Chapter 19: Simularca and Simulation, by Jean Baudrillard – Part 2

At the first appearance, it looked like these protests were having an incredible effect. People were waving signs, shouting, and protesting in droves that have never been seen before in modern memory. On social media, so many threads, comments, and discussions were happening that you’d think there was a real movement going on with all the hashtags and whatnot. But like a heavily photo-shopped iceberg, that’s only what appears on the surface because all that crap is nothing more an illusion. Peel away the superficial and you’ll see that nothing had changed.

At the very top of the social media iceberg is the idea that social media is is a force of good. It’s not, but it certainly marketed as one. After all, how could something which brings people together possibly be bad? Isn’t communication the key to exchanging different ideas, view points, and knowledge? Well, the answer to that is that nothing shared on social media can be trusted because almost everything about it is hollow and performative.

Social media is a cancer. Even on the best of days and without the existence of bots, social media is a cesspool of toxic hate and misinformation because it takes more effort to speak truth than lies but social media gives both bad actors and the stupid an equal voice. When people use the internet, you know, when they’re not looking for porn or pictures of cats, they are searching for things to reinforce their existing viewpoint and are very unperceptive to any information that does not support it. That’s just how the average person is. Why? Because people want to win, not get smarter. As a result, genuine discourse almost always loses because popularity dominates the medium – truth is not a requirement.

When populism controls the medium, intelligent people become increasingly marginalized and either reduce their use of social media or disengage altogether while the stupid become emboldened by both their loudness and number. The result is that social media becomes dominated by idiotic populism where facts don’t matter as people are spoon-fed what to think because they cannot think and feed themselves. The intelligent members flee and form new communities, which invariably attract stupider members who then eventually stress and overwhelm the community and forces another exodus. Rinse and repeat – that’s why every social media platform eventually becomes fucking retarded. It’s not bots which are ruining the internet, it’s people.

This is called the brain dead internet theory.

From there, consider the following: Take all the pictures, videos, and comments being shared whether it’s the protests at City Hall or the protests outside the Crafting Guild headquarters. It shows a lot of activity both in person and online, but how much does it actually matter? The number of people who are online and didn’t show up to those protests vastly outnumber the number of people who attended one of those protests but their online support doesn’t actually matter, now does it? All the thoughts and prayers, upvotes for visibility, and good vibes don’t mean jack shit compared to the value of a dollar. In the history of the world, the only time where history is made is when people show up – not online, in person. Everything that the people shared online is performative, virtue-signaling, clout-chasing, drivel. You have to show up, whether that’s in person to a protest or to vote – that is the basic requirement.

But that by itself is not enough.

Take an election for example – let’s say the choice was between eating burgers and eating shit for the next 4 years but the shit-eaters won. Is it enough to resign one’s self to eating shit for the next 4 years or is it better to revolt and choose to eat food? If you just eat shit, then you’re part of the problem! You need active resistance! The reason why protests used to work, say during a certain Boston Tea Party, is because of both the implied and actual threat of violence! Once you take that threat away, if the threat of violence is gone, there is no reason to take a protest seriously. General strikes are threatening because they threaten the fabric of society and they can very easily lead to violence. But here in the Columbus Server, violence is not an option and so the threat is completely toothless. Thus, all protests are pointless and performative.

In communications, there are certain ideas, symbols, and signs which can be represented by simularca. Let’s take for example, the image icon of Che Guevara. Che Guevara was a revolutionary who took inspiration from Marxist ideals and it’s easy to consider him a violent, authoritarian communist for all intents and purposes. During his life, he fomented rebellions and destabilized countries and thus, the image of his face came to symbolize one of rebellion. But then a funny thing happened: over time, people, namely capitalists, started putting his face on things like T-shirts and other assorted goods and other people, namely consumers, began buying them to show how anti-establishment they were. Imagine the irony – the icon of the proletariat being used by the capitalist to shill for conspicuous consumption. Hell, most people don’t even know who he is – he’s just the guy from the T-shirts. No one has more wet cat energy than a liberal wearing a Che Guevara T-shirt as they exercise their right to non-violently protest, right up until the point where they are escorted off the campus by the armed goons of the law.

People have become so fucking stupid that they don’t know what anything is anymore and that’s exactly what the enemies of democracy want – a stupid, angry, and scared mob who will buy into whatever lies they are told. This horrifying, mutated abomination of a human mind is the end result of political subversion and demoralization.

The Honesty Foundation is obviously dishonest but their supporters don’t care that they’re being manipulated so long as they get what they want – that someone else die so that they can survive. These fringe groups are all opportunists and the only real reason why they exist is because they are useful idiots who are being funded through a shadow apparatus for nefarious purposes. Would it be a surprise to find out that it is the Crafting Guild are the ones responsible for supporting the Honesty Foundation? That it is they who are dividing people on purpose, along pro-trans and anti-trans lines across every cohort, to get them all to hate the C-rankers who have signed up with the Honesty Foundation in order to survive? To get everyone to ignore or forget the fact that they have completely bankrupted the middle C-rank class? Or that the Honesty Foundation in turn hired influencers like Chad, whose audience is largely composed of demoralized and desperate men? Men who are so stupid and their powers of reasoning so degraded that they have actually equated toxic male masculinity with success just because they saw that a toxic male was rich?

There are monsters in this world but they’re not the monsters people think they are. The enemies of humanity aren’t defined by any one ethnicity, sex, or ideological belief but rather they are the diverse and unseen manipulators who operate from the shadows. They are illusionists whose illusion is so impressive, divisive, and distracting that everyone in the Columbus Server has already forgotten that nothing that happens in the Columbus Server matters.

The question should have never been a matter of “Who is getting culled?” but rather “Why must we be culled?” and anyone who provides those answers should not be trusted.