The Most Subversive Act
Thinking for oneself is today’s most subversive and important act.
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The Most Subversive Act
Satan’s latest and greatest invention (having already convinced us he doesn’t exist) is the internet. In keeping with his prior success, he and his minions no longer show themselves or clearly speak. Still, they use the internet to possess us so that we see blindly, speak dumbly, and know without knowing. And always more extreme, reanimating the past and foreshadowing what is to come.
The future won’t be televised. It will be live-streamed in its Callithumpian glory. Indiscriminately.
The internet is a faceless and empty monstrosity of pixels, wires, and lights that subverts agency and debases humanity. It sells compelling narratives tied to our appetites and deliriums that mold chaotic reality into readily discernible plot-lines, characters, and scenes within a particular worldview and a particular interpretive framework. It defines the bounds of acceptable behavior and the scope of our vision, setting limits on what we can see. Facts only matter to the extent they can be monetized. Like Scheherazade, Satan stays alive and relevant if and as we keep coming back for more.
The internet isn’t the only thing wrong with the world, of course. IKEA uses design to influence where and how we go through their stores to maximize our spending, for example. But the internet fills the gaps in our libraries and the gaps in our heads. It is the most unreliable of narrators. It is sorcery’s GOAT.
For some, it’s all red meat, all the time. For others, it’s the smug assurance that they still live in the reality-based community while the sheeple everywhere else believe whatever feels right. For all, it both reflects, shapes, and adjudicates.
In 1999, Tyler Durden warned, “Advertising has us chasing cars and clothes, working jobs we hate so we can buy sh*t we don’t need…. We have no Great War. No Great Depression. Our great war is a spiritual war.”
The internet has turned that conventional spiritual war nuclear. And it’s not just advertising anymore, either.
Every fringe idea begets a niche demographic to be exploited. When given choices, humans seek out fear and outrage within the context of that which confirms what they already believe. And that’s much of what the internet provides. All Apocalypse, all the time.
Fox News hardly stands alone. The New York Times cares far more about narrative development and appeasing its staff than reporting hard news. When Stephen Colbert promised “truthiness,” he wasn’t in character.
As Chuck Klosterman recounted, the key characteristic of twentieth-century media was its ephemerality. We experienced it in real time and then moved on. “It was a decade of seeing absolutely everything before never seeing it again.”
Google pioneered technologies for collecting, aggregating, curating, and personalizing information online. The internet and its perfect digital memory lets us – begs us to – see absolutely everything again. And again. And again.
In 2002, Jon Stewart could see a “disenfranchised center” with a longing for “fairness, common sense, and moderation.” If that was true then, it isn’t true now.
Every niche flatters and flattens its audience by showing them purported evidence of how stupid, corrupt, and nuts the people they despise are. We never tire of being told what we want to hear, how smart we are, and how everybody else is just hearing what they want to hear. You can get rich on confirmation bias and bias blindness alone.
Accordingly, the following can be wildly, insanely false…
…while this is still entirely true.
The digital universe is funny, entertaining, and utterly vapid. Our vocabulary is as shrunken as our based ideas. Our politics is all wish-casting and virtue-signaling, loudly proclaiming what is wrong and unwanted, as well as who is hated and anathema, but without statements of purpose or plans for finding a way forward. Our religion is angry yet toothless, without grace, redemption, or power. Our families and relationships are Instagram-perfect yet life-bankrupt.
It's all about outrage, mockery, and preening excess, soulless nonsense or slavery, all desperate for clicks, likes, and mentions. And all escalation, all the time, with no absolution possible. The internet is written in ink, and all that.
Moreover, the digital world not only obscures, it obliterates the line between the private and the public. It sees what we read, what we watch, and what we buy, providing a window to who we are. Satan sees what we allow no other human to see. When we think we’re alone.
Once more, for emphasis: The internet is written in ink.
When I went to work at one of the world’s biggest investment banking firms, many years ago now, my training included the exhortation that I never represent the firm in a way I wouldn’t want to see reported in The Wall Street Journal. In today’s world, with ubiquitous social media and recording devices, nobody should ever do, write, or say anything they wouldn’t be willing to have put on blast for the entire world to see.
One of my favorite thought-experiments is wondering which of today’s prominent ideas are the most likely, at some later date, to be seen by pretty much everybody as beyond the pale. My leading candidates include (in no particular order) socialism, meat-eating, abortion, a growth-focused economy, transgenderism, fossil fuels, and fealty to Donald Trump. Your mileage may vary. Whatever they are, the internet means we won’t be able to deny what we once proclaimed, or at least that we proclaimed it.
The more on-line we are, the less human we are, at an accelerating pace, and the more alone. Real human contact is no longer required; Satan works apace.
God no longer governs our lives; algorithms do. But who writes the algorithms? Satan disguises himself as technology, technology disguises itself as Satan, and it’s impossible to tell them apart.
The universe may not be a simulation, but the internet is, and it’s low-rez, too. Our communications media no longer mediates. Something is always in the way. Life is lived at a distance. Like Bacon’s brazen head, it has a form but no soul: addictive and empty.
Leibniz, a pioneer of early AI, insisted that his gear-driven mechanical calculator did not think, because the purely logical and technical operations of the mind are not true thought: “It is unworthy of excellent men to lose hours like slaves in the labor of calculation which could safely be relegated to anyone else if machines were used.” In other words, calculating machines allow us to spend our time fully inhabiting our own minds.
If only.
We are sinners through-and-through, of course, so the (unintended) consequence is pretty much the opposite of what Leibniz intended. Today, computerized systems form our opinions, collect what we read, collate the movies and music we enjoy, aggregate what vision of reality we see, decide on and deliver our meals, and select our relationship partners.
Lots of us will admit, sometimes cheerfully (amidst the scrolling lolz), that the internet has destroyed our ability to pay attention, and it has. But, more than that, what it’s really done is alter our minds, doing away with our ability to think.
Death no longer lies in wait. It has already been swallowed whole, where it devours us from the inside out.
That is why thinking for oneself is today’s most subversive and important act. Doing so is as rare as a Reasonable Man, Bigfoot, homo economicus, or a moderate Republican.
In the 13th Century, Ramon Llull invented a mechanical computer made of paper that he imagined could help us understand the nature of God. Satan gave him the idea.
It has always been the case that presidents, premiers, prime ministers, other politicians, princes, purveyors of stuff, pastors, priests, parents, and the population at large have vied for our attention, allegiance, action, and money. Ruthlessly. And not necessarily in that order.
The internet has one-upped them all. Thinking for oneself is today’s most subversive and important act.
Totally Worth It
Hard to believe.
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A new estimate for the total number of ants burrowing and buzzing on Earth comes to a whopping total of nearly 20 quadrillion. That staggering sum — 20,000 trillion, or 20,000,000,000,000,000 — reveals ants’ astonishing ubiquity even as scientists grow concerned a possible mass die-off of insects could upend ecosystems. Put another way: If all the ants were plucked from the ground and put on a scale, they would outweigh all the wild birds and mammals put together. For every person, there are about 2.5 million ants.
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Benediction
The great Iris Dement offers this week’s blessing and Vince Gill honors Loretta Lynn.
Amen.
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Issue 125 (October 14, 2022)
My first reaction was Happy Birthday! My second reaction was...whoa what happened to Bob this week to put such a dark cloud on his outlook? Then I realized the Padres lost Game 1 to the Satans of the National League (to borrow from your rather loose definition of the angel of darkness ) and this must have been written before Game 2. So I will look forward to next week's with hope that the local team shines a light on the forces of evil and banishes those bad boys back to brooklyn where we all know true salvation resides...
Happy birthday!