Situational Assessment 2018

Boy Wonder is out with his 2018 Situational Assessment.

The thoughts aren’t new to me, so it doesn’t have the same impact that his 2017 Situational Assessment had.

In 2017, hostilities continued to intensify along the existing fronts, which Boy Wonder had previously identified as (A) communication infrastructures, (B) the Deep State, (C) globalism, and (D) culture wars.

Boy Wonder notes rightly that one of the things that’s sinking the Blue Church is that its members don’t understand that narrative is no longer important. Attention is attention. Thus if you spend all your spare time watching MSNBC and pouring over news stories in The New York Times or The Washington Post, you may imagine you’re striking a blow against Trump and everything you believe Trump stands for, since these outlets put a negative spin on Trumpism. But actually you’re not, since you’re still immersed in the Trump niche. The spin is irrelevant. Follow the money: I suspect if you looked at Fox TV and MSNBC’s advertisers, you’d find a really high correlation.

Thus, the increasing disenchantment with legacy “news” channels in people under 40, and the shift to decentralized digital communication infrastructures.

If you really want to know, you divide your time equally between Blue Church and Red Religion feeds. (Hence my affection for Red Religion aggregator The Daily Mail.)

Of course, I'm a lightweight, so my eyes glaze over whenever I think of things like “Deep State” and “Globalism.” Ana Maria expended reams and reams of prose in another galaxy far, far away giving me the background on The Memo – Golden showers: check! Carter Page: check! A complicated backstory that reads like the story arc for a season of The Americans: check! – but I confess, I followed very little of it.

On the other hand, the culture war is something I can really get behind.

If you want to drive a staunch Blue Churcher absolutely nuts, Boy Wonder notes, you start feeding them tropes. Blue Church is used to tropes that were propagated with top-down authority: Uncle Sam! Swastikas! But that’s not the way Red Religion uses tropes.

What’s informing all this is an underlying shift in the underlying technology. (Shout-out to Marshall McLuhan.) Although, of course, underlying technologies also change the ways people think. May even change the way neurons process sensory data collection in the brain.

Neurologists weren’t around to wring their hands back in the days when writing was the great new underground threat to the established hierarchy. But there’s a lot of justification for seeing the religious clashes between Catholics and Protestants that dominated 15th, 16th, and 17th European history as a response to the technological innovation of the printing press, and that’s kind of an analogy.

###

One area that Boy Wonder does not get into in the 2018 Situational Assessment is the whole #MeToo phenomenon, which strikes me as the biggest thing that happened in 2017.

So, I asked him about it.

Blue CI coherence mechanism, he answered. (CI = “collective intelligence.”) Non-linear. Its problem is that it weaponizes too quickly. It could also be part of a deep auto-immune system: a homo sapiens way of removing dominance / tyranny that comes from way back. A lot of collateral damage, but evolution only cares about getting the job done.

###

In other news, I went to Walmart yesterday! Walmart is supposed to have a Dr. Scholl’s orthotics kiosk that spits out customized inserts on demand! I’ve been wondering whether the autoimmune disease arthritic discomfort might not be at least partly alleviated if I shifted the impact when I step down. My feet are almost flat; better arch support might do miracles.

But, of course, the Fishkill Walmart did not have the Dr. Scholl’s kiosk.

I spent an hour wandering around anyway and bought a Bluetooth speaker that I don’t strictly need and was deeply tempted by a 60-inch HD TV for under $300.

But I didn’t give into temptation.

TVs are the ultimate thought control technology. I mean – people with great self-discipline can limit their use of them to Netflix streaming, I suppose.

But sooner or later, that day comes when you’re feeling sick or dispirited, and you tell yourself, A couple of hours can’t hurt…

And then the next day, you find yourself reaching for the remote control again…

The most revolutionary thing you can possibly do is throw away your TV.

I imagine that’s why TVs are so cheap.