the internet is a diseased brain

or, the end of all worlds

the lies of Eden

The Ones Who Walk from Omelas by Ursula K Le Guin is one of the most taught short stories of the last 50 years. It’s often taught in moral philosophy classes because of its very clear moral statement.

For those who are unaware or who don’t want to click that link to read the story (it’s short), I’ll summarize it here, briefly.

Omelas is a seeming utopia. People are happy and cared for.

What you discover is that all of this happiness relies solely on a single child being tortured.

Every citizen of Omelas must look upon the child and come to understand the cost of their happiness, of this utopia. Many go the one time and then never again. Maybe they never even consider it again. But they go about the rest of their lives and live utopically in this utopia.

But some walk away.

Maybe not right away. But eventually, some leave and go off to survive in the non-utopic world rather than rely upon such cruelty.

When I first encountered this in a mandatory philosophy class at university, most of my peers seemed to misunderstand the story. I know this because when my professor asked how many of us would walk away, almost everyone raised their hands.

They didn’t seem to understand that Le Guin is not asking us a question but raising a mirror.

You may believe you would walk away from such cruelty, but I’ll ask you a few questions.

Are you reading this on a computer or phone?

How old do you think the slaves were that mined the precious metals in your electronics?

Did you know that there’s an entire wikipedia article devoted to the people who committed suicide at the facility where iPhones—among other electronics—are manufactured?

Did you know that instead of solving the horrific working conditions that caused workers to throw themselves to their deaths from the top of the buildings, Foxconn set up huge nets to keep those would be suicides from dying?

the cost of Eden

In a comprehensive study of drone pilots engaged in the American Antiterrorism Drone War of Terror, we discovered that there was significant mental stress to people engaged in warfare from 9-5 who then went home to civilian life for the rest of the day.

Here’s a piece about it from 2021 and here’s one from 2017. You can find books and more articles about this as well.

Some of the problem is the blurry boundary that formed between wartime and regular life. You can spend all day bombing kids terrorists and then go hug your kids and play Mario Party or go out for appetizers and appletinis with your best friend from middle school.

The whiplash and juxtaposition of extreme violence with normal every day life formed a knife cleaving their brains in half.

Some may call this trauma.

Or even Post Traumatic Stress Disorder.

Eden, spoiled

Once upon a time, Instagram was the place you went when you decided you were too cool for facebook. You were done with writing posts for strangers and people you used to know in school.

You were ready to, instead, share pictures with these same people highlighting how badbutt your life was. This was after twitter became the playground for politicians and journalists.

Instagram was a refuge from all that, where you shared pictures of food or sunsets at beaches or maybe some highly coordinated and choreographed candid pictures of yourself laughing or dressed real nice or holding your kids or pets or whatever.

Maybe all of the above.

At a certain point, the rest of the social media ecosystems, which became massively online fandoms to current events, stretched their legs into instagram’s beaches and candids and the platform—like all social media platforms—filled up with screengrabs of tweets from AOC or Donald Trump or some other social media influencer, and organizations like Unicorn Riot gained huge followings by documenting and livestreaming from the ground of the 2020 US protest movement.

Instagram became political in a massive and aggressive way during 2020 and has since sort of split in half.

You can still find the sunsets and breakfasts but you’ll also find the political sloganeering. Sometimes the exact same people are doing both within minutes of each other.

And underneath it all, most of you are just privately messaging memes and funny reels to one another. This may even be the primary way you interact with certain people in your life who live far away.

As most of the internet centralized on twitter and facebookstagram and as we used the 2016 election as a breathless marketing pitch for the strength of their online marketing tools, the hands at the wheels of this grand human experiment on behavioral manipulation and human consumption began incentivizing worse and worse behavior. Twitter under Musk is probably the most talked about version of this, but we probably should remember that the reason none of you use facebook anymore is because our parents’ generation lost their minds sharing insane infographics and slideshows trying to prove that Michelle Obama is secretly trans and that Megan Markle pretended to be pregnant and never actually had any children with the former prince of England.

The degradation of information is so pronounced that many, many people get their information about current events from tweets talking about tweets talking about an article that literally no one has read, not even the editor of the magazine that published the piece.

And then, of course, there’s Nathan Robinson’s infamous description of the news as we’ve come to understand it:

The truth is paywalled but the lies are free.

And so many of us no longer even bother to find out what is true about anything, especially current events.

We have all, individually, curated our reality in such a way that no matter what happens in the world, we instantly know how to respond based on the opinions fed to us by algorithm, by meme, by the previous contract we made with influencers and dubious news aggregates who shove complex geopolitics into bitesized memes while we crafted our curated digital existence.

And we all dance in this existential nightmare, this demiurgic sword of Damocles, this pantomime of watching shadows on walls and calling that truth, life.

And though I just described us all as curating our realities, it’s more that algorithms designed to keep us staring at a lit up piece of glass for long enough that we’ll end up buying shirts with anime characters on them have a much heavier hand in this curation.

I think

Ryan Broderick

’s Garbage Day newsletter has mostly done an excellent job of documenting and reporting on the degradation of our information.

This is what an unmoderated internet looks like

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If you’ve ever talked to me in real life about social media or political commentary, you’ve probably heard me mention Barbara Tuchman, the hilarious Jewish historian who made Wilhelm II sound like a Wodehousian joke in her Pulitzer Prize winning history of the lead up to WWI, The Guns of August.

You have no doubt heard me mention her in relation to Tuchman’s Law, published in A Distant Mirror:

"The fact of being reported multiplies the apparent extent of any deplorable development by five- to tenfold" (or any figure the reader would care to supply).”

She also said, and I paraphrase here, that the rate of information does not better inform us but it does increase our anxiety.

She died in 1989, before the 24 hours news cycle and long before social media turned current events into a constant, neverending barrage.

I often wonder what Tuchman would say about the accelerated rate of information now, where you cannot escape being punched in the face by horrorshows from a continent or two away while you try to relax on the couch after putting your children to sleep.

One might call this infoterrorism.

the fruit of knowledge and the snake

There is, apparently, a popular notion going around right now that Jesus was a Palestinian.

When my wife told me about this I was literally stunned to silence and then woke up half an hour later after having a seizure induced stroke.

And it’s not because I just read 3,000 pages about Anglo-Saxons, the Dark Ages, and the Norman Conquest, which should demonstrate to literally anyone the myth of racial purity or how time and migration absolutely transforms peoples and places.

The Greeks living in Greece right now are not the same as Homer or Aristotle’s Greeks. The Egyptians who built pyramids are not the same as the Egyptians who fought Napoleon.

And understanding Jesus of Nazareth as a Palestinian should cause nosebleeds to anyone who has ever even walked past an open history book.

Now, it’s only human and natural to understand ancient people through the world we know. Many people tie a wire from the Roman Republic to the modern US and I think this is a very useful analogy.

But it’s also important to understand that Julius Caesar has nothing but geography in common with the average citizen of Rome today and has literally not a single thing in common with any US politician, past or present or even future.

I’m trying real hard not to write 5,000 words about the history of Jerusalem, specifically, but I’ll just say this and move on:

It makes more sense to understand Jesus as Babylonian than it does to understand him as Palestinian.

If you’d like me to explain that, I encourage you to open a book.

History matters.

It is the best way to understand the world we currently live in. The one we’re forced to live in because of the terror of chronological time.

I believe much of this willful suspension of knowledge is incentivized by what some call an identitarian obsession.

There are many people who view the history of Israel and Palestine through the lens of skin color, where this appears to be a conflict between white people with overpowering military and political might oppressing brown people.

This fits very nicely in the American psyche.

When someone says something like Israelis are white, you may ask yourself, When did that happen?

The Holocaust ended in 1945. I’ll let the Math Majors in the crowd inform the rest of you how recently the Jewish people were definitely not white.

The history of the Jewish people is one of oppression and displacement, of pogroms and holocausts. They were nearly exterminated during your grandparents’ lifetime. The remainder were given land surrounded by people who hated them and thought it might be worth finishing what Hitler started.

And so when someone says that the Jewish people are now white or that Jesus was actually a Palestinian, I think there’s reason to question the motive or underlying pre-occupation with this specific configuring of identities.

In a way, the argument that Jesus was Palestinian is a way to deny Jewish people’s connection to Israel, their ancient homeland, their holy land. By invalidating this connection at its foundation, you may begin to walk the path that leads to you saying that Israel should not exist¹.

You got here through being an ally with oppressed people oppressed by, perhaps, the most infamously oppressed people in history.

And so while discussion of identity and the melanin in skin has become a fixation bordering on obsession with US politicals, I think applying today’s american liberalism to different cultures with very different historical backgrounds and current political contexts is almost as foolish as claiming a direct connection between ethnic groups separated by thousands of years of genetic drift, migration, military invasions, and cultural transformations.

an Eden for others

Famous person and Israeli citizen Gal Gadot shared a slideshow of the many Israelis kidnapped by Hamas on October 7th in which Hamas killed 1,300 Israelis in a terrorist attack. Some of them were children and infants.

She’s a parent and an Israeli and a human, so her care for these people seems about as uncontroversial as any normal person might expect.

The top comment right now with 600 more likes than the second most popular comment is What about [the] thousand children in Palestine?

This isn’t necessarily a bad question, since the week since October 7th has seen the Israeli government absolutely demolish Gaza with indiscriminate bombing, including the bombing of areas the IDF highlighted as safe routes for evacuation. This has been condemned widely, including by the UN, and has led to over 2,000 deaths (and counting) since October 7th.

Many of them women and children.

You may ask yourself why this is not called terrorism.

This cycle of violence seems endless. It’s been going on for longer than my parents have been alive.

There’s much that I could say but I don’t think you need a history lesson from me. Probably you’ve long ago decided how you feel about this conflict and maybe you’ve even picked a side and rarely, if ever, stray from that side.

But I do want to talk about this, briefly, in a few ways.

How have we gotten to the point where someone showing you a picture of kidnapped or dead children causes you to react with What about this other thing?

cast from the garden

Something breaks in the human animal’s brain when we go to instagram.

For so long and even still, it’s a place where we go to see pictures of our friends, their families, and memes that were popular on reddit or tiktok two months ago.

When something like the Hamas attack and the subsequent Israeli response happens, this place we go to mindlessly scroll past pleasant pictures fills up with violent rhetoric, inflammatory sloganeering, and graphic depictions of violence done to children, it not only guts us but it sweeps us out of reality.

We have conditioned ourselves to space out while wiping our grimy fingers over the glass showing us pictures of our high school friend’s niece and our brains fracture when our scrolling is no longer just interrupted by the constant onslaught of ads and promoted posts but also pictures of kidnapped or murdered children.

And it would be one thing if instagram turned wholly over into this gruesome display, but instead you’re still seeing pictures of deviled eggs and wedding pictures while you’re seeing videos of people running for their lives, of collapsed buildings, of men and women holding the all too lifeless body of their loved ones.

Even stranger, the same person may be posting both at the same time.

Here’s me at my best friend’s babyshower.

Here’s bombs raining down on Gaza.

Here’s some guy shouting Death to Jews.

Here’s the Prime Minister of Israel calling Palestinians animals.

Here’s a picture of my fucking cat, isn’t she a goof.

The juxtaposition, the whiplash.

I can’t help but think of drone pilots living constantly in two worlds that are incompatible and how this breaks them to pieces.

And, yes, of course, sitting on your couch while The Office replays endlessly on your TV that you’re ignoring while you scroll thoughtlessly on your phone that can’t stop showing you heinous violence is not the same thing as literally driving to an office to enter a warzone for a few hours of the day before clocking out and texting your spouse and asking them if they want to get appetizers at Applebees.

But, a little bit, it also is.

forcefeeding forbidden fruit

Jacques Lacan described the Real, the Symbolic, and the Imaginary in ways that seem counterintuitive. For example, the Imaginary is most of what makes up our conscious experience of the world. The Imaginary is built upon and framed by the Symbolic, which comprises not only language but what we might call identity itself, both individual and collective.

On top of that, to Lacan, we are essentially trapped within the Symbolic.

The Real, weirdly and hilariously, to Lacan, exists outside of our conscious reality, but not really in a Platonic way.

I don’t know. I’m an idiot and this was explained to me by a friend on antipsychotics in London in 2008.

But I think of this often. And I feel it captures perfectly what social media has done to us as people.

We have become trapped in a reality where posting a meme supporting some idea on twitter or instagram is seen as identical to going out and actively engaging in a political project.

Politics as meme. Meme as political project. Meme as activism. Activism through memes.

It has become so much this way that the simple act of not doing this feels like a political statement to some.

IF YOU’RE NOT TALKING ABOUT THIS THEN YOU ARE TACITLY SUPPORTING THIS.

And THIS is always real bad.

Often, it’s the worst thing someone can imagine in that moment.

People now feel it is necessary to have an opinion on everything. Thus and so, everyone you know became an expert overnight on Ukrainian politics in February 2022. On October 8th, everyone you know suddenly became a teacher of Middle Eastern politics and history. And because their expertise ballooned so suddenly and spread so rapidly, they also were compelled, like any good convert to a cause, to badger and harass everyone about this new obsession.

But the posting, for most, has become the political project. Politics is no longer the realm of addressing the material conditions of people’s lives. Instead, it’s this symbolic game where the endpoint is recognition that you were on the right side of history, even if all you did was reshare the malformed and corroded information via memes while taking a shit on your lunch break.

When George Floyd died in my neighborhood and people from the suburbs came to my neighborhood to burn it the fuck down, these same people also had the audacity to post about how everyone needed to be posting about this.

I cannot explain to you how exhausting and frustrating it is to do community organizing all day and then see people from 50 or 500 miles away tell people that the real activism is turning your profile picture into a black box.

Or the implicit demand that I spew my thoughts ceaselessly into the gaping algorithmic maw of the social media ecosystem so my opinions can become takes can become content can become a shorthand for other people to use to justify whatever mad thought they have about whatever is happening to actual real life people living through a terrible and terrifying moment.

But this is the Manners of Social Media.

It’s purely symbolic and because we’re trapped in the Symbolic, by the Symbolic, the symbolic actions and behaviors and statements become the reality that matters.

It’s not about doing anything. It’s about having correct manners.

It’s all quite Victorian.

If you use the right words in the right way, if you know which utensil to use at the correct time, you’re able to demonstrate your status, your inclusion in the correct group, in the proper mode of conduct.

But because of the way the algorithms incentivize our anger and hate, hyperbolic statements become the norm and you are quickly shoved into becoming a hardliner on any subject you dare mention in public, because even thought there’s a canyon between both sides, standing anywhere in the middle is seen, now, as worse because you’re enabling the worst people imaginable.

So if you make a post saying that Hamas committed an act of terrorism by kidnapping and murdering children, many people will read that as you saying I hate Palestinians and am glad that they’re dying.

Of course, the opposite is also true. If you post a Palestinian flag, you’re probably a Holocaust denier.

I mean, those are the two options, yeah?

There’s no room to say, Hey, fellas, maybe all of this is pretty fucked, yeah?

What are you, some kind of fascist enabler? Some kind of apologists for terrorism and war crimes?

My theory on why empathy for all sides has become so hated online comes down to the Thoughts and Prayers discourse.

When US children got murdered in schools, as they often did and do, it became a trope for politicians receiving millions in donations from the NRA to offer their Thoughts and Prayers to the victims.

This symbolic gesture was seen as woefully inadequate at best and horrifically hypocritical at worst.

And so the Manners of social media changed and we normalized hardlined responses. You can’t offer Thoughts and Prayers but you can say FUCK COPS and get a thousand likes and shares, probably.

We do not want your empathy. Empathy has become meaningless online.

We want to hear your anger, because that is righteous.

Thus and so, when tragedy happens, people on the word wide web decided that simple statements of empathy were dogwhistles, probably, or tacit endorsements of whatever horrific event just occurred, obviously. Rather than, you know, a very normal human response to hearing about people being indiscriminately raped or murdered.

And we get here because this is all symbolic, because the Symbolic is the reality imprisoning us, at least online, at least on social media.

You abstract the problem.

Whether it’s Palestine or Ukraine or Baltimore, you understand the violence in an abstract way. Because it’s abstract and because you’ve never spoken to anyone who has to live in those places, who has to deal with the reality of violence, you’re able to have very strong and clear cut beliefs about what is right and wrong.

And perhaps, most despicable, are those who respond to tragedies by making it about themselves.

the rotten apple and the birth of shame

If your response to 3,000 dead people is What about me?

Maybe think about it for one more fucking second.

Literally, just one.

And then don’t write anything at all.

Consider what your response says about you.

Now, to be fair, the above headline and article is from 2018 (a different year full of different tragedies for Palestinians). But it still speaks to a deep derangement, I think, wherein we become the center of everything in the world. Our own personal story outweighs the tragedy.

Responding to tragedies with personal anecdotes makes you a terrible person.

It really is that simple.

But the incentives are there and so we see this all the time. The death and destruction and disasters are abstracted and all of our responses are symbolic, so why not shine the spotlight on myself for a moment?

Consider what it truly says about your concern for your Palestinian siblings who are not simply demanding freedom but are having their homes and neighborhoods reduced to literal fucking rubble, you absolute maniac.

I’m sure not having your gender affirming medication or whatever else is difficult for you but so is holding the corpse of your child and maybe one of those is just a bit fucking more important, Leslie.

Maybe don’t compare your struggles as a person in the wealthiest nation in the world, whose military is instrumental in the generations of Israel and Palestine’s cycle of atrocities and catastrophes, to an ethnic group in some of the most abysmal living conditions on the planet, who don’t have any political agency or even a path to political agency.

I cannot express to you the absolute disdain I have for someone whose response to the last two weeks is How can I make this about me?

And, yes, I have seen YOU do this.

And I hate you for it.

the tree of life, forgiveness, Eden revisited

I do not have an answer for what should be done for Israel and Palestine.

Neither do you.

But we also don’t have to.

We’re not world leaders. Shit, we’re not even local leaders in the town we live in (I’m guessing).

What I can tell you is that there are real people there facing real violence. A type of violence that you, dear reader, will (hopefully) never understand.

They’re human.

They’re not pawns for you to score online points with. They’re not tools for your own self-aggrandizement or self-actualization. They’re not rhetorical devices.

They’re human.

Not props.

Not abstractions.

They’re human.

Adults and children and babies. Parents and friends and lovers. They have their own dreams and desire, passions and personalities.

You can be human too.

You can look at what happened on October 7th and acknowledge that this was a horrific tragedy. You don’t need to reduce the heinousness of what happened to support Palestinians. You definitely don’t need to say that Israelis deserved it.

Even if you really think that, I promise you that you did not need to say it out loud or post it a hundred times online.

You can look at what happened every day since October 7th and acknowledge that this, too, is an ongoing tragedy. You don’t need to downplay the scope of human suffering in order to defend Israel’s right to exist.

You can hold all this inside you. These tragedies linked, interacting, bound together. You can understand the history, the political context, the material conditions that led to Hamas, the ones that led to Israel surrounded by nations that have called for Jewish genocide and how this plays into the theocratic ethnonationalism of Netanyahu who has been PM for nearly twenty years in a nation that has existed for only 75 years.

You can hold all this inside you. And you can still look upon the people living through this nightmare, this hellish maelstrom of ceaseless violence, and just feel bad.

Empathy is not a weakness and it is not meaningless.

It is, perhaps, all that we ultimately have, as humans.

Our empathy.

Our ability to see the Other as ourselves. To see ourselves in one another. To understand and to believe and to know bonedeep that we all deserve self-determination, peace, and freedom.

And so before you share your next meme about Israel or Palestine, before you furiously type some comment below this essay about how I’m an antisemite or a Pontius Pilot for the ethnic cleansing of Palestine, maybe, instead, take a moment, take a breath, and throw your phone into a fucking river.

Anyway, I liked this essay by

Sam Kriss

about what’s happened in Israel and Gaza recently (and historically).

Bread, figs, phosphorus

1. Personally, I think the question of Israel’s right to exist is a very dumb question for the simple fact that Israel does exist.