How to commit internet suicide

Outing the REAL mainstream media – yes, it’s you.

Words & images © Paul Ransom

Dateline: late 2023. Random nobody kills a few minutes scrolling their Facebook feed. and is soon overwhelmed. Have they stumbled into a cult compound? Or is it that a number of their ‘friends’ have just been hacked by an army of hysterical jihadist paradigm police? Is this the much-vaunted doom scroll, or merely the standard issue war footing of the self-appointed priests of common (non)sense?

According to the variously outraged denizens of decency and democracy their version of the apocalypse is the real end of days, and everyone else’s great awakening is fake. A hoax. A plot. You are either with them or against them. Sheep asleep or warrior of truth.  

Where, our anonymous social media user reflected, (having checked the perimeter for surveillance drones, chemtrail residue, and unvaccinated disease carriers), was the middle ground, the grey area, the perspective?

Oh c’mon, that’s way too bookish. No one’s gonna click that shit. Everyone knows that fear and simplicity sell – yell – and that anything less than salvation or damnation is just the mumbling prevarication of out-of-touch elites and paedophile-enabling dinosaurs.       

Thus, suitably upbraided for their unappealing brand of temperance, our unliked Meta friend began to wonder if the much-touted collapse of civilisation was indeed nigh.

However, rather than citing the evil machinations of opaque cartels or the star-studded scheming of Woke Hollywood as the wellspring of terminal decline, they began to ponder the possibility of a more plural culprit. No, not Zuck or Musk, not even the algorithm, but you.

Us. We the people. The ultimate 24/7 channel of fear and division. The silver bullet seeking, panacea peddling prophets of quick fix, vigilante justice and posters of me, me, memes. From the higher than high horses of popular wisdom we stoop to blame Murdoch, CNN, et al for selling us a junk diet of disaster and conflict, whilst simultaneously churning out a relentless self-authored torrent of tabloid drama and must-see spiritual truths.

Like this post. Yours (un)truly. Another internet sage spewing so-called insight for the benefit of absolutely no one. Perhaps, for all my attempts at balance and fairness, this is yet more doom porn. Barbarians at the unkept gate, etcetera.  

Sure, I’m doing the fancy, post-modern version. Meta-doom. But it’s still a whinge.

I may never post about the ‘freedom hating agendas of black communists’ or the ‘transgender assault on parental rights’ – nor indeed am I likely to assert as FACT that bearded comedians, orange-haired candidates, and groin-grabbing football administrators are the victims of witch-hunts – but I am here to bewail the blame shifting consensus of the REAL mainstream media.

Here on the freely accessible internet, we are suffering through a pandemic of viral persecution, where the righteously infected biliously broadcast their own banner headlines of crisis, conspiracy, and cut/copy consciousness. OMG, where’s my mask?      

• NB: At the time of writing – September 2023 – sundry members of my online friend group were busily frothing about The Voice Referendum in Australia, the forthcoming end of hetero-normality in Canada, Russell Brand’s latest sexual assault controversy, Trump’s numerous narratives, and the fallout from the Hermoso/Rubiales kiss scandal. In addition, there was much talk of chemtrails, the patriarchy, the death of common sense, Cultural-Marxist plots, how innately evil and stupid all men are, and – of course – the fact that the mainstream media is a sinister propaganda vehicle working at behest of an elite cadre that is somehow both white male/hyper-capitalist and feminist/socialist. (Damn, those hoaxers have everything covered.)               

All of which reminds me of what I once called the slave narrative. In my 2019 publication, The Pointless Revolution, I defined this as a complex of ‘fantasies of righteous victimhood and impending apocalypse’ that allow us to ‘blame the system for just about everything and remain rooted in ironically passive alt-smugness.’ In other words, the citizen martyr. The holy warrior/victim locked in a self-legitimising love/hate tango with the nefarious forces of Orwellian awfulness.  

In the lamestream social media landscape, it seems that a sizeable chunk of my network have a conveniently available suite of oppressors to shake their impotent rebel fists at. Once nominated – othered – said oppressors then appear to both validate and exonerate. Cue the noble, long suffering 99%, endowed as they are with the far-sighted wonders of folk wisdom, standing in both proud opposition and blameless (helpless) innocence against the evil expertise and blundering stupidity of…whoever, whatever.

Them!!!!!!!!!!!

But like I said, doom porn. As in…bedroom know-nothing tries, and fails, to suck own microscopic cock. Blames hoi-polloi for embarrassing blogospheric fail.

If I were you, dear reader – which you may be thankful I am not – I would flag this post as disinformation. Feel free to write off the above polemic as a robot-generated failure to add anything meaningful to the digital discourse. Don’t like. Don’t share. And whatever you do, just don’t subscribe.

I am not part of the solution. I am the hidden-in-plain-view engine of the problem. Furthermore…

…THIS IS A HOAX!

But hey, fake news is no news, right? Sure ain’t sharing that. Unfollow. Unfriend. Next.

Postscript: If my Woke/Central Banking/Big Pharma thought controllers ever let me back online, I will be sure to remind myself that the mainstream media share-feed is a (fake) swamp of fear and negativity badly in need of better drains. That is, assuming the paradigm doesn’t shift in the interim or the machines don’t kill us.

If you are yet to unsubscribe, and something of the above rang a bell, you may be keen to explore the theme further.

Don’t Blame Me, I Voted… (2014)

It’s All Their Fault (2019/23)