To give an example of the recent "hot button culture war topic of the month" I feel like the whole Manosphere..."phenomenon" as it's known memetically today by the Theroux documentary, is very much the embodiment of hyperreality that Baudrillard discusses.
There are so many levels of signifiers completely divorced from reality, that one can easily take any level of abstraction, or any time delay of causation, and make a compelling "reasonable" thousand word essay discussing how the recent documentary is a clear display of social decay caused by machismo/social-media/feminism/late-stage-capitalism/decline-of-religion or whatever bogeyman an individual's writer's ideological sports team jersey says is the enemy of all that is good and wholesome. As has been done throughout media, including, unfortunately (as there are pockets of genuine insight here) substack.
To give examples on two commonly trending well known characters:
Clavicular is a clear personification of John Calhoun's mouse utopia experiment "pretty ones", as an embodiment of a strawman of "looks are everything". As Mike Israetel recently pointed out, and really anyone with common sense can see, beyond being colossally stupid and self-destructive, his "looksmaxxing" protocol is not even all that useful compared to just...naturally aging out of being a pimply awkward teenager.
Andrew Tate: if I didn't know the hyperreality concept, I would be convinced his whole existence is a PsyOp. Based Camp did a great episode which caught a video of him talking about how he walks around his house with a sword in order to garner respect from his women..."No if you walk around with a sword you're a rennaissance fair nerd" and their overall point is exactly that he is hyperreal - he is entirely a cosplay of himself. Concretely both his fans and detractors are performing commentary on something that has absolutely nothing to do with him as an embodied human operating in the real world 1) He is very much a complete joke among true macks/ladies'-men - an attractive man can sleep with hot women regularly without spending money, showing he has any money, or promising any future, and at his aesthetics Tate should actually not need all of the "instagram clout" he leads with to get laid. 2) The (real) research on domestic violence and abuse indicates it's rarely "big bad man abusing sweet innocent lady" - it's usually two crazy people that found each other and the abuse is mutual. A woman willing to leave behind her whole community to go be with a dude because of his flashy instagram can hardly be called the paragon of being a wholesome sweet family-oriented lady. Finally 3) he's actually a lot more misandrist than mysogynist - he literally teaches his cam-whores to manipulate men into giving them their life savings, ruining the lives of countless clueless dudes, while also regularly berating and showing contempt for his followers.
It's all quite absurd, and nothing more than a convenient opportunity to present an opinion in memetic battle space, and ultimately just an indication that people should all comprehensively detach from media and spend more time in the real world to stay sane.
Let’s just have everyone go around and share their wildest conspiracy theory and reset the room so we’re all equally wrong and no one has to pretend they’ve got it all figured out. Because if there’s one thing I’ve learned lately, it’s that we could all use a good laugh.
Reading the news adds to the frustration. Who's driving the narrative? What are their biases? What are some other perspectives? By the time, I feel comfortable with all of these questions, the news cycle has moved on to the next catastrophe.
Nobody watches the news to learn things, they watch the news to demonstrate that they tried to learn things. That's why they don't change news outlets when evidence of lies and conflict of interest emerge. Aside from liberal hatred of Fox News people take mainstream news sources seriously even when they have been wrong many,j many times. This explains the Gell-Man amnesia effect, where the newspaper gets stories a person knows about very wrong (even the opposite of the truth) and yet they turn the page and accept the truth of other stories. So for instance a physicist can see they get a physics story completely wrong but turn the page and accept the paper's views on Europe. Meanwhile someone familiar with Europe accepts the physics story then turns the page and sees how wrong they get European culture and politics.
In fact they even accept mainstream media conclusions even when the evidence for those conclusions is presented and it's insufficient. Take for instance the conclusion that the lab leak theory was absurd and people must be racist to believe it. Note, not the lab leak theory itself but the claim that it's definitely not true and you have to be bad to continue advancing it. This was based on a claim by Fauci that a paper that he didn't cite concluded that the evidence was consisten with zoonotic theory. But consistent doesn't mean it's true, it means it could be true. So the mainstream media condemned people for disagreeing with the authorities, and the authorities didn't even say anything definitive.
Thank you for sharing your experiences and thoughts around all of this. It helps me (and I hope many others) know that we are not alone. The stifling of thought at this moment combined with the universal-accepted-left-thoughts stance of so many people makes me feel like I am in Invasion of the Body Snatchers.
Also, since I was fired, one complaint against me really stuck. I stated that we (the people who accosted me with their intolerance) that we are all small "L" liberals because we live and breath in the United States of America. This statement was added to the complaint against me, so I no longer believe the left is Liberal, and reserve that term for actual liberalism.
The real issue isn’t news itself, it’s unowned attention. People are carrying emotional weight for things they can’t influence, then calling that responsibility.
It definitely activates people. I’m saying what happens after that matters more. If you carry that energy into things you can’t influence, it turns into weight without action. That’s where agency gets lost.
Thank you for writing this. I had many thoughts, but I will try to keep them brief.
1) Reminds me of Stephen Covey and his Circle of Concern/Control. Why become so consumed and angry about something that we can do nothing about? Help the people you can and let go of the rest.
2) I've often found that those who consume the most news have the least grasp on reality. You must be detached from the chaos designed to consume you to see the beauty and conflict around us accurately.
3) It is often the poor who suffer during actual conflicts. If you have hours a day to spend doomscrolling, you probably have enough.
I hope you have some good Austin peeps who also don't need the news to be with.
I started noticing that the Substack algorithm now floods my "feed" ("activity" list?) with a lot of grotesque, hideous (usually corrupt) leftist/Democrat politicians and their propaganda outlets, such as Newsom and Pritzker. Lots of liars, narcissists and sadistic sociopaths.
I typically spend an hour or two blocking their most obvious AI bot and troll leftard followers. It will be interesting to see how long I have to keep doing that until I stop seeing their mental sewage and absurd propaganda.
Last week I started seeing stuff from Greenwald's reactivated substack account, and "liked" and restacked most of it (critiques of zionist warmongers).
YOU HIT IT RIGHT HERE: "This imperative to ‘be informed’ is actually a call to emotionally overload yourself, and implicitly requires a person to consume the output of advertising platforms."
From now on I'm not calling them social media... they are Advertising Platforms.
"This is the actual position underneath: it is morally unacceptable for a person to choose mental quiet and not consume what is essentially entertainment in the service of signaling the correct opinions socially."
The blind ignorance of these hypocrites is fascinating to me. What we can see so clearly, their uncontrolled emotional programming by the matrix media feed to 'buy this', seems so far away from their individual and collective self-awareness, it is almost like they are living on some alien planet where only half the news is delivered.
So, I am privileged to turn off CNN and ignore the propaganda of the NYT. What a hoot.
Just look at the people participating in their 3rd "No Kings" protest. These are the same that would scold you for not holding their views from current news reports and claim that you are acting elitist and privileged by ignoring all the fatalistic and alarming happenings. Yet the majority that disagrees with just about everything these people believe in are too busy working and taking care of their families to enjoy a full day wasted on this type of collective feel-good protesting.
They think they are the better people shaming the rest of us.
The truth is that we are the better people trying to ignore them, but we are getting to the point where we are so tired and frustrated of their out-of-control behavior, that we might need to force them back into an asylum or to attend cognitive behavior therapy.
It’s funny, many with mental illnesses would benefit from dialectical behavioral therapy, which is based on Buddhism and stoicism. But the latter now has a bad name because I guess men like it?
I've been wondering about this for a while as well. I don't read the news but I used to. And when I used to it felt like putting my emotions through a grinder (that too first thing in the morning)
Choosing not to read the news is a form of preservation but my tradeoff is I just don't know what is going on (but I don't think reading the news helps with this either)
I appreciate reading essays that synthesise what's going on though but those are rare and they are rarely helping me sensemake right at the moment
Left me thinking about how much of what we call being informed is actually social pressure dressed up as responsibility. It takes effort to step away from that loop, especially when silence is often read as ignorance or indifference. If someone chooses to step away from news to protect their focus, how should they stay aware of issues that directly affect their decisions without getting pulled back into the same cycle you describe?
The best advice I have here is to read books on the things you care about. Any of those topics that come up in social settings - no one will have read a single book on them. For example, if Iran is salient right now I should probably read about its pre-twentieth century history up to the Shah to understand the present moment. I did the same thing with the ideologies I’ve now rejected.
My apologies for not having interacted with your content in some time, Anuradha! This was a very good article! The news makes you less informed and holds you back. It does NOT make you more informed or educated! That’s not what the mainstream media’s purpose is. It’s purpose is to divide America for ratings and profits and protecting powerful people from being held accountable for things they’ve done wrong. The press in this country does NOT work for you or care about you, they work tor the elites, those being the U.S. government, the intelligence agencies, big business, and the military-industrial complex. They do the bidding of elites whether it be CNN, MSNBC, Fox News, CBS, ABC, NBC, the New York Times, or the Washington Post. Look at everything they’ve lied to us about: the Iraq, Afghanistan, Libyan, and Syrian Wars, the Hunter Biden Scandal, COVID-19, January 6th, Kyle Rittenhouse, Nick Sandmann, the Twitter Files, the BLM riots, Russiagate, Ukrainegate, numerous things Trump said, Joe Biden’s mental health, the Epstein Files, you name it!
They tell lies and half-truths, omit inconvenient facts, gate keep what the “acceptable parameters” for debate are, play the partisan game, fear monger, don’t care about fact checking, race bait, practice sensationalism and yellow journalism, kiss up to powerful people, are stenographers who repeat whatever they want them to say, push war all day long, and do endless fear mongering about everything under the sun. All mainstream journalists are either nepotism cases or empty drones who say what they’re told to say to collect a check at the end of the day. They all went to the same Ivy League journalism schools, come from money and privilege and all think alike. The days of journalists coming from the working class are over. As to the idea you’re “privileged” if you avoid the dumpster fire that is the news, it’s total nonsense. You have every right to do it. By the way, Radha is a woman of color from an immigrant background, if we’re going to play that game she’s among those who are supposed to be the least privileged in this country.
If you want to rot your brain out reading The New Republic or Breitbart all day be my guest. But I’m not going to subject myself to that. For news that is actually unbiased and nuanced, I would recommend the following: C-Span, Tangle News, The Free Press, Ground News, 1440, and The Flip Side. The Good News Network is great because they report only good news all the time. UnHerd, Spiked Online, Quillette, Persuasion, and Free Black Thought are all great commentary sites to look at for opinions you won’t typically hear out of the mainstream. But don’t move too far in the other direction and start listening to tin foil hat nonsense like InfoWars, World Net Daily, The Jimmy Dore Show, The Daily Kos, The Young Turks, Secular Talk, The David Pakman Show, Prison Planet, the Tucker Carlson Show, or the Megyn Kelly Show. Just because Rachel Maddow or Sean Hannity aren’t trustworthy doesn’t mean Alex Jones or Cenk Uygur are.
Hell of a summary on the MSM and response in general - I also appreciate the list of alternative news sources as I have not heard of many of them. Thank you!
Yes!
To give an example of the recent "hot button culture war topic of the month" I feel like the whole Manosphere..."phenomenon" as it's known memetically today by the Theroux documentary, is very much the embodiment of hyperreality that Baudrillard discusses.
There are so many levels of signifiers completely divorced from reality, that one can easily take any level of abstraction, or any time delay of causation, and make a compelling "reasonable" thousand word essay discussing how the recent documentary is a clear display of social decay caused by machismo/social-media/feminism/late-stage-capitalism/decline-of-religion or whatever bogeyman an individual's writer's ideological sports team jersey says is the enemy of all that is good and wholesome. As has been done throughout media, including, unfortunately (as there are pockets of genuine insight here) substack.
To give examples on two commonly trending well known characters:
Clavicular is a clear personification of John Calhoun's mouse utopia experiment "pretty ones", as an embodiment of a strawman of "looks are everything". As Mike Israetel recently pointed out, and really anyone with common sense can see, beyond being colossally stupid and self-destructive, his "looksmaxxing" protocol is not even all that useful compared to just...naturally aging out of being a pimply awkward teenager.
Andrew Tate: if I didn't know the hyperreality concept, I would be convinced his whole existence is a PsyOp. Based Camp did a great episode which caught a video of him talking about how he walks around his house with a sword in order to garner respect from his women..."No if you walk around with a sword you're a rennaissance fair nerd" and their overall point is exactly that he is hyperreal - he is entirely a cosplay of himself. Concretely both his fans and detractors are performing commentary on something that has absolutely nothing to do with him as an embodied human operating in the real world 1) He is very much a complete joke among true macks/ladies'-men - an attractive man can sleep with hot women regularly without spending money, showing he has any money, or promising any future, and at his aesthetics Tate should actually not need all of the "instagram clout" he leads with to get laid. 2) The (real) research on domestic violence and abuse indicates it's rarely "big bad man abusing sweet innocent lady" - it's usually two crazy people that found each other and the abuse is mutual. A woman willing to leave behind her whole community to go be with a dude because of his flashy instagram can hardly be called the paragon of being a wholesome sweet family-oriented lady. Finally 3) he's actually a lot more misandrist than mysogynist - he literally teaches his cam-whores to manipulate men into giving them their life savings, ruining the lives of countless clueless dudes, while also regularly berating and showing contempt for his followers.
It's all quite absurd, and nothing more than a convenient opportunity to present an opinion in memetic battle space, and ultimately just an indication that people should all comprehensively detach from media and spend more time in the real world to stay sane.
Let’s just have everyone go around and share their wildest conspiracy theory and reset the room so we’re all equally wrong and no one has to pretend they’ve got it all figured out. Because if there’s one thing I’ve learned lately, it’s that we could all use a good laugh.
Reading the news adds to the frustration. Who's driving the narrative? What are their biases? What are some other perspectives? By the time, I feel comfortable with all of these questions, the news cycle has moved on to the next catastrophe.
Nobody watches the news to learn things, they watch the news to demonstrate that they tried to learn things. That's why they don't change news outlets when evidence of lies and conflict of interest emerge. Aside from liberal hatred of Fox News people take mainstream news sources seriously even when they have been wrong many,j many times. This explains the Gell-Man amnesia effect, where the newspaper gets stories a person knows about very wrong (even the opposite of the truth) and yet they turn the page and accept the truth of other stories. So for instance a physicist can see they get a physics story completely wrong but turn the page and accept the paper's views on Europe. Meanwhile someone familiar with Europe accepts the physics story then turns the page and sees how wrong they get European culture and politics.
In fact they even accept mainstream media conclusions even when the evidence for those conclusions is presented and it's insufficient. Take for instance the conclusion that the lab leak theory was absurd and people must be racist to believe it. Note, not the lab leak theory itself but the claim that it's definitely not true and you have to be bad to continue advancing it. This was based on a claim by Fauci that a paper that he didn't cite concluded that the evidence was consisten with zoonotic theory. But consistent doesn't mean it's true, it means it could be true. So the mainstream media condemned people for disagreeing with the authorities, and the authorities didn't even say anything definitive.
It's extremely performative.
Thank you for sharing your experiences and thoughts around all of this. It helps me (and I hope many others) know that we are not alone. The stifling of thought at this moment combined with the universal-accepted-left-thoughts stance of so many people makes me feel like I am in Invasion of the Body Snatchers.
Also, since I was fired, one complaint against me really stuck. I stated that we (the people who accosted me with their intolerance) that we are all small "L" liberals because we live and breath in the United States of America. This statement was added to the complaint against me, so I no longer believe the left is Liberal, and reserve that term for actual liberalism.
The real issue isn’t news itself, it’s unowned attention. People are carrying emotional weight for things they can’t influence, then calling that responsibility.
No, it’s definitely the news. It’s intended to emotionally activate you. Are you saying it’s not?
It definitely activates people. I’m saying what happens after that matters more. If you carry that energy into things you can’t influence, it turns into weight without action. That’s where agency gets lost.
I love this. As someone who is paid to monitor the news for her clients, I can honestly say I do a better job when I "tune out" a bit.
I read for fun, go for walks, and I follow specific news and check news 1-2 time days in a very targeted way.
Yes, bad stuff happens all around us, but doomscrolling and screaming at internet strangers won't solve the horrors.
Focus on family, friends, community, your work-- all things you can change.
Bless you dearly for that
Thank you for writing this. I had many thoughts, but I will try to keep them brief.
1) Reminds me of Stephen Covey and his Circle of Concern/Control. Why become so consumed and angry about something that we can do nothing about? Help the people you can and let go of the rest.
2) I've often found that those who consume the most news have the least grasp on reality. You must be detached from the chaos designed to consume you to see the beauty and conflict around us accurately.
3) It is often the poor who suffer during actual conflicts. If you have hours a day to spend doomscrolling, you probably have enough.
I hope you have some good Austin peeps who also don't need the news to be with.
These are indeed good thoughts.
Nice to hear from you Brandon
This is why the expectation that people have an opinion (the correct one, of course) on everything is so counterproductive.
It kind of reminds me of the Douche vs. Turd Sandwich episode of South Park.
A true classic
I started noticing that the Substack algorithm now floods my "feed" ("activity" list?) with a lot of grotesque, hideous (usually corrupt) leftist/Democrat politicians and their propaganda outlets, such as Newsom and Pritzker. Lots of liars, narcissists and sadistic sociopaths.
I typically spend an hour or two blocking their most obvious AI bot and troll leftard followers. It will be interesting to see how long I have to keep doing that until I stop seeing their mental sewage and absurd propaganda.
Last week I started seeing stuff from Greenwald's reactivated substack account, and "liked" and restacked most of it (critiques of zionist warmongers).
YOU HIT IT RIGHT HERE: "This imperative to ‘be informed’ is actually a call to emotionally overload yourself, and implicitly requires a person to consume the output of advertising platforms."
From now on I'm not calling them social media... they are Advertising Platforms.
Call 'em what they are. 😎
"Be informed" basically means "think what I think and do what I say".
It's an attempt to bully people into agreeing with the speaker by implying the listener is uninformed or stupid of they don't.
Let's just call these people what they are - bullies (or assholes, if you prefer adult language).
This is a home run.
"This is the actual position underneath: it is morally unacceptable for a person to choose mental quiet and not consume what is essentially entertainment in the service of signaling the correct opinions socially."
The blind ignorance of these hypocrites is fascinating to me. What we can see so clearly, their uncontrolled emotional programming by the matrix media feed to 'buy this', seems so far away from their individual and collective self-awareness, it is almost like they are living on some alien planet where only half the news is delivered.
So, I am privileged to turn off CNN and ignore the propaganda of the NYT. What a hoot.
Just look at the people participating in their 3rd "No Kings" protest. These are the same that would scold you for not holding their views from current news reports and claim that you are acting elitist and privileged by ignoring all the fatalistic and alarming happenings. Yet the majority that disagrees with just about everything these people believe in are too busy working and taking care of their families to enjoy a full day wasted on this type of collective feel-good protesting.
They think they are the better people shaming the rest of us.
The truth is that we are the better people trying to ignore them, but we are getting to the point where we are so tired and frustrated of their out-of-control behavior, that we might need to force them back into an asylum or to attend cognitive behavior therapy.
It’s funny, many with mental illnesses would benefit from dialectical behavioral therapy, which is based on Buddhism and stoicism. But the latter now has a bad name because I guess men like it?
Neville Roy Singham? Corrupt billionaire communist tech bro. Funded the No Kings "protests" from the profits on his Chinese corporation?
https://www.hindustantimes.com/world-news/us-news/who-is-neville-roy-singham-billionaire-linked-to-activist-groups-involved-in-la-riots-faces-congressional-probe-101749728779809.html
Great article, Anuradha. Good for you.
I've been wondering about this for a while as well. I don't read the news but I used to. And when I used to it felt like putting my emotions through a grinder (that too first thing in the morning)
Choosing not to read the news is a form of preservation but my tradeoff is I just don't know what is going on (but I don't think reading the news helps with this either)
I appreciate reading essays that synthesise what's going on though but those are rare and they are rarely helping me sensemake right at the moment
Generally why I look to nonprofit newsrooms and even foreign news outlets for information.
Which ones though? They all can be argued to have agendas
Left me thinking about how much of what we call being informed is actually social pressure dressed up as responsibility. It takes effort to step away from that loop, especially when silence is often read as ignorance or indifference. If someone chooses to step away from news to protect their focus, how should they stay aware of issues that directly affect their decisions without getting pulled back into the same cycle you describe?
The best advice I have here is to read books on the things you care about. Any of those topics that come up in social settings - no one will have read a single book on them. For example, if Iran is salient right now I should probably read about its pre-twentieth century history up to the Shah to understand the present moment. I did the same thing with the ideologies I’ve now rejected.
My apologies for not having interacted with your content in some time, Anuradha! This was a very good article! The news makes you less informed and holds you back. It does NOT make you more informed or educated! That’s not what the mainstream media’s purpose is. It’s purpose is to divide America for ratings and profits and protecting powerful people from being held accountable for things they’ve done wrong. The press in this country does NOT work for you or care about you, they work tor the elites, those being the U.S. government, the intelligence agencies, big business, and the military-industrial complex. They do the bidding of elites whether it be CNN, MSNBC, Fox News, CBS, ABC, NBC, the New York Times, or the Washington Post. Look at everything they’ve lied to us about: the Iraq, Afghanistan, Libyan, and Syrian Wars, the Hunter Biden Scandal, COVID-19, January 6th, Kyle Rittenhouse, Nick Sandmann, the Twitter Files, the BLM riots, Russiagate, Ukrainegate, numerous things Trump said, Joe Biden’s mental health, the Epstein Files, you name it!
They tell lies and half-truths, omit inconvenient facts, gate keep what the “acceptable parameters” for debate are, play the partisan game, fear monger, don’t care about fact checking, race bait, practice sensationalism and yellow journalism, kiss up to powerful people, are stenographers who repeat whatever they want them to say, push war all day long, and do endless fear mongering about everything under the sun. All mainstream journalists are either nepotism cases or empty drones who say what they’re told to say to collect a check at the end of the day. They all went to the same Ivy League journalism schools, come from money and privilege and all think alike. The days of journalists coming from the working class are over. As to the idea you’re “privileged” if you avoid the dumpster fire that is the news, it’s total nonsense. You have every right to do it. By the way, Radha is a woman of color from an immigrant background, if we’re going to play that game she’s among those who are supposed to be the least privileged in this country.
If you want to rot your brain out reading The New Republic or Breitbart all day be my guest. But I’m not going to subject myself to that. For news that is actually unbiased and nuanced, I would recommend the following: C-Span, Tangle News, The Free Press, Ground News, 1440, and The Flip Side. The Good News Network is great because they report only good news all the time. UnHerd, Spiked Online, Quillette, Persuasion, and Free Black Thought are all great commentary sites to look at for opinions you won’t typically hear out of the mainstream. But don’t move too far in the other direction and start listening to tin foil hat nonsense like InfoWars, World Net Daily, The Jimmy Dore Show, The Daily Kos, The Young Turks, Secular Talk, The David Pakman Show, Prison Planet, the Tucker Carlson Show, or the Megyn Kelly Show. Just because Rachel Maddow or Sean Hannity aren’t trustworthy doesn’t mean Alex Jones or Cenk Uygur are.
Hell of a summary on the MSM and response in general - I also appreciate the list of alternative news sources as I have not heard of many of them. Thank you!