I’ve been thinking a lot about the Spectacle and our psychotic influencer society lately. Wrote a little about it yesterday again…and when I had hit publish, I saw that Charlie Kirk, a top righty youth influencer, got assassinated. I have to say I’m not that surprised. I could sense the tension in the air. I’m sure I’m not the only one to feel it. The Spectacle had gotten too dense, too saturated. The dark psychic energies coursing through it have become too powerful, spinning too fast. There had to be a release at some point…like a thunderstorm and lightning. Not that it will help anything, other than feeding the Spectacle even more and making everyone even crazier. No matter what happens, the Spectacle wins. We have to exit the Spectacle to win. But can we exit?
We still don’t know who carried out the killing — it could be anyone, really. It could be a disgruntled liberal boomer vet. It could be a militant zoomer. It could be an actual Nazi pissed at Charlie for selling out to Israel. It could be some other third party — the feds, a private operator MAGA Navy Seal guy — who did it to rile things up, who sacrificed Charlie to give Trump his own Reichstag Fire/Franz Ferdinand.
Really, though, don’t want to spend time on any of this. Plenty of influencers have all sorts of theories in line with their particular political brands, all of them doing their part to get the Spectacle whirring again, pumping it full of dark psychic energies. I want to stay at the level of philosophical analysis — analysis of THE SPECTACLE that we all inhabit.
We’ve seen so many assassinations in film and TV shows. I was surprised by how accurately these fictional assassinations were portrayed on the screen…the real one looked just like what you see in the movies. The Spectacle and reality are one. We’ve all forensic experts now. But that’s not it…that’s not what I want to talk about.
What I want to talk about is about the reaction to the assassination. The hit did something I haven’t seen before. It spooked the political influencers. They are scared. Many of them spent last night issuing lengthy, serious statements on X about the gravity of the situation. Some of them are calling it a 9/11 event — a 9/11 for the influencer class.
Political assassinations are one thing. Killing a president, however horrible, was seen as within the rules of “the game.” But influencers? Political commentators? They were supposed to be a protected class. Their free speech was supposed to matter. It was supposed to be protected by “the rules.” Many of them see themselves in Charlie Kirk. And they are clearly afraid for their lives. The world — their world — has turned upside down. Nothing will be the same to them. And it’s not just the influencers on Charlie Kirk’s team. The liberal and left wings of the influencer class are panicking, too. If a righty influencer can be whacked, so can they. The rules have changed.
Konstantin Kisin, a wormy right-wing influencer from England (who we’ve talked about before), lays out what everyone in the influencer class, regardless of political orientation, is thinking:
Reading this I can’t help but think, What did he expect? Did he think that the he would never be touched by the real? That all this is like a game he plays on his PS5? I guess so…he’s not alone in thinking this way.
Influencers are the core of our political culture now. So much moves through them. They are central actors in the Spectacle. Many of them are on the feed every day stirring the psychic chaos, reflecting people’s fears and hatreds and petty grievances and giving them moral power. It’s all about riling up conflict — stoking tribalism, in-group/out-group hostility, painting targets on people’s backs. It doesn’t even matter what their politics are or whether you or I agree or disagree with their positions. The general pattern of the political influencer is almost always the same. It’s about conflict. Conflict is what gets the engagement, keeps people coming back, plugged into the Spectacle.
The political influencer is a relatively new phenomenon. Bigger and more numerous and more visible as a class than the talk radio guys and a lot more unhinged than the cable news personalities, they’ve risen to the top of the Spectacle — made possible by the monopolistic communications technologies that we all now inhabit. Many of them are completely self-made, talented, coming from “the people” with a gift for sensing what their people want to hear and projecting emotional connection. They are kings and queens of the Spectacle now — agitating the mass psychosis, exploiting the alienation, pain, and anger that’s surging through the population. They’ve been stirring the psychic oceans, working up surges and storms, and then riding these waves to fame and money and political power.
Throughout their short existence, they have been insulated from the psychic madness they’ve pumped into the Spectacle. They’ve been secure in their nice neighborhoods and big houses and elite institutions, certain that the people they’ve trapped with the Spectacle are too distracted, too enchanted, too zombified… But this Charlie Kirk assassination changed something for them. It’s dawning on them that the Spectacle is not just an abstract entity. They are realizing deep down inside that the Spectacle can be made flesh. And that flesh can be killed. And that this flesh can be theirs.
Still, though, there is little they can do. They are at the top of the Spectacle, yet they are still slaves to it, bound to it more tightly than any of us. They can’t exit. They’re trapped. And so…the Spectacle became real for them, but only for a moment. Charlie Kirk’s death has now too been Spectacularized — taken out of the real, uploaded to the feed, abstracted and refracted and reflected through millions of prisms and mirrors. But make no doubt, the Spectacle will make landfall again. The Spectacle will again become flesh. And then the cycle will begin again and again and again.
And so…
DON’T SUBSCRIBE.
DON’T SHARE.
GET OFF THE MACHINES.
—Yasha
Want to know more? Check out The Vampire Castle series…
There have been times throughout history (maybe last time here in the US was in the 60s and 70s) where there are more assassinations and political violence. Now feels like that time.
imo the reaction feels a lot like what happened with Luigi in that "normal" online people (i.e. non-influencer people but those who spout their opinions on social media) are very much "what did you expect". I don't know what you call it - the phrase `vibe shift` seems too overused and late to the party, the vibe shifted already plenty of time ago. It's more that the violence of both assassinations is welcomed with open arms by onlookers stateside - less bystander effect and more "g'wan, do it again" - and this apparently terrifies the class of people who claim they "matter". Hard to think of another country remotely close to this.