The War You Need To Win
I was talking with some friends yesterday, (who shall remain unnamed on account of the fact I don’t even know if they have internet-facing profiles I can link to anymore,) about legacy, the current social malaise and how to fix things.
In the little group chat I’m in, there are YouTube guys, photographers, writers, tech guys, and so on. It’s pretty typical faire for an online social group that came out of the proto-Red Pill movement of the 2010s.
And the other day, I logged into Twitter for the first time in ages in order to wish a friend Happy Birthday, and all over there; people are saying, “The algorithm* is making it harder.”
In fact, it’s a pretty universal; we’re awash in addictive algorithm content and there’s not a lot we can do about the meta-fact of that; everyone’s eyeballs are captured by scrollbait technology. When people aren’t trying to either find more CCP weaponised butt cheeks or quickly scroll past them, they’re busy Chicken-Littleing the latest Sky is Falling political story. **
So what do we do?
*: “The algorithm is a misunderstanding of how things work that’s quickly turning into an omniscient Elder God.
**: When I started writing the blog again, I made a quip about World War III beginning, making reference to global events bringing us to the alleged Brink Of War. Today, World War III is also about to begin based on entirely different events in a different area for a different reason.
Background: The War On The Imaginal
I’ve written somewhere else, and I can’t remember where; we’re in a war for the Imaginal.
It’s a Cold War using Cold War tech; the war you need concern yourself with most at the moment is the fact that various parties are trying to control what you believe, and between the psychological, biological and technological theatres of war, they’re very good at it.
I’ll write about this more in future updates, but we’ll get to the point of the article with haste:
You don’t win the War for people’s imaginations by a) doing the same stuff over and over, and b) pointing out that you’re under attack.
Most things fall into either of those two camps, at the moment.
The algorithm hates you because you’re human? You won’t fix it by complaining.
Your ability to attract and retain new followers* is diminishing? Time to switch off your post rescheduler because if resharing the same content the first four times didn’t yield the results you hoped for, neither will lucky number five.
What To Do?
Try Something New!
Recently, I’ve been thinking a lot about legacy. Don’t buy me a zimmerframe just yet, but I’ve hit an age where older people die, (sometimes not-so older people too,) new people are born, and it’s all a bit Rafiki-holding-up-Simba/Simba’s Kid-while-all-the-animals-sing-and-bow.
Ultimately, humans are narrative creatures; sure, there’s physical materialism, the bones and sinew and the inert matter comprised of chemicals that make up us and the food we eat and the ground we walk on. However, it takes a particular kind of simpleton to not recognise that the absolute majority of human experience isn’t that.
The root of the rest of it lies in narrative choices spiralling into infinity. Hence, at the beginning there was God and the Word.
Or the death of a giant cow.
Or a giant turtle dreaming everything into existence.
You understand the analogies, and that’s sort-of the point.
To bring us back into the modern day; if you feel as though you’re losing the battle with the algorithms, the archons and the cognitive warmongers, then the solution is manifest in the problem.
Think hard about the stories you’re being told, that you’re telling yourself, and that you’re telling others.
And I’ll be back soon to elaborate.