crossing the threshold between the analog fukuyamaist 20th century and the all-digital 'frictionless' capitalism of the 21st century -- 2012/2013 was the tipping point where there was no going back to a flip-phone/blackberry system, everything now was touch screened and intuitive. the occupy movement was crushed by despair and dispersal, obama gets re-elected, we think business as usual. vaporwave begins to signal this entropic decay, as does the burgeoning culture war bullshit which begins on 4chan/tumblr/reddit and then spreads like a virus to every corner of the internet -- no one in america stopped being poor after the 2007/2008 crash, poverty just got transferred to the gig economy, to indiegogo and patreon and monetized videos and personal 'branding' -- now everyone had to exploit themselves as a personality and image on the internet marketplace of ideas. capitalism copies itself into the virtual world fully with a flood of custom advertising, which is now able to intimately overhear your daily conversations and mold itself to you -- spielberg's minority report predicted this in 2002, and now we take it for granted that we're always being listened to, which we only really discovered the extent of via people like julian assange and chelsea manning who were persecuted for years and years after people stopped giving a fuck that google and the FBI knew what they ate for breakfast every thursday and how incoherent their politics are.

the trump ideology was in nascent form -- the '07 writer's strike made hollywood pump out hundreds of reality TV shows, of which jersey shore took pointless trashiness and made it the top priority of what the american dream could look like: be a loudmouth loser and act like the world doesn't deserve you. conspiracy theories began to be less associated with fun kooky area 51/knights templar stuff and became more invested in mainsteam politics -- suddenly it was okay again for senators to pretend that they were underdogs against the hydra of the deep state instead of being implicated in its every move. the difference between resistance and complicitness evaporates, and any revolution otherwise gets pushed out as a wave of neo-reactionary right-wingers (many of whom are schooled in the esoteric and the occult) begin using social media as a way to create innumerable mini-cults of isolated voting blocs and brown shirts who can be controlled, and of course all these groups are infiltrated & manipulated by the FBI.

the sandy hook and aurora colorado shootings were shocking, and even worse were the warning shots in what has become the new normal for america -- there's a mass shooting nearly every week, it's been normalized by the culture and is barely talked about with a fraction of the coverage that sandy hook received. all the daily terror we experience is simply seen as 'how things are' -- the new nihilism, as nietzsche predicted, has fully crept into every segment of america and europe. everything is fake and performative, no one really cares all that much about potential nuclear exchange or the long-term effects of viruses -- russia annexes crimea in early 2014 and leads to the mess of a war that's been going on today, yet it's handled aesthetically by the media conglomeration as cold war 2.0, even putin's hyper-capitalist russia gets lacquered with nostalgia for a time when political multi-polarity existed. everything is okay and nothing is okay, history has returned with a vengeance yet we're all waiting for something to really disrupt the system -- america is already a totalitarian state, it's merely a soft one where you can make a movie about the world ending but you can't make a movie that breaches copyright law -- 2012/2013 felt like the afterparty of capitalism surviving yet another crisis and clinking glasses of champagne and laughing and saying 'this is it, there's no other alternative for you guys, and with a programmable society, we'll eventually reshape history and delete any suggestion that the present wasn't forever and inevitable'.

we then become nostalgic for a world which never existed before us -- the human being becomes a tabula rasa whose main purpose is to feed AI algorithms with data and consume enough Content™ to keep the engine of the god-machine running. 12:13 was the dangling precipice of the volcano pit -- we are now cellular glands in the body of an unknown dragon who keeps us locked up with it in plato's proverbial cave of the national security state and forever-viral kkkulture, bereft of daylight or context -- no one left to steal the fire from heaven.

tim leary's infamous 'find the others' quote was an injunction to 'escape the self' -- but where else is there to go?

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