either consciously or not, is the idea that their choices
make them better than other people. They also believe they should be
rewarded for it.
Liberals and conservatives are both weirdly enamored with advancing
the interests of a free market, though liberals are pretty sure that they aren’t.
Well, at least the liberals who aren’t in power aren’t. You’ll be amazed at
how much this little piece of information matters in explaining what has
happened to reality.
The rift between these two demographics is both huge and tiny. That
sentence seems counterintuitive, but later, you’ll be able to come back to
this part and say “oh, that is actually true.” It requires at least a few new
concepts, too. I had to make up some new terms and phrases for any of it to
make sense, though, which I think was worth the years I’ve put into these
ideas. I get to name the ideas that ended the world. That’s badass!
That’s an intentionally dramatic statement; obviously, we are all still
here. But what is “here?” What exactly are we talking about when we say
“reality?” How “postmodern” is this book and how much of an existential
crisis is it going to cause?
The manipulation of reality didn’t start with the World Trade Center’s
falling. It also didn’t start with algorithms or social networks. These things
enabled it on pretty high levels over the last decade, but reality has been on
this trajectory for centuries. We could spend a long time in this intro setting
up historical context to give you a fuller view, but from this point I’ll
reserve further contextualization for when talking specific mechanics or
situations.
Please remember that my concepts of how this works are based mostly
in observation. I’m attempting to create and apply framing devices that can
both explain and aide in further criticism and observation of the “reality
crisis” this world is currently having. I also want to remind you that this
isn’t new; profit was always nudging people in this direction.
Also, “Reality Crisis” is apparently also a Japanese metal band. Google
told me that.
So, what is “custom reality?” I think this term is basically the simplest
version of the thing I want to say. Perhaps people may already say it, too. I
don’t know, but I don’t hear a lot of people saying things like
“individualized reality” or “cultivated identity.” These are terms I made up
and for that reason, they are not “real.” Yet.
There aren’t a lot of ongoing conversations about lifestyle marketing’s
deep effect on our lives, nor are there many that characterize it as I intend
to. Typically, the mainstream understanding of lifestyle marketing might
influence what brand of soap you may buy, or whether you drink only Coke
or Pepsi and do so with fierce loyalty, despite these products’ similarity.
Why you may like Coke or Pepsi has no relation to why you’re a
Republican or Democrat… right? Directly speaking, probably not. But the
methodology behind brand differentiation, lifestyle marketing, and political
loyalty aren’t that different.
Custom reality isn’t just the result of marketing, though. There is a load
of factors: the ideals of the United States of America. I’m going to say some
stuff about how individualism is not actually leading us towards a collective
reality. I’m not going to tell you that there should be no such thing as an
individual or that we need to stop acting as individuals with their own
identities. I am going to tell you that individualism is a means to be directed
by manipulation of the environment we are presented with.
A lot of people spend time talking about how stupid everyone is, how
there’s an Idiocracy forming, how the idiot majority is screwing everything
up for us, and any number of infinite variations on how 90% of people are
stupid and 10% of people are constantly trying to fix the world for them. To
drop the first curse word of the book, I think that’s horseshit.
People make rational decisions based on the world presented to them.
I’m not saying that genuinely makes their decisions rational, so don’t you
dare think that. Keep in mind that the goal is to understand and not to
excuse. People who are ignorant about things often are that way because
they’ve never been exposed to an argument that’s not condescending.
Unfortunately, a sympathetic ear is often attached to a mouth that wants
something. This mouth and ear combo is also often attached to someone
inherently closer to the sensibilities of the person in need of the ear than
someone who might want to attempt to convince them of opposing points,
like a family member or friend.
Through familial, social, analog and digital conduits, we have the
mechanisms for creating a custom reality from parts given to us selectively.
We aren’t sheep. Every one of us is a shepherd. We are all leaders, thinking
for ourselves, making our own decisions. That might sound positive, but it’s
not. Eventually, we must realize that we’re at one end of a hallway and our
decision is limited to staying there or walking to the other end. We are free
to choose whichever end of a rectangle we want to occupy. Woo.
Essentially, we aren’t tricked at all. We’re allowed a decent amount of
agency, but it only works in a world with very limited choice. Therefore, it
isn’t power in the real world but instead in a virtual one. We are living in a
custom reality—a dream world. While we occupy our individualized
existence, our essence is easy to control.
Sounds like a fun book!
2. QUESTIONING WHAT’S
REAL

I
’ll ask you a question that’s been made obvious by the title of this
chapter: have you ever questioned reality? Of course you have. A cat
would probably do the same if it was smart enough. Because we’re such
big smarties, like cats, asking super intense questions about the world
around us is inevitable.
Cats, however, cannot ask those questions because they cannot talk.
Well, unless you consider “Oh my dog, oh long John, oh long Johnson, oh
Don piano, why I eyes ya, all the livelong day” to be more than nonsense.
Further, cats cannot read. They also poop in a box, like, that’s not weird?
It’s weird.
If you asked a cat about postmodernism, that cat would probably look at
you as if to say, “I shit in a box.”
Starting conversations about the current state of facts will often steer
itself toward a discussion on postmodernism, usually negatively. There are
a few people who repeatedly call themselves “skeptics,” both in traditional
and new media, who you may see reference postmodernism in a negative
context. These clowns tend to paint it as the reason nothing is “real”
anymore, which reveals a flawed understanding of what postmodernism is.
Despite what you’ll hear any number of cartoon animals in tuxedos say
if you search “postmodernism” on YouTube, the actual underlying
philosophy is not “everyone gets to define their own personal truth.” It’s a
philosophical approach that questions human perspective; it is
acknowledgement of the flaws in our perception. There was a broad
movement of philosophers and artists who used this approach to
deconstruct cultural norms, evaluate them, and attempt to ascertain their
validity. To simplify (a lot), it’s skepticism by another word.
In fact, most philosophical methodology is. Postmodernism just happens
to be the one that was skeptical of the objective aspects of modernism.
Which is very good, because though modernism brought us to societally
accept more self-awareness through its skepticism of the Age of
Enlightenment’s sureness in its collective conclusions, it was overzealous in
its utilitarianism. Modernist conclusion, just like the Age of Enlightenment
and other philosophical development before it, regarded itself as objective
or provable. But every new wave of philosophical thinking usually regards
itself as the final form; believing we’ve reached peak enlightenment doesn’t
give much in way of understanding who we all are as different people.
Postmodern philosophers broke the link in that chain.
What we might call the “postmodern approach” is what led to the so-
called “skeptic” cultural movement that gained prominence during the last
decade or so. This is neither a good thing nor a bad thing, despite all the
pretend skeptics definitely being a bad thing. It also yielded social sciences,
aided in the development of today’s feminism, and in your questioning of
movies, music, news, art, architecture, or just about everything. We were
raised to deconstruct; it’s damn good framing for the stage of critical
thinking in which we ascertain base level assumptions. We really could do
with more acknowledgement and acceptance of our inherent lack of
perfection. None of us are gods.
A cartoon animal in a tuxedo on YouTube will not tell you that. A cat
might. Also, because a cat is probably not masculine enough for the kind of
skeptic that makes those kinds of videos, the cartoon tuxedo animal won’t
be a cat.
My understanding of postmodernism is derived mainly from some of
Michel Foucault’s critical histories and the work of his contemporaries, but
I don’t intend to force their material upon you. You have a life, let’s take a
TL;DR (“too long; didn’t read,” for less internet-y folks) perspective on the
specifics and then talk more about how these ideas slot into society.
Postmodernism is characterized by its questioning of objective truth,
which is a good thing to be questioning. When one criticizes something
using a postmodern approach, one deconstructs the elements of an assertion
or observation to reach a base level understanding from which to find truth.
It’s not mere simplification; deconstruction means analyzing context,
connections, implications, consequences, materials, and motivations, among
other things. Obviously, that doesn’t include screaming that “nothing is
real” at passers-by from an alley while on a three-day binge, inexplicably
wearing a stolen Technicolor Dreamcoat. It does, however, require you to
understand that “reality” and “fact” are products of human perception.
“Reality” is a word. There was no concept of reality before humans
came into existence, in no small part because there was no concept of a
concept before humans came into existence. Words didn’t exist before they
came out of people’s mouths.
Everything we observe is automatically viewed through the lens of
perspective, seen differently due to variations in everything from our optic
nerves to our cultural sensibilities. There is no such thing as someone who
observes something with no perspective whatsoever, and because of this,
there is no such thing as objectivity.
For instance, there are a select few of us who just despise the internet’s
thing for pictures of cats. I am one of those people. Yeah, I said it. Come at
me, bro.
You may have thought it to be an objective fact that cat pictures on the
internet is the best thing for a bad day, but guess what? I don’t. In fact, they
genuinely make me feel worse. Getting cat photos sent to me when I’m
down makes me feel like I’m on a path I can’t change, so the best I can do
is distract myself. It makes me feel as if my efforts are futile and sends me
on a path to a darker place. For some people, it’s medicine that is the best
thing for a bad day. For others, it’s sex, drugs, chess, a good joke or driving
around in the rain with the orchestral versions of ’90s Japanese role-playing
game soundtracks on loop. I don’t know!
I just know that if I’m feeling down, Caturday puts me in a worse place
than I was before the feline love-bombing. Though, I do very much like
cats. I also know that this is not a relatable statement. But nothing is
objective because no one is objective. This is partly why we value
sympathy and empathy so much; the idea that one might understand or even
have parallel emotions helps overcome the total lack of objectivity in a
human world. The imperfection goes much further, though.
Memory provides us with a good idea as to how imperfect human
perception modifies perspective continually over time. Yadin Dudai, a
Professor of Neurobiology at the Weizmann Institute of Science of
Rehovot, Israel, put together a collection of essays on how memory works
called “Memory from A to Z: Keywords, Concepts, and Beyond” that I’ll
attempt to summarize my understanding of here:
Human memory is an extremely complicated construct; it doesn’t
operate digitally like a data storage device, nor does a memory exist
singularly. It exists as an index of many sensory events which are “stored”
(for lack of a better word) all over the place. Where you might think a
memory exists as “event.mem,” it’s more like “event.eye” and “event.ear”
floating somewhere in a neural network, encoded through the strengthening
and weakening of synaptic connections. Whereas data is stored in ones and
zeros, human memory is stored in a much more analog manner.
The next thing one needs to know about memory is that every
recollection of it acts as a new event. As one recalls something, the parts of
the brain that handle the different sensory functions act as if they are
experiencing it again. We also have maintenance recollections which take
place specifically to preserve a memory instead of allowing it to weaken,
but any form of recollection needs to be regarded as a new event. This in
mind, recollection is essentially rewriting a memory, possibly because
organic matter is never in a permanent state.
In this mode of preservation, we must acknowledge a specific weakness:
an imperfect mold creates imperfect casts.
Your memory is you. If we didn’t have memories, we would not have
identity. This means identity itself is imperfect, as is everything humans
have come up with. “Fact,” however, is something that someone defined in
short-term memory, or possibly even considered a long time, then
committed it to paper, papyrus, or cave wall. We mostly agree on what
“fact” is supposed to mean, but that doesn’t mean we agree on what “facts”
are.
If something is created by (or is in some other way the product of)
humans, it is imperfect. We cannot claim our observations to be universal. It
is self-aggrandizement to call our perception anything other than imperfect.
Evidence is imperfect, and must be accepted for it to matter. The processes
we use to accept evidence are imperfect, for the evidence passes through the
eyeballs and memories of those examining it. The person perceiving it has
had a very specific life experience and that colors their interpretation, as
well. The idea of “true or false” is imperfect, and we must understand our
own implicit biases cannot be avoided.
The only thing a human could objectively state about “fact” is that it is
not objective. I am joking (mostly).
Yes, there is most certainly a universal commonality outside of human
perception. The universe is as it is, whether we are here or not. However,
truth is a concept invented by humanity, just as facts are, and all other
words. Not only is our perception of reality colored by our own perspective,
but so is our recollection. Our memory, the way that we retain a grip on
reality, is astoundingly imperfect as well.
Memory is not definite, and nor is the person with the most photographic
memory in existence perfect. Memory is analog and in flux; it is fluid and
in every way unlike how computers store data. It’s also not persistent. The
ink on the pages of a book doesn’t change every time you read it; memory
does.
Not only is perception imperfect, but your ability to go back to that
perception is imperfect. Therefore, your perception of facts and reality
cannot be called objective. Because it’s not.
This was a typical assertion of postmodern philosophers. For instance,
Michel Foucault presented his ideas and theories on modernism as a critical
history of various subjects. This is a simplification, but modernism
presented an objective truth and objective reality. My assertion, as well as
anyone who puts any stock at all in postmodernism, is that perspective
makes that impossible. This isn’t to say we should all just live in our own
little bubbles; we must acknowledge historical and cultural concepts on
which we power our societies. But ongoing criticism must continue. We
must be skeptical of everything, but only if we understand all the historical
and cultural contexts, as well as its implications.
So basically, like YouTube skeptics, but with information and
acknowledgment of culture. For the uninitiated, “skepticism” on YouTube
is anything but, functioning primarily as a kind of resistance to progressive
critique of social and economic norms.
Our perceived certainties close us off from what is certain. The universe
is cold and unfeeling, but our perception of it is colored by, if not entirely a
result of, our biological imperfection and our life experience. It’s both
nature and nurture that we can’t perceive objectively, and postmodernism is
one of many means to acknowledge and criticize our bias. It exists because
modernists believed that science was somehow perfect, and that humanity
was able to be objective.
I believe postmodernism’s net effect was simply reminding us that we
aren’t perfect.
There is a flaw in it, though; it doesn’t go much further than that. We use
it to deconstruct and analyze our society’s norms, and those who subscribe
to the approach often follow that same process when philosophically
critiquing things. This results in many people effectively bungee jumping
alone regarding critical thought. No one is there to pull them in, so they
must do it themselves.
This creates a rabbit hole. If you get lost in it, deconstruction can waste
away all meaning around you. Sure, if nothing means anything, nothing
hurts. Just the same, nothing feels good. The world around us can appear to
be ridiculous in the most depressing of ways. If the only thing we do is
deconstruct, we can strip away meaning and become very nihilistic, and not
the careful, positive nihilism some have created through personal meaning.
I’m talking the Markus “Notch” Persson kind of nihilism.
Similarly, one can use postmodern deconstruction to find a sweet spot
for exploitation. One can profit, either socially or economically, by taking
things down to their base and applying their findings to an agenda. This
isn’t postmodernism; it just started there. In much the same way, Adolf
Hitler was once an innocent child who played with toys and shat his pants.
On the 22nd of January 2017, Kellyanne Conway, senior advisor in
Donald Trump’s White House, appeared on the NBC’s Meet the Press and
in defense of their press secretary’s loose handling of numbers said, “You’re
saying it’s a falsehood. and Sean Spicer… gave alternative facts to that.”
Kellyanne Conway likely utilized something akin to postmodern
deconstruction to break down the societal concept of fact. I don’t know that
she would describe her approach as such and it’s quite possible she doesn’t
know anything about it, but “alternative fact” is an idea that started there.
“Alternative fact” doesn’t justify; it defines. The term is not just some
excuse to say things that aren’t true; it reflects an actual phenomenon.
Donald Trump is hardly the first person to say things that don’t reflect our
broad social truth in order to muddy the waters. This is a popular tactic that
more than a few “real” politicians, and significantly more everyday folks,
regularly employ. Many believe themselves when they say these things, too.
On December 5th, 2013, 95-year-old Nelson Mandela died after
suffering from a prolonged respiratory infection. However, many people
think he died in prison in 1988. The likely reason for this is that it was
announced he had tuberculosis while imprisoned in 1988. Several times
since then, his death has been announced or talked about, including by
former President George H.W. Bush. More than one book claims he died in
1988, 1991, and so on. There is a collective misremembering of the death of
Nelson Mandela.
What is known as The Mandela Effect is all the proof you’ll ever need
that reality has been individualized. It originated from skepticism of
mainstream narratives and, in truth, it comes from a healthy place. The
conclusion goes beyond deconstruction, though; it’s a repeated mistake by a
lot of individuals, reinforced by other individuals. This situation brought
itself about through misinformation (both intentional and unintentional) and
is regarded by some as proof that people are living in different dimensional
timelines.
A lot of people define The Mandela Effect as a set of parallel universes
clashing and changing our memories or some such horseshit. Anyone
familiar with memes (“viral content” for the lay) can pretty easily figure out
how The Mandela Effect works: stuff gets popular and then purple monkey
dishwasher. Now, neither “stuff” nor “popular” have anything about being
factual baked into their definitions; misremembering happens whether
erroneous accounts of an event become popular or not. People accept them
as valid, no matter how bizarre.
I believe people make this mistake for the same reasons they join multi-
level marketing schemes: a lot of the time, verifiable information is
negative, disappointing, and/or delivered in a condescending or elitist
manner. Also, a person claiming to be an authority rubs many of us the
wrong way, as we’re repeatedly asked to be their own authority on
everything. You’ve likely heard a variant of the phrase “we’ve represented
all sides, now it’s up to the viewer to decide for themselves!” That’s
validation by deferment; apparently, we’re supposed to conclude that a
multinational corporation doesn’t have the resources to look into something
and it’s up to us, the rational outsider, to find the real truth.
When questionable conclusions are reached by an attitude of skepticism
and distrust toward popular narratives and ideologies, it’s both because our
methods are individualized and how they become further so. Our counter-
arguments may be rooted in fallacious logic or traditional thinking when we
accept validation without verification. But because we got there of our own
volition, we think it’s correct, regardless of where we came from. In
thinking this, we may deconstruct things down to a base level, but our own
biases fill in the blanks rather than insight.
When Kellyanne Conway used the term “alternative facts,” it was
perhaps a new phrase; it was certainly the first I’d heard of it. It was also a
perverted testimony to just how far the deconstruction of “objective fact”
has come. But neither the impetus or result is “postmodernism.” It takes
more to erode reality than simply questioning it.
American life, in its endless stream of conditioning, has been priming us
to believe that whatever we choose to consume, we’re empowered for
having chosen. This is much more related to the idea of “my reality.”
Media has not done much to help. I didn’t mention “we’ve shown both
sides, now it’s up to the viewer to decide” for no reason. Media happily
represents every issue as a two-sided one, including issues that have long
since been verified or debunked through evidence-based methods. We are
given the basics, but we are left to decide for ourselves. We are the leader
presented with the briefing. We’re asked to make the decision where to take
our own personal Nation of One™.
Why is it a problem to represent assertions that have been debunked as
valid opinions? Tell me this: when Robert De Niro says “what, you don’t
think we should worry about vaccine safety” is he not trying to undermine
conclusions that have seen rigorous scrutiny through usage of fallacious
logic presented as common sense? Does his status as a beloved actor and
member of the film community lend credence to his assertions? Should it?
Yet, some people listen to him, and they do it for a complex set of
reasons. Maybe they’re a fan. Maybe they aren’t but regard him as high in
status or wealthy enough to simply know more than we small folk. Maybe
people assume he doesn’t make decisions without expert input. He certainly
has better access to information and the people who research it than those of
us without much material wealth, so assuming he uses that access isn’t
terribly absurd (despite being incorrect).
A person could even just have an underlying distrust for the medical
profession due to an incident at some point in their own lives. These aren’t
illogical; there’s more than a few people with more than a few reasons to
feel as if they’ve been wronged by a doctor.
For instance, the most recent US Transgender Survey reports a
whopping 33% of transgender people, who saw a healthcare provider in the
past year, having at least one negative experience specifically related to
being transgender, with even higher rates for people of color and those with
disabilities. That’s an extremely high rate; imagine if your experience with
doctors was “at least one out of three are going to fuck with my day.”
The information De Niro has disseminated regarding vaccines ranges
from “provably false” to “just asking questions” depending on who he’s
speaking with. Giving him a platform to speak about vaccines as some kind
of expert creates a dynamic where he’s deemed credible, though. You may
not consider him to be and I certainly don’t, but if he’s presented as an
authority, it undermines an actual specialist on a topic and in more than one
way. The effect of perspective should become obvious here.
If there were a panel of (or a debate between) specialists, and if Robert
De Niro is part of it, he will automatically appear to be on equal footing
with doctors, researchers, and various professionals who back up their
assertions with something more than conjecture. He isn't, though, because
the actual specialists here used scientific methodology to conclude what
they have. De Niro has experienced personal hardship and, perhaps, has
gotten a lot of unsatisfying answers.
I get why that might lead someone on a path to alternative ideas, but
when those ideas come from a debunked study an insurance company
commissioned for a lawsuit with results that can’t be duplicated (and got its
head researcher’s medical license revoked), it might be time to ask the
question if De Niro is genuinely “just asking questions.”
Now, whenever someone becomes anti-vaccine after their kid’s learning
disability manifests, I sympathize. Life deviated from the plan; things didn’t
go how they imagined. The fantasy is not the reality. However, I can’t help
wondering whether many of these parents view their children as an
individual with unique challenges or if they see them as a broken promise
from their maker. That’s not to say I think these parents don’t love their
children. I, however, rarely read a message board post, a professional
article, or a tweet that isn’t all about what the parents “deal with.”
My belief isn’t that the onus is on them, though. Those who understand
the benefits of planting seeds of distrust in parents who are desperate for
answers, creating new markets full of products and services, are the ones
who did this. There’s plenty of incentive to find people with that need and
attempt to “inform” them.
Anti-vaccination is a hard position to take. There’s built-in alienation
that can only come from having a perspective that society just doesn’t
accept its validity.
With the escalating pressure to constantly be perfect, it makes sense that
a person who has gone for decades without a release might finally
metaphysically explode.
The obvious intent on catering to a specific audience through the
selective omission of facts has made people suspicious of ostensibly true
information due to who presented it. This has led many to alternative media
outlets cropping up. However, these outlets aren’t usually offering a
collective, evidence-oriented substitute on the narrative-oriented
mainstream media. They’re just offering a near-infinite number of counter-
narratives. And ads.
Between broad, partisan-driven mainstream narratives and narrow,
fragmented, confirmation bias-oriented alternative narratives, there’s a start
point and a rabbit hole for nearly any assertion you can make. There’s
content that can confirm anything you want to think, because it’s profitable
to co-opt your deconstruction of something of which you’re right to be
skeptical. Making facts into a personalized, “choose your own adventure”
sort of affair is a brilliant means of control because those operating with the
means present the choices.
With all this in mind, it’s important to note specifically that I think
deconstruction of universalism and realism has been a good thing. It is
utterly impossible to describe any of this without it. An imperfect, human
approach cannot yield unquestionable truth. Yet universalism and realism
(approaches created by humanity) purport to do so. Among those truths are
religion, and not the “found God, volunteer in a homeless shelter in my free
time” kind. Universalism breeds obsession and even violence over who is
right, rather than encouraging, rewarding, or canonizing the work of
scrutiny.
Postmodernism doesn’t really offer a replacement for universalism,
though. Combined with societal norms, this is why I think individualized
reality has taken prominence over a collective one. We deconstructed as if
deconstruction was the ultimate goal. This could quite possibly be due to
the idea our direction has been co-opted by those with power. Their covert
redirection of each of us as individuals through promises of empowerment
through choice (which they carefully curate) yields many fragile,
fragmented perspectives (read: realities) that all operate in service of
consumption and capital.
Which prompts the most postmodern question of all time: what is
reality?
There are wealthy, prominent figures in one of the United States’ biggest
industries, technology, who believe the answer is that we live in a computer
simulation. And who knows? They could be right. Simulation theory posits
that reality is running on one or more computers. This requires many
assumptions; there must be computers, and they must be powerful enough
to run all the physical simulations and render an image for every single
person who is connected to or created by the simulation. If each one of our
consciousnesses are generated by the simulation, then we would all be
smaller-scale simulations ourselves, as well. We all make complex
observations and choices on a non-stop basis. Are we hardware? Are we
software emulation? Are we interfacing with the simulation or are we part
of it? These are all questions that must be answered in order to map out
even the simplest version of this theory that could be considered
“complete.”
However, there are significantly less assumptions in believing in a
religion. Believing in a religion does not require one to observe all the
tenets of it; a great many religious people in the United States subscribe to a
very individualized version of the religion they follow. They pick and
choose what is “best for them” and ultimately the only collective
assumption one is truly required to make as “a believer” is that somehow,
someone created all of this. Ultimately, the non-evidence-derived
assumption you must make is that there’s a god (or multiple). See, the holy
texts are all human-made.
Among competing hypotheses, the one with the fewest assumptions is
often favored as “more likely true,” and that the simplest answer is often the
correct one. There aren’t testable, scientific hypotheses for either of these
viewpoints, but simply by number of assumptions, religion is more likely to
be true than simulation theory, because religion only requires one: faith.
More important to acknowledge, though, is that neither of these ideas
are scientifically testable. I’ll go a bit further; I outright believe both
simulation theory and religion are incorrect assumptions. My viewpoint
requires no assumptions; anything could have happened to bring earth and
life around, including, though highly unlikely, the things I believe to be
impossibilities. Thing is, really shouldn’t matter to one’s spiritual beliefs if
someone else’s don’t align fully. The nature of assumptions one makes
about the nature of the universe needs to be acknowledged as what you
perceive to be true without evidence.
This is to say that I am simply stating my perspective on these ideas. We
have no reason to try to escape perspective because we can’t. Similarly, to
acknowledge that you’re reading my perspective is utterly necessary for the
things I say to be valid. If I assert what I believe as fact, I’m essentially
saying “everyone is wrong but me.” While that could be the case, an
important thing to remember is that I’ve arrived at all these conclusions in
the same way all human beings do: through observation and reflection.
The “battle for reality” is this: lots of people with differing perspectives
want their perspective to be the only one. They believe in objective truth,
that a person can act entirely objectively, and that perception can be ignored
in the service of universal fact. They also, therefore, have the final answer. I
think this is absurd. If we acknowledge that humanity is imperfect, which I
do, we must understand that agenda is possible on every level of thought.
On top of that, simple imperfection without agenda influences how we
perceive things.
I want to stress that deconstructive methods are not harmful; finding the
very core of something by stripping away all the layers of context, creation,
subversion, and anything else people add to concepts, can be good or bad.
My concepts are built entirely on top of deconstructive analysis of social
and economic norms in the United States.
The phrase “everyone’s a critic” is often used to be derisive of other
people’s opinions. The idea that everyone has something to say that may
contradict our perception of personal righteousness prompts a certain
defensiveness, too. But if one looks closer, one may see it as an
acknowledgement of the basic humanity postmodern philosophy draws
from. Everyone should be, at the very least internally, analyzing things life
brings to their doorstep. Comment or complaint about how things are is
often one of the most important steps to take in making a better world.
However, many people assume postmodernism is “deconstruction-as-an-
ideal.”
South Park, for all the criticism I have for it, is an entertaining show and
through the years has made some incredibly good observations. It’s got its
own share of problems, though, ranging from ignorant takes on
marginalized people to what I’m getting at in this chapter: the idea that
everyone’s wrong except you.
Matt Stone and Trey Parker have made it a virtue to find what’s wrong
with “both sides” and then just call it a day. Stating something is true or
false in any capacity means you’ve “taken a side,” and, therefore, you are
wrong. The only way to be truly “correct” is to stand above all people,
pointing down at them saying, “You fools.” Correct is a place in the
hierarchy, not a reflection of soundness of statement.
Their show is, in many ways, good, and sometimes even very useful.
However, it’s also a perfect demonstration of the issue I am attempting to
articulate here: if no one is right, then nothing is real. The show doesn’t
reject meaning; it rejects the pursuit of meaning. Through the years, it
seems to have put forward the idea that simply taking everything down will
create a situation in which meaning will simply emerge. For a long time, the
ending would be when one of the moderate children would deliver a
monologue about how we can all be better if we all just stop being so
extreme. To put plainly, the work of South Park is taking everything down,
not building towards something.
The problem with this is how much it sets the stage for everyone to think
their own beliefs are the “non-extreme” ones. If the ideal is the center, then
it’s best to attempt to paint yourself as the center, even if you aren’t. It
doesn’t really matter whether it’s to persuade others or to feel comfortable
in the idea you are correct. Being “rational” has become “knowing how all
others are wrong.”
South Park probably didn’t cause society to adopt this viewpoint; it’s
more likely an avatar for a prevailing belief. Yes, some people probably did
grow up on South Park and view reality through this lens. However, I feel
this viewpoint was an inevitability with the environment we have been
presented. There is no sincerity in shows like “The Bachelor” or “Keeping
Up With The Kardashians,” nor is there in a news story written to aid a
prevailing narrative.
My wife, Ashleigh, and I do a weekly show called “Adversaries,” where
we deconstruct advertising. We take a commercial and attempt to strip away
all the aesthetic and rhetoric to distil the advertisement into something
easier to understand and, therefore, easier to find the agenda. When we
started it, the goal was to push marketers to stop making advertising that
dilutes people, manipulating them and presenting a controlled reality where
their product seems to make everything much better.
For a very short while, we put forward ways in which advertising could
do things better. We don’t really do that anymore. Through our criticism,
we’ve concluded that the very concept of advertising is built on the
manipulation of reality itself and therefore shouldn’t be reconstructed. The
most bizarre thing about this is that advertising itself is little more than an
acknowledgement of the intended customers’ biases framed through
aspiration.
Advertising demands an individualist view. For it to succeed on the level
its architects wish it to, a person must not be looking beyond their own
moral and intellectual authority. You have just been presented with new
information, and you must decide based on it. If you look beyond the new
information, you begin to tap into the collective understanding. However, if
you accept its attempts to tie your feelings and identity to products,
services, and lifestyles, you’re customizing your own reality using a toolkit
provided by capital. You’re painting a picture with a palette handed to you
by Sprite. It’s not a trick; it’s you making a decision based on choices
within the curated environment that’s presented to you. You are not under
control; the toolkit, the palette, or the environment is.
We regularly get asked why we treat advertising so seriously. In today’s
America, all things are advertising. Every presentation of ideology,
representation of events, all hot takes, everything is advertising. South Park
tried to present this concept during a season that is a lot better in its base
assumptions than in its presentation. They ran a multi-episode plot arc in
which advertisements were sentient beings wishing to take over society.
Their anthropomorphizing of advertising is actually brilliant, and
represented what could have been a large progression in their approach.
However, that season also attacked “politically correct culture,” even if only
at face value to make a larger point. I’m probably a bit more lenient about
that specific plot arc than a lot of public leftists. I think “PC Culture” was
possibly intended as a stand-in for neoliberalism, or perhaps they are inches
away from understanding that the gentrification of language is related to
neoliberalism’s marketization of everything. The likelihood that a regular
South Park viewer, a comedy fan rather than an economic theory buff,
would take this away from their viewing is extremely low, though. The
season ended up being a bit disjointed, with a lot of concepts that were
presented through an unempathetic, angry narrative that was designed to
maintain their “both sides” cred. So close and yet so far.
Everything that gets presented in media is meant to persuade you in
some way. It maybe to get you to laugh or it may be to get you to believe
that men are somehow in a worse position than women societally. What is
strange, however, is that we automatically accept advertising as a
convention of American life. The construct of advertising pays for all the
things we like to watch so it can’t be that bad. Mr. Robot, a show about
distrust in the systems around us, wouldn’t exist if it weren’t for
advertising. Which advertising, of course, asks you to place your trust in
that very system. Because of this, it can only tangentially mention certain
things. It can’t give you specifics and it must come off as maybe only
possible in fiction.
If the show worked tirelessly to persuade you to opt-out of modern
American life, no company would run ads on it. If no one wanted to run ads
on it, it wouldn’t have a home on the USA Network. This is controlled
opposition; the show itself is very good, but ultimately something in it (or
excluded from it) must encourage you to prefer the comfort of the status
quo, or just not encourage you to resist it. Given what the show is, it still
must feel as though you’re somehow resisting by engaging in this rebellious
act of… watching a TV show that’s supported by advertising.
Whether or not this is intentional, I can’t tell you. I’m sure for some
marketers and content creators, it is. For others, it may just be some version
of “we can’t depict violence as good,” without understanding that there is a
difference between retaliatory violence against the system and violence
against individuals or marginalized groups. For others, it’s a fight in a
boardroom about censorship of art.
Without deconstruction, our analysis of these things will never be
complete, partly, because we need to look at all aspects of something at
their base levels and, partly, because advertising itself has been
deconstructed by people who want to build a more effective framework on
top of the things that they deem already valuable. The building part is not
postmodernism; it’s drawn from whatever philosophical approach those
with agenda favor. The point is, they had to start somewhere.
Deconstruction of societal norms to examine their worth is good, there’s
just always going to be difference in intent. Some may wish to deconstruct
to attain more understanding and, therefore, a better grasp on the world,
while others may do it with naked exploitation in mind.
When we expose the reasons that we hold things to be true, we may find
that we are propping up ideas that are harmful or just plain wrong.
However, if deconstruction is the only ideal from the philosophy we engage
in, then we will always end up with little more than debris. In the case of
specific societal norms that end up being harmful, that may well be a good
thing.
In the case of everything, however… not so much.
3. DENIAL OF A
COLLECTIVE REALITY

I
f there was an alternate world in which you were all-powerful, where
everything bent to your will, including reality itself, would you want to
live there? What would you give up to take residence?
What if, technically speaking, it wasn’t real? To you, it’s real, but to no
one else. Is the “real” world, the one inhabited by others, real? Also, what is
real?
To quote the Matrix (because, come on; you knew I would eventually),
“if real is what you can feel, smell, taste and see, then ‘real’ is simply
electrical signals interpreted by your brain.” So, what if the world everyone
else is living in is fake? What if the imaginary world we just made up, but
also the “real” world, are fake?
Let’s say you can prove the imaginary world is fake, but you can’t prove
the “real” world is real. You wield power in the imaginary world, while in
the “real” world, you and those around you have none.
Would you rather live in something specifically constructed for you, as
an individual, or would you rather live in a world where our experience is
shared? Philosopher Robert Nozick poised similar questions in his 1974
book Anarchy, State, and Utopia. His main purpose was to refute hedonism,
the idea that all good is derived from pleasure. Though I don’t necessarily
believe pleasure is the only thing good is derived from, I am not asking this
question to debunk anything. I’m asking because it seems like many have
made the choice unconsciously.
Love has the capability to make life both horrible and wonderful.
However, does that power exist if the party giving you love doesn’t have
the ability to choose? Further, do you define the criteria from which they
choose? Is that love? Does that feel the same?
Can love be simulated? Fully?
I don’t think so; reciprocal love necessitates participation from all
parties, and knowing it’s one-sided creates a sour smell. The smell is not
unlike a refrigerator containing fresh produce but also a carton of sour milk
that’s been left open. It is the smell of a poopy diaper in a trash can where
someone forgot to close the lid; you only smell it a little, but you smell it
everywhere in the house.
If you don’t have the ability to create what we call “true love” in your
simulation, are you actually all powerful? What if you don’t need love?
What if you are beyond love? What if this isn’t something that matters to
you? What if you totally ignore the human meaning that we’ve ascribed to
love and view it simply as a chemical reaction? What if you are unable or
unwilling to acknowledge that, for many people, the sum may be more than
the parts?
This isn’t a success or a failure; it is “the individual” in practice. The
lack of need for something that’s impossible to reproduce virtually might
make a self-contained virtual life work out pretty well for that individual.
That said, in retreating to such a life, one also may be prioritizing oneself
above every other human being. Individuals all have different situations and
motives, though.
To some of this mind, one’s ability to live in a perfect world matters
more than what they can do to improve an imperfect one. To them, it’s an
elitism and a greed entirely familiar to our current world and, sadly,
shouldn’t sound that absurd. To escape into a perfectly tailored virtual life
and leave the rest of the world to fend for themselves, one would have to
be, well, selfish.
To that effect, I think Ayn Rand would really like virtual reality. Her
ideology of “rational self-interest” melds incredibly well with a loveless
ultimate power simulator.
Rationally speaking, love is absurd. No one acting only in their own
rational self-interest would engage in it; love causes one’s priorities to
center less on oneself. Love breeds attachment and fondness. The result of
“true love” is some degree of selflessness. Not necessarily to the degree of a
Tibetan Monk, mind you.
Love, however, is inherently collective. At least, it is if you look at it as
a human feeling rather than a “strategy for mate selection.” Love can be
romantic, platonic, familial, or societal, and these are all collective
adjectives. Love for, and I must emphasize only for, oneself is selfishness at
best.
That said, I do hope you love yourself and who you are. You have
absolutely no reason not to; you are a biological wonder on the basest level
and yet you are so much more. You have a personality, a moral compass,
wants, needs, and everything that comes with being among the most
complex life on this planet. Though the water flea has about 25% more
genes than you and me, but you don’t need to spend several hours googling
that.
Depending on how close to my description you personally feel, it’s
probably not just yourself that you love. I’d bet you love someone out there
for genuine reasons. You may not feel it at the same level all the time. That
feeling may be in the past, associated with a deceased person, animal or
something else. It’s not necessarily romantic, platonic, familial, or even
something I want to rigidly define for you. You know it when you feel it. It
is there.
Otherwise, why wouldn’t you just abandon this place to live in a world
where you were all-powerful? Why would you care if it’s not “real?” If you
had no attachment to this world, why bother? Fully individualized custom
realities exist in many forms, some noticeable and overt while others might
be totally imperceptible to even ourselves. But in absolutely none of them
does there exist a feeling of genuine love, and that is why I think you’re still
participating in our admittedly struggling collective reality.
I’ve played video games since I was five years old. We got a Nintendo
Entertainment System in 1989 and I have loved them ever since. There’s
something amazing about being able to experience a different place or
something that’s totally impossible and video games most certainly allow
you to do that.
Gaming isn’t just a platform for creativity and entertainment, though.
It’s a place; one where you can feel like you’re “more” or “bigger.” That’s
not to say in the physical world, you definitely feel “small.” It’s just that
most of us don’t have any significant power to fight injustice or even just
demand a raise at a job we don’t love. In gaming, though, one accumulates
points, trophies, achievements, and gets to be The Chosen One™ in a
million different scenarios. In the physical world, one must compete with
7.5 billion other people. Video games let you insert a disc or download a
few gigs of data and POOF! You’re a special boy!
That’s not an assertion that video games are little more than simply
flattery to the player. Complex, thoughtful tales and amazing gameplay
experiences exist in abundance. There just happens to also be a significant
number of video games that can be boiled down to simply a power fantasy.
It’s very profitable to sell people a means to feel powerful when the world
they would occupy otherwise alienates them, rendering them
disenfranchised and powerless, is easier than selling them a reminder that
the power dynamics of the world do not favor a person in their position.
The power fantasy of these types of video games is that you, too, can be
a hero, a genius, and a Casanova simply by fulfilling mission criteria.
Gaming can present us with simplified versions of complex human issues,
from violence, to mystery, to relationships, and I think that’s where a
serious problem begins to set in: in the physical world, these things are not
missions. We do not have objectives that can be completed or conditions to
be met which guarantee success. There are no checkpoints or cheats.
Violence has complex motivations and ramifications that can’t simply be
solved by rationalizing. Crimes go for decades without being solved. A
relationship based on the idea that if you do A, B, and C, then you will get a
Blowjob Bonus is not something anyone should ever simply expect. I’m not
saying it’s impossible, but it’s incredibly unlikely. People aren’t games.
What are video games? Ultimately, they’re just computer programs.
They’re loops of instructions essentially dictating logic; “if this, then that.”
It is important to highlight that this is not even vaguely like how human
logic works. For better or worse, we are much more complicated. We can
have multiple motives, multiple desired outcomes, contingency plans, we
work on assumptions and then have to shift gears. We fuck up in both small
and extraordinary ways. We contradict ourselves regularly. We can absorb
numerous layers of meaning from almost anything: the personal,
metaphysical, contextual, or existential. We don’t take everything literally
and we don’t always mean the same things even if we repeat ourselves.
The way things really are in our world is wholly dissimilar to the mode
of operation many video games prime players to exercise. Cause and effect
is certainly real but if we view life through a rigid lens of “if I do this thing,
this other thing I want will happen!” This breeds a sense of entitlement. “If
I’m nice to a woman, I’ll get sex” is one of the most time-honored
misconceptions this kind of thinking can result in. That said, I’m not
asserting that video games make a person think simply being nice gets you
laid, because they do not. Still, after ongoing conditioning in this way, one
might experience disappointment at the world for not holding up its end of
the bargain.
Through repeated consumption of a curated, abridged version of an
experience, it may be that people can be led to believe that if one fulfills a
certain specification, they will be rewarded in kind. This “win
conditioning” could help to form identity, acting as both carrot and stick,
the establishment of rewards and consequences directing who a person is.
Winning would be looked at as a celebratory event and a loss as
questioning of one’s validity as a person. Losing is then not a learning
experience, it’s proof of the deficiency of who loses and one cannot allow
oneself to be viewed that way in a society of supposed merit. If we view
social interaction through this lens, we will always be seeking a payoff.
We’re trying to “win,” and additionally, we want the “good ending.”
The more profit-driven aspects of this serve to consume and gamify
social interaction and it yields an expectation or “product” that one is
investing their time and attention into. I believe this results in an injured
way of seeing the world, as well as seemingly unrelated to the stated
purpose of any artistic medium. Most of these results come from the
business end of the project’s necessity to profit. Often, art must acquiesce to
the need to be a satisfying purchase, either one time without refund or
repeatedly in smaller transactions.
Video games have been quickly adopted into the societal canon as an
incredibly effective platform for both artists and businesses. Like radio,
television, books, and all the many works of fiction created in these
mediums, video games allow a mind to run wild in situations one will likely
never physically experience, and they can tell us something about our own
lives. They stimulate us and make us think. They’re capable of being both
very powerful and very empowering.
For those with disabilities they can be more than empowering. In fact,
and as we develop virtual reality, society may be able to further empower
them. While advances do slowly bring more of this to fruition, we often
look to the future in science fiction.
The series-defining episode of the popular Netflix series Black Mirror,
“San Junipero,” is one of those serendipitous cross-sections of several types
of media that somehow does significantly more than any one of the
mediums it exists in or critiques. On the surface, it’s the love story of two
people in a strange place. As it progresses, we realize the characters are
dealing with serious issues: severe disability and terminal illness.
Ultimately, because of the virtual world they’re given the opportunity to
inhabit, they fall in love and begin a life together that will last as long as
they wish. This riveting sci-fi depiction of a love impossible in the physical
world portrays a very specific context, though, and either quietly or
accidentally addresses something very important about virtual reality.
When life is over and our bodies die, would it be bad to live in a perfect
world, even if not entirely real? No; I think that’d be pretty damn good.
Few would turn it down; it’s essentially Heaven. A lot of us have given up
on such a thing.
Similarly, when someone is paralyzed, injured, ill, marginalized, or
otherwise affected beyond their control and to their own detriment, is an
alternate reality somehow bad? Someone wishing to occupy a world in
which they are no longer limited by their situation in the physical world
deserves very little criticism. Limitations and discrimination could be
sidestepped, leaving them with a possibly more emotionally fulfilling
experience. Similarly, a person starving to death due to extreme poverty
would likely prefer a virtual world where they can craft pizza into existence
(or just never feel hunger) over one where they live in destitution. I
wouldn’t call these scenarios bad or unproductive, in no small part because
I try not to be an ass.
However, let’s flip the whole thing. Imagine that San Junipero was a
story between two young, healthy, completely able, straight, wealthy people
with the ways and means to live exactly the way they want. Doesn’t it feel
just a bit wrong?
Those people get to live in our world however they wish to. They get
whatever they want, on demand, and hold real power. Their existence
travels along a path they get to define for themselves, and they experience
the real world in a manner that makes a controllable, virtual one
superfluous. Yet, these are the people who can get their hands on virtual
reality; it’s always been expensive, and it’s being engineered to profit. It
makes perfect business sense as a luxury product; those who hoard power
because they want power will obviously buy a thing that lets them
experience ultimate power.
We often talk about the privilege of being straight, white, or male. But
we discuss the able-bodied, healthy and neurotypical a lot less in that
context. We don’t often talk about physical health as a privilege, much less
mental health; Americans live in a country with a for-profit health system
that exacerbates many curable issues, and the cure always boils down to
money. It’s important to recognize that it’s not always quantifiable how
anyone deemed something other than “normal” is punished in our society.
Not to mention the fact that the aspirational programming and lifestyle
content of our media rarely focuses on the impoverished. It’s much harder
to get people to go buy stuff if they have no money.
There are many ways in which this world can be totally unbearable. The
beauty in “San Junipero” was the enabling of two people, one entirely
unable to physically move, and another with failing health. These two were
given a place where they could be able and healthy. They could live lives
that the “real” world didn’t afford them the opportunity to experience—and
with those limitations gone from their lives, they fell in love. The profound
sublimity and raw potential of the ideas on display was nothing short of
beautiful.
Now, for a moment, again consider synthetic reality and artificial
intelligence in the context of Palmer Luckey and all the other straight,
white, cis, able-bodied, healthy, wealthy young men working to make it
happen. Do they actually need an alternate world where an age-old
patriarchal fantasy where consent is not an issue, where sex is an executable
program, comes true—where all things are possible and dependent only on
desire? Where money is no object and reality itself is subject to their
whims?
No, but they want one.
To be clear, it’s certainly alright to want your own personal space. Still, I
believe the current push for VR is more about finding the lamp and getting
your wishes, than about that. To have unlimited power in your own personal
space rather than just to have it seems to be the real focus.
So… Ready Player One, a book and upcoming film. It’s exactly that.
VR is headed for a place of wish fulfillment, ignorance, and insensitivity
to people experiencing real problems. Hell, the protagonist of Ready Player
One is living a destitute existence in a corporate dystopia in which they
escape to a virtual world called The Oasis and the book can’t even be
bothered to give a shit about that. “We must save the Oasis...” As if the
Oasis isn’t clearly a platitude offered in exchange for inaction regarding the
hopeless decay of society. The neurotypical, fully abled, cis, white male
protagonist chooses the Oasis over working on making the world better for
everyone. There’s a shock.
“But... But it’s about stopping an evil corporation from monetizing the
Oasis!” To that I say, “so what?” The plot isn’t about ending the Oasis or
fighting back against the conditions people are forced to live in, so I believe
it’s the wrong plot for the world described in the book. Ready Player One,
published over a decade after The Matrix was released, is a book set very
obviously in a dystopia where people connect to a virtual world because
their material conditions are so terrible. The Oasis is defined quite explicitly
as escapism rather than liberation, and the story is not about making its
inhabitants’ lives better. Instead, it’s about the protagonist becoming the
rich owner of virtual property.
But can we really expect much more from a book where there is an
ongoing energy crisis, but most people spend the majority of their time in a
shared, photo-realistic simulation in which anything is possible? Forget
Bitcoin, Oasis would be a hell of a power suck.
The ultimate point of Ready Player One is a race to find a MacGuffin
that makes you GOD KING OF ESCAPISM WORLD. It is in no way
concerned with power structure or oppression. It doesn’t want to talk about
what the Oasis could be in terms of a tool for helping people, instead it is a
distraction and this is a good thing. The plot genuinely is “white man turns
on his VR and gets everything he could dream of, including material wealth
and a romantic relationship.”
I’d call that a far cry from the beautiful situation in which two
marginalized people were able to experience what would be completely
impossible otherwise. If today’s VR companies succeed on the trajectory
they are on, it seems likely that situations like San Junipero will be no more
than a byproduct, if anything at all, while Oases will spring up constantly
for people to race Deloreans with Ghostbusters logos on the side, wearing
custom outfits they got out of a loot box.
Or worse… the USS Callister, another episode of Black Mirror in which
artificial intelligence copies of people are kept in a simulation to serve as
punching bags for a man who wishes he had more control over their real-
life counterparts.
It’s with a certain reverence we should criticize the self-indulgence of
video games or VR. For some, these are life-changing mediums that give
hope and form community. But for others, I’ll quote from a brilliant song by
Gorillaz: “don’t get lost in Heaven, they got locks on the gates.”
This line means a great deal to me, personally. The eponymous song
“Don’t Get Lost In Heaven” is seemingly about cocaine addiction, though I
take it more generally speaking; “getting lost in Heaven” means having too
much of a thing you deem to be good. “They got locks on the gates” means
if you’ve gone too far, you can’t come back. They’ve got you for good.
Demon Days, the album this song is on, is about the ruin of the Earth at
the hands of humanity. It’s a quintessential album of its time, discussing the
war in Iraq and other destruction we’ve wrought as a species—in ecological
terms as much as personal ones. It’s an album that totally fucks me up every
time I listen to it, and it might be my favorite one of all time. I say all this
because I want you to understand just how important this specific line is to
understand how I read the denial of a collective reality: we are all,
individually, lost in our own personal Heaven.
So what’s the good thing we’re getting too much of? Ourselves.
Individualism is a social outlook that emphasizes the importance of the
individual at the moral level—that it is moral for the individual to be the
most important thing, also making the individual the highest moral
authority. One’s goals and desires are not just one’s drive, but also one’s
value. The hyper-individualism of the United States of America considers
independence and self-reliance to be godlike. The individual is believed to
hold precedence over any group.
The customer is always right.
Before I continue, I want to note that the idea of individuality is good.
The notion that we are all individuals with unique skills, thoughts, feelings,
etc. is healthy. Contrary to how media has painted the collectivist viewpoint
through the years, acting as a hive mind is a physical impossibility for
humans, and if we were asked to operate as one, life would suck. We
neither need or deserve that. We are all different people with complicated
sets of circumstances that there is no singular method to put oneself into a
better situation, and it’s important to acknowledge this. Life is obviously
not one-size-fits-all.
But none of us are the only person on the planet, either.
That’s where The Religion of Me, individualism, comes in as a core
societal philosophy. When the individual holds precedence over all other
things, the individual’s choice can only be at the center of all things.
Imagine more and more people believing that VR is better than real life.
So, then, what is virtual reality? Is it specifically a medium in which to
create and/or experience things, or could it be the most elaborate
“alternative fact” of all? Does it even matter if this is a computer simulation
when your outlook is based purely on belief? Do you believe that Sandy
Hook was a hoax put on by actors? That there was no Holocaust? Did we
land on the moon?
Do you need the objects around you to be simulated by a computer to
live in that world?
This is the cross-section of individualism and win conditioning: if I lose,
but simply believe I didn’t, then I didn’t lose. In fact, I win. Very black-and-
white thinking combines with an individualist view on reality and one’s
own relationship with it. One may find the necessity to create a custom
version of the world one lives in that doesn’t violate one’s identity.
I don’t believe in telling people the internet isn’t real life because I met
my wife on it. We’ve been married since 2012 and if you’d have told me
our long-distance, online relationship was fake, I’d have told you to fuck
off. The internet is all of the following at once: a video game, virtual reality,
real life, attachment and detachment. Its oscillation between contradictory
ideas is fascinating. It’s amazing something can be so many things that are
seemingly mutually exclusive.
My wife and I loved each other before we physically met and that was
not a simulation. The internet itself is not a fantasy world by default; it’s a
tool—one that can be used to create a fantasy world. It’s not just a tool for
you and me, though. It is as much a medium for governments and corporate
entities to do as they wish in, as well.
The way the world currently works often puts governments in service of
corporate entities so let’s focus on the corporate agenda: profit.
So how does one profit on the internet? Well, let’s talk about how
Google does it. When you go to google.com and type in a thing, Google
learns from it. The more things you tell it that you want to hear, the more it
knows what you want to hear. The best thing Google can do is give you
what you want—because that makes Google useful for you.
What if you want information that is provably false? Does Google
benefit from telling you it’s false? If Google repeatedly tells you that you’re
seeking false information (read: that what you want confirmed or debunked
cannot be) are you as likely to keep using Google? Don’t answer “yes” on
principle, either. You’ve searched for validation on Google. We all have.
We’ve all gotten it, too.
Google’s most profitable feedback loops include something like this:
user searches for “climate change,” then gets the answer they already
believe, and the site that gives it to them displays Google ads. Or, even
better, the site that gives them that information buys the ad space directly
above the search results. You know, the ad space that really looks like
search results?
“A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace” by John Perry
Barlow is widely considered to be one of the most important things ever
written about the internet. If you haven’t read it, it’s pretty much a rebuke of
the physical world’s power over that of the budding civilization of the
internet. Indeed, it’s essentially a rebuke of power itself; it mentions
protecting individuals’ opinions “no matter how singular,” and the concept
of “enlightened self-interest.”
Some consider it to be anarchist, but I think that had Ayn Rand had not
been dead for 14 years when Barlow published it, she’d likely have gotten
behind it. Anarchy understands and recognizes power and believes in
working to distribute it, so it cannot create unjust hierarchy, while Barlow
simply rebukes the idea altogether.

Cyberspace consists of transactions, relationships, and thought


itself, arrayed like a standing wave in the web of our
communications. Ours is a world that is both everywhere and
nowhere, but it is not where bodies live. We are creating a
world that all may enter without privilege or prejudice
accorded by race, economic power, military force, or station of
birth. We are creating a world where anyone, anywhere may
express his or her beliefs, no matter how singular, without fear
of being coerced into silence or conformity.
This sounds great, but the underlying ethos does not account for the
distribution of power. Instead of talking in any way about power structure,
it views liberty as a sort of “god mode,” as one might say in the parlance of
video games.
When the concept of the individual becomes society’s most important
thing, society doesn’t function, because society is collective. “Fact” is
collective.
The acceptance of evidence is the basis of collective reality. Without
agreeing we all see that rock that looks kinda like a scrotum, we don’t know
that everyone saw it. If someone didn’t see it, they can’t remember it. If
postmodern deconstruction exposes and criticizes just how fragile the
collective concept of fact is, individualism is the ideology that takes
advantage of that fragility.
It’s as tempting to dictate one’s own reality as it is terrifying to find out
to what extent one is already doing it. You know who and what you believe.
You know who talks like you talk and what makes you feel at ease. That’s
what’s right for you and you can never be wrong about that, right?
But what happens when everyone is off in their own perfect-for-them
world? What happens when no one cares about what happens to other
people because those people tried to tell me I’m wrong? What happens
when “the people” act more like “a lot of persons?”
My thought is this would become a power vacuum. While we’re
occupying a fantasy where we all weigh 20 pounds less, people who want it
all are taking it. These people don’t care what we think and feel; they just
want money and power. When they move, we’re preoccupied and don’t see
it.
There are more than a few reasons someone might want to curate an
environment encouraging this denial.
Scrutiny starts as the act of an individual thinking critically and then
spreads as more people with similar observations repeat these criticisms to
each other. If people get to talking about something that’s just a bit off, their
words will likely find new ears, possibly infecting them with aversion to the
thing in question. Wouldn’t it make sense to address it where it starts; to
vaccinate, rather than treat an epidemic? If you can head scrutiny off at the
pass, why not do it?
Companies, governments, and other people who wish to consolidate
power specifically for themselves can either rule through force or
manipulation of environment. If everyone is encouraged to believe that the
buck stops with them, if we’re all the protagonist of our own movie, if
we’re placed at the center of our own little universe where it really seems
like everything revolves around us, then we’re encouraged to be critical of
each other more than those with power.
It’s not as if none of us deserve criticism, but if the criticism one brings
is “the world doesn’t revolve around you,” then it might be useful to ask
oneself “does my world also revolve around myself?”
You’re required to be a leader in a squad of one because everyone in the
world is doing the exact same thing. You must defer to you, otherwise what
do you even have in this world? And when everyone’s competing with
everyone over whose facts are real and whose are “alternative,” those who
understand why and how this is going on can take everything they want.
The denial of collective reality is the ultimate tool to those who want
more and more power. It’s accomplished by presenting every single
individual with a world that customizes itself to their individual preference
and tells them that everyone who doesn’t agree is wrong. It has no
allegiance to narrative—for every Fox News, there’s an MSNBC; for every
Breitbart, there’s a ShareBlue. Also, Verrit happened and it is hilarious.
These are all the result of indulging narrative that reinforces one’s own
perspective.
Custom reality is there for you. It’s the default. You don’t opt-in to it any
more than you would opt-in to what country you’re born. It mirrors you, so
any scrutiny towards it is scrutiny towards you. It’s uncomfortable to say,
“I’m wrong,” and for good reason: it’s legitimately good to believe in
yourself.
But you can’t treat yourself like your own personal savior,
either...
4. THE RELIGION OF ME

S
ix thousand years ago, God created the Heavens and the Earth. Right? I
mean, that seems real to me. Nothing seems inherently strange about
that statement. My neighbor and my family think so too. So, it’s real,
right? I mean, I have never looked in to carbon dating and everyone I’ve
ever spoken to thinks it’s just a test from God to see if we all really believe.
My friends and family would never lie to me, so I believe in what they
believe in.
I’m hoping what I’ve done here can illustrate a couple of things.
First: collective reality, the thing I’m advocating for in this book, is not
automatically scientific or evidence-based.
Second: collective reality, the thing I’m advocating for in this book, is
also not automatically correct. There’s a very specific danger in the idea
that we all must work toward agreement on what reality is: that we’re
wrong.
Religion is a collective reality in the way I’m using the term. This
prompts the question: why hasn’t that been enough? This book has
repeatedly said that a collective reality is what we should strive for and will
continue to do so. But why have previous collective realities not held the
world together in the way I hope one eventually could?
Most obviously, there’s more than one religion. Less obviously, religions
constantly evolve. People believe in different things and every single one of
those things has changed in some way over the many years we humans have
been using our rods and cones to take in light waves, and assigning
meaning through interpreting the spectrum of radiation to which we’ve
grown sensitive. Religion evolves with society and the biggest piece of
evidence I’d submit in support is the Old Testament.
The Old Testament pretty much tells us to stone everything that isn’t a
nuclear family, though we didn’t start using that term at a societal level until
the 1950s. If they’re not behaving in a manner that creates more human
beings while following the established hierarchy, you stone ’em.
Gay guys? Stone ’em. Ladies showing their ankles? Stone ’em. Slaves
doing something that isn’t labor? Stone ’em. Pile of stones? Stone… wait, I
can’t stone these stones with… these stones! I have failed! I’m sorry for my
transgressions, oh Lord! Please have mercy, Lord! Hallowed be thy name!
Hosanna! Amen!
Man acting overly apologetic to avoid a stoning for being unable to stone
stones with themselves? Stone ’em.
Ever notice how we don’t stone people for doing stuff the Old Testament
says we can stone them for? Christians don’t even seem to get Stone
Thirsty™ when you break the commandments; in fact, many of them don’t
even care. These folks simply believe in God and Jesus; they believe there
is good in the world and that these entities are the reason why. Many call
the Bible, both the Old and New Testaments, a metaphorical book, one not
meant to be taken literally. Still others outright ignore the book itself,
creating churches that welcome people who view others from the same
gender in a romantic light, which is explicitly banned in the Bible. Perhaps
they even go so far as to properly recognize and accommodate people who
don’t conform to a binary, which would probably really freak Paul or
Matthew right out. I doubt The Disciples™ had even thought of gender-as-
a-spectrum or any alternative to a binary of genders.
Religion isn’t the same thing it was a century ago. In the United States,
we’ve gone from Puritan slave owners to drug-taking, anti-racist, anti-war
hippies, and then to unknowing servants of godless, capitalist rulers who are
always looking for new ways to separate the people, to isolate us, prevent
us from feeling whole. Endless consumption is the endgame, telling us we
may one day find something that fills the empty hole in our hearts left by
our inability to form a fulfilling identity in a space crowded with logos and
slogans all meant to manipulate who we are.
The genuinely religious among us are, thankfully, less dogmatic than
they once were. I don’t understand why people criticize Christians for
“picking and choosing.” When I see someone do it, I can’t help but think to
myself that it’s a good thing the stoning stopped at some point. Does that
person really just want to be able to do rock murders?
That individuals preserve the good things about religion, dropping more
and more of the bad, is not only positive, but some degree of evidence that
humanity is good at its core. It is right to purge the kind of stuff that only
leads to unending aggression. Any philosophy preaching hatred doesn’t
deserve acceptance in my book.
And this is my book.
Religion is seen by some as universal truth, but as I said earlier, it is
collective truth. In this book, I’ll endlessly prattle on about my bullshit. You
will hear many variations on the notion that collective reality is the antidote
to custom reality, but it’s also important to keep in mind that even life-
saving medicine is imperfect.
The price of a collective reality with holes in it, from inconsistencies to
moral lapses, is that individuals may opt-out. Whether that means saying “I
don’t take the Old Testament literally” or totally not believing in God is all
up to the individual. Individuality, in this context, is incredibly important. It
is imperative that we can form opinions that contradict established ideas if
they seem questionable, and equally so that we attempt to corroborate what
we are saying.
If a collective reality is based around traditions and norms that people
eventually question, it stands to reason that individuals will break off from
that. They do not trust the reality presented to them anymore and must
begin the process of adjusting their perspective to feel as though things
again make sense. I perceive this as reality individualizing; as an individual
finds answers for themselves they become the curator of their custom
reality.
“Good” collective reality must be based on standardized acceptance of
evidence. If not, it wouldn’t really be a good faith attempt at a conclusion.
That would make our agreement on what is real, nothing more than
argumentum ad populum, or, a fallacious argument to popularity. Popular
consensus involves relying on the opinions of a lot of people who do not
necessarily have all the information, so I think it would be better to
collectivize through scientific methodology, material dialectics, or some
other evidence-based method of discussing and testing the material validity
of a claim or observation.
Collective reality can be good or bad, but we must acknowledge that it is
also custom reality. All reality is.
If a collective reality is not rooted in evidence and our understanding of
it, the likelihood of it falling apart under scrutiny grows. That people can
interpret evidence in different ways further complicates the issue. More
people fragment off and create their own individual variants, finding what
they are comfortable believing and forgetting everything else.
This has become a standardized mode of operation; what is “best for
you” according to a news feed or search engine may lead you in a totally
different direction than those around you. People are meant to emerge as the
leader of their own little world. As the collective reality of specific dogma
(religious or otherwise) dissipates, we are encouraged to centralize
ourselves in our belief structure. We become our own savior. The customer
is always right.
I’ve heard people say, “everyone thinks they’re the protagonist of their
own movie” to try to shame folks for thinking they’re special. I don’t think
this is productive; I do think everyone is special and I’m not afraid to say
cornball shit like that. I just don’t think everyone should get to prioritize
their own reality running as a perpetual validation machine. There really is
no “objective truth” if you are a being of perspective, and humans are. This
seems ever more apparent as people reject the dogma of religion, or indeed
religion itself, with their own versions of these age-old beliefs.
Our religion is us as individuals. We’re our own personal Jesus. Lift up
the receiver, I’ll make you a believer.
“Believe in yourself,” everyone says on repeat in every corner of our
lives. Certainly, love and belief in oneself are important components to a
fulfilling identity, but how much farther are we all asked to go? Well, how
much growth is enough for a publicly traded company on the stock market?
Is the answer “infinite?” Why yes! Not only is that how business works, but
it’s how you’re supposed to do everything, too!
“Believe in yourself,” your teacher tells you as they hope you score well
in standardized tests, ensuring they keep their jobs another year.
“Believe in yourself,” your boss tells you as they decline to give you a
raise, but will “revisit your productivity report in a few months.”
“Believe in yourself,” the corporate trainer tells you when you ask about
accountability protocols, hoping you feel good enough about their answer
not to put the question to their superiors later.
If any of these things go awry, it’s certainly just that you didn’t believe
enough in yourself, right? You need to believe in yourself more! Believe
more, okay? Clap to tell your inner Tinkerbell you believe! Why aren’t you
clapping? Do you not believe? CLAP, ASSHOLE. LOUDER. THIS ISN’T
LOUD ENOUGH.
GREAT JOB. YOU KILLED TINKERBELL.
We don’t get the privilege of doubting ourselves or our actions. No, I
don’t mean insecurity, because we’re never meant to stop feeling that. I
mean that re-evaluating the course we’re on is seen as a weakness. We can’t
be wrong too often, so the best thing to be is never wrong. The best way not
to be wrong in an environment where the individual is the key authority on
all things is to simply believe you are right. When you believe you are right,
you feel confident in your facts. When you feel confident, you look
confident. When you look confident, you’re taken to have a reason to be
confident. You must be right!
The competitive environment that is modern, American life all but
eliminates our ability to be wrong, which then also limits our capacity to
learn by the experience of being wrong. “Wrong” must never be
acknowledged internally or extremely.
As pressure mounts to be perfect, incentive to have a different definition
of “perfect” rises. If “perfect” means “perfect by your own standards,” then
being perfect is as easy as forming beliefs that don’t contradict anything in
your life. It’s as easy as ignoring any internal or external push for you to
develop. If you need to develop, that means you aren’t already perfect. And
you are! Right?
Taste is something that we should be able to apply to low-stakes
situations without major conflict, yet every situation involving taste has an
element of garbage behavior. This is where we see what I believe to be the
conflation of taste and value.
Since taste diverges so much between people, it often becomes a priority
to convince people you are the one with good taste. Now, there really is no
such thing as good taste or bad taste; the actual distinction is just yours and
mine. But because we have accepted the position that we must always be
correct, we are willing to contort our own perception to remain truthful. We
must honestly believe we are correct, which also means having the best
taste.
This means caring about the review scores of films and video games. “I
like movies that have good Rotten Tomatoes scores and I hate ones with
bad scores! That means I have good taste! Wait, it looks like people enjoy
this film I do not enjoy. I must coordinate on anonymous message boards to
fill the user reviews with scores that will bring its average down!
Muahahahahahaha!” For video games, replace “Rotten Tomatoes” with
“Metacritic.”
It’s about what you believe and trying to make others think that it’s the
prevailing belief.
One can truthfully say one is nice if, by one’s own standards for “nice,”
one is nice. Maybe this hypothetical person holds doors for a first date, but
when that doesn’t make their date fall head over heels, they act standoffish
or mean. The person might think they acted nicely and are just reacting to
someone being mean to them. But what if their date suspected they might
change tone based on a small slight and considers that not nice? Is that the
date’s failing, or is that the “nice” person’s?
What if a trans person was denied a bank loan, despite having great
credit? The loan agent they were working with to apply for the loan acted
perfectly “nicely” about it, but it’s the millionth time the trans person has
heard the phrase “there’s nothing I can do” this year, despite doing
everything right. Is that “nice,” or is it just cordial? Is it the loan agent? Is it
the trans issues? Why won’t anyone help the trans person? The loan agent
may truly think they are good on trans issues but also just made a trans
person’s life harder for no reason.
On the other hand, how mean is it to draw negative attention to some
guy groping women on the subway? It’s certainly going to sound mean. It
would most likely include some harsh language that will insult him and
make him feel bad. He’s going to go home and feel hurt by the mean person
on the subway who yelled at him. Was it truly mean, though?
Uh, no. It was not. The only mean thing that happened is some jackass
grabbing folks’ body parts without consent. That is the mean thing here.
According to me, anyhow. I’m sure the imaginary groper thinks he’s
harmless. Both of us are living in different realities with separate sets of
rules, ultimately chosen by the individual. The Divine here, the one
dictating what is the acceptable behavior, is us. Seriously, though, fuck that
guy I made up.
The strength of religion through the ages is that everything you needed
to know was just right there. If one followed a religion with an afterlife, one
just had to follow those instructions and would end up in a great situation
for all eternity after death. Whether this is right or wrong, I don’t pretend to
know. I don’t personally believe in it, but my opinion is not the cause; it’s
the effect.
When Charles Darwin put forward his theory of evolution, he met a lot
of resistance from religious people. In fact, he still does, despite being very
dead. There’s more personal reasons for why this was a huge problem for
the religious on an individual level, but let’s talk about what this has done
on a macro level.
The more the theory of evolution was tested through the years, the more
correct and useful its main assertions proved to be. We have mapped the
human genome at this point. We will likely be able to mass clone
replacement organs sometime in the future and that wouldn’t be possible
without starting at Darwin. This was also a significant disruption to not just
a belief structure, but a way of life for billions of people. For many, it was
the end of an era. All this proving of information that harms one’s belief
structure triggered the grieving process en masse.
Here’s something interesting about the grieving process: a lot of people
do not get past the first stage of denial. Some do and move to anger, lashing
out at scientific research that has repeatable results. Still, the farthest some
go is bargaining.
Negotiating with the loss of even just an aspect of one’s belief structure
is the single most individualist thing a person can do. It’s not easy to find an
acceptable rationale to allow one to maintain a belief structure after it has
been proven flawed on some level, and people do it just because their
identity is threatened.
This isn’t to be critical of people who believe there’s no reason to stone a
woman to death for having lied about having sex before marriage, as
Deuteronomy 22:20-21 implies. I think if you can mentally say, “I believe
in God, but I do not believe in this,” then you’ve proven to have had both a
moral center and a backbone, even if you’ve only had to use it in the most
internalized of ways. Remember, a holy text authentically says this, but
most religious people do not think this.
Holiness is the state of being consecrated to God or a religious purpose.
One doesn’t fuck with holy stuff; it could damn you to hell. It takes a lot of
chutzpah to say: “I don’t care if going against this book may lead to eternal
damnation, I’m not actually going to kill this cheating piece of shit. I just
want them to fuck off and get out of my life!”
I commend a person for knowing that is wrong and embracing a kinder
version of their faith and simply cursing at people instead of committing
nonmetallic mineral homicide. Similarly, I commend the people who totally
reject the religion due to its foundation in cruel ideas such as this (though it
should be said that patriarchy isn’t exclusively a problem of religion). In
fact, I commend anyone who doesn’t stone people for not being virgins,
regardless of motive. No, this isn’t an astounding accomplishment to be
proud we have progressed beyond, but more than one holy text says people
can (and should) stone them. Sometimes we must take inventory and
understand how far we’ve come.
In doing this, we reveal the biggest problem with universalism in the
human experience: it’s fake. It’s something we just made up to describe shit
we see, just like everything else. As both science and culture evolve, both
naturally and because of the increased flow of information, little holes like
that get poked in what is generally accepted as “universal” truth. People
begin to question things. Some of those things stop being holy.
As inconsistencies make it harder to accept these ideas at full bore, we
search for replacements. Some try other religions and find what they’re
looking for; others don’t. While “enlightenments” have happened
throughout the course of history, I want you to consider what the increased
influence of the ideology of individualism has done to the approach of
many people.
It’s not that people have gone searching for a new God; it’s that the old
one became questionable. Critique and deconstruction strip the abstraction
all away, but it has nothing to do with dealing with the effects of people
scrutinizing universalist ideas. Yes, that our cultural norms have received
this scrutiny is a good thing. I vastly prefer the Christians of today to the
ones that enacted the Crusades. However, I think the system in which the
deterioration of centralized, universalist religions happened made way for
The Religion of Me.
Individualism is a brilliant concoction, though I’d like to remind you that
“brilliant” is not necessarily good. Individuality is legitimate; we are all
definitely individuals with different thoughts, dreams, and approaches, so it
may seem like a good idea to build societal philosophy around that. But
rather than accommodating and incorporating the differences we all have—
our essence—into a diverse society, it functions more to isolate people from
each other.
Philosopher Karl Marx wrote of the alienation a person feels from their
“species-essence,” or what it is to be human, which he believed was the
ability to shape things around us with conscious intent. The work
individuals’ lives are made up of often has little to do with what truly
matters to them. The individual does not feel as though they have much say
in their situation, and individuals do not come together.
Earlier in the book, I mentioned I hate when people send me cat pictures
to cheer me up. This is an example of something about me, individually,
that totally isolates me from other people. I most likely have several
subconscious reasons for disliking this. It is partially that it feels like
allowing a photo of a cat to assuage my problems equates with avoiding
them. Avoidance always feels like helplessness to me. But if I’m being
honest with myself here, it’s also probably partly a non-conformist act I’m
pulling.
I, like all people, have been brought up to think I’m somehow intelligent
for “resisting the programming, maaaaaaan.” The weird thing is, there’s
always an alternate “program” that accommodates our resistance to
whatever kind of lifestyle marketing that makes us queasy. For every action,
there’s an equal and opposite reaction. For every rebellious teen, there’s a
punk band on a label that isn’t Warner Music, but it is owned by Warner
Music.
Not that musicians don’t make rebellious music or that their messages
are automatically inauthentic, but their insurgence is compensated for by
creating a culture of overconsumption based around it. Your food has to
come from somewhere.
That identity can be used to create and nurture a dependence on new
products and updates tied to the person, group or entity is what I want to
bring up here. Capital cultivates people’s identity with the intent of
inspiring less scrutiny. A worldview where identity, individual expression,
politics and enjoyment are rooted heavily in consumption creates an ever-
expanding list of demands for profiteers to supply. To transform various
competing aesthetics and attitudes into consumer goods not only serves to
generate profit, but also to stop the progression of idea-based resistance to
these exploitative modes of operation.
The choices we have access to regarding the lives we lead are not
limitless, despite what we may be repeatedly told and even what it may
look like. As demographics split into smaller and smaller micro-
demographics, we are more specifically categorized and then presented
different options to consume. There’s a profile of every one of us on a
server somewhere; hell, more than one. The information recorded there
helps to determine what advertisements we are shown as we do anything
online, as well as influences our search results on both traditional search
and social content platforms like YouTube or Twitter.
But again, the insidious part: we’re making our own choices and are
therefore less likely to question what we are presented with. The customer
is always right.
However, the right to choose doesn’t mean the right to meaningful
choices; as stated earlier in the book, choice is still choice even if
prefabricated or co-opted. If an entity or institution can provide an
experience that validates the consumer while keeping them on a controlled
path, that person is dedicating their time to the enrichment of that entity or
institution. Time, attention, and data are all forms of currency, and if one
knows what to do with them, one can amass an amazing amount of power.
Through the years, “individualism” has been conflated with
“individuality.” I try to draw the distinction that individually is the
acknowledgement that we are individuals with our own wants, needs and
taste. Individualism sounds very much like it could be that, but it’s not; it is
an ideology.
Individualism itself is The Religion of Me, and it slots itself very well
into the kind of “profit-seeking through environmental control” I’ve been
talking about. To attempt to tell people about this, we must overcome a
strong inclination to regard this as trickery. In my 20s, I would try to tell
people they were being manipulated, but the response was always some
variation of “I’m not. I make my own choices.” People feel like being told
they are being tricked is an insult to their intelligence. It’s also just entirely
incorrect. Like I said, it’s the environment that’s been engineered, not the
individuals.
Because we’re constantly encouraged to be more of a closed-off
individual, we become more disenchanted with “the other side,” and then
eventually even the people with whom we ostensibly agree. In that we are
meant to believe in ourselves, we have our own personal truths, therefore
questioning what we perceive as our reality is seen as questioning us. This
is a devastatingly bad proposition in a supposed meritocracy, where we
must constantly be right and assume the role of “expert” in order to
maintain the ability to make money in a world where entry-level jobs are
exported or automated.
Individualism is an ideology and a philosophy. The bedrock of this belief
set is the priority of the individual, that one’s own desires and goals are the
ultimate aspiration. The interests of the individual are given precedence
over all other things. No social group is to have any kind of undue influence
and any collective is the deliberate antagonist, for its stated purpose is the
collective good and that supposedly interferes with the individual’s plight.
I’m often criticized when I voice my distaste for individualism. People
who do this tend to refer me to Max Stirner, a philosopher who supposedly
has it all figured out. He wrote a book called The Ego and Its Own which
was published in 1844.
What Stirner put forward in this book was that autonomy, or what I’ve
been calling agency, is of the highest importance. He believed that the
individual must free themselves from any and all external forces. This
included ethics, ideology, other people, and even one’s desires. He believed
that “good” is basically synonymous with “unique.” He was against all
obligations, be they moral, political or familial. He didn’t love “rational
self-interest” and had his own definition for “egoism” that centered on
autonomy, but like other definitions, I think the focus on the self as the
ultimate authority is bunk.
To be fair to Max, he was right about the state (he was not a fan) and
cleared the way for a lot of other important things. Existentialism and
postmodernism have their roots in his work. Both ask vital questions that
clear the way for what I’m doing in this book. Other important works that
you can find Stirner’s fingerprints on are Peter Kropotkin’s The Conquest of
Bread and Oscar Wilde’s The Soul of Man Under Socialism, though I would
say I think that both of their ideas on individualism trend toward simple
anti-authoritarianism than Stirner’s (or Rand’s) “shed all influence and
obligation, agency is the highest ideal and selfishness is good.”
To follow Stirner’s philosophy as a purist would require constant
justification of the emotions one would feel. Frankly, to categorize familial
responsibility as little more than a hindrance demands endless justification
for love. It must meet the requirement of “not sacrificing autonomy” to be
valid, which makes me think of Max Stirner in the context of the Reddit
incel (an “involuntary celibate” person who seems to think the world owes
them sex). To be in love with someone, however, is to care about them in a
way that does obligate certain things. Truth, transparency, and even simply
caring are obligations love brings, and I don’t know too many people who
would say “I don’t want those things from another.”
In Stirner’s eyes, others are “nothing but my food, even as I am fed upon
and turned to use by you.” I’m not going to pretend this is a deep dive into
Stirner, and you will absolutely find material of his that is useful.
But I cannot resist; if he weren’t a Reddit incel, I think Stirner would
have at least been some 4chan dipshit had he lived in this era (complete
with ironic racism). To me, he comes off as a selfish man-child who
happened to have some decent ideas about some things while endlessly
shouting that he should be doing as he pleases always. This is the area of
his work that I think today’s individualism comes from.
Of the utmost importance to an individualist is opposing interference
with the interests of the individual—from society or institution, public or
private. This is often to such a degree that any kind of collective is
characterized as totalitarian, either loosely or to the point they are
synonymous. Ayn Rand’s philosophy of objectivism really doesn’t read that
differently from The Ego and His Own. The focus is in different places, but
I have sincere doubts Stirner would dislike The Virtue of Selfishness: A New
Concept of Egoism.
When materializing these abstract concepts, we must understand there is
a large amount of nuance. We can’t and shouldn’t advocate against free
will, nor freedom of expression, but these concepts are also complex.
Technically, killing someone is a form of expression, but we shouldn’t
really have the freedom to do that if we’re calling ourselves “civilized,” so
that would mean “freedom” can’t mean “unlimited freedom.” It would
eventually restrict itself through tyranny. Not that our current concept of
“law” does a particularly good job of ensuring justice.
Not having some means of recourse would be very disturbing, but it’s
also very clear that law is abused. Stirner’s answer was for the individual to
reject all of that and allow for autonomy, which would most likely make
“revenge” and “justice” seem a lot more similar. “An eye for an eye” is not
something everyone has the stomach, means, and/or ability to do, though,
so those who cannot would become ruled by those who can.
A word being thrown around in political arguments a lot is “tribalism,”
which is almost never regarded as a positive. Besides the issue that it
creates possible negative connotations for indigenous tribes of people in
framing the concept as a negative, there’s also a lot of issues with what the
word is used for. Often, it’s used to describe a certain level of perceived
conformity in a group of people. I also see it used regularly as the
bogeyman in a binary where individualism is the hero.
My belief is that individualism feeds into the phenomenon people call
“tribalism.” I think “tribe,” in this case, is basically referring to Stirner’s
“union of egoists.” These act as groupings of similarly minded individuals
which do not subordinate to the collective good of the group. You can
probably guess, but they all retain agency and don’t really act like a group.
Instead, they act more as an association of individuals. You can see this in
online “movements” that amount to “I don’t like this thing and believe it
should be attacked,” like GamerGate, a movement that called itself a
“consumer revolt.” Instead of being individuals banding together to use
collective power to demand the end of exploitative practices or to improve
conditions through awareness, it was ultimately a conduit for people to
validate their dislike of a changing social landscape.
A person doesn’t generally wish to be totally alone in life and will often
seek out companionship of some kind. I think the “tribalism” that’s being
referred to is specifically due to people being unwilling to acknowledge
anything but themselves as inherently correct. They must associate with
people who specifically reinforce their worldviews. I don’t think it’s
conformity; I think it’s mutual need for validation and attention that human
beings inherently have.
However, when people who believe they are entirely correct about
everything get together, there’s eventually going to be problems. Because of
this, there will, in due course, be in-fighting, because the foundation of the
group is not based in the evolution of ideas and mutual respect; it’s simply a
lot of people who think they are right about everything and who happen to
think the same thing. The prominent individuals among them are called
leaders because their takes are the absolute hottest of the hot and they do a
good job maintaining attention, but they’re not developing the group’s ideas
philosophically—and neither is the group. Because of needs socialized in a
society that is best described as “neoliberal capitalism,” we often consume
human interaction as one might with any product, and therefore we have
certain expectations. Ultimately, the group is there to validate everyone
involved. The customer is always right.
You’ll notice I didn’t associate this with a particular side of the political
spectrum, and while I do think one side is guiltier of this than the other, I
don’t want you to think that I think it’s just one. Hopefully, the ambiguity of
“who” will get you to think about the structures and hierarchies you’re
involved in and whether they act this way to some degree.
These groups are not hive minds; they’re shaky alliances. They aren’t
based in solidarity or common cause (even if they purport themselves to
be); they exist to find validation through the metrics of a group. “Many
people agree with me, so I must be right.” The phenomenon I am describing
is one of many things that feeds into “perpetual correctness,” which I will
detail later. Essentially, I don’t think “tribalism” or “union of egoists” are
good terms for this. In my view, they’re more like “validation gangs.”
We shouldn’t try to end the idea of the individual, though; instead we
need to end the idea that everything hinges on the individual.
Individual responsibility sounds like a good concept, and if you take it to
mean “keeping your house clean or paying your bills,” it is. I’m not talking
about those things, though. Nor am I talking about your culpability in a
crime or whatever thing you hear people bring up when talking about
individual responsibility. What I’m talking about is your situation.
What we’re dealing with is the idea that your situation is 100% entirely
of your own doing. In a world based in what we’re referring to as
“individual responsibility,” if you’ve done well in the world, it’s because
you’ve worked hard and did a good job. No systemic considerations should
be made. There should be no talk of your privileges, any inherited wealth,
or lack thereof.
The tradeoff of there being no systemic factors in your success is that
your failures are also entirely your fault. If you don’t succeed, you didn’t
try hard enough. You didn’t work hard enough. You didn’t bother to become
educated.
If the individual is the prime actor in society, then it’s your fault that you
haven’t seen all the information, despite the fact there’s no reliable
guarantee you’ll ever get exposed to that information. There’s also no
guarantee that when given a choice, you will be given a good choice. You
may never be exposed to a good option, and you’ll be blamed for it because
you’re ignorant.
Being ignorant is a grave misdeed in the world of individual
responsibility. How dare you.
This is how individual responsibility is used as an excuse to marginalize
people who are different in some way, as well as perpetuate the myth that
no matter what circumstances you’re born into, all it takes is hard work to
get out. If you compare the numbers of people who are working to the
number of people living with no monetary worries, you’ll see why it’s
popular to criticize “the 1%,” who happen to hold more wealth as the
bottom ninety percent.
In 2017, psychologists Nicole Stephens and Sarah Townsend published a
research paper in the Harvard Business Review entitled “How You Feel
About Individualism Is Influenced by Your Social Class.” Their research
draws a picture of two totally different perspectives:

Our body of ongoing research shows that people from working-


class backgrounds tend to understand themselves as
interdependent with and highly connected to others. Parents
teach their children the importance of following the rules and
adjusting to the needs of others, in part because there is no
economic safety net to fall back on. Common sayings include
“You can’t always get what you want” and “It’s not all about
you”; values such as solidarity, humility, and loyalty take
precedence.

In contrast, people from middle- and upper-class contexts


tend to understand themselves as independent and separate
from others. Parents teach kids the importance of cultivating
their personal preferences, needs, and interests. Common
sayings include “The world is your oyster” and “Your voice
matters”; values such as uniqueness, self-expression, and
influence take precedence.
But can you sell that stuff? Ayn Rand tended to hold production as an
incredibly individualist trait. And if you aren’t producing something, to Ayn
Rand, you are a parasite of some kind. These amazing producers take their
product to market. As Rand says in The Virtue of Selfishness:
An individualist is a man who lives for his own sake and by his
own mind. He neither sacrifices himself to others nor sacrifices
others to himself. He deals with men as a producer.

But a market isn’t just merchants. Customers must exist, and you know
this already, but the customer is always right. Everything in today’s
America is meant to be a transaction, meaning you’re always the customer
and you’re always right.
People like to negatively associate participation trophies with
collectivism or equality, as if it is an expression of entitlement that all
should have reward. But tell me something, are all those people sharing one
trophy? Did the collective achieve a goal and collectively receive a reward?
Is that one trophy for many? No, it’s one trophy per individual.
A participation trophy is an instance of “the customer is always right.”
The event stops being about competition and starts being about the
individual and their validation. Not that endless competition is the healthiest
thing in the world, but it’s the thing that sports are usually said to be about.
A participation trophy is the individual and their parents consuming the
event. The event is a product—an experience. And it is the means to
monetize all the individuals and their parents’ validation. If you want to
criticize participation trophies, talk about the commodification of
experience and realize that it is capitalism and individualism. The event
organizer buys the trophies and money is made.
Another of Ayn Rand’s favorite things is acting in “rational self-
interest.” In her eyes, actions can only be rational or logical if they act in
the interest of the individual performing them. Which sounds pretty damn
rational until you consider that it was contextually used to undermine the
idea of altruism. It doesn’t really seem possible for absolutely everything to
be altruistic and therefore it’s not realistic to expect. But to act out of pure
selfishness on an ongoing basis would likely be more destructive than
thinking the people of the world should focus more on helping each other.
Selfishness does not benefit the many; it doesn’t even benefit the few. It
benefits the individual.
I believe selfishness to be utterly bunk as a guiding, primary societal
virtue. Yet, we have a system that incentivizes it. If you’re not putting
yourself and your needs before other people and theirs, you often can’t get
anywhere. So, from the perspective of getting anywhere in capitalism, greed
is good. However, as I said earlier, perspective is a very individual thing.
We’ve talked about both biological and cultural difference in
perspective. Whereas someone from a poor background may not see the
benefit in pure unchecked greed, Scrooge McDuck has already received it. I
mean, do you know what swimming around in a pool of gold coins is like?
Because I do not. People see things differently.
We talked about philosophers of the postmodern era having different
things to say, but that ultimately a common theme is a rejection of
empiricism and objective reality with the understanding that human
perspective makes that impossible.
In perhaps the most amazing feat of irony ever, objectivism, Ayn Rand’s
philosophy, a philosophy that has guided some of the primary economic
actors of modern society, including Alan Greenspan, one of the best known
economists and former chair of the federal reserve, also understands this.
In fact, one of the central tenets of objectivism is that reality exists
totally independent of human consciousness. Human beings only have
contact with reality through perception. This really lines up with what we
are talking about here, doesn’t it?
However, where postmodernism uses this to frame critique of human
perception, objectivism asserts that you can attain objective knowledge
through perception and the application of inductive logic. Though, I feel
this is effectively self-aggrandizement.
Through a standardized process of scrutiny and acceptance evidence, we
can create collective reality. This certainly requires more than one person’s
perception with a kind of logic that deals with more than probabilities and
likelihoods. This is not just perception of an event or object, but their
perception of the evidence regarding it. The more people who understand
the historical and cultural implications in context of these things, the more
likely our collective reality is to be internally coherent.
Which, by the way, accuracy is another human concept. It does not mean
perfect. Perfect is impossible. Though, we seemingly demand perfection of
everyone and everything, including ourselves and the ones we love.
The real irony, though, comes as one preaches the values of the
individual and the philosophy of individualism mixed in with the attack on
individuals who are different from oneself. This clear contradiction is a large
part of why I believe the philosophy of individualism feeds into the concept
of a custom reality rather than being a legitimately workable concept built
around individuality. It often seems to me that people who believe in the
individual over all else act as if their thoughts are then the only ones which
are true. “It’s not about what other individuals want! It’s about what I
want.”
There’s a difference in acknowledging the individual and claiming that
individualism is the correct philosophy. But if I’m correct (a vulnerable
preposition on my part, in which I acknowledge I may not be) about the
effects of ideological implementation of individualism in the philosophical
sense, it’s one of the larger things responsible for the breakdown of reality
in a manner that consolidates power among those that already have it.
In a speech back in 1975, Margaret Thatcher said the following:

We’re all unequal. No one, thank heavens, is quite like anyone


else however much the socialists may pretend otherwise. And
we believe that everyone has the right to be unequal.

This takes advantage of our mass conflation of individuality and


individualism, capitalizing on the framework of “inequality as uniqueness.”
It’s brilliant in that respect; this works well to stigmatize equality as a
conflicting concept that competes with individuality. However, “if everyone
is equal and of equal standing, everyone would just be the same” is not a
statement that would hold up to even minor scrutiny.
What must be said, however, is that all this criticism comes from my
custom reality.
Because of the fragile nature of anything conceptualized by humanity,
reality is a very fragile construct. Individualism and profit motive can
combine to create deeply divergent, customized paths we can all choose to
take on our own. If I do not acknowledge that this is my perspective on the
problem of how we pushed reality to its breaking point, I’m not being
intellectually honest with you.
I do, however, believe wholeheartedly in what I’m saying here. More
importantly, I’m saying it in a genuine attempt to get us all on a path to a
viable collective reality. But even though I acknowledge that I am a
vulnerable, possibly incorrect human being, I’m going to pull a Disney’s
Aladdin here and reach out my hand to you.
Do you trust me?
5. THE MARKETPLACE OF
IDEAS

I
am not a salesman. Yes, I very much want to persuade you to agree with
me on the ideas I’m presenting and hope we can collectivize some or all
of reality, starting with what reality is. But in acknowledging I could be
incorrect, I effectively ended the ability for you to “buy it.”
Sales is about overcoming objections and solidifying a product’s
purchase as a sound decision. It’s also about hiding flaws and uncertainty. I
don’t wish to follow that process with you, because I’m not “selling” my
ideas to you. At least not in any traditional sense; you already bought the
book! LOL, right? I’m already cashing the check and buying an island
whether you agree with me or not. I've gotten away with it!
I’m sorry.
Thing is, I don’t want you to “buy it” in any metaphysical sense. I am
not looking to achieve market share, nor am I looking to compete. I don’t
want a monopoly over your mind.
A controversial term recently used much more than in years past is
“neoliberalism,” meaning the application of the free market to literally
everything. There’s another philosophy that operates similarly called
transactionalism, which openly posits that all interaction be considered
transactional. Neoliberalism, while not exactly the same, shares a lot of the
gross reductionism that would make a person view human interaction as a
commodity or transaction. Indeed, the effects of neoliberalism feel very
transactional.
Neoliberalism installs a market situation, economically speaking (as it
would have to, since derived from liberalism, which can be defined very
simply as “freedom through markets”). But it goes beyond that and employs
markets as solutions in our social problems. If you’ve ever heard the term
“social capital” used instead of “trust,” “integrity,” or “credibility,” then, at
least in my opinion, you’ve witnessed the effects of neoliberalism. There is
a certain dehumanization that comes with framing social interaction as a
commodity.
The need to marketize comes from three places: those who believe in
market philosophy’s tenets in their need for “fairness,” those who are
ignorant of market philosophy but still have a need for “fairness,” and those
with an excessive concentration of wealth. Make no mistake, the waters are
very muddy as to who is who, but this gives us another lesson in
perspective. If a system which people can game to hoard power seems fair
to most other people, then it also seems fair that the grifters grift. You may
have heard, but we got a President that way.
Marketizing the social sphere makes things needlessly hyper-competitive
and encourages people to prioritize superiority and gaining power. Sound
familiar? That’s because this is how we do things.
Some who ostensibly support social justice do not care about economic
justice. Some think the economy is unrelated and believe working
specifically in the social sphere will change material conditions. These
people are often good, and informed discussions about how social and
economic injustice overlap usually do make a difference with them. Also,
some others know that if we get to messing with the economic power
structures too much, the following they have accrued by painting
themselves as an activist “thought leader” would not be as useful in a
monetary sense.
This is bound to make some people angry, but there are social justice
advocates that are hard neoliberals (or cultural capitalists, if you will).
These people make up a tiny minority of these movements, however, and
are not a legitimate means of discrediting large numbers of people simply
seeking equality. I’m not even asserting they are not serious about their
stated cause, just that there’s a side motive of personal enrichment that is
enabled and encouraged by their ideology. Also, their rivals in the anti-
social justice space are usually a lot worse about profiteering on what they
assert to be their beliefs.
In neoliberalism, profit (both monetary and social) can be derived by
saying what people want to hear. Social interaction and discourse are
commodities. So how do we exchange them?
Well, that would be the Marketplace of Ideas, a notion that is touted as
the means of facilitating the adoption of concepts through a metaphorical
free market. Through this symbolic belief bazaar, it’s proposed that the
“truth” will, by default, emerge from the competition of ideas in the public
discourse.
One of the earliest mentions of ideas competing in a societal market was
in a court case between the US government and Jacob Abrams, an anti-
imperialist who got in trouble with the US government (can’t imagine
why… okay, I can and it’s because the US acts very imperialist). My
interest in this case doesn’t concern the specifics, but rather a dissenting
opinion about the result written by Justice Oliver W. Holmes, Jr:

The ultimate good desired is better reached by free trade in


ideas… The best test of truth is the power of the thought to get
itself accepted in the competition of the market, and that truth
is the only ground upon which their wishes safely can be
carried out.

This is a quote that has been extensively covered in many forms of


media, garnering a large amount of support over the last century. The
interesting thing, however, is that support for Mr. Holmes’ idea isn’t
necessarily support for “The Marketplace of Ideas” itself. For instance,
centrist (and huge Oliver W. Holmes, Jr. fan) Alan Dershowitz had this to
say about it when he reviewed a book about Holmes called The Great
Dissent for the New York Times in 2013:

The dissent introduced into American constitutional law


Holmes’s concept of ‘free trade in ideas — that the best test of
truth is the power of the thought to get itself accepted in the
competition of the market.’ This was an imperfect analogy,
since ideas are not commodities traded on markets, like oil
futures, stock shares or gold, which are appropriately regulated
by government agencies.

Thing is, the idea of “The Marketplace of Ideas” is what stuck. Though I
can’t imagine it a heavy deviation from what came before in the already-
capitalist United States, American truth testing is done essentially through
this framing of a competitive marketplace—apparently, to the dismay of
Mr. Dershowitz. Though I will say, I believe that the net effect of “The
Marketplace of Ideas” is essentially golden mean-oriented centrism like his
own. Speaking of which, here’s a quote from a Fox News article Alan wrote
in 2017 entitled “Berkeley must defend Ben Shapiro’s Right to Speak”:

Ben Shapiro must not be prevented from speaking. His talk must
not be cancelled, as others were. Berkeley must do whatever it
takes to protect Shapiro and those who follow him from the
intolerant mobs that don’t want anyone to hear his conservative
message. What is at stake is more than Shapiro’s personal
freedom of speech, important as that is. What is at stake is the
right of every American to participate in the open marketplace
of ideas. If a great university shuts down that marketplace, the
rights of all Americans are endangered.

When it comes to centrism, I agree with this fairly widespread meme


depicting “Fish Hook” theory:

Like most, I was taught that the truth always prevails, that the best ideas
are implemented, that working hard is all it takes to generate “merit,” and
that presenting a rational approach will make all the difference in the world.
But if this were true, then ideas and ideology could very well actually have
their validity derived from competition within this metaphorical market.
However, I haven’t seen much of that during my time on E arth.
What I said in the previous chapters on postmodernism and individualism
regarding perspectives on words like “truth,” “best,” “rational,” and “valid,”
as well as the consumptive situation that perspective is used to create, are
precisely why a supposed marketplace of ideas cannot work in the way our
society proposes it does.
If we understand that there is no “ultimate truth,” but do not understand
the need to collectivize reality and labor at maintaining it, we throw the
deck up in the air, shouting “52 pickup!” This mixes harshly with systemic
encouragement to regard ourselves as moral and intellectual authorities
while obsessively consuming co-opted culture. With everyone operating in
their own reality, consensus is not just unscientific, it’s coincidental. I'm
hardly the first person to make these kinds of assertions, too. The Duke Law
Journal published a paper by Stanley Ingber entitled “The Marketplace of
Ideas: A Legitimizing Myth” in 1984, the same year in which I was born,
that makes the same assertions.

If truth is to defeat falsity through robust debate in the


marketplace, truth must be discoverable and susceptible of
substantiation. If truth is not ascertainable or cannot be
substantiated, the victory of truth in the marketplace is but an
unprovable axiom. In order to be discoverable, however, truth
must be an objective rather than a subjective, chosen concept.

For truth to be determined through a marketplace model, fact must be


objective. I have been saying, as many have before me, that it is not. Recall
that simply because a person’s vision might be slightly blurrier than
someone else’s, these two people perceive things differently. They occupy
the same space, but their “personal truth” is different. One person sees a
very detailed object and can discern fine differences, while the other may
only know it by its outline.
Again, if there were no humans in the universe, the universe would still
exist, though “facts” would not. We made up “facts.” People came up with
the concept of fact and therefore it is inescapably human. It is imperfect,
just as all of us are. Ingber continues:

Consequently, socioeconomic status, experience, psychological


propensities, and societal roles should not influence an
individual’s concept of truth. If such factors do influence a
listener’s perception of truth, the inevitable differences in these
perspectives caused by the vastly differing experiences among
individuals make resolution of disagreement through simple
discussion highly unlikely. And if the possibility of rational
discourse and discovery is negated by these entrenched and
irreconcilable perceptions of truth, the dominant ‘truth’
discovered by the marketplace can result only from the triumph
of power, rather than the triumph of reason.

Ingber posits that for the model to work, different positions in society
shouldn’t affect people’s perception of truth. Remember the Harvard
Business paper about how individualism is viewed differently by
socioeconomic position? That’s people viewing even the idea that they view
things differently in different ways.
Reality has different demographics. To some, the best way to solve the
problem of climate change is to “just stop talking about it” because “it’s
more of that libtard shit.” The “truth” doesn’t automatically have anything
to do with scientific consensus, but rather being “rational” by someone’s
individual definition of the word. Let’s also not forget this is a word often
used disingenuously to uphold a status quo those in power find favorable. If
one does not consider scientific research, either through intentional
omission from worldview or simply through ignorance, then it’s actually
pretty rational to go outside in January and say, “it’s cold, so climate
change must be a hoax.” Add in the choir of voices willfully using the
conflation of weather and climate to justify environmentally dangerous
action and it’s sometimes hard to know where one stands.
The stated goal of a market is not a monopoly or any dominant situation;
it’s to provide a platform for competition, generating refinement and
evolution of products. This would supposedly end in multiple choices for
the “consumer,” all of which have been continually improved upon with the
hope of winning over customers based on merit. If the Marketplace of Ideas
worked like this, we would never actually choose which ideas are fact… so
it kind of works like this. Kind of.
The actual result of a free market, however, seems to generally be a
monopoly, a duopoly, or an oligopoly; competition slows down and
differences are expressed in brand image more than in product specs.
Eventually, the biggest always eat the others. For instance, there are only
six media conglomerates in the United States of America and the mergers
haven’t stopped. In theory, someone could eventually own all media,
though there are laws that will supposedly stop that. This is basically how
the Marketplace of Ideas is purported to work; there is a “winner,”
eventually.
Somewhere in between these two situations is how the Marketplace of
Ideas actually works. We do choose some facts to be real, but they are often
the two opposing facts that are most popular, creating a situation with only
a few dominant forces. Those contradictory facts can never be decided upon
in any finality; they must engage in unending competition. I think the
market framework encourages this, and therefore discourages any kind of
collective finality on an issue.
The only way something can change is that once an issue becomes
viable, both economically and socially, our neoliberal capitalist constructs
deem it worthy enough to attempt to provide products, services, and
solutions for its realization. None of this is permanent, either, and can only
last if a majority accepts it as reality. My favorite examples are renewable
energy and marriage equality. Now that they’re both considered valid and
make money, you see Exxon investing heavily in renewable energy (though
ceasing almost none of their still-profitable oil operations) and wedding
cake shops specifically catering to gay couples (except at least one run by a
homophobe). Never mind that over 95% of the scientific community has
been talking about climate change for 40+ years. Never mind that gay
people are human beings and should therefore have the same rights as other
human beings. There’s criteria, damn it! Polls!
Many personalities, both conservative and liberal, will happily bring up
the Marketplace of Ideas to defend the speech of people like climate change
deniers, anti-vaccine activists and race realists. This is because regardless of
how socially progressive someone is, liberalism is inseparable from the free
market; it was originally conceived of with “liberty through markets” as a
foundational principle. The attitude embodied in a quote constantly
attributed to Voltaire (but one he never said) is on display: “I don’t agree
with what you say but I will defend to the death your right to say it.”
A liberal would rather see a “great debate” with a Nazi than for someone
to punch them as they continue to work towards genocide. This is because
their belief is that the Great Idea Market will automatically compensate for
the Nazi’s horrible ideas, and individual people will happily accept the
rational argument provided by their opponent, regardless of previous
position and environment.
One could say this comes from a position of elitism, in which they
believe that they simply know more than the Nazi. A smart person could
never become a Nazi! So, they will show their intellectual superiority in a
battle royale. The liberal spectacle of the “showdown debate” is a bit of a
perversion of discourse, but an interestingly fitting one. What’s the point of
a prize fight? For the organizers to make money. Showdown debates like
the ones CNN holds to with Ted Cruz and his binders of “helpful statistics”
that show us why healthcare is impossible amount to treating what should
be reserved for exercising scrutiny as a sporting event, one where headlines
the next day can talk about how much one “eviscerated” the other. That gets
clicks! The “obviously good” opinion gets to show how superior it is to the
“obviously bad” opinion, and obviously that’s all it takes. Hard to do that if
those “dummies” don’t get to advocate for genocide.
The idea that “destroying” them on TV stops this kind of ideologue or
what they advocate for isn’t how things work. When a white supremacist is
given the platform to say their piece, people sympathetic to that belief (or
prone to be) galvanize. Many find they are not alone; this white
supremacist, on TV no less, has validated the viewer’s questionable
worldview, something maybe no one else in their life does. This is the
beginning of a validation gang.
In the meantime, the consensus may very well be that what the Nazis are
saying isn’t good. There’s a problem in this, though: if consensus isn’t
automatically scientific, determining what is fact by simple consensus is a
logical fallacy, in my opinion one of the logical fallacies that matters more.
It’s specifically called “the consensus fallacy,” but it goes by other names,
too. For instance, argumentum ad populum, “appeal to popularity,” or
simply a “bandwagon.” This is the kind of collective reality that I think
sucks ass.
Though, one must keep in mind science is also a human construct and
therefore isn’t perfect. There’s a reason not to simply believe that “if we just
do science everything will be fixed!” There is a phenomenon known as the
replication crisis—the results of many scientific studies, new and old, are
impossible to replicate (or nearly so). This is found when researchers, either
an inquiring mind or the original researcher, wish to place more scrutiny on
scientific findings.
For instance, the entire concept of an “Alpha Male” was first
conceptualized by Rudolph Schenkel in the 1940s, but was most
popularized by a book published in 1970 by L. David Mech entitled The
Wolf: Ecology and Behavior of an Endangered Species. In it, he makes the
same case that had been made before, that one wolf becomes dominant and
leads the pack. This idea came from observing wolves in captivity, which
was also where prior assertions came from. But wolves do not naturally live
in captivity, and these behaviors did not repeat in observation of wild
wolves. In the years following the publishing, he disavowed these
dominance hierarchy dynamics. The original results are not repeatable in a
real world situation.
The crisis here is one of verification. Scientific verification requires the
ability to repeat the results of a similar experiment, and organizations don’t
accept results without a lot of rigid controls and requirements. This has
been agreed upon by many (not all) people who are constantly trying to
prove and disprove assertions made with this same method. This is not how
a market works. If anything, a market is an institution where you, the
individual (or whatever entity ends up being the customer), will decide if
you “buy it.”
This is the polar opposite of universalism.
It’s important to specify that scientific methodology is not universalist;
nothing created or observed by an imperfect human mind is. It is, however,
collectivist in practice; it sets standards we all agree on and, although there
are indeed scientists that anonymously admit to falsifying information in
studies, it’s only two percent of them. It allows us to do everything we can
as imperfect beings to find an educated “best guess.”
It’s reasonable to operate on assumptions found by agreed-upon
methodology that have been checked by multiple people using the same
methodology (not that it is a guarantee anything has). It is also reasonable
to question these results if evidence is considered; revisiting assumptions is
not inherently bad. The issue that an endless idea competition is not that
any human assumption is infallible, but rather that previous evidence is
ignored to prolong the conflict.
There’s a propensity to argue against scientific consensus with popular
consensus, particularly within whatever group is making an argument.
Climate change is regarded as sound science, but some groups of people
validate each other into believing it’s nonsense. So, for the sake of clarity,
when I mean consensus reached by science I will say “scientific
consensus,” and for societal/popular/group consensus, I will simply say
“consensus.”
A huge problem with the Marketplace of Ideas is that because it
encourages fact-by-consensus, it’s self-validating. There appears to be a
consensus that the Marketplace of Ideas itself is valid, and even that it’s
somehow related to “freedom.” I think this is an interesting manifestation of
liberalism’s “freedom through markets.” This continually validates the
entire concept by its own circular logic.
Scientific consensus does not share this trait with plain ol’ consensus. At
its best, science continues to test and retest, and it continues to do it with
rigid methodology. This is not to say science is always at its best. When
people don’t adhere to this methodology, they are often discredited by
individuals and organizations who simply have to point out the lack of
methodology. When something isn’t peer-reviewed, you can’t just say that it
is and walk off. People check you and they check your results. True, there is
most certainly profit incentive to fake results. But unlike in a lot of other
industries, there is at least some kind of baked-in scrutiny.
I’ll be happy to acknowledge all the flaws in the reliance of human
beings in either scientific or plain Jane consensus. However, I want to point
out that the environment is relatively more accepting of incorrect
assumptions. In many cases, incorrect assumptions have produced
incredibly useful results. Some of the most useful inventions we use today
were accidents, like microwaves and pacemakers.
Relatively speaking, as long as you were honest in reaching your
conclusions, it is okay to be wrong in science. This changes the dynamic of
defense by quite a bit; someone who has made an assertion in good faith
and is proven wrong through honest means will look ridiculous if they do
not back down.
It’s fairly easy to pick out the hacks from the scientists. Andrew
Wakefield, forerunner of the anti-vaccine movement, will not back down on
his assertions despite having a near-endless stream of peer-reviewed,
repeatable studies produce results that discredit his. There are literally
hundreds to choose from; you could write a book filled with only citations
of reproducible studies that debunk Andrew Wakefield. Still, he will not
acknowledge that his methodology was flawed, and intentionally so. He
will not state that he had financial incentive to produce the result that he
did, but I’m sure lawyers that hired him to aid their lawsuit against a
vaccine company paid him very well. Wakefield didn’t get to continue as a
scientist or doctor; he was stripped of his license to practice medicine and
within the scientific community is totally discredited.
Unfortunately, consensus, even when scientific in nature, doesn’t just
automatically convince its own opposition. Wakefield isn’t a doctor
anymore, nor is he acceptable as a citation in academic circles, but he didn’t
do anything against the law, so he continues to operate as a businessman.
Business is booming, too. The Marketplace of Ideas doesn’t require peer
review; in fact, any attempt to impose any regulatory consideration to a
metaphor would likely be laughed at. On top of that, it’s just not possible to
shed disproven (or bigoted) arguments when the accepted mode of
discourse extends them well beyond conclusion by continuing to platform
opposition to scientific consensus. So, it’s not only self-validating, it’s self-
perpetuating.
While this is not ideal for the stated purpose of the Marketplace of Ideas,
it is indeed ideal for profit-seekers and agenda-pushers. Often, these are one
and the same; see Wakefield. By presenting a disproven, bigoted, or
otherwise silly viewpoint on a high-profile platform, one can become the
leader of a validation gang. This position is a very easy one in which to
generate revenue.
The Marketplace of Ideas doesn’t work. At least, it doesn’t work for its
stated purpose.
When you have a horse in the race, you want that horse to win. That’s
the flaw in physical markets, as much as it is in this metaphorical one.
Capital, systemically speaking, doesn’t genuinely “want” a competitive
situation where they’re forced to evolve their products to be better than the
other entries; they want market share so they don’t have to deal with that
shit anymore! They want to win and drive a Bugatti!
When we commodify something, we ensure its gamification. What I
mean by that is commodification of ideas has led to the need (or perhaps
just desire) for measurement. Inevitably, performance metrics lead to a
“who’s bigger” competition, whether explicit or implicit. This ultimately
colored what we fondly called “the democratization of media” not so long
ago.
At any point, you can post an idea on Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, or
any number of other networks. What happens next? Well, it might get
retweeted, liked or shared. Every time it does, the little number next to the
button goes up. As it goes up, it’s more and more likely to keep going up.
Metrics that are generated, whether it’s a tweet, a status update, or a video
are a measurement of action on your idea.
The more often you can get high numbers next to those little icons, the
more likely you will continue to get more. Gradually, we’re conditioned to
regard the blue thumbs up, the red heart, the green… retweet thing(?) with
respect. Though I disagree with the concept, societally, these numbers
signify credibility and the accumulation of “social capital.”
As with the market itself, the want to measure self-validates and self-
perpetuates. It becomes something of a thrill to see a surge in metrics,
releasing endorphins into one’s system and giving the satisfaction of
knowing we’re right once again. We’re justified in doing the thing we did to
see that surge (no matter how “good” or “bad”), and you may find that more
people are willing to throw their lot in with you, for you have validated
them.
The scary thing about the perspective of “I win because metrics. Neener
neener” is that metrics can be gamed. If you want 50,000 YouTube views,
there’s bots for that. You could set them up yourself or you could pay
someone who programs them to send a bunch of views your way. You can
run challenges or giveaways that encourage people to engage with your
content, or you could just advertise somewhere.
The fact that these things influence how many people see your idea or
thought puts people who already have accumulated wealth and power at an
advantage. It also makes success difficult to achieve without strong support.
While “out” white supremacists are certainly a minority, several of them
have accumulated vast wealth and many have relatively large validation
gangs. This means they do have the advantage of the power to buy exposure
as well as strong support. You can spend to make.
On the other hand, by all accounts I could find, trans people make up a
tiny percentage of our population. Though some may have support
structures and others may not, they don’t have massive corporate money
pushing in-depth trans content into the media or small doses of new
information in memetic form. Often, content about trans people on anything
but trans-owned media comes off as a pat on the back to the outlet, the
consumer, and the author themselves for not being a monster. Much less
seen are the studies and data-driven analysis regarding the issues trans
people face in our world.
Yes, you see it on trans-owned media, but you rarely see a trans person
on a major media outlet fielding anything but the most basic of good-faith
(but still a bit ignorant) questions or grinning and bearing bad-faith
criticism. Almost never is anything substantial done to normalize trans
people. I’d say this is evidence that society has issues morally speaking, and
that there isn’t really any money in normalizing the actual humanity of trans
people, but there’s clearly money in asking white supremacists their
opinions on things.
One way the Marketplace of Ideas works exactly like a real free market
in every way is that it’s flexible. It has no morals, ethics or code of conduct.
Though, because it’s not a real market, there’s also no way to regulate it and
therefore it basically just does whatever. It has no process, nor does it have
any accountability. It’s simply an abstract framing of how discourse works
—one that gives us the impression we should approach discourse as a
marketplace—through the lens of commodification and gamification. When
we have an idea, we must act like business people to achieve anything with
it.
This is a big part of what I believe to be the way to exploit said
discourse, and if you can control the means through which we accept ideas
on the societal level, you control the environment that we make our choices
in and therefore our reality. There’s no question of accepting the control
itself, but, instead, the endless diverging questions about validity that
everyone thinks they have the correct answer for.
I brought up trans content and white supremacist content because they
perfectly exemplify the kind of imbalance I’m talking about: white
supremacists raise insurmountable amounts of money to spend in the media,
and trans people don’t. They can’t. Because of the social and economic
disadvantages that come with being in a marginalized group, trans people
have significantly more to deal with just to live some semblance of a
normal existence. It’s harder to organize a trans group because it’s harder
for someone who can’t get a job due to covert or unconscious bias to show
up to meetings or dedicate their time in other ways. People who worry
about eating or where they’ll sleep tonight can’t spend the kind of time
necessary to raise money for a cause—even their own.
White supremacists can raise money simply by dog whistling on a
prominent platform. Old rich white dudes are going to send in money.
Young white heirs to fortunes can also quite possibly be racist.
The Martel Society is a “paleoconservative,” white nationalist, 501(c)(3)
nonprofit group that was named for Charles Martel, who “held back a
Muslim invasion of Europe by winning the Battle of Tours in the year 732,”
as stated by their promotional material. William Regnery II, heir to the
publishing fortune that caters to far-right readers, founded the group in
2001. Regnery is called a “prime mover and shaker in white nationalism
publishing,” by the Southern Poverty Law Center, a group that tracks
racism, along with other types of bigotry and extremism.
Ron Robinson and James B. Taylor are board members of several
political organizations, first and foremost Young America’s Foundation
(YAF), one of the co-founding organizations that created the Conservative
Political Action Conference (CPAC). Additionally, Robinson is on the
board of Citizens United (yes, that Citizens United) and the American
Conservative Union (which operates and administrates CPAC). These are
extremely mainstream political organizations; CPAC itself is typically
covered by the most prominent news outlets—conservative and otherwise.
In 2017, former executive chair of Breitbart, Steve Bannon’s speech at
CPAC was broadcast live on several of these networks, including Fox News
and CNN.
But Robinson and Taylor’s activities don’t stop there. They’re also on
the board of “America’s PAC,” an organization that has raised millions of
dollars which it has both spent on various conservative political candidates
and donated to conservative political organizations. One of those
organizations is William Regnery II’s Martel Society, the
“paleoconservative,” white nationalist nonprofit I mentioned earlier.
America’s PAC has sent thousands of dollars their way.
Trans people don’t typically have heirs and board members of powerful,
mainstream, political organizations funneling money into the media for
them, but white nationalists do.
To be entirely fair, yes, there are a few PACs dedicated specifically to
transgender issues. They are, however, not numerous. The first PAC
dedicated specifically to trans issues, the Trans United Fund, was founded
in 2016, but to call it a mainstream organization would be an overstatement
of its influence.
This is but a tiny slice of what kind of money goes into getting ideas to
“the market.” To me, this makes the idea that “everyone has to be heard”
seem very much like an illusion or perhaps an excuse. We see people say,
“but everyone has to be heard” as they’re pocketing money for airtime or
advertisements, or even worse, funding “alternative media” organizations
that traffic in “alternative facts” with the intention of profiting from
misinformation.
Now, independent media isn’t automatically bad, but it certainly isn’t
automatically good, either. If it’s calling itself “alternative” media at this
point, though, I’d be wary. That’s a loaded term, not simply meaning “an
alternative.” This is a lot like what “indie” meant for a while in pop music;
it was short for independent and that only really means that no
conglomerate owns the rights to it. But in American canon, “indie music”
has a specific sound.
The thing is, while I am essentially deriving my definitions of these
things from their cultural significance, there are people who will sometimes
stick to their dictionary definitions—and sometimes not—to derail the
conversation. Someone will say “alternative media is just a choice to avoid
the mainstream,” and technically, they aren’t wrong. Combining the fact
that culture is not something created by committee or through specific
oversight (which I think is good) with the way we have framed the
acceptance of ideas through a marketplace (which modifies the way we
interact with absolutely everything), we’ve created a framework by which
reality itself can be controlled without exerting any physical force. In this
framework, providing choices that account for the likely actions of an
individual begins to make more sense as a means to control outcome of
choice.
The result of commodification and competition is fragmentation. The
very last thing we want to end up fragmented is the perception of reality by
individuals. But that’s where we are, isn’t it?
Indeed, money might get you an advantage in the Marketplace of Ideas,
but to put this in role-playing game terms, it’s a buff. It’s an advantage or a
privilege, one that makes the battle ahead easier. But it’s not the endgame of
your actions in this market. You’re not competing for money, you’re
competing for market share. You’re looking to gain control.
Some assert that validity itself into the currency that is exchanged in this
market. I heavily disagree with that proposition; how valid something is has
very little bearing on its position in this market. How good it is doesn’t
matter; good means different things to different people, especially in this
individualized, market-based reality where “the customer is always right.”
So, if money isn’t the currency, and the stated currency (validity) isn’t
the currency… what is? What does an idea accumulate as it gains market
share in the Marketplace of Ideas? What do people pay to “invest” in an
idea within this market?
What non-fiat tender is being exchanged for furthering an idea you
believe to be correct? For the answer, I’d ask that you pay attention as we
continue...
6. ATTENTIONOMICS

A
ttention is currency in the Marketplace of Ideas. Now, if you had an
actual, physical elephant in your room for five years, it wouldn’t be
weird to you anymore. Sure, it would be weird for someone else, but
you’ve built routines around the damn thing at this point. It isn’t coming out
of your house unless you literally tear that corner of the structure out. If you
do that, it’s going to be one of those projects you never got around to
finishing. Home renovation doesn’t exactly cost peanuts. Peanuts do.
So, you’re feeding it, cleaning up after it, and you know what? You’re
used to the smell. You didn’t put the elephant there and no one’s happy
about it (least of all the elephant), but at this point you’re doing what you
can to keep yourself and the pachyderm alive.
Since this circus-dwelling shit machine demanded your attention for so
long, it became normal. I don’t think there is a complicated process in
which conflicting information interacts to create a “hypernormal” situation.
I don’t think confusion is an element in it. I think you just do shit for a long
enough time and people think it’s normal. Do weird shit for long enough
and people expect it. Doesn’t matter if it’s Tom Green, Lady Gaga, or
Vladislav Surkov.
A good history and critique of reality comes in the form of Adam
Curtis’s 2016 documentary series, Hypernormalization. I do think it’s a
great series, though I believe there are certain concepts Curtis
overcomplicates. He asserts that a lack of ideas to fix the USSR’s
counterintuitive, top-down approach to a system designed specifically to
distribute power evenly, combined with constant dissemination of
contradictory information by the state, caused a new kind of normality
where the obviously false felt real, at least on some level.
I don’t think that’s why people accepted it, though. My characterization
is much simpler: the USSR was just a shitshow for such a long time, it
became normal. That’s not to say I outright disagree with the film. I find a
very large amount of it valid and the historical account it provides is
nothing short of terrifying. I just think things are much simpler: whatever
maintains attention becomes normal, and normal is profitable.
The USSR was not “evil.” It was the product of a group of people who
had, very specifically, fair ideology. There are issues with their
implementation that made it susceptible to the issues of the very systems
they were against, though. Where they sought economic equality, they
believed this could be achieved by force of authority rather than by willful
(and careful) building of horizontal, democratic hierarchy. I’m not someone
who’s going to demonize the USSR, but I disagree with how they went
about doing things. It was a shitshow.
If something can get attention, there will be people who agree and
people who don’t. If those people clash, the ideas will get more attention.
As this happens, they may be talked about in social, independent, or maybe
even traditional media. Which will result in (you guessed it) more attention.
The attention will give rise to the acquisition of more attention, and the
longer the ideas can maintain this hypothetical mainstream attention, the
more likely they are to be considered normal, and therefore increasingly
called “correct” by a lot of people. And as previously said, value can be
extracted from this process.
An idea that has become profitable in attention currency is primed to
generate profit in fiat currency. This is why companies like Unilever
piggyback on things like feminism to sell soap through their subsidiary
Dove: feminism is relatively normal. Many women seem to support it
anyhow (can’t imagine why) and there isn’t really much risk in supporting
something that’s normal. They also obviously consider “white” to be
normal, which is why Unilever sells skin whitening cream in other
countries. If someone’s feminism is okay with that, I’m not okay with that
person’s feminism. Though I would say a corporation is not capable of
caring about equality in any possible way beyond the most surface level.
To someone in the United States who has seen a Dove commercial a few
times, it may seem normal that their soap is somehow associated with
equality. This might cause them to purchase or to avoid the soap, because
they might personally agree or disagree with that (there’s also an identity-
oriented aspect we will discuss later). The result will have been higher sales
than simply attempting to sell soap on effectiveness, though, as there’s not a
lot of soap on the market that flat-out just doesn’t work. It’s the brand that
matters, which includes the logo, the shape, the smell, and what the
company wants to associate itself with. “Good soap” is not a description of
effectiveness, it’s a description of what someone feels about soap.
The point I’m making is that facts don’t automatically get attention,
which is the path to normalization or “share of the Marketplace of Ideas.”
This is why fact-checking doesn’t really do much. Facts can certainly be
interesting, but are not automatically so. Nothing is automatically
interesting, fact or fiction.
This assertion is often met with one or both of two responses. The first is
that we should put more work into making facts interesting. The second is
that “people are idiots with the attention span of a gnat.” Neither of these
responses are based on a systematic assessment of the issue; the second
blames individuals for the environment created by those in power and their
predecessors, while the first blames facts for not being sound bites.
When fact is approached scientifically, the result is scientific consensus;
I would call this a “good” form of collectivism. It’s imperfect, but when
executed in good faith is as close to perfect as humanity can be. Scientific
consensus is process-tested, peer-reviewed and proven. Attempts to
disprove it fail. In short, it takes a long time to reach scientific consensus,
and it’s often a cacophony of information coming together in conflict. The
loose ends get tied up, but the road there can be frustrating and
uncomfortable.
This process isn’t something you’d make into a TV show. It’s not that
“facts are boring,” but facts are often formed by findings presented years
apart in studies and papers hundreds of pages long, not written by someone
who cares if a lay person can understand. In fact, they might even hate us
lay shit-eaters!
If collective fact was automatically an attention-getting concept, Donald
Trump could have never won in 2016. Also, collective fact isn’t just
competing for attention, it’s also competing with “alternative”
(individualized) facts. Remember, the customer is always right! Given
collective fact has a lot to deal with and is at a disadvantage for pretty much
all of it, it doesn’t make a lot of sense to run a political campaign on
collective fact.
Alternative facts make the individual feel comfortable in the idea they
are right. We’re really going to dive into this in the next chapter, but I’d
wager that doesn’t sound too wrong, even without much explanation. If an
alternative media source confirms the thing you believe, you at least give
them more of a chance. Right?
Oh, come on! You do.
Let’s say some things out there just gets all the attention. Donald Trump
had a kid with Kim Kardashian who was then the drunk getaway car driver
for a crime OJ Simpson and Tonya Harding committed in Hell, MI. Not
only is their getaway car the Oscar Meyer Wienermobile, but during the
police chase, Don and Kim’s kid came out as gay via a drunken rant over
the Wienermobile’s built-in loudspeaker, jeopardizing their new
sponsorship with Chick-Fil-A. It’s the only news story for six months. That
thing is in control, right?
If you have a ton of money, does that automatically mean you’re in
control? Potentially. That said, you aren’t really in control if you don’t
know what to do with that money. To really exert some control, you need to
set things in motion with that money. You need to pay some people to talk
and some people not to. You need to get your message into living rooms.
You need to forge connections and networks, to find people who do things
that make your goals easier. In short, the money is the means. If you don’t
know what to do with it, you might as well not have it. The only thing
having a ton of money automatically means is you can easily lead a
comfortable life.
Attention is very similar. You can’t just get attention and hope shit works
out; you need a plan. Currency is a means, not an end. If you think it is an
end, you will never get what you want out of it and thus will always seek
more.
So, who controls the narrative in the bizarre situation I described earlier?
Well, it’s something that no one involved in planned to be public, so the
originators of the story have already lost control of it. Where’s the next
bottleneck?
The media is usually the default controller, because they are the ones
capable of attracting the most attention to a person, place, event or other
thing. The way they present it is often the largest number of people’s first
impression; therefore, they get to dictate the input. What they present as
fact is then accepted or denied by individuals and an opinion is formed—
the Marketplace of Ideas!
We have two points of interest here. First, the mainstream and the
alternative media alike are more than happy to misrepresent things in order
to appease the demographic of which they are looking to secure the
attention. The inherent credibility of a professional aesthetic (professional
graphics, everyone has a suit, etc.), a lot of what they are saying, is taken as
“serious” and that’s what they care most about. Second, individuals are
constantly given many variants on this call to action: “you’ve heard all the
facts, now it’s up to you to figure out what to believe.” This ensures the
company is not interfering with the agency of the person viewing, but we
must remember that the outlet has already framed the facts through the bias
that they believe will benefit the outlet best. After all, it’s a business.
The decision to accept a media outlet’s version of a story only seems like
an individual exerting power until one considers the profit motive of such
an outlet. Fox News is the easiest to figure out; it’s a conservative news
outlet and blatantly so. Their business model revolves around reinforcing
the biases of people who have made the choice to be conservatives. No one
else matters, so there is no incentive to consider outside viewpoints. They
make money because people are conservatives, so it makes sense to
encourage them to stay conservative. You can’t make people do that, but
you can curate an environment that feels satisfactory, as well as discredits
criticism.
CNN is less obvious, because their political bias is center (center-left at
times, but not too far in that direction), so it is not the stark opposite of Fox
News. CNN used to be “the news network” and to garner a very utilitarian
reputation for covering news and events from about as neutral a point of
view as is possible for a corporation. The bias they’re catering to isn’t
necessarily as overtly partisan, but rather the idea of hyper-awareness and
savvy: everything they cover is presented as extremely important and vital
to give attention to and, therefore, if you know what CNN is talking about,
you’re perceptive and knowledgeable. The bias they cater to is the idea that
“I’m plugged in, I have my finger on the pulse of society.” Everything on
CNN is Breaking News—you have to know about this!
MSNBC is basically Fox News for liberals (like how conservatism is
just liberalism for people who automatically hate immigrants).
They make money by maintaining an audience that is comfortable with
the way things are being presented. In that comfort, when a commercial is
aired, they are more likely to listen to what an advertisement says. You’ll
notice these outlets don’t do much investigative reporting on companies that
advertise with them.
When an outlet that gets lots of attention exhibits one of these biases,
spending time framing their facts and arguments through a lens that will
help them achieve their goal (profit), that’s them directing the attention they
get. This is the actual power of attention-as-currency. If you don’t
understand the necessity to do this that capitalism creates, you can’t get
market share in the Marketplace of Ideas. As said earlier, it’s not about what
is genuinely most valid. It’s about what gets the most attention.
Attention itself can be controlled via platforming (or not doing so), but if
you don’t control the framing and flow of information, it’s more likely you
got rich by winning the lotto. However, in this scenario, you’re one of those
lotto winners you see in the news who goes bankrupt very fast because they
have no idea what to do with that currency.
The ability to profit, both in social and economic context, means the goal
of a situation will always eventually be profit. Maybe at first, people take it
seriously. However, it becomes apparent that the ones who more clearly set
their sights on profit go on to achieve it. For that reason, there’s no
incentive to push for equal representation of opposing ideas because that
would give an observer the ability to consider both opposing ideas after
having heard both arguments—you have no control over this situation. But
if, as is implied by the name, the Marketplace of Ideas is a competitive
market situation, that’s what people would seemingly want. These
inherently contradicting motives ensure nothing can ever be standardized,
and therefore nothing can ever be decided.
Also, when one idea is represented more than another idea, that idea
becomes “normal” or “acceptable,” this means that it has won on at least
some level, though not on one in which the competition is totally
vanquished. If attention, the specific currency of this market, can be
achieved by simply being louder than the competition, reaching people first
and drowning out opposition, why wouldn’t you do it that way?
Media is the default controller, but that can be overridden. When another
source disseminates information in a controlled fashion, this may very well
dictate the input. For instance, if someone says something that is
questionable when without proper context, it could be sent to media outlets
in a manner that said context isn’t ever seen. The media outlet may sense
profit in outrage and roll with it. Yes, the media would likely exert some
degree of control over what is presented, but they are the secondary
controller, not the primary one.
Similarly, a press release for a new product or service would never
contain anything negative about the thing it wishes to promote. Can you
imagine if Pepsi introduced a new drink saying “40% of our taste testers
disliked it!” No, they’d say “the majority of people who tried it loved it!” If
that press release is platformed (it usually is) and gains attention, as well as
not being scrutinized heavily, that drink will probably sell well, at least
initially.
When an idea’s representation gets the bulk of the attention, that idea has
a share of the market.
There’s another exploit for the Marketplace of Ideas and its attention
economy. We’re about to talk about the two years of events that culminated
on November 8th, 2016, so if you’re not interested in Donald Trump, stop
reading here.
You didn’t stop reading there. Why are you reading more?
The truth is, you’re interested in Donald Trump. I am too. How can
anyone not be? Nothing about him is acceptable, yet he won the Presidency.
He doesn’t fit into a legitimately civil society, he’s continually damaging
cultural norms, and he’s lied many times to the people who put their faith in
him, yet many people think he’s the most honest politician who’s ever lived.
I’m interested in not having this kind of prolonged mess anymore and
that doesn’t just mean Donald Trump. Conditions led to Donald Trump. He
is not the beginning of our problems, he’s just the guy who lied most
interestingly about how to solve them.

A tally kept by the Internet Archive TV News Archive kept track of


media coverage the top 22 presidential candidates all got. Donald Trump
received more than double the coverage Hillary Clinton got, who received
double the coverage of Bernie Sanders, and no one else matters if you’re
going by this metric. In addition, it must be said that though Bernie Sanders
did manage to force the media to cover him at times, the only people the
media really cared about were Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton—and
they cared about him twice as much as her.

If you looked at a study conducted by mediaQuant, a metrics firm,


entitled “$2 Billion Worth of Free Media for Donald Trump,” you’d
probably be able to guess that most of the coverage Donald Trump got was
totally free. He paid for roughly 0.05% of the coverage he received; at the
time of the study, he had paid for a bit less than $10 million worth of
coverage. If the media had charged him for all the free time he got, they
would have sent him a bill for about $1.9 billion. By the start of the general
election, Hillary Clinton had paid for about three times as much coverage
($28 million), and received about $746 million in free coverage. She
effectively spent three times as much and got only 40% in return.
In a similar mediaQuant study entitled “A Media Post-Mortem on the
2016 Presidential Election,” done after the election, the final estimate for
the free coverage Trump accrued was $4.96 billion compared to $2.6 billion
for Clinton. Trump’s total was higher than every single other candidate of
any party combined.

Source: Nieman Lab at Harvard


Nieman Lab at Harvard conducted yet another study entitled “Polls vs.
Mentions in 2016 Primary,” which, among some other things, considered
the correlation between media coverage and pole position, finding the two
are extremely closely tied. Now, to be fair, correlation doesn’t equal
causation. There is most certainly a degree of reaction within both sets of
numbers. Polls likely influence who is covered and who is covered likely
influences polls.
The ratios of poll position are very similar. The polls match the media
mentions in every case except Jeb Bush, and that’s likely because the
amount of paid media coverage he received was significantly higher than
everyone other than Hillary Clinton. Paid coverage appears to do less than
an organic mention, though. Still, to see the numbers are as closely tied as
Nieman Lab found should trouble you for more than one reason…
Well… “President Trump” is not hypothetical anymore. So, there’s that.
The media just couldn’t dictate the narrative with him. Since he managed
to control what was said in essentially all coverage of him, while easily
maintaining coverage at a rate no one was able to keep up with, Donald
Trump overloaded the system. The overload allowed him to consistently
reach people first with the version of information he wanted to be
prominent. Covering Trump was ratings gold regardless of whether the
viewers loved or hated him, so there was no profit motive to even really
attempt to control these narratives. That’s not to say the last few months
they didn’t try, but by then the circuitry was just too fried.
Donald Trump is hardly the first to do this; if you’ve ever dealt with
GamerGate, been on the receiving end of organized attacks from channers
or Kiwifarms, or have ever heard the term “lolcow,” you know what I mean.
GamerGate started as a false story spread by the boyfriend of a game
developer by the name of Zoe Quinn. It alleged that she slept with game
journalists to get positive reviews of her game for profit. While at one point,
she did date a games journalist, her game was free and entirely text-based.
On top of that, these reviews don’t exist. But if you mention any of this on
social media, even today, a noticeable amount of people will approach you
to tell you “what’s really going on here.” Their explanations range from
mostly false to totally made-up, and I won’t go into specifics. If you’re
interested in that incident specifically, Zoe Quinn has a book out about it.
This so-called movement was not without precedent; this should remind
you of the way the far corners of the internet worked to spread
disinformation about Anita Sarkeesian when she did a Kickstarter
attempting to raise $6,000 for a new feminist series, but ended up raising
over $200,000. When you mention her, people give you stories about how
she’s a scam artist in the hopes you take them at their word. There was also
Retake Mass Effect 3, a movement that was basically the film Misery,
except instead of a fan who tortured a writer because she thought the ending
of a book was bad, it was many fans who tortured anyone and everyone
who would listen to their whining about how the ending of a video game
was bad. There were even positive things that came from these anonymous
corners of the internet, like Project Chanology, a movement organized on
and off image boards to expose Scientology as the dangerous organization it
is.
These things vary in degrees of focus and seriousness. I know many
people who were victims of the negative version of these kinds of
campaigns, and I am also one. This simple fact is one of the bigger conduits
for me organizing my perception of all this abstract thought.
Way back in 2007–2010, I was a somewhat popular YouTube sketch
comedian. I still have the subscriber number to back that up. Though, the
people who subscribed when they saw me on Annoying Orange tend not to
watch me much anymore, now that I make documentaries, video essays on
philosophy, and advertising critique. Who’d have thought!?
I was also in a relationship with someone who was misrepresenting who
they were to me. Yes, I was catfished.
The way I interacted with this person was very public, and I didn’t just
start publicly having opinions about things recently. I voted for Barack
Obama and supported a public option in the health care overhaul and was
quite forward about all of that (as was I about my disappointment about all
of it later). I also had the same distaste for many of the things I still have
today, however, with less knowledge. In this instance, I had an issue with
shady marketing targeting kids and teenagers, but I had not developed ideas
on these things. So, I would make people angry because I would point at
bloggers and YouTubers who were simply doing it and say, “BAD!”
That was messing with their money, though, and I probably should have
had my house in order before criticizing people in ways that, on some level,
threatened their livelihood. I was a nuisance with a weakness: an online
girlfriend who was suspicious.
One of these personalities, a gossip blogger, did some digging and found
out my catfish had been using photos of a celebrity in South Korea, a place
I have very little knowledge of, least of all the language. Now, I don’t know
for sure what this blogger thought of me, but they published a blog post
saying I made up a fake Asian significant other, so I could say racist things
about Asians through this phony Twitter account that I was supposedly
running, as well as not appear single. Only losers are single.
To this day, I have no idea if the blogger thinks that what they wrote is
true or if they found inconsistencies in my life and knew it was enough to
make it look as if I did this. I do get why they did it, though.
To summarize, I was an ostensibly well-liked internet personality with a
following of people who listened to what I said and talked to other people
as well. I was pointing out what I considered to be unsavory marketing to
teenagers, but that was this blogger’s income. If what I said gained any real
attention, it would likely damage this person’s ability to make money, even
if just a little.
Anyhow, that post of hers spread along anonymous image boards,
Facebook and LiveJournal. It then got back to a YouTuber—one could say
easily the biggest at the time; one I had openly criticized for content theft
on a regular basis and who still has me blocked on Twitter to this day—
who decided to get the fly swatter out. He posted it to his Facebook page,
where it somehow received over 77,000 likes. From here, it was picked up
by Gawker and then everyone who used to mooch off Gawker.
This is not a narrative I had control over; the people dictating the input
framed it in a way that established me as a pitiful, possibly racist, individual
and the media itself simply repeated hearsay from gossip bloggers as
“news.” At this point, you should get why I have incentive to take these
abstract progressions and figure out how to verbalize them.
Now, I don’t want to prove anything to you. I have no agenda in
explaining it other than to point out I have a horse in the race regarding
your understanding of how what I claim to be false information about me
became accepted as reality. I want you to know I have seen what I am
describing first-hand and I have been at its mercy. I’m not the first person to
experience such a thing, and I’m certainly not the one who’s experienced it
the worst. Marginalized people constantly receive this kind of treatment for
no reason other than their identity.
But if I’m honest, at this point, I wouldn’t change it. Would it have been
nice not to live through that? Absolutely. I won’t go into detail about what
this caused me to lose, but I gained something that has paid off—
understanding. “Getting it” was just impossible until this happened to me. It
seems like none of this can really happen, but like I said, there are people
who deal with nothing but this. There shouldn’t be.
The Anti-Defamation League Task Force on Harassment and Journalism
released a report in October of 2016 entitled “Anti-Semitic Targeting of
Journalists During the 2016 Presidential Campaign.” The report attributed
just under 70% of anti-Semitic hate targeting journalists on Twitter to only
1,600 accounts. Meaning a wide majority, 1,768,000 of the 2,600,000
tweets found using keywords like “jews good old days” and “jews ovens,”
came from only 1,600 people, and that’s assuming no one registered
multiple accounts, which is charitable. The most significant spike in anti-
Semitic tweets from these accounts occurred on March 13, 2016 and the
following days, when Donald Trump blamed Bernie Sanders for violence at
one of his rallies. Similar studies by individuals on GamerGate yielded
about 2,200 accounts that appeared active for any meaningful amount of
time, and about 60–70% of those tweets were retweets.
In 2017, I made a video about James Damore’s Google memo, a sexist
manifesto filled with biological determinism that got him fired from the
company. Another YouTube user with a very right-wing audience saw it and
really wanted to, I don’t know, stick it to me. I guess. He made a video that
repeated variants of the phrase “you didn’t even read it” many times and
linked to my video. He whipped his audience into a fever pitch with his
characterization of me as a “deranged regressive leftist” and an “SJW male
feminist” all the while making sure they remembered that link to my video.
The result is over 3,500 insulting comments that contain variants of the
phrase “you didn’t even read it.”
Whether consciously or subconsciously, that was the likely desired
effect. On YouTube, many people put on a video and listen to it while they
read the comments. If they did that with my video, the comments section
would give the impression I didn’t read it and make it seem like a waste of
time. I’d bet at least a few people did legitimately not watch it due to the
comments making the video seem ignorant.
I deleted all those comments and banned the users from my videos,
though, because I’m not going to be branded. Make no mistake, the hope
was to brand me. Unfortunately, for them, I did read it.
When Star Wars: The Last Jedi hit theatres later the same year, it was the
second highest movie opening ever and, eventually, the fourth highest US
box office total ever (behind another recent Star Wars for both). Scientific
polling was conducted by several different firms (Cinemascore, ComScore,
Screen Engine, etc.) in the business of predictive metrics. All three polled
90% of the audience liking it, 84% saying they’d recommend it to other
people. All the firms I checked at the time predicted a $220 million opening
weekend and they were all completely correct. In the meantime, the user
reviews on aggregate sites like Rotten Tomatoes and Metacritic showed that
about half of the reviewers hated the film and gave it 0–1 stars.
Scientific polling in the film industry involves ballots filled out by
people coming out of the movie. A statistically significant number of
people are polled and results are extrapolated. There is a small margin of
error in scientific polling, and frankly anything can be faked, but
methodology is followed (and posted on most of these firms’ websites) and
the people who participate saw the movie. User reviews require you to sign
up with an email address. To check, I was able to very quickly register five
Rotten Tomatoes accounts and post reviews from each. It took me about
10–15 minutes total and I affected the average five times as much as anyone
polled scientifically, or at least would have if my five reviews hadn’t been
one, two, three, four and five stars.
I’m not saying there’s nothing wrong with The Last Jedi or that people
aren’t allowed to have different taste than mine, but I am saying it was
probably review bombed (both positively and negatively) by significantly
less than 100,000 people. Let’s be honest, 55,000 people who liked it (and
45,000 who didn’t) didn’t just show up on day one and leave most of the
user reviews in the first few hours you could. This was a reality
manipulation nerd war waged in the Marketplace of Ideas.
To reiterate, the idea market and its attention economy are not that hard
to game. The way these events get covered, you’d think legitimately half
the country was doing them.
But, for instance, the anti-Semitic Alt Right attack on reporters was not
even as many people as GamerGate's attacks (also on reporters), which was
not even one tenth of one tenth of one tenth of one tenth of one percent of
the US population. Similarly, I’d love to see how many Last Jedi reviews
came from the same IP addresses, but I doubt Rotten Tomatoes wants “easy
to game” to be one of their more well-known attributes. Also, there are
people still saying, “half the country voted for Trump.” 18% of the total
population of the United States voted for him. That’s it.
As for the Alt Right, 2.6 million tweets sounds like a lot! But from only
1,600 accounts? That sounds… odd. Tiny numbers of people orchestrating
what appears to be huge mobs of people who get coverage by mainstream
media, as such, cloud what is really going on. When the numbers make it
seem like huge amounts of people think this way, it makes the world much
more frightening. The point is to make you think “maybe it’s true” or
“maybe they won.” Because that’s how you win: you seed doubt in a world
that demands perfection.
But the party’s over. As of today, you understand enough of this to be
dangerous.
7. PERPETUAL
CORRECTNESS

I
t would be weird if I thought I was wrong about all this stuff. The kind
of effort it has taken to write this thing has, at times, totally taken me
off-guard. I’m reasonably certain I’m the only one in my family to have
written a book, other than a distant relative who got shipwrecked about a
century ago—and I totally get why. It is genuinely very difficult. If I had
put this much of myself into something I thought was wrong, I don’t know
what I would think of myself—or what I would do with all the money!
Pandering to people one internally disagrees with can be profitable, but just
not my style. That’s lazy green.
I do think that I am right about this. Though this is all an attempt to
create framing for things that are totally abstract or metaphorical, I do
believe I am not just talking out of my ass. These things have come from a
lot of time, observation and reflection. It’s informed by experience and
study, but I also must acknowledge that this isn’t scientific fact.
This is largely my opinion, but I’d like to remind you that democracy,
capitalism, liberalism, conservatism and communism are largely borne from
the manifestation of people’s opinions, as well. What I’m saying might not
end up agreeable, and it may end up not being taken seriously by
academics, intellectuals, or the billions of people just living out their lives.
That’s fine by me. I was born in a rural area and have largely presented
myself in the service of humor throughout my life. People have said a lot of
frankly bizarre things about me and I exist outside the circles of “people
who are normally taken seriously.” I understand that.
I am fully aware that this is all coming out of my custom reality.
Both despite, as well as, because of this, I must think I’m right. We are
all spending time trying to make sense of things in our lives that appear to
be simple at the top level. But, as one becomes more knowledgeable, these
things are infinitely more complex than our initial perception. I’m not the
first person to raise these questions, and I’m also very likely not the first
person to have had the thought that the Marketplace of Ideas is bad for
collective truth because of how it plays out to commodify discourse, ideas,
and other things that are not traditionally thought of as commodities. These
are mechanisms for changing reality as perceived by human beings, and
although I’ve never seen a book about all the specific things I’ve mentioned
in relation to each other, I find it hard to believe no one has had these
thoughts. Noam Chomsky and Edward Herman wrote a book in the 1980s
entitled Manufacturing Consent that attempts to make sense of some very
adjacent ideas.
Specifically asserting I’m confident in this material also acts as a case
for the validity of my concepts. I think this is extremely interesting to think
about; presenting the idea of the Marketplace of Ideas in the Marketplace of
Ideas would likely tell you that it’s valid.
Though, most assertions aren’t as self-fulfilling. It takes a specific
attitude to continually feel valid about much of the stuff people are
screaming into cameras and microphones all over the world, and it’s not
“self-reflection.”
When we turn on cable news, we will see any number of experts
speaking on whatever issue is going on right now. Now, “experts” is a word
and therefore subjective, but I am speaking specifically of people who have
proven themselves to be at the very least interesting. They may possess the
ability to speak on a topic or several at an acceptable level. It’s somewhat
fair to call them an expert, though not with the traditional definition of “a
person who has a comprehensive knowledge or skill in a particular
discipline.” More appropriately, if you really wanted to point out the
difference between an expert and an “expert,” you could use the term
“thought leader.”
The function of a “thought leader” is specifically to validate everything
around them. They validate the narrative, thereby validating the show,
network and company they are providing commentary for. They also
validate themselves, but most importantly, they validate you.
Thought leaders traffic in perpetual correctness; each one of them a
televangelist for the Religion of Me, designed to ingratiate and direct
demographics of people who see themselves as smart individuals making
up their own minds for themselves. They carefully curate the things they
want their followers exposed to, because the beauty of this system is how
much agency we have. We have all agency! Smart people make choices like
mine!
In the Marketplace of Ideas, thought leaders are the Salespeople of Ideas.
They are, themselves, a brand that sells their perspective as a lifestyle.
Sometimes they might get all humble and say “I don’t have all the
answers,” but they emphasize the “all” instead of the “don’t.” More than
anything else, though, the thought leader is getting paid. They’re writing
books, they’re making appearances, they’re doing everything someone of
note might do—but there’s money behind it. You see them doing native
content, ads that look and read like actual articles. They might work for a
think tank that acts as an intermediate between a company wishing to lobby
and a politician. They might push an oil agenda but this time, it’s somehow
clean!
This does an amazing job integrating with our country’s perception that
it is operating as a meritocracy. For instance, a thought leader can most
likely maintain employment. That can mean on cable news or on the
assembly line, though they might not be called a “thought leader” when
they are filling less visible jobs. But whether they’re an author or an
engineer, being perceived as an expert is an easy way for a person to reach
“safe career” levels.
The hard way, obviously, is being a legitimate specialist with any degree
of modesty. Not to say that building a brand and lifestyle around oneself is
easy, but if it was easier to be a full-blown specialist, we’d probably have
more of them. Possessing the ability to speak on one or more topics of
interest to those who sign the checks can simply mean taking advantage of
their ignorance to things like terminology, and paying attention to new
developments within the sector, repeating information when convenient.
Ultimately, it’s just dependent on what someone will accept as an “expert.”
An expert, in the context of today’s media, is a necessary component in
the construction of narrative. On cable news, that means an expert is either
there to reinforce what the outlet wants to say, to “debunk” what someone
else has said, or provide controlled opposition. Remember, the narrative
needs the social capital to maintain market share and remain “valid.”
Actual specialists on subjects are often on TV saying things that are
provable with science, but so do the thought leaders with their cursory,
TL;DR-level knowledge of the topics at hand interesting demeanor.
Thought leaders fill the specialist role when a specialist can’t be there (read:
costs too much), doesn’t exist, or wouldn’t say what a producer wants a
specialist to come in and say. So basically, all the time.
Eventually, thought leaders might get to host their own program. Their
guests range from other thought leaders, to people who are intentionally
brought in to look wrong to help the narrative in some way. Tucker Carlson,
host of “Tucker Is Right And The Person In The Other Box Is Wrong And
Dumb And Bad,” is a thought leader. People he brings on are there to be
painted as wrong.
The most important distinction to make regarding the difference between
“expert” and “thought leader” is that there aren’t any distinctions made.
These roles are treated the same, regardless of whether it’s a genuine
specialist, a thought leader, or a schmuck setup to take a fall. A network
must represent the people who fill “expert” roles as experts. If they didn’t
book experts as experts, where would they be? Certainly not in a position of
credibility, that’s for sure. The net effect is that everyone who gets called
“expert” gets to share in the credibility of specialists, because the people
who constantly have your attention act as though they are specialists.
Individually speaking, you may agree with them or you might say “that
guy’s full of shit.” It’s up to you, right? Regardless of what that person says,
they’re meant to help the narrative in some way. That can mean you think
they’re full of shit if it reinforces why you watch that network. Ultimately,
the thing that matters is that you feel comfortable in the idea that you are
correct.
When you have lots of people looking for competing viewpoints to
reinforce their own biases and verify themselves as correct, it makes sense
to pick one and give them the “best” version of what they want.
Representing opposing views in a responsible, fair way might make the
viewers question themselves and the information presented. Someone who
is willing to do this is not an ideal viewer for a commercial break, and,
therefore, bad for the bottom line. Now, it’s not just about the bottom line;
there are people involved with both better and worse motives. But if a
person interested in gaining and retaining power can get a ton of people to
agree with them and it makes them a ton of money… why wouldn’t they?
We all want to be experts within our own set of standards because we all
view ourselves as leaders. Whether or not we lead others isn’t relevant;
we’re leading ourselves. Simply put, these competing narratives exist
because we all follow the Religion of Me. We’re all the protagonist and the
savior; we all must do something extraordinary with our lives so when
everyone looks back, we are recognized as the leader of the entire world!
We all must be that one guy in that one movie who kept saying the thing
was going to happen, but the scientists, the government, and all the people
said “no, it won’t happen”—and then it happens. You know, that guy played
by Jeff Goldblum. Basically, it’s all a bunch of smoke and mirrors that feeds
into the idea that we progress on merit.
What’s the cardinal sin in a meritocracy?
If by “meritocracy,” one means that power should be bestowed upon
individuals based on ability or talent, then the people who excel are those
with abilities and talent. The way one can explicitly show that they have
abilities and talent is by being right. So, the cardinal sin is being wrong.
When one is wrong, it invalidates one’s entire position in a meritocracy,
which we think we live in. But if we lived in a meritocracy; the “experts”
would consist entirely of actual, real, foremost specialists. If this were a
legitimate meritocracy, and your opinion is the one with merit, how would
“experts” exist with views other than your own? They should only be able
to get there on merit, and no doubt you believe your own philosophy and
thoughts to be “of merit.” So how do they have a salary?
Well, we don’t live in a meritocracy, for one. We live in a world
attempting to exploit us, but keep us feeling validated. So, instead, we have
“thought leaders,” and you are the judge of what’s right. The net result is a
personal taste that isn’t just about entertainment or politics, but about
reality.
Because your personal taste is tied so closely to the world as you see it,
you must endlessly justify. This is a process that holds you dead in your
tracks; you will never progress if your main activity is justification. Not to
mention the fact that you must be an “expert,” too. You don’t have a choice;
you need to be right. You must be equipped for conversation among your
peers and superiors and you need to show that you can be relied upon.
So, what if “right” or “correct” isn’t objective? What if your taste in
“reality” is one that can be advocated for? Is your flavor of existence one
that is profitable?
You likely can internalize information presented to you, as well as act
agreeable to people in power. You might live and work in a place that is
primarily “conservative” (or a place that is primarily “liberal”) and you
might know how to package what you say to get through to people in this
environment.
Either way, you’ve likely heard someone say “look at all the sheeple in
the Republican party, just doing everything they’re told to! They’re stupid!”
Or you may have heard “get a load of these libtard sheeple! They just hole
up in their coastal cities and don’t talk to anyone who thinks differently
from them!” The thread through these statements is that the opposing side is
full of “followers” that need to be “herded.” They essentially receive
“orders” and execute them.
That’s just not how you get people to do what you want them to do.
People hate orders.
No, people aren’t blind or stupid. They certainly aren’t sheeple. In
chapter 2, “Denial of a Collective Reality,” I said everyone is encouraged to
believe that the buck stops with them. We’re all the protagonist of our own
movie and despite our anger at others for being so self-centered, we’re the
customer and the customer is always right. In our own heads, we’re Sir
William Wallace, Jon Snow, Tony Stark or some other masculine hero that
is foisted upon pop culture. Or, if we don’t yet realize that The Matrix is a
trans, anti-capitalism narrative, we’re all Neo.
We’re all leading ourselves. As we make our way through life, we can
feel as if everyone is following our lead. We don’t stop to check if anyone
is following, we just lead like the glorious bastard we were destined to be.
If we don’t, then we don’t even have a chance in this world. At least, that’s
what our supposedly merit-oriented culture is predicated on.
We’re all “Leaders of None,” bravely occupying spaces or making
choices from drastically oversimplified information, not always presented
in a binary, but most effective if done so. Republican or Democrat,
conservative or liberal, Marvel or DC, Coke or Pepsi, Xbox or PlayStation,
male or female—these choices serve to keep us in a controlled
environment. They’re managed choices that we feel empowered for
making, because we’re exercising our agency. A true leader thinks of all
their people—even when the only person they’re leading is themselves. As
our own leaders, we rely on ourselves to make the right choice for all of me.
When presented with the opposite end of the binaries and spectrums we
occupy, we become very uncomfortable. Why? Because we’re always
correct! We know that we picked the right side. We had to; we’re the leader!
When presented with something we haven’t yet considered, we aren’t
supposed to want to consider it.
Being perceived as “correct,” by both ourselves and others, validates so
much about how this world works, including the things with which we
disagree.
This can be seen in a study published in the Psychological Bulletin in the
very last days of 2017 entitled “Perfectionism Is Increasing Over Time: A
Meta-Analysis of Birth Cohort Differences From 1989 to 2016.”

Our findings suggest that self-oriented perfectionism, socially


prescribed perfectionism, and other-oriented perfectionism
have increased over the last 27 years. We speculate that this
may be because, generally, American, Canadian, and British
cultures have become more individualistic, materialistic, and
socially antagonistic over this period, with young people now
facing more competitive environments, more unrealistic
expectations, and more anxious and controlling parents than
generations before.

With general social malaise as a backdrop, neoliberalism has


succeeded in shifting cultural values so to now emphasize
competitiveness, individualism, and irrational ideals of the
perfectible self. These ideals are systemic within contemporary
language patterns, the media, and social and civic institutions,
and are evident in the rise of competitive and individualistic
traits, materialistic behavior, and presentational anxieties
among recent generations of young people.

In a meritocracy (even a fake one), being correct (even pretend correct)


is power, whether that’s expressing yourself in the “expert” role on
television or demonstrating why you should be promoted and not another
worker. When they are wrong by your standards, you feel powerful.
News, like any other television program, caters to demographics. So,
while it may usually “get it right” for their audience, there is always
something you’ll say, “I’m not entirely in agreement with that” about.
Ultimately, if the overall narratives validate you, then the network
accomplishes what it sets out to do. They’ve become better over time in
accomplishing this task as they have become more blatantly partisan and
specific in narrative.
Algorithms do this so much more efficiently, though.
Google and Facebook aggregate and curate your experience online down
to the most finite detail they can glean from the habits all those tracking
cookies record. Honestly, I often feel like they named them “cookies”
simply because cookies taste good and aren’t related to stalking in any way.
What a tasty and effective way to sound like you’re not stalking people!
Instead of television producers, there’s probabilities based on your
previous habits. Computers are faster than a human being, and it doesn’t
matter if they’re right or not; they’re presenting you what you choose from.
When you see something on these services, it’s because the algorithm
deems it “best for you,” or relevant to your interests. Considering what is
required of a person in their everyday lives, somewhere in your interests is
“being right.”
Being right is extremely comforting. That comfort itself is so specific
that I’d call it a particular type of comfort, as well. It’s special because, in
the traditional sense, one could be extremely uncomfortable—even in
danger—and if one was correct that it was going to happen or about how it
would happen, somewhere inside we’d be saying, “I knew it.” Despite
whatever terrible thing is happening, we are at least validated in that way.
9/11 produced an entire industry of people who were Perpetually
Correct™. They were right about who was the problem, what they were
going to do next, and what we should do about it. Obviously, this turned out
really well. The result was definitely not that; by estimates in peer-reviewed
research from a 2013 report published in PLOS Medicine entitled
“Mortality in Iraq Associated with the 2003–2011 War and Occupation”
arrived at, a half million private citizens in Iraq were killed in a war that
Wasn’t About Oil™. Clearly, that wasn’t the outcome.
NARRATOR: “That was the outcome.”
On every level, the post-9/11 machine incentivized speculation on a
massive level and resulted in what is arguably genocide. It was inarguably
imperialistic and in the service of a few profiteers, and yet people bent over
backwards to justify their own support for “spreading democracy.” People
who were in the government, the media, and every walk of private citizen
were bending over backwards to go scorch Iraq again. A series of societal
biases, combined with the context of a decade of war that painted Saddam
Hussein as “Hitler: The Sequel” and then questionable links to 9/11, made it
make sense to want to go to war in Iraq again. Nary an oil baron or a private
military contractor had an argument against it, either.
In fact, questioning going into Iraq was viewed as heretical. While some
might paint that as groupthink, I would like to propose something different:
tons of “experts” and everyday people who all considered themselves the
primary authority on everything were all saying something similar, so
everyone said “look at all these people telling me I’m right! Everyone
agrees with me!” Everyone was the protagonist at a time when protagonists
who supported the Iraq War played well with audiences.
Do you remember what it was like back in 2003 to say, “maybe we
shouldn’t invade Iraq?” It was basically like saying “women don’t like nice
guys” nowadays, except for the fact that we actually shouldn’t have invaded
Iraq. But that wasn’t “correct.” Unless you said it to some folks on the left,
then it was.
Neither Twitter nor Facebook were around back then, but can you
picture the discourse on either leading up to an Iraq invasion? I can only
imagine how sky high all the metrics would have been when arguments
were running hot in that era. Regardless of what anyone posted, it would
have received a lot of engagement, which feels great. It’s proof you’re right
—not just to you, but to the algorithms, too.
The more detailed a profile on how to make you feel right, the more
specific the advertisements that get shown to you. The advertisements show
you positive versions of things in which the algorithm believes you’d be
interested. Then maybe you’ll talk about it if you check it out. If you’re a
“thought leader,” you will—and you will try to be first. Oh, and here’s the
kicker: we’re all meant to think we’re thought leaders and we’re all first in
our own lives. We all did everything before it was cool and everyone else is
behind the times.
When you feel the comfort of perpetual correctness, you’re more likely
to be receptive towards ad messages, because they’re only presenting
positive information for you to decide with, and you don’t feel the need to
ask other people for input—why would you? What you think is true. You
are “right.”
There’s an element of self-preservation, as well. The perpetually correct
are more likely to point at a symptom of a problem as the problem and say:
“That’s bad. See this? It’s bad. So bad. How bad, bad, bad, BAD!”
However, if the system that created that problem comes up, there’s nothing
to be said.
When I say, “Logan Paul,” what do you think? Japan Suicide Forest,
right? How much discourse surrounding that event had anything to do with
systemic racism? Almost none. Everything was about how bad every person
thinks Logan Paul is. True, I wouldn’t mind pouring laxative into his warm
2% milk or whatever he drinks before bed. But a conversation could have
easily been had about racism that isn’t outwardly malicious, but because it’s
racism, it still has that net effect of maliciousness. We’re talking about the
kind of racism where people have no idea they are racist.
Or hey, instead of telling people to retweet if you care about suicide
victims, maybe let’s talk about something related to suicide. Yeah, it’s good
to get suicide prevention phone numbers out there, but what about people
who are constantly haunted by thoughts of suicide. Why did it need to wait
until Logan Paul did something ignorant and vaguely racist? Why is there
so much stigma in discussing suicide? What is it that causes suicide? Is it
the fact mental health is neglected in our health system? Is it that our health
system is for-profit, that it makes more sense not to indulge in maintenance
care, the kind that most mental health care is? Is it that emergencies are
significantly more profitable, not only because of their high dollar amounts,
but also because insurance companies are more likely to pay out those high
dollar amounts?
In my frankly lazy analysis here, I’ve now talked more about systems
than everyone did when that whole thing blew up. However, addressing that
would end the perpetuity of one’s correctness, because the problem could
be solved due to the mass acknowledgement and demand for a solution.
Twitter is absolutely wonderful for this, because there’s this loop where you
just pick a thing that is obviously bad, call it bad, and accept the sweet,
sweet spike in metrics without any thought deeper than surface-level.
Thought leaders have a vested interest in criticizing symptoms, because
they need something to be right about. Everyone participating in this system
needs to be right, including the people who own everything, the people who
appear on cable news, and yourself.
So, is the media totally worthless? You may be surprised to hear me say
this, but absolutely not. Indeed, there are a plethora of issues based in this
profit-driven perspective-as-fact popularized by Fox News but employed by
basically any news outlet which has profit at its heart.
There are situations where the media can be worse; I pointed to
“alternative facts” because it’s an obvious issue, but “alternative” media can
be just as bad as (if not, much worse than) mainstream media. Then there’s
state-owned media, which has legitimately no incentive whatsoever to
question any authority the government amasses. There are many obvious
problems that can arise from that, as well. The situation we have is,
amazingly, not the worst it could be. However, most agree that we are
closer to “the worst” than we should be, at least if you don’t ask them any
partisan questions.
However, just “not being the worst it can be” is not a good reason to
avoid discussing it.
The Religion of Me, individualism, is not a functional societal
philosophy. We have information and entertainment reinforcing it at every
turn, validating our every assertion before we even have the time to reflect
on them ourselves. This is not to say we must invalidate the individual, just
that we need to stop centering society so completely on the concept of the
perfect, rationally acting individual.
To go a step further, things like gender identity and expression are not
threats to collective reality. These are issues that one attends to on a
personal level and, regardless of how one chooses to proceed, do not
actually impact other people in a negative way. Agency and diversity are
important ideals—ones I advocate for. On top of that, there’s peer-reviewed
behavioral and biological science that backs a lot of people’s assertions up,
with new research happening all the time. Standardized information can be
checked; experiments can be repeated. If the results replicate, there’s reason
to believe something may be collectively true.
There is an inherent issue with scientific studies, though: they’re often
behind a paywall. Research costs money, which has to come from
somewhere. This is one of many reasons information scientific
methodology yields get shielded from public view. Besides that,
withholding information is vital to controlling people who retain agency, so
outlets that disagree with the information are likely not to disseminate it.
Keeping everyone feeling as if they are correct is a balancing act. It’s
incredibly fragile and necessitates a singular, predominant mode of
operation in which no one solves anything. If you can represent yourself as
an expert on how things are right now, then this is the situation in which
you can profit—that means everyday people in normal jobs and every
single person up the hierarchy. We are specifically comfortable when we are
correct because being correct seems to lead us to a more generally
comfortable existence. Just feeling correct might not yield that same result,
but Pavlov proved the result isn’t necessary to reinforce the behavior. Just
the promise.
Ultimately, The American Dream is that promise. Do you still believe in
it?
8. CULTIVATED IDENTITY

“W
ho am I?” We ask ourselves this question all the time. We ask it
at important crossroads, in times of need, and with our head on
the pillow after even the most uneventful of days. It is the most
basic human question of all and the answer can elude even the best of us.
One of the most interestingly worded definitions for “identity” I’ve seen
is “the characteristics of determining one’s fact of being.” I find it
interesting for a couple of reasons. The first is that, of course, “fact” is not
objective; this definition makes it even more apparent. The second is that
those who argue against the idea a person can be marginalized by their
identity often say, “it’s fact.” You hear it all the time: “there’s only two
genders; that’s fact” or “there’s just more crime in black communities; that’s
fact.” Some folks will ignore all the research, deny that context influences
the effect statistics have, and otherwise choose not to believe peer-reviewed
evidence.
It’s interesting that the people who argue that “fact is universal” or that
something can be “objectively true” are usually the ones who ignore the use
of scientific methodology (or other collective methodology) to further our
societal understanding of things. Demanding a human-created idea be
considered universal is a ridiculous overstatement of humanity’s importance
in the universe. Yeah, we’re objective. Us.
It might sound like I’m saying humanity has a superiority complex, but I
think it’s quite the opposite. There is very little which reveals fragility more
conspicuously than demanding one’s assertions be considered universal.
The fragile often want to appear infallible, but in loudly asserting they are
the latter often look the former. To be human is mandatorily inclusive of
weakness; to deny weakness is to deny humanity.
Why would someone so desperately want to deny that which makes
them human?
Perpetual correctness explains some of it; in a perceived meritocracy you
must be right or else. There is only one path to comfort and that’s
continually looking as though you are intellectually superior to the people
around you. Being confronted with being wrong impedes our path to being
perceived as being an expert. Someone who is wrong by their target
demographic’s standards even sometimes can hardly be perceived as a
thought leader.
Talking about merit and perpetual correctness is talking about external
pressures and socialization, though. These expectations “inspire” many to
aspire to be the next Steve Jobs, and so many will consider themselves
failures for never having met those expectations. Still, that is an exchange
with society rather than an internal one; thought leadership is a means to
produce or profit. But how does one consume?
To find and understand the processes behind that, we only have to look
at fandom.
“Fan” is a late 19th century abbreviation for “fanatic.” A fanatic is “a
person filled with excessive and single-minded zeal, especially for an
extreme religious or political cause.” Basically, an obsessive person whose
interest and enthusiasm for something is extreme. In more recent parlance,
people say “fan” more casually in place of simply saying “enjoyer of.”
Most who say “fan” do not mean “obsessive,” and I am not asserting that it
automatically means that. Yet, you do see quite a few people who
specifically identify as a fan of something often tend to be just that.
Someone who identified as a Limp Bizkit fan in the 1990s often dressed
like the band’s frontman, Fred Durst. They’d have on a backwards red,
fitted baseball cap, a white t-shirt with the band logo, and khakis. Someone
who liked Metallica in the 1980s probably wore faded jeans and a black t-
shirt with the band logo. People who supported Hillary Clinton in 2016, are
now carrying around a copy of What Happened and wearing a blue t-shirt
with that bad “H” logo (with the arrow pointing right for whatever reason).
She may have charted better if she had toured more in support of her
album...
Being a fan of someone or something means more than you might think.
It doesn’t matter if we’re talking about Star Wars or the Republican Party. I
mention both because I want you to understand this isn’t about anything
specific. Everything has “fandom,” no matter what it is. This applies to
entertainment, a political party, a religion, an activity, and everything you
can consume.
It’s important to understand that I’m very specifically not talking about
just liking something. What I mean to highlight and criticize is the
phenomenon of capital interests pushing people to incorporate enjoyment of
a thing one likes into one’s identity. This is intended to continue in an ever-
increasing capacity with the intention of extracting more and more value
through consumption.
It could be popular culture, or it could be a deeply held belief that
becomes obsession and overrides the people and activities that make up
their lives. When a person’s identity is on the line, criticism of one’s
treasured thing starts to feel extremely important. I also believe that all of
us acquiesce to at least some degree of this aspect of socialization in
capitalism. However, I very much want people to understand I am not
saying that enjoyment of things is bad or that responsibility for this rests on
any individual. It is not you who is cultivating your identity; it is capital that
is extracting value from you. Think of it like a crop on a factory farm; the
farmer plants seed, nurtures and harvests.
By cultivating identity, marketing can encourage a person to act as if
they own a thing they love, despite not being involved in the process of
creating it. The perspective capital often wishes to cultivate is that the fan
gives the words meaning. This is mildly similar to “death of the author,” if
the concept were more about ownership than interpretation. In the fan’s
mind, they own this thing someone else has worked on.
This is actually not an outlandish reaction, if you think about it. Fans
have purchased the object of their enjoyment, either directly or via related
merchandise. Not only do they literally purchase media and merchandise,
they metaphorically “buy it,” as well. The purchase occurred both
physically and in the Marketplace of Ideas. Fans give the brand their
attention, which in a world where everything is commodified and framed as
a market, is an investment. One might call it an emotional one.
In defense of this thing, or rather, the fan’s investment in the thing, they
can bother, troll, trick, threaten, harass, stalk and even abuse. This is a bit
like being correct and obtaining or retaining merit, but not entirely. When a
fan has reached this point, criticism becomes a perceived threat to their very
identity, which often evokes an emotional response.
Regarding “attentionomics,” expression of emotion is often regarded as
attention-seeking. As said earlier, this is analogous to profit-seeking.
Fandom is a place where one is given the justification to express emotion,
because it is done in a manner that feeds into the actual profit-seeking of
whatever company owns the rights to the thing people like. This legitimizes
this kind of attention-seeking in the eyes of fans; it contributes to a thing
they derive identity from, rather than specifically for themselves. This can
be taken as “contributing to the community,” and therefore excuses the
emotional outbursts that fans might criticize in others as “irrational.”
The positive effect of surrendering one’s identity to capital are new
places to belong: castles, pirate ships, or beyond the stars. A fan might label
where they come to belong as a “community,” but it’s not as simple as that.
Community has several definitions. There’s “a group of people living in the
same area,” but this is obviously not relevant as fandom is often spread
around many locales and connected over the internet. The definitions that
matter in this conversation are “fellowship with others, due to sharing
common attitudes, interests and goals” as well as “a group with similarity of
identity.” Given the identity we are talking about is one cultivated by and
for the interests of capital, fandom can act and feel very much like
community. However, I would assert that at its core, it is more a validation
gang. Which might hurt, because you are probably a fan of something. If so,
it is not me who is hurting you.
“Toxic fandom” is something we likely all carry a degree of, even if the
subject of our admiration is overtly progressive. The reason? Marketing
doesn’t ask us to consume in a healthy way. In fact, the goal is that we will
consume as much as possible, which depending on the tactics used, can
easily exploit the vulnerable or naive. Most people are (at the very least)
naive to the way marketing works; more research than you can imagine has
been put into creating effective marketing.
A man you may not have heard of is Edward Bernays. He was born
November 22nd, 1891, and lived 103 years. He was Sigmund Freud’s
nephew. I’m not dealing with Freud in this book—he did contribute some
useful things but a larger amount of the opposite.
Freud was Freud, but his ideas did lead Bernays to create highly
effective marketing theory. Bernays was an artist when it came to creating
material and circumstances that caused outcomes he desired. Though he did
start specifically in the realm of marketing, he wrote the book on
propaganda. I am not using that as a figure of speech. He wrote a book
entitled Propaganda that is essentially “how to propaganda.”
What you may find interesting is that the book functions as propaganda
for propaganda. He not only lays out his theories, but he does everything to
normalize and popularize propaganda as a method for maintaining an elite,
as much as it encourages consumption. Step one, do not call it propaganda.
Call the stuff that the bad guys do, propaganda. We do public relations here.
Among his ideas was attaching a product to a person’s self-image and
their expression of it, tapping into their desires and preferences, or what you
and I today might call identity. Materials he wrote told people outright to
express themselves through performative consumption. Here’s what he had
a spokesperson for one of his campaigns say:

There’s a psychology of dress. Have you ever thought about it,


how it can express your character? You all have interesting
characters, but some of them are all hidden. I wonder why you
all want to dress always the same. With the same hats and the
same coats. I’m sure all of you are interesting and have
wonderful things about you. But looking at you in the street,
you all look so much the same. And that’s why I’m talking to
you about the psychology of dress. Try and express yourselves
better in your dress.

He’s arguably the originator of this. Over the following decades, other
theorists tinkering with and building on his ideas came up with a framework
we now know as lifestyle marketing.
This, despite Bernays not personally believing a damn word of it. Where
you might find the theorists who created “Values and Lifestyles,” the basic
methodological scaffolding that lifestyle marking is built on, are true
believers, Bernays wanted to use it in aid of the creation of a controllable
population.
As it turns out, he vehemently agreed with some of Freud’s other ideas.
The one he leaned hardest into was the idea that all people hold depraved
desires that need redirection or they would certainly carry them out. This
led Bernays to believe that the theories he created should be used to control
the populace. When dominance is the goal, actual validity in theory is much
less important than creativity and drive.
In so many words, we’re asked to pledge fealty and opt-in to a sub-
economy based entirely around a thing we might like. We enter a reality in
which there’s a version of everything just for us. There is chopped lettuce
branded with Star Wars and I am not joking.
The level of commitment we would need to feel excited about branded
lettuce with Rey on the bag is vast, so criticism would feel dire. No, I’m not
saying Star Wars fans all have to be careful about their bowels when they
see a Star Wars brand chopped lettuce. I am saying that Disney would
consider it ideal if Star Wars fans all were shitting their pants for Star Wars
lettuce. Well, at least if the movements were caused by excitement and not
E. coli.
It feels like an attack on our fandom and, therefore, our identity. We own
enough merchandise or have consumed enough information to show that we
shouldn’t be questioned. For this, we’re awarded the designation of “real
fan.” We take on this status in situations where we don’t even realize we are
fans, too. Certainly, Donald Trump has a fandom, and some of them likely
consider themselves “the real deal” for having more of those shitty hats
than someone else, or for having been to more rallies. They’re “real fans,”
damn it!
Such a title is an illusion, though. It’s only meant to create an
aspirational level of fandom to exclude people and contribute to the
alienation one can experience—to create feelings of longing. One could say
it is easier to get people to long for something that isn’t real; they can never
have Crash Bandicoot go on a date with them or whatever.
Some kids don’t get all the toys. In schoolyard conversation, it may
come out that they don’t have all the toys, leaving them open to the
question of whether they actually like the thing. The words “real fan” get
used, establishing a consumption-driven hierarchy. Nothing would make a
kid feel better than to just have that stuff—to be a “real fan.” Having more
toys means the child has indisputably proven they meant it when they said,
“I like this.” They are a peer or even a superior, rather than a wannabe.
Simply being born to parents whose situation allows for the purchase of
more toys makes them “real fans.”
The next stop on this ride is ownership, where “real fans” dictate what
happens with something. They know better than the creators, the “lesser”
fans, and (especially) anyone with criticism.
The tricky part is, buying merchandise isn’t evil. None of us are wasteful
monsters who are ruining something for others when we buy this stuff; we
are people and shouldn’t be told how to like things. We are not deliberately
supporting corporate greed, and that’s not automatically a conduit to acting
abusively on the internet.
I’d even go so far as to say that the problem with this kind of co-opted,
profit-driven identity is that it’s built on top of things that are basically
good. To cultivate this kind of identity, capital takes advantage of
something normal and healthy: our enjoyment of cool shit. Just like
individualism, the construct doesn’t trick anyone, nor does anyone need to
“fall for it.” It’s a series of many tiny pushes in a direction one already
wants to go in, albeit with the intention of pushing one further than they
originally wanted to go.
Somewhere in there, our enjoyment of something stops being just
enjoyment. I believe there is a slow transformation that happens as pieces of
us are linked with pieces of the thing that’s being advertised. Marketers find
new ways to make the little things in our life remind us of their products,
services and lifestyles. They also work to remind you there’s someone (or a
group) out there trying to stop you from enjoying what you like. The intent
is to nurture dependence that mutates into something with elements of
fixation, ownership, control, fragility and (most of all) identity.
To explain with a pop culture reference: Stephen King’s Misery.
Gamers, the “alt right,” white feminists, anti-vaxxers, militant Vegans™,
“carnetarians” and Star Wars Fans are all groups you might applaud or
cringe at the mention of. This is mostly due to these groups’ propensity to
be exclusive. But what do they all have in common? Is there a shared trait
between these seemingly unrelated groups? What exactly are these things?
If you’re buying what capital is selling, they are identities.
What I’m describing is typically referred to as “consumer identity” and
“consumer culture,” but I would argue the inclusion of the word
“consumer” is too positive sounding. The term sounds as though it’s
positive, perhaps even a recognition of the customer’s individuality and
culture. That’s not what it is.
Consumer culture is a carefully curated set of social norms with an
agenda—profit. It’s easier to profit (either monetarily or socially) when
people identify with a controlled, predictable culture where the only real
choice is assimilation.
This is why I feel that a better term for “consumer identity” is
“cultivated identity.”
Cultivation of identity, as previously stated, is an act performed by
capital. It is the subconscious defining of people’s essence in a manner that
suits an intended purpose. This is enacted by putting a “consumable” at (or
near) the center of a person’s identity. One might think by “consumable” I
mean a physical product that can be purchased with fiat currency. I intend to
instill a wider definition of “consumable,” however. Here, when I say
“consumable,” I mean everything from a product, a TV show, a franchise, a
point of view or a person. I derive the concept of consumption and
hyperconsumption from the work of a writer by the name of Trudy, whose
brilliant writings start at a blog she ran called Gradient Lair and do not stop.
If you have time and the inclination to read more material that my work
here derives insight from (and a wealth of other insight), I highly
recommend her work.
It’s essentially impossible for an identity forming around a consumable
to have a fully formed set of ideals, but it does have tenets and requirements
of its own. The associated lifestyle marketing will continually push a person
to concentrate more on the consumable (simply by associating feelings with
it rather than further discussion of it) and eventually can put one’s identity
in a very fragile position.
Commercials and other brand messaging might sell consumers on
adventure, a look, a feeling, the good ol’ days, the future, caring, not caring
or whatever. A company puts its logo on all this content, but concentrates
on associating the brand with the experience they attempt to curate.
Lifestyle marketers invest a great deal of time and money into content to
which they believe consumers will relate. The intent is to create managed
culture and identity, rather than to claim their product as the best.
Even so, people need to be primed to consume or it’s all for naught.
9. PRO-CONSUMER OR
PRO-CONSUMPTION

T
o be “pro-consumer” sounds like a really good thing. One wouldn’t be
a fool to take it to mean “advocacy on behalf of the consumer,”
meaning the end user of a product, service, or other consumable. This
sounds like a noble endeavor. The consumer is but an individual, and their
power pales in comparison to that of a corporation; what a truly wonderful
thing to stand up for them. However, I believe the terms “pro-consumer”
and “pro-consumption” are often confused.
Amazon brands itself as very “pro-consumer,” but a lot of its “pro-
consumer” activities don’t have the objective of increasing accountability
on their end, but rather simply encourage more consumption. They “make it
easier” to order with the Buy Now With 1-Click® button, which reduces the
number of steps needed to purchase something. They also have a priority
shipping service that makes individual purchases seem cheaper and faster.
They even have physical buttons one can connect to WiFi to press when one
runs out of something. That's right! You can buy buttons that you press to
buy other products.
The only way this is “pro-consumer” is that they are actively pursuing
the state of having consumers. They are not protecting the “consumer” from
exploitation engaged in by an entity with significantly more power than the
average individual, like themselves. Instead, Amazon is simply streamlining
the purchase process, removing points where a customer might say
“actually I'm not going to buy it.” More transactions are becoming impulse
buys as we have less time to slow down and consider what we're doing.
Consumers are being given easier paths to consume, and therefore their
lives are being made easier. Consumption is genuinely a large part of life,
whether it is the primary means to enforce hierarchy or isn’t. We must
consume food and water whether we’re “consumers” or not, it’s just that, at
some point, someone figured out that controlling food and water meant
controlling people.
Nobody wants to be just “a consumer,” though. Consumption isn’t an
identity. Don’t believe me? Ask someone “is consumption identity?” and
very few, if any, people would answer with “oh yeah, I am a sum of the
things I consume and nothing more!”
Yet, we don’t just play video games; we are “gamers.” We’re not eating
a vegan diet; we’re Vegans™.
We all have our own brands, hierarchies, validation gangs, thought
leaders, and our own perception of what is correct. At the center of all of it
is us, the reluctantly smart protagonist of our own film, making all the right
decisions. Whatever we consume, we’re right about it. Whatever we say,
we’re right about it. People may not believe us, but that is at their own peril.
We knew the aliens were coming. We knew Facebook was Black Mirror.
Just us, just me, and just you. All of us, individually, are the only ones that
know anything.
We’re not naturally so self-absorbed, though; the world is simply made
to seem focused on us. We are merely responding in kind.
Paul Mazur, a prominent figure at Lehman Brothers from 1923 until his
retirement in 1977, was a primarily financier for consumer goods firms. In
1927, Mazur said the following in a piece he wrote for the Harvard
Business Review:

We must shift America, from a needs to a desires culture.


People must be trained to desire, to want new things even
before the old have been entirely consumed. We must shape a
new mentality in America. Man's desires must overshadow his
needs.

Paul Mazur was not alone in this sentiment; his contemporaries said
similar things in other articles a and essays. Mazur is more significant
because he ended up a consultant on the “New Deal,” which should
contextualize that effort a bit. Yes, a lot of business people fought tooth-
and-nail against anything that could possibly limit them in any way. But
people with a better understanding of where America was headed and how
to use it thought it made sense that consumers not only wanted to consume,
but could, would, and (most importantly) wouldn't stop.
These things get so embedded in who we are that they eventually
become our defining traits. Many of us take “who are you,” to mean “what
consumption do you want to be associated with?” We would never admit it,
especially to ourselves, but how many times has “fan” passed your lips
when asked to describe yourself? Did you feel vindicated when I talked
about the fact The Last Jedi user reviews were likely gamed? Does it feel
good seeing someone bolster something you enjoyed consuming? Or were
you one of the people that gamed them?
You rat bastard.
Validity of art in the “nerd” realm, be it videogames, comics, or
blockbuster movies, is framed almost entirely from a business perspective.
There are conventions, announcements, metrics, metascores, rankings,
revenue reports… Other than the works of art themselves, essentially all the
talk surrounding them is overtly commerce-oriented. This talk is not, by any
stretch, about how best to ensure consumers are treated well, either. It’s
about how well multinational corporations are doing.
How well did this game that I love sell? What was the metacritic score?
How was this film’s Rotten Tomatoes percentage… not the critic one, the
user one? That's accurate, right? What was the box office? More people
agreeing with us means we were right, and the more right we are the better
position we are in to be comfortable in whatever hierarchy we take part in.
Therefore, people with no financial or artistic stake take entertainment so
seriously; from their perspective, this is about their place in societal
hierarchy. Their taste is Certified Fresh™.
It’s not pro-consumer talk. It’s pro-consumption talk. “Pro-consumer”
means regulations, consumer protections, and transparency. “Pro-
consumption” means “feed me my fandom shit just how I like it, bitch.”
So, what are consumer protections? I’ll quote Wikipedia because the
volunteers there put it very plainly:
Consumer protection is a group of laws and organizations designed to
ensure the rights of consumers as well as fair trade, competition and
accurate information in the marketplace.
Essentially, consumer protections are regulations on the market and
watchdogs ensuring they're followed. This means if one were genuinely
“pro-consumer,” they would be least partially against the “Free Market.”
Keep in that in a market situation, freedom doesn’t mean “the state of being
unhindered in thought and expression,” but rather a complete lack of
regulations. This ensures that trade will not be fair, because fair means
different things to different people. To a profiteer, it is fair to swindle a
person because they “should have known better.” Combining that with all
I've said so far in this book (environmental control, perpetual correctness,
cultivated identity, the marketplace of ideas, etc.) it sounds like a loaded
deck, which obviously isn't fair. Clearly consumer protections are meant to
change that; you can even see it in the definition, plain as day: “fair trade.”
The Fair-Trade movement demands regulation and accountability in
working conditions and other aspects of trade. But the very idea of
regulation is against “Free” Trade. That’s not to say the Fair Trade
movement has it 100% right; there’s still a great deal of exploitation that
goes on even within the parameters they set forth. Anyone who pretends
Whole Foods isn’t exploitative knows just how to get a laugh out of me.
The point is, “consumers” are viewed simply as a resource by those
looking to extract value from them. Consumers are to be cultivated, not
protected. They’re harmed by addiction-encouraging business practices and
the only way to make that seem normal is through the creation of “culture”
that ties their identities to their unending consumption and sidestepping the
idea of this consumption being a possible problem. Instead, it’s proof you’re
a “real fan.” You’re a “true believer” a “legit supporter,” or “an actual
Democrat.” When this happens successfully, they convert someone into a
“hyperconsumer.”
This is largely why the gaming world complains a lot about
microtransactions, but tolerates them. If there hyperconsumers among them
were to bite the hand that feeds, their One True Emotional Outlet™, other
people might see the thing they derive identity from as “weak” because
Real Fans™ attack it. It's also why when they do attack, it's out of
perceived ownership and a belief that the fan just knows better. But no one
outside video games cares about the “strength” of gaming; it’s profitable
and it isn’t going away anytime soon. Similarly, Vegans™ aren’t suddenly
not going to have meatless food. There’s no real danger, but a company still
benefits greatly from more obsessive advocates.
This model works extremely well and that is terrifying to me. It’s
continues to leak into every aspect of our lives, too. Notice how it costs
$5.99 to watch a movie on a plane now, bougies? It used to be free! Bottled
water is a microtransaction, one that's older than gaming. Anyone who is
pro-consumer would care about that significantly more than if Some
Localized Video Game™ had the best boobies and booby physics it can
have.
Before you ask: yes, that is something “gamers” consider “pro-
consumer.”
As I mentioned earlier, the cultivation of identity often includes an
element of demagoguery; to point at foes (real or imaginary) that threaten
the thing you like. A superhero franchise, titty anime, video games, a
political party, or a space opera absolutely cannot occupy a healthy person’s
life entirely, so there must be threats to it. Everything that contradicts the
consumable, even slightly, is labeled one of these threats, and it really
doesn’t matter if the contradiction is only a perceived one. For instance,
“western censorship” isn’t a real threat to titty anime as long as oversized
cartoon breasts make some company in Japan money.
These threats are to be addressed by various means - and various
statistics (sales figures, metacritic scores) or acknowledgements (GOTY,
Grammys, or even just good reviews) are seen as justification for whatever
action is taken. “Would it have gotten that attention if we hadn’t made a
stink?”
Often, there is subtle implication that if that threat were not there,
everything would be better, but eventually the thing may win the approval
of the “threatening” group. This is called “crossover success” and is how
something becomes mainstream. Lots of it.
If the market gets to the point of needing to include the people in the
group previously considered a threat, though, a company will likely begin
to cater to them. For the company, there is no need to view them as a threat
anymore, because they’ll happily buy the lifestyle and products associated
with it. This makes the company SELL OUTS. In encouraging
Hyperconsumption, companies nurture people down a path where they can
easily turn on those cultivating their identities. In fact, is say it's inevitable
if something becomes successful in the mainstream. If the thing they derive
identity from suddenly contradicts that identity, everything goes haywire.
This is what GamerGate was: a perceived “threat to gaming as-is” in the
form of increased participation from women (considered members of an
out-group) and a wider variety of core tenants. The industry that previously
labeled these people and things as threats seemingly embracing these
changes. Star Wars fans did the same. Three times now: “a female lead!? A
black stormtrooper!? POC!? REBUTTAL OF CAPITALISM AND THE
MILITARY INDUSTRIAL COMPLEX!? SJW INVASION!”
Ultimately, this is all interfering with their perfect experience, as
promised by an entity in exchange for a pledge to consume. Pop culture and
fandom is an easy place to point out identity cultivated by capital and why
they do it. As I’ve said, though, it’s embedded in everything, including
politics.
Before continuing, let’s clarify that “identity politics” is not directly
related to what we’re calling cultivated identity here. Identity as a category
of political concern can be extremely important as representation of various
non-consumer cultures and identities. It’s tantamount to a legitimate
democracy (the Civil Rights Movement was a direct result of black identity
politics). An organic identity, one not cultivated by profit-seekers, has
environmental and situational traits that create different perspective that is
sorely needed in politics. Organic identity legitimately informs opinions and
cultivated identity exists to influence opinions.
That isn’t to say identity can’t be co-opted to become cultivated. Nor do
I wish to imply that the identity of any percentage of people is 100%
cultivated or 100% organic; this is most likely not true. I simply wish to
draw the distinction that “identity politics” is a totally different thing.
Flavia Dzodan, a writer who deserves much more credit than she gets,
was the person who coined the phrase “my feminism will be intersectional
or it will be bullshit.” What is non-commodified, intersectional feminism if
not a cross-section of identity and class as categories of political concern?
Kimberlé Crenshaw, the originator of intersectionality, engaged in deep
critical analysis to create the idea. These things aren't marketing; they're
deconstruction of marketing. That's not to say no one has ever or will ever
attempt to co-opt them. It is to say we are not talking about the political
concern of identity, a point I want to make abundantly clear before the next
piece of criticism.
That now said, I want to point to Hillary Clinton’s “#ImWithHer”
messaging as a blatant attempt at cultivating identity. In three words, it does
the work of totally absolving the politician for which it supports from direct
responsibility or transparency and encourages the creation of a validation
gang.
“I’m” is very direct. It’s immediately asking you to declare this is about
you and who you are.
“With” functionally bonds “I’m” to whatever comes next: it essentially
works as the pledge. If you accept the messaging, your allegiance lies to the
final word...
“Her.” Not ideas, a platform, or ideals, you’re with a person. Whatever
this person says or does, that is what “I’m with.”
You are to validate that person and they are to validate you. That is the
contract. This demands flexibility on the part of both parties, but it also
demands allegiance from everyone who is not Hillary Clinton. Her
marketing team, like every other marketing team ever, wants to avoid
scrutiny.
If one’s identity depends on something being as one perceives it to be,
whoever benefits will not likely to want anyone to critically analyze it.
Knowing that an identity derived from a consumable is a fragile one, if one
were to find inconsistencies in the thing one derives identity from, that
identity then comes into question. Public figures and politicians
intentionally make themselves and their messaging into consumables, and
Hillary Clinton is not exceptional.
Nor is Donald Trump. He engages in this very same insidious
manipulation of his following, but with a much better handle on how to do
it. Where “I’m With Her” is obvious cultivation of identity, Donald Trump
can accomplish it by performance of things you would take for granted.
That's not to say he legitimately understands all of this; I believe it just
comes naturally to him.
Regardless of intent, what do you think happens when Donald Trump
got people to raise their right arm and pledge their vote to him during the
campaign, though? Do you think that he thinks it’s just a fun thing to do?
Do you think he really wants people to think he’s Hitler? No. It's probably
simpler than that; he wants people to think about when they pledged to the
flag as a child. He wants to trigger the emotion of being a “true” American.
The kind that openly, proudly says “I pledge allegiance!” He wants to open
his huge yap and eat those feelings the same way I eat at a good All-You-
Can-Eat Chinese buffet.
You might think I'm taking this a bit too seriously, but I’d say not. Your
subconscious takes it as seriously as I do. But more importantly, marketers
take it significantly more seriously.
A subset of hyperconsumers that will reliably purchase and advocate the
consumable from an uncritical viewpoint is the most valuable thing a
marketer could ask for: a perpetual motion machine. Forget the idea of
being pro-consumer; become a Pro Consumer™.
There’s consumptive behavior in almost all modern identities, whether
organic or cultivated. The issue is not consumption; an individual has no
choice but to consume “needs” and life without consuming some “wants” as
well… sucks. The issue is that this is a system that has made consumption
into more than just “eating” or “watching” in attempts to make business
models that function predictably. Identity that is created by marketing
quickly morphs into to incentivizing consumption with perceived
friendship, community, and a feeling of validation. Strong incentive can
lead only to hyperconsumption in those most receptive, which can be really
frightening, aggressive behavior.
Simply addressing that behavior doesn’t address their fragile identity,
though. Because that doesn’t get addressed, people will constantly feel as if
they are under attack because different things they identify with are all tied
to competing corporate and social interests.
One of the worst, most ingrained cultivated identities is “MAN” (yes, in
all caps). The consumable in this case is “literally everything, except with
stainless steel and black rubber.”
So much of what is out there for people to consume is branded in a way
that MEN will find it palatable, therefore unobjectionable to like in the
presence of other MEN. This is the ultimate form of avoiding critique, in
my opinion. Look at the abuse masculinity has brought the world. Hell,
look at the abuse masculinity has brought to the people who consider
themselves MEN.
Because everything is framed through marketplace scenarios, because
we are all competing for attention in The Marketplace of Ideas, we all want
to find something that makes us superior to others. If we can’t do it through
“thought leadership,” we can as “the best consumer.”
In our current system, ownership of a creative work is something one
would supposedly know to ascribe to the creator of that work. The dynamic
is sometimes looked at as parental, with the artist giving birth to art. In
today’s market-driven, neoliberal society, it’s looked at as intellectual
property, which generally regards ownership as a broadcast rather than a
conversation. This makes it something is owned by an entity and distributed
like food. Consumption does not create ownership.
On paper, we “know” the creator is “the owner” of the work because that
is what we are raised to believe. It’s only “fair,” after all. It’s interesting,
though, that in the age of lifestyle marketing this is how we ideologically
view creative work. Why, you ask? Well, because in practice, we don’t
think that way.
Today, consuming something also means buying accessories, like buying
t-shirts that tell other people you like that product (and if they like it too,
you're potential “friends”). Also, we're subscribing to the official monthly
crate for that brand (only $24 a month). Finally, where would we be if we
didn't click like on that product’s Facebook page, so their algorithm knows
to show you whatever other ridiculous products it decides to be related to
“titty anime.” That's what you clicked like on, right? Don't lie, your feed is
public.
We allow this consumptive situation because we live in a cultural
environment that is not complete. Today’s world often withholds the
opportunity to experience substance, instead offering a shallow, marketable
version of every place, thing, idea, or whatever. Guy Debord talked about
this in his 1967 book “The Society of The Spectacle.”
Debord asserted that modern society essentially does not have an
authentic social life. Instead, it's co-opted by representation and
performance. He outlines a process by which a phenomenon he calls
“Spectacle” takes effect as “the decline of being into having, and having
into merely appearing.” He said that getting to this point is regarded as the
“moment at which the commodity completes its colonization of social life.”
One could say that the commodification of life we’ve discussed in this book
is just that.
Debord said that “passive identification with the spectacle supplants
genuine activity,” which is so damn close to what I'm saying, it should
bother you. “The Spectacle is not a collection of images. Rather, it is a
social relationship between people that is mediated by images." Debord
essentially predicted HGTV and TLC.
“Organic” identity is developed by an environment that informs our
views, by other people we know and love, and by the individual’s
interpretation of these things. It’s not automatically good, either. Cultivated
identity is the result of an inauthentic environment tailored to encourage
consumption by means of tying it to one’s identity. I alluded to it earlier, but
I think we all exist at some point on a spectrum between these two things. I
very much doubt it's possible, at least in current conditions, to have an
entirely organic or an entirely cultivated identity.
Sometimes one might observe a disconnect: there is identity obviously
cultivated by capital and there is also identity that acts as if it was but
wasn’t. A lot of people act as if their identity has been cultivated by capital
even if it hasn't been directly.
A good example of this would be that whole “Rick and Morty” Szechuan
Sauce debacle. The TV show made a joke about one of the main characters
being totally obsessed with a sauce used to promote Disney's Mulan back
when it was in its theatrical run. People began demanding McDonald's
bring back the sauce and, sensing a situation in which they barely had to lift
a finger, McDonald's whipped them up into a frenzy. The lifestyle and
identity elements just occurred naturally; McDonald's just had to show them
how “pro-consumer” they were and the grift commenced.
I would say I believe this to be a product of being socialized in a society
in which cultivation of identity by capital is accepted as a social norm. I
also believe that when this happens, the resulting identity is still cultivated
by capital, just indirectly.
When consumption is identity, others’ creative work is potential identity.
When it matures into cultivated identity, we treat others’ creative work as
our property. It stops being a house and becomes a home. Have you ever
had someone criticize your home? It doesn’t feel good, and it causes us to
do all sorts of messed-up shit.
We wouldn’t admit to operating that way, because we don’t really think
we do… But we do. Let’s say you rent your home. You’re asked to pay rent,
then, right? Of course.
So, you know how every single year we're told “we need everyone to
buy so we can keep making them” in reference to your favorite
thing? This is a statement reminding those people who have invested their
identity in the product to pay up or else.
If your landlord really wanted to, the bastard could unlock your door and
leave a goat heart on your kitchen counter at night. You could probably get
litigious, but if your landlord did that, I doubt they care. The point was to
remind you who actually owns the place.
“We don’t have to let you live here. We don’t care if this is your home,
we own it” is a contradictory message to “we need you to buy this so that
we can continue to make things and you can briefly feel whole!”
Essentially, we’re being told we’re needed as well as not needed.
Given that cultivated identity is fragile and incomplete, delivering
contradictory messages only serves to further confound a person already on
edge with who they are. This only works to the advantage of those doing
the cultivation. The more vulnerable a person’s identity is, the more likely
the person is to hyperconsume. To obsessively buy everything, read
everything, to fixate and aggressively advocate. Whether they advocate for
or against the product itself is quite irrelevant, it’s simply the attention it
receives and how cultivators invest that attention. A massive backlash
might sound negative, but it does heighten awareness a great deal. If the
marketing department knows what they're doing, they can use that attention
to buy hype. “We want to thank the real fans for sticking with us. They
mean everything to us and are so awesome for believing in us. We only
want to give them the best product possible.”
Normal consumption is a goal, for sure, but a subset of hyperconsumers
is the goal. They’re the most reliable and most sizable revenue stream.
Someone with a life centered around consumption of a brand (and the
lifestyle it’s positioned with) will do more word-of-mouth advocacy on
behalf than a team of marketers can even think to accomplish. They’ll
innovate marketing in a way thought leaders in making will never begin to
dream of. They only care about how to sell something, and not about the
minutiae of the actual artistic work; fans care about that deeply.
When one’s identity is consumptive, then what the subject of their
consumption becomes very important to that person. Their interpretation of
those works is a central tenant to who they believe they are as a person.
Certainly, the philosophies of artists of all kinds have bearing on this and in
all people who consume their work, but we're talking on another level. The
fact that consumption (particularly of creative work) affects identity is not
the problem. The issue I am attending to the is that when consumption
effectively takes over the main functions of identity, it leads to obsessive
and/or abusive behaviors that have been so publicly on display as of late.
Star Wars, Five Nights At Freddy’s, Stranger Things, and Donald Trump
- what do they have in common? Beyond their rabid fandoms (yes, Trump
absolutely has a fandom), we view all of them as consumables. In a world
that pushes consumption-as-identity as hard as ours does, everything must
be one. This situation is the default to us. As we observe fandom, the “real
fans” are the ones living this situation. It takes a lot of work on the part of
marketers to make this reality so.
If everything can generate wealth, then everything is a business. If
wealth can be measured socially as well as economically, then we don’t
have to look at physical “products” as our way of generating wealth, nor do
we have to provide a service. Something merely has to exist and do
whatever it is expected to be consumed in this situation. It's possibly most
gross when we view people as consumables, but so many people think that
being a “personality” is something to aspire to, where do we even start?
Framing everything as consumption, everyone as consumers or
consumables, and everything said or made as consumables is made possible
by cultivating identity around it to defend this situation. The opposite is also
true; the cultivation of identity is possible in such a widespread manner
because everything is looked at as a consumable. Changing this situation
means changing a person’s custom reality, which feels the same as if you
turned gravity off or made all the air into water.
But if you’re on gravity’s side, every day you wake up not floating in a
pressureless void is validation.
10. BEAUTY AND ROT

B
ut why? We’ve talked about, among other things, ideology that co-
opts the fact we are all unique individuals, metaphorical markets for
discourse and fact, and corporations carving themselves out a place in
our inner selves with the intention of getting us to consume more.
Now let’s talk about Star Wars.
I’ve brought up 2017’s The Last Jedi a few times, but I think there’s
much more to glean from it in the context of “custom reality.” The user
reviews are a pretty good case study in attempting to manipulate reality. In
a galaxy far, far away, we were treated to a Luke Skywalker who had cut
himself off from the outside, desperately regretting the past. We saw several
different perspectives of the event he regretted, in which the impetus and
deed were descriptively the same but came off very differently.
At first, we saw the version Luke wished he remembered, then we got
Kylo Ren’s version—the perspective of a kid who woke up one night not
sure if his uncle would kill him—and then the version in which Luke admits
his wrongdoing, but still a different perspective from Ren’s. The movie
itself acknowledges perspective changes with environment, but it was the
reaction to the movie itself that I find of particular interest.
Opposition to the film came from a cross-section of Real Fans™ who
felt deeply hurt by the lack of ability to consume an exact replica of The
Empire Strikes Back, as well as from reactionaries, people who are angry
that society continues to change. Groups of both took to Rotten Tomatoes’
user reviews section, typically writing that the movie’s story was too much
of a departure, that it was too humorous, or that they didn’t like its
progressive politics. Then many of them repeated the action several times,
either manually or using a bot or script.
Rotten Tomatoes has claimed this didn’t happen, though they are under
no obligation to acknowledge if it did. In fact, the very idea of a law
concerning transparency in what amounts to a comment section is
somewhat laughable. There’s no such thing as a content company that
doesn’t absolve itself from liability regarding user interactions in their terms
of service. But if they did acknowledge that this happened, it would
undermine the validity of one of the more popular features on their site.
There’s neither incentive nor requirement for them to do so, though, so why
would they?
One user operating a Facebook group called “Down With Disney’s
Treatment of Franchises and Fanboys” claimed his bot malfunctioned and
posted some reviews of The Last Jedi on The Shape of Water instead. I can
think of very few other reasons for the reviews saying they were angry
about Luke being portrayed “badly” by “harming men” and lack of an
explanation about who Snoke is in the user review section for that film. The
Shape of Water was clearly under no obligation to reveal Supreme Leader
Snoke’s backstory.
Actual film critics saw it differently. Though, by this point in the book, I
hope that when you read the phrase “actual film critics,” a little voice in the
back of your head says, “some are legitimate experts, and some are thought
leaders trying to round up a validation gang.” I don’t want people to think
that just because one gets paid to critique films automatically makes one a
great film critic. Still, “actual” film critics typically had much more positive
opinions of the film. What almost all of them negatively criticized,
however, was a plot thread where several characters go to an opulent city
called Canto Bight on a planet called Cantonica.
I’ll summarize this part of the movie:
Two rebels must sabotage a large ship. To do this, they’ll need to sneak
aboard, and to get aboard, they’ll need clearance codes, which change every
hour. To even have a small chance, they must recruit a master code breaker.
There is one apparently hanging out in a Canto Bight casino, so they go
there.
They improperly park on arrival, then get to see, firsthand, both the
relative beauty that wealth creates and the sickening exploitation that
enables it. One of the two rebels has a more detailed understanding of why
these people are rich, telling a story of oppression in a mining operation, as
well as pointing out that the casino’s patrons are mainly in the business of
selling weapons to the First Order, the evil owners of the very ship they
need to sabotage. But before they can speak to him, they are arrested for
having parked improperly earlier. Should have thought that through!
In jail, they meet another code breaker who is, let’s say, significantly less
cut from the cloak of a traditional “hero.” He seems very much like he
could even be a problem, but he is also the only option as there isn’t much
chance they will see the other code breaker again from behind bars.
Reluctantly, they recruit him, then escape in a manner that trashes the
casino and frees some abused space horses that are raced for fun and profit.
On the way to their final objective, the shady code breaker reveals that
the weapons’ dealers also do business with The Resistance (the good guys),
and that business people really don’t care about what is designated as
“good” or “bad,” rather, their main concern is that money is flowing in their
direction. This ultimately is his personal stance as well; he sells out the
mission when he finds out they’ve been caught. They are unable to sabotage
their enemy and the mission is a failure, leaving The Resistance in one hell
of a pickle.
To some, the lack of a payoff in the form of a massive victory is
regarded as a lack of a point. I disagree; I believe this part of the movie is
meant to be an imitation of (possibly even homage to) the films Studio
Ghibli. If you were to take that part of the movie out and watch it as a
standalone, it would play like a brisk Ghibli film of the earlier, more bleak
variety. Serendipity and chaos combine to free the space horses and trash
the casino, but then things don’t go the same way when the code breaker
who is mainly concerned with profit sells them up the river.
There is an obvious point, though. I think more than one, in fact. The
first is that failure isn’t the end; we should learn from both our successes
and failures. This is, ultimately, the point of the movie and not having a
sequence that provides context in the way Canto Bight does would lessen
the amount of sense the film makes. However, I think this more general
point is ignored due to a more specific point this sequence makes.
That point is “systems of profit don’t have a ‘side,’ but ultimately the
worst people tend to have more money, so these systems help them more.”
Hoarding wealth is on a pretty short list of “definitely bad” traits and is
rarely the only one checked off when it is. Rian Johnson, co-writer and
director of The Last Jedi, seems as though he wanted to make this clear.
This showed that the rebels aren’t just up against space fascists, but that
there are people who benefit from the prolonged conflict between these two
sides. This applies not only to the arms dealers in the fictional galaxy of
Star Wars, but also to the non-fictional company that made the movie,
Disney. Neither fictional nor non-fictional parties involved are interested in
progressing beyond the conflict because the conflict is profitable.
Most importantly, it showed that someone with good in their heart and
the best of intentions can think a place is cool and great because they don’t
understand that the mold has been painted over. The beauty of Canto Bight
was on full display in its architecture, a mixture of Dubrovnik, Croatia,
amazing practical set design, and CGI augmentation. We were given the
ability to see much of the city from a bird’s eye view, a blunt way of saying
“from a distance this seems amazing.” The closer we get to things that seem
wondrous, though, the material cost becomes much clearer. There are child
slaves and those space horses I mentioned have huge scars from the abuse
they suffer on an ongoing basis. Sadly, this is the nature of the world we
inhabit, as well. We often can look away, though, because of our ability to
choose to stay at a distance. The Last Jedi did not give us a choice, and it
made a point that hits a bit too close for comfort.
The beauty hides the rot. A beautiful veneer must obstruct the rot, or the
rot will be scrutinized.
The rebels are not just fighting an analog for Nazis and all their evil.
They’re also fighting an analog for capital interests, which don’t appear to
be outright evil. In fact, everyone is supposed to aspire to get into that
position. The fascists are indeed the greatest threat, but the fight against
them is profitable and therefore profiteers will seek to prolong it. This is
also a likely contributing factor to the failure of the New Republic, the
government that was organized after the Empire was destroyed in Return of
the Jedi. This unending conflict where the answer, already very apparent,
yet profitable to avoid, should seem familiar.
It’s the Marketplace of Ideas, but in space.
Setting up a hasty New Republic after the old one proved that competing
interests inevitably position it for a charismatic fascist to take power, either
through subversion of its marketplace of ideas or by force, due to the utter
lack of preparation of a defense, seems like an obviously bad idea. Simply
duplicating previous systems that are proven vulnerable to the rise of
fascism will, y’know, cause fascism to rise. We just didn’t get three less-
liked movies about the failure of bureaucracy this time around.
By my thoughts, these points I mention about the film fit pretty well into
what I believe the overall theme of the film to be, which is to keep what
works and leave behind what doesn’t. It’s about acknowledgement of the
flaws in heroes and legends and understanding that, while they may have
some of the answers, they do not have them all. It asserts that we must
embrace change because nothing is permanent. Not who we are, not where
we are, and certainly not how we see things. It asks us to understand the
beauty and the rot, and it demands that we seek to end the rot. Without the
rot, the performative beauty is no longer needed to uphold the situation, and
will be washed away. What doesn’t matter won’t survive, but any beauty
that does survive will be of a totally different kind.
Permanence is an illusion, much like objectivity, and I’d assert these
things are extremely related. When we see something as permanent, we
tend to neglect that it needs maintenance. When we see reality as objective,
we do the same. These are things we are in dire need of hearing, and to see
them depicted in a blockbuster film was something I did not expect. The
idea that we need to examine what we were socialized to believe and
address the paradoxes that have arisen is a fairly radical one, though it
should be looked at as absolutely amazing we’ve designed a world where
reflection is radical.
Film critics acted as though the Canto Bight part of the movie, the part
which discussed the systemic problems the theme of the film points at, was
just pointlessly included and therefore not very enjoyable. I feel that on
some level, this is an unconscious reaction to being told the system we live
in is, itself, the problem. Remember that these critics, among many others in
the media, depend on this system to survive as much as they do to thrive.
Now, I could tell you about why I liked that part of the movie, but
honestly, I think it would only prove that part of my identity is that of a Star
Wars Fan™. I think it serves better to say that despite all my talk, I still
know what it feels like to be excited for a movie to come out. The movie
also acted as an outlet for other wants of mine, including its surprisingly
harsh criticism of capitalism (at least for a mainstream blockbuster) that
people seem not to want to acknowledge is there—instead calling it
“pointless.” I have reasons to be interested in this film; in many ways it
feels like it was made for me, and that sounds rather like “cultivated
identity.” I have no qualms in saying that it very well could be. That’s the
point of the book. It’s all of us.
This part of the movie serves to contextualize the rest of the movie (and
all other Star Wars movies) with the idea that everything you are is useful to
capital, though. You can become a commodity by having your humanity
stripped from you just as easily as validating it. It doesn’t matter if you’re a
screaming fascist or “rebel scum,” profit can be had. The same people are
benefiting either way.
Karl Marx was okay at predictions. He had failures (he asserted that
capitalism would just naturally evolve into socialism... ha) and successes
(he predicted automation in his writings from 1857). He even used the term
“social capital.” He meant something different by it than how we use it
now, saying it to mean “the total amount of capital society possesses.”
In fact, he never predicted anything like what we have labeled “social
capital.” When we say the term today, we are referring to the
commodification of things such as credibility and trust.
To follow this line of thinking, in our neoliberal, heavily marketized
society, you could say we have “social capitalism.” Now, this term has been
used to describe a theoretical “in between” for socialism and capitalism, but
here I’m using it to say that social capitalists do all the same shit that
economic capitalists do. Except their market is one of ideas and the
currency they traffic in is attention. They trade it for social commodities—
credibility and trust—and hoard that wealth and any other wealth created in
the process.
I believe this to be the logical conclusion of socializing generation after
generation to believe a set of norms that tug them in many different
directions at once, in the name of extracting value from them. We are the
ultimate authority on everything and cannot be wrong, but we are also
fragile and unconfident in our infallibility. Everything is our fault, good or
bad, and when things are bad, we just didn’t work hard enough. How could
anyone think that would never bleed in to our behavior socially? Our
environment will forever change and therefore demands a continually
developing version of human nature. Our actions will always become
second nature in a second nature. The environment will require us to
interface with it differently, to develop new behaviors, and to understand we
must define emergent ideas and means of existence.
The desire to rule is the incentive to manipulate reality. We do not live in
a monarchy, however, so how does one “rule” in capitalism?
The social side of capitalism acts as the infrastructure to “rule.” If you
“have all the answers,” you can sell access to them. You can deal in
monetary capital or social capital, but either way you’re going to ultimately
gain share in the Marketplace of Ideas to truly “rule” in some capacity.
People must believe that what you do is necessary and correct. They must
“buy it,” and they may honestly have to do so before you “buy it.” You may
have to “fake it ‘til you make it.”
So, much of our environment is intended to appear beautiful as it
disguises the rot; the Canto Bight storyline in The Last Jedi lays that out
plainly. One of the rebels verbalizes his wonder at the elegance of the place,
only to be rebuked by the other’s story I mentioned earlier. The point of
individualizing reality is to avoid people getting angry enough to band
together, free the space horses, and trash the casino.
Why must we be led to think things are beautiful when they are rotting?
Well, people who are selling something are always very positive. So, are we
all supposed to be selling something?
Our economic system is a large-scale value extraction operation. You are
being asked to sell the idea that it’s fair, both to yourself and to others.
You’re asked to look in the mirror and sell yourself on giving it your all
today, even if you hate doing it. You’re asked to show up at work and act
like this project is awesome, to sell the idea that things are awesome here
and that things here work out awesome. You’re supposed to believe student
debt is a fact of life and the idea that profiting from healthcare isn’t one of
the worst things you’ve ever heard. You’re supposed to think racism isn’t
worth talking about in a systemic capacity and that there is no wage gap.
Hell, you’re not supposed to even really think about what wages really are.
If we look at this false positivity as a false reality, we must start to see
this as a means, but to what? What is the motive? How do you rule in
capitalism? What do you need? What do you want? What might you
already have if you are in the position to acquire more?
It must be profit.
Profit is the incentive for keeping every lie we live with active. It’s the
incentive to own and control the environment in which we make choices.
It’s the incentive to make everything as cheaply as possible and instead sell
the product on the nice things the brand is associated with over time. If they
don’t control the environment, if you don’t believe your first decision based
on the first information you receive is the correct one, if they don’t find a
way around scrutiny, then all the garbage they do (selling cheap crap made
by slave or near-slave labor) brings trouble to their door.
Profit is what racists receive when they make other racists feel good for
being racist. I promise you that donations to Richard Spencer’s think tank
went up after Heather Heyer’s death in Charlottesville at the hands of a
white supremacist. I also promise you white supremacists were enriched in
terms of social capital when the President of the United States said there
were “fine people on both sides” in regard to an incident where white
supremacists got together and killed a protestor.
Profit is what I, someone condemning profit, will receive myself if this
book is a “success.” Oh yes, I’m not going to sit here and pretend that isn’t
possible. My motives for making this book are not to get rich, nor do I
believe it will result in that. But it could happen. That would be weird; to
pay off debts, to own a home, to know my family wouldn’t struggle for the
duration. When the world changes, would it matter?
I’m an individual. I pay rent. I eat food. I have bills and debt. This
system sucks, and I am at the mercy of it, at least as much as most people.
While there are people who have it worse than I do, I’m not rich. My family
lives on a working-class income. I surely don’t believe this book will make
me rich. I believe it will get into a few people’s hands and illustrate an
easily understandable version of the framework I think is being used to
keep us at bay.
I am dumping all of this into the Marketplace of Ideas, the very construct
I have pointed at as a big part of the problem, hoping that what I’m saying
finds its way to enough people so that it can begin to undo it. Such a
ridiculous metaphor, ultimately constructed so some may profit in some
way, might start to see more opponents. Hopefully some people who are
stronger, smarter and better at organizing people than myself.
Social profit brings economic profit. Economic profit brings social
profit. Someone with social and economic capital has the means to lobby
more effectively than anyone else and, therefore, is more likely to affect
actual laws. Much of this is more roundabout and requires those with
agenda to get their ducks in a row, but it brings about real power and
control. Because we believe in a “Marketplace of Ideas” where every side is
valid, we often think of fence-sitting as “being critical of both sides.” The
Golden Mean is a logical fallacy, though, and this view invites those with
bad faith arguments (often debunked ones) the ability to insert themselves
into many discussions in which they otherwise have no business.
This can be subverted; in fact, we’ve seen it happen very recently. The
weakness that Trump exploited is the same one that Hitler and Mussolini
did—they just happened to be doing it on purpose as part of a plan. The
First Order even did it in the Star Wars novel Claudia Gray wrote called
Bloodline. A faction of the New Republic actually called the “Centrists”
was subverted by the First Order to cause political deadlock and unrest.
Trump is just a jackass. That’s not to say a jackass isn’t a threat; people
like him have eroded these constructs for many years. But with Trump, it’s
not 4D chess. He’s just naturally the thing that works when you have a
system like this, where people are becoming discontent without access to
understanding why. Loud strongmen will scapegoat just about anything, and
when money controls access, the poor are kept away from the full story.
This is why framing any information situation as a market is bad. Trump
didn’t even have to understand it and he’s President.
In competitive situations, profit often requires cutting corners and
engaging in practices that harm the world simply because they advance the
interest of growth. Physical commodities markets are manipulated for the
sake of acquiring more capital. We should stop pretending this only applies
to the material and the physical, though. As if people wouldn’t do that, even
if doing so made them more money. Sure! As if there are no people out
there who understand that attention is another form of money. I bet! As if
no capitalists attempt to expand influence and reach. I believe that! As if
they have no incentive to. Okay, this is more sad than funny!
Media outlets profit when they present the views that validate their
viewers. Capital profit when their advertisements have an effect. Profit
works best when people perceive the extraction of value from commodities,
time, and themselves as “normal.” Unfortunately, that is exactly how it is
viewed.
Everything must change, because it all eventually comes down to profit.
The incentive to strategically falsify what people perceive, as to engineer a
desired outcome, really is the basis of our system today. The most basic
monetary model for the art we all enjoy is advertising, and many people
consider it harmless, even if a little irritating. However, advertising is
perception management. I’ll quickly allow the harmlessness of that phrase
to pass and wait for your realization that this means “control over the
environment in which you make choices.”
We accept it on a constant basis. Advertising is ever-present. From the
obvious commercials and billboards to the subtler product placement or
brand integrations we see on YouTube or even in movies, it’s an attempt to
engineer your actions. Most of the time it works, even when you think
you’re above it. People accept this as a fact of life, but it truly is the most
omnipresent version of what this book is about. Advertising is the most
blatant form of reality manipulation, and though it is the least effective, it is
very effective.
When you don’t realize it’s happening, though, that’s when it works best.
Earlier, I mentioned Edward Bernays’s book Propaganda, in which he had
an interesting way of saying this:

A store which seeks a large sales volume in cheap goods will


preach prices day in and day out, concentrating its whole
appeal on the ways in which it can save money for its clients.
But a store seeking a high margin of profit on individual sales
would try to associate itself with the distinguished and the
elegant, whether by an exhibition of old masters or through the
social activities of the owner’s wife.

The perception of elegance and the associated lifestyle function here as


the beauty. The fact that a product that is no more materially useful bears a
higher price and, therefore, a higher margin, is the rot.
The PGA golf club and the world-class hotel in Benton Harbor,
Michigan, built in the last decade as a certain multinational corporation
continues to gentrify the city, are certainly beautiful. They have their world
HQ in a city that is 89% black and 60% of its residents live at or below the
poverty line. They have a page on their website about how diverse they are,
but I can’t help wondering how many local people they hire. They will not
be mentioned by name, though, because I could see that getting litigious
and I would like not to have a multinational corporation on my ass. It’s not
a tough guess, though.
The company was founded by some rich folks. The wealth they put into
it is literally nothing compared to what it’s worth today. They have an heir
to that fortune, too. But not just any rich kid doing nothing; he is also a
member of the US Congress. He might even represent the district Benton
Harbor is in—who knows? This company is known for doing anything it
can to utilize tax loopholes, and this gentleman voted “yes” on the
unpopular tax bill Donald Trump signed on December 22nd, 2017. It’s hard
for me to figure out why, though!
Benton Harbor borders a river, which flows into Lake Michigan. On the
river, the city is beautiful—new buildings in the business district and
expensive homes closer to the lake’s beach. There’s an airport where private
jets land. It’s a very convenient way to get to the golf course. According to
Facebook posts, Leonardo DiCaprio was there once last year. So cool!
Elsewhere, though, memories of police killing unarmed black people
remain. It’s too easy for some folks to forget things like that. For the people
close to it, however, it’s always there. Terrance Shurn was speeding on his
motorcycle when he was run off the road after police “bumped” into him
(according to multiple witnesses). You know, because death is an
appropriate punishment for speeding. Then there’s Arthur Partee, who was
choked to death outside his home while being arrested for a traffic
violation.
There’s a dismal mall if you travel several miles in, clearly given up on.
The parking lot is overgrown due to a total lack of maintenance,
reminiscent of a post-apocalyptic film. Inside it isn’t much better; the
majority of it is unrented and the few stores still occupied look very lonely.
Decades ago, this city was run dry, and now a multinational corporation
is “saving it.” Sure, it looks nice in certain areas, but where is that value
being extracted from? Letting the place rot to a husk was a great way to
ensure real estate was extremely low, and then the state swooped in to enact
an “emergency manager” system. This very same system was also enacted
in Flint, Michigan, where two former emergency managers have been
indicted on felony charges regarding their water crisis.
The way that system works: the state appoints a manager to the city to
essentially act in the way a corporate manager would operate if the city was
a business. Decisions made by democratically elected city officials could be
(and were) overridden in favor of the state’s will, which for decades has
mainly functioned to enrich Michigan businesses.
Speaking of the state, two former aides of that one heir-turned-politician
I mentioned went on to government positions in Michigan. One is a State
Senator and one is the state’s budget director. I can’t see how that would
benefit that multinational corporation. Obviously, it is plausible that I got
positions wrong or possibly even the whole scenario, so I will say that I
would deny anything specific if asked.
We often hope that our government will pass rules to stop people from
acting in a manner that harms the public good, but ultimately this harm is
just a fact of life where those with power work only to extract value. This is
the point of our system, and ultimately the government doesn’t work against
it at all. The government is for this, partly because taxes fund the
government and partly because these corporations basically have
representatives in the government working to fortify their position. They act
as a support system, so these corporations can “save” cities in a similar way
as described here.
How are we in the dark about how this all happened? Well, Canto Bight
is beautiful…
11. SEIZE YOURSELF

I
woke up today with the desire to sleep some more. I almost always do;
my wife and I have two kids and they don’t sleep until noon (for
whatever reason). One is only a few months old as I write this book, and
my sleep schedule is anything but stable.
During the day, everything is more obvious and present. But during the
night, it takes effort to see. What lights you turn on determine what your
house looks like. It’s a bit as if your home is a canvas and light is paint.
How you light your home is a simple exercise in artistic interpretation. I
like less harsh lighting, personally. I’ve also just got to have faders.
Whatever your preference, however, everything is still there. The dark and
the quiet don’t erase things; they just limit your perception of them.
Our relationship to the universe is comparable to this; at times, it is
easier to see than others. Conditions change and with them our perception.
Night to the human eye makes objects take on another form. As shadows
become slightly deeper and ominous, we become slightly less rational. We
seem to have embedded worry in darkness and associate it with uncertainty.
In the night, things that we declare “totally impossible” during the day are
sometimes a question. What if ghosts are real? What if this house is
haunted? What if my antique doll collection springs to life and goes on a
rampage?
Side note: that last one is your fault if it ever somehow happens. Anyone
with any ounce of sense would not have an antique doll collection, for
multiple reasons.
These aren’t things I believe in at all. I think they’re silly, and I think it’s
foolish to believe in them. That said, I don’t think the people who believe in
the supernatural are fools; the right set of circumstances can make many
things seem real.
One may be raised in an environment where authority is openly abused,
so there isn’t much trust in information that comes from authority. Or one
might be tired and prone to nightmares ever since they kept replacing their
own face with hellish deformations by intentionally using Snapchat
improperly. I’m not saying I’m definitely the latter, but I might be. I really
might.
As much as I have personally made up my mind on the supernatural, I
could be wrong. Sure, I’m confident in what I think on this subject. But I
am not a god myself; to claim omnipresence would basically invalidate my
belief structure. I’m fallible, as are you. Our perception makes us prone to
believe things differently.
Besides artistic interpretation, the way you light your home at night is
also the application of power, and in more than one sense. To use “power”
as a synonym for electricity, you’re using up potential energy generated and
stored to be bought and sold as a commodity. You purchase it and gain
power over how it is used. Using “power” to mean “to direct or influence
the behavior of others or the course of events,” you are exerting your will
on your direct surroundings to change it as you see fit.
For me, the most interesting thing about the concept of an
individualized, custom reality is that we’re creating one for whether we’re
doing it responsibly or irresponsibly. Also, while it may seem like we’re
doing it specifically for ourselves and our own benefit, we’re being directed
and guided so that others may benefit.
In fact, one could call reality the main product that humanity’s labor
produces. Some say that the meaning of life is “to create meaning,” but
what is meaning? Whether we mean to indicate interpretation, significance
or essence, we’re talking about the reality of one’s situation. Should we die
out and another species find the remains of our civilization, they will
attempt to put together an idea of how we lived. Assuming they cared about
archaeology, their understanding of our reality would consider evidence,
such as carbon dating of fossils and the cycles of organic matter, but it
would also be very dependent on our records. We could “spin” our history
as a species of whosoever we desired. I doubt very much that our current
history is a genuine “no spin zone,” and in that context, the effect of custom
reality could be observed perhaps a little easier.
This should act as evidence of the power one has in artistic
interpretation. If it matters enough that we want to change something as
materially unimportant as lighting based on one’s own personal preferences,
it matters that events that happened long ago are remembered a certain way.
It’s important we recognize that artistic interpretation is a form of labor, and
thus an exertion of power on the world. All of one’s interpretation is artistic.
The exertion of your ideas and ideals into the medium of your choice,
conscious or not, is your art. In many ways, the current nightmare that is
“reality” is the work of many different, deviously creative “artists.” They
just do not paint with paint.
The brush they use to paint their masterpiece works from a palette of
commodities, and I don’t just mean the basic earth tones of wood brown,
water blue or coal black. I’m referring to more cerebral, challenging colors
like brain peach and heart mauve. Everything has become a commodity.
Your smile is regarded as a commodity. When a seemingly well-
intentioned man tells a woman she should smile, it’s because he doesn’t
view this stranger as a person. He wants to consume her smile, as well as
consume his ability to make her do it. He views their passing glance as a
transaction and the dancing monkey must dance. At the same time, he
views her face as a canvas and her smile as his creation. He’s looking to
consume the experience of creating something he does not actually create
and, again, the customer is always right.
This is the expectation of all possible actions and outcomes as a
commodity. While this isn’t a feature that appeared thanks to neoliberalism,
the ideology provides a way to perpetuate and propagate it. We have been
conditioned to expect this; we are Pavlov when we have power and we are
his dog when we don’t. It’s not always easy to tell who we are, but this is a
closed system, keeping the small folk in a small struggle with other small
folk.
The climate I have described here is how I believe power is exerted over
us in a manner that compensates for the fact we are all, in this respect, an
“artist.” I will be the first to admit that I am human and that this reality is
my product; I am imperfect and this could be wrong. But if this works as I
believe it does, it is either brilliant or the most amazing accident that’s ever
happened. Rather than trying to thwart this inner desire to interpret and
create, even on the smallest of scales, it nurtures those abilities while
directing them into undertakings that aid (or at least can’t interfere with) the
system and its pilots’ goal: money, power and control. It works, too.
But as an individual, if you understand that it is happening, you can also
say “fuck that.” And it needs to be said as we collectivize, or those
collectives are doomed.
If you’ve read this book and been made angry, good. Not just good,
incredible. We need to be pissed off, and that’s all on you, my friend.
Though we can share anger as a group, we can only feel it as individuals.
People either get angry when they see injustice, or they don’t. I hope I’m
pushing you towards the former.
I feel angry about how this works. It’s a scheme so clever that it predicts
the attempt to inspire others to figure it out and engineers a response to
thwart scrutiny. I can’t tell you how to feel, but if you’ve made it to this
point I have a feeling you might agree. Which means you’ll probably want
to stop it.
You’ll want to tell people, “you’re being tricked!” Not only will that be
ineffective because of the identity the various forces of capital have so
carefully cultivated in those who do not actively shield themselves, and the
ever-growing demand to be perpetually correct, but people legitimately
aren’t being tricked.
We have been groomed.
Individually speaking, we must take ourselves back from that
socialization, from this environment. I make the distinction between
individualism and individuality because that battle is so utterly internal. We
all must individually beat the co-option of “the empowerment of the
individual.” We must break free from the results of egoist thinking, where
the individual’s agency becomes our ultimate authority, creating the
perception that what one knows now is exactly enough. Everything that
sounds good must no longer be automatically good; investigation may
sound like a questioning of one’s authority but who is even exercising it?
It’s certainly not us, no matter what it feels like.
We must fully grasp the concept of environmental control and that it
results in the ability to engineer consent. This is what Edward Bernays was
on about; it works kind of like passive aggression if it were applied to the
full landscape of society. The result is an environment of omitted facts,
carefully curated norms, selective oversimplification, over-complication,
distractions, misinformation and other issues.
The individual should not be made disenfranchised by the collective.
That’s not the point of working together in any way. We do not carpool so
that we may be disenfranchised, we do it so that we might save some cash
and put a bit less smoke in the air. We do it to have someone to talk to
before we step into the value extraction machine. We do it because we have
friends and we care about them. We don’t do it to control each other, at least
hopefully not.
That’s not to say a carpool couldn’t be used as a means of environmental
control. Almost anything can be authoritarian, and that’s why when we talk
about collectivizing, we need to talk about it in a less scary way.
9/11 in some ways collectivized us in a bad way. It terrified many of us,
and it is one of many reality windshield-breaking rocks that we haven’t
properly dealt with. Among other things, we need to learn how to tell others
about this without blaming them for it, too.
The concepts I’ve attempted to define and criticize in this book are,
regardless of intent, used to funnel wealth and power upward. There’s
always been a class of people who have more and other classes with less.
We live in a system that uses the haves/have-nots dynamic to survive and
thrive, but those pesky poors and minorities keep banding together to
demand a less hellish experience for themselves.
Collectivization is what happens when people start expressing the
scrutiny they have personally applied to things. They speak with other
people around them and the illusion capital has worked to construct
crumbles. This can happen at family get-togethers where people share that
this supposedly great product simply sucks in their opinion. It also happens
in the news as powerful men get outed as sexual harassers and abusers.
When evidence is corroborated, the selective omissions made in the
prevalent narrative can be made clear. There’s no guarantee it will, but
instead of just claiming something to be true, would it not be better to…
work on it? We small folk could, in theory, stop using what we “know” as a
bludgeon against the smaller folk with even less, individuals will begin
working together. We could side with each other rather than with capital
and a government that seems to exist purely to enable them.
We’re meant to consider the decisions we make as unquestionably
correct because it was our decision. It is an exercise of our judgement of
whether or not something presented to us smells of bull, and our value as a
person is tied to it. However, there’s no situation any person will ever see in
which they have all the information immediately. Even less are the
situations where all the information is spoon-fed without active
investigation and research. Media companies have tried to make it look like
that is their job and that they are doing it… But it isn’t and they’re not.
We must all be more skeptical, and this has to have less to do with who
we are and more to do with the methodology of how we look at things. As
much as I believe the societal solution is collectivizing, corroborating, and
otherwise working together, that isn’t to say we don’t have our internal
issues to work on. We were socialized in this world, and we will carry the
social norms of the current world wherever we go.
You, as an individual, may also need to work out the difference between
being skeptical and being “a skeptic” and you need to act accordingly.
Whether you do or do not consider yourself to be “a skeptic,” that idea that
one must do so to be skeptical is something that needs to be left in the past.
You do not need the label of skepticism, though I am not going to shame
you if indeed you take it on. What I ask is that regardless of what you call
yourself, you act genuinely skeptical. I personally think it’s more
productive not to take it on as an identity, but I’m not going to tell you that
everything is as cut-and-dry as the words on these pages. The lines are
much blurrier. If they weren’t, there would be no need for anyone to say
anything.
I’m cognizant of the idea that an individual and a collective can be at
odds. It must also be said that the corroboration of evidence becomes an
argument to authority with only one step in logic. We are a species that
happily argues about what is rational without acknowledging that the
universe isn’t. We made up “rational.” Nothing about the universe should be
regarded this way; instead, it should be regarded as something foreign to
human understanding.
The ideology of individualism leads us down the corridors of a prison
that presents itself as voluntary but a collective cannot be authoritarian. We
are creating our own custom realities on an individual level but must
attempt to corroborate these realities with others. Acceptance of evidence is
simultaneously authoritative and, if done responsibly, the path to liberation
from narrative created by those in power.
I don’t want to resolve this contradiction, I want to lean the hell into it.
We are a contradiction ourselves, an intelligent animal, the organic
industrialists. We are trying to resolve an unsolvable paradox instead of
acknowledging it and working to create a good situation. We must
understand what individualism gets us and thus what to avoid, but should
work as hard as we can to make a situation that empowers us all as
individuals and as groups.
We should not be easily convinced of anything. Yes, that does mean
looking at everything with a question in mind. It also means looking at
previous answers to questions skeptically. Though, many that currently call
themselves “skeptics” take this to mean that one must just outright reject all
answers. I believe that is a cop-out at the very best. What I am saying is that
one must investigate all answers and take evidence seriously. That means
collaboration and substantiation, an embrace of good faith and an
unambiguous rejection of bad faith and those acting in it. I’m talking
everything from “don’t accept assertions at face value” to “don’t accept
evidence that, on peer-review, was debunked.” There’s a contradiction to
embrace here, one that I hope in future work to make something of: there is
no current right answer on how to do this. The contradiction puts us all at a
crossroads where we either accept information from an authority or ask
every individual to essentially live a life of endless research, something that
is not a logical or respectful thing to ask of people. Life is short.
Our current process is often described very similarly, but the he
mechanics of our current system deviate significantly. This book doesn’t
contain discussion on the Marketplace of Ideas and related constructs for no
reason; it’s important to remember that if we frame discourse this way, we
don’t talk about finding answers, we talk about choosing our answers and
pitting those answers against each other in endless competition.
An argument should not continue just because the market demands it,
and you should not accept this mode of operation. You are not obliged to
engage with people trying to argue disproven points, nor is a school obliged
to platform Charles Murray, whom the Southern Poverty Law Center,
whom I am now deferring to as an authority, describes as such:

Charles Murray, a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute,


has become one of the most influential social scientists in
America, using racist pseudoscience and misleading statistics
to argue that social inequality is caused by the genetic
inferiority of the black and Latino communities, women and the
poor.
The “truth” of this situation is that many people believe they should push
schools to invite and platform people who deal in information that has been
disproven in good faith, and agreeably labelled “bigoted.” The people who
believe in the stuff Murray says are usually people who feel validated by
said information and work to get it accepted in any way possible.
Are you a part of any of these kinds of validation gangs? Well, maybe
not exactly this kind. I hope you haven’t read this far in a book I’ve written
and actually take eugenics seriously. But you probably are part of some kind
of validation gang. I very likely am, too. I think a lot of my behavior as a
Star Wars fan over the years has been in the more benign areas of what we
are talking about. I know things from Star Wars have mattered too much to
me as a person at times in my life, though I certainly have never attacked
anyone over it, and have worked to create a healthier version of my
engagement with it. Star Wars will probably always do something magical
for me, and I really don’t think we should want to kill things like that. I
hope there is something like that in everyone’s lives.
Well, except Nazis. I wish they didn’t have their “thing like that.”
Creative work should affect us. We should care about what the message
of art is, even if it ultimately isn’t what we like about it. There is agenda in
all creation and interpretation. We are lying to ourselves if we don’t see this,
and we’re also lying to ourselves if we say that all agenda in art (or
criticism) is bad. Message is motive is agenda, and there’s no such thing as
art that doesn’t contain it. Even a blank canvas hung in an art gallery has an
agenda. It could be for a laugh or to make a point about modern art. Or it
could be modern art. I don’t know.
The work of the individual in undoing their individualization of reality is
counterintuitive and probably confusing.
A person must understand that our perception is reality for us. The thing
we are describing as “reality,” is simply the universe totally independent of
human consciousness. We are always perceiving it through our imperfect,
personal means. Everything we understand about it has been framed
through human constructs. The first stop on the path to undoing the
individualization and customization we’ve discussed is a revision of our
societal conceptualization of reality itself.
Our social concept of reality that is the underlying problem. The Nasdaq
stock market has never been higher, but people around the world have never
been exploited on this level. To acknowledge this is to be doing more about
it than the average person has ever done. Hell, even just saying the words
“individualized custom reality” does more than saying the word “bubble.”
When you are distinctly defining the actual issue with words that point
much more directly at the components of it, you are making the preliminary
moves that lead to solving it.
People want to “know what they’re up against,” as the adage goes. They
want this for a reason.
To become as literate as one can about the individualization of reality,
then attempting to spread that literacy, sounds like a very small thing for an
individual to do. It really does. But if the problem with reality is that it can
become individualized, it is of the utmost importance that individuals
become savvy. Today, as you read this book, this means you. Tomorrow, it
means everyone who will listen.
The thing I’ve been steadily advocating for in this book is an evidence-
based collective reality. This doesn’t happen if you sit in your house and
laugh at the smug condescension on display in commercials, knowing you
are above it. Real progress on this frontier happens when you have in-depth
conversations with people who are willing to listen to you about how we
got to this bizarre dystopia.
Some may say the solutions exist purely in the material world, asking
folks to stop talking about “abstract nonsense.” I’d argue that what many
label as “the abstract” is also the material, especially since the advent and
popularization of the internet. The internet is the real world and vice versa.
Reality is a product of our species, and therefore, our perception is a means
of production. We are the workers, the machines and the factory. We are
also the consumers. On the internet, our production and our consumption
are bought and sold as commodities; you don’t want to know where your
search history goes. This makes our consumption into production and our
production into consumption. As we consume, we produce.
Karl Marx believed that our societies develop their defining
characteristics through class struggle. His critique of capitalism holds that
the ruling class(es), which own the means of production, exists in conflict
with the lower class(es), who sell their labor in return for wages. Surplus
value is extracted from them, as wages are less than the total value of labor
sold to accommodate seeking of profit.
We need to seize ourselves. If neoliberal capitalism is going to look at
everything as commodities, then every person’s every action is labor, and
every moment of our existence is the product. Value is extracted from us in
that all of this reality is subjected to a canonization process that involves the
various constructs we’ve discussed, in which those with power choose what
works best for their bottom line.
What I am saying is that currently, we are dehumanized. We are not in a
situation in which we can say “I am not a commodity. My ideas, thoughts,
and feelings are not commodities. The idea of seizing oneself as the means
of production of a commodified reality, is to rehumanize.
You must take yourself back; you were never given the option to opt-in
to this. We were all born into this. This has always been “the world” for us.
We must say “no, I do not accept this method or level of control.”
If we revolt and overturn the unjust hierarchy without purging all of this
from what we consider our personal canon, we may undermine ourselves in
very serious ways. We may still be looking at the situation as untenable; we
were raised to believe a wage is fair and that money is necessary. What if
the society of the future has neither? How will you integrate into this
situation?
I’ll spare you the “we’ve got to unplug from the Matrix” kind of talk,
because at this point you may understand that I’m not so keen on the
opinion that “the Cyber is bad.” Quite the contrary, I think the Cyber is
good. I just happen to also think when wealth and power can be
concentrated, those who have the technology will use it to reign.
We need to seize ourselves as the means to produce reality. We need to
understand exactly what that means and how deep it runs. We must start in
the neoliberal/capitalist framework we were all born into and socialized in.
We must understand its conceits. If we start somewhere else, we're talking
about goals. If we start where we are, we're talking about the path we walk.
You need to take yourself back, find others, and we must collectivize.
The world is awash in contradiction, though, which is probably the most
uncomfortable point I have to make to you. There is centrism, and then
there is synthesis. There is fence-riding, and then there is nuance. It’s not
about balance, it’s about the correct answer. But the correct answer becomes
authority, and not everyone has the time or desire to follow a specific,
rigorous process to verify claims. Are we asking those people to submit?
The point I make here is how much of a mess this all really is. How does
one seize oneself when every element of freedom and authority is pulling in
a different direction?
How do you pay rent when you separate your interests from that of
capital? How do you reject environmental control while collecting a
paycheck, an inherently coercive reward for allowing extraction of value
from your labor? How can your mind be free when there’s no way to free
your body?
How can you reject the commodification of all things by saying “I am
doing labor, I am creating a product” talking of perception and reality?
The answer to that is internal and abstract. A free mind acknowledges
that a structure built to contain is inherent in the system, but a free mind is
just one. It is one thing, one person and one step. We must care about
individuals, including ourselves, without building a prison and calling it
individualism. We build collectives for individuals, and individually care
about the collective. It’s not one or the other; the human condition is one of
potential and our potential is abundant.
A free mind will search for an approach to free others, and many will
disagree on which. We’ll cite books, we’ll argue about theory and it will be
clear that we are a mess. Because that is what humanity is. But if we care
about each other, then a mess is good.
When one seizes oneself, one becomes both a conduit and a current with
too much voltage to handle running through it. One becomes a track and a
train going recklessly fast on it. One embraces that our start point is
neoliberal capitalism. We are here, not there. When one realizes they are
one of many, many can become powerful by joining forces.
We embrace that we will be refuted, because to some, we look agents of
chaos. This could very well be what you are, too. Is freedom chaos? Maybe.
Can chaotic beings work together? I don’t see why not; remember, “chaos”
is a word; it is a thing humans made up.
To own your mind is the goal. This means taking it from those who own
it now.
12. CONCLUSION

T
he concepts I’ve discussed in this book are my conceptualization of
what is going on in this world. My belief is that disagreements in what
“the truth” is, subtle to significant, have slowly developed into a
situation where we might as well all be living in different dimensions. This
is a situation engineered and/or encouraged by capital interests.
If we aren’t working not to, we will be trapped in our own, “perpetually
correct” perspective, formed to preserve our perceived viability as a
“productive human being” in a society where survival is a privilege to be
earned. We are not at fault for this; it is the environment in which our
upbringing takes place. It is a stronger, more effective, more accepted
iteration of the same thing previous generations grew up in. What used to
be called “keeping up with the Joneses” is now called “Instagram.” Not that
people are wrong for using social media; it’s understandable why we do it.
Where we are born and to whom are conditions in which we have
absolutely no agency, much less in which socioeconomic system. It should
not be our responsibility to understand this, explain it to others, or fight this;
it isn’t just. But someone must.
What does one do when identity is being cultivated as a crop? How does
one belong when one refuses the false choices that yield a place that will
accept them? What life is there for those who have walked away from a co-
opted or pre-fabricated lifestyle and all the products and services associated
with it?
I must confess, it’s a bit scary. I won’t pretend I’m hugely connected
with a lot of people. I struggle with much of this; it’s hard to feel as if you
belong when you’re not among friends in the stars, dressed up for the
premiere, wearing the band merch, holding up a sign at a political rally. It’s
hard to know if any of this is truly real, or at least which parts of it.
What can one change? The key element in all of this is your ability to
participate in this cycle of labor and consumption, and the requirement
through coercive environmental control. We are led to believe that we are
working towards becoming worthy (a “real fan”), or, for the less merit-
oriented among us, we are working towards that place to belong. This is
perception; when I say perception is reality and reality is your art, your
being, and your product, it means you can change your output.
What one can change is their perception. I’m advocating that you
perceive these constructs as simply another way of saying “you will work
forever, you will give your time, your money, and your life to benefit a tiny
class of people who make up well under 1% of the population. You will do
this, and you will love it, obsessively, or you will starve.”
Simply understanding how the human brain interprets its surroundings is
a legitimate start point. For us all, it means overcoming the pushes to
separate, which are inherent in the situation described, whether it’s into
demographics or down to “rational” self-interest, and becoming more of a
genuine community. For one, this means the showdown debates about class
and identity some like to have, need to stop. These aren’t “sides,” they are
categories of concern. Poor white people are tyrannized because they’re
poor. Poor black people are tyrannized because they’re poor and because
they’re black. Apply that to any identity or class. It’s not that hard to get; it
doesn’t invalidate anyone’s experience, especially if you understand the
division simply hurts us while building our obstacles higher. I’m
simplifying, but while we all must confront where we stand in hierarchies
of marginalization, I’d suggest it would be better to stop arguing “what kind
of politics works” and start understanding that the problems of one are the
problems of all.
Identity is incredibly significant, otherwise powerful forces would not
work so tirelessly to create an environment that defines it in a way that
gives access to it. Why would a system want a means to direct identity if it
wasn’t valuable? Can a system created by people reach a level that doesn’t
require the intent of people to act? Capitalism is working at peak efficiency
when it is extracting all kinds of value, from the ground and sky, to our
hearts and minds. Do you think everyone who benefits is totally aware of
that?
A person’s upbringing may easily make a person believe this is all just
the natural state of the world, but it is not. It is the reality we have created
as a species; our “meaning.” It is our product as a living factory. True, one’s
perspective can easily be that a factory is natural. We are of the earth and
what we create is just as much so. The universe, however, is a place so
unconcerned with humans and our “perspective,” “meaning” and “reality,”
that it can be easy to forget that “natural” is something we made up to
describe what “just happens.”
Thing is, in a world run by beings of perspective, nothing really “just
happens.” What we call “reality” amounts to a living painting, an ongoing
interpretation created by our brains using information we gather from
organs and nerves relaying signals. Little electric pulses are always
indicating absorption of radiation and pressure and we’re continually
rendering a composition for an audience of one.
Our ongoing grasp on “reality” is determined by a recollection system
that’s constantly in flux, rewriting information as it recalls, making
memories of recalling memories, losing track and creating inconsistencies.
Everything about our perception, recollection, interpretation, and output of
all information is, in every possible sense of the term, imperfect.
Sure, there is something resembling what we describe as “universal
fact,” but it exists outside of human perception and operates outside of
human parameters. It’s also not called “universal fact;” this is a human
term. It’s not called a term at all. “Term” is a human term, too. It just is, and
that’s impossible for us to fully grasp, regardless of whether we think we
can.
We must understand that everything, as humans perceive it, genuinely
isn’t objective. In his Inaugural Dissertation, On the Form and Principles of
the Sensible and Intelligible World, philosopher Immanuel Kant theorizes
that the hard boundary of the human mind is the human senses. He put forth
the idea that we do not experience any actual object itself, but rather how
our senses interact with it.
We all have varying strengths and weaknesses of sense, thus what we
perceive is somewhat different. A time and place where we aren’t all
defining our own realities hasn’t happened—nor can it. The things we have
considered universal in the past change when we regard them with
skepticism. Often, they outright crumble. The only possible reason anyone
could even regard an object or observation as objective or universal is
because they are not applying enough scrutiny to it. The less specific one’s
observations are, the less consistent with another person’s view an object
might be.
Sadly, when people take the step of applying skepticism and constants
are found, they have a decent chance of being shunned. If it’s contradictory
to what we think now, it’s dangerous to who we are now. Remember that
“the customer is always right.” Because we are asked to look at everything
as a transaction in a neoliberal capitalist environment, we are to behave as a
customer. This means that in everything from our language to what we
expect to get out of friendships and jobs, we are meant to consider what we
are buying. Was this a decent transaction? Please rate the seller.
If we’re not right, we’re wrong. If we’re wrong, we’re unemployable. If
we can’t make money, we can’t eat. Significantly less can we buy merch or
attend events. In today’s situation, human needs of sustenance, community
and identity depend on our ability to spend. Our ability to spend depends on
our ability to seem right, so our ability to seem to be right becomes a
priority. We have no real choice because we don’t have access to all the
information, thus we dig our heels in and develop identity around our
beliefs. Then we must consume more validating products, services and
content. The cycle continues in a hundred different directions and we’re not
supposed to comprehend it. It is amorphous and difficult to keep track of.
It may well be that some of the architects of this situation didn’t
understand what they were doing, either.
However, some did. People like Edward Bernays understood what things
were and sought to use this knowledge, developing ideas and techniques
that carried out these specific goals. However, it ultimately doesn’t matter
which motives led people to create and exploit this system; the system
exists one way or another. It’s there regardless of whether it’s intentional or
not. It’s there whether crackpots are right about the illuminati or not. The
goddamn lizards will be there, either literally or metaphorically, until
something changes.
You and I can’t fix these systemic problems ourselves. However, we can
strive to minimize their effects in our own reality. This is not insignificant,
though, as any system designed to control people is a tacit admission that
people are powerful, and as people understand this, that power can be
collectivized. I’d even argue that the reality we all see can’t resemble what
we call “factual” without doing so.
At our most basic level, you and I must acknowledge reality as both the
flaw and the strength of humanity. It is our “meaning,” our “product,” and it
isn’t perfect at all. It is like all other human things; it can be garbage, or it
can be amazing. That depends very much on what we decide it to be. Why
should a small, rich group of assholes be the ones who get to determine
what is real?
If two people observe the same thing and agree on what they saw, that
doesn’t make the thing objectively exactly that. Further, if two people
disagree on it, whether explicitly or implicitly, we have the basis for artistic
interpretation. Art isn’t automatically amazing, but the potential is endless.
If the full population of the world accepted all the same contentions and
evidence, it would result in a unanimous reality. We shouldn’t assume this
will ever happen, though, as it demands uniformity. It would demand
perception as an objective phenomenon, which it isn’t. Also, everyone
simply agreeing doesn’t mean the evidence is sound. The argument to the
majority is fallacious; just because a ton of people say something doesn’t
make it objectively true.
So, what does? Well… nothing. Nothing human has been or ever will be
just plain true.
This can be a blow to the psyche. It can feel like a major loss because
when we examine this a little deeper, we find that we may just not have
control of our surroundings in the way we think we do. It may even be
necessary to traverse the stages of grief. If that’s the road we end up taking,
we must make it to the stage of acceptance. If we can get over the loss of
objective reality, we may “lose” a perceived mastery over the material
world and the knowledge “objective” examinations can yield; but the key
word there is “perceived.” It’s not something we have ever had.
Now, that doesn’t mean you go out and “live off the grid” in a hut
somewhere in the temperate forests of Canada, as Wolverine did in certain
stories. That’s going to make your existence harder and will do nothing to
change the overall situation. You’re going to need to keep your job until no
one needs a job. You’re going to need to rent your home until there are no
landlords. You’re going to have to pay your mortgage and utility bills until
a home and the services that make it habitable have all become a right.
You’re going to have to use and save money until you don’t.
But you don’t have to just sit and wait. This is the strength of the
individual: at any time, you can say “fuck this.”
You aren’t looking out at the same reality as anyone else. All things in
the world are not yours, but how you see such things is up to you. You must
own this. Embrace it. We must make this weakness into a strength by
understanding that the problem of reality is that there is no reality if you
don’t exist.
You probably care a great deal about the idea of “facts” or what’s “real.”
I know I do. It matters on such a high level to me that I am using my reality
trying to get others to see theirs for what it is: either a means of control you
remain unaware of, as it exerts itself on you, or a means to build a world
that is fair and rooted in evidence.
“Facts,” currently, are what authorities have deemed the best explanation
for our perception. This is both a good thing and a bad thing. As far as
science goes, it’s good that experts have a say in what is accepted as
legitimate. The problem is, this is establishing a vertical, unquestionable
hierarchy. Yes, someone who lives science—reads, experiments, publishes,
etc.—should be regarded as worth listening to about science. But should
they be given power over others? I don’t really think so. This is one of the
contradictions I don’t know that we have a perfect resolution to, and thus
should lean further into rather than recoil from.
I’m inclined to agree when folks say that authority is a corrupting force,
too. I also think that the Religion of Me preys upon this perfectly legitimate
concern, setting us up to live in our own custom realities by repeatedly
indulging this flaw with conspiracy theories and outright false information
presented as an explanation for unjust authority exercising power.
If you have addressed this conflict, you’re on the path I hope you will
continue to follow. I’ll try to illuminate what I think that path looks like just
a little more for you, but ultimately the best thing you can do to combat this
as an individual is understand the system, the motives behind it, and talking
to new people about it as much as you can. Even if you don’t know what to
do, eventually we will. The reason for that is that we can. We are capable of
much more than you or me.
Somewhere you’ve likely heard the phrase “they own you.” It might
sound ridiculous, because you might feel like you are truly in charge of
your life. You might feel powerful. Hell, you might be powerful in certain
contexts. One of the things that compounds our ability to address the power
structure is that even the oppressed might be slightly less oppressed than
someone else and therefore have the capability to oppress them. Often, what
happens directly to us seems more real than what does not. This is, again,
The Religion of Me. Individualism is amazing at giving us an inch with the
intent of making us feel like we got a mile.
The thing is, no one needs to own you in 2018. No one needs to care
about you at all. No one even needs to think about you. An entity wishing to
exert power over others simply needs to own the environment. Someone
who owns the environment can engineer people’s actions and consent by
changing their circumstances. They not only do this; they are very good at
it.
You don’t have to have any idea who “they” are, you just must know
how the power structure works. I would even argue that finding out
everything about who “they” are is a distraction. Do we really need a
dossier on everyone who is using the system? I do not. All that really
matters is that large entities and wealthy individuals have actual goals of
consolidating their power and work on a constant basis to do so. This is
why we have five media companies owning the vast majority of the media.
This is why you live near a Walmart.
That Walmart has been there a long time. At this point, you have
accepted the idea of living near it as normal, because every time you’ve
seen it, it’s grabbed your attention. In maintaining some level of attention,
there is no question anymore; Walmart is normal. “Normal” is a commodity
because it is an idea.
You, as an individual, must find others. You must find out their
problems, and offer them more than sympathy. You must take their
problems seriously. I don’t care how absurd they sound to you, they have a
root somewhere. People do not need the idea that they have problems to be
debunked. We need to collaborate on solutions.
That might mean finding the roots of problems that are very
uncomfortable—problems where people who don’t deserve blame are given
it. It might mean changing assertions, and that very well may result in
disagreement. That will require patience. It may even require you to go
down rabbit holes which you don’t agree with, even if only to prove
something incorrect and to find a more productive mode of operation. You
may fail. That’s okay, because the greatest teacher… failure is.
If the commitment you are making is towards creating a workable,
evidence-based collective reality, it means ending the need to be validated
by capital and the systems it has created to uphold its interests.
Unfortunately, that means an extremely difficult battle against the feeling of
validation. You will be validated as you prove or uncover things and,
frankly, you should. Feeling proud when one accomplishes something is not
bad, but validation cannot become a thrill to seek, as capital will supply
where there is demand. That’s what has led us to a situation in which
whatever we believe, someone seeking profit will ensure we are validated
for it.
We should enjoy when we are proven right; it’s just that being proven
wrong is something we should maybe enjoy, too. Being wrong is not a flaw;
it is a step.
We have a lot of steps to take and the walk is going to be long and
painful. Most of these steps, we don’t yet know (or have a full adaptation of
lots of theoretical ideas for post-internet times). So much of what we use to
survive today will be put into question tomorrow. A lot of what we
personally subsist on is predicated on our acceptance of an environment that
is intentionally curated to produce certain results. As we reject that mode of
operation, much of the world will seem significantly less pleasant.
Hope does not require comfort. Though hope itself can be co-opted, that
the future can become better is the only reason it ever will. Similarly, reality
requires care, which requires conscious effort. Hollow weights take less
effort to lift, so we must fill them with substance.
To seize yourself means to be hopeful, to enjoy things for yourself, to be
critical of those things and all things you perceive. Since we must do things
that serve the interests of capital to survive, we must do it with the
understanding power is being exerted over us. Be open, but be careful.
Don’t needlessly make enemies because you’re woke and they’re money;
endlessly make friends because friends are great. Understand why things
happen in this world and you’ll get what we’re up against.
What is your perspective on “revolution?” I used quotation marks again,
so I’d bet you know that I have one. Revolution is a word. Words are
human creations. It means something, but that meaning came from people.
Revolution, to me, means a total systemic change. That, itself, can mean a
million different things; it can be violent or non-violent, political or even
emotional. Whatever form it takes, though. I believe it must be as close to
the will of all people as it can be. It must be owned and operated by the
public. That is what I think is missing from many calls for revolution in the
world of today; for those calling hardest, revolution is the goal. It can’t be.
Revolution is a means… to what? My hope is in fairness and equity. I
can’t guarantee that yours is, too. Even if it is, we can’t just believe in it; we
have to face reality. What do we agree these things mean? What don’t we?
Customizing reality is something every single one of us is going to do
for the rest of our lives. We are groomed to do it in a way that keeps the
heat off the people at the top. There’s a dependency on the hierarchy that is
nurtured, keeping everything real.
But it’s stopped seeming real, hasn’t it?
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Peter Coffin is basically a satirist and more or less a cultural critic in a
variety of mediums. Besides this book, he produces the video series “Very
Important Documentaries” and “Many Peters,” and a TV commercial
criticism show, “ADVERSARIES.” He also writes “about the author”
sections, but mainly in other people’s books. Not this book.
twitter.com/petercoffin
youtube.com/petercoffin

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