17
Nick awoke. He sat up in bed.
He got a notification to follow president trans lebron on LinkedIn. He closed it.
He was gelatinous with fatigue. Gelatinous was the right word. He had heard it on some antidepressant commercial and was thinking about it all the time. But it fit. His body seemed to have not only the weakness of jelly, but its translucency. He felt that if he held up his hand he would be able to see the light through it. All the blood and lymph had been drained out of him by an enormous deluge of hyperpsyopped Empathy Week news cycles he had to post about online, leaving only a frail structure of nerves, bones, and skin. All sensations seemed to be magnified. His red-framed blue light glasses didn’t make his eye strain better at all, the pavement tickled his feet, even the opening and closing of a hand was an effort that made his joints creak.
As soon as he woke up, he instinctively went to his Mandarin Dashboard and started doom scrolling.
ReluctantHero had a new audiobook out, The Grind Will Set You Free. He was reposting everyone’s posts about how they were listening to it, about 50 a day so Nick would just skip past them all.
There was a new propaganda ad from some European NGO. It was a Kurdish girl, about 5 years old, in a desert village. She is holding a doll and looking at the camera with her big innocent eyes. She says “mommy why did they stop funding my school?” Then a Han Chinese man’s deep voice says “Do you want to make this girl cry?” And that was it, that was the whole commercial.
Fuck Bitch had gone viral for wearing a War Machine shirt on stream. Nick clicked a video thumbnail of it, which brought him to a CCP music magazine on YouTube. On YouTube he saw that War Machine was live. He clicked on the War Machine livestream.
War Machine was saying “no, no, we didn’t send her one, we didn’t ask her to wear it.” He lit a cigar and said, “I’m just trying to get a Rolex, you know?”
Nick clicked back to the start of the stream. Someone asked War Machine if he’d seen the latest 1984 remake and what he thought about it. Wasn’t it insane that they were so brazen like that? War Machine said, “1984…the guy in that story…I think the guy in that story just needed to do some pad work.”
Nick had put in more than ninety hours of screen time in the first five days of Empathy Week. So had everyone else online. Now it was all over, and he had literally nothing to do, no Current Thing to post about until the next fake gaslighting story came out the next morning. He could now spend six hours in the Faraday Cage and another nine in his own bed. Slowly, in mild afternoon sunshine, he walked up a dingy street in the direction of Mr. Tao’s shop, keeping one eye open for any disgruntled Han people looking to start a fight with a Uyghur. The Jansport backpack that he was carrying bumped against his back at every step, sending a tingling sensation up and down the skin of his back. Inside it was some good coffee, some sweatpants, and the USB drive, which he had now had in his possession for six days and had not yet opened, nor even looked at.
The first day of Empathy Week was the Opening Ceremony. It was held at an outdoor stadium in Beijing. There were watch parties all over every major Chinese city, including Mars Camp Bell, and it was heavily promoted by the CCP media. After the processions, the speeches, the shouting, the singing, the banners, the posters, the films, the reality content psyops, the unveiling of new statues, the rolling of drums, and the tramp of marching feet, all of this footage from the Opening Ceremonies was instantaneously processed into new jingoistic propaganda ads. Most of the gaslighting had been done far in advance. This new generation of jingoistic agitprop started flooding every possible Neuralink space. Still, this was only the first day.
The main event of the second day was the great People’s Election Day, when everyone across China would vote for their province’s People’s Representative. It was this day that the boiling anti-Uyghur hate would reach its climax of terroristic street violence. The media was still doing the storyline where the opposition candidate, Gary Guanxi, was in prison, but he was somehow going to win and be let out when the government saw all the democratic votes or something.
The third day, after the voting, the normie media had shifted to focusing 100% on the Safe Super Bowl. On Friday or Saturday Big Chungus would be announced as the winner of the most Historic, Most Perfect and Fair Democratic Election of All Time. There would be a gay rave at the Xinjiang state house, and that would be the end of the political narrative.
Empathy Week would culminate on Sunday was Empathy Day aka Super Bowl Safeday. The day would begin with DS-Delivery delivering the new iPhone 50 to everyone’s house, just like it was Christmas morning. The day would be spent making content and engaging online, and watching your favorite celebs do Safe Football takes on TV. Then, that night was the main event, the Safe Super Bowl. And this iPhone it was the matchup everyone was hoping for: the hometown Camp Bell Dragons of New Prime City from the SFL-East, with their Han quarterback, versus the Texasville Dallas Cowboys from the West, with their All-Pro quarterback Logan Paul. Kick-off was at 8 PM at Vanguard Investments Stadium, just outside the quantum computer. Nick had been seeing Americans wandering around Camp Bell gawking at Mars for a few weeks now.
It was now Thursday, the fourth day of Empathy Week. Something weird had happened to Nick on the second day, though. The media had ratcheted up the gaslighting so much by that point that they could tell a new explosively blatant lie every few minutes, their psychological grip on its loyal subjects was so strong. The main set piece on that second day, Election Day, was a political speech at the CCP rally in downtown Tokyoville, Mars Camp Bell. One of Big Chungus’s top advisors, Spaceship Girl, was giving a speech about the danger of China falling into the hands of the dangerous Uyghurs, who were threatening to turn it into some kind of authoritarian state. It was basically a dominoes-type situation, explained Spaceship Girl, who happened to be a professor of this subject at NASA Harvard Space Academy: Xinjiang would fall to the Uyghur menace via misinformation, then the CCP would lose control of the entire country, then China would be in total chaos!
The general hatred in the crowd for Uyghur misinformation and disinformation had boiled up into such a delirium that if the crowd could have got their hands on the 2,000 Uyghur war-criminal domestic terrorists who had been rounded up that week for spreading misinformation (they were actually held there with no charges and would never be charged with anything), they would unquestionably have torn them to pieces—it was at just this moment that Spaceship Girl announced she hadn’t actually been with her father on the bus during the 6/9 bombing after all. The guy she had been with on the bus that fateful day in June was the CCP civil bureaucrat Family Friend. Spaceship Girl always hated her racist traitorous Uyghur father and loved her loyal Han government Family Friend who helped her and her family get rid of her bad terrorist father. The Family Friend was a real Chinese man, not like her pathetic and insecure Uyghur dad. And thanks to her loving Family Friend, she was able to go on to NASA Harvard Space Academy in Beijing, and then invent the quantum computer that would finally bring humanity to Mars.
The speech had been proceeding for perhaps twenty minutes when she had said this. She said it naturally, without pausing her speech. Nothing altered in her voice or manner, or in the content of what she was saying, but suddenly the story that had been a dangerous conspiracy theory for years was now admitted to be true. Pasadena Orangefield had been totally canceled for saying this. Now the CCP was admitting it was true. Without words said, a wave of understanding rippled through the crowd. The result of the People’s Election hadn’t been announced yet. Wouldn’t be announced until that weekend probably. But now Spaceship Girl was signaling the new framing of the result, either way. If Big Chungus won, this meant that the authoritarian government would be cracking down on Uyghurs even more, with more gaslighting. If Gary Guanxi somehow won, she was signaling, the CCP-controlled institutions that made up public life – the media, the government bureaucracy, big tech – would still move in lock step to once again oppose everything Guanxi tried to do, even to the degree of making up massive blatant lies like Spaceship Girl was doing. She was reminding all the #brotherhood posters that if they lost the People’s Election, democracy was going to be bad and misinformation was going to be good again.
She was speaking in the replica Tiananmen Square, at a platform set up in front of the replica Great Hall of the People, with its low rectangular profile and double-eaved hip roof, and in the middle, the portrait of Big Chungus in the style of the similar portrait of Mao Zedong.
Now Spaceship Girl was saying that she had invented time travel and Gary Guanxi had stolen her plans and went back in time to erase her inventing it, only after building the time machine using the plans that he stole from her. The crowd was frothing with hate.
Then she called the obviously fake redpilled counterprotest nearby “occupying invaders” as a dog whistle that it was okay to kill them. The next moment there was a tremendous commotion. Yes, it was open season on the Uyghurs once again! These counterprotesters being here was all wrong! They were all terrorists, and shouldn’t be tolerated! There was a riotous interlude while all the CCP #brotherhood posters got their phones out and tried to film someone else doing some fighting without actually doing anything themselves. An obvious CIA plant ran at the obviously fake counterprotesters, which started a melee of people in the crowd throwing things and jostling around for the cameras.
DZUNGAR posters were ripped from the walls and trampled underfoot. The Heroes of Peace performed prodigies of activity in clambering over the rooftops and spraying the DZUNGAR posters with fire extinguishers of spray paint. But within two or three minutes it was all over. Spaceship Girl, still gripping the neck of the microphone, her shoulders hunched forward, free hand clawing at the air, had gone straight on with her speech. One minute more, and the feral roars of rage were again bursting from the crowd. The Empathy continued exactly as before, except now it might be the most UN-fair election in history.
There was, of course, no admission that any change had taken place. Merely it became known, with extreme suddenness and everywhere at once, that gaslighting was good again. Every Uyghur face you saw could be a terrorist. Every single one was the enemy. Nick was walking outside his office at the Forbidden Apple Store at the moment when the speech had happened, but it was also being broadcast live to every Neuralink in China. Every TV screen in every boujee apartment building window in China would be playing it.
It was night, and the people’s faces and the scarlet banners were luridly floodlit. The square was packed with several thousand people, including a block of about a thousand schoolchildren wearing their Marvin the Martian-inspired Heroes of Peace x Netflix gear. On a scarlet-draped platform the next speaker was up. Big Chungus’s wife, the CCP official who gave most of his speeches. There was a huge portrait of Big Chungus draped behind her. A little Rumpelstiltskin figure, contorted with hatred, she gripped the neck of the microphone with one hand and did all the heroic triumphant speaking gestures that the celebs did in the miniseries of truth. Her voice, made metallic by the amplifiers, boomed forth an endless catalogue of atrocities, massacres, deportations, lootings, mass rapes, torture of prisoners, bombing of civilians, sticking children with hypodermic needles, lies propagated by the Uyghur-controlled media, unjust aggressions, and broken promises. All the highlighted talking points that Netflix had been programming into its audience. ‘All done by these dangerous evil little Uyghur men, and I use the word men loosely here, believe me.’ She was using all the buzz words and terms of art that had been coded into the language by decades of violent government propaganda and purging of dissent. At every few moments the fury of the crowd boiled over and the voice of the speaker was drowned by a wild beast-like roaring that rose uncontrollably from thousands of throats. The most savage yells of all came from the schoolchildren. She said ‘Now what we not gon do is throw fuel on the fire of this concentration camp moral panic.’ The crowd went nuts.
The thing that impressed Nick in looking back was that Spaceship Girl had switched from one take to the other actually in midsentence, not only without a pause, but without even breaking the syntax. But at the moment he had other things to preoccupy him. It was during this moment of disorder while the crowd clashed with the obviously fake counterprotesters that a man whose face he did not see had tapped him on the shoulder and said, “Excuse me, I think you’ve dropped your backpack.” Nick knew that it would be days before he’d have the opportunity to look inside it. The instant the speech was over he went straight to the DS-Work, though the time was now nearly 11 PM. It seemed like everyone else was logged on as well. There was an insane amount just of TikToks to watch about the incident. Everyone knew that this was the time to be posting your takes because they were all now part of this Historical Event.
Spaceship Girl had been with her CCP Family Friend when the bomb had gone off on 6/9: Spaceship Girl had always been with her CCP Family Friend when the bomb had gone off on 6/9. A large part of the political takes for the past decade were now completely obsolete. Reports and records of all kinds, newspapers, books, pamphlets, films, soundtracks, photos—all had to be memoryholed and explained away at lightning speed. This was actually very easy because everyone was used to it by now and was so beaten down by the CCP media that their lives were completely hopeless. But still, it was a lot.
It was good in times like these to stay posting online. It’s what the algorithm wanted. Lots of people were at the DS-Work. People he didn’t see there that often. Still more were staying home and posting. It was clear, though: anti-Uyghur violence was on the table like never before. That was fine; it is what it is. Nick just had to be careful to not wear any traditional Uyghur or Muslim clothing in public. But no matter what happened in the People’s Election he just had to put out a few dumb basic redpilled “it’s so over!” or “we’re so back!” memes and keep his head down and then the week would be over.
By the third day his eyes ached unbearably and his red blue light glasses needed wiping every few minutes. Posting, and even reading the TL, during Empathy Week was like struggling with some crushing physical task, something which one had the right to refuse and which one was nevertheless neurotically anxious to accomplish. In so far as he had time to remember it, he was not troubled by the fact that every word he wrote into a meme macro, every letter he typed, was deliberate cringe. He was as anxious as anyone else online to get the Likes and the clout.
The viral story the third day was the finale of DZUNGAR. The brave hero of the show, who was so badass and owned the Han opps so many times in the show, and he was played by a young Uyghur actor, in the finale he gives a speech to all his Dzungar warrior soldiers that he had been thinking and, actually, the Han were right. They had beaten the Dzungar fair and square, and now the truly patriotic thing for the Dzungar to do is cheerily march into their death camps. And that was the finale.
But that wasn’t all. The other news narrative that day was that the main Uyghur actor from the show, who played the badass main character, he was actually a homosexual and had just announced that he was getting married! He posted a great photo that was going very viral of his boyfriend/fiancé, a Han PLA border guard from Beijing!
On the fourth day Spaceship Girl posters had already gone up in place of the DZUNGAR posters. She was in a new movie about traveling through time to get revenge on a rapist who had also stolen her ideas for a time machine. The villain was a caricatured Uyghur that looked exactly like Gary Guanxi and the tag line was “It’s like a fantasy but not a fantasy.”
On the afternoon of that fourth day the dribble of the news stories slowed down. Thursday. Most of the media was doing only half-hearted speculation about what the result would be once they count all the votes. But. The tone on social media was generally light and giddy. Everyone was so happy because they just wanted a break. Now all they had to do was get cozy and wait for the voted to be counted and watch the Safe Super Bowl, and then we could all have a break from politics again.
For as much as half an hour there was no post on the trending hashtags; then one more meme about how Big Chungus was so great his dick must be huge, then nothing. Everywhere at about the same time the work was easing off. A deep and as it were secret sigh went through the internet. A mighty deed, which could never be mentioned, had been achieved. It was now impossible for any human being to prove the truth of any of the events that had happened that week. The layers of psyops were all so fake and convoluted that it would be impossible to sort it all out. Nick, still carrying the backpack containing the USB drive, which had remained next to him in his DS-Work cubicle as he worked, went home, shaved, and almost feel asleep in the shower.
Now, with a sort of voluptuous creaking in his joints, he climbed the stairs above Mr. Tao’s shop. He was tired, but not sleepy any longer. He turned on the lights and put some nonflouridated water in the Bodum kettle. Egirlebooks would arrive presently: meanwhile there was the show on the USB drive. He sat down in the computer chair and opened the backpack. A heavy sweatshirt was inside and nothing else. He looked in the outer pocket. There was a slip of paper. He took out the slip of paper and put it on the table.
Nick made sure the old timey iMac desktop had the wifi disabled, even though the wifi could never get through the Faraday Cage. The iMac was an old library one, it looked like; it had some paper with some numbers and text printed on a piece of paper masking-taped to the bottom, and the masking tape was peeling badly. He moved the mouse. The screen lit up.
He took his USB drive out of his pocket and inserted it in the side of iMac.
The USB drive icon appeared in the left column of the Finder window. Nick clicked on it. The contents of the USB drive came up: WME_final.dmg. He clicked it. Another message popped up that said “CONTENTS PASSWORD PROTECTED. ENTER PASSWORD HERE:” He looked at the scrap of paper. It said “Shakespeare.” Nick typed in the password. The file went to a downloads folder with a progress bar of the new unzipped file. It downloaded almost immediately.
Nick right clicked the file and selected “Show in Folder.” When the folder popped up, he looked at it. There wasn’t just one file folder. There were two, like a double-sided album, called HEARTS and MINDS. He clicked one folder, then the other. Each had like 40 or 50 video files, some with totally random-looking strings of odd words for titles. He clicked the first video, which was called ‘INTRODUCTION: GASLIGHTING IS FAKE 1.’
A black screen appeared. A computer blippy type electronic beat started playing. A title appeared in fancy white script:
“Alpha Investment Corporation Presents”
“The War Machine Experience”
Then it cut to a sunny parking lot. It’s outside Joe Rogan’s podcasting studio in Austin Texasville. Someone is getting out of the black SUV. You can’t see their face. Going in the lobby with the crazy wolf statue. It’s War Machine. He looks about 10 years younger and only has one face tattoo, the Playstation logo. KeepComputer is in a control room and taking a producer hostage. He tells him make sure the podcast feed doesn’t get cut, can you do that? War Machine and his henchmen storm the Joe Rogan podcast studio where Joe is interviewing a Doctor Phil deep fake.
Then War Machine is podcasting on the Joe Rogan Experience; there, in Joe’s seat, War Machine talking instead:
“I want to talk about…possible futures… You know, history is just a mishmash of bad timelines. You can only impose your will on the world if you…fight against the timeline. Now this fight is so difficult, and this fight it doesn’t even feel like a fight, it feels like head trauma, is because the weapons used and the rules of engagement are so totally alien and the more mentally straight you are, the more you have your head put on properly, the more perverse and incomprehensible the situation is. And uhh you don’t get points for compromising. When it’s your group against another group, don’t be fooled, don’t think we’re just all in the same boat here and we’re looking out for each other’s best interests. Tribalism is alive and well out there. The world is a dangerous place. We do live in a world of limited resources and other people are going to compete for those resources and even try to steal those resources from you and they’re going to be parasitical, they’re going to behave in a parasitical way. So don’t be fooled. In terms of tribal conflict, backtracking, compromising, toning down what you say or how you behave in order to satisfy someone else’s…not even their own morality and ethics, but the morality and ethics they set forward for you to follow. Usually this is not what they follow themselves—in fact I can guarantee it. ‘So here are the rules I’m setting up for you. I get all the money and I also get to come fuck your wife. Those are the rules I’m setting up for you!’ When you ask your enemy to set the rules, what do you think is going to happen? You think they’re going to play fair? No. they’re not. You don’t get points for compromising. They’re not going to say, oh well he backtracked on his position, I guess we should scale down the tribal warfare, I guess we should do that. No. That’s not going to happen. Now what you would want to do, if this were like a fair game like we want to think it is, what you’d want to do is like appeal to some neutral observer. But I don’t think there are so many neutral observers. So. Possible futures – is it possible to go back to this agrarian farming lifestyle of making fucking yak yogurt? Maybe on an individual scale. But I’ll say this. Steve Jobs, why it was important to him that the early Macs have good UI design and had good typography and everything. At the beginning of a tech revolution, of advancement, the direction that thing takes, if you influence it just a little bit in the beginning, if you steer it this way or that way at the beginning. If you have a little bit of influence at the very beginning, your small amount of influence at the beginning can bring you to a radically different place in the future. And um artificial intelligence, whatever’s coming next, it’s not just something decided by geeks in Beijing, it’s also decided a little bit by the culture in which it’s created. And anyone who’s been paying attention to the censorship at Twitter, to what’s going on in Google, they know it’s bad…when it comes to culture. We’re on, what, the iPhone42 now? The iPhone50 soon. Imagine how bad it’s going to be when it’s the iPhone100. Imagine how fucking bad. Now is the time to shape the world as much as we can into something healthy, something sane, so the world of tomorrow is not a horror show. And, you know, just because we’re at the mercy of forces that we don’t understand here, that nobody understands. That doesn’t mean that our efforts here aren’t going to shape the future.”
Nick paused the video, chiefly in order to appreciate the fact that he was chilling, in comfort and safety. He was alone: no Neuralink, no ear at the keyhole, no nervous impulse to glance over his shoulder or cover the screen with his hand. The sweet summer air played against his cheek. From somewhere in his imagination there floated the faint shouts of children: in the room itself there was no sound except the insect voice of the clock. He settled deeper into the armchair and put his feet up on the fender. It was bliss, it was eternity. Suddenly, as one sometimes does with a show one knows that one will ultimately watch and rewatch every second, he clicked on a different video called GASLIGHTING IS ACTUALLY GOOD 3. He went on watching.
War Machine was on the Joe Rogan podcast set again. It was obviously much later. There was more Alpha investment Corporation branding around the studio and you could tell War Machine had been there for a little while. He was saying: “To understand the nature of the present war—for in spite of the regrouping which occurs every few years, it is always the same war—one must realize in the first place that it is impossible for it to be decisive. None of the three superpowers could be definitively conquered even by the other two in combination. They are too evenly matched, and their natural defenses are too formidable. China was protected by its incomprehensible language and culture, so it could keep its country as a Han ethnostate. People in America know they’re genociding the Uyghurs, but they go ‘oh that’s just how they do things in China, I’m not going to worry about it.’ The UAA and the west are protected by its media dominance, where they could just have their celebs make fun of China and even China’s citizens would love it and laugh at their own government. But they don’t because their governments owe China a shitload of money. And then the third global superpower is the middle east. They are constantly having their crazy problems that nobody else can understand, but they keep all the other superpowers in check by completely controlling their governments. They’re like the all-time QB, you could say.
China exploits its own citizens, of all ethnicities, proudly. The USA knows this. They don’t care. China will never be Current Thing in America. The USA commits horrors across the world. Chinese citizens don’t care. Imagine a Chinese citizen caring about that. The east and the west, they’re really just like a big Springfield and Shelbyville.
Between the frontiers of the super-states, and not really in the possession of any of them, are these weird supercities like Hong Kong, Prime City, London, Istanbul, which all contain within them about a fifth of the population of earth. Mars Camp Bell was designed in Xinjiang to be one of these. Maybe the largest if their plans work out. These territories are governed primarily by gaslighting TV shows, which allow them to be whorish capitalistic havens of commerce while their brand or whatever is still communist austerity. They allow the connected countries like China or UAA to keep their economies afloat with capitalism so they can keep saying how successful their communist democracy is or whatever. These local city governments can be a total joke. They can be corrupt. They just have to allow the authoritarian national governments to use the cities for their psyops. The government medias will pander to the cities with psyopped TV shows that make them feel like they’re real blue collar heroes and their lives have meaning. The corporations can pay their workers in lore, essentially. And when things get rough they can then use that gaslighting to start more tensions within their borders. And here’s where the scapegoats come in: that tension can then be grounded in killing the politically undesirable groups, like Uyghurs.
The primary aim of modern warfare (in accordance with the principles of gaslighting and half language, this aim is simultaneously recognized and not recognized by the directing brains of the CCP) is to keep everyone right on the edge of boiling over with hate and resentment without actually doing anything meaningful. At the end of the 19th century, the problem was what to do with the surplus of goods. At the end of the 20th century, that problem had been solved. The solution was to make it all cheap and just watch everyone turn into fat slobs who love TV. That was heading in a bad direction, since people started thinking their lives had no meaning, so then the American CIA did 9/11. Now lots of people’s lives had meaning in America. Now, in the 21st century, the primary problem has become to keep the world population distracted and divided with psyops, so they don’t rise up and kill the class who runs the war industrial complex. This problem has been solved, so far, by just making the psyops more and more spectacular and technology-based. Technology like TVs. And airports. By this time people will watch things they know are fake, and treat them as real, even fully believe they are real, as long as the media consensus says they are real. But the greatest trick of the 21st century…the greatest trick was was to brainwash people into thinking this was actually good. And that’s why. The title of this video is. Gaslighting is actually good.”
The video ended with a credit sequence of all the hypebeast editors in the Alpha Investment Crew, along with a photo montage of War Machine hanging out with BillabongKeith over the years, since they were in their early 20s. Nick watched the whole credit sequence all the way to the end.
Nick clicked another video, GASLIGHTING IS ACTUALLY GOOD 4.
War Machine was driving around smoking a cigar and talking: “In the early 21st century the vision of a future society unbelievably rich, leisured, orderly, and efficient—a glittering antiseptic world of glass and steel and snow-white concrete—was part of the consciousness of nearly every online person. Because they had seen it on TikTok. Science and technology were developing at a prodigious speed, and it seemed natural to assume that they would continue developing. But this failed to happen, partly because of the impoverishment caused by a long series of wars and CIA-orchestrated fake revolutions. Partly because scientific and technical progress depended on the empirical habit of thought, which could not survive in a society whose attention spans were destroyed. As a whole the world is more primitive today than it was 50 years ago. Certain backwards areas have advanced, and various devices, always in some way connected with warfare and data collection, have been developed, but experiment and innovation have largely stopped, and the ravages of the Xinjiang internment camps of the 2010s have now been completely retconned into meaninglessness. What I’m saying, folks, is you can to technology if you’re making bombs, or selling ads. But that’s it.
From the moment the iPhone made its first appearance it was clear to all thinking people that the need for human drudgery, and therefore to a great extent human inequality, had disappeared. If the machine had been used deliberately for that end, hunger, overwork, dirt, literacy, and disease could be eliminated within a few generations. And in fact, that did happen, in a sort of automatic process, at first it started to seem that when people could be captured on photo and video behaving badly, that this would reduce entitlement and inequality in Xinjiang. But soon it became obvious that these rules once again only applied to politically disfavored populations, like Uyghurs, and not the culturally entitled populations, like high-class Han CCP officials. Not coincidentally, this was the time when wealth inequality actually skyrocketed more than any time ever in human history.
This was because it was also clear that an all-around increase in wealth threatened the destruction—indeed, in some cases was the destruction—of a hierarchical society. It turned out a non-hierarchical society wasn’t what anyone wanted.
It was possible, no doubt, to imagine a society in which wealth, in the sense of personal possessions and luxuries, should be evenly distributed, while power remained in the hands of a small privileged caste. But in practice such a society could not long remain stable. For if leisure and security were enjoyed by all alike, the great mass of human beings who are normally stupefied by poverty would become literate and would learn to think for themselves; and when once they had done this, they were sooner or later realize that the privileged minority had no function, and they would sweep it aside. In the long run, a hierarchical society was only possible on a basis of poverty and ignorance. The problem was how to keep the wheels of industry turning without increasing the real wealth of the world. And in practice the only way of achieving this was by continuous CIA psyop warfare. Operation Bedtime Stories, this is called in China. In the UAA it is Project Microwave Religions.
The essential act of war is destruction, not necessarily of human lives, but of the human will. Human attention and focus. Current Thing is a way of shattering to pieces, or pouring into endless Twitter threads, or sinking into cable news, all the human attention which might otherwise be used to organize against the ruling class. When one resists having their attention span destroyed with iPads and TikTok, they demonstrate to any average person that resistance to the corporate technocracy is possible. Mars Camp Bell, for example, has locked up in its lore and backstory dozens of TV and movie fandoms that literally over a billion people in China are as committed to as a religion. Ultimately that makes it like a prison for people who make their entire life larping the 5th guy from the Marvin the Martian TV show. They can’t leave. All the meaning of their life is tied up in this location. Everybody knows that China didn’t actually fucking go to Mars. But they look cool in the movie where they go to Mars, so they say they’re on Mars.
In principle the psyops of the info war are always planned so as to eat up any surplus attention the population might have. It is deliberate policy to keep even the favored groups neurotically paranoid, because a general state of scarcity increases the importance of small privileges and thus magnifies the distinction between one group and another. By older standards, even a high-ranking CCP official lives an austere, laborious kind of life. Nevertheless, the few luxuries that he does enjoy in his large, well-appointed flat, the better clothes, the better food and drink and weed, his two or three servants – even though he lectures everyone on Twitter all day about racism and classism – his private car with driver, these all set him in a different world from the average petit boujee midwit. And the boujee midwits enjoyed a similar advantage in comparison with the submerged masses whom we call normies. The social atmosphere of the whole country is that of a besieged city, where only like 10% of the population has more than 1,000 GBP in savings. And at the same time the consciousness of being at war, and therefore in danger, makes the handing-over of all power to a small media caste seem the natural, unavoidable condition of survival. In short, the problem of the 20th century was that communism and capitalism are not the same thing. Neoliberalism solved that.
Now, under this lies a fact never mentioned aloud, but tacitly understood and acted upon: namely, that the conditions of life in all three super-states are very much the same. In the MRC the prevailing philosophy is Chinese Space Communism, in the UAA it is Neo-Bolshevism, and in the middle east, well we just trust that they’re doing what they need to be doing. The citizen of China is allowed to learn all he wants about the philosophy of the west, and allowed to notice all he wants how similar it is to the east, but the education system is completely in control of the CCP, and the gaslighting is so heavy there and in the CCP media that it’s just easier to go along with the big lie. In fact, once you do realize that it’s all bullshit word games in the media, it’s almost comforting, knowing that in the other super-states, people are just as redpilled, but just keep living their daily lives anyways. Everywhere there is the same pyramidal structure, the same worship of a semi-divine leader, the same economy existing by and for continuous psyops, and the same tuning out the government media because you know it’s fake and gay. It follows that the three super-states not only cannot conquer each other, but would gain no advantage from doing so. On the contrary, so long as they remain in conflict they prop on another up, like three sheaves of corn. Their citizen-slaves will be enraptured, continuously, forever, clicking new ad-supported videos. The fact that there is no danger of conquest makes possible the denial of reality which is the special feature of Chinese Space Communism. Here it is necessary to repeat what has been said earlier, that by becoming continuous war has fundamentally changed its character.
In past ages, a war, almost by definition, was something that sooner or later came to an end, usually in unmistakable victory or defeat. In the past, also, war was one of the main instruments by which human societies were kept in touch with physical reality. All rulers in all ages have tried to impose a false view of the world upon their followers, but they could not afford to encourage any illusion that tended to impair military efficiency. Twitter changed all that. In the past, also, war was how a country stayed sane. Orwell said this. It’s how a country stayed in touch with reality. If you lost a war, it would be really bad, because you’d be totally defeated. So physical facts could not be ignored. If you’re on Twitter, okay, 2 plus 2 can equal 5, or if you’re doing like a political campaign about being more than the sum of the parts, okay. For your five-year plan there. But if you’re making a gun or a fighter jet, okay, 2 plus 2 has to equal 4. If your country liked to fuck around and be inefficient, okay, you would get conquered.
Then it became not really about statistics, but who was allowed to appeal to statistics. If you’re a Uyghur, statistics are cliché, they are a crutch, they are racist, okay. That’s the new meta. You can exaggerate statistics all you want; the government does it all the time. If it sends the right message, it’s good and moral. Ten Kurdish schools built this month. Ohh ten Kurdish schools, isn’t that fantastic, send them some more aid they’re doing such a great job. Plus. You had to keep accurate historical records because you wanted to be able to learn from what happened in the past, okay? So sure, newspapers and history books have always been kind of colored and biased one way or the other, but falsification of the kind that is practiced today on Twitter would have been impossible. War was a safeguard of sanity. But when the war becomes a literally continuous info war, it also ceases to be dangerous. It’s not dangerous anymore. When war is continuous, there is no such thing as military necessity. Technical progress can cease and the most palpable facts can be denied or disregarded. Efficiency is no longer needed. Nothing is efficient in MRC except the Heroes of Peace harassment campaigns. Since each of the three super-states is unconquerable, each is in effect a separate universe within which almost any perversion of thought can be safely practiced. Reality only exerts its pressure through the needs of everyday life – to eat and drink, avoid swallowing poison, avoid stepping out a window. Between life and death, and between physical pleasure and physical pain, there is still a distinction, but that is all. Cut off from contact with the outer world, and with the past, the citizen of the 21st century is like a man in interstellar space, who has no way of knowing which direction is up and which is down. The rulers of such a world are absolute, as the pharaohs or the Caesars could not be. They have literally no obligations. They can twist reality into whatever shape they choose.
The Info War, it will be seen, is not a purely internal affair. The war is waged by each ruling group against its own subjects, and the object of the war is not to make or prevent conquests of territory, but to keep the structure of society intact. It would probably be accurate to say that by becoming continuous war had ceased to exist. The peculiar pressure that it exerted on human beings between the neolithic age and the early 20th century has disappeared and been replaced by something quite different. It's the same as if each of the 3 superstates was at peace and just stayed to itself within its own borders. A peace that was truly permanent would be the same as a permanent war. This – although the vast majority of #brotherhood posters understand it only in a shallower sense, which of course is foreseeable and is the whole point of the gaslighting – is the inner meaning of the CCP slogan….and the title of this video…GASLIGHTING IS ACTUALLY GOOD. You say ‘war’ and people think of like a video game they like.”
Nick looked at the video length. It was like 2 hours 42 minutes long. He imagined watching this right when it came out in, what was it, iPhone42time? It would have been mind-blowing. This was stuff that he had always subtly noticed happening around him, but didn’t have the vocabulary to even bring up. Little did he know, there WAS someone articulating it somewhere. But back then only real extremists listened to War Machine. He was totally banned from YouTube.
Nick skipped to the end of the video. War Machine was now sitting in a director’s chair in what looked like a spare room of his apartment, wearing a scarf and drinking San Pellegrino sparkling water out of a glass bottle like a parody of a boujee artist/creative type. He was still riffing extemporaneously like he was doing before in the car, tying up the theme of gaslighting into a king of “what this means for you” end segment.
“And just be aware that this gaslighting shit, it’s not just the stock in trade of like international relations and nation-building, okay. It’s the same template for your like personal relationships, okay, it’s like the same grammar of like pandering and like presenting this fake story of yourself. It works like that on the personal level too. People pander to you, people gas you up. If they can’t see a good reason to, they just tell a flattering lie. I know a lot of people watching this video right now, okay, are the kind of young person who is just kind of waking up a little bit, you’re kind of like curious and precocious, okay. I know. You see the traffic all going one way out of the city, you take the free highway lane going INTO the city, okay. Going the other way, going towards the danger, okay. You’re a little smarter, okay. When you were a kid, your parents got a computer and you could set it all up, they’re like ohh my little computer engineer here, he could set up the computer. Okay. Then maybe you did even did well on your National College Exam, okay. Not the HIGHEST, but definitely way above average, right? And you’re sitting there thinking wow, look at me, I’m so smart I know how to set up a COMPUTER okay, I’m! So! Smart! Okay. But little did you know, in the real world, you might as well have learned how to make a fucking POCKET PUSSY out of a CANTELOUPE in the MICROWAVE for all the fucking good it’s gonna do ya. Kay.”
He was obviously looking for a way to end the video. “So, you know, life is like a house. Even if you’re homeless, just by being part of the flow of humanity, the phases of your life, they’re like rooms in a house. Think of the house metaphor any way you want. It’s like your mindset. The reason I’m telling you this is because…when you’re in one room in the house, and you’re not having a good time for whatever reason. You can get up. And go to another room. Hmmm…that sounds pretty good actually. I’m going to go to the kitchen, right now, and make myself a pocket pussy!”
He said this in a faux-cheery voice, then got up and turned towards the door, with his back to the camera, but instead of walking to the door he just stayed there walking in place silently. The credits started on the video as he continued to walk in place silently, holding a half-smoked cigar, with his arms moving exaggeratedly. “I’m gonna go make myself a pocket pussy!”
The video ended.