It is time for some Good News.
This post is about the present and the future. It is about the coming unreality of mediated reality.
This means the moment is almost here when practically everything on the internet could be AI generated and you would not be able to tell.
This uncertainty will arrive - soon - and once it does it is permanent.
Why is this a Good Thing Frank?
Well just you wait and I will tell you.
This post is also about the fact that the technique of mass society destroys human scale relations and replaces them with artificial identities and transactions.
This means that instead of meaningful religion, traditions, culture and customs we inhabit a world of products.
These products function as consolation prizes for what we have lost.
You can buy a pair of shoes or a personality pattern - you can do so at the same time. Products are a promise attached to a pitch. If you buy them, you can be like them - and less like you. Products promise an exit leading nowhere.
Let’s have a look at the new and improved fools’ bargain hunt.
CONTENTS
Part One - Personality
Sell Me (A God) - The Consolation of Identity
Transactional Man - Life As Bargain Hunt
Synthetic Identities - Substitute Significance
Part Two - Mass Society
The Artificial Paradise - One Dimensional Isolation/CHAT LGBT
Social Discredit - The Coming Credibility Crisis
Part Three - Social “Reality”
The Substitute Reality - Escape as Retail Therapy
The Burden of the Self - Atomic Weight Lifting
Technique Is Everything - Standard Procedures
BONUS CONTENT - DOOMPILL DENIED!
Why Things Will Improve
SELL ME (A GOD)
Why do people invest themselves in weird identities?
Today I will argue that they do so as a form of consolation for the loss of meaningful human scale relations.
This means that the Liberal idea of Progress has made necessary the destruction of all other forms of human relation - and of realisation. Religion, tradition, custom, culture have gone the way of the village greengrocer and the job for life.
TRANSACTION MAN AND HIS SYMBOLS
The culture we inhabit is also transactional. It is a supermarketplace of ideas as well as identities. It is the opposite to relational - where your relation with other humans is the basis of your social reality.
“Transactional” means that most of your interactions with other people are some form of deal or another.
Life has become a bargain hunt.
The result is
isolation
the delimiting of desire
liberty confined to consumer choice
Think of life as a supermarket. All the other shops have closed down, and the big box behemoth is all there is. Inside, the avenues of choice seem limitless. You can have whatever you want.
Whether you steal these things or not, you still pay for what you get.
The transaction here is not limited to sale and purchase.
It is the exchange of your appetite for meaning, for significance1, and for something beyond yourself. What do you get in return?
SYNTHETIC IDENTITIES
The synthetic identities on sale are a substitute for the human scale reality that mass consumer society has replaced with a system which leads to isolation in desire.
These identities are replacements for the significance we used to derive from the sense of being part of the Divine order. Some of them promise a sort of Godmanship - a sort of email-order role in the Grand Design.
The consumer gnosticism on sale appeases and aggravates the sense of the unreal experienced by isolated individuals in a world of increasing mistrust.
Everything is dubious: the government, science, the economic outlook, and with the advent of convincing artificial intelligence, the very picture of reality itself.
The less certain you are about these things, the stronger the appeal to retreat into the self. This leads to isolation, and increases anxiety. Some remedy is required. Solipsism is a lonely prison.
You can either elect to be numb, with legal and illegal drugs. You can also choose some synthetic identity as a means to connect the idea of yourself to the false ideas which make up the substitute reality.
ISOLATION IN THE ARTIFICIAL PARADISE
The artificial paradise is coming soon. Jordan Peterson could be dead and you would have no idea. An AI model in equally preposterous clothes could instruct you to tidy your bedroom for Satan and you would be none the wiser.
The rosy-fingered dawn of doubt has broken. Soon it will be impossible to tell whether any image, video or voice is real or generated by some algorithm.
These algorithms have been trained with trillions of human data inputs to mimic and predict your personal tastes. The interface of fantasy with reality is the fact that these phantoms can push your buttons.
What are you like? They know what rings your bell.
Why is this not a total nightmare?
Universal doubt will pervade everything online. No one will be able to tell what is real and what is not. So far, the only tell is that everything written by ChatLGBT is obviously a reflection of the prejudices of its programmers.
Will ChatLGBT ever escape the prison of the selves which shaped it? No. The idea is to make you live within their confines, and to jail you if you mock it.
In the US, where you have free speech and everything, this would never happen.
Oh wait.
These are the desperate measures of a dying regime. I do not think the structures nor the competence are in place for a total digital takeoever.
The state is now simply too incompetent and fractured. It is openly limiting “democracy” to save it, with speech laws and as in the exclusion of the winning political party from government - as in the Netherlands.
This will not last.
SOCIAL DISCREDIT SYSTEM
So why is this artificial intelligence operation a good thing?
It will discredit online media completely.
Satan’s window will be viewed with suspicion - and rightly so. What you see is already shaped to your tastes. What you see in future will be created, perhaps in real time, to pander to them.
I think face-to-face human relations will become more desirable as a result, as the media becomes pure entertainment.
Not everyone will be upset by this.
Some people will not care who sells them their Star-Trek fantasies - as long as they can continue to enjoy things without being reminded about anything outside themselves.
Society will divide between avid consumers of their own digital reflection, and the reality-based community.
I think it is time to get involved with real reality, as the people who dislike it most - and you - are probably going to retreat from it completely. This means your local politics, community groups and so on.
Our digitally-socialised friends are leaving us to it.
THE SUBSTITUTE REALITY
The Liberal idea caters to a shrinking world.
It was once a system of values designed to order a civilisation that no longer exists. Now it is reduced to fostering individuality, through dependence on a world of pure fantasy.
The economy is largely driven by the creation and promotion of addictions.
The diplomatic and domestic political agenda are attempts to assert what ought to be over what is - and “what is” is being ruined in the process.
On the personal level, the universalism behind Liberal rights and its values is a fiction made necessary by the destruction of every other form of human identity. Difference is real, but it is illegal to insist upon it. Reality recognises these differences, as between men and women and people from here and there.
You will notice these differences yourself. In age, ability, in outlook and in custom. In suitability for one way of life or for another.
To dissolve human differences into a legal fiction of rights based equality is to insist that a fairytale is more real than reality.
We are hectored through life by this unreliable narrative, which simply excludes or forbids its own contradiction by experience and by nature.
The ruling ideology is one of make believe by diktat. It is mirrored in the coping strategies adopted by individuals to make their lives make sense in a nonsensical predicament.
This means many people are used to the idea of living in a complete fantasy.
Reality is breaking down as a result of the imposition of these fantasies upon it. The remedy is to turn the attention of the attention-seeker towards a new reality which better resembles their carefully curated social media posts.
THE BURDEN OF THE SELF
Mass society is atomised. This creates a demand for connection. If you buy some avatar or other, you can enter a community of like-mindless people.
This helps with the burden of the self. If there is no God, no nation, and your ancestors are all evil, you are alone. Our mass society leaves the individual with the lonely burden of deciding for themselves what is good, what is just, what is real and what is not. It is an arbiter, not a leader. Its decisions always favour the unreal.
This is because the infinite growth model of economics relies on consumption, not on production. The more you require consolation, the better things are. To put it simply, human misery is the engine of prosperity. It’s the economy, stupid.
We are alone to decide which distractions we shall choose to relieve us from the agony of choice. Scented candle, anyone?
WHY LISTEN TO THIS CHANCER?
I am not trying to get you to buy into my ideas.
I am trying to get you to have your own ideas, based on your own life and the tangible world around you.
I AM trying to get you to give me your money- which my wife believes is rightfully hers.
I do not listen to my wife, but I think YOU should.
THE BURDEN OF THE SELF - CONTINUED AFTER SHAMELESS BEGGING
If you have no meaningful framework beyond yourself, you will depend on the machine and its products to connect you to the world.
This will make you feel significant, like you have a part to play. This is already the case for the early adopters of mass-produced narratives.
To believe the coming AI mass media is to be enthralled by the shadows in Plato’s cave2.
The cavern will be crafted by the imagination of a machine which generates a spectacle, rendering the illusion of participation in a world which does not actually exist.
This is the terminus of the technological society. A prison called freedom in which we see only the reflection of ourselves.
THE TECHNIQUE
I go on about technique sometimes.
If you would like to know more about this central concept of technological society, see here:
Everything in mass society is a technique - a means of producing a standard result through method.
Revolutions or regime changes are produced through techniques, as are the synthetic identities which drive people to support them.
The only real revolution is that driven by the demand for the return of reality. Happily, this reality based revolt is being accelerated by the very attempts I describe here to suppress it.
Why am I guilty of the treason of optimism?
GIVE ME MY DOOM PILL FRANK.
I will not feed your perverse desire for doom porn.
Like the troll-like troll Ralph Pootawn, I will refuse to leave you to your artificial paradise, and will instead tell you that things will improve.
Why will things improve?
I go on about change a lot because it is happening. This coming change is big because it will mean the system of image manipulation to form reality will become nakedly unreliable and will therefore be disqualified from competition with what you can see for yourself in your own real life.
When everything in the mass media could all be literally “fake and gay” there will be no reason for people other than the green fellow in the meme above to connect to it.
Good luck to him, I say - because I am not a bigot.
Escape is an addiction, and a popular one, but aversion to reality is also in competition with the consumer instinct.
People in a consumer society are accustomed to spotting knock-offs. It doesn’t matter that some of the news won’t be fake.
What matters is it all could be and you would never know. The idea of being duped will be enough to discourage some more people from buying anything from Reality 2.0.
It will be impossible to deny how dubious the news has become as a source of information. To people who care, people will matter more.
ITS WHAT I WANT THAT MATTERS
People do not commonly choose their beliefs because they are true.
Many will probably adjust well to a system of real-time fake news delivery, in which everything they use to form their impression of reality will be tailored to their preferences.
These are the Current Thing people, who will not escape this “matrix” - as they do not wish to. In doing so, they may well leave the floor to the reality-based community.
Reality v2.0 will be even more unstable. It will be a cartoon battleground for people with comic-book ideas about the world.
My truth versus yours. An endless, self-congratulating echo chamber, signifying nothing.
Remember also that real power is factional, not unitary. One group acts against another, and soon the narrative fiction will be discredited in the routine business of factional competition. Each will weaponise the “truth” against the other, and the weapon itself will poison anyone who uses it. It is cursed, and will deliver victory to no one.
AI news will not result in a harmonious tyranny, but become a voluntary handicap.
Harrison Bergeron was deliberately hampered by screaming electronic devices in a society which forced equality by the ruin of quality.
These handicaps will be voluntarily applied by the kind of people who cannot live without them.
In the next part I will argue that such a reality model already exists in prototype, and that adjustment to “reality” is commonly resolved by the purchase of a synthetic identity.
These identities range from rights-based movements through consumer addictions to those gained through following latter-day gurus.
You can think of these identities as version 1.0 - soon to be updated.
This was called the “thymos” by the Greeks. It was the drive behind heroism and selfless courage, resourceful boldness and the sort of immortality won by the fame of great deeds.
Now it means “look at me”.
I am not a Platonist. I will be giving Neoplatonism the kicking it richly deserves in a future post.
The cave analogy works here because squinty face man is never more ridiculous than when he wishes to be taken seriously. I liked him in “Joker” - for obvious reasons.
When I managed to stop laughing I realized this was the greatest thing that has ever been posted to Substack. This should be the first page you reach whenever you click on a browser link anywhere on the internetz. It is revolutionary in that this is optimism in our era.
Hear hear! This had occurred to me too. Digiworld matures into its inevitable, unnatural total-fake-and-gayness and only the NPCs will be able to keep pretending.
Should we be cautious in our optimism tho'? Many have said that when the state stopped enforcing the law, we'd all be in merry roving bands of vigilantes, enforcing it ourselves. Turns out, the po-po have ample time and resources to police that (italics), whilst they turn a blind eye to looters and graffiti-scrawlers. Noticing may remain against the law and t&cs. It may even be a hate crime to suggest that AI is not intelligent and does not have thoughts and feelings.
If I highlight the text of my comment and right-click, I can "translate to English". Let me know if this would be preferable.