We live in an era of mass psychological abuse. There is no purity here, indeed we are all guilty. There is no ethical consumption of media in this abyss.
The fix, as they say, is in.
On every side, every angle, every nook, cranny, every alley, vehicle, channel, precipice, turning point, avenue, projection, sound, taste, EVERY STIMULATION captured and cajoled. “More total than totalitarian”; no escape from the clown machine.
Let’s call it Babylon. Let’s name this thing too great to name. There is no purity here.
Every icon your keyboard autocapitalizes is the enemy.
Mickey Mouse the crucifix of a terrible dismantling.
Nonhuman personhood? A top most layer masking something more sinister. Too dark to see. Too dark to grasp.
Let’s call it Babylon. The dark mirror of a functional society.
Organic processes supplanted by the artificial and constructed. Sown together by a propaganda that reinforces a gross misunderstanding.
A small room with a blaring klaxon. Nothing else can be.
There is no purity here.
Does the fish know it is wet?
Let’s call it Babylon. Is it on the TV? National Geographic?
“We have to create new ways of creating new ways of creating change.” – P Bourdieu.
Foundational root axioms? Babylon is every where. Every image an advertisement abuse for a lifestyle of images. Every icon, meme, symbol, idea … the more rudimentary the better … collected under a single whip. Something larger than ideology. Deeper. A collective identity of nonidentity.
Let’s call it Babylon. – it’s a foreign country to normal humans. A place to which we have been abducted. We are raised with Stockholm Syndrome.
Born drunk. We live drunk. We die drunk.
An ideological battle for the territory of the soul, of souls; all too late in a terrible silent war. Do you pay Netflix actual dollars? Toward your own destruction? Guilty as hell.
There is no purity here.
Let’s call it Babylon.
I was in an elevator and it showed me gossip about media “celebrity” stars [______] and {______}. In a fucking elevator. What the fuck is a celebrity anyway?
Reality? Baseline? A constant?
Humans are biomechanical robots and wildly programmable through a panoply of means. Since at least the 1970s¹ we’ve known how bad, for instance, television is for people. … and yet… Some dork laid it all out in 1928.² A guidebook for yoking the savvy media consumer. They taught us to read so we could read their commands. No other reason.
I don’t think we need to discuss free will.
Maybe we do?
Does a well running machine have a Buddha nature? Does a society? Can we push the metaphor from the natural aspiration of a vacuum driven engine to the computerized dance macabre of disparate systems that is the modern equivalent? Are you not a motorhead? Is society a body or a machine? Suddenly this question matters.
Let’s call it Babylon. Can we crucible ourselves to humanity by burning away everything we can identify tainted by this abyss. Yeah probably not.
We’re all guilty of doomed to engaging with this humiliation.
There is no purity here.
However.
And Yet.
In Spite of.
Let’s call it Babylon.
