Social media really accelerated that particular kind of violent, hedonistic stupidity, I think. Explicitly monetized it, explicitly selects for it, even on platforms which would otherwise appear to be algorithmically agnostic in their format. I’m not sure how to solve that, or if it’s even solvable, in the current system in which the internet exists. I think I still need to watch that one zizek video where he talks about how the function of ideology is to kill hope, and I maybe kind of agree with that statement at face value even if he’s probably going to end up saying something much more complicated and nuanced in the actual video.

You don’t have to read all this if you don’t want to, but it feels as though many things which are otherwise politically agnostic, ideologically agnostic, are kind of, thrust into the political realm with great violence, mostly as a kind of hedonistic rhetorical game rather than through a legitimate desire to improve things. In order to score political points. Things like public transportation, something which is otherwise politically neutral, actually not that related, fundamentally, to any ideology inherently, get politicized, and then they’re guaranteed to die in that throes of that. The rights of transgender people is maybe another such example. These are things which, regardless of your ideological or political predisposition, are totally fine to have, right. Public transportation, or, maybe put more literally, regardless of public-private structure, trains, buses, trams, subways, even bikes and pedestrian-friendly development, is just explicitly more efficient than the car centric, overly privatized shit we currently have. That’s true in both a privatized context and in a public context, and you could have an orientation towards either method of development regardless of your politics. The elites, presumably, want a better standard of living, not even just long term, but on the scale of, say, the next five or ten years, right, and mass transit projects can achieve that goal, even for them, by virtue of letting them save on the costs spent on their peasantry, their underclass, and increases the level by which private roadways, a private transportation, can be used easily by them. Transgender rights are the same way, decreasing trans healthcare provides a maybe minor, yet still existent, cost, it imposes a cost on society. You hear this explicitly called out whenever some chud talks about the suicide rate. Ideally, you would want to avoid suicide! You would want that healthcare, you should want to prevent that, in an ideologically neutral context, because it’s strictly inefficient!

I think, then, maybe the great achievement of the social media superweapon in a post-nuclear, cold war context, is to manipulate these aesthetic ideological dispositions, disconnected from reality, to recreate the appearance of politics without any of the content. I think maybe cynically that it’s just a grand kind of illusion used by three letter security agencies and private capital interests to explicitly manipulate the population, not into necessarily being concerned with actual material reality, but into being lost in this kind of hedonistic game world. I dunno. I think even beyond that we’re kind of, as we’re seeing now, we’re now all explicitly lost in that illusion, the illusion that was created by the internet, or, maybe, the illusion that created the internet. Even at the highest levels of government, this is the case. There’s no concern with any basis in reality, anymore. So under the guise of that, right, I think maybe we’re cooked, is I guess what I mean. Nobody’s steering the ship, anymore, even.