Becoming a Noosphere Prepper During the Long Night
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January 10th, 2021
Big Tech just flexed, removing Donald Trump from their platforms, and some platforms did so permanently, clearly revealing the power they already had.
I am not really following what the rumblings of memetic tribes are saying right now, but I imagine many are delightfully gleeful that the Orange Man is gone from these platforms, but for many others, lots of whom are not his supporters, a chilling effect is surely occurring.
A senior legislative counsel from The American Civil Liberties Union made the following statement...
We understand the desire to permanently suspend him now, but it should concern everyone when companies like Facebook and Twitter wield the unchecked power to remove people from platforms that have become indispensable for the speech of billions …
Of course, Trump is going to pivot and make this an issue before another impeachment attempt, and the people who have a fever-pitch hate for him, will simply go with the opposite of whatever he says.
John Robb, one of our previous Sensemakers in Residence, and a military theorist on fourth-generation warfare, thinks a “long night” is on the horizon, which is:
A sameness of thought and approach enforced by hundreds of millions of socially internetworked adherents. A global orthodoxy that ruthlessly narrows public thought down to a single, barren, ideological framework. A ruling network that prevents dissent and locks us into stagnation and inevitable failure as it runs afoul of reality and human nature.
This is that “capturing the metanarrative” stuff I was writing about before. The “Culture War 2.0” thing, where you have various memetic tribes competing for the metanarrative in the noosphere, might have been the chaotic noise needed for a long night to manifest. Memetic tribes, culture war profiteers, military Psy Ops, and “black PR” firms, all tried to capitalize on this chaos, as did the “chaos president” himself, which has forced the hand of Big Tech to reveal their power.
The medium is the message, and who controls the medium controls the message, hence the metanarrative. Perhaps this is not a concern for many, as long as the Orange Man is gone. But what happens after the Orange Man is gone? Who actually has the power here?
A power literacy would be needed to grok all of this of course, and unfortunately, that is above most people’s pay-grade, or interest space, to even attempt to explore. Given this, easy narratives are adopted, with myopic shibboleths, that temporarily appease one’s trauma, in a way that is retraumatizing.
I have a buddy who is living in one of the special administrative regions of China. We were talking about propaganda, and when he is in conversation with one of the “mainlanders,” it is obvious to him how perfectly aligned their worldview is with whatever the state-owned media says is true. If questions even slightly gesture towards something outside that worldview, they shut down immediately. If you know enough of the “party-line,” their thoughts are very predictable.
This sounded very familiar to me, and it is probably familiar to most reading here. I know people, people close to me, who only get their news intake from Fox News, and some who only get their intake from CNN. Talking to both of them feels perfectly similar to how my friend describes his encounter with the mainlanders.
Jordan Hall calls this simulated thinking, which is like giving yourself a gold star because you memorized something which gives you nodding heads from other people giving themselves gold stars for memorizing the same thing. Robert Jay Lifton, whose “protean self” idea was a big influence on me, is valuable to read here, especially his work on thought reform.
I recommend everyone review his “Eight Criteria for Thought Reform,” and reflect on some of the criteria, and feel into the possibility that this is happening right now, in whatever memetic tribe you most vibe with. The sixth criteria, or “loading the language,” is quite good to take a look at.
It focuses on “thought-terminating clichés,” which are lines that end any inquiry into the possibility-space that falls outside the worldview that is permitted. How many “thought-terminating clichés” are being deployed against you, and how much are you deploying yourself?
I like to think of myself, and perhaps present myself, as a calm headed Stoic, who is slowly sensemaking in the spirit of festina lente, and who can authentically code-switch well enough to avoid getting cancelled or censored, thus far. Maybe this is true, or maybe I am just as brainwashed as everybody else.
I do try to diversify my epistemic intake, and follow every memetic tribe I can, in order to grok how epistemically diverse our collective mind actually is. I also like to promote sites like allsides.com, which clearly shows the bias of each hot take in the spectacle. This is basically in service to developing a “transperspectival mind,” which the likes of Daniel Schmachtenberger and others in our sensemaking space like to talk about.
Those of us who have a transperspectival mind, are in a vast minority. It is probably very naïve to expect this kind of thinking to be adopted en masse overnight. It does strike me as a worthwhile endeavor to convert more people to, but this probably needs to be combined with a “noosphere prepperism” if the long night is about to take place.
If the long night does occur, shit is going to start getting “memory holed” hard, thought-terminating clichés are going to intensify, and doublethink is going to become the norm. Maybe it will not though, but a Stoic does his negative visualizations, and some healthy “enlightened doomsaying,” in order to be properly prepared.
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