The Death of the Empire Through The Lens of Social Media
Morning Comrades.
I have been thinking a lot about what topics to tackle this week and there are heaps but with reality being what it is, I haven’t found the energy nor time just yet, and yet being the key word here to really dig into them, particularly Sri Lanka, but I am on it. As it so often happens today’s little thought storm happened during my day shift: Social Media, but rather than venting about the platforms toxicity, a few more philosophical thoughts.
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The Death of the Empire Through The Lens of Social Media
We all know Social Media is broken beyond words. Whatever purposes apps and platforms such as Instagram, especially IG actually, Youtube, Twitter and co - no one uses FB anymore right? - used to have no longer exist. It is without a doubt that the early days, around 12 years ago now for IG, were fun and useful, both on a personal and “professional” level. Hell, the majority of your readers are here because you follow me on IG but most likely never see whatever shit I post on there anymore. For today, I don’t want to beat a dead horse and complain about the clusterfuck that these sites have turned into, on purpose, by Zuckerberg and his merry band of sociopathic ghouls - I don’t want to talk about so-called shadow bans or how to beat them because let’s face it, IG and co are dead and useless for anything other than rotting your brain. To be sure, I am on there and guilty of letting them manipulate my own perception of reality but increasingly less so, which has been lovely and healthy for the own state of mind.
No, rather than beating said dead horse like some petulant pseudo micro-influencer who has had his toy taken away from them I have been thinking about these platforms as a reflection of the dying empires that we all mostly exist in. It’s one thing for these platforms to mine your data to sell advertising, we all know about and mostly grudgingly accepted that reality. Shit started getting real around ten years ago when your data, and the billions of other data sets not only became more valuable than oil, literally, but more so when we were made aware of the capabilities to change the world with said data via the Cambridge Analytica Scandal - not only referring to Trump, Brexit but most definitely the genocide in Myanmar also. Things got even wilder when Shoshana Zuboff wrote her monumental book on surveillance capitalism that also resulted in a very watchable and noteworthy documentary.
Even earlier than these revelations and understandings, we had clear statements from the top NATO countries admitting that they were manipulating “the narrative” i.e. the collective stories we humans share to build our realities, for their own purposes.
Again, none of this is really news but illustrates the fact that “social media” and the “internet”- something that most people understand simply as “google” aren’t what we think they are. Plainly speaking these companies, like all others, exist to make money. Oddly enough, and despite their size, the majority of these Silicon Valley companies still pay heed to the US and NATO governments - obviously, if they truly were ever a threat to their population control, and I’ll get to that in a hot second, they would be nationalized and/ or shut down. Meaning, that other than money, these companies and their owners are inherently bound not only to money but power, and yes, governments “still” hold more power than Facebook, Google etc - because, armies.
So what happens when the power and inadvertently, the governments money is threatened? The same playbook gets opened that always gets opened when the system that supplies power gets threatened ( mostly by internal factors but occasionally even by external factors ) - external enemies get created, the narrative gets controlled and the population that supplies the fuel for these empires gets manipulated into submission.
Judging by this playbook alone, our empires are much steadier, radical decline than I believe we all want to face. In regards to social media, that acts both as a conduit for narrative and population control the screws on their function have been screwed so tightly by the NATO governments that make the Patriot Act after 9/11 look like a children’s colouring book. Not only is ALL of you data, this does includes this text for example, but all your DM’s, all your movement, history, “secret” chats on dischord etc readily available to our respective governments Disinformation has become a central tool in the United States information war. US officials have openly admitted to “using information as a weapon even when the confidence and accuracy of the information wasn’t high,” with corporate media eager to assist Washington in its strategy to control their narrative, i.e.: we good, them bad, shut up, starve and take it.
Dissent, a central tool in any healthy democracy - not that we have seen one here in the Empire in our life time, is now not only disturbed via said shadow bans etc ( still not convinced these are real as a individual target tactic to be honest ) but more importantly by the demonetisation and deletion of critical voices of the official narrative. This happens more often on the socialist/anarchist/communist side of the spectrum - remember when paypal shut down my account and kept our mutual aid funds because I sold an antifa t-shirt for example - but also, clearly on the other side of the spectrum. This level of censorship obviously isn’t anything new, if you look at any critical stage of any empire, dissenting voices were always silenced, usually killed in the past, but the way that these social media companies work hand in hand with our governments is new. So is their power but if anything this symbiotic realtionship between the powerful and their ever increasing fascist tactics in regards to dissent are, if anything, indicative of the trouble these empires are in. Essentially, just throwing their adage of “if nothing is wrong, why are you hiding anything” back in their fat, corrupt, ugly faces.
This is just the beginning of their end and the above mentioned screws will continue to be screwed tighter. “Freedom” has always been nothing more than a buzzword to sell whatever fuckery they have been up to in the past but as far as I am concerned we can kiss whatever perceived freedoms we think we have good bye over the next decade and the way that social media acts, both against us and what they show, is probably your best indicator of deep the shit hole is. A thermometer of decline if you so will.
Food for thought.
Thank you for your time, attention and support as always. I’ll be back here tomorrow for the weekly patreon-only dispatch and on Friday for everyone. Yours, without compromise,
V.