A Crisis of Meaning and Purpose: Our Identities Have No Bodies
A Crisis of Meaning and Purpose Part III: You cannot understand what is happening in our present crisis without wrestling with the effects of the corporate Internet
This is Part III of a series I’m calling A Crisis of Meaning and Purpose, which dives into how our fascistic and democratic crises are driven by historic levels of loneliness, depression, and fear. In Part I we discussed how the Neoliberal Consensus intentionally divided us in order to undermine democratic opposition to capital and in Part II the focus shifted to MAGA as a fascistic cult that promises terrified Americans a sense of community and power.
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“Governments of the industrial world, you weary giants of flesh and steel, I come from Cyberspace, the new home of Mind.”
Thus begins A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, a manifesto published by John Perry Barlow for the Electronic Frontier Foundation in 1996. Barlow was a fascinating character. He was a rancher. He wrote lyrics for The Grateful Dead. He worked for both the Democratic and Republican Parties. He advocated for the transformative power of Burning Man and psychedelic drugs. He was a counterculture fixture. And, in the role that would most define him, a fierce advocate for the potential of the Internet to forward human liberty and expression.
A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace was a statement written in a grand tradition. As long as human societies and nations have existed, individuals have traveled to places beyond their borders and declared themselves sovereign and removed from the authority of their previous home. As the full-scale adoption of the Internet loomed, Barlow joined other advocates in imagining the digital realm as something removed from the terrestrial realm altogether. Many were survivors of the turbulent 1960’s and 1970’s and saw that era as a failed revolution that had been defeated by guardians of capital and power. Now, like explorers of old, they believed by relocating to this alternate reality they would find the means to create a new world.
But, like those past explorers, Barlow and his fellow digital dreamers made a mistake in thinking their new world would be left untouched by the one they had escaped. History tells this story over and over again. There is no corner of the Earth or even the online space that can leave the past behind, and every new endeavor, unless meticulous in its work, is affected.
Many of the counterculture warriors of the mid-20th century had given up on using the tools of democracy or collective action to make the real world better and found comfort in a utopian vision for the web. For those of us who got online for the first time in the 1990’s, that kind of thought might have seemed possible for a moment. I, myself, was in a small town in Indiana and lonely with my interests and thoughts, and when I got online I found others like myself. It felt revolutionary and world-changing. And, in those nascent days, I couldn’t even begin to imagine what it would all become.
Barlow died in early 2018. I’m not sure what he thought about in his private moments, but he lived long enough to see the utopia he imagined collapse. The endeavors that meant the most to him had all fallen sway to capitalist perversion. Burning Man, once seen as a socialist/anarchist/individualistic social experiment, became a corporate cosplay retreat. The Grateful Dead had turned from the vanguard counterculture band into one of the most recognizable and profitable brands in the world. Something hippie-turned-executives wore driving to dinner while listening to Jimmy Buffet. And the internet, seen as an outpost in a new world, was totally taken over by corporate interests and turned into something dangerous, reprehensible, and bloodless.
“Our identities have no bodies,” Barlow wrote, imagining a space removed from the physical realm. In cyberspace, race and sex and gender wouldn’t matter. Everyone would be free from the binds of past, oppressive society. By 2018, before Barlow died, he must have seen that this hope was severely misguided.
The Seeping
It feels like another lifetime, but it wasn’t so long ago that most people felt there was a distinct wall between the online world and physical reality. The internet was seen as some sort of advanced, interactive television. Something you shopped on, something you logged onto and logged off, and just, something else entirely.
2016 was the year this delusion became apparent to many. There was no shortage of articles and panic that social media had affected the presidential election and it was like everyone woke from a slumber with a shock. Personally, I remember multiple conversations with police officers as I was being stalked and threatened by Neo-Nazis and Right Wing extremists. They tried to break into my house. They tried to swat me. And every time I explained what was happening to law enforcement I was met with a puzzled look. “Are we talking about online stuff?”
What took place was the emergence of Web 2.0. Barlow and others cherished their “utopian” space, but eventually it was corporatized and essentially colonized by a new breed of tech capitalist. The internet you are using now is a perfect capitalist tool that wrings every possible cent out of us while manipulating us in ways most people never consider. The modern internet, as well as associated tools like the smartphone, are engineered to addict us, surveil us, and change the way we think and act and feel.
And, more importantly, it is all designed specifically to keep us from thinking about any of it.
The relationship between our experience online and our regular lives is nearly seamless now, which keeps us from considering both how that relationship affects our experience of ourselves and reality and what it does to us to experience reality according to invisible algorithms. That these machines and the modern web was designed by individuals and corporations that sought to create a more and more addicted user base is one of the most damaging and under-discussed changes in modern history and human history writ large. It has changed us and it has changed our society.
Much like tobacco companies engineered cigarettes with chemicals and substances, the modern internet and digital tools have been created to addict us and then, over time, continue that addiction. One of the most diabolical aspects is that these algorithms have prioritized more and more of what it is that we want and, over time, to feed us continually increasing content intended to feed that addiction. What has emerged is a society that is largely dissociated, increasingly self-absorbed, and undeniably more radicalized.
What has happened is that our reliance on these tools and on these addictions inevitably bled from the digital realm into our real lives. The idea that addictions, no matter how small they might be when they start, will not influence the rest of our lives has always been pure denial. We can tell ourselves whatever stories we want and lie to ourselves that it is otherwise, but the end result is assured.
The pioneers of the internet, the adherents, the creators and engineers, the politicians who refused to regulate any of it, and, to an extent, all of us who use it without thought, have been involved in one of the largest public health crises ever. Despite promises that it would free us from the sins of the past, the internet has instead streamlined and increased them, creating a bizarre, distorted, and lonely reality that we must all escape if we are to move past this moment of crisis.
Narcissist Machines and an Unconscious World
The modern internet and its successor-in-waiting AI have one major component that drives them: enabling.
Real life is complicated and full of friction. You have to navigate a world logistically but also emotionally and relationally. In stores, at work, out in the public square, you have to interact with other living, breathing human beings living their own lives and feeling their own feelings. Some are like you, most are not. They have their own beliefs and their own thoughts and their own motivations. This friction is uncomfortable at times and revelatory at others. You, as a person, change over time by interacting with those different people and finding out, over time, what it is you truly believe and what it is you truly feel. You learn empathy and compassion and how to share space and time.
Web 2.0 as a concept is meant to maximize the amount of time you’re online, the number of things you look at and buy and where your attention lands. To do this, we are fed a constant stream of things algorithms believe we want to see, meaning our interests and ideas and beliefs are fed to us incessantly, reinforcing them and creating, as much as possible, a frictionless experience. Other people are reduced to names on screens and, as a result, become either “allies” and “friends” or mortal enemies. These enemies are most often simply people we would have had to interact with and treat with basic human dignity in the terrestrial world.
It should be no surprise that as this process continued, and as our experience with the internet became more narcissistic and intentionally frictionless, that users shifted away from interactions with other users and that space was filled with malicious bots designed to, once again, tell them what they wanted to hear and made them feel how they wanted to feel. You cannot reckon with the idea of the Dead Internet, or a web that continues to function with more and more artificiality, without also seeing how our retreat into our comforting self-serving fantasies made it possible.
AI is this idea accelerated and heightened. Chat bots lavish us with praise, telling us our ideas or notions are brilliant and singular. “You’re seeing something others don’t see,” they tell us, while repeating back to us the things we already hold to be true, all to maximize our usage. The content creation, be it in videos or pictures, is all structured to just give you more of what you already know you want rather than doing what true art is supposed to do, which is giving you what you didn’t even know you needed. Despite its best impression, AI is not human and can never be human. But my mimicking another human that agrees with us and will give us everything we think we want, it will ensure this cycle of addiction continues and worsens.
The true and darkest secret of the modern internet is that it is a mirror and what many are consuming is themselves. This is hidden because it takes the form of memes, content, podcasts, livestreams, a constant flow of posts that are curated meticulously until all that is left is the version of ourselves at that moment and the future self, which is just a worse and enabled version. Much like the secret ingredient of Donald Trump and MAGA’s appeal is a promise that you don’t have to do anything or work on anything or get any better, the modern internet’s offering is an enabling that feels good because it is the equivalent of a warm bath and a bedtime story. It infantalizes us and makes us regress through forces and technology we either don’t understand or even know is operating.
And, all along, we are told those people who disagree are evil and dangerous.
In the real world, there are incredible consequences. Smartphone and internet addiction is readily apparent for anyone wishing to see them. Every dull moment or moment of discomfort can be broken up by retreating to a world curated for us and feeding us enabling content. Our actual relationships, our actual lives, are devalued in comparison because they do involve friction and they do necessitate moments of discomfort in order to grow and progress.
Is it any wonder that those people who are most addicted to the technology and that escape also seek political figures and movements, often populated with the same figures who hold their attention online, to use force and violence and any measure necessary to relieve the friction of the real world in the same way the internet does digitally?
Not to mention the other effects, primarily the sense of instant gratification. Consuming content online hits us with dopamine and addicts us. Buying whatever we want whenever we want it - which is the hidden component of Web 2.0 as the cornerstone of this wretched economy, which, for the record, is why it was never actually regulated - has a poisonous effect. Access to everything we could ever imagine, be it products or entertainments in streaming services, means that we have learned to appreciate things less and instead see them as instant hits of pleasure that are fleeting and needing chased. This motivation is essential to capitalism in that the crux has always been the necessity of buying more and more things we do not actually need and, over time, that process having to speed up. Services that work within that system - think Amazon next-day shipping - are like the app scooters many of you probably see littering your city sidewalks. They’re cheap and meaningless and, so, they are disposable. This works, and has always worked, the same as the litter you find around your town. No one is tossing out expensive dinners as they drive down the road. It’s cheap food. It’s cans of soda or candy bar wrappers.
Over time, everything has become this. America’s soul has been corroded by instant access to things we do not appreciate that we can get on the cheap. It creates a cycle of self-harm in which we consume and consume, get quick hits of fleeting pleasure, feel bad about ourselves and the world, and then it continues and continues. And, as we have been trained by a society of consumption, that discomfort and that self-loathing cannot stay within ourselves. It must be projected out onto the rest of the world, which is the other component of MAGA and the worsening authoritarian project.
The issue is that the vast majority of Americans do not know why they do what they do. They consume content and products because they are subject to invisible forces, whether it is the algorithm humming under the surface, addiction patterns that have been perfected by scientists and engineers, or simply the unconscious motivations that drive us to feel and act. Every bit of our entrenched power, from the fascists to the corporations, is focused explicitly on continuing these cycles and keeping people from questioning why it is that they do what they do. And, as is the case with addictions and enabling, over time that means more and more self-destruction and harm.
The Cosplay Society
Since the social revolutions of the 1960’s and 1970’s, corporate America has relied on a lesson they discovered amid the tumult. Millions of Americans rebelled against the homogenized and repressive culture, finding outlets by fighting for Civil Rights, Gay Rights, free speech, against the Vietnam War and American imperialism, and gender equality. What capitalists learned was that there was an opportunity to market products to individuals based on not who they were but who they wanted to be.
Segmented marketing replaced the bland and constrictive homogenized approach, which was advantageous because it sold more products and allowed individual expression. Corporations came to realize Americans were interested, more or less, in wearing costumes that expressed their inner-desires to be seen as something they weren’t. Purchasing these items thereby transformed them into their ideal selves.
The modern internet has supercharged this and the stream of enabling content has coincided with algorithms that pair content with targeted advertisements for more of those products that fit within our segmented categories. If you spend your time watching videos about governmental tyranny, chances are you’ll be advertised Don’t Tread On Me flags or t-shirts that display an AR-15 with the words TRY AND TAKE IT. On the liberal side, if you read about the corruption and authoritarianism of the Trump Administration, you’ll have the opportunity to buy every bobble imaginable with Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s likeness or quotes emblazoned on them.
And, because it was an online space that felt less “real” than the real world, users felt more free to let loose the parts of themselves that would have otherwise seemed troubling or unacceptable. Over time, and with enough immersion, this venting or experimentation became very, very real.
There’s nothing inherently fatal about this process, but what has happened as capitalism has accelerated toward hypercapitalism and then fascism is something else entirely. Built on top of segmented marketing and enabling content is a new layer of exploitation in which grifters and personalities have then marketed themselves and their associated products to the people already being targeted. This is how you come to find yourself wearing that AR-15 shirt and driving your giant pickup truck emblazoned with the entire 2nd Amendment and listening to podcasts telling you you’re a warrior, that your enemies are satanic pedophile snowflakes, and that it’s time to rise up and take the country back. Over time, you start to believe the fantasy. And, over time, the person hosting that podcast ends up becoming a senator or the Director of the FBI.
On the flip-side, liberals have been conditioned through this advertising to believe that the crisis is different from its reality. They see social media, where we play these characters, as the main point of “resistance.” Posts that perform well and may even lead to monetary rewards are seen as volleys against the fascists. If they listen to the right shows, if they support the right personalities, if they just hold the line - and by hold the line of course we mean continue consuming the same products and more products - eventually the crisis will pass and we will “restore” the republic. This is yet another comforting and enabling piece of denial being sold to people. What gets obscured is a very uncomfortable truth: Donald Trump and MAGA are symptoms of a larger disease and we must actively fight to change things.
What has happened is that we have been plunged into addictive and comforting fantasies that keep us from navigating the reality of actual life. And, what’s more, millions are choosing to merge their online experience with the real world.
A Synthesized Reality
It is a complicated thing to discuss. All of this, really. But one of the strangest and most important aspects is this: the fascistic regime we are currently fighting is the realization of forcing actual reality to reflect the online fantasy.
Donald Trump is not a real president. The Trump Administration is not a real administration. He is a creature composite of the dregs of the fantasy worlds of television and social media and his regime is stocked with personalities who either made a living capitalizing on the internet echo chambers or TV characters. What they sell their followers isn’t solutions but the same enabling horseshit they peddled on their podcasts or in their posts. They are in positions of power because they are willing to lend the authority of state power in order to tell their addicted followers the online space and all the accompanying fantasies are real.
This is extremely beneficial to the wealth and oligarchical classes, both of which helped to create the internet and turn it into this twisted addictive space. These are the serious people who create the serious ideas and projects. Trump and company are just there to sell them to their followers the same as hawking Trump bitcoin or snake-oil supplements sponsoring their shows. The product is, and has always been, the frictionless fantasies of those who wish to not engage in their actual lives or their actual selves.
Authoritarianism has a set of standard principles and tactics, but it takes the native form of the culture it is conquering. Nazism and Fascism in the 20th century had particular traits specific to German and Italian culture and their own undercurrents, same as Francoism in Spain and Pinochetism in Chile. This is as much a reflection of nation state “identity” as it is a side-effect of the mass media that helped promote the takeover in the first place. Reactionaries and authoritarians have always made use of mass media and been entirely addicted to it, choosing to live inside paranoid realities depicted in newsletters, newspapers, radio broadcasts, and the television. America’s fascistic turn is informed by the television and now the internet, the latter having radicalized the population with incredible speed.
Making it worse is the underlying loneliness of the moment. Economic precarity and Neoliberal incentives make us work more and behave sociopathically, all while the internet gives us a facade of connection that leaves us feeling lonelier and lonelier with every turn. And why? Because the majority of content is enabling and prioritizes our most selfish and destructive tendencies. It drives us apart. It liquidates our connections. It has replaced human connection with an artifice that AI is now bringing into full-focus.
Millions of Americans are not voting for Donald Trump the person, they are voting to shift their preferable online, addictive realities into actual reality, all consequences be damned. We are suffering a collective mental breakdown buttressed and accelerated by addiction and loneliness and a desperate desire to continue using and abusing our preferred drugs of denial and fantasy because it feels better than actually facing the reality of our situation, which would require change and healing and, above all, actual work and risk. We would have to face the prospect of true discomfort and dealing with our pain and grief. And, in opposition to that necessity, we have an entire capitalist system designed to tell us we don’t need to, and a population of radicalizing, fascist grifters promising we will never have to. Now, they have power, and they are going to use that power to attempt to bring us all into their paranoid, hateful reality.
John Perry Barlow, in his A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, wrote of the online user, “Our identities have no bodies, so unlike you we cannot obtain order by physical coercion. We believe that from ethics, enlightened self-interest, and the commonweal, our governance will emerge. Our identities may distributed across many of your jurisdictions. The only law that all our constituent cultures would generally recognize is the Golden Rule.”
Barlow and others held these utopian hopes, but they collapsed under the unbearable weight of capitalist reality. There was no separating the real and digital realms and over time the brutality of violence would eventually make sure that denizens of the online space were brought to heel.
One of the most important pieces of writing in the modern era. Perfection Jared. Thank You.
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Thank you. So true.