Attempting to understand media in a world of mirrors.

The term “civil war” conjures up visions of “Patriots” with guns in the streets, waving flags and taking their country back. The country was probably never theirs and there is probably nothing to take back, but thats very much besides the point. If January 6th has shown us anything; it is that we are deep into a civil war; tho it is one of information. It is being fought by all of us on social media sites, and it can be very hard not to engage. Weaponized facts are scary; it is human nature to debunk non truths. With media becoming personally curated; everyone is now chugging from their own truth streams. The civil war may be as simple and bland as two family members fighting over “who won the election” or “but BLM riots were worse than the Capitol riots” etc. What is happening now is if you engage with the form at all via the content; you’re already losing.

Months ago I had the thought that social media will turn into nothing but a prison of sorts. I didn’t know exactly what I meant; but I have a clearer picture now. The spectacle has grown so large it seems hard to avoid; but it is actually easier than ever. There has been so much confusion pedaled to us; and because “discourse” now consists of chopping peoples heads off on social media sites for maybe believing in something untrue or even spelling a word wrong (not to mention having an actual opinion, even if you do not express it), no one actually is able to formulate correct thoughts which leads to no one even knowing what they think and fearing not just their own thoughts but the idea that they may have these thoughts.

It seems like something very extreme has happened this week, especially if the internet is your locus of reality. Nothing really has, and nothing will happen. Medial abuse accelerates always; and abuse is insidious. Abused people abuse until they can face what has happened to them and make a conscious effort to do better. People now “lie to be polite”; when you are gaslighted 24-7 it becomes the only way one can communicate, or you lash out because you are being abused. Looking at social media in the last week, one would think people no longer have free will. The internet is an amplification apparatus, and noise always fuzzes things up. How many times have you found yourself deep into an argument with someone on social media, only to realize “wait, I don’t even know what I am saying and I am just repeating back memorized facts a paid perception manager has made me think I like to consume”. How many times have you been having a “conversation” with someone, only for both of you to throw readymades that don’t even make sense at the other; “anecdotal evidence doesn’t matter”/”whataboutism”/”false equivalency”. Information and data are very different from knowledge and wisdom. Even people with extreme learning disabilities can memorize data and spit it back. Memorizing data itself is of course not a bad thing; but people now seem to be emotionally tied to the “facts” they consume. Which in itself should not be a bad thing, but if one does not correctly understand media than it will not work.

Many people have become very disheartened seeing people who have helped build their worldview seemingly reverse their whole course overnight. Leftists/”anti-racists” who have made a living (in the actual sense) off telling us why police are never good, authority should always be questioned, everyone has a right to their opinion and that equality is the only goal are now re-tweeting the FBI and having near heart attacks because people they watched on TV have not yet been arrested. Conservatives/”Patriots” have gone “Orange Man Bad!!!!” because he didn’t go full WWE and body slam Nancy Pelosi on the steps of the Capitol and now are talking about how they have always wanted to kill police. But almost no one is saying “pull back for a hot second; we are literally fighting over fed percepts”.

To think “dissent needs to be prized” is very much missing the point. “Dissent” still implies that you are attached to the same media industrial apparatus as “your enemy”. What matters is being able to think outside of a system of control that is made to make u think certain ways. “They” (which would be sorta akin to what Mencius Moldbug calls “the cathedral”) have a vested interest in promoting ANY ideology, the more extreme the better, because it keeps people ready to kill their own grandmother over absolutely nothing. And their main goal is to make the fear matrix always expanding and very contagious; when empathy is weaponized nothing is attainable.

When one can not correctly understand media; the predictions for what will happen get weird. Theres been a lot of talk about arming yourself with weapons and prepping for a disaster, but no talk of how to correctly navigate a war of information, and thats because they don’t want u to know how. They need people acting like rabid dogs; dying for the next piece of data about the big bad white natonalist boogeyman who will ruin the world. It’s gotten so weird that the 75 year old black man down the road who doesn’t even like Donald Trump but loves God, his family and his neighbor is a now a “white nationalist” somehow. This is how a mirror world works; and Donald Trump is the ultimate mirror man.

This is where “cancel culture” comes in. The people I see who are very scared at the moment are people with something to hide, or people who believe they have something to hide. Nobody does. Humans are very complex and we often do atrocious things, especially to those closest to us. Throw in a media system which literally profits off abusing you and things don’t go so well*. People seem to be very scared about “those with an opinion being throw into camps” and I don’t blame them, the media’s job is to make us fear the most left field bullshit. If you use social media, you already are in a camp of sorts, or at least on the battlefield of the Civil War 2.0. There will not be mass arrests of dissenters (though there may be a medial sideshow that shows us just this), they already have everyone where they want them to be. When people are scared to tell there closest loved one a very simple observation or thought out of fear of being called something that does not exist; in some sense they’ve already won the war they’ve waged on us. But that shouldn’t be read as defeat, quite the opposite. Just like it is a jail, social media is also a graveyard of the soul. You need to let humanity exit your body before you enter. Being a calm, rational human does not work in this topology, and it sets the inhumanity off when one tries to engage calmly.

Mirror world works very funny, one of the main complaints I hear about both the left and right is “man they always accuse others of what they’re doing at that moment”. In a way people have actually been blinded; as the Jan 6th spectacle proves. No matter what anyone saw, they also dealt with more perception managers telling them what they saw then they can count. It doesn’t help that the media is showing you videos of “what really happened” and then saying “please stop the gaslighting!”, but thats business as usual in the mirror. To even engage is to abuse and being abused, and it is a sick cycle that needs to be broken. People need to be able to use media correctly and not let media use them or become them. It’s easy to forget when we think of our friends as avatars and two dimensional. Humanity is not something one can collect like baseball cards, though it is rapidly dying out in a world that actually wants to flatten us. Social media has become an “anti mirror” where we see a composed image of what we desire, and makes actually looking in the mirror very disorienting. The narcissism social media engenders plays into this too; a ready made people love to throw out if they disagree with you or let themselves become hysterical because you have maybe read something that is different than what they have is “well who are you to think your voice is so important on this matter”? “Discourse” itself is being destroyed, its not even a debate in the classic sense, it’s more like a mutual temper tantrum.

Being that this war is unconventional, their will not be clearly delineated sides, and you will see avatars fighting for one side one minute and completely flipping the next. This is by design. To engage the content without understanding the form is losing completely. When there is no understanding, all we get is noise. It is hard to hear above the clamor, but there is always space. It is time to re-enter the body, that may be what “they” fear the most, and it is why there is such an assault on identity itself.

*Media refers to the printed word or things like radio/tv, not just social media and the internet. For more on this please see “Gutenberg Galaxy” and “Understanding Media” by Marshall McLuhan. “Into the Universe of Technical Images” by Vilem Flusser is also essential.