Emerging threats from a world not yet born.
In short: Weaponized Unreality is a “middle-out” conglomeration of misinformation, disinformation, conspiracy theory, state and nonstate pr and corporate media “synergy” between them all. It’s participatory ever-present and eroding our sense of cohesive, shared reality that is key to democracy.
Writers like Peter Pomerantsev and Masha Gessen helped identified Unreality when it emerged in Russia after the fall of the Soviet Union and after the gold rush of the early Putin years. In the years since it has been written about in many forms by different authors and writers, but only now has it become crystal clear that it can also hide in the day-to-day motion of the world once unleashed, especially in the west. The social conditions are ripe in the west but especially heavily commercialized; commodified societies seem highly receptive to this parasitic construct. Unreality takes many forms, a chimera hidden in plain sight and designed by the same people who created the rest of the world you inhabit. An anti-meme of sorts intended to blend just well enough with its media surroundings and narrative that it passes if it feels..fake or like a facsimile of the thing it is trying to emulate. Be that the news, a favorite “reality” tv show, or social media interactions.
Poteramzev’s dark vision of Russia under Putin and the alignment of business media and the government, specifically Putin in Russia‘s case and the sandbox it presented for propagandists corporations and PR firms to test out the best forms of mixed media manipulation. It’s not by coincidence that this new form of authoritarianism became possible during the era of mass information and a rapidly growing Internet. One of the unreality and weaponized unrealities facets is its use of the internet’s ability to cause information overload and novelty bias in humans. Like any sufficiently large system that interacts with multiple meta systems, feedback loops within this specific set of systems exist in a way that amplifies simple answers, even if dubious or outright conspiratorial. It strengthens divisions at all levels and distorts our sense of history, politics, and self. These amplifications and accelerations work with and against narratives and myths, especially at the societal/governmental level recently. We’ve seen the effects of that both under Trump but more starkly under Biden . Seeing the push back when institutions that are supposed to be transparent and clear can’t manage to answer in either of those ways creates a gulf that only reinforces, accelerates, and feeds weaponized Unreality. Partially it’s the inability to build any long-term narrative that stands up, and it’s also characterized by the failure of static governmental level institutions to stand up to the constant and ever-accelerating flow of information, ideas, and increasing personalized realities. This combination of factors presents the most transparent and present threat to our democracy and the shared reality that underpins society.
Those personalized realities, built and maintained by algorithms, have created a digital world that is a. massive funhouse mirror that only seems to accelerate. Self radicalizes the person in the reflection. This personal acceleration coupled with both algorithms ability to amplify and radicalize has built a network of participatory consumers and creators of more content that feeds back into the ecosystems that formed them; this shift is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the algorithmic manipulation that is now being turned against almost all avenues society and by extension government work and function in the day to day capacity needed to continue functioning.
The paranoid worldview in American politics and society would be comical. If not for the damage it has caused and will continue to cause at scale. The level of paranoia already present in America before the social media revolution laid the roadwork weaponized unreality would later follow and turn into superhighways. Conservatism, capitalism, a fear of communism had driven America to the point of almost schizophrenic-like paranoia. Whether about the “reds,” minorities, or any “other” of the day. As a result, the right became adept at manipulating power, even as they held less and less of the populations’ minds. The mass violence of the right in the 1980s and 90s led to the concerted effort to infiltrate different institutions, bringing their paranoia and conspiracies of invasion and corporate autocracy with them. This has led to a dangerous convergence of paranoia, personalized media spheres, and increasingly hostile and anti-democratic rhetoric spread both by the base and by its leaders, Donald Trump. His influence cannot be calculated in full in his effect on the long-term erosion of American society. The erosion of American democracy as well as society’s shared goals, especially in regards to democracy, are not new or unique to Trump. He is a symptom of an ongoing deterioration in America and a culmination of sorts and a beginning. Over the last twenty years, as it became clear the nation was reeling from the war on terror and the economic crisis of 2007, its reluctance to let go of neoliberalism and its accompanying austerity and increasingly hostile corporate influence on everything from democracy to how we teach our children at school only feedback into a system of technology influenced and shaped radicalization, weaponized unreality, and America’s already. full-throated acceptance of conspiracism and hyper-personal realities.
The now almost ever-present sense of paranoia in America and in the west as a whole is an outgrowth of both information overload hey ever-quickening pace of the day today and the feeling that things are missing or hidden behind layers of BS it’s not new in many ways. America’s susceptibility to conspiracies, its tendency toward exceptional thinking, and its growing reliance on technology at all levels have given tech-driven unreality the upper edge. The modern variation of conspiracy is sleek and well-edited to appeal to the tik tok generation as well as the boomers it initially fed conspiracy and fear from Facebook to. This is the Phrenetic world of unreality and weaponized unreality, which simultaneously flattens history, undermine shared social spaces, and the accompanying cohesive shared reality society has built to this point.
