“Social media isn’t real life.” It’s a phrase we hear a lot. But is that really true?
When Congress threatened to block China from controlling TikTok, the company riled up a mob of tweens to threaten Congress. If the Senate gives in, the outcome will be real enough.
TikTok certainly is real life. If you doubt it, look at the rate of teenage girls who have themselves mutilated because of trans trends on the app, even younger girls who killed themselves over material in the app’s algorithm or the spread of verbal or motor ‘tics’ to teens over the platform.
Social media isn’t real in the same way as the wind and the rain, or the laws of physics or economics, it’s an alternate reality spread through the internal realities of our minds.
Before social media, there was just media, the concentration of mass media, radio, film and newspapers that wrecked much of the twentieth century and killed millions of people. It is no coincidence that some of the most destructive social and political movements arose in line with the growth of the media. It’s impossible to imagine Nazism or Communism without the media.
What made people think that the Third Reich or the Communist revolution were viable? The Communists and Nazis were savvy propagandists who took full advantage of newspapers, film and all the elements of modern spectacle to concoct an alternate reality for millions of people. The crowds at Hitler rallies or Communist marches were living in their own version of the real world. And it was not until Hitler shot himself in his bunker or the Berlin Wall fell that they woke up to find that everything they believed had been as delusional.as anything on TikTok.
Social media is more unreal than media because, like Hitler rallies, it’s a mutual fantasy. TikTok denizens take that to the next level through triumphs over reality by claiming, for example, that Helen Keller never existed. Like a magical world, social media is a place where people can create their reality and then use intimidation and peer pressure to enforce it on others.
In this state of affairs, millions will believe that men can become women. And vice versa.
What was a consensual mutual fantasy within a like minded group became a non consensual fantasy once it was being imposed on women in locker rooms and swimming matches. The process by which the fantasy of a small group became a sexual assault on a larger society parallels how the unreal realities of narrow groups, whether it’s Communists fantasizing about the abolition of private property or master race fetishists, becomes a form of violence when a private fantasy is tethered to political power and imposed on the unwilling millions.
The unreal is sustained first by the delusions of those who wish to believe, then by persuadable useful idiots, then by mass propaganda and finally by force, social, political and finally violence as the failure of the unreal makes its devotees desperate to uphold it by any means necessary.
The power of the unreal lies in the magic of its unreality. Whether it entails transforming economics, gender or our understanding of the universe, revolutionary movements promise to reveal what is hidden and to accomplish the impossible if people just believe. But to believe, people must leave the realm of the real and enter into the alternate universe of the unreal.
Unreal politics depend on an unreal life. In times past, mass ignorance of the larger world made it possible for entire peoples to believe that their destinies depended on constellations or conversations with trees. There was no larger reality and so much of life took place in the unreal. But the citizens of modern civilization had to be immersed in the unreal. And only the advent of the mass media made it possible to immerse millions in unreal alternate realities.
The more people inhabit an alternate reality, the more they can be convinced to believe in anything. The phenomenon that began with the dawn of the media is reaching its apotheosis.
People could be skeptical of what they read in one newspaper, but the age of mass media introduced a barrage of newspapers, and then supplemented them with immediate messaging from radio broadcasts and then cinematic newsreels. The sheer concentration of park speakers, newspaper editorials, magazines, and headlines marching across the silver screen proved much harder to resist because it created an enveloping effect seemingly from everywhere.
Beyond politics, mass media made life unreal. People began taking fashion cues, life advice and moral guidance from the media. When celebrities divorced, it became more normalized, when they committed suicide, a rash of suicides followed. Millions of people stopped using their own judgment and took to repeating whatever they heard as if media culture was their society.
Reality fractured. Nations went to war or went bankrupt. The family fell apart. And throughout it all, the population climbed deeper and farther into the alternate reality of the media.
The internet fragmented that alternate reality and it made way for more immersive and less relatable echo chambers. The old media ceased to be able to speak to anyone outside its echo chamber, but the new media was even more unreal and less tethered to external reality. And the old media came to chase the fantasies of the new media no matter what dead ends they led to.
The old media, Hollywood, cable news and the rest of what’s left of the old mass media apparatus struggle to compete with the truly immersive swipe, stream and social media culture that not only surround smartphone users, but climb inside their heads and invite them to enter another world. And waiting in the wings is an augmented reality metaverse populated by AI bots that will make the worst of the current social media seem like the early days of the internet.
A preview of it can be founded on ‘child-friendly’ metaverses like Roblox or Minecraft where eight-year-olds are groomed by sexual predators, ordered to carve names in blood, like the recently exposed ‘764’ international network, and where reality becomes malleable long before children have reached an age where they have any sense of a clear and definite truth.
That is the same reason why the transgender movement is targeting increasingly younger kids.
Mass indoctrination programs always work best with the young. Children are the easiest to introduce to an imaginary world. And they will have the hardest time breaking away from it.
Children have always lived in imaginary worlds, but as mass media turned to colonizing those words, seizing control over them and imposing rules that crippled childhood imaginations, it also groomed each generation to buy its commercial products and then its ideological products.
What began with a for-profit colonization of childhood became a non-profit colonization in the same way that most of the old infrastructure of capitalism became political enterprises. ‘Woke’ and ‘broke’ are true, but also miss the point. The goal of the ESG system is for corporations to produce primarily political outcomes. Rather than achieving profits through competition, ESG secures wealth by consolidating political control over entire nations. That begins with children.
Woke corporations care very little what anyone over forty thinks about them. That is why the vast majority of advertising is aimed at younger audiences. Despite their assurances to their shareholders, they are not thinking about the next quarter, but about the right side of history.
The collective labor to create a utopia with an ideal outcome for everyone is a fantasy that has overtaken entire societies. The only reason anyone believes in it is that life has become unreal.
The degrees of unreality began with the rise of an upper class and then a middle class that had been sheltered from the realities of life and had a poor understanding of basic external realities. Newspapers, novels, theater, radio, film, television, the internet, social media and smartphones each came with a jump in radical politics as life became ever more mediated and unreal.
America’s early settlers struggled, but had a fairly tight grip on common sense, but by the mid-19th century, middle class families, with little understanding of settlement, headed West because they had been enraptured by popular accounts and worthless guide books, with no understanding of what it would take to make the trip, suffered and in some cases died.
They were already living in an alternate reality created by an early form of media.
Today, a population insulated by multiple media layers believes in seven impossible things before breakfast. Politicians, with no idea of how to accomplish anything, make worthless promises based on whatever trends on social media, run up trillions in debt and believe that they are making the world a better place without ever knowing the world as it truly is.
The concentrations of power, whether in D.C. or Silicon Valley, are more unreal than ever, mad courts where the echo chambers of power allow the elites to flirt with insane fantasies.
Anything seemed possible in Woodstock. Anything seems possible when playing with $6 trillion budgets. And anything can seem to be true in a modern university critical studies course.
Unreality has become our religion. Traditional faiths are falling away in favor of this unreality.
Our elites believe that we can all inhabit their unreal utopia if only we believe, make the appropriate sacrifices and stamp out all skepticism. And then the magic will be unleashed.
All of this seems more plausible to the laptop class who already live in a magical world where any food they want arrives in a few swipes, their screens hold endless entertainment and the world seems to exist to service them. In this unreal world, everything seems possible.
Living in it, reality seems like a distant fantasy. Fully automated luxury Communism, gender transformation, a global order and plastic bags summoning the wrath of Mother Earth are real.
The ancient pharaohs had no trouble believing that they were gods, because for a limited time they were. And for a much more limited time, our elites, either ancient and powerful, or young and wielding dot com enabled jobs, appear to be because they are detached from reality.
Living unreal lives, they adopt unreal beliefs until the unreal bubble of their lives bursts.
But where the pharaohs and ancient monarchs lived unreal lives on account of their power, the unreal inhabitants have been wrapped in unreality by media. Their power is an illusion. They are not god-kings, they have little real power, only a power fantasy fed to them by those with actual power. Whether it’s corporate media or radical politics, the true power lies with those who control the tap, not to those who get drunk on the unreal fantasies they provide.
The more the West loses itself in an unreal world, the worse the real world becomes.
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