Take Facebook, X down – Do you ever get the feeling that ‘we’ are unwinding?

 

Do you ever get the feeling that ‘we’ are unwinding?

Unravelling?

Mass culture – when it was under the control of regulated authorities – provided a framework for our social identity.

In the 80s we all watched the four channels – and they framed our shared experience – of the world around us – of who we were together.

For better or worse.

We knew who we were.

And in political terms – the dividing line was clear.

We were united in how we positioned ourselves in relation to the question of what is the best way of doing things.

Now. Its not clear anymore – that there is anything unifying us.

And yet there probably is.

Social media companies – which can operate freely of most government regulation – now operate internationally – maybe not completely globally.

People born in the twentieth century can remember the common unifying framework of the printed and regulated televisual media.

But the younger generations – lack that frame of reference.

Everything has been thrown into the air – like confetti – by social media.

Or so it seems – but as the confetti falls back down – its not in a random pattern – but rather in patterns determined by the people who control and use social media to their ends.

British politics has now been framed by a post-democratic capitalist cabal – which has more in common with the control and command capitalism of China and Russia.

And we’re so embedded in these new identities formed by social media – that millions of people find themselves – coming to identify with a social media creation of national identity – whether American or British – which reformulates what it means to be American 0r British – so that nationalist identity is now realigned to a bunch of policies, ideologies and values – which serve the kleptocratic interests of China and Russia. National self-interest has been eaten from the inside – so it is now reformulated in a way to serve the interests of China and Russia and totalitarian forms of capitalism. Brexit and Farage – are understood as acts of patriotism – but which serve Putin, China and Trump.

Nigel Farage is a huge cheerleader for Trump and Putin and what they represent – and is clearly focused on prioritising the interests of the capitalists that ride on the pair’s tailcoats – and couldn’t care less about British people – but somehow when people see him through the lens of social media – they see someone championing their cause – or some cause that is painted in a Union Jack. That is the achievement of the new social media owners.

British elites – political and economic nationalist – have lost control of the British nationalist narrative – as the power of the televisual and radio and printed press – which they could control – has waned. It has slipped into the hands of social media companies, the capitalist interests that pump money into social media, and countries like Russia and China. It is the latter now which is framing how people feel and think about who they are, individually, socially, nationally and collectively – and what it means to be British.

And everything that is said is seen by social media users through this framework – so those who try to espouse a liberal democratic framework for serving the interests of the British people – that used to frame post-war media representations of what it meant to be British – find themselves on a loosing ticket. In the UK the Labour Party, slowly and perhaps reluctantly, is beginning to wake up to this new frame of reference, through which everything is seen. The real power then is in those who are controlling the frame.

The politicians have lost the ability to frame it would seem – and so real political power – it would seem lies in the hands of those who own the social media companies – and its not always completely clear who they are and what they want – but we can see how it is evolving. A globalised social identity and set of relationships, in which white males are supreme – and other people take second, third or fourth seat. And it is one, it seems, in which Muslims are framed to be the baddies.

This looks to be heading somewhere pretty fucking dark.

In Kyiv they can already see that.

..see

…you might think the pure fight is to concentrate on what is true, and that politics need to be taken back to the world of truth (reversed from this post-fact world)….

…but if you’re thinking about truth…  you’re not starting from where you should be starting…

…truth comes after – a focus on something…

the focus comes out of a shared sense of values, of who we are, and a share set of taboos of who we are but who we don’t want to admit to being…

so the starting point is who are we and who do we want to be and what are our values….

…but the who we are has never been more uncertain…

the continental plates, so stable in the twentieth century are beginning to move in mysterious ways…

…the national media regulated by the nation state… framed by national politics… is beginning to unravel…

we see the same symbols…. HMG, The Guardian, The Times, The Daily Telegraph….

but they are now just part of a much bigger picture… Facebook… TwitterX… Instagram… Snapchat…

all now controlled… not by the liberal democratic nation state… but by The Chinese Government…. by billionaires who have no interest in anything that is anything like the frame and values we lived in 20th Century western Europe… but who realise they now have a new weird power to shape, evolve and re-create the sub-conscious values and perceptual frameworks through which people see and understand the world, and each other, and go on to vote…

….Vanguard Online’s strap line was always define reality before someone does it for you….

But there’s something a little bit naive about that strap line – no-one defines reality by themselves…

Wasn’t it Richard Jenkins in his book on Social Identity that made the point – all identifications – and perhaps then – by extension – all constructions of reality – are socially constructed and negotiated – fought over perhaps – but all essentially social…

Implicit, perhaps, in the strapline define reality before someone does it for you… was always the idea that you ought to think fucking carefully about who you ally with – because your alliances will heavily influence – the reality of the world in which you come to have to operate. Or maybe it was just – try and find your group – la resistance – to resist all the bullshit and lies that create the psychological and social constructions and illusions around you – in which you have to live your life through – unite and resist – and overcome. But with whom?

We look at politics and the way the media reports it as if the power is with political parties, the Prime Minister, and the people who vote…

But quite clearly the power is with the institutions who stimulate our minds with their reality and realities, second after second, minute after minutes…. with their ideas, memes and messages… and I’m feeling when I walk through the street – that although everything looks the same – we all still live in houses – with gardens and hedges and footpaths – and shops on street corners – some kind of revolution is going on in our minds – that is revolutionising who we are and what we think of each other – and how we categorise and identity with each other – and who we are – and what our values are – and what the taboos are that we can’t and wont forbid talk about… all this is changing… so that whilst everything looks the same… all that is left is the shell of reality… we are all… politics and political parties and values… being eaten from the inside…

Look at the Tories – they have been completely eaten from the inside…

Look at the Republican Party…

Look at Keir Starmer… and all his bullshit about the Tories operating open border policies….

Look at the Observer… now for sale….

Look at Steve Bannon… he is actively engaged in this cultural revolution through his political memes and his behind the scene plotting and planning… And Elon Musk with X and Zuckerberg and Facebook and Jeff Bezos and Amazon… all behind Trump… donating money and time and allegiance to a version of politics of narcissism and instability and uncertainty and spite… and people vote for this shit!? Do these guys know where they want to take the planet, the word, or are they just enjoying fucking with the old established order, do they have a grand conspiracy, a master plan, or are they just enjoying the power to create a cultural riot that no established political order appears to have the power to control and wrestle off them? Perhaps with time the Chinese government will? Or some massive global authoritarian power?

There seems to be some logic to this… the madness of the shit that is shared on social media… and the changing of the hive mind of western democratic politics… and the choosing of a politics of narcissism, nastiness and self-harm, a politics in which people relinquish any sense of self-value, of sense of power of their own rational and personal powers of critical reflection, of any kind of responsibility to consider what might be in the interests of the common and social good, and instead for a politics of riot, hatred and emotional hostility, of nastiness and coldness, a politics which projects and focuses, all of one’s own personal poison and discomfort and hatred, into a variety of paupers. But with this is killed off any sense of social and collective trust within the nation state, any sense of national interest, patriotic interest, sense of the social good, sense of its us against the world. Because now its we hate much of what it is we are, and much of what we are made up of.

This cultural transformation, has then, perhaps created a sense of fear and trauma in people, where none really needed to exist, and which has put people into a collective state of trauma (via culture wars), and has meant that they have become much more inclined to assign themselves with self-styled uncompromising violent fascist strong men and women – people feeling needing to be protected because they fear they are going to be eaten – rather than people who are feeling relaxed enough to consider what programme of policies would be best for the collective good.

Lets see.

But if centrist or left – nation state – politics is going to survive as a concept that people understand (and want) then it requires super regulation of social media & we’d need to take down Facebook, Instagram and X – now. They are all trojan horses that are already eating us from the inside – it may be too late to stop them.

 

 

So what?????? Well, on Christmas Eve 2024, Ross Barkan, writing in the Guardian, made the following points…

• Culture has fractured under social media’s dominance over traditional forms of state regulated and nationalised mass media.
• That Luigi Mangione, the guy who allegedly shot a healthcare executive in the States, has had a lot of people looking at his social media accounts. The implication in Barkan’s article is that ‘the youth’ as he calls them have been able to use social media to create their own group hysteria and idolatry of Mangione, in a way that mainstream forms of social media would not have allowed or enabled twenty-five years ago. It’s a good point this – the idea that everyone – including the working classes – have now become media producers – broadcasters. For the first time ever the working classes have begun to have a bit of power over the means of cultural production.
  • Need to be careful here though – people have talked about the internet democratising culture – but democracy is the wrong metaphor – its better to keep our descriptions literal rather than poetic – if we want to understand what’s going on – what the internet – in its current form – with its current levels of regulation and anonymity and room for allowing people to act without impunity has done – is create the conditions in which anyone who wants to can create and distribute cultural perspectives and memes. This website that you’re reading this page on – was an early – and now thoroughly antiquated and irrelevant – form of this.
    • But the thing that we need to be careful about is that there is a real power structure to this – that whilst people are producing memes and stories and distributing ideas – these ideas are not pure creation – they are instead replicas of memes in a network of ideas – in which major corporations and states – with political ambitions are flooding the market – in other words what people do when they create and distribute memes – is actually forward on, iterate or speak in reaction to memes – and given that corporations and states are able to saturate the market – what we have is a situation in which people appear to have some kind of freedom – but that freedom is only really a freedom to absorb, replicate and respond to a dominant set of themes and motifs – of which they have very little control. And to the extent that this freedom gives them a power to absorb and then replicate – arguably – the game in which they have become absorbed in playing – this cultural replication or war – has deepened the influence of those who have the billions and millions to spend on flooding the social media market.
    • And anyway, even with Mangione, we might add that it is still the major news distributors who set the agenda with the stories and analysis – to which the minions on X and wherever else respond, rejoice or oppose.

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