Heat death of the discourse?

There’s an undeniable feeling of the air coming out of the balloon of discourse on x.com. Some of this is natural enough. We can’t be at a fever pitch all the time, and now that the most important election of all time is over, we’ve all earned at least a breather.

But there’s a deeper, more sweeping effect at work.

The Perfume Nationalist just laid it out as well as anyone in a long and bracing X thread. “It may have taken seven years but I’ve reached this point,” he begins. “The plot lines are so utterly repellent because it ended, we won. The things you all fight about are completely made up. We won and you can just let Trump do everything.”

Trump’s win shifted the center of political gravity away from the ideological intelligentsia toward not just ‘tech’ but to the agentic, whether human or machine.

“I don’t need to know which malignant groupchat dirtbag leftist who was based-curious in 2021 has written a substack renouncing their dalliance with the right,” he goes on, subtweeting a raft of right-wing-disenchanted online personalities whose grievances and disappointments were recently aired out by a lefty New York Times columnist. “You should’ve known they were bad at the time. You didn’t trust the plan. We won. The side of good won. There was a happy ending. The big Snow White book closed on the page that said THE END. You’re free now you can go read a book. There’s nothing here since it ended.”

The rant expands from there. “Everyone is supposed to be happy at THE END like Beauty and the Beast where the household appliances are changed back into people. But here you chose to stay household appliances.”

“Everyone anonymous has an incredible real job as a lawyer or a censor at the libtard factory. You don’t even have to shill your wares here.”

What is going on is that “the right” or the “anti-woke” rebel alliance became so intellectually top-heavy during the bad old Biden years that many of its leading and most popular figures defined the identity of the movement as an intellectual one, a talking one, one that not only won by talking but could only talk, not do — at best, have ideas and then talk about them.

So it became extremely important to have the right ideas, the very best and most correct ideas. But at the same time, paradoxically, it became essential to the movement and its leading online figures that their incredibly superior ideas also be strangely ineffective or unpopular — in a constant state of existential threat and crisis, demanding perpetual belligerent defense and pedantic exposition.

Trump’s win shifted the center of political gravity away from the ideological intelligentsia toward not just “tech” but to the agentic, whether human or machine. What is especially interesting is that this shift not only imperils the identity and the lifestyle of the perpetually arrogant and embattled “wrongthinker” who is ackshually right about everything; so too does it undermine the basic value proposition of X as the so-called “global public square” — transparently an onboarding scheme to achieve a new cyborg sort of “collective consciousness.”

There is a lot of talk in certain online circles about the antichrist-like vibe of this swarm consciousness and the identity that arises from it, but the naive or practical version of the notion must also be acknowledged, namely that our human consciousness is always already relational — and so far, at least, the printing press and the television have done a lot more than digital technology to encourage and accelerate violent, destructive substitutes for the shared spiritual consciousness of Christian communion.

And whereas print and television unleashed an overwhelming world war on words, Trump’s win amid today’s digital conditions augurs the paradoxical corrective that, if we’re headed into a golden age, perhaps it’s because we’re rediscovering how silence is golden.

That leaves the question of what will become of X, the internet, or AI itself if the blather and discord subside and the bots become heirs to a desertified digital commons … and who will actually care!

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