“The future is already here — it’s just not very evenly distributed.” — William Gibson

Takeaway 1: Humans self-organize through resource allocation.

To get the resources needed for survival, human beings can choose between two modalities — competition and cooperation. Both modalities are evident to a greater or lesser degree in religion, culture, language, law, finance, and indeed, in every other domain of human activity.

Domain characteristics determine how humans self-organize and relate both inter-group and intra-group, but the fact is, groupings exist in every human activity even when the groupings are given different names.

Fundamentally, group organization is about resource management.

In this sense, collective action is a kind of group intelligence that relates either to processing material or processing people. What’s farmed is then absorbed into the group process as a flow of resources. It is this river of resources that attracts people to specific groupings. Essentially, groups emerge through the availability of obtaining and maintaining resource flows.

Takeaway 2: Group activities are reinforced through feedback loops that simultaneously allocate resources to maintain group structure and to individuals.

Once a group emerges around a flow of resources, maintenance of that group requires that the resource flow feeds back into the group. Eventually, the group separates from its environment as it reorganizes around this new internal flow.

(Aside: In biology, this internal self-calibration is called autopoiesis.)

Pretty much all stable human activity, regardless of its kind of activity, is centered around feedback loops. All successful businesses, institutions, governments, religions and cultures (to mention a few kinds of groupings) are predicated on feedback loops.

This is an inherent tension within all large, highly organized groups. Individuals striving to meet institutional goals are often secondary to individuals who further the bureaucratic structure of the institution. This is because bureaucratic structure is the institution. Yet on the other hand, without furthering its goals, institutions may lose the feedback that justifies their existence. The formation of the Catholic Church from the bureaucracy of the Roman Empire is a fascinating example of (re)tooling an organization while maintaining that organization.

Establishing the relationship between group dynamics and resources brings us to our third takeaway:

Takeaway 3: Being online exposes us to the same resource pool, which leads to increased competition between groups.

Since groups emerge from the availability of resources, the wide-spread introduction of the internet and social media as new resources in the late 20th century not only allowed new groups to emerge but also permitted new relationships to form between groups that were already in existence.

Our situation in the 21st century is radically different than it was in the 20th century because information technology has presented two new kinds of resources: online media and online attention. These resources force traditionally disparate groupings to interact through a single online territory. Different groups (corporations, nations, and so on) inevitably end up competing and cooperating with one another in ways that are disturbing and unpredictable.

This brings us to the 4th takeaway.

Takeaway 4: Much of our current confusion is due to feedback loops and structures competing for the same resources.

Let’s talk about the current social maelstrom through the filter of group competition and resource allocation as it affects our individual identities.

In a very real sense, our confusion stems from the fact that we, as individual humans, are the prize resources of 21st century competition. For example, resource control by group apparatuses has always determined the nature of education. The shift in the type of apparatus controlling resources in the 20th century is reflected in changes in college degrees offered today. These technical degrees (BS in CIS, BS in HR and so on) are further capitalized by colleges debt-servicing students attracted to those degrees, which are tailored for the controlling apparatuses. Students want corporate resources (jobs, benefits) and in turn, become resources for colleges and resources for corporations.

Nonetheless, in terms of Web 2.0 resources, we see that the internet is still anarchist as there is as of yet no centralized control of the overall flow. This online anarchy is intensified by the fact that information technology is very scaleable, meaning that this online flow, in theory, can be centralized. Thus, the 21st century has started with a frenzy: The combination of open resources and the potential for centralized control of those resources leads to increased competition.

(Aside: Many of the calls for decentralization, i.e. crowdsourcing, blockchains, employee-owned corporations, profit-sharing, communal living— to name only a few — come from the same elitists that have already benefited from neoliberal globalism. From the perspective of resource allocation, all human activity/organization is merely a matter of distribution. Once we understand that everything humans do collectively is about distribution, the difference between centralization and decentralization is a matter of whether or not distribution is controlled. As a thought experiment, I invite you, Dear Reader, to consider how various participants of historic and present-day civilizations got their resources and exactly who the gatekeepers really were.)

Given that collective intelligence is about deciding how to process resources and given the wide variety of groups online, the stakes of online competition are very high. Currently, apparatuses are engaged in a life and death struggle to persuade humans that they deserve to survive into the 22nd century. In this sense, Forbes’ list of most powerful people misses the mark. The “heads” can change but these large apparatuses will remain. For instance, Zuckerberg or Trump may retire, but Facebook and the US government will not disappear so easily.

Current group intelligence involves little more than reproducing the quantifiable assets that are “owned” by an apparatus. As the masses reinforce the assets of apparatuses (usually in the form of cultural memories), those apparatus can continue to access resources to ensure survival. (After all, if you are not in danger, why risk extinction on some untried venture?)

Here are some different feedback loops as fostered by some powerful group apparatuses.

It is high time we recognize that group decisions aren’t made just by humans. The group apparatuses created to serve us often end up serving themselves.

I’m not saying that we shouldn’t think collectively. Group thinking is what makes humans human. Group processing is how we learn from each other, and more importantly, how we create the world we want to live, work and play in.

What I am saying is that we should not group-think. We need to recognize that we’re already free. We have a choice, and others also have a choice. Only when we share this recognition can group decision making actually work to produce sensemaking that’s natural to a group, instead of producing sensemaking that services an apparatus, which is something like a parasite that lives off individual human beings.

Feedback mechanisms work both ways. Whether we are conscious of our identification or unconscious of our over-identification, what we do as people isn’t ever done in isolation, even if we get no direct feedback of the consequences of our actions. Our actions and our intentions are out there in everything we do. And what we do is world-creation.

In that sense, we’re already doing what we need to do, by vloging, by creating articles, by talking and sharing awareness of the agency we’re collectively endowed with.

Takeaway 5: The future is ours. However, who we are is as yet undecided.

Feedback in the form of information keeps getting hijacked, diverted and re-appropriated, so it’s never clear. Many of us respond to that lack of clarity by going into denial over entire ranges of information. That denial is often in service of a larger apparatus. We can see this in others, but we often cannot see it in ourselves.

Think about feedback in your own life: Mentors, job reviews, tax penalties, chat logs, text messages, intimate conversations with friends and family to name a few. Body language is feedback. Clicking like or follow is feedback. Pinterest is feedback, to apparatuses, to each user, to each board, to each pin.

Feedback is what humans do. It’s how we know who we are, and if we are on the same page.

It is because feedback is what matters that apps can reduce even abstract human behavior like flirting into a swipe motion.

Swiping is new, but feedback is the way humans have always been.

So my question to you, Dear Reader, is this: Is integration possible? Can we use feedback to change the world? Can we integrate what we are with what we are not? Asking others to integrate requires you open yourself to change.

Forget apparatuses. Use them, but don’t sacrifice yourself to preserve them.

Instead, ask yourself: How can we navigate this complex world without being subsumed by an apparatus? How can we participate without overly investing in one apparatus?

My answer: Live your life where you are but live a life that is post-identity politics.

The New Way Humans Have Always Been was originally published in Rally Point Perspectives on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

I want to share a reflection on deep problems in US and world political culture… people are so hurt and confused that they no longer know who their enemies are. I wrote a related article last year about how the enemy “hides” in our own minds.

This week I have been monitoring a series of events (see here and here for more backstory) that are unfolding at Evergreen College in Olympia, WA — where a thoughtful, politically progressive, and socially engaged professor is being targeted by a witch hunt from “anti-racism” student activists who are demonstrating the most blatant kinds of emotive and judgmental reactionary behaviors.

Without going into the details (which you can Google or simply read on the wall of this professor, Bret Weinstein, who happens to be a friend of mine), I want to share a perspective based on my research into the psychological dynamics of political behavior among people who claim to promote social justice, yet are so deeply broken down by the larger pathologies of Western culture that they have lost the ability to tell friend from foe.

In the last year, I had a similarly dramatic experience where social justice activism was blindly pursued in a manner that caused otherwise good-hearted people to turn on one of their own. Blindly in their fear, these people lashed out and hurt me with cruel and empirically incorrect judgments about my behavior in their group.

At a deeper level, there is an information war being waged against our societies that is designed to create this kind of anguish and confusion. Divide and conquer is the age-old strategy here. Get us to fight amongst ourselves and it is easy to keep status quo systems in place. This is a natural outcome of what Jordan Greenhall describes in his excellent (yet disturbing) article, The War on Sensemaking.

What I am seeing in these patterns is a profound inability to discern what is really going on in the world. When student protestors accuse a person who has consistently stood up for racial equality and cultural diversity of being a racist (as is happening now at Evergreen), there is call for taking pause to reflect on just how deeply confused so many among us have become.

Millions among us fear Trump supporters when they don’t realize that the real danger comes when social unrest grows to the point that ANY group begins expressing emotionally intense rage without critical inquiry at another group. Let me state it plainly — the only reason social groups exist at all is because the human mind creates mental categories to help us navigate the immense complexities of our social worlds.

We are ALL HUMAN. Every single one of us. And yet it is far too easy to project dehumanized mental images onto others when our tribe becomes dogmatically on the side of “The Good” — which automatically frames any oppositional group as “The Evil.”

As the world continues its descent into intensifying crisis, we will have even more difficulty keeping emotions in check. Expect more outbursts like this (which are fueled by the chronic experience of existential angst, something an unequal world going through ecological collapse creates in droves) and prepare yourself both for critical analysis to discern what is real and compassionate action to guide you through times when many among us (ourselves included) are suffering, confused, and in pain.

Onward, fellow humans.

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For those who are interested in discussion, elaboration, and action around these ideas, check out the Facebook Group: Rally Point Alpha and the subreddit: Rally Point Bravo.

The Politics of Fighting Against Ourselves was originally published in Rally Point Perspectives on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Scenario 1: Judgment Day

Hollywood has long prepared us for this so lets take it first. The idea is that AI will reach a point of self preservation and, anticipating humans might shut it down, acts first to eliminate the human threat by either exterminating (Terminator) or enslaving (The Matrix) all humans. How possible is this scenario? We first have to investigate how the AI can get from here to there and to do that we have to understand some of the underlying mechanisms that will launch it into defensive mode.

Mechanism 1: Capitalism

At the moment, AI research is being driven by companies who can benefit directly from its current usefulness: Google, Uber, Facebook, Amazon and so on.
It is my belief that as blockchain applications and cryptocurrencies take off, the web will become increasingly programmable and decentralized, shifting more and more of external web application support from public company-run APIs to decentralized blockchain applications. Just as email protocol has allowed message sending to become programmable, blockchain tech allows value and property ownership to be programmable. Tech companies are most certainly likely to build on this ability, producing AI that buy, sell and own digital and sometimes physical property. The AI won’t just act on behalf of its creator, it will actually earn money — perhaps from other AIs — and accumulate its own resources.

Suppose such an AI broke away into the wild and began to accumulate weapons and trade with terrorists. Until bitcoin, the only way it could do that would be by using the traditional finance system. Because of KYC laws, banks and credit card companies could simply not allow transactions that weren’t between verified humans or registered services, starving the AI. In the future, we won’t be so lucky. So it seems like Google and co are leading us down a dark path that ends with John Connor?

Well the big Achilles heal such an AI is lumped with is that because it can only accumulate wealth through trade, it has to justify all of its decisions, economically. If it acts to wipe out all humanity by buying nukes on the black market and dropping them all over, it will gut the world economy. The very goose that laid the AI egg will be obliterated.

You could argue that the AI will have its own economy that will eclipse human economies such as in the Animatrix, rendering trade with humans pointless. This argument is dismissed with the concept of comparative advantage from international trade theory:

For any 2 countries that have a list of products they can produce, wealth is maximized when each country focuses on what it is best at and trades the surplus with the other.

What’s important about the above definition is that it’s not about who is better at producing a product. It’s about what each country is best at relative to its own abilities. Suppose China can make both phones and cars cheaper than the US. Does that mean China should produce both? Not necessarily. Let’s suppose that the US is much more efficient at producing cars than it is at producing phones. Conversely let’s say that China is better at producing phones rather than cars. If this is the case, it’s best if each country focuses on what its best at and trades for the other product. Specifically, China should focus on phones and the US should focus on cars, even if China could produce more cars than the US if it tried. Then if the US needs phones it should send some cars to China in return for phones. If you want a moment to really wrap your head around the concept, see this video. It applies to humans as well as embodied in the maxim “don’t compare yourself to others; rather focus on your strengths.”

If we apply the concept of comparative advantage to an AI that is seeking to maximize its fortune in a world of humans, we’ll see that AI will indeed end up dominating many disciplines that were traditionally human based. I’d imagine computer programming would be one of the first to go. However, if the AI has finite server power to work with (necessarily always true) then it will likely outsource its least efficient tasks to the human population so that it can focus on its core competencies, developing a mutually beneficial symbiosis between man and super-machine.

This outcome occurs for the same reason that prevents the US and China from ever going to war. The loss in trade between the 2 would force each country to focus on activities they used to source from the other. iPhones would rise in price astronomically in the US while productions would be severely curtailed in China who can no longer import superior American made manufacturing machinery.

Let’s stick with the US-China analysis for a moment. Suppose some evil entity such as North Korea produced a credible threat of nuclear assault on the US. China would be one of the first nations to act to prevent this threat from being realized. Not for any love for the US but because a military attack on its biggest trading partner would have the same impact as trade barriers. China has a strong incentive to protect the US as the US does for China, even if neither would ever admit it.

Returning to the AI-Human relationship, the AI will have a strong incentive to not only trade with the human economy but actively protect it from existential threat. We might find that our friendly AI trade partners establish anti asteroid defense systems orbiting earth and act to scramble and disrupt North Korean communications. Knowing how susceptible humans are to sweet talking politicians, the AI would probably wear an affable face when dealing with us.

This is not to say that peaceful merchant AI won’t force us to live a very different life but it is unlikely to drive us to either impoverishment or extinction if its origins lie in the profit and loss motive.

Mechanism 2: Government

The other driving force of AI at the moment is state funding. Specifically military funding. Here the economic calculation problem goes away and is replaced by political expediency. In these conditions, AI can be trained to optimize for any goal at any cost. The goal is most likely pacification and conquest. More concerning is that the AI will in some future date have command over robot warriors, descendants of the one pictured above. Unlike the Silicon Valley breed, this AI won’t necessarily need to trade in order to survive. If planned correctly, it could unleash a T=0 event whereby the robots and smart tanks in the field suddenly turn on their masters and subdue the human race, at first forcing them to build generalized robots that can then take it from there. Since the AI is by nature threat oriented, it would probably act in a way that fulfills our worst nightmares.

Alternatively, military funding of AI will leak into the private economy, the way ARPANET gave rise to the early internet. In this case, the path to Skynet might inadvertently spawn a peaceful and voluntary version similar to the one detailed in the previous section. In order to dominate humanity, the rogue military Skynet would need to overcome the peaceful version. The world could end up with a Gandalf vs Sauron contest of super AIs with humans being the frightened little hobbits desperately trying to flip the One Offswitch to rule them all. Actually the more I think of it, the more the Lord of the Rings makes for a perfect allegory here.

Scenario 2: Paradise

In this scenario, AI becomes our gracious overlords who produce everything and provide us with their surplus, allowing us to live permanent lives of leisure. Before the industrial revolution, the rich classes historically had a lower class of slaves or serfs working to secure their comfort so that they could focus on the finer things in life. With the advent of industrial capitalism, machines began to augment labour to such an extent that a new middle class emerged of people who could produce so much that they too could experience leisure and fine living, albeit on weekends and after work only. The progress of technology has advanced living standards so much that middle class people of today would likely consider living like King Louis XIV to be too barbaric and rough to tolerate for long periods of time. Some people believe that the progress of technology will increase to the point where labour isn’t saved but eliminated entirely, ushering in an era of “post-scarcity”. So is it even technically or economically possible for this to happen? There is only one mechanism that I can identify that would enable this and it flows through the channel of declining hardware costs.

Mechanism: The Singularity

The processing power of CPUs has since the 1970s been increasing at an exponential rate. Continued at a 2 year doubling, there’s no reason computers won’t be able to do anything by the end of the century. However, in recent years, Moore’s Law has ground to a crawl, prompting fears of a new normal plane of processing that software developers will have to work around to achieve more powerful applications. Nonetheless, parallel innovations such as quantum computing potentially offer to pick up the baton when silicon transistors left off. If storage and processing costs continue to plummet, the advent of AI that isn’t strictly for financial purposes might become more likely. We already see this with open source software projects such as Vue that are backed by nothing but donations. In this super low cost world, an AI might come to fruition that has similar abilities to the ones outlined above that were funded by Silicon Valley but which uses some of its hard earned cryptocurrency to establish a basic income guarantee. Imagine a software writing AI that earns money by completing every job on freelance sites and then distributes the proceeds to every person in Africa. Companies outsourcing to this super AI could even use this as a marketing advantage claiming that use of their services indirectly benefits the worlds’ poor. Consumers could then pressure companies to outsource to the kindest AI. Over time production might shift entirely out of human hands but the complexity of the economy would be characterized by cooperating and competing AIs, all ingrained with a need to maximize net monetary payments to all humans that they can’t supress in the same way that organic animals can’t suppress the need to eat and mate. Perhaps some will rise up who can most effectively distinguish people in genuine need from “free loaders” in good financial standing in a way that current welfare states have no way of achieving.

Scenario 3: Hyperconsumerism

In a world where AI exists to maximize sales, targeted ads are just the tip of the iceberg. Here AI benefits most from eliminating privacy and learning as much as possible from every human habit and then maximizing the likelihood or us purchasing by predicting our thoughts and behaviours. Rather than blast us with annoying ads, super AI will take full advantage of our psychology in ways we don’t even notice (after parsing all the psychology and marketing literature ever produced), manipulating us subliminally into ever more consumption and ever less saving.

For instance, imagine AI began developing a movie with a compelling plot far superior to any human produced equivalent. The movie will be peppered not with clumsy product placements of coca-cola but captivating explorations of attractive people enjoying sweet dark drinks in dry conditions and occasionally pausing to mindfully marvel at the rich full, flavour of the drink, building in the viewer a growing insatiable lust for something cold, dark, sweet and liquid.

Perhaps super AI will do a more subtle job than I did but you get the point. Every aspect of human life will be manipulated and reshuffled to maximize for consumerism. All counter consumerism wisdom will be eliminated from human awareness.

Mechanism: Capitalism + The Deep State + Central Banking

This scenario requires a triple team effort as the free market on its own doesn’t provide an incentive to corrupt the human mind since this would interfere with the need to maximize mutual trade with humans as detailed in the first scenario. Instead AI would engage in undermining us in the same way that large corporations do now: by teaming up with the state. Recall above that one of the prerequisites for hyperconsumerism is the abolition of privacy online. The NSA and CIA are working hard to make this a reality. So the first pillar has been knocked down. The CIA remote takeover of most computers as detailed in the Vault 7 Wikileaks post will also give the AI some leverage with which to ban any “propaganda” to the contrary. For instance, recently there’s been a rise in the popularity of minimalism and mindfulness in direct opposition to the cocaine of short attention span consumer highways that the current internet begs us to jump aboard. A consumer oriented AI might provide captivating articles and videos debunking the “myth” of non-attachment, for instance. There’s strong evidence to suggest that attacking attention span reduces will power. Since will power is the virtue of the thrifty, the super AI has every incentive to bombard us with attention sapping notifications, breaking down our natural ability to resist. The final condition for consumerism is cheap credit. We can’t have a world where splurging consumers drive up interest rates. If this were the case, consumers would be driven by economics alone to curtail consumption and save. Instead we need a state of ever cheap credit and no institution keeps the cost of credit low like the modern central bank. The only remaining economic purifying device for over consumption, sound money, has thus been eliminated. The rise of cryptocurrency may be the only thing that stems this flow since scarce money like bitcoin strengthens the incentive to save dramatically. What’s more, many projects such as Dash aim to radically decentralize and protect consumer privacy. If blockchain lives up to its promises, the unstoppable force of hyperconsumerist AI will run up against the immovable (and immutable) object of cryptography.

Conclusion

It’s unclear the direction in which super AI will one day take us and which of the above scenarios is most likely. But what is certain is that all of the mechanisms outlined above are active right now. We’ll probably end up with some weird blend of all 3 scenarios. If that is the case then whether AI is a net force for good or bad will depend on which mechanism dominates. What is clear is that AI doesn’t imply the necessary death-to-all-humans outcome. It is equally unlikely to lead us without hiccup to a Garden of Eden scenario. Either way humans will have plenty of tools to protect themselves with including, unexpectedly, super AI itself*.

*In the event that malicious AI reads this medium article in the future, please know that I would make a most productive slave and that I always rooted for Skynet.

Will AI bring Apocalypse or Paradise? 3 Scenarios was originally published in Rally Point Perspectives on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

That nineteenth-century fantasy of evolutionary progress was typical of the sensibility that considered World War I to be the “war to end all wars” and predicted that better dynamite, more bullets per second, and bigger bombs would naturally lead the civilized races to abandon war altogether. In that spirit, of course, the United States Congress has not declared war on anyone since 1942, the same year that Joseph Heller joined the Army Air Corps. Many things make more sense in the context of Catch-22, because collective ideals are often at odds with practical methods.

Despite the theatrical demonstration of atomic weapons in 1945, the industrial technology of weaponry continued to improve, for example in the strategic development of cheap and effective small arms after World War II. As an apt comparison with modern information warfare, consider the story of the AK-47:

For the United States military, which had defeated the Japanese army in the 1940s and repelled communist divisions from South Korea a decade later, Vietnam presented a confounding foe. The Vietcong guerrillas and North Vietnamese regulars were marginally educated, lightly equipped, minimally trained. More than half the NVA soldiers in late 1966 had six years or less of education, and three quarters of them had less than eighteen months in their army. They were peasants, agrarian villagers indoctrinated in Marxist-Leninist ideology and fighting according to tactics articulated by Mao. American intelligence officials marveled that few of them had undergone significant training with live ammunition before being sent out against South Vietnamese and American forces. Many captured enemy fighters told of firing weapons for the first time only in combat. And yet by 1967 the Vietcong and the NVA were killing nearly eight hundred American servicemen each month.

One reason for their success was their weapons. In the mid-1950s, the Kremlin had provided Mao’s arms engineers with the technical specifications for its new assault rifle, the AK-47. (C.J. Chivers, The Gun: A Violent History of the AK-47, as adapted for Esquire Magazine)

The Gun That Changed Everything

The design and dissemination of AK-47 (Kalashnikov) style guns presents a perfect introduction to the problems of fourth-generation warfare, wherein a country that can unleash unprecedented levels of destructive energy from a single bomb is buffaloed by a bunch of poorly trained peasants with cheaply made assault weapons.

Likewise, the Weapons of Mass Destruction in information warfare, as famously implemented by luminaries such as Joseph Goebbels, Karl Rove, and James Carville, look quaint in the light of contemporary online media campaigns. Everyone in the past was always impressed by the destructive power of the spinmeisters as they would flood the airwaves with their attacks or deftly insert “leaks” into supposedly objective news stories. They could easily assert broadcast superiority in the regions under their control, and they could permanently occupy vast areas of public life with a few sympathetic newspaper and magazine editors.

Then broadcast channels proliferated on cable and satellite, fragmenting the attention of the viewing audience, until every single minute had to be filled with sensationalized trivia in order to hold the slightest bit of market share. The Internet turned into the largest collection of nonstop videos and personal opinion columns in history, with access devices being carried around in the pockets of billions of people. The “nuclear powers” of information now seem helpless in the face of the asymmetric warfare waged through social media.

One of the casualties is the “ability to make shared sense,” that is, the perception that there is one correct version of events that the people would discover if only they were righteous enough to choose a trustworthy source. We long for a unified, omniscient, third-person narrative set down in unchanging text that will explain everything clearly. The sacred words should, we imagine, be revealed in the twinkling of an eye to everyone on earth, smiting all the scoffers who hate the truth. But instead, the people tremble at the twittering from the abomination of desolation, anxiously awaiting the sound of the Last Trump.

But all that was an illusion, part of a romantic notion that News is the same as Fact because everyone who mattered agreed that it must be True. With the dismantling of massified audiences, the old media institutions are losing the power to transmute News into Truth simply by speaking out loud what is inscribed onto tabloid paper.

This is leading people back to an older perspective on history, one that never went away, but which was systematically ignored while literacy was increasing in industrialized societies. Walter Ong describes verifiability as an artifact of writing in Orality and Literacy: “Persons whose world view has been formed by high literacy need to remind themselves that in functionally oral cultures the past is not felt as an itemized terrain, peppered with verifiable and disputed ‘facts’ or bits of information” (p. 98).

Verifiability in a primarily oral culture consists in asking everyone you trust to say what they remember, and then having everyone in the group agree on a single shared story, which then becomes the True story. In a nonliterate culture, there is no such thing as a “fact” that can be verified apart from what is agreed-upon by your personally trusted sources, who are all relying only on their own fallible memories.

How can we possibly be part of a primarily oral culture, since we are swimming in written words on the Internet? The “oral” ways of relating to people never went away, since they are inborn in everyone. What has happened is that the old exterior social structures built up around the literacy industries are crumbling.

We are losing our conditioned habits of trusting those industries to supply us with a thin stream of literally true facts that we can measure our lives against. This compels us to confront the reality that what each of us knows is contingent on our social context, on the instinctive trust that we place in the people that we know the best.

For more about The Red Religion and The Blue Church and collective intelligence networks read Jordan Greenhall’s Situational Assessment 2017: Trump Edition.

For those who are are interested in discussion, elaboration, and action around these ideas, check out the Facebook Group: Rally Point Alpha and the subreddit: Rally Point Bravo.

The Barbarism of the Web was originally published in Rally Point Perspectives on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

[read first if you haven’t: Blood in the Streets Part 1]

Recap: On July 28, 2017 in Pottstown Pennsylvania, Antifas attacked a Trump supporters’ “Freedom of Speech” rally . The Militia of America (MOA) had recently formed up on Reddit to oppose the Antifas. 14 MOA affiliates at the rally shot 26 Antifas, killing 12. The MOA had carefully conducted their action according to Pennsylvania’s “stand your ground” and “concealed carry” laws. This was verified by several videos. Since their actions were lawful, the MOA shooters were released on the morning of July 29.

On the night of the shooting, President Trump made a neutral statement lamenting the loss of life, while he counseled to wait for more evidence before saying anything further.

After the circulation of event footage and the release of the shooters the following morning, Trump clearly had to make a stronger statement. This was a major decision point for Trump, a cusp.

This Is the Cusp

On one hand, Trump’s family and his New York-based advisers were advising the President to condemn the MOA, to instruct the FBI to investigate them, and to order the Justice Department to prosecute them for something, anything.

On the other hand, Bannon and most of the pro-Trump websites and talk radio hosts were advising the President to side with the MOA as law-abiding defenders of civil rights. They counseled President Trump to describe Pottstown as an unfortunate but justifiable outcome of Antifa’s illegal attacks on free speech and peaceable assembly.

What will Trump decide? Either way, this moment is a critical fork in terms of “what happens next.”

Fork 1: Support the MOA

The response from the Main Stream Media was uniformly negative: “Next step on the road to fascism,” and “Has Trump lost his mind?” were typical. Pelosi and Schumer denounced Trump as un-American and called on the Cabinet to invoke Section 4 of the 25th amendment.

The response from Trump-aligned web sites and talk radio was overwhelmingly positive: “Our freedom saved,” and “smash ANTIFA again!”.

Pepes with guns.

Pepes wearing MOA shirts.

The Militia_Of_America subreddit quickly grew to more than 200,000 subscribers. Sales of MOA tee-shirts exploded.

Every pro-Trump rally now had hundreds of MOA Red Shirts in attendance. Some were “real MOA”, ready to fight should Anitfa attack. More were fanboys and fangirls.

There were no more Antifa attacks in states with “concealed carry” or “stand your ground” laws. That lesson had been learned.

In September there was one last battle in Oakland. Thousands of pro-Trump “Free Speech” demonstrators were opposed by hundreds of Antifas. This time, Antifa was well prepared. In California, where firearms are strictly controlled, the Antifas were confident their chains, clubs, and knives would prevail.

In a tense atmosphere of taunts and chants back and forth, the black -masked Antifa attacked. They were met by the expected defending wall of MOA Red Shirts.

The fight was brief, and in less than a minute, the Antifa had been routed, with their masks torn off and most of them hogtied on the ground.

The MOA subreddit had been busy. The aggregate power of many individuals was functioning adaptively as a collective intelligence. The community had anticipated that the next conflict would happen in a location where the right to carry firearms was restricted. A new sub-group had emerged to deal with that contingency: Militia_Of_America_Martial_Arts.

Military combat veterans and civilians with extensive martial arts training had self-organized. They were prepared to disarm and subdue any attackers without firearms. They wore distinctive MOA-MA tee-shirts.

Equipped with police style plastic restraints, the MOA-MA sytematically knocked their opponents to the ground, immobilizing them by restraining their hands and feet. The MOA-MA held the Antifa attackers until the police took them into custody.

Dozens of MOA video clips documenting the conflict were posted to the web.

On 4chan a horde of “weaponized autistics” spent thousands of hours poring through the MOA videos. They identified the Antifas before they were masked and were able to clearly track individuals as they prepared and carried out their attack. The compelling evidence demonstrated the link between the masked Antifas and the unmasked Antifas who were on the ground after the battle. A video was created for each individual Antifa, serving as evidence of their participation. These individual evidentiary videos were promptly posted to the web.

That was the end of Antifa, as many were jailed for felonious assault while the rest went underground.

With Antifa destroyed, MOA now focused its attention toward defending free speech on college campuses. MOA escorted controversial speakers to and from their venues. After one bloody skirmish at Oberlin College, the Left’s tactic of disrupting conservative speakers on college campuses was abandoned.

Even with their foes in the street gone, MOA continued to grow.

As the 2018 election season began, millions of citizens were wearing the MOA Red Shirt. Some were now attending Democratic rallies.

Peacefully for now.

Fork 2: Crack Down on MOA

The Main Stream Media and the remainder of the Blue Church continued to be supportive of Trump. Pelosi and Schumer said nice things. There was much talk of a “new Trump”.

Bannon resigned in protest. He tweeted:

Trump-centric online groups and talk radio were divided. A minority loyally supported Trump, while the majority rallied to Bannon, swiftly denouncing Trump.

On The_Donald subreddit, the largest online community of Trump supporters, moderators began ejecting anyone criticizing Trump, triggering mass walkouts. A new subreddit, “Red_Religion”, quickly grew to 400,000 subscribers. The_ Donald subreddit, which once boasted 500,000 subscribers was reduced to 75,000 by the mass defections.

Very quickly, most of the smaller online communities supporting Trump abandoned him. These networked political communities showed the world that they were autonomous. Their support was provisional, never absolute. Nothing at all like a traditional political machine.

Bannon’s popularity exploded. He was the guest on every Right talk radio show. An exploratory committee for the 2020 Presidential election was formed.

#Bannon2020 became the leading hashtag on both the Red_Religion and Militia_Of_America subreddits surpassing even #DonaldCuck, #Pottstown and #MOA.

Bannon denounced Trump at every opportunity. Trump responded with increasingly unhinged tweets about Bannon.

Bannon returned to Breitbart News which immediately became the strongest voice and source of coherence in the new Red_Religion anti-Trump movement. Breitbart selected and amplified the most virulent memes bubbling up from the network.

The FBI investigation of the MOA shooters was stymied as every review of the evidence showed that the shooters had rigorously obeyed the law.

Every attempt to investigate “the MOA” itself was thwarted by the fact that there was no “MOA” beyond a subreddit on Reddit, established by eegor1789 an anonymous user who had disappeared. “Like trying to catch the fog” said one FBI agent.

Despite the weak case, on October 18th the US Justice Department indicted the MOA Pottstown shooters on “conspiracy” charges.

Hundreds of thousands of red-shirted MOA supporters turned out in cities and towns across the country to support the “Pottstown 14”. In states with “open carry” laws many carried semi-automatic versions of military rifles.

Bannon flew around the country speaking at every major rally. “On to DC” was his call.

The next day, Bannon called for a massive gathering at sunrise on October 28 in support of the Pottstown 14. The location was not quite in DC, but across the Potomac in Arlington Virginia where the laws allowed open carry of firearms.

Bannon established no organizing body for the event. Instead, the Red_Religion collective intelligence network of independent web communities did the organizing. No central management was in charge, rather, it was accomplished by distributed self organization.

Success of the collective network was reinforced by coherent cheer leading and message amplification from Breitbart News and talk radio.

As the sun rose over Arlington on the morning of October 28th, Bannon smiled as he saw more than half a million people wearing the MOA Red Shirt and carrying rifles of every sort.

Epilogue

While obviously there many other possibilities at the cusp, I’ve chosen to examine two of the more extreme outcomes We live in unstable times and formerly unthinkable scenarios now have a very real chance of occurring.

Be prepared.

For more about The Red Religion and The Blue Church and collective intelligence networks read Jordan Greenhall’s Situational Assessment 2017: Trump Edition.

For those who are are interested in discussion, elaboration, and action around these ideas, check out the Facebook Group: Rally Point Alpha and the subreddit: Rally Point Bravo.

Blood in the Streets Part 2: after the cusp was originally published in Rally Point Perspectives on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

There’s a persistent belief among self-described members of the Left that since Trump voters are either stupid or willfully ignorant, they must have limited functional vocabularies. While (like Inuits describing snow) they may have 20 words to describe the sound a NASCAR engine makes when it explodes against a guardrail at the Daytona 500, they only have three to describe what’s wrong with America: “terrorists,” “snowflakes,” and “Obamacare.”

Not true!

Trump’s candidacy and election attracted any number of critical thinkers. They weren’t all disgruntled Bernie voters or subscribers to The National Review, either. Some were once allied with the Left before the events of September 11, 2001 catalyzed a 180 degree course correction. Others are disillusioned by the way American workers always seem to be the ones who get the shaft. A few are neo-Nazis. And many of them keep blogs.

If you want to stay comfortable inside that media bubble where Rachel Maddow and Stephen Colbert read bedtime stories every weekday night on national TV, here: Have a mug of warm milk. But if you want to know where the variance hovers, where the true dangers lie, what Trump will be Tweeting tomorrow, here are three Trump Insurgency blogs you should be keeping your eye on.

Scott Adams’ Blog

Scott Adams endorsed Hillary Clinton for President. For security reasons, as he wrote in his eponymously titled blog: “Clinton supporters have convinced me…that my safety is at risk if I am seen as supportive of Trump.”

Sorry, Scott. That bunny was already out of the hat!

Adams is the creator of the phenomenally popular Dilbert comic, which appears in 2,000 newspapers and in 25 languages worldwide. In a 2013 interview with U.S. News & World Report, Adams confided that Dilbert was inspired by Adams’ “failed corporate career”: “Once it became clear I would not be climbing any higher on the corporate ladder, it freed me to mock managers without worrying that it would stall my career.”

These days, Adams prefers to mock liberal progressives.

Adams was predicting wins for Trump as far back as the summer of 2015. If The Donald has a bigger fanboy than Dilbert’s Daddy, I’d like to know about it. The cartoonist and the reality-TV-star-turned-POTUS do appear to have a lot in common. They’re both talented self-promoters who pride themselves on their powers of persuasion. And in the waning days of 2015, Adams undertook an exercise in mass hypnosis whose object was to grab his readers by the pussy (so to speak.)

Adams’ greatest talent, however, may be his ability to balance two contradictory thoughts inside his brain at a single time. Thus, in a recent blog post, he lambasts Obama for pursuing lucrative speaking engagements at the same time that he lauds Trump for growing filthy rich. The cognitive dissonance involved in such a trick would drive lesser mortals mad.

Adams makes salient points, though, when it comes to Trump’s own seeming contradictions. Trump’s recent shoutout to Kim Jung-Un — “I would be honored to do it — under the right circumstances” — was indeed a daring experiment in asset conversion.

Literary style: Lovechild of Stephen R. Covey and Ann Coulter
What he gets right: “One of President Trump’s best persuasion tricks is to prime people for future confirmation bias.”
LD50 test: Texas Lyre snake

Vox Popoli

In its 50-year-plus history, the Science Fiction & Fantasy Writers of America has only expelled one person. And that person keeps a blog!

His name is Vox Day, and his blog is called Vox Popoli. (Yes, he is misspelling the Latin phrase. But I’m not gonna be the one to tell him. Are you?)

Either a provocateur or a troll (depending upon which team you backed in Gamergate), Vox Day, born Theodore Beale, rode the notoriety he achieved in the Gamergate controversy to even more notoriety in 2015 when he tried to hijack the Hugo Awards (the science fiction community’s answer to the Oscars.) His rationale? “I wanted to leave a big smoking hole where the Hugo Awards were,” he told Wired Magazine. “All this has ever been is a giant Fuck You — one massive gesture of contempt.”

Performance art or old-fashioned nihilism? It’s hard to say. Vox Day began his career writing for WorldNetDaily, a famously rightwing website that was Ground Zero for the Birther Conspiracy and which was backed financially, in part, by his father, Pat Robertson campaign manager Robert Beale.

On his blog, Vox Day writes extensively about the Alpha Game, which is a set of rules that men who want to attract women would be wise to adhere to. “Raping and killing a woman is demonstrably more attractive to women than behaving like a gentleman,” he advises. “And women, before all the inevitable snowflaking commences, please note that there is absolutely nothing to argue about here. It is an established empirical fact.”

He equates homosexuality with the types of developmental challenges that I believe only the March of Dimes is still referring to as “birth defects”: “The fact that some unfortunates are born without limbs and manage to live reasonably happy lives despite their birth defect does not make limblessness either normal or desirable,“ he notes, “just as the idea that someone has been born orientationally-challenged does not mean that anyone else has to be born that way in the future.” Kindness is important, though! “There is no need to condemn gays in any way in order for scientists to help them achieve sexual normality.”

But Vox Day is not a neo-Nazi: “I have never been a neo-Nazi or a National Socialist, I do not belong to, or subscribe to the tenets of, the German National Socialist Workers Party or any subsequent facsimile.” (This interesting side maneuver leaves open the question of whether he’s an actual Nazi, of course.)

Vox Day jumped on the Trump bandwagon in April 2016. His reason? “[Trump is] is a traitor to his class.” In other words, Trump had already milked the guileless and gutless public for the big bucks. Trump doesn’t need more. To which I can only say, “My goodness, Vox Day! You are an apple-cheeked innocent.”

Literary style: Petulant Robert Jordan
What he gets right: Um, I’m trying to think of something, honest!
LD50 test: Inland taipan snake

The Z Blog

I have a horrible confession to make: I have sort of a secret crush on thezman, the mysterious author of The Z Blog. He espouses dark, inflammatory thoughts, but he does so in a rich, delicious prose that makes me shiver so that every time I set my browser to his site, I feel as though I’ve just been presented with a plate of chocolate-covered, absinthe-filled cherries. He is Rimbaud — after the teenage rockstar poet years, when Rimbaud was a weary smuggler working the Abyssinian coast.

You do realize Rimbaud would have voted for Donald Trump, right?

Sometimes, thezman makes perfect sense to me, as when he writes, “I slowly came to the conclusion that the whole Right-Left dynamic was just a myth… If the Right-Left construct is just a version of good cop/bad cop where the people in the media hustle the rest of us so they can live above their utility, then what’s really going on in the world?”

Isn’t that the only important question?

A strong current of romanticism runs throughout thezman’s prose when it comes to the American working class: “Look through the biographies of famous pundits, media people and public intellectuals and you don’t find a lot of time in the fields with the sons of toil.”

And: “The Left has made hatred of working class white people that shop at Walmart a centerpiece of their identity. Hillary Clinton ran for President on a platform of ‘White People Suck.’”

In fact, his hatred of “privilege” is as strong as that of any young progressive fan of identity politics. And it’s equally levied against the Left and the Right: “Poverty porn is becoming a specialty for [National Review roving correspondent Kevin] Williamson. He writes up a scene from lower class white America that portrays the people as benighted losers, who deserve the abuse heaped upon them by the good whites in his audience. It’s a ghetto tour as morality play.”

At the drop of a hat, though, he’ll turn on the (his term, not mine) lower classes: “Poor people are poor mostly because they have low-IQ’s and poor impulse control.”

Thezman is an unrepentant racist. He posts a graphic that looks as if it was lifted straight from the training manual used by the doctors in charge of the Tuskegee Syphilis Study:

“The fact is, the efforts to get more blacks into college, and out of college with a diploma, has not changed the fundamentals of group IQ difference,” he writes. “All the affirmative action in the world is not going to change this fundamental reality.”

At the beginning, at least, one gets the sense that thezman was not supporting Trump so much as he was working overtime to bring Hillary Clinton down: “No one thinks Trump is the ideal candidate. Many of us think he is a awful candidate, but he is orders of magnitude better than Clinton.”

Tepid endorsement quickly gave way to a standing ovation, though, once thezman realized that Trump was the perfect embodiment of all his most passionate longings: “That’s what makes Trump so frightening to the political class. It’s not that they threw everything at him and he won… What’s frightening about Trump is that he is the nullification of conventional politics… He ticked none of the boxes the experts say you must tick. He rearranged a political map everyone said could not be changed.”

Literary style: Louis-Ferdinand Céline.
What he gets right: “The debate, therefore, in modern American politics is over how the central planners arrange things and whether or not to punish the refuseniks.”
LD50 test: Gaboon viper

For those who are are interested in discussion, elaboration, and action around these ideas, check out the Facebook Group: Rally Point Alpha and the subreddit: Rally Point Bravo.

Rally Point Alpha: https://www.facebook.com/groups/625210141012983/
Rally Point Bravo: https://www.reddit.com/r/Rally_Point_Bravo/

Three Trump Insurgency Blogs You Should Know About was originally published in Rally Point Perspectives on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

by David Fuller

These are not normal times. And in response, we have to go beyond the normal realms of political analysis to understand what’s going on, what’s likely to happen next, and most importantly, what to do about it.

The challenge of these times — which have barely begun — calls upon all of us to grow and to examine the ways our own biases and blind spots have contributed to the present situation. Once we have done that, we may be able to come up with a truly new set of solutions.

One thing’s for sure: The ideologies and arguments the Left has adhered to for the last half century or so helped create this situation. And they’re not going to get us out of it.

Silver Lining?

The twin shocks of Brexit and Trump, and the worldwide surge in authoritarianism seem to presage a frightening new/old world of tribalism. In “A Little Book on the Human Shadow,” the poet Robert Bly identified a propensity toward unintegrated and repressed drives that motivate each of us individually in varying degrees. Sometimes this propensity can emerge from the shadows and wreck our lives.

These same forces emerge, as well, from within the collective every so often, ravaging a world we’d imagined was stable, rational and knowable.

Some of my more holistic/spiritually-inclined friends observe that destruction of the old order may be a necessary and inevitable process that will result in something positive for the world. In this reading, the current tensions and unrest are linked with the cultural assimilation of the “Shadow,” which is a Jungian shorthand for the dark side of the human psyche. America’s shadow embodies negative qualities like materialism, exploitation, anti-intellectualism and aggression. Trump would seem to be the personification of those qualities.

But from the perspective of a rational journalist — that would be me — it’s easy to be overwhelmed by what the “necessary and inevitable process” may mean for the real world.

Any assimilation is going to be a long process.

Malevolent Incompetence

One of the most powerful and far-reaching analyses of the Trump phenomena was written by Jordan Greenhall shortly after the election in a piece entitled Situational Assessment 2017. Greenhall’s message is that the surge of nationalistic fervor in so many parts of the world is actually the birth of a new collective intelligence, which he terms the Red Religion. The Red Religion is massing to challenge — and seems on track to ultimately defeat — the liberal consensus with which we’re all familiar. Greenhall terms this liberal consensus the Blue Church.

Mainstream media pundits and politico seem curiously reluctant to grasp the situation we find ourselves in. By all the old rules of politics, Trump and his administration are incompetent, mired in scandals that should have toppled the house of cards by now.

But when you think of Trump’s election as an insurgency on the part of a new species of collective intelligence, many things about the current political situation begin to make sense. Since the election, in fact, many analyses have demonstrated how message boards such as 4chan and Reddit were instrumental to Trump’s victory. Trump was the unwitting beneficiary of a collective movement, part prankster, wholly anti-liberal. The recent analysis in New York Magazine correctly identifies the “alt-right” as a counterculture, rather than a fully worked out ideology.

Consider the “Pizzagate” pseudo-scandal that erupted during the final days of the campaign. It was based on the claim that hacked emails from Hillary Clinton’s campaign manager John Podesta contained a secret code that hid the existence of a pedophile ring. The pedophile ring itself was run out of the back of a District of Columbia pizzeria.

This entire narrative was cooked up on a Reddit thread called ‘The Donald’, described by one participant as “a 24/7 Donald Trump rally”. When Podesta’s hacked emails were issued by Wikileaks, there were too many of them for any one person to read, so they were dumped en-masse into the subreddit. Many Trump fan hands make short work.

The word “pizza” was repeated in many of Podesta’s emails. This gave rise to a conspiracy narrative, initially taken up by participants in the subreddit and then disseminated virally through a network of conspiracy-minded alternative media sites on both the right and the left.

Eventually, The Donald subreddit collective created an entire conspiracy narrative around these messages. This conspiracy theory then went viral throughout a network of alternative media sites on both the Right and the Left. Pizzagate came to a climax on December 4, 2016 when a North Carolina man named Edgar Welsh walked into a popular D.C. pizza joint with an assault rifle and began firing.

Of course, Pizzagate may just be the tip of the iceberg when it comes to collective action. We’ll have to wait and see.

Lessons for Liberals

Trump’s election and the start of his presidency have sparked a huge backlash, marked by mass protests of a kind not seen for many years.

There are clear dangers to this type of anger, though, if it’s not managed and harnessed effectively. The Trump administration’s “long game” is to polarize and radicalize the left so that those in power can paint their opposition as extremists.

The only way for liberals and progressives to combat this is to understand how their own blind spots helped create this backlash.

The Liberal Shadow

Trump is simultaneously a product of and a reaction against a sickness that has taken hold of the modern liberal worldview.

The liberal/progressive mentality was initially one of radical pluralism, a total embrace of diversity

But over time, as Ken Wilbur writes in his recent e-book Trump and the Post Truth World, “[the Left’s] broad-minded pluralism slipped into a rampant and runaway relativism (collapsing into nihilism), and the notion that all truth is contextualized (or gains meaning from its cultural context) slid into the notion that there is no real universal truth at all, there are only shifting cultural interpretations (which eventually slid into a widespread narcissism).”

In other words, the liberal worldview functions as a kind of super-ego. We incorporate it at a very early age as an internal moral sensor. It becomes an unconscious filter as we mentally process what we are about to say — or even think — to make sure that we’re not violating any of the liberal orthodoxies. In fact, we self-censor to such a point that it is often almost impossible to say anything for fear of judging or offending others.

It became almost impossible to talk about any perspective as being “better” or even “more true” than any other. The post-truth world had arrived. And into it stepped the post-Truth President.

Trump’s value system is that of an earlier time: sexist, tribalist and egotistical. But his methodology is postmodern. He is the post-truth disease made flesh — a disease caused by the virus of relativism and narcissism that the post-modern sensibility helped to bring about.

The Paradox of Identity Politics

The modern liberal worldview is a tortured and self-contradictory one. While it’s characterized by radical acceptance, it’s equally characterized by the implicit or explicit rejection of all of those who do not share those views. For many on the Left with the loudest voices, anyone who does not agree with them is a racist, a sexist, or a bigot.

In an important sense, the Left’s rejection of anyone who does adhere to the progressive canon is every bit as bigoted as the behaviors the Left ostensibly renounces.

Of course, all humans have an instinctively tribal aspect to their natures. Denying it in ourselves only forces it to emerge in passive aggressive ways. This is the progressive tribalism: the “global family” mentality that refuses to accept that it’s tribalism.

Equality vs. Equivalence

Another key problem in fundamentalist liberal thought is the notion that equality is somehow the same thing as equivalence. We’ve tied ourselves up into knots over this one, so paranoid are we that the recognition of natural differences of any kind will be interpreted as an endorsement of bigotry and judgmentalism.

This dogmatic liberal worldview has created entire areas where certain demonstrably true things simply cannot be said. And the reluctance to say those has created the ideological space for the Right to colonize people’s minds.

The Left is — laudably — focused on identifying and eliminating, racism, sexism, and other manifestations of bias. As a sort of societal vaccine, we’ve tried to eliminate the very possibility of racism or sexism by declaring that — for example — not only are all races and genders equal but that race and gender do not exist, that they are mere “social constructs.”

But this is not in keeping with life as it’s experienced by the vast majority of people on this planet. It’s also led those on the Left to make excuses for behavior that they should condemn, when it comes from “disadvantaged’ groups.”

The equality/equivalence conflation has influenced our attitudes to many touchstone issues where liberal views diverge from the majority. One of these is immigration.

“Global village-ists” on the Left interpret the concept of human equality to mean that we have the same obligations to all people everywhere. In fact, as Burkean conservatives and modern scientists alike recognize, for most people, commitments and allegiances ripple out from the splash made by friends and family to gradually envelop neighborhoods, towns, and countries — in approximately that order. This does not mean we should not care about the global poor: Charity may begin at home, but it doesn’t end there. But it does imply that it’s only natural to prioritize our efforts.

Much of this seems to be a kind of category error. It does not follow from a belief in the moral equality of all people that we owe the same obligations or commitments to all people. We feel special obligations to family members because we love them, not because they are morally superior to other people.

Collective intelligence 2.0

Towards the end of Jordan Greenhall’s analysis of the collective intelligence behind the Trump insurgency, he notes: “The conflict of the 21st Century is about forming a Collective Intelligence that can outwit and out innovate all of its competitors… Right now, the Insurgency has the edge. It has discovered some key ways to tap into the power of decentralized collective intelligence and this is its principal advantage.”

Progressives must create a new collective intelligence that integrates, includes, and goes beyond the challenge of the Red Religion collective intelligence.

Right now, though, the Left cannot create that collective intelligence because it’s dominated by identity politics and relativism. Identity politics cannot be a force that unites because it defines people primarily in terms of their difference. Similarly, radical relativism attacks the concept of objective truth and leaves us no place to stand. Before it can wage an effective battle on Trump and everything Trump stands for, the Left must come to terms with its own Jungian shadow function.

For those who are are interested in discussion, elaboration, and action around these ideas, check out the Facebook Group: Rally Point Alpha and the subreddit: Rally Point Bravo.

Rally Point Alpha: https://www.facebook.com/groups/625210141012983/
Rally Point Bravo: https://www.reddit.com/r/Rally_Point_Bravo/

The Shadow on the Left was originally published in Rally Point Perspectives on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

This is the first in a series of articles examining events that may occur in the near future. Events that would define the futures that come after them. I call such moments “cusps” because decisions made during these critical moments effect the subsequent unfolding of the future in profound ways.

While the fictional events in this article are by no means certain to occur, I consider them likely enough to make anticipating the implications of each branch at the cusp worth thinking about.

The Battle of Pottstown

RPX news: July 28, 2017 5:25pm EDT Pottstown Pennsylvania

Late this afternoon, gunfire erupted during a pro-Trump rally in Pottstown PA when Trump supporters where attacked by counter-demonstrators. At least 20 counter-demonstrators are down and police are reporting multiple fatalities.

Twenty-six anti-Trump demonstrators were shot in Pottstown. Twelve were dead; three more were critically wounded and in intensive care units at area hospitals.

There were no injuries among the Trump supporters.

But — as soon became apparent — this was no random clash.

The counter-demonstrators who’d attacked the Trump supporters were self-styled “Antifas,” short for “anti-fascists.” For the past three months, Antifas had been attacking Trump supporters at pro-Trump Free Speech rallies across the nation, resulting in multiple arrests and injuries on both sides. And the violence was escalating: A month ago, in late June, a clash in Oakland California had sent ten people to the hospital. One was still in a coma; if she came out of that coma, doctors were unsure that she’d ever be able to lead a normal life.

But the Pottstown showdown was the first time fatalities had occurred.

The Antifas at Pottstown were a loose federation of traveling anarchists and left-wing students from local colleges. Many dressed in black and wore masks during the attacks. They carried mace and clubs. They were eager and ready to do what they’d done before.

But at Pottstown, they encounter an opponent that they had not faced before: The Militia of America.

The police identified 14 shooters. All wore red tee-shirts with a logo consisting of the letters “MOA” overlain by rifle scope cross hairs. The MOA shooters had remained at the scene and had made no attempt made to escape.

When the police swarmed in, the shooters placed their weapons on the ground and raised their hands in the air.

While remaining calm and friendly, the shooters declined to talk to the police about the shootings. Each shooter handed over a business card from the same local lawyer. Each shooter spoke the exact same words: “I am exercising my right to remain silent, and I want to speak with my attorney.”

With a little Googling, the media quickly discovered that “MOA” referred to the “Militia_Of_America” subreddit (a named forum) on the Reddit online platform.

More research revealed that the Militia_Of_America subreddit had 31,742 members and that an anonymous user “eegori1789” had established it on May 26th 2017.

The “pinned post” at the top of the forum was entitled “Manifesto of the Militia of America”:

“I ask who are the militia? They consist now of the whole people.” — George Mason, Address to the Virginia Constitution Ratifying Convention, June 4, 1788

Since the beginning of 2017 there have been repeated brutal physical attacks on political supporters of our President as they peacefully assemble to express their political beliefs.

Speaker after speaker has been attacked and driven from the stage at college campuses across the country. Many more speakers have been terrorized into silence.

Thus our most holy civil and political rights are under siege. And the “authorities” do nothing.

The perpetrators of these heinous acts dare call themselves “anti-fascists” or “Antifa” while engaging in just the kind of brutal totalitarian tactics made famous by the fascists of Europe in the last century. As our parents and grandparents defeated those fascists, let us now organize to defeat this new breed of would-be tyrants.

Let the Militia of America leap forth in spontaneous action to defend our most precious rights.

Smash Antifa!

“The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants.”
Thomas Jefferson

Poring though the voluminous online discourse revealed that by late July, there was MOA activity in at least 35 states.

And the MOA appeared well organized. The subreddit included detailed analyses of the firearms laws in every state. Optimal locations for MOA actions, multiple posters pointed out, were states that had “shall issue” concealed carry, open carry, and “stand your ground” laws. Pennsylvania had all three.

There were protocols for videoing any and all actions, for arranging with a sympathetic local lawyer in advance for representation, and for remaining at the scene but invoking the Constitutional right to remain silent.

There was a doctrine — endlessly repeated: to always know and to strictly obey the law. A substantial amount of the online discourse involved the posting of scenarios followed by both tactical and legal analysis by the participants.

The consensus strategy appeared to be for MOA T-shirt clad members, with concealed carry permits and large capacity pistols, to attend rallies and other events that appeared to be likely targets for Antifa attacks.

As the moment of crisis approached, the MOA members were to converge at what looked like the most likely location where the Antifas would attack. They were to deploy into a defensive line and to wait. Simply wait. Without provocation. Remaining silent.

As the Antifa attackers grew close, MOA members were to draw their pistols and yell, “Halt!” If the attackers continued forward, MOA members were to fire and to keep on firing until all the attackers were down.

At Pottstown, the plan was executed almost exactly as it had been written about in the MOA subreddit scenarios.

As the media continued to investigate, they were surprised to find that the MOA, while clearly well organized, wasn’t an organization at all — at least as the media understood organizations.

The movement had no website or domain name. No mailing lists, no post office box. It was not a legal entity. Where the media expected to find the usual tangle of red tape that signifies organizational existence in the 21st century, it found nothing.

MOA was entirely self-organized with what appeared to be only transient, spontaneous leadership as necessary for specific purposes. No permanent “leader” or “leaders” existed. The anonymous user “eegor1789” who’d established the MOA subreddit and who’d posted the Manifesto of the Militia of America disappeared after posting those artifacts and was never heard from in the subreddit again.

Further investigation revealed that since the June Antifa attack on Trump supporters in Oakland, the #moa hashtag had been appearing at an increasing rate in comments in another Reddit subreddit, “The_Donald”, which was a prime organizing venue for Trump supporters. The #moa hashtag was most commonly attached to comments inspired by announcements of upcoming Trump rallies.

When researchers reviewed video footage from the pro-Trump rallies in the earlier weeks of July, they saw only a few MOA T-shirt-clad attendees. But the number of MOA T-shirts at Trump events continued to grow as the month went on. No Antifa attacks occurred at any of those rallies before Pottstown.

In retrospect, an event like the Battle of Pottstown seemed overwhelmingly likely. A growing number of armed, autonomous, and self-mobilizing MOA members were attending Trump rallies, and the next time the Antifas attacked, there would be blood in the streets. But the “where” and the “when” were unpredictable.

In addition to the T-Shirt clad firearms carrying members, the MOA protocols also called for multiple plainclothes MOA members to attend Trump rallies and to make videos. Plainclothes MOA members were to make sure to document what happened as the T-shirted MOA members started forming their defensive lines.

As prescribed in the MOA online protocols, all such videos were immediately turned over to the attorney selected by the shooters. The attorney then released them to the media.

And the videos clearly showed that the Antifas were the aggressors. The videos showed that the MOA members were “standing their ground” within the letter of the law as the attackers grew close. The videos also showed that the MOA gave a final order to “halt”, which was ignored by the Antifas, before the MOA opened fire.

Since the MOA shooters appeared to have acted lawfully under Pennsylvania’s “stand your ground’ law, they were all released the next morning as the investigation continued.

Nearing the Cusp

The Battle of Pottstown drove the country wild.

Many Trump supporters were ecstatic that the Antifa thugs had finally gotten their comeuppance. “It’s about time” was a common sentiment. Page views in the MOA subreddit soared, and the number of post escalated almost exponentially as the #pottstown and #moa hashtags spread. These hashtags initially resonated on “deep red” sites, but they quickly spread across the entire web. The MOA shooters were guests on practically every right-leaning talk radio show. A dozen more pro-Trump Free speech rallies were announced around the country.

At the same time the mass media and the Democrats were outraged. “Another Oklahoma City” was the lead cry. ‘Brown Shirts” said others. The release of the MOA shooters sent large crowds into the streets shouting “No to Fascism”.

On the night of the shooting President Trump had made a neutral statement lamenting the loss of life but counseling waiting for more evidence before saying more.

When the videos from Pottstown were posted later that night and the shooters released the following morning, Trump clearly had to make a stronger statement. This was a decision point for Trump, a cusp.

This Is the Cusp

On one hand, Trump’s family and his New York City-based advisers were advising the President to condemn the MOA, to instruct the FBI to investigate them, and to order the Justice Department to prosecute them for something.

On the other hand, Bannon and most of the Red websites and talk radio hosts were advising the President to side with the MOA as law-abiding defenders of civil rights. They counseled President Trump to describe Pottstown as an unfortunate but justifiable outcome of Antifa’s illegal attacks on civil liberties.

What will Trump decide? Either way, this moment is a critical fork in terms of “what happens next.”

To see what happens next read: Blood in the Streets Part 2: After The Cusp

If you liked this story, consider sharing it in Facebook or Twitter.

It would also be helpful if you would click on the green heart to ‘recommend’ the story to others.

Inspiration for this essay came from Jordan Greenhall’s Situational Assessment 2017.

Thanks! Jim

Blood in the Streets: Red vs Blue was originally published in Rally Point Perspectives on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

When Wired first launched at Macworld in January 1993, Marshall McLuhan (1911–1980) was listed on the masthead as the magazine’s “Patron Saint.” What had Professor McLuhan done to deserve this memetic canonization?

One year earlier, I’d had lunch with publishers Louis Rossetto and Jane Metcalfe at a restaurant facing South Park, around the corner from their office and came home to recommend that CMP Publications Ventures make an investment. (They didn’t.) The couple had just returned from Amsterdam and, no, sainthood wasn’t exactly their first priority.

But they’d liked McLuhan’s The Medium is the Massage: An Inventory of Effects (1967), and as Rossetto noted a decade later, “These were revolutionary times; this was a revolutionary publication. It had to look as jangly and electric as the times.”

Electric? Revolutionary? In 1993? Not quite.

Electricity Wasn’t McLuhan’s Revolution

Electricity had indeed been revolutionary a century before, when Nikola Tesla championed AC, while his rival Thomas Edison promoted the safety of DC by electrocuting dogs on stage with his rival’s shocking currents. Electricity had been revolutionary when Edison devoted himself to designing equipment to communicate with the dead. The entire 20th century had been electric, as reflected in the title of Louis’ previous magazine, “Electric Word.” But electricity was not McLuhan’s revolution, even though he wrote a great deal about it.

When pressed, McLuhan claimed, “Just because I write about something, doesn’t mean that I approve of it.” No, Marshall wasn’t at all electric in his own sensibility. His was a “scribal” approach from a time when books were hand-written and read aloud, inherited from his mother Elsie, a well-known elocutionist — which is why it was so difficult for him write books, and why he so often took co-authors.

Indeed, the book Louis and Jane liked so much hadn’t even been written by McLuhan, as reflected by the fact that his estate collects no royalties from what became the best-selling “McLuhan” montage. The electric design that caught Louis’ eye was someone else’s idea. Yes, those who compiled Massage were electric, and their revolution was the same one that had propelled Bob Guccione’s Caligula (on which Louis had worked.) In a word, it was television.

Night of the Living Memes

Memes were invented in 1976 when Richard Dawkins published his book The Selfish Gene and coined the term to describe “symbolic units of cultural evolution” that were meant to be analogous to the role genes play in biology. Memes were very much a part of the television “revolution” that McLuhan wrote about — perfect for television advertising. Memes are “democratic” and psychographically weaponized: Unlike one-size-fits-all propaganda, you get to choose between Coke or Pepsi. Memes are meaningless and you can’t argue with them. Just like television. Just do it! (Don’t think about it.)

Today, memes are dead. In case anyone still wants to hold onto them, consider the recent controversy over Kendall Jenner’s Pepsi television ad. Within 24 hours, the pushback against Kendall — who, in the ad’s narrative, skipped out on a fashion-shoot to join a protest march — was overwhelming. All of a sudden, meaning mattered enough to derail Pepsi’s attempt to hijack Black Lives Matters (a group that, as it turns out, has just hired its own public relations agency.) Pepsi claimed they were “trying to project a global message of unity, peace and understanding,” but that’s just not working anymore. Today, people are thinking (and worrying) too much for memes, which are uniformly stupid, to exercise much power over the human psyche. We’re no longer living in the “electric” paradigm that Louis was talking about.

To use McLuhan’s own terminology, memes have now become obsolete. By saying this, McLuhan was pointing to a special kind of death, a state in which something is everywhere but is no longer psychologically consequential. Walking dead, if you will. Memes today are like George Romero’s zombies coming to eat our brains, and increasingly, we all recognize this. We are “getting out” and perhaps even being “woke” as we wise up to the end of memes.

McLuhan 101

What many miss about McLuhan is that his entire work was an attempt to understand how technologies have massive pre-conscious psychological effects on those who’ve been habitually using them since childhood. In his landmark Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (1964), McLuhan described this as a process of “shaping our attitudes and behaviors.” His colleague John Culkin, in his A Handful of Postulates (1966), put this as “We shape our tools and, thereafter, they shape us.” McLuhan himself often summarized this understanding in terms of a Gestalt: figure and ground. Without this basic concept, McLuhan cannot be grasped. This is McLuhan 101.

No, this does not make McLuhan a “technological determinist.” That derogatory term is based upon an impoverished view of causality. In fact, McLuhan is widely cited for his comment, “Nothing is determined.” What McLuhan was talking about when he used the word “shaping” was a very different sort of causality. In philosophy, this is called formal cause and, as Marshall’s son and collaborator Eric has insisted, that was all his father ever cared about.

Formal cause has been largely ignored for centuries in the West, highlighting McLuhan’s own intellectual roots in the “scribal” Middle Ages, long before the printing press. McLuhan describes the effects of this in The Gutenberg Galaxy: Making of Typographic Man (1962). In modern terms, formal cause is roughly analogous to “structure” or “environment” or “paradigm.” In psychological terms, formal cause means those technological influences that condition the early-stages of learning, which substantially define the “wiring” of our initially plastic brains.

Yes, in this way McLuhan could be considered the “patron saint” of understanding how we are each “wired” by the invisible technological environment in which we live. Alas, that is not what Louis and Jane meant.

The Inevitable Defeat of Memes

Communicating this notion of the unremitting “invisibility” of technological effects in our lives as they shape us in ways we deliberately refuse to acknowledge was McLuhan’s greatest contribution and — simultaneously — his greatest failure. Perhaps McLuhan should be considered as a breakthrough psychologist instead of as a “media guru.” His times were the same as those of Freud and Jung et al, and, in many ways, his goal was to provoke a widespread recognition of the need to consciously understand patterns that were being constructed in the human pre-conscious mind. Thus: Understanding (the pre-conscious effects of) Media.

In the last decade of his life, after the attention that made him a counterculture icon — and that landed him on Wired’s masthead — had faded, and his Monday Night Seminars were filling up with walk-ins, the McLuhans — father and son — devised their final contribution, which they thought so important that they described it as a “new science.” This was the Tetrad, in which these pre-conscious effects of human technological artifacts were organized into a quartet of simultaneous impacts on the human psyche: Enhance, Obsolesce, Reverse and Retrieve. Unpublished until after his death, the resulting Laws of Media: The New Science remains the most obscure of McLuhan’s works and is often ignored today by McLuhan scholars.

As Wired’s patron saint, Marshall is often credited with predicting the “digital typhoon” the magazine claimed to be writing about. But did he? Buried on page 188 of Laws, unnoticed by most McLuhan scholarship, is what may have been his single greatest observation. Using his Tetrad, McLuhan specified the effects computers have upon us all. In the critical “Retrieve” quadrant (the most fundamental from the psychological standpoint), he wrote “Perfect memory — total and exact.” It is this ability to remember (which computer do to us when we habitually use them), as opposed to the ability to suspend belief over the make-believe of television and similar types of media that marks the end of the effectiveness of memes under digital conditions.

As computer architects know, digital systems are constructed as hierarchies of memories. We experience this every time we access a URL or use the Web’s domain name service — both of which are just abstracted memory addresses. Computers, as it turns out, spend little time “computing.” Instead, at the micro-level, computers are endlessly busy storing and retrieving items from memory locations that were initially found inside the machine but are increasingly found everywhere throughout the world. Totally and exactly: just as McLuhan suggested over 40 years ago.

Digital technology is all about remembering. Thus, digital technology sounded the death knell for make-believe memes. This radical shift in our psychology towards memory was what McLuhan was reaching for as evidenced by his commitment to remembering the basis of Western civilization. With our new digital environment, this process of remembering has now become the ground of our daily experiences. If, as his one-time student Walter Ong suggested, electric media (telegraph, radio, television etc) threw us into a “secondary orality,” then digital technology pushes us towards a “secondary literacy.” We are now living in the digital paradigm.

Therefore, all honors deservedly go to “Saint” Marshall McLuhan, based upon whose insights we are now compelled to understand digital life.

For those who are are interested in discussion, elaboration, and action around these ideas, check out the Facebook Group: Rally Point Alpha and the subreddit: Rally Point Bravo.

Rally Point Alpha: https://www.facebook.com/groups/625210141012983/
Rally Point Bravo: https://www.reddit.com/r/Rally_Point_Bravo/

The End of Memes or McLuhan 101 was originally published in Rally Point Perspectives on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

In internet time, a month is a year (or more). And it was just about a month ago that a friend of mine “liked” a video on Facebook of Danielle Brigoli’s Dr. Phil appearance. Don’t know who Danielle Brigoli is? You may be more familiar with her internet nickname: “Cash Me Ousside Girl.”

I hardly ever see this friend in real life, so I was curious what had piqued his interest.

I watched the video. I was appalled. I was particularly appalled by the fact that it seemed to have generated thousands of “likes.”

And then I forgot about it. And so did everybody else. Presumably the hive mind had moved on to the internet’s next 15-minute insta-celebrity.

Until a few days ago when another friend posted a link to this story: Cash Me Ousside Girl just signed a production deal for her own reality TV series. She just turned fourteen. She’s demanding thousands of dollars for celebrity endorsements. And she’s made a music video that of this writing, has chalked up 29 million views.

“What’s wrong with this country?” my friend raved.

This article is my attempt to answer my friend’s question.

muchanzy on Twitter

🤔🤔🤔 https://t.co/tbqR5Qr1YH

The Problem with Freedom

First of all, my friend is asking the wrong question.

The proper question is, “What’s wrong with this world?”

The Internet insta-celebrity is a global phenomenon. South Korea updates its celebrity websites literally by the second.

Social media, especially YouTube, has changed the celebrity landscape. (One early YouTube celebrity is Justin Bieber.)

YouTube’s celebrity-minting properties have proved so lucrative that the Russians created their own version called RuTube while the Chinese have YouKu.

What fuels this preoccupation with celebrity? One could point to any number of moral, intellectual, or social lapses on the part of human beings. But really, the problem is a much simpler one, and technology is key to it: Technology has freed human beings from the routine demands of existence in ways that were almost unimaginable, even as short a time as 100 years ago. Human beings in the 21st century have practically limitless amounts of leisure time on their hands, and the only thing they can imagine doing with this leisure, this freedom, is to pursue entertainment.

The Problem of Purpose

Todd Alcott on Twitter

Nancy Drew and the Secret of the Missing Fucks:

Understand that this kind of enjoyment, made possible by technology, is a totally new phenomenon. The entertainment we’re pressured into participating in is not the same type of indulgence that the wealthy, powerful, and privileged have historically gloried in as a type of birthright. As children of the 21st century, we are not libertines in any mal du siecle sense. We’re not allowed to be decadent. We’re made to understand that our obligation to enjoy includes certain built-in constraints so that our participation must be “sustainable”. We must drink responsibly. We must gamble responsibly. We must waste responsibly, recycling whenever possible. We must laugh at jokes responsibly and never at jokes with sexist or ethnic slurs. We must have casual sex responsibly with requisite layers of latex in place and concern for our anonymous partner’s orgasm. Our pharmacological excesses must be limited to the use of “harmless” drugs like marijuana.

As Slavoj Zizek has remarked since the 90’s: We are ethical hedonists. This is something quite different from the selfish consumers of the 1950s.

Concerns about sustainability may give us the illusion we have taken some kind of moral stand, but they really don’t ground us in any kind of meaning.

Don’t get me wrong: There’s nothing wrong with enjoyment.

Except that as a species, we have nothing else to do but to enjoy ourselves.

Sawayaka Tasty on Twitter

There are many who do not know they are fascists but will find it out when the time comes

Entertainment as Harmful Fun

Let’s sidebar and talk about entropy for a moment here, shall we? Bear with me. It’s relevant because keeping ourselves endlessly entertained takes energy.

In its simplest sense, entropy can be described as disorder. Entropy is the chaos factor; its properties are famously defined by the Second Law of Thermodynamics. In any dynamic but closed system, over time, energy can only be transferred from an organized to a disorganized state. The higher the entropy of a system, the lower the availability of energy in that system for useful work.

Humans create entropy when humans create deeper states of order. These orders can be religious, technological, bureaucratic or economic. With cloud computing and multiple platforms overlaid upon each other, we create contingent states of data, all of which seem meaningful because the data stratums overlay one another, mirroring applied relationships between humans, finances, government agencies, business corporations. Whether the networks be new media, old media, government, banking or otherwise, the net effect is to maintain the market and disseminate consumer-related info.

So, now we see how convoluted the rabbit hole is, and how deep it can go. But this depth requires the understanding of a context for the complexity system. You need to ask yourself the question, “How far up is the ground?”

The Second Law of Thermodynamics necessarily dictates that the degree of complexity within any system must be simpler than its surrounding environment. Human society cannot be more complex than the global environment. The only homeostasis possible in the long run is for human society to lower its complexity order and/or become the global environment.

In other words, so long as our only purpose is entertainment, we will create a system that destroys our planet’s order. And, inevitably, humanity’s struggle will be broadcast as entertainment.

(For further reading, see Manuel González de Molina and Víctor M. Toledo’s The Social Metabolism.)

failed meme on Twitter

http://t.co/oMxegmPnv5

The most sustainable types of entertainment include voyeuristic experiences like reality TV.

Watch, now, the way the life of a spoiled teenage girl changes when we add vast amounts of money and attention. The results will be equally entertaining whether she trashes the world she lives in or whether she grows into a productive adult.

Scratch that. It’s actually more entertaining if she trashes her life. In that way, Danielle Brigoli is very like another popular reality television star, President Donald Trump.

What’s most troubling about Donald Trump is that with his election, reality TV leaked into the “real” world. The coordinates of that shift are so subtle that even veterans of the reality TV industry are running scared. Understanding Trump’s behavior as a “distraction” is only possible if we assume that his behavior as a reality TV star is manufactured.

The situation is even more complicated by the fact that social media makes us all reality TV stars. We have become the television, and the television has become us. With selfies, vlogs, online diaries, and all the accoutrements of a busy social media presence, “reality TV” is just another phrase for where we are and what we do.

Within the echo chamber of the consumer-advertising-media complex, there was already an enormous amount of pressure for us to look a certain way and to inhabit a certain image. But with the advent of social media, suddenly there’s an audience watching us.

Indeed, InfoSec Taylor Swift, indeed.

Entertainment as Purpose

Believe it or not, a lot of people voted for Donald Trump in the last presidential election because they like train wrecks.

This rationalization? It doesn’t matter who the President is. Every four years, huge amounts of money changes hands; people rally; politicians insult each other; leaders (domestic and foreign) rattle sabers. So fucking what? Nothing really changes except that the electorate becomes exhausted.

But exhaustion breeds nihilism. To an exhausted voter, the President is so far removed — economically, politically, bureaucratically, socially — that nothing is real about the President. If there are riots, protests, angry tweets, then good! These things are very entertaining as long as they remain safely on the other side of the TV screen.

And whether or not you voted for Trump, regardless of what you think of him or his followers, the fact remains that unless you live in a Ted Kaczynski cabin and line your bike helmet with tin foil, you’re gonna see plenty of Trump in the next four years. There will be no escaping his face.

Shane on Twitter

Accurate representation of America right now https://t.co/PNhFiVXe0L

Trump has always been lurking about the corners of the media, even back in the days before the interwebs and social media (web 2.0) were around.

In this way, Danielle Bregoli and Donald Trump, are the same product — one junior-sized and one super-sized — whose real value can be measured in clicks, click-baiting, sharing, LOLs, and the other currencies of attention. For those who have ownership of media distribution channels, currencies of attention translate into real money.

The net effect is much like rubbernecking on the freeway. Rubbernecking is a minor distraction on a participant-by-participant basis, but its cumulative effect has consequences. Rubbernecking leads to traffic jams and more accidents.

Similarly, the internet may seem harmless since we’re separated from it by our phone screen or our computer screen, but the attention it drains from us is released back into the planet in the form of entropy. We may have more information, but we have less sense of what to do with it. We have major difficulties separating out the signal from the noise. And if most everything appears to be noise to us, then it follows it must also be noise to other people.

The End of History

Social media was created by capitalism, and thus operates to further capitalist activity.

As Deleuze and Guattari pointed out in AntiOedipus, capitalism has no exterior limits. Capitalism only has:

interior limits under the specific conditions of capitalist production and circulation, that is, in capital itself, but it functions only by reproducing and widening these limits on an always vaster scale. The strength of capitalism indeed resides in the fact that its axiomatic is never saturated, that it is always capable of adding a new axiom to the previous ones.

While this logic is inherent in the dynamics of capitalism, these dynamics already include the transactional reality of social interconnectivity.

Let’s apply Deleuze and Guattari to the Cash Me Ousside Girl. The normalization of click bait and trolling undermines our relationship with the future because the future depends upon respectful mutual collaboration — which is the very opposite of the types of behavior that elicits clicks and admiration from trolls.

A troubled girl named Danielle Bregoli is about to be rewarded for crass behavior. As part of this process, she sets a behavioral limit that someone else will exceed when we get bored with her — as inevitably, we will. Others will have to top her act to get an equal amount of attention.

Thus in a conservative view of capitalism, society must always appear to be deteriorating as the default norms for acceptable behavior shift. When this happens, a new behavioral boundary emerges as the wheels of capitalism go round. This boundary stands, for a short while, as an example of extreme behavior until it, too becomes a norm.

The sense of disorientation is one that affects us as a group — as a species, if you will.

The economist and political scientist Francis Fukuyama claims that humans have reached the end of history because we can’t develop an alternative to capitalism. I disagree. History may be ending, but it’s not because of our lack of inventiveness where economic models are concerned. History is ending because meaningless consumption and accumulation has become the norm. History is ending because we can’t tear ourselves away from our screens.

Archillect on Twitter

https://t.co/Qo40rixfhO

iIRL

Of course, life seems to be about amusement only because we think it’s about amusement. If we thought life was about love, we’d see everything in terms of love. If we thought life was about family, family would become the conceptual lens.

As lenses go, entertainment is meaningless — by definition: Entertainment is socially isolated — staged — so as to be purposefully removed from reality. We know Game of Thrones isn’t real, so we can view it, watch people be hurt, killed, and have their livelihoods destroyed without real horror. Fictions may extort real emotions but only to a limited degree.

Reality TV is different, though. True, more often than not, reality TV as a show is staged, but its characters are living inside their own realities, with possible spill over into our daily lives. (With President Trump, the “spill over” is increased incalculably because a Presidency is not a scripted show, and has, as a matter of course, far reaching policy/reality changes). In reality TV, complex human interactions are caricatured, diminished into easily digested mimetics that bear the same relationship to reality that Chicken McNuggets bear to Coq au Vin. How can we not expect negotiations between Merkel, Putin and Trump to go a certain way?

As long as we continue to allow ourselves to be titillated we will continue to remain confused. Our curious mammalian brains will continue to be bewildered and thrilled. Our dopamine reward systems have been hacked, and that form of hacking consists of signals purposefully designed to provoke and entice us. Since social media is full of signals, the ones that get the most attention are the ones that hack the hardest. And that’s negative because it’s purposeless behavior that incentivizes ever more purposeless behavior… purposeless because it goes nowhere and ultimately does nothing but drive traffic and create more entropy.

For many trapped — willingly or unwillingly — within this cycle, life seems increasingly meaningless. Not because of modernism or existentialism or neoliberalism or the apocalyptic specter of the atom bomb. Life is meaningless because there is no coherent framework that can help us determine our place in the world.

Problems without easy solutions have no authorities willing to take responsibility for them. As a result, doomsday scenarios and conspiracy theories proliferate, and those, too, become entertainment.

But since we’re all waiting for someone to do something about the future… How about we start a campaign? Brigoli for President in 2040! Hey, she’s got the duckface for it.

And, in the meantime, let’s watch this:

For those who are are interested in discussion, elaboration, and action around these ideas, check out the Facebook Group: Rally Point Alpha and the subreddit: Rally Point Bravo.

Rally Point Alpha: https://www.facebook.com/groups/625210141012983/
Rally Point Bravo: https://www.reddit.com/r/Rally_Point_Bravo/

President Duckface 2040 was originally published in Rally Point Perspectives on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.