Our post-reality moment is easy to see in political discourse and action, though not limited to that hyperbolic echo chamber of political preservation denuded into reductive soundbites. It’s everywhere. It drives our national conversation. It’s embedded in our popular culture. Politics is the leading edge, teaching us how to create a reality from thin air, but doesn’t have nearly the reach nor appeal of the everyday lies we are convinced to believe are true.
The most spirited and annoying students of the post-reality axiom are crypto enthusiasts, better known as “crypto bros.” They are mostly young, male, in arrested development, and ooze unearned ego and confidence. To the average person I imagine the enthusiasm for crypto currency appears organic; deriving from a groundswell of techno futurists, libertarians, or hangers on who believe they are solving a social problem. “Bros” are vocal on social media, usually have very limited understanding of the technology itself or its supposed benefits, and are riding the Ponzi wave very far from the center of power. They are the biggest fans and the ones most likely to lose their shirt. They don’t represent a popular movement. They are a small mob shouting from the sidelines of the gladiator arena for more blood because they believe it’s a quick ticket to the new American dream. Life, for them, is a zero sum game of winners and losers.
Behind them are more serious investors with real power over markets and their brothers in arms who own exchanges or have created their own coins. They are the people with the resources to fund commercial sponsorships, hire well-known spokespeople, and swing elections at every level of government. The sharpest minds on Wall Street learned a long time ago that you could invest thousands of hours pouring over data to gain some nugget of insight that would yield a substantial return or spend no time at all by rigging the game in your favor. They decided the latter was obviously more preferable. Ponzi schemes and other scams have never been that sophisticated. Bernie Madoff’s scheme, for example, was stunningly simplistic for anyone who cared to look closely at his business. It has hiding in plain sight, but it didn’t call attention to itself. It was built on the myth of an all-seeing genius, an almost religious devotion to the impossible and unprovable. It took a sharp economic downturn to expose his malfeasance.
The crypto situation is different. They are “coins” with no utility and only have value as long as resource rich power brokers can continue to recruit new “crypto bros.” Nothing is being hidden from the public. There is no demigod genius behind the curtain. The scheme is overt and obvious. Now, they say a sucker is born everyday and maybe that’s true. Nothing about crypto coins, or the application of blockchain technology to currency, solves any societal problem or makes sense as a legitimate investment vehicle. It’s pure speculation. The problem is the constant bombardment of sound bites, social media buzz, and advertising telling us the opposite. Even after the Sam Bankman-Fried scandal was exposed, America has forgotten quickly forgotten the crypto industry is a scam. The only logical off-ramp or end game for powerful investors is to get the American government to backstop what we could easily call a post-truth widget. And that seems more and more likely as their narrative grows and buries the truth in a puddle of tears. The industry’s investment in politicians is well documented. Those investments aren’t just about regulations, which are sorely needed. A Ponzi scheme requires a constant stream of new investors, and getting the biggest investor in the world on board, is the obvious goal.
Meme stocks are part of the same trend but more simple. They are presented as different in most contexts, but rely on the same duped investor, the same cabal of advocates necessary to drive price growth, the same power dynamics to be successful. Game Stop is the exception here. That was an inverse case where a committed group of regular people won the game, even when power brokers erected new obstacles, stopped trading, put their fingers on the scale in favor of big money interests. Make no mistake. That was an aberration, an error in the social code, the one in a trillion slot machine jackpot. Every other meme stock has fit the crypto, big interest driven pattern.
In some cases there are real companies involved, like Tesla for example, that are propped up by fans who’ve bought into a narrative divorced from objective reality. Elon Musk thinks social media is real life and he’s manifested that in the case of Tesla. It makes and sells a fraction of the vehicles of large companies who’ve done it for decades, but is valued many multiples higher. He makes wild claims cribbed from science fiction texts, his fans lap up every word like obedient pets, and Tesla’s stock jumps as a result. It’s classic call and response I’ve talked about before in the context of the Republican Party. It’s so simple and stupid, eschewing the more sophisticated narrative building of the crypto and political spheres, that I have a hard time coming to terms with how gullible and controllable we’ve become as a society. It’s one of the harder post-truth pills to swallow. At least the political and crypto examples require a multi-pronged reality building apparatus. The meme stocks and bubble companies narratives are very thin, sometimes the work of single grifter on social media.
The fabulist space race among a few billionaires is a post-truth example built on our collective love of heroes in our popular culture which masks nihilism about the future and creates a massive new market we don’t need. Some of the richest people in the world, people whose money could cure so many societal ills, behave like children, publicly comparing the size of their rockets. They want to convince us that we need to send people to Mars. They want us to believe that it’s the only viable long term solution for the human race. That would cost trillions of dollars – both to get there and develop a life sustaining infrastructure. So who pays for that? The only entity that will ever have the funds to make that kind of investment are governments. And to do so they would need to justify a massive investment to move some humans to another planet instead of making a similar, massive investment, on preserving and enhancing the social conditions of life on Earth. It’s almost too stupid and obvious to argue, but who benefits if government chooses to invest in manned missions to Mars? Of course it’s the little men with large wallets in the global rocket measuring contest. We have to suspend our belief that real world problems are solvable because people with giant microphones are telling us the opposite is true. The even more pessimistic side of me thinks the end game of all massive technology investments is to get government (read: us) to pay for them. We’ve been fed hero stories of techno-libertarian problem solvers for twenty years and all we’ve gotten is middle men and a growth trajectory where selling to large governments is the ideal scale of the future. Everyone sucking up to the orange cretin is doing so with their hand out.
The new media landscape and our inability to process and discern between fact and fiction will continue to make these problems worse. The term “mainstream media” is so overused that it’s lost all meaning. Podcasts hosted by know-nothings get higher ratings and viewership than any legacy “mainstream” source. People who’ve cultivated large followings on social media and have turned that into selling opportunities for consumer products have opinions that carry more weight than a dogged journalist working on the front lines. The most successful people in the post-truth world have figured out how to use the new media landscape to their advantage. There is no single empirical fact or statistic that can’t be bent into a pretzel and tell the opposite story. There is always a mob of bots and real people waiting in the wings to follow their “gut” and push those narratives farther than they would otherwise go. When almost everything is garbage, or mindless entertainment, it’s exceedingly hard to find that objective truth in all the noise.
A product of the assault on reality is the new frontier of that war, now taking on criticism. We’ve already seen the ABC News kowtow to the Neo-fascist government in waiting and the Washington Post bury a critical cartoon. Those are the opening salvos in a war on the voices who have historically built narratives in media by distilling reality into trends and ideas and a deeper human understanding, and ensuring they get drowned out by all the narratives I’ve already mentioned. That battle will take place in courtrooms across America and normalized by compliant judges. It will turn on the people who self-censor and the ones who will feel emboldened by the new normal. It will feel like a battle against conformity and the sane will be shouting into the void. We only have to look at South Korea to see our future. They are mired in a stand-off between two entrenched political realities driven by myriad new media voices.
Where this post-reality wave will take us is nowhere good. The voices convincing you to reject objective truth and reality are pining for complacency. They want you to give up and accept their version. Most, from what I can tell, have already conformed. I hope I’m wrong.
