Drowning in Cyberspace
There's too much to know.
Today, Reddit's defaults were flooded with anti-China posts. On this particular day, it was related to a protest against Xi Jinping about Zero Covid or something like that. Who knows what it's about on every other day.
Were the lockdowns in Shanghai too harsh, or did they save millions of lives? Are these protesters a small group of anti-vaxxers (whatever the hell those are) or the ripples of a surfacing cetacean ready to upend The Party?
Who fucking knows? Who will ever know? Does anyone in China even know, really know?
I can't be expected to know what to think about this. I can't be expected to judge the worthiness of the evidence put forward to make the charge of "genocide" against the Uighurs in Xinjiang. I can't be expected to judge if the guys in the hazmat suits are gestapo blackboots fucking up innocents or the People's Police Force locking up enemies of True Socialism.
How many books will I have to read? How much Mandarin will I have to learn? I spend all my time on the Anglo internet and can barely grasp the change of pace of our own memes; what do I know about Russia's or China's?
This is why we have historians & propagandists. We mere mortals cannot engage in discourse with the history of five or six different designated enemies, a meaningful sequence of events that is happening in those places but not over here in the suburbs of the military-industrial complex. But the historians are too slow and the propaganda gets baser and baser, stuck in previous decades & mostly reduced to buzzwords. The tankies1 are just as fucking stupid as the liberals, and increasingly as self-righteous. The conservatives don't see that their world is ending, and that their growing dawn actually heralds a black sun. The anarchists are who they are. I am too indecisive to know who's right.
What is left? There's nothing left. There is raw information, generated & hand-crafted, pointing in any direction. And I'm too tired of sorting through it.
I spend time with friends & family; I raise my daughter; I hack away at my stupid useless job; I try to find something interesting to do in the meantime. The only dream I have left is not work for someone else, to be a little less alienated. How else do you make sense of the world? The Zeitgeist is not too large, but too small and legion. Local politics is now global politics, not in the revolutionary-optimistic way that a single strike can ignite the fire of class consciousness across the globe, but in the schizo-pessimistic way that every local library is a node in the power network of Global Pedo.
Maybe it's always been this way, and everything only makes sense in retrospective or with the stunted clarity of ideology. Either way, I don't think I'll be participating anymore.