Communists, Fascists and Algorithms

A World at the Extremes

Iran is weeks away from achieving a nuclear bomb. We must protect Israel at all costs.

Iran has never been close to such an achievement and has no intention of ever being a nuclear power. Israel is manipulating the west into another regime change war.

You’re a bloodthirsty neocon.

You’re a godless antisemite.

Billions of individual realities constructed by algorithms. Some overlap, some repel each other with great centrifugal force. The algorithm whirls at light speed to feed us narratives that align with our prejudices and shape our worldview. Its presumptions about our one dimensional monkey brains is generally correct. We mindlessly snap the selected anecdotes into our subjective railroad and continue the charge toward oblivion. The train never stops.

We’ve abandoned the objective. It didn’t conform to our desires for a personalized universe. It had flaws that reminded us of our own inadequacies. It challenged our beliefs and often disproved them. The uncertainty made us anxious. The lack of control made us feel powerless. The algorithms gave us the illusion of superiority over ambiguity. They relieved the anxiety of knowing nothing through a superficial sense of total awareness.

But what was the objective world before this? Was it merely a set of master narratives we all agreed upon that formed a common reality? We trusted our media networks to deliver the pieces of absolute truth that defined our perceptions and paved the way forward. We followed the same informational pathway; our compasses were all calibrated to what we were told was true north.

There was a warm tranquility in our uniformity of thought. We traveled through time with blind confidence in a firm understanding of our environment. Geopolitics didn’t concern us. We were the mighty enlightened west; the global torchbearers for human rights. It was a title we earned after liberating the world from Hitler, Mussolini and Tojo (singlehandedly of course, the Russians had nothing to do with it). If we bombed the Koreans, eviscerated the Vietnamese or liquidated Arabs in some hellhole Middle Eastern country then we were indisputably on the right side of an issue that was beyond our comprehension. There were a few stragglers who questioned the validity of the official versions of events, but there was no readily available alternative to reference their instinctual skepticism against. We had to accept the world as it was presented to us or learn to live with our suspicions- there were no other options.

In retrospect we now know many of these master narratives were outright deceptions; pretexts carefully crafted by intelligence community think tanks and disseminated by legacy media networks. Much of what carried us into the 21st century was a lie; the age old story of a universal mission to spread American democratic values that masked a hegemonic war machine sponsoring coups, revolutions and mass exterminations in countries with the unfortunate circumstance of having something the United States and its allies thought valuable. The American dream was largely fueled by the destruction of poorer nations. It was a realization that was difficult to reconcile with the illusion we knew.

9/11 was the catalyst. It was supposed to be a routine scenario: bad guys attack America, America kills the bad guys; incinerate Iraq, get Sadam, flatten Afghanistan, get bin Laden, plant puppet governments, steal resources, build a few Walmarts, declare victory, ‘Murica. But it didn't go that way. From the moment twin passenger jets slammed into the World Trade Center the suspicions that had long plagued cynical observers returned with a sonic boom- and this time there was a mechanism for discovering and distributing information.

The internet- though still in its infancy- became a boiling pot for bloggers and amateur documentarians. The yellow cake/weapons of mass destruction conspiracy was taken apart immediately, the Sadam-bin Laden connection was severed instantly, Haliburton’s no-bid contracts were public knowledge seconds after the ink dried; the sequel to Desert Storm was the most reviled war in recent memory before the first bombers left the tarmac.

That era gave us Julian Assange, Glenn Greenwald, Matt Taibbi and a load of other renegade journalists tossing hand grenades into false pretenses.

The Bush administration had no idea how prolific the information stream could be. To them the internet was just a passing fad. Their illegal invasions would be background noise in months. They followed the same war-profiteering game plan as their predecessors- with heavy doses of torture and unlawful imprisonment mixed in for emphasis- under the expectation that the media would steer the narrative and pacify the American public. They never anticipated the prevalence of independent writers who took to Wordpress pages and disassembled their facade with such veracity that eventually left wing media outlets were forced to pivot and join in their dismantling. It was a miscalculation that eroded trust in the American project and exposed the inner workings of the neoconservative deep state.

In the years since the independent voices multiplied by millions. Legacy media took a fiery nosedive in the gap between the woke cultural revolution and Covid-19. The floating heads replaced the talking heads and with it alarmism became our main method of communication. The social media landscape is a tunnel of wailing banshees competing for the attention of a delirious audience wired on rage and fear. The most urgent shrieks of impending catastrophe capture the doom consumers until a louder death siren roars and draws them away.

Billions of individual realities defying the laws of physics; bubbles frenetically zipping around the boiling pot. News networks editorialized their reporting in an effort to wrestle back control over the messaging but it was too late- the floating heads had already mastered the art of hyperbolic sensationalism. World events are condensed into ninety second clips and shared without context. Commentators conveniently trim out the facts that don't support whichever stories their commentary is trying to weave. Much is left to interpretation with the intent to lead viewers into drawing a conclusion that is inferred but isn't stated, or stated but driven by agenda. This is how populations are radicalized and political ideologies develop into religious cults: through distortions designed to invoke an emotional response that compels their targets to whip the narratives back into their echo chambers with their own interpretive spin; boomerangs gaining speed with every revolution, amplified by algorithms. The end result is a hall of mirrors effect where every version of the same event is slightly altered, making it impossible to discern what's real from what isn't.

There's no doubt we're better off today than we were when intelligence propaganda was broadcasted into our living rooms on a nightly basis. The question now is, how do we co-exist without common ground? Jordan Peterson famously diagnosed the woke revolution as postmodern neomarxism. Now the postmodern element appears to have penetrated everything in what's become a “choose your own adventure” universe. When left to our own devices we propelled each other to extremes. We accused each other of being communists and fascists until we became communists and fascists. Maybe we need a return to some sort of central axiom we can all follow; something outside of ourselves that we can view as a higher authority; something that represents beauty and peace and humanity’s true potential:

We need God.