DIGI-DESPAIR

...or the crushing hollow.

There’s a new hunger in the streets. It prowls the smalltown alleyways, the dusty lanes of weed-choked pavement running alongside the miles of forlorn stroads—those rubber-fumed monuments to the idol of consumption dotted endlessly with the faded reds of bygone signage, the faded reds of a once vibrant America.

Something pernicious runs through the heart of it all now; a new kind of hollowness. You can see it in the eyes of those stricken souls sifting through the barren lots. Catch their glance in time and you’ll note the subtle linger of their gaze, one that sinks into you like tenterhooks, as if pleading: “Do you feel it too?”

Other gazes smolder with cynicism or fear. The commonality between men has been severed, replaced with a newfound distrust, one that winds through the narrow streets like a cold draft. The divide has grown so wide each excursion outside has the spirit of a high noon standoff. Those tense, adversarial stares between the hopeless, digging through each other’s despair for the telltale signs—are they kin, or other? Are they one of them?

The gate’s been crashed. America has been hollowed out, crushed beneath the unbearable weight of shame and manufactured guilt, its soul sold to the lowest bidder while the people slumbered the years away beneath the trembling glow of their television sets. The slow-moving changes were invisible at first, creeping through the heart of the country, overtaking it like the kudzu eating through the empty mall parks just outside your cozy, enclosed abode.

A country can be like a living organism. It can have course and sense of purpose. A destiny, illusory though it may be. These are the incantatory hyperstitions wrought through decades of a shared dream, as sublimated through the glitter of cinema and pop-culture, which have always been the subconscious effluent of America, the tide pulling us forward.

A mystic enthusiasm for the future once tinted the country’s spirit like a dewy sheen. The sense of hope and destiny as a forward momentum, filling us with dreamy excitement. Now those traces of our collective memory are but receding waves, leaving a wake of dull nostalgia.

What once was, has been corrupted, polarized and inverted. The name itself—America—now evokes a muffled discomfort, a throb of secret guilt or shame, a subcutaneous unease, even in the believers.

We’ve lurched from one crisis to the next, and the history-bifurcating divide has never felt more palpable, like a razor against skin. Something happened in those last few years. We’ve been usurped by an unknown force, the hum inside replaced by a needling psychic terror. The airwaves which once crooned their drowsy dreams have lost their lilt, now spilling forth the unnatural rhythms of our collective isolation. The ever-present muzak was once the soundtrack to our lives. But what meaning can songs of love and happiness have before such an indeterminate future?

Trust in authorities has been lost. Hollywood, once a mirror held against society, reflecting its many quaint neuroticisms and dark fears, transfiguring them into something boldly electric—a thrill for what was next—has become detached and irrelevant, losing its dominance as cultural medium. Now it’s a bizarre pastiche of itself, endlessly recursive and robotic. Even the normals feel the divide, severed from the immersion that once fattened their lives with a sense of meaning. Today a bland parade of movies and shows regularly rolls out to an apathetic audience, reels of content that feel ever more gray and fleeting, tone-deaf to our common lives.

Celebrities have become more distant than ever, sapped of their cultic allure, instead appearing unhinged and irrelevant. The tinsels of Hollywood’s once-cutting edge culture-tap lie dull and brittle, crinkling at our fingers. A deep fatigue and distrust of media has set into the old bones of this weary populace. The conveniently-timed writers’ strike has only served to exacerbate the disconnect; television, shows, media of every sort have become distant and unrelatable—a gaping void between humanity and what Hollywood once offered as a moreish and resplendent vision of the future, ersatz as it was.

Culture has fractured like a crumbling facade. The connective tissue of society, which binds us together with a common cultural language and semiotic framing, has broken down. Noting the change, influencers today write the new “vibe shift” is in fact a total lack of one. Today’s vibe of twenty twenty-three branches outward with blithe indifference, nothing to anchor it to hard ground. A digital daze of fruitless pleasures, synthetic confections, and zombified insta-gratification winding us into a coil of madness and isolation.

This schizophrenic morass is amplified by the nonstop, syncope-inducing media blare. Propaganda earworms scribbling through our skulls, swelling them with pressure. The true vibe shift everyone feels but is too afraid to utter is an irrepressible existential angst: a stifling anxiety imposed by a future that makes no sense, follows no logic, and most importantly, lacks a sense of human compassion. A cold and sterile digital dragnet.

Have you had your helping of digi-despair today?

A viral Reddit post encapsulated a lot of what people have been feeling lately. All too perfectly, the author proceeded to collaborate with ChatGPT AI to even create a word which describes the unwonted feelings evoked by our unique civilizational precipice:

Lately, I've been grappling with a feeling that's hard to articulate. As I drive around, I find myself contemplating the insane technological and social changes on the horizon, and I'm struck by the sense of isolation I feel. I often feel isolated in this temporal awareness, experiencing a sense of liminality as if I'm at the tail end of a vast epoch in human history. Its like I'm standing at the end culmination of everything history has led up until now, right on the precipice of a radical shift. It's a mix of wistfulness for what is ending and excitement + incredulity for what's to come.

Together with GPT-4, I've explored this emotion in depth, giving it a name, a formal definition, and even crafting a short passage to encapsulate the experience. We've coined the term "Vesperance," combining "vesper," meaning evening, with "esperance," denoting hope or desire. The term captures the dual awareness of an ending era and the hopeful anticipation of a new world yet to be born.

The formal definition we settled on was : Vesperance (n.): The solitary emotion of wistful recognition of the present as a fading era, tinged with anticipation for an unrecognizable, transformative future.

The following passage i think does a really great job of exemplifying it, I went in depth with GPT_4 about how it felt and we settled on this as a good illustration: Vesperance is that bittersweet moment when you're driving through your quiet college town, windows down, and the air feels thick with possibility. It's the golden hour of an era, and you're acutely aware that you're riding the last rays of a setting sun. You look around and see the world in the simplicity of the now, cognizant of the tectonic shifts on the horizon. And in that instant, you're both a poet and a prophet. You feel a sense of loss for this beautiful, imperfect world that doesn't even know it's already a memory. Yet, there's a thrill, a pulse of electric anticipation for the unfathomable future that's rushing toward you. Vesperance is the emotional echo in that liminal space, where the nostalgia for what's behind you is tinged with the exhilarating unknown of what lies ahead. It's not just an emotion; it's a narrative, a story where you're both the reader and the protagonist, caught in the poignant pause between chapters, unable to resist turning the page.

I hope this resonates with some of you guys out here, I'm really curious to know if any of you can relate to this really odd feeling. Its an intense one and it felt important enough to delve into, I appreciate any feedback

It’s a beautiful ode to the sense of derealization lodged like a stone in the throats of many. For the first time, the future feels unimaginable, unguessable—the arcs too manifold. In previous decades, a sort of undefined logic ran through each successive generational permutation. In the 80s you had a good inkling where the culture was turning and what it would evolve to in the 90s, and so on.

But now a pall’s been thrown over our eyes. The future is at its most ontologically ambiguous, its most splintered and entropic. Political flashpoints erupt daily across the globe, economic turmoil is drowned out only by the flare-ups of cultural neuroses. Against this backdrop, transhumanism spurs to life with AI superintelligences breaking through the soil to claim their slice of the pie.

This zeitgeist has been captured well by Christopher Rufo’s startling new video about the “Cluster B Society” that the U.S. is fast becoming:

For those unfamiliar, in clinical psychology personality disorders are split into three categories:

As can be seen, Cluster B represents the ‘dramatic’ clade, or specifically the narcissistic and histrionic types. In his accompanying essay, Rufo writes:

New College of Florida trustee and activist Christopher Rufo wrote in a Sept. 24 City Journal essay that universities encourage behaviors associated with psychology’s “Cluster B” personality disorders: narcissism, borderline personality disorder, histrionic personality disorder and antisocial personality disorder.

“It feels as if we are in the midst of a society-wide mental breakdown,” Rufo wrote. Even more, “psychologists have captured the spirit of our modern culture” in categorizing these pathologies.

That’s right, universities are openly and actively encouraging students to display, possess, and develop highly deviant psychological pathologies, resulting in an historic rise of reported mental illness amongst the college-going generation.

Rufo continues:

This cluster of psychopathologies is no longer an individual matter, however, to be dealt with in the privacy of the analyst’s office. On the contrary, Cluster B psychological traits have begun to shape the patterns and structures of our culture. The scenes of American public life increasingly resemble a Cluster B psychodrama: victimhood replaces accomplishment as the standard of merit; accusation replaces disagreement as the means of settling disputes; false compassion becomes the primary method of manipulating citizens into compliance; and the whole scheme is enforced with the threat of violence: obey, or suffer the consequences.

He ends up concluding that our government is in fact turning—or already has done—into a Pathocracy: the rule by psychological dysfunction.

For most of American history, significant personality disorders were treated as problems and their sufferers largely relegated to the fringes of society. But in the emerging Cluster B society, narcissistic, borderline, histrionic, and antisocial psychological traits can now be found in those elevated to positions of power and celebrated by our institutions. The new status quo is an emerging leadership class that rules through emotional blackmail and uses the cover of various “victim” groups to impose its agenda on society. If citizens dissent, they are branded hateful bigots, accused of lacking empathy, and sometimes banished from public life. 

…

Social media accelerates these trends. Sites such as TikTok have become a petri dish for incubating mental illness, especially in teenage girls, who mimic the Cluster B behaviors they see online and register skyrocketing rates of anxiety and depression.

What do you get when you combine these things? A society as a goulash of existential misery, anxiety, and pathological distortion, peopled by the increasingly distant and distrustful, decoupled from any semblance of compatibility. Ghosts drifting through a miasma of AI techno-entropy, numbed by the uncanny smear of gonzo verisimilitude. Such a society is bound to rupture at the seams, breaking apart from lack of a molecular valence binding it together.

In a Cluster B society, psychological disorders become marks of distinction rather than problems to be solved.

We sit anesthetized by the distortion of it all, gorged on the stupefying self-eating culture of pathological hysteria. All while the moneyed basilisk parasitizes our ruling class, co-opting them as zombie hosts to redirect the country’s last remaining resources to stave off the imminent collapse, discarding the empty husks afterwards like dead skin.

Breathe.

But this dark metaphysical blind-alley has one important positive. It has opened our eyes to the ontological dead-ends we’ve naively stumbled down. For generations, we allowed ourselves to be seduced and numbed by the splendor of a metaphysical narrative lowered onto us like a crown from on high, never thinking to question it. Well, some of you precociously ‘awakening wonders’ have done so, earning yourselves swift ridicule and ostracization in an era that was still unprepared and ideologically shackled.

Now this reckoning is forcing us to reexamine reality. And from that, new breakthroughs could emerge, allowing us to free ourselves, find a new course of meaning in this existential flytrap. In chaos and disorder lies opportunity: for restructuring and renewal, both spiritual, physical, and metaphysical.

Flies in the digital ointment.

Such things are cyclical. Nietzsche, in many ways, grappled with this same paradox back in the late 1800s, once the old metanarratives had worn thin, and humanity was faced with troubling implications about the purpose of existence. Now we’re forced to do a sort of psychic housecleaning on ourselves which wouldn’t have happened otherwise. A recalibration of our priorities, motivations, true goals and desires in the face of a total societal derailment from a common, coherent future. It’s a molting of our psychic skins, a re-evaluation of all the baggage accumulated over decades of subtle programming.

The emperor has no clothes, but aboard his pride parade float, it little matters.

Now’s not the time to give in to the vortex of meaninglessness and ambiguity. But rather to listen to our own most ancient, instinctual inner voices, and forge a new path forward, one paved with the stones of our long-ignored subconscious.

That’s not a call to start doing chinups, eating raw steak, and listening to Bronze Age podcasts. Find your own truth, forge your own path by re-examining your relationship to the world. Just know that it’s a time of dissolution, the kicks and starts prefiguring the painful birth of something new. The time is now for us to have our say in the script at draft stage, our own ontological writer’s union arbitration with the reality purveyors and narrative makers, away from the Munchhausen trilemmas and Adlerian pathocracies and all the endless epistemological traps that are the rotted, fermenting flesh of post-modernity stinking up the longhouse and stultifying us into a narcotic stupor. Clear the slate and start over.

Forget truth.

What is good?

What has meaning?

Because in the end, as we stand before the abyss and watch the grand cosmic recalibration unfold, the surreal cascade of new cyber-theogonies and singularity streams degaussing our sense of meaning and presence, we come to see the world reduced to binary simplicity: push and pull, action or no-action, lethargy and impetus. And though these universal precursors are often reified into the tangible moralities of our present day and age, dressed in theological robes and cast in philosophical lights to give them meaning, in the end only one true sin—as cosmic error—remains:

Indifference.

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