Pony, I fear we’ll end up in an infinite regress talking about the issues of relative valuation between reality and simulation and simulacra. The procession of them is I suppose evolutionary in nature, though it goes forward with time and entropy and becomes more complex it is not necessarily better, rather it is simply continually fit to the condition of the world. We can always look back and find hyperreality that way, and it’s comforting to know I can’t somehow ‘leave.’ Primitivists and Uncle Ted just have an evil doppelganger of them that stalks in the mediated world.
I wanted to ask about two things today.
The first was the strange and mindbending nature of the war coverage I follow. I follow a couple of OSINT channels on X, this open source intelligence phenomena is now two wars old roughly and is quite interesting to see especially in terms of its mediation and the relation of it to events and its own consequence politically. Bellingcat you’ve likely heard of, one I follow most for war updates is some Singaporean guy named Defense Politics Asia. I think his English given name is Wyatt. Clever guy, understands military strategy seemingly, and is more or less liveblogging the war as a grand strategy game, day by day documenting the frontline changes and assessing the veracity of the claims of both Ukraine (daily updates) and Russia (weekly updates) against social media posts and geolocation of troops from posted video or assessment from drone strike footage shared to social media. It’s a fairly complicated operation, but basically it appears to be a guy streaming a lot about the war and making a lot of videos of him interacting with a google maps overlay and explaining the relative strategic value of different cities and regions. There are a lot of these channels with Russian or Ukrainian or neutral stances, different tones and audiences. Some follow
On the one hand, yes, this is just independent journalism in a new media environment. On the other--what the hell are FPV drone strike videos getting out on the Internet so often for? What are propaganda departments up to? The geolocations, the daily updates, there is seemingly a weird desire by states to invest as much effort as possible in the media war. Presumably Russia must keep its fans going with something, and Ukraine is courting potential investors with its cool videos of how great NATO equipment is I suppose. But what is this media war’s actual relationship to the conduct of the war, it’s second or third hand news at best distributed to groups of people who have no relevance to the affair. Why should either military really bother with hyperwar?
The other thing I wanted to ask about was the satisfactoriness of accepting the dumb surface world in front of you. I know a man in Chicago, I have been in his house many times, you’ve seen it, tacky, awful. He’s got a nice family--he works for the city, his wife is a professor, their kid is half gay and half trans, they’ve got a cute dog and, like I said, an ugly townhouse.
It’s really fucking ugly. The first thing you notice upon going in is how fucking tasteless these people are. There is a distinctly political smack to their decoration--there is a distinctive centering of marginalized people, but it is a centering of strange looking and viscerally unappealing naive art. As you keep looking, slogans start to emerge. A spinner on the fridge where the spinner says FUCK and of its many stops 3 say TRUMP and 1 says WHITE PEOPLE. They are white. They’re white party creatures, specifically lefty DSA type party creatures--fridge magnets of Lori Lightfoot, buttons stuck in the wood frame of the bathroom vanity mirror with quotes from Malcolm X like “"You can't operate a capitalistic system unless you are vulturistic; you have to have someone else's blood to suck to be a Capitalist.” and “I’m with Her--So my daughter knows a woman can be president,” you know from when. They don’t have a daughter. In 2016 their kid would have been 3, who is a natal boy. The husband has a lame band that practices in the basement. The library is full of gender identity workbooks, and they’re vegan. They’re also really quite nice people if you can suppress the sharp instinct to shake them until they love beauty and hate these lame self-defeating ideologies.
From the perspective of social utility, these people are certainly having a suboptimal number of kids, and maybe even conditioning the one kid away from reproduction or even normal sexual maturity. I am not on board with the trans kid thing, but that’s not really my business. Besides that, they’re lazy homeowners, but I can’t really say they’re losing from a position of individual happiness and fulfillment. Their lives probably aren’t perfect, but they appear to have dialed in to the right frequency, they’ve got a house, decent jobs, professional success, a kid, a dog, hobbies. They’re kicking the asses of a lot of people, while being absolutely 1000% bluepilled, they are in the hyperreality, they are mainlining the mainstream and seem silly, but nice. And at this point, they’re silly enough where I wonder if they need a world where they see the nature of simulation around them and it makes a difference. What does consciousness of hyperreality get you when snoozing seems to work out well enough for some people?