Is Modern Mass Media A Mind Prison?
maybe
WARNING: The following images are stupid and tragic and you will only find them funny if you are a bad person, like me.
These are screengrabs from a Qanon hangout where users are complaining that their loved ones have all abandoned them:
And not to totally change the subject, but I unscientifically asked my Twitter followers if they’d stopped speaking to any family members due to a difference in political views and almost 44% said they had:
This sounds like a great time to talk about the one huge conspiracy theory that I secretly believe, so buckle up:
Before we start, my next novel is up for pre-order! If you want a signed hardcover you can only get them here. All the other buy links, including audio, are right here. If you want to read the first two chapters to get a sense of what you’re buying, here you go.
1. Avoiding the proverbial racist uncle at Thanksgiving
The first thing you need to understand is that the alienation the Qanon types endure is a feature, not a bug.
This is the same mechanism that allows cults to survive, a technique experts call, “Encourage the members to act like weird assholes so that nobody else will want to be friends with them.” It is necessary, because social isolation keeps fragile beliefs intact. This is why political outrage influencers have always trained their followers to repeat talking points in the most off-putting, dehumanizing tone possible.
Knowing this, we should be suspicious of anyone who implies that cutting off loved ones is a virtue. It tends to be a method of control.
Now obviously only a true bastard would suggest that, say, a trans teenager should be forced to spend time around her openly transphobic father, or that anyone owes it to their racist grandpa to listen to his rants about how Trump’s border wall should include sniper nests. Even if they’re just parroting something they saw on Facebook, some positions are less about policy preferences and more about an ugliness in the heart.
And, also, at the same time, it is not at all clear at exactly what point you stop cutting people off. You avoid the racist granddad, but what about the non-racist sister who herself remains close with the old man? Isn’t her continued relationship a betrayal, a way of condoning and thus perpetuating the bigotry?
Something like seven in ten Democrats say they wouldn’t date a Trump supporter, but would they date the best friend of a Trump supporter? How about a lovely, kind-hearted woman who is not herself homophobic but whose church calls gay marriage a sin? The internet is lousy with posts about which books on a partner’s shelf are “red flags”, along with what podcasts they listen to and what movies they watch. We are told that good people create filters around themselves to strain out the undesirables.
If I seem suspicious of this trend, it’s because there’s a larger context here that we cannot ignore…
2. Mass media has become an atomization machine
Quick, what do the following have in common:
Fox News reports about a wave of carjackings by out-of-control youths;
Endless Twitter threads from users who were accosted by strangers about their Covid mask usage;
Countless Reddit posts about Tinder dates turning out to be psychopaths;
A massively viral TikTok trend in which young people declare that certain totally innocuous behaviors give them “the ick”, a visceral disgust that justifies rejecting the offending person forever.
I believe what they have in common is that, intentionally or not, they all inevitably lead the audience to the same conclusion:
In-person interaction is hazardous to your body, mind and reputation. The only truly safe space is at home, in front of a screen.
This is the one conspiracy theory I truly believe, that mass media’s relentless “stranger danger” propaganda serves the same purpose as a cult’s rules against fraternizing with the heretics. And it’s the worst kind of conspiracy in that I don’t think the conspirators have any idea what they’re doing.
Broadcast news has known for 70 years that ratings go up when they shriek that the streets are full of rapists and murderers, so that’s what they shriek. Creating a generation of viewers too scared to go outside at night or to let their children go anywhere unsupervised was just a side effect. You know, the same as how the oil companies weren’t trying to make the planet warmer, but…
3. The consequences are not hypothetical
I assume you’ve seen me post this data before but just so you’re caught up: Yes, we are having less sex than ever...
... and that’s for the same reason violent crime has fallen, which is that there are certain things you can’t do if you don’t leave the house and many of us have stopped doing that.
I’m not saying that teens have stopped having sex because they’re too busy canceling each other over their political views, I’m saying that a whole bunch of different currents are pulling us in the same direction. This is what the system “wants” in the sense that entire multibillion dollar industries have arisen to fill social voids. DoorDash doesn’t make a dime if you go out and eat with friends, Uber would have to dissolve if everyone had a buddy who could drive them to the airport and a whole bunch of influencers would have to get real jobs if it wasn’t for a generation of lonely kids willing to settle for parasocial friendships.
Sure, there are still forces pushing the other direction. Bars and casinos and strip clubs still exist in the same way that newspapers and phone booths still exist, in that they are steadily losing because they represent the more expensive, dirtier and less convenient option. For the winning side—Team Screen—there was just one problem, which is that a lack of friends (or “popularity”) has typically been the most shameful trait in society. But what if it turned out that enjoying shallow distractions in solitude was the most logical, ethical option?
It seems to me that whenever a system wants to pacify the public, the one surefire method is to paint the lazy choice as heroic. Thus, if you say out loud that you think it’s probably bad if a sixteen year-old spends two hours a day watching porn, a chorus of the loudest voices will reply that you must hate sex workers, that you clearly favor suppressing expression and hold puritanical views of the body. “That’s right,” says the dude with 250 tabs open in his browser. “If you think about it, I am advancing feminism by masturbating alone, in the dark, to a video called ‘Horny Schoolgirl Gets Punished By Hornier Gym Coach.’”
4. For the lonely, all excuses are welcome
I know what you’re all thinking: “Jason, you make your living on the goddamned internet, half your income is from your bafflingly popular TikTok account. Put on your crown, King Hypocrite! It’s just a ring of dog turds we painted gold.”
My friends, it is so much worse than you know. I was alienating classmates and co-workers while you were still a gleam in your daddy’s eye. This is me reporting to you from the scene, someone who spent the 90s beating Donkey Kong Country over and over while the other kids were at the lake.
And what I remember from those days is that this kind of loneliness is counterintuitive, in that the longer I went without friendship, the higher my standards for friendship became. A single awkward conversation with another kid was enough to make me avoid them forever. These days, you see that everywhere, the filter designed to let nothing through. No one has a higher bar for female beauty than the incel, as no real woman looks like their OnlyFans girls and none can offer their frictionless one-way flow of pleasure. “I’ll stop being alone as soon as I can find a companion who literally never makes demands or disagrees!”
I have spent the last 30 years watching the entire culture slowly come to adopt the impossibly fine people-filter ethos. Hugely popular sitcoms were based entirely on characters finding petty-but-relatable reasons to harshly judge friends, acquaintances and strangers.
And then came the rise of “cringe” comedy, relentlessly hammering home the visceral horror of inescapable awkward social situations.
And of course the most popular dramas were cop procedurals that took place in a society that’s 40% bloodthirsty deviants.
By 2012 or so, Tumblr was producing endless discussion about which relationships were “problematic.” What’s an unacceptable age gap between partners? Or income gap? Are romantic co-worker relationships ever appropriate? Isn’t any power imbalance in a relationship coercive and suspicious? Speaking of which, be wary of befriending anyone who disagrees about the Johnny Depp vs Amber Heard case, that’s a major red flag.
Remember: novelty is the lifeblood of media. That means the stakes have to keep rising higher and higher, toward greater outrage, more grotesque cultural enemies and endless new categories of undesirables.
The arguments come from radically different directions and rely on wildly different rationale, but they all agree that we must err on the side of avoidance.
This is getting kind of dark, let’s pause for a music break:
5. Even rebellion is built into the system
“Hold on,” some of you are saying, “how can you insist that pop culture drives us relentlessly into the arms of an all-screens lifestyle when so many movies are specifically about how screens are bad? A quarter century ago, every third film was about how tech and cubicles were disconnecting us from what made us human...
...and that was so long ago that at least two of those films had key scenes take place in phone booths. Wall-E even predicted a comfortable, sexless dystopia.”
The trick these stories pull is subtle but crucial to understand: The world of the screens, they say, is boring and tedious. Breaking free means embracing the exciting, sexy danger of Real Life.
This accurately portrays the situation about as well as Spider-Man accurately portrays the effects of a spider bite. Media will always be more entertaining than real life for the same reason a Frappuccino will always be more delicious than creek water: it was specifically engineered to be so. It’s also the reason the Qanon conspiracy will always be more entertaining to think about than the boring, run-of-the-mill corruption in the headlines.
I actually believe this to be the single most successful technique for social control in the 21st Century, convincing those most eager for change that it can only come through thrilling and glorious action, a battle of pure good versus pure evil. “Why bother voting on this boring bond issue? I’m not leaving the house for anything less than a war to overthrow capitalism! And don’t ask me to hang out unless you agree, I don’t befriend class traitors.”
The truth that the system is so afraid of us learning—and that we’re happy to let them keep from us—is that actually changing the world requires a stunning amount of tedious, quiet work, of dry reading and learning and organizing and slowly changing obstinate minds. Mathematically, this includes engaging at least some minds you previously considered ignorant or hateful. And this persuasion occurs, not through flashy performative acts, but by slowly earning trust until your opponents want to agree with you.
The system wants you to equate tedious work with neutered slavery and to equate liberation with sexy drama because it knows the opposite is true, that if you restrict yourself to flashy and dramatic solutions, you will be exactly as useful to the status quo as any other sedentary daydreamer. There is a reason the system has no problem feeding you a steady stream of fantasies about violently overthrowing it.
The reality is that the amount of focus and desire required to blow up the occasional building or pipeline is nothing compared to the lifetime of quiet labor required to understand the system well enough to actually build a better one. And that better world, if it arrives, will require the cooperation of some truly unpleasant people, because all of civilization is nothing but truly unpleasant people learning to peacefully cooperate.
Meanwhile, I will continue to make my living in this very media ecosystem and who knows, maybe this post is just one more layer of the Matrix. Side note: This is secretly what my upcoming novel is about.
If you want a signed hardcover you can only get them here. All the other buy links, including audio, are right here. If you want to read the first two chapters to get a sense of what you’re buying, here you go.