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[spectrums]

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Comments

[cryptkeeper17]

This is going to sound crazy, but it is almost like Trump has some kind of supernatural force field around him. Those who enter the circle are safe "within the eye of the hurricane." But when you step out just a little you get absolutely destroyed and lose everything. Steve Bannon to me right now almost reminds me more of King Solomon right now, reading the public sentiment to absolute perfection while guiding Trump through the election, then inexplicably losing his mind. Your thoughts? Great post @spectrums!

[spectrums]

Thank you for the kind words and engaged commentary, @cryptkeeper17.

And you think you’re crazy? I really do think that the most accurate way to describe Trumpism is a hologram. Seriously. I wrote on this elsewhere:

Stanford physicist and leading string theorist Leonard Susskind, in meme-worthy fashion, calls this “hot bit soup,” —the view of a black hole. I want to clarify that the black hole, now under Trumpism, is fascism. This is how this politics has always historically manifest in the flesh in the “free world.” Fascism is an outward expression of mass psychosis, and when it goes viral, the memes zombify the people who make up the domestic population of a nation. All black holes are holograms. In his groundbreaking 2000 lecture at the Spinoza Institute in Utrecht, and in an article published with the title "The Holographic Principle," Gerard 't Hooft concludes with this gorgeous line: "This is what we found out about Nature's book keeping system: the data can be written onto a surface, and the pen with which the data are written has a finite size."

Traditional social media and web 2.0 is a cauldron of hot bit soup, and the meat is Trumpism. It’s a mess all of our most intimate bits—statuses about new jobs or lost ones, Tweets into the ether of our most private and compulsive “hot takes” on what’s going on around us (off and online), Google searches of things once only said to priests in confession, and the like. All of our bits appear in Trumpism, but in bad faith, scrambled and distorted.

So, if all holograms are by definition black holes—information scrambled, suspended in entropy until it is decoded/projected again outside of the “event horizon”—then your hunch is pretty much squared with my own thoughts :)

[cryptkeeper17]

I'll leave the theoretical existentialism to those of you who can back up with coherent thought, which I certainly cannot. I disagree with talk that his is more facist agenda than the current status quo. I think a lot of what he is doing is placing more of our daily transactions and decisions in the hands of the free public market place, like the one we are having a conversation in right now. The tax cut that was passed had a ton of perks for small business, of which I think he is very much more of a champion for smallest business development than the largest public, pro-government stalwarts. I am by NO MEANS a Trump groupie, apologist, maybe that's why my comment earlier hits me like a ton of bricks. I have seen this guy have gaffe after gaffe coming out unharmed, even strengthened by it. Funny, I can't even come up with a kook conspiracy theory to explain it. Thanks for the great conversation, I wasn't counting on having this one when I woke up this morning. Keep up the great work @spectrums!

[spectrums]

Like so many others—I can't resist!—I'm hard at work on a review/contextualization Michael Wolff's book Fire and Fury; that post should put all of this further into context.