Anarcho-Cynicalist

In the summer of 1933, Alfred Korzybski warned us that "the map is not the territory." Today, we're drowning in maps while the territory remains largely unexplored. Americans, those peculiar primates with their capacity for time-binding and abstract symbol manipulation, have constructed elaborate semantic maps of their social reality - digital atlases of outrage that bear increasingly tenuous relationships to the flesh-and-blood humans they purport to represent. Consider the curious case of our current semantic civil war. We've developed intricate linguistic frameworks - "left," "right," "liberal," "conservative" - abstractions piled upon abstractions until we forget that these are merely maps, not the living, breathing territory of human experience. The map says your neighbor is an "enemy," while the territory shows them helping your child catch the school bus. Our digital information ecology, with its algorithmic pre...

The Great Orange Rorschach Blot: How Trump Became a Living Inkblot Test for a Fractured Reality By now, everyone with a pulse and an internet connection has realized that Donald J. Trump—real estate mogul, tabloid mainstay, game show carnival barker, and, oh yeah, ex-President—has become something far larger and weirder than the sum of his parts. He’s not a man; he’s a phenomenon, a gravitational anomaly in the cultural phase space, warping perception itself. Look at him, and what you see says more about you than it does about him. This is not accidental. This is not even new. It is, however, an accelerant, a quantum amplification of forces that have been bubbling beneath the surface for decades. To some, he is the prophesied savior, the Last Honest Man standing against a cabal of globalist pedophiles, a real-life John Wayne, if John Wayne were a spray-tanned New Yorker with a taste for gold plating. To others, he is the Antichrist, the beast foretold in Revelation, the final boss in A...

It begins, as these things inevitably do, with an irresistible promise: the merging of neurons and silicon, the ancient meat computer melded with gleaming circuitry. A utopian vision that might just save us from ourselves—if we can manage not to destroy ourselves with it first. You know the story. We, with our magnificent and terrible gift for self-deception, have convinced ourselves that education—that beautiful, broken, essential human enterprise—simply requires a little technological enhancement to achieve perfection. As if the human mind were a smartphone requiring the latest software update rather than the most complex object in the known universe. (Here I should acknowledge that even as I write these words, electrodes are being attached to the shaved scalps of grad students in labs from MIT to Shanghai, measuring the electrical whispers of thoughts-becoming-just as they once measured the muscle contractions of frogs' legs.) The optimization of the human animal is the ...