The above image was made with stable diffusion using the prompt 'woke and flat earth.'
Lately I've been trying to think up good metaphors for our media environment and have been coming up short. Maybe the situation is too dire for metaphors. The control regime's media establishment dominates public discourse. For its part, the public staunchly refuses to abandon this establishment in favor of readily available alternatives.
Our free press has been replaced by a massive propaganda delivery system. Free speech has vanished in the online spaces where we interact with each other. The control regime is primarily responsible for this, but average people are also culpable. They have a choice and they keep choosing to stick with the mainstream.
In practical terms, regardless of party affiliation, our leaders and their supporters are all working together to remove freedom from our information ecology, and this work is largely complete. The whole thing is very dramatic. It's also surreal, with masses of people programmed by emerging technology to repeat lie after lie while legit news is suppressed or branded misinformation.
At the same time, dissident voices across the board have been replaced by garbage beliefs like Flat Earth and Woke ideology. I recently lost another friend to Flat Earth. This otherwise thoughtful man is now convinced that the Earth is flat and that NASA never went to the moon. I tried talking with him about it, but he misunderstood basic stuff like relative motion, precession of the equinoxes, and the relationship between mass and gravity.
More than anything, these garbage beliefs are a massive waste of time, siphoning cognitive resources away from actual problems and into endless absurdities. For this reason, I strongly suspect that they are psyops being pushed by the control regime to keep potential rebels stupid and occupied with inconsequential matters. And for the individuals who buy into the madness, the benefits are obvious.
The primary benefit of believing in Flat Earth or Woke ideology is false empowerment. In the case of Flat Earth, there's the illusion of power stemming from the special-ness of possessing privileged information about the world. In the case of Woke ideology, there's the moral superiority that comes from being right about everything. In both situations, genuine empowerment is diminished because the ridiculous beliefs destroy credibility.
Importantly, legacy news is barely more credible than Flat Earth or Woke ideology. If recent years have taught us anything, it's that mainstream media is a lie factory. In the face of this, it is tempting to adopt any stories about the world that make us feel like we're regaining some small measure of our lost power.
Perhaps the saddest part is that there are many alternatives to mainstream stories that are genuinely empowering. Just as there are alternative news outlets and social media platforms operating outside of the control regime's narrative. Yet instead of embracing these alternatives, the dissatisfied are getting Woke or imagining that the world is flat. Who benefits from this? Not society at large.
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