Digital Imperialism

Revolutions, Rackets, and Ratchets

Some of my older readers and listeners may remember what the trenches of the culture war looked like 25 years ago. I have faint memories prior to 9/11 that one of the bigger issues President Bush took on was the question of fetal stem cells being used in medical research, and his pro-life position wanting to ban it. I know it was reversed ten years later in 2011 or so with Barack Obama’s administration. Will and Grace was still on the air, normalizing a more polite, softer image of homosexuality in the United States. Even then, there’s the backdrop of the free trade protests, The Battle of Seattle and the rest, and Pat Buchanan’s political career was finally over despite decades of being a Cassandra figure for the United States.

I was in college when Obergefell v. Hodges was ruled, I was in high school when the titular “Obamacare” was upheld by the Supreme Court in 2012. These things feel like ancient history when your perception of time is warped by an always-in-flux media stimuli machine that comes with being online. This was a time before I was on Twitter, when I would consider myself a classical liberal or a libertarian, long before I was concerned with the issues that are at the forefront of random anon and White House staffer alike. Politics, formulated abstractions based on our encounters with reality become more extended and distended as we engage in the broader cultural battles of our time. Signal amplification of these political beliefs, give us excuse to reduce those we’re arguing with or railing against as nothing more than dehumanized radar blips or incoming replies to shoot down like it’s Atari’s Missile Command.

When your political horizons are extended to a degree that you’ve become deracinated to the issues that affect your day to day life (the potholes, the bond votes on your school, etc.,) one’s worldview can be overdrawn to a point where the mental capacity of an individual reaches a certain “loading distance” causing psychological strain on one’s neural hardware. The great writer Egg Report writes on this in his recent essay, “The Act of Reading: Literacy and Alienation.”

Mass literate society is a society ruled by neurosis. This is not by accident, but is baked right in. The feeling you get from first being literate, the opening up of the world, is a mirage. What is actually physically happening is that you are taking a step further inside yourself, not one "into" the world. It opens doors to doubts: you can now second guess the world, and yourself. You don't actually get more privileged access to reality and truth, you paradoxically get less, you become aware of your lack of access. The room provided by the expansion from a flat 2d universe to a 3d one, is room for doubt. Doubt is what fills out the space and creates the sensation of depth.

Thus literate man doubts himself and questions the world. He has taken a step inside himself and is alienated from the world. His access to the world has been neuroticised. Now from here you can go on the whole Jordan Peterson Pinocchio hero's journey and "return from the underworld" of your own mind, with magical gifts and powers, and return to the immediacy of reality. But this is not an automatic process, which occurs as long as any one person can read a street sign or sign his name. It requires deliberate effort and choice, and in most practical cases, guidance. He must become post-literate: that is, gain an understanding of the literate process.

I’m usually not a man akin to machine reductionist when it comes to these comparisons, but I find it pertinent when realizing that so much brainpower is given to draw these elaborate parafictional worlds that define so many camps, factions, and gangs of online politics. We never have a complete worldview or complete frame of reference, which most of the time is not necessary as first principles can lead one to ask the basic questions of how does this affect me or my particular faction, running on the logical conclusions one might draw with some degree of openness depending on the person.

Social revolutions, the unshackling of prior bonds of social and cultural norms isn’t just rebellion of the established norms themselves but also a reestablishment of new hierarchies and orders, sometimes inverted sometimes in complete new directions. Reactionary attempts to reassert the old order are their most successful when the living upper classes are still alive, or the memory of the before times are still very much a living memory and there is a force capable of resisting, overthrowing and capable of rule. There’s a tendency of ghost dancing, or LARPing as some might call it, when trying to harken back to the golden days of what was in the hopes that it would give one power to endure today. On one hand, it should be inspiring to look back on what was and to tell yourself that you wish to endure to achieve that greatness or at the very least restore it akin to Justinian or The Order of Santiago. While some may construe this as a liberal argument, Ernest Renan was right to say that a nation is built upon the greatness of its ancestors and we should look to them and avoid defeatism.

However with modern revolutions, social especially, we’ve yet to see State Collapse take place in places like France, the United States, or even Spain despite the many changes to demography, the riots, and general trend of social unease. The State is powerful and an effective mediator of social change usually by being the one subsidizing it or outright endorsing it. The last 250 years have been a period filled with all kinds of revolutions, although those revolutions have certainly changed since the United States took up arms or when the Bolsheviks decided to martyr the Royal Family. So many of our revolutions are primarily social ones, in which the procedures of the law, culture, religion, social technics of institutions, are used to institute changes often wear these once established and esteemed institutions as skinsuits advocating for their own agendas. This is in part, especially in the last thirty years of computer mediated communication have the communication mediums of empire been refined, sharpened, and used daily whether we think about it or not. Borrowing from the late media and communications theorist Harold Innis, we need to look at what exactly are forms of Imperial Communication.