Reality As A Riot: A User's Guide
Riots, realism and false consensus
As the mostly peaceful protests gear up in California, a former adviser to the British Prime Minister warns of civil war in Britain. Politics, once confined to theory - is now breaking out in reality. The media manufactured consensus is breaking down, and so, it seems, are our societies.
Today I try to explain why, as I examine the conflict of order and chaos, good and evil, and fantasy versus reality. What does it all mean?
In brief
The return of the Big Questions - God, Good, Truth and the nature of reality
Modern Life Is Disintegrating
Conflict between the new politics of reality and the old reality of politics
How both sides are dancing with the digital devil
The basis of the truth in an age of digital uncertainty
POLITICS GETS REAL
Conflict in society and in war is experienced by the spectator class as a battle of narratives.
As with most sponsored thought, this is an experiment conducted at scale to project reality as a game, a contest - of Good and Evil.
You are expected to pick a side. What passes for thinking often resembles televised sports - a spectacle in which you invest your feelings.
The game is now real, however, as it is no longer confined to our screens. We live in it, and its outcome determines our future - or whether we have one at all.
This makes deciding what is real and what is not an existential question.
DECISIONS, DECISIONS
Choosing what to buy is the central question of the human condition under liberal consumerism. What is on sale in the marketplace of ideas today?
Crime as justice, riots or protest, the rape of children in Britain versus noticing is racist, the thirdworldisation of the West or diversity is our strength, trans rights for kids and Israel’s right to “self defence” or the value and dignity of human life?
Is Donald Trump just a Zionist Globalist flooding the zone with crazy statements, or are we living through an elite civil war over who controls the West?
Trump said in 2019 he says the craziest things he can think of just to keep the hostile media busy. Well, reality has responded in kind, and the going continues to get weirder.
What are we to make of it? Social reality is dissolving into chaos. It is hard to pick a side when disruption is a means and and end, and both sides see the way out in government by algorithm.
On the globalist side, Tony Blair is pushing digital governance. Leading the counter-liberals is Bad Orange Man, busily digitising the US State with Palantir and Oracle - reassuringly named after mythical objects granting all-seeing eyes.
Who can you trust when everyone seems to be dancing with the digital devil?
MODERN LIFE IS DISINTEGRATING
There are four main elements to the disintegration of meaning in modern life.
The modernist current, which replaced God with Reason and truth with preference.
The replacement of reality with mass manufactured media
The breakdown of this system
The advent of a new fake reality in AI
The algorithm makes information inherently unstable to the point of functional incoherence.
This means as time goes on you can be less and less certain whether what you see or read or hear is real.
People will repeat this stuff as if it was real, and so there will be no escape from the AI slop.
From the point of view of ideas this makes old questions new again.
Most people have forgotten that we used to ask what the basis of reality was, how we could tell if things were alive or dead, and what it is that makes us human.
These questions were assumed to have been settled as superstitions banished by modern progress. Yet the idea of progress itself is a superstition1, and it has created a series of crazy beliefs which have labelled sanity as dangerous extremism.
Progress has progressed to the point that it is in conflict with the nature of reality itself, with progressives arguing there are no facts, there is nothing objective in beauty or in truth, and that reality is simply a point of view. How?
Pure perspectivism does not allow you to see through things, but beyond them - into a world of make belief.
The question is - who - or what - is making these beliefs?
DANCING TO THE AUTOTUNE
The voices which guide us through our transactions are increasingly inhuman.
Autotuned songs wail through the speakers at the gym, the supermarket terminal repeats its tocsin instructions metronomically. We are entrained by replacement human interactions into being smoother consumers, released from human frictions.
Reality is contested in code. The contest over meaning is a helpmeet to evil, as whoever wins gets to define what is real. Meaning becomes a matter of arithmetic - regardless of what happens. The algorithms which are intended to rule us are coded by human inputs to moderate human outputs.
What this means in practice is that reality is filtered into cues for cheers and boos. Our team good, their team bad. “Good” and “bad” are also simply matters of number here. Human relations - man to man, man to God - are displaced by consumer transactions. This includes the meaning we consume - now increasingly mass manufactured by machines.
Information systems are not bias free. They are as partial and factional as political power. Palantir is owned by Zionists. The LLMs are all liberal.
All of them oppose the “far right”, which means noticers with common sense. They are biased against the constituency of reality.
None of these systems seem interested in God - but we are told they will wield godlike powers.
I think those powers will certainly be used to govern us.
As the chaos gets worse, the appetite for automated order will grow. The system is generating consumer demand for its new solution. This is not only a solution for the problems created by liberalism. It could replace politics completely - at precisely the point at which politics is getting real.
Thanks to my paid subscribers, I have had the time to research and write this counter-chaotic guide to life.
Keep reading with a 7-day free trial
Subscribe to Frank Wright to keep reading this post and get 7 days of free access to the full post archives.