The Inter-Twingularity is Nigh

Symbol Switching and Narrative Collapse

Alright! This week started off kinda gently, with a bank holiday for Armistice Day/Veterans’ Day and then got quickly weird, with UFO hearings in Congress and all manner of face palm moments in our newsfeeds.

Saw a piece on the BBC about how the tradition of wearing red crepe paper “poppies” on people’s lapels as a fundraiser and sign of traditional remembrance for fallen soldiers was falling itself on hard times.

Seems that somewhere in the last few years of topsy turvy, the Red Poppies had come to symbolize, at least for some, a militant nationalism that they didn’t want to associate with.

An alternate has sprung up, the white poppy, intended to symbolize a polite emphasis on non-violence and peace. But that too has become fused with a different meaning–solidarity with the Palestinian cause.

So a tradition that has been going on since 1917, and would seem to be a simple show of respect and solidarity is splintering apart based on conflicting interpretations of the symbolism involved.

But that’s just one of literally hundreds of such “symbol switches” we’re awash in these days.

And if you’re occasionally feeling like your head’s spinning, or you’re losing your bearings, take comfort! You’re not going crazy. The World has!

Take Teslas—the ultimate eco-warrior flex from the time they first launched until (checks notes) Elon bought Twitter?

In LA–the place that brought us mega-celebs like Leo slumming it in a Prius because everyone could tell at a glance how conscious you were as you zipped past them in the HOV lane on the 405–that very same bastion of virtue signaling has Hollywood power players ditching their Teslas in droves.

Walking away from leases, selling at steep discounts. Trying desperately to get into a new E-Tron Audi or some other German electric. Anything, to be shod of the problematic association, you see.

Amazon is doing a brisk business flogging “I Bought This Before Elon Went Crazy” bumperstickers for dismayed Tesla owners.

(Cybertruck owners, apparently remain happy with their personal brand affiliations)

***

But it’s not just things we buy or wear that are flipping around on us. It’s the things we believe too.

The term RINO has undergone a complete flip-flop, and lifelong grandma/grandpa Republicans might not have even noticed (due to the relentless carpet bombing of the new orthodoxy on Fox and elsewhere)

But just to recap, (and before this all gets memory-holed) RINO: Republican in Name Only, used to mean the exact opposite of how it’s being bandied about today.

It first got traction as a slur against Teddy Roosevelt’s presidency, when he played fast and loose with Republican orthodoxies, busted trusts, and did all those populist Bull Moose/Rough Rider things that Teddy was wont to do.

It got a revival during the Clinton years after Billy cannily tacked the Dem party towards the center, and a bunch of ideologically pliable Republicans pivoted to meet him there.

But let’s recap exactly what being a “true” Republican meant, as recently as ten years ago:

• You were adamantly free trade and global markets. No interventions, no tariffs. Friedman Fundamentalism in its purest form

• You were pro military, FBI, CIA (soldiers and cops had a well-known conservative bias back then)

• You were sworn enemies of the Soviets (no place, never. Dominos, Evil Empire, etc)

• You were pro a muscular US presence on the world’s stage as policeman and banker (NATO, G20, IMF, etc)

Today, MAGA Republicanism has flipped every single one of those positions on its head.

• We will now be a high protectionist tariff economy (with unforeseen impacts on dollar as reserve currency, prices on Wal Mart shelves, inflation etc)

• We view the Deep State as woke and captured by the Democrats (including all intelligence agencies)

• We see Putin, Assad and other strong men as cultural allies, and possible partners in carving up a new multi-polar world

• We see foreign entanglements and historic alliances as bad for the US and to be exited as quickly as possible to leave the rest of the world to fend for itself.

To be clear, you might read through that second list and agree with all of it!

That’s totally fine and your prerogative. But just so we don’t all lose our fucking nuts here, can we at least mark this waypoint as a moment when RINO ceased to mean “you’re no longer a champion of the party of Eisenhower and Reagan” and now simply means “You refused to bend the knee to DJT.”

Like I said, symbol switching. Coming soon, to a meme-plex near you.

And if we’re not noticing these things as they flip, the next time we use them to find our way home, we can end up hopelessly lost.

Our waypoints no longer point in the same directions they used to.

***

As we approach what many people are imagining to be the End of History, it’s increasingly unlikely we’re heading toward a slickly choreographed Singularity. Ray Kurzweil won’t be there to usher us across the silicon Pearly Gates. We’re going to have to navigate this one ourselves.

Instead, it’s looking more and more like an Intertwingularity.

As we search for some kind of coherent explanation for a world in turmoil, everyone’s favorite mythologies are smashing, crashing, and blending into each other. It’s getting near impossible to separate signal from noise.

To be sure, there are social media algorithms amplifying our worst instincts, geopolitical players weaponizing content, and fringe theorists confusing things almightily—but these seeds are landing in especially fertile soil in our minds right now

—and here’s why.

Our little amygdalas, oxytocin, and dopamine.

Given that the last few years have contained decades’ worth of shocks and destabilizing developments, it’s fair to say that our amygdalas—our threat detection systems—have been on super high alert.

Whether it’s been surprise election results, natural disasters, or global pandemics, it really has mattered what’s going on in other countries, other states, even right next door. Our impulse to stay on top of every breaking news item, every hot take, and every “expert opinion” has skyrocketed.

In the olden days we would’ve been listening to jungle drums, smoke signals, or village gossip. Now it’s morphed into Facebook and Instagram posts, YouTube binge watches, and Telegram groups.

We’re all desperate to get a handle on what might save us or kill us.

Each time we listen to that amygdala alarm clock and find something that Stanford’s Robert Sapolsky calls “salient”—meaning it might make us or break us—we get a strong squirt of dopamine.

Even if the news is shitty, it feels perversely good to have found it. Plug that “like,” click, or comment into Big Tech optimization algorithms, and we’re off on a self-reinforcing ride of our lives.

But a funny thing happens when we get too much dopamine in our systems. We succumb to apophenia. It’s the tendency to perceive patterns and meaning between otherwise unconnected events and facts. It shows up in early onset schizophrenia and in conspiracy theorists.

That’s not all. Especially when we’re all cooped up, separated from each other, unable (or just unwilling) to hug, kiss, and hang out with our friends and family, our oxytocin levels plummet.

This leaves us less trusting, more suspicious, and prone to paranoia.

In the paper “Oxytocin, Dopamine, and the Amygdala: A Neuro- functional Model of Social Cognitive Deficits in Schizophrenia,” Andrew Rosenfeld, a psychiatrist at the University of Vermont, and his colleagues lay it out:

“Aberrant interactions between dopaminergic reward systems, a dysfunctional amygdala, and the neurohormone oxytocin engender a neural milieu that improperly assigns emotional salience to environmental stimuli. This deficit in turn results in ab- errant social cognition that may ultimately lead to misguided social responses, from withdrawal and isolation to suspicion and paranoia.”

Put more simply: We’re overcooked, overclocked, and losing our minds. Even familiar and comforting narratives are breaking down. Into this vacuum, all sorts of wild stories are rising up to fill their place.

***

When we’re considering End of Days Ideologies, there’s less difference between what’s written on ancient papyrus, celluloid, and comic books than we might think. All our mythologies, both contemporary and historic, are products of human imagination expressed in language and image—it’s only the format that has changed over the years.

Take two of the most popular epic tales of recent times—Star Wars and The Matrix—and we can see how once heroic and unifying stories are splintering under the tensions of the Intertwingularity.

When Star Wars debuted in 1977, it told the rousing tale of Luke Skywalker, Princess Leia, Han Solo, and the rest of the Rebel Alliance battling the Evil Empire. At the eleventh hour, Luke shot an improbably lucky torpedo down the exhaust tubes of the Death Star and delivered victory to Team Good Guy.

For millions of fans, the whole thing felt profoundly resonant. It was the Odyssey and the Wizard of Oz retooled for the space age.

But fast-forward forty years to the eighth installment of the franchise, Star Wars: The Last Jedi, and things weren’t quite so simple anymore. The familiar plotline of good vs. bad was fracturing. A story that had once united audiences was now dividing them.

With the young girl Rey replacing Luke as the central character, a black Stormtrooper as her best friend, a Latino pilot (standing in for the wisecracking Han Solo), and an Asian woman all getting major screen time, traditional Hollywood casting had been turned upside down.

Many die-hard fans, often Middle American males, found them- selves written out of leading roles. They weren’t happy. On the review aggregator site Rotten Tomatoes, the gap between critics and fans clocked in at 90 to 42 percent in the opening weeks—the widest of any film in the history of the franchise.

“Good and evil doesn’t seem quite so clear,” the film critic Dave

Schilling writes about Star Wars: The Last Jedi. “Everyone’s hands are dirty in one way or another. Greed, lust for power, and self-interested cynicism won out. Whatever New Hope Star Wars represented in 1977 is in retreat.

How can one make a cathartic action romp about space Nazis in a time when actual Nazis are reasserting themselves in the national political conversation? Simple: you make a movie about how hope dies.”

The once unifying narrative that inspired Ronald Reagan to chris- ten his antinuclear missile defense system “Star Wars” and call the Soviet Union “the Evil Empire” has flipped. Former White House adviser Steve Bannon argues, “Darkness is good . . . Dick Cheney. Darth Vader. Satan. That’s power.” Meanwhile, Republican strategists celebrate the construction of an electoral “Death Star” to hijack social media and bend elections.

It’s fair to say that things have taken a turn since that Long Time Ago in a Galaxy Far, Far Away when we all sat entranced, bonded by the story unfolding in front of us.

***

It’s not just Star Wars that’s gone off the rails lately. The Matrix—a parable about seeing behind the illusion of the conventional world into a darker but more heroic battle underneath—has also been hijacked by competing interpretations of What It All Means.

The film famously expressed the chasm between initiates and the ignorant. Neo, the main character, finds himself pulled out of his numbing cubicle job as a software programmer into an alternate real- ity filled with danger and purpose.

The character of Morpheus (a nod to Ovid’s god of sleep) offers Neo a choice between two pills—the Red Pill and the Blue Pill. “This is your last chance,” he tells Neo. “After this, there is no turning back. You take the blue pill—the story ends, you wake up in your bed and believe whatever you want to believe. You take the red pill—you stay in Wonderland, and I show you how deep the rabbit hole goes. Re- member, all I’m offering is the truth—nothing more.”

That was the line that launched a thousand memes. Since the film’s premiere in 1999, Red Pills have come to stand in for meditation, men’s work, psychedelics, leadership advice, cybersecurity, and pretty much any product or service where someone believes someone else needs to be radically disillusioned about what they hold to be true.

For the better part of twenty years, that held up. Sheeple, Muggles, Basics—those were the sort of boring or cowardly folks who opted for the simple comfort of taking the Blue Pill. But the brave, heroic, and courageous, convinced there has to be something more to life? The “Crazy Ones” who shared Apple’s Think Different ad campaign with all their friends? Red Pillers, every last one of them.

That was the Big Tent Matrix, roomy enough to hold free thinkers and rebels of every stripe. Until 2016, when a growing online men’s movement on Reddit and 4chan message boards shrank the tent considerably. It redefined being “Red Pilled” as the experience of white men finally waking up to a world where the deck is firmly stacked against them. According to this community, they had to band together to defeat the forces of globalism, feminism, and reverse racism directed their way.

In 2019, Wired magazine editor Emma Ellis wrote, “This reading of Neo’s choice is so widespread that it’s made its way to some very unlikely places—like Kanye West’s Twitter account.” Her co-author, Emily Dreyfuss, wrote, “Its meaning has been totally corrupted. . . . It’s hard to talk about the Aristotelian ideal of the blue or red pill as it was meant to be. Now it’s something else.”

Darth Vader—unsung hero of the White House. Rebel Alliance as totalitarian thought police. Black stormtroopers, white masks. Red Pillers as freedom fighters against the machine. Red Pillers as “deluded misogynist trolls.” These days it’s better to never leave home than try to find our way to a happy ending.

***

Add in the complete insanity (and tragedy) of Abrahamic religions at each other’s throats (Judaism, Islam, Christianity), all utterly convinced that their Bat Phone to God is the only one that counts, and the others shall burneth in hell. Even as their End Times stories all involve, Jesus Christ and anti-Christs, and False Messiahs and…it’s mind bending, heart breaking and gob smacking.

And now, as of this week, increasingly hard to ignore evidence at a Congressional hearing that we might be getting visited by all manner of whack-ass UFOs (including my personal favorite, the “organic non-linear” forms of floating jellyfish brains over the Southern Border.

So much for that Great Big Beautiful Wall, kids!

Seems like those illegal aliens are just gonna float right over them.

And that would serve us right, in the Intertwingular End.