"I used to think that online life constituted the shadows in Plato’s allegory of the cave, and those craning their necks into phones all day were the poor souls chained down and forced to watch the meaningless digital flickers of reality. After having to explain again and again to normies how some new real-world scandal, be it the fight over CRT, the latest Trumpian sound bite, or the lab-leak hypothesis, all had their origins among obscure corners and figures of the Internet, I now realize it’s the reverse: real life is increasingly a reflection of what happens online.
In our society of spectacle, the only hard, non-optional realities left are war, the markets, and elections. War has been outsourced and forgotten: consider how much longer the Chapelle discourse lasted than the debate about the Afghanistan debacle, the humiliating end to our nation’s longest conflict. Markets impact most people indirectly, but are still real enough to eventually cause a glitch in the matrix about inflation being under control (narrator’s voice: it’s not). Elections, however, are real enough to instantly slap us in the face and make entire fantastical worldviews crumble within a day.
[...] Politics become strange when reality becomes optional."
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