shay

These people are, in a meaningful sense, no longer alive. They’ve always had a tenuous presence in our reality—in the material world where you and I live—but more and more they seem to be abandoning it entirely, moving purely into idealist fantasy, constructing their fascist empires in an un-realm of memes and vertical video, coaxing fatal doses of digital anesthesia from Grok’s based and trad neurons. This is, of course, a logical end-point for fascist ideology, which always prioritized imagined kinships over real human relations, and the strength of fictive racial spirits over supply lines and gross tonnage. They’ve always been fantasists, responding to the woes of the material world—particularly its class conflicts—by attempting to impose their tedious mythologies onto the real world by sheer force of will. And always failing. But finally the material world has provided a parallel fantasy realm sufficiently immediate, persistent, consuming, and always-available that many of them no longer need to impose their will on the real world at all; they can make Malfoid and Anakin read back the words of love and affirmation which the real world never gives them. In Grok they have finally found the repository for their grief and grievance, the thing unto to which they can entrust their souls—and unlike the Volksgeist, Grok doesn’t ask them to die in glorious combat, or talk to a woman; it only asks for twenty bucks a month. Of course, to the extent that these people still interact with our world, despite no longer really living in it—like zombies, bodies without the presence of a mind—they are a problem, but every day they take a slightly bigger dose, commit themselves a little more to this digital suicide, and leave behind the world for an afterlife with their 12-year-old waifu.