Bonus Thoughts on the Culture of Spectacle: Flooding the Zone
In the pursuit of a frictionless world, the gaslight burns bright and fascism takes flight.
T.V. it
Satellite links
Our United States of Unconsciousness
Apathetic therapeutic and extremely addictive
The methadone metronome pumping out
150 channels 24 hours a day
You can flip through all of them
And still there's nothing worth watching
T.V. is the reason why less than 10 per cent of our
Nation reads books daily
Why most people think Central America
Means Kansas
Socialism means un-American
And Apartheid is a new headache remedy
Absorbed in it's world it's so hard to find us
It shapes our mind the most
Maybe the mother of our Nation
Should remind us
That we're sitting too close to...
—Disposable Heroes of Hiphoprisy, first verse of the song Television, the Drug of the Nation
Ah, 1992. Back when the shitstorm was a teen and the internet was a baby.
Michael Franti’s Disposable Heroes of Hiphoprisy isn’t well known. There was only one album released in 1992: Hypocrisy is Our Greatest Luxury.
Franti could only muse on the beasts before him, and at the time television ruled. Yet his observations remain evergreen, translating directly to the dazzling spectacle the algorithmic internet has become.
In 1992, radio was still a powerful vector, too.
After landing a spot in 1984 on news station KFBK (in my hometown of Sacramento, CA.), Rush Limbaugh’s star was burning bright. Thanks to Ronald Reagan’s killing of the fairness doctrine, Rush’s zone of shit became well established and kept spreading on AM radio waves…and into ignorant ears hungry to find a home for their resentments and fears.
Rush understood the power of spectacle, maximizing controversial rhetoric, including conspiracy theories and vicious divisiveness, with bombastic delivery to monetize infamy and further political agendas.
As you know, things have gotten so much worse.
Dickfinity
I burned all my bridges to social media years ago because I didn’t like what it was doing to me. And watching what it was doing to others was disturbing. Their shadows grew obvious. Reason had no place. It was all reaction. Delusion flourished. Artifice ruled.
When I joined Substack, Notes hadn’t been released yet. I was still apprehensive. Once Notes was announced, I figured it would only be a matter of time before the trolls emerged. As I watched Twitter burn in the news, I figured they would be migrating (it’s no fun when your haunt is all trolls), searching for new lands to spread their zones of reactionary shit.
They have arrived.
Trolls teach you pretty fast that picking up the sword only feeds them. And once you feed one, the rest come running. But I can’t always be on the top of my game. One hooked me and the race to dickfinity was on.
Professional troll, shit-stirrer, and muckraker, Christopher Brunet threw out his hook on a Notes post of a writer that I follow, bashing Greta Thunberg and mocking climate disruption. I took the bait. The psychic vampires swarmed. I should have known better, but you know, I’m human.
His comment was so obviously, purposely divisive, I thought I’d do a low-key callout and call it a day. What a fool I am.
The backlash came hot and fast, from a whole group. I can’t say for a fact, but it felt a bit orchestrated. The common theme they share is the anti-woke agenda. Lots of crossover into anti-trans rhetoric, climate denialism, and anti-vax realms.
You know, the manufactured culture war circle of hell. Fun.
Some of the nobody-trolls have “hundreds” and “thousands” of subscribers despite only having posts going back six month or less, with no prior platforms that I could find. Hidden identities are common in this realm. Brunet has a large following, but it makes sense since he’s been cultivating his corner of the right wing faux outrage machine for years on other platforms. All of it is a flaming red flag.
This became apparent after I searched his name. An article from the New Yorker gave me all I needed to know about his background, character, and motivations.
Per the article, the American Accountability Foundation is a conservative dark-money group created in 2020 to foment political discord. They are funding who knows how many professional trolls to “flood the zone” with shit-spectacles, throwing up straw men and attracting useful fools. Are they funding Brunet? No idea. But I wouldn’t be surprised.
I blocked them all. But not before I breached Level 2 of dickfinity.
Weapons of Mass Enshittification
I do not identify with our political system. What identifies as the “right” has turned necrotic and plunged into fascism, and the “left” lost its soul to neoliberalism and its technocratic delusions. We’re all sliding towards doom.
Physics remains immune to the stories we tell, intentional or otherwise.
I vote for the lesser evil, but it’s only a stopgap to keep the worst at bay. It’s not been very effective. We desperately need new stories of meaning.
The rise of Trump inspired new strategies of Flooding the Zone. It’s a never ending spectacle of shameless infamy that overwhelms the beholder: stir shit, blow smoke, hurl insults and cheap shots, purposely twist words, deny, reflect said criticisms back on the observer…just keep dropping vile bombs, fear-monger, attack without restraint, lie constantly and distort every interaction.
You don’t have to be intellectually subversive. You can fly your satanic aims in plain view. Full-blown idiocy works wonders.
MISINFORM. DISINFORM. DISTRACT. ATTACK. FLOOD ALL THE ZONES. TURN EVERYTHING TO SHIT.
All the while, make the money. Do the crimes.
There’s definitely a well funded “anti-woke” agenda at work, stirring the pot with bad-faith rhetoric and intentional false equivalencies to sow chaos and to channel misplaced rage/fear through pandering to the ignorant. All of it magnifies reach.
The stuff is infernally contagious, and they know it.
No doubt our latest bad miracle, “A.I.” will be leveraged to escalate the process, just as the as-is internet has been manipulated to stoke flames higher. It probably is already. Can you imagine an internet infested with never-sleeping, omnipresent shit factories? It’s coming. And it will make today seem like 1992.
The feedback loop intensifies. All dials to 11.
In the 1970's
The OPEC nations began to dominate
The world's oil economy
In the 1980's
Japan became the world's
Number one economic power
In 1989 the nations of Eastern Europe
Attempted to restructure
While in the United States civil rights have
Collapsed at the hands of fundamentalists
And national insecurity's at an all time high
Exxon and on and on and on
The ministers of double speak
New meaning of clean they tried to teach us
They staged the phoney shampoo of the Valdez greases
Completely Jheri curled the beaches
Pipe bomb for the NAACP
And a hit on Salman Rushdie, the Berlin Wall comes down
And the U.S. cracks down on illegal aliens
Ban the freedom of choice for those wanting abortion
And enforce capitol punishment
Twenty four hour radio ban
For indecency determined by the F.U.C.C
Why are we so anesthetized to the lies?
Because we do it in our own lives
We believe all the things that we want to hear
But then we also love to criticize
—Disposable Heroes of Hiphoprisy, first verse of the song Satanic Reverse