The subject is in crisis, its hegemony threatened by centralized structures of control, by a technology which simultaneously alienates and masks alienation, by a perception of its own helplessness.…
History doesn’t exist anymore, day by day it’s undergoing erasure, the PC police are correcting the errors of the dead without the dead’s approval. No one cares about those dead white men dressed up in their white wigs and spangles. No, in our moment of social justice warriors and liberty loving freedom fighters the world is more like a nuclear firestorm awaiting its apocalyptic nightmare than a place anyone takes seriously anymore. Nothing’s real in this hellish paradise. Reality is finally not even to be taken on faith, but simply replaced by an acceptance of a conditional and malleable appearance. Staged events replace actual ones, pseudo-actors replace activists, and the social media echo chamber replaces real conversation. We are the representations of fake imaginaries, brokers of fantasy worlds where escape and exit are just a naïve excuse for opinion polls.
We used to trust the images of the world portrayed for us behind the façade of the screen, now that we’ve succumbed to the image-wheel of the Reality Studio the reality behind the screen no longer provides us with the basic image of the Real, instead the image “masks and perverts the basic reality, and replaces it with a new “mask of the world as the absence of a basic reality.” (Bukatman, 98) We are all ghosts now erased even of our simulated flesh and sex appeal. Instead we’ve all entered the twilight zone of a peripheral mirror world where pseudo-events have become the only reality we can know, a reality we trust and believe in because not to would spell the erasure of our own ghosthood. Living in an unreal world we have lost even the satisfaction of our anger and our rage. Most of all I wonder about the hate and spite that at a street level pervades the young now, the paranoid state of mind against each other, against their elders who have proven to be idiots, to our leaders who have entered a mode of ultra-madness. It’s as if our whole society had been drugged, given some kind of spurt of magnetic mind-warp vibration from a strange experimental black ops weapon trained not on some external enemy but upon the very citizenry of this nation that harbored such hope and has now fallen into a black hole.
Of course this is a fantasia, there is not weird weapon of mass distraction and insanity working its mode of deformation and degradation on our minds and hearts. Instead we’ve allowed ourselves to forget ourselves, disconnect ourselves from the human, from the very powers of thought and feeling that kept us in touch with each other, flesh to flesh, touching, haptic, communicative. Instead we’ve all entered into a fake contract with technology, allowed the promise of communication to lead us into the lonely atomization and fragmentation of a society of addicts. We live in our screen worlds, texting each other on our mobile devices rather than speaking to each other face to face. We lost our bodies, given ourselves over to the very technological objects that are now recreating, forming, shaping, molding, modulating our flesh and minds and souls into technology, into artifacts so artificial that the human has disappeared.
We tell ourselves stores of the Anthropocene as if the narrative of species destruction and habitat disconnection were a truth-condition of our time, one that has forced us into removing ourselves from the center of existence, from our exceptional status as God’s favored children on planet earth. But in truth we are still the bound ego’s of a world so enchained to its ancient sacrificial trajectories, ethno-religious bigotries, and the tribal compacts of our primitive brainstem that we cannot break free. Our philosophers and scientists continue to tell us the sense of Self is an illusion, all the while we continue to act on it, believe in it, assured that the name we are is this thing we are. That memory and desire are a unity, a totality that is the human condition, one from which there is not escape.
And, yet, even now we are long past such a world, technologized and riven from the humanist world of religious and secular thought, living in a paranoid schizophrenics worst nightmare in which everyone surrounding us is the enemy and that reality is not what it seems… We project our inner madness and fears on all those others we deem the enemy, as if the solution is the final solution: as if we could solve the world’s issues if only we could get rid of all those fascist dogs… or, if we could get rid of all those red commies… two sides of a Mobius strip that seems to push both extremes into a paranoid frenzy: the right to paranoia, the left of revolutionary schizophrenia. Neither accepting that maybe both extremes have led to a dead end, an End Game for both themselves and civilization. This need to universalize our madness, our beliefs, our mythologies has led us into the final circle of hell.
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This text reminds me of this from hellodamage too;