The internet ushered in a new age of information, or so we’re told. It was heralded as a liberatory tool that would spread knowledge and democracy to all corners of the planet. The despots of the world would have nowhere to hide once we had the truth in our hands and the ability to spread it across the globe with the click of a button.
In retrospect, this was incredibly naive. The information superhighway not only failed to live up to its original promises, but it seems as though its had the exact opposite effect for a critical amount of people. It took awhile for capitalism to fully take control and colonize the wild west, but now they have narrowed this once endless and expanding universe into a handful of social media websites where vast swaths of people get all of their news. This means a couple of tech billionaires that you could count on one hand are controlling everything we see and hear on our feeds. They have the editorial control to silence points of view that challenge our socio-economic hierarchy and super charge reactionary nonsense that protects their position of power.
Take Twitter as an example. Twitter, under the stewardship of Elon Musk, has become a nazi shit-hole filled to the brim with schizophrenic racists complaining about things that aren’t even remotely real. Elon himself has undergone a political radicalization over the past few years. As recently as 2020, he said he voted for Joe Biden in the presidential election. Now he’s Trump’s “first buddy”, scraping people’s personal information from government databases with his rogue’s gallery of 19 year old groypers. Why did this happen? Well, we know that Elon is perhaps the most terminally online man in the world. He purchased Twitter so we would all have to look at his horrible posts. The negative feedback he received for being a libertarian weirdo who doesn’t know anything and can’t do anything pushed him further and further into the hands of the groypers, who were happy to embrace a sympathetic tech oligarch that would allow them to run the table on one of the internet’s most influential websites. The Twitter algorithm now only promotes the most violently reactionary garbage. You scroll down and see Nick Fuentes, Kanye, Andrew Tate, porn, crypto scams, Trump, etc. The point of doing this is not financial gain. Rather, it’s about creating a right wing radicalization machine that will break the brains of anyone who stares into its abyss for too long and turn them into hardcore MAGA foot soldiers.
Kanye is also another case study worth looking into. The disgraced rapper gave us the first indication of his right wing radicalization in November of 2016 at a stop on his Life of Pablo tour. He claimed to the audience that he didn’t vote in the 2016 election, but if he had, he would’ve voted for Trump. Pretty soon he would dawn the MAGA hat, visit Trump Tower, visit the Trump White House, and fully embrace their mutual “dragon energy.” On April 21, 2018 he tweeted out, “I love the way Candace Owens thinks,” which was the kickoff of his flirtation with the far right media circuit. Starting in 2022 he infamously went, “death con 3 on JEWISH PEOPLE.” He met and embraced Nick Fuentes, declared his love for Hitler on Info Wars, and went on an antisemitic podcast tour where he repeatedly blamed jews for personal problems that were his own fault. The jews broke up his family. The jews nuked his sneaker deal with Adidas. The jews are taking his songs off streaming services. All of this to avoid responsibility for his own behavior.
These moves by Kanye alienated all of the normal people in his life who cared about him and could tell him no. The more he pushed these people away, the more he fell into the sphere of influence of the likes of Owens, Fuentes, Tucker Carlson, and others who were cynically aligning themselves with a certified crazy person for their own personal gain. Let’s not pretend that someone like Alex Jones or Nick Fuentes cares or understands the numerous contributions Kanye has undeniably made to the world of American fashion and music. These people view rap music as degenerate thuggery, but they endorse the things Kanye says and does for strictly idealogical reasons. The version of Kanye that exists today is virtually unrecognizable. Again, very similar to Elon, a mix of negative feedback, social alienation, and online political brain rot drove one of the most consequential American musicians who ever lived into a brainwashed nazi that can only exist as a shell of his former self.
These two high profile examples highlight a problem happening on a granular level. Everyone in America knows someone who lost their ability to reason and think critically because of internet brain rot. After a certain point, we’re not talking about honest differences of opinion; we’re talking about people who have lost touch with reality. There are certain canon events that break people’s brains. The election of Donald Trump, covid lockdowns, the 2020 election that many MAGA supporters still believe is stolen. Normal people are falling victim to this. When Trump gave the order for a national covid lockdown in 2020, a Qanon conspiracy circulated online that the lockdown was merely a cover so Trump could rescue the “mole children” being held in underground bunkers by satanic democratic politicians. These types of conspiracy beliefs would be humorous if it weren’t for the real world consequences like the election of Marjorie Taylor Greene to Congress. That’s when these conspiracies stop being harmless and start driving actual federal policy.
The fun part for the internet foot soldiers that spread these ideas is it becomes a choose your own adventure game. The democrats are drinking the blood of children. Joe Biden was replaced by a clone. Trump and Elon are populist outsiders trying to save the world. It doesn’t matter if any of these things are true; what matters is their commitment and willingness to act on their beliefs. With media literacy at an all time low, it’s time for us to think more critically about the things we put in our brain, just as much as we think about our alcohol intake, diet, etc.
+ There are no comments
Add yours