The image above was made with stable diffusion.'
My job for many years has been summarizing news reports about high level corruption in business and government. In this capacity, I watched media messaging change significantly in 2014-2016, then change again even more dramatically during COVID. Today we have blue news and red news, each presenting different and mutually exclusive versions of reality to their respective audiences. There are now blue facts and red facts, and neither type of fact bears much resemblance to the actual truth in its proper context.
Rachel Maddow has argued that our Director of National Intelligence is a Russian asset. More recently, the blue elite began literally all reading from the same script in much the same way as major news networks have been synchronizing their messaging. For all intents and purposes, this group lives in a different world from the world inhabited by their opponents, who are immersed in their own dubious programming.
In the abstract, the situation has become very postmodern. The factual itself is in question, with red facts and blue facts competing with each other for social power. The underlying truth has become largely irrelevant. What feels relevant to us is whatever our programming tells us to pay attention to.
All the world's a stage,
And all the men and women merely players;
They have their exits and their entrances;
And one man in his time plays many parts
The American public is rarely presented with the truth about the dark machinations of power. Sometimes, we get a glimpse. Wikileaks. Epstein. The intelligence community's bizarre attempt to pass Hunter Biden's laptop off as Russia disinformation. The revelation that the US was funding the risky research that probably produced the global pandemic that killed millions.
These things are shocking, but they don't necessarily feel relevant. It isn't clear how exactly they relate to our lives. The economic big squeeze we're all dealing with is much more immediate. If we had any sense at all, we'd be demanding answers about the wholesale theft of our purchasing power.
After all, two-thirds of all new wealth created since the pandemic has been captured by the 1% and big business has sucked an extra trillion dollars out of our wallets since 2021. Rampant price gouging has become the norm. These things aren't secrets. They're happening right in front of us. And we're ignoring them because our programming tells us to focus exclusively on personality and identity drama.
Our esteemed president is running the country like it's a reality tv show. Trump and his team of maverick reformers are pushing for major changes. Some of these changes are good and some are obviously terrible, but they are all sensational. Their importance to the control regime lies primarily in their theatrical value.
Instead of addressing the causes of our problems, we're programmed to misidentify those problems and then blame the other party for them. Instead of uniting to reclaim all of the value that's been siphoned out of our lives in recent years, we're programmed to compete with each other for resources that have made artificially scarce. To scapegoat some celebrities for our difficulties and blindly trust other celebrities to fight for our interests.
Meanwhile, behind the scenes, there seem to be two factions of the regime competing for dominance. The legacy faction is being overtaken by the Big Tech faction and this transfer of power is starting to get messy. As the technological transformation of the total economy ramps up, things are just going to get weirder and weirder. We're probably looking at millions of job losses and maybe some serious civil unrest in the next few years.
We Can Feel It Coming
Most us are on some level aware that society is becoming sharply less stable. There are many socially acceptable ways to express our discomfort with this and none of these meaningfully address the problems giving rise to the discomfort. Right now there are vast numbers of people walking around stressed to the max over media portrayals of the political situation. They can see the storm coming, but they believe that this storm has to do with celebrity drama, because that's what they've been told to believe.
Many of the people carrying this stress aren't even aware that they're carrying it. At scale, this introduces more friction into everything, which makes everything more frustrating, compounding the problem. When you add in all of the bold action Americans love so much, you end up with a thousand kinds of chaos erupting all throughout the total system. It may be tempting to succumb to the chaos, but I'm hoping most of us learn to dance with it instead.
Read Free Mind Gazette on Substack
Read my novels:
- Small Gods of Time Travel is available as a web book on IPFS and as a 41 piece Tezos NFT collection on Objkt.
- The Paradise Anomaly is available in print via Blurb and for Kindle on Amazon.
- Psychic Avalanche is available in print via Blurb and for Kindle on Amazon.
- One Man Embassy is available in print via Blurb and for Kindle on Amazon.
- Flying Saucer Shenanigans is available in print via Blurb and for Kindle on Amazon.
- Rainbow Lullaby is available in print via Blurb and for Kindle on Amazon.
- The Ostermann Method is available in print via Blurb and for Kindle on Amazon.
- Blue Dragon Mississippi is available in print via Blurb and for Kindle on Amazon.
See my NFTs:
- Small Gods of Time Travel is a 41 piece Tezos NFT collection on Objkt that goes with my book by the same name.
- History and the Machine is a 20 piece Tezos NFT collection on Objkt based on my series of oil paintings of interesting people from history.
- Artifacts of Mind Control is a 15 piece Tezos NFT collection on Objkt based on declassified CIA documents from the MKULTRA program.
I think the state of the press today is similar in some respects to how it was in the early days of the republic. I mean John Adams was throwing newspaper editors in jail for sedition. As contentions as things are today, it has been worse.
As far as Trump, I think he does what he thinks is best, particularly on economic issues. That doesn't mean he is always right but I don't think he has a hidden agenda. Tariffs are a bad idea (but he may just be using the threat as a negotiating tactic) and some of the cuts have been a bit heavy handed but I don't think the alternative of the status quo was better. There needed to be a serious reckoning with regards to government bloat.
As far as tech and jobs, until we get to star trek levels with replicators, I'm not sure it's going to make as big a difference as some people think. That's been the threat since the steam shovel replaced men with shovels (and probably before).
Thanks for the thoughtful comment. Yes, a look at history quickly reveals that things have been worse and we're not so special. My sense of Trump is that he's more interested in actually helping than he was in his first term, particularly after getting grazed by a would be assassin's bullet. I feel the same way about the tariffs and totally agree that business as usual is a guaranteed losing strategy.
I do think that we're still reliant on systems designed for a paper based world, and that modernizing these systems might eliminate a large number of jobs.