Twitter is not a real place

There have been several news stories this week that I do not want to talk about, so I am instead going to talk about cognitive security.

About a decade ago, the rationalists came up with a way to talk about demons.

An “egregore” may act like a malign supernatural intelligence — but it is actually just an aggregation of perverse incentives that generates outcomes which fail to reflect the ultimate desires of any individual within the system.

The depth of coordination and cunning exhibited by these systems/entities sometimes seems like it must reflect some kind of wicked intentionality — but perhaps that intentionality only exists within aggregated human minds.

Whether you prefer a supernatural or materialistic explanation, these forces are definitely real, and they are both nonhuman (they cannot be persuaded, dissuaded, or motivated like humans) and superhuman (they are beyond our control, and difficult to resist.)

These forces now dominate every aspect of Western life — but especially your access to information, which is now almost 100% mediated through algorithmic content aggregation.

This means that your model of the world is at best only coincidentally accurate, since the process that generates the model has almost nothing to do with the truth.

Besides which, no extant form of media has the bandwidth to convey reality at the scale of global events — and even if Elon made it, your brain would be helpless to process it. The World can only be pulled through your mortal eyeballs at a catastrophic loss of resolution.

Whatever picture ends up in your mind, even if it isn’t a deliberate lie, cannot possibly be the truth.

You don’t have to believe that this is literally dark and dangerous magic; but not much would be different if it were.

The palantiri are magic seeing stones in The Lord of the Rings that enable transmission of knowledge and thought across great distances, but which require a powerful will to control what is seen and communicated.

They aren’t inherently evil, and not even Sauron can make them lie outright, but he deceives Saruman and Denethor by showing them glimpses of the truth that made his power seem overwhelming.

At the time, commentators assumed Tolkien was saying something fairly obvious about wartime propaganda — but his description of Denethor’s spiritual battle with the palantir is prophetic:

“the Lord Denethor is unlike other men: he sees far. Some say that as he sits alone in his high chamber in the Tower at night, and bends his thought this way and that, he can read somewhat of the future; and that he will at times search even the mind of the Enemy, wrestling with him. And so it is that he is old, worn before his time.”

Then, after his suicide:

“But his wisdom failed; and I fear that as the peril of his realm grew he looked in the Stone and was deceived: far too often, I guess, since Boromir departed. He was too great to be subdued to the will of the Dark Power, he saw nonetheless only those things which that Power permitted him to see. The knowledge which he obtained was, doubtless, often of service to him; yet the vision of the great might of Mordor that was shown to him fed the despair of his heart until it overthrew his mind.”

In Unfinished Tales, Tolkien says that unlike Saruman, Denethor was kept from total domination by Sauron because of his rightful claim to the palantir, and the fact that his searching was rooted in honest love for Gondor and its people. He “remained steadfast in his rejection of Sauron, but was made to believe that his victory was inevitable, and so fell into despair.”

All of this is just a straightforward description of Twitter.

You are presumably reading this on your palantir because you, like Denethor, are looking for ways to protect yourself and the people you care about — to learn the enemy’s disposition of forces, and find tools to defeat him.

You may feel like you’re immune to propaganda because you look around and see how easily so many of your friends and family have bent the knee to obvious absurdities, while you are Built Different — but the truth is that the enemy has basically given up trying to persuade you of anything.

The propaganda that comes for you and me is the kind delivered by the Mouth of Sauron.

The army assembled at the Black Gate has nothing to learn from Sauron’s emissary: he is a pure information weapon. It’s not just the things he says, it’s what he is — he wields his own hideousness and corruption as an instrument of demoralization.

This has extremely direct analogues from the last 24 hours on Twitter, which you can find for yourself. I won’t disseminate the enemy’s infohazards for them, but you won’t have to look hard.

Right-wing Twitter distributes an endless flood of horror and corruption, and we think of it as something we are doing, toward our ideological aims — but given how psychologically destructive it is to us, and how little movement it seems to generate toward its ostensible purpose, that is obviously not the case.

Again, it doesn’t matter if you think this is being done to you by human conspiracy, or supernatural agency, or blind incentives toward negative engagement on social media — it is clearly being done to you, and it can actually destroy you if you let it.

So how can you improve your cognitive security?

1. Stop disseminating demoralization propaganda.

No useful information is conveyed by one more video of a white middle schooler getting beaten up on the bus. No one, not even your normiecon mom or uncle, needs to see it.

The obstacle to social and political change is not that there’s too little resentment — it’s the feeling that there is no moral and practical alternative to the status quo.

It’s not that people feel great about how things are going, and need you to snap them out of it. They feel horrible and trapped — even the normiecons. Stop making them feel more horrible, and more trapped.

2. Stop believing what you see on the internet.

Nothing you see on the internet is real. The aggregate of nationwide happenings on your Twitter timeline literally did not happen in any sense that your mind is built to ingest.

There is no emotional response to these stories that is natural or healthy, any more than there is a healthy insulin response to a 2600-calorie Oreo shake. It may be composed of theoretically naturally-occurring ingredients, but the quantity and configuration is totally artificial and unfit for human consumption.

Likewise, atrocity propaganda hijacks emotional responses designed to help you respond appropriately to real people — but the parade of strangers who perpetrate and suffer these things inside your phone cannot be processed as real people. There is nothing productive for you to do with the stimulus.

You can argue that your endless flood of despair-inducing video anecdotes is “real” in the sense that it is directionally more in line with statistical realities than the enemy’s endless flood of despair-inducing video anecdotes on climate change or microaggressions or whatever, but that’s a bar you could trip over — and you don’t actually need to keep proving these points to yourself over and over for years on end.

Fortunately, AI is debasing the coin of this type of propaganda, rendering it “unreal” in an even more basic sense — which will hopefully help smart people to disengage. Stop giving social media algorithms root access to your limbic system.

3. Ruthlessly hold your attention at the scale of your own influence.

In The Forest Passage, Ernst Junger explains that the intent of propaganda, “friendly” or not, is to draw your attention toward global domains governed by titanic forces against which you feel small and helpless, so that you will experience the overwhelming impulse to surrender.

Abjectly, if necessary — but ideally, to give yourself over enthusiastically, to some entity of appropriate scale (a state, a movement, an ideology) that promises to relieve you of the crisis of your own powerlessness, and “fight for you”.

Propaganda of this kind works on you even if it accomplishes nothing other than drawing your attention away from the real work of your life, rendering you passive and inert.

EXIT is about practical freedom of action in the real world — running for school board, building a business, starting a homeschool co-op, reducing your attack surface, shorting the regime.

Stop doomscrolling and join us at exitgroup.us.

EXIT News

• On last Tuesday’s full-group call, one of our members had a hot seat on the healthcare startup that he launched with the group last year. We discussed the long process of experimentation and research that led him to his big idea. We also connected him with some new investors, and help with process automation.

• On tonight’s full-group call we will have an early look at a blockchain event management startup that one of our members is launching later this month.

• The DFW guys are planning a dinner meetup on 6/24 — see the chat for details.

• Cocktail hour RSVP links for New York City (6/21) and Columbus (7/19) below the paywall for subscribers. These are a great opportunity to meet your local guys and see if the full group is a good fit for you. Invites to the members-only portion of the meetup will be sent via email.