what are we doing here?

the constant news and media cycle has us constantly jumping from one tragedy to the next outrage. we don't get time to breathe. we don't get time to think, or meditate, or grieve, or be angry about any one given thing. we are forced to be mad or upset about everything, all the time, all at once.

this is extremely apparent after school shootings. as a father, every time there is a school shooting, it almost brings me to my knees. I almost always get the notification in the middle of the day as my own kids are at school. the video of children walking in a straight line, fleeing the violence in the place that is supposed to be safe for them... and how calm and normal they look, how this has become just a normal part of every day schooling. the media covers it for the obligatory 12 hours, and then, as long as there is no juicy scandal to cover like there was with Uvalde... we all just move on.

we give dead schoolchildren 12 hours of our time. we say our thoughts and prayers, then we move on to being angry about the phrase "thoughts and prayers." the bodies of our children are still warm when we move on to the next thing to be angry about.

because it's always anger, isn't it?

I'm going to share some photos here of social media posts I saw in the direct aftermath of yet another rash of anti-ICE and anti-fed riots. I want you to really read them with an objective mind, let yourself feel emotion, and then, before you react in a more visceral way, take an introspective look at what emotions were stirred up.

"no mercy." "terrorists." "I voted for this."

I'll include one more, penultimate example: Brian Kilmeade of Fox News calling for the "involuntary lethal injection" of mentally ill homeless people. "just kill them."

I started writing this post weeks ago and had to take a break from writing it. there are countless more examples. it has only worsened over the last two weeks.

what the hell are we doing here?

there was a time when we fought against ideas like this. there was a time where protest was celebrated as one of our most important rights as Americans. there was a time when we didn't agree with the popular protest movement... but we at least agreed that they shouldn't be designated as terrorists for the simple act of protest.

people like the accounts above shouldn't be celebrated with ad revenue and fandom, they should be cast out of society and relegated to the dregs. calling for the genocide of the mentally ill homeless in our society should be reason enough for an immediate firing and casting Brian Kilmeade out of the industry permanently. it should be enough for a psychiatric evaluation.

proudly admitting that you voted for the designation of your neighbors as a terrorist organization, calling for the merciless beating of protestors, there was a time when that would be rightfully called un-American.

this isn't a blog post in mourning, though. when I ask "what the hell are we doing" it is not a call for calm, it is not a call for peace, it is not a call for 'making up' or 'finding common ground' with the people that want their neighbors beaten, jailed and killed.

it's a call to action for those of us who can to fight back.

we have to reclaim the information environment

it's time we talked about the disgusting places that we spend our time in online.

when I am anxious, I find one of the most helpful things to do in that moment is to clean my office and, often, the rest of my house. there is plenty of research on the effects of organization and disorganization on the human psyche, how a disorganized house causes a disorganized mind. it causes stress, anxiety, frequently makes you angry, and oftentimes the thing that helps when you're feeling the most anxious about something you cannot control is exerting power over something you can.

we need to take this same approach to our information environment.

we have to stop debating

the time for debate is over. I do not mean this hyperbolically, I mean that there is genuinely no point in debate anymore

debate is what happens between individuals who are living in a shared reality. debate is what happens between individuals who are both willing to be convinced. debate is what happens when there is no audience, or when the audience is also willing to be convinced. debate is when the primary purpose of the debate is to be convincing, not scoring internet points.

there is no more debate to be had with the type of people who are calling for "no mercy" in the military and government's treatment of protestors. there is no more debate to be had with people who want to mass murder the homeless and mentally ill. we have to stop pretending like these are normal times and the people with whom we are interfacing are normal people.

there is no debate to be had with the people labeling half the country "the enemy within" or "gnats" that need to be swatted. there is no more debate to be had. some day we may return to more normal times when we can agree upon a shared reality, a shared set of ideals, a shared understanding of how we can treat our fellow humans. I want to get back to that day, but in order to get there, we have to accept that we are not there now.

Elon's Twitter is not a place for debate. the algorithm is keyed in on outrage. nobody on that site is willing or able to be convinced. it is a site you should treat as a write-only place. you put your opinions, your research, your media, etc. out into the world and maybe one or two people read it. you should treat it like a write-only bulletin board.

this isn't just a complaint about how nasty social media has gotten. it's not just whining. this is a reality that I think we all need to face. because it's been this way for a while now, and we have yet to come to terms with it to our own, massive detriment. twitter, and increasingly other sites like YouTube, Threads, TikTok and Reddit, are battlegrounds. they should not be browsed lightly. they should not be treated as a public square. normies should use them to post family and fitness updates at most, but all of us should treat social media as a dangerous, toxic environment that should not be taken lightly. those of us in the political and technological sphere should view it as a battleground.

instead of treating social media casually, instead of letting it destroy our attention span, our humanity and our mental health, we should subvert it.

information insurgency

we are fighting an information insurgency.

the people that hold power over the information environments we live in know how dangerous they are. some of them, namely Elon Musk, are victims of the information environments themselves. we have to stop treating social media as a "place to hang out" and instead treat them as hostile territory.

this means that we need to organize collectives like Concept Country to start influencing social media in a direct and directly combative way. it's time to start weaponizing the dark forest against social media platforms.

and to the pearl clutchers, this is not new. information operations, psychological operations and the rest are old as time, and the exact people that we are combatting, the anti-humanists, the authoritarians, the capital accelerationists, they are organizing the exact same power structures at scales that we cannot even comprehend. when your party owns the local news outlets through Sinclair, when news anchors all read from literally the exact same script, when most of the mainstream media is owned by a handful of billionaires who have made it very clear they are putting their thumbs on the scale, when the algorithms are owned by Elon and Zuck and, now in TikTok's case, Oracle and the US federal government, there is no room to pearl clutch over fighting back.

so organize with your friends. find ways to create a pro-humanist information environment at small scales, and find out ways to use weaponized virality and, yes, memetics to fight back. there are plenty of resources out there on how information operations work. there are entire realms of study on how propaganda works. as annoying as he can be, Noam Chomsky's "Manufactured Consent" is a good read in this regard.

if you take no other action after reading this article, I ask that you are far more wary of the information environment you are swimming in. this is not a good time to take these things lightly. you stare into the abyss, and it tries to find some way to drive you insane.