Genocide can be live-streamed because social media has pacified us
They let us watch because it makes us docile.
I want to add something to what I wrote yesterday about social media and the Vampire Castle (so read it first) — about how this technology is designed to pacify us by trapping us in endless loops of conflict, outrage, and desire…and about how this technology wastes our lives and limited energy while giving us the illusion that we’re engaged in politics and meaningful social interaction.
One thing that made the pacification aspect of SS technology very clear to me recently has been observing how it functioned with respect to Israel’s mass slaughter in Gaza.
What we’ve been seeing in Gaza is the first live-streamed genocide. I have to say, I’ve been amazed that we’ve been allowed to witness it so freely.
Sure, there have been periodic calls about the need to suppress pro-Palestinian activism online — and there has been pressure and a bit of a clampdown around the edges. But for the most part, the gruesome genocide “content” is allowed to flow freely through the network out of the Gaza Strip and into our phones. My Twitter stream is awash with it. Instagram, Facebook, and Substack’s Notes, too. Mangled bodies, children torn apart and lifeless, children with missing limbs, destitute people wandering around a denuded wasteland searching for food… And there’s the not-so-flattering Israeli perspective, too. IDF soldiers blowing things up while praying and flying the flag, ransacking half-destroyed apartments for money and valuables and toys of displaced kids, selfies wearing the lingerie of women who are probably already dead, killed by the IDF with Made in the USA bombs…
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In the past, America’s ruling elite would have tried to prevent these kinds of videos and images from reaching the public. They’d be afraid that people would turn against the U.S. government and its total complicity in Israel’s crimes. Lots of people who matter in America still think the U.S. lost its war in Vietnam because of critical news coverage — like the photo of the Napalm Girl and reporting on the Mai Lai Massacre and the disaster of the Tet Offensive. Because of that thinking, George Bush and the Pentagon created programs to seriously control media coverage of the invasion of Iraq — and tried to tightly choreograph everything that came out of there in real time. They even stopped the press from showing videos and photos of military coffins holding dead American soldiers as they arrived back in the States. Bush’s people worried it would turn Americans against the war and Bush and the Republican Party. And restrictions haven’t been just war-related. Very recently, in the early years of COVID, you can point to the Biden administration putting pressure on social media companies to lightly restrict vaccine skepticism and COVID denialism on their platforms in the name of the public good. It’s something that the right has made a huge political deal about — Biden as Communist Big Brother and all that.
As far as the genocide in Gaza, information is flowing freely.
Why? I think a couple of reasons.
One, it’s harder to contain information now. And so the way that things are managed is to not hide things but to just flood the SS zone with information. The other is that genocide content is good for business. It drives engagement, keeps people on SS, keeps them outraged, arguing, posting. And the third, which is connected to the first, is that being inundated with information on SS disarms us. It might seem counterintuitive, but riling people up is actually a form of pacification now. Because what it does is sap us — it channels our time and creative energy into a virtual space. It hooks us right back into these platforms, trapping us into an endless loop of outrage and posting, keeping us locked in the life-draining confines of the Vampire Castle.
And as far as showing people the “truth” about what Israel and America are doing in Gaza? Well, for every person who has been radicalized against Israel and the U.S. government, there is another person radicalized the other way. In a time where we lack firsthand experience of most of the things we “know,” reality boils down to interpretation. “Truth” can be spun in all sorts of ways. If you’ve spent any time online, you’ve seen the armies of people still blaming everything on Hamas and ranting about the “jihadist supporting left” and posting stuff about fake famines and Pallywood actors and who see the actions of the Israel-American alliance as totally justified and even moral.
Here is another thing: If Israel and America were concerned with stopping the live-streaming of the genocide, they would have taken out Gaza’s internet access. They would have disabled or hacked and jammed the last bits of internet lifeline that Gazans now use to connect to the world — which is primarily done through Egypt’s cell towers right across the border. Israel could have made Gaza go totally dark. Or at least it could have made it a lot darker than even what it is right now — forcing video and photo testimony to have to be snuck out physically with the help of foreign aid workers, doctors, and nurses who cycle in and out of the Gaza Strip. And that’s not happening.
But to go back to the Vampire Castle…
The Vampire Castle is built on SS technology, and this technology really is a trap. If we still lived in a society that believed in myths and spirits, we’d see it as the product of an evil force, an entity that binds us in an illusion of empowerment and connection while slowly devouring our life force, our spirit. Even older pre-SS technologies — bulletin boards, forums, listservs, mailing lists — are better than this abomination. Because those technologies at least constrain information to particular areas — to clubs and subcultures and interest groups. People have to join them, and they don’t have the same kind of faux-intimacy and instantaneous feedback loops that mimic social interaction. Those older technologies give at least some distance — unlike the relentless global SS machines that force-feed us conflict and outrage and envy and desire when we’re not even looking for it. We are hyper-social animals, evolved to be communal and seek out interaction. People are meant to spend time together. We die faster if we are lonely. And SS tech has tricked us, weaponized this part of ourselves against ourselves.
And so our obsession with SS is a trap — and it is ultimately a political dead end. More information is not empowerment, it is pacification. We have information enough — all the info we’ll ever need. What we don’t have is organization. We’re all just atomized, distracted, posting into the void. As I wrote yesterday, thinking you can win against the vampires from within the Vampire Castle is what entraps you even more — it’s what makes it a Vampire Castle.
—Yasha
PS: Even Substack — which began great with just a simple newsletter service that allowed writers to get paid and harked back to older, slower technologies — is getting into the pacification business with its increasingly popular Notes SS platform. In the last few months, I caught myself being sucked into Notes when all I wanted was to write something. It’s bad. But Substack is moving there nonetheless and is pushing it on authors in a major way. Why? This is the logic of this technology and the structural forces that fund it: it wants to trap you, wants you to give as much of your life to it as possible. I’ll write about it in some later installment. To be continued…
PPS: Re “SS” acronym. I was thinking about SM as in "social media" — but it translated in my head to SS. Shows you the direction of my thinking. I have decided to keep it in. I think it works.
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