Algorithmic Kabuki

Synaptic Alchemy in the Holographic Red, White, and Bruised Pantheon

Cognitive Proxies

“But not to worry—I’ve read it so you don’t have to!”

This is how the anointed Queen within hive mind jubilance celebrates itself as an authority figure, selling its audience the lie that they have somehow done them a favor. An ideology coalesces around a trusted source they have called upon to discern truth from fiction and fact from fable within the written work of an agreed enemy. They swarm around that authoritative source with glee awaiting their assessment of something they cannot be bothered with for a variety of tendencies rooted in herd behavior.

Outsourcing trust in the evaluation of words and ideas is nothing new, but only in this century did the masses begin to follow strangers into digital hives to celebrate the agreed foolishness of someone absurd and undesirable—a dishonest actor whose status is confirmed by merely adhering to a different ideology. The common justification is, “I don’t have time to read that, I trust this anonymous stranger who exists in the digital ether only, to read it for me and give me an honest appraisal of its contents to confirm all my biases about just how ridiculous I already knew it was so I can celebrate my certitude within the comfort of my herd.”

Nobody ever consents to outsource their minds to proxies, yet billions of people willingly do it, and those with ideas of exploiting this behavior know how and where to do so, with terms like Trust The Experts. From a young age, we are told indirectly that we must constantly sacrifice thought for obedience to remain part of polite society. With each passing year, we are dragged along a course of prescriptions that lead us to various analog cognitive proxies, most of these proxies are affiliated with a government that stakes a claim to the fruits of that obedience while penalizing insubordination.

The passive acceptance of inculcated truths is the honey that keeps the hive intact from one generation to the next. Before our steady sustenance of digital soma, analog proxies served as the cognitive conduits of the status quo. Teachers, professors, authors, pastors, priests, filmmakers, and celebrities—each reinforced the narratives handed down from their institutions, whether educational, corporate, or cultural. These figures were granted authority on the impression of originality or insight, but in reality, their authoritative status is derived from their ability to regurgitate accepted doctrines and avoid troubling questions. All of them ascended because they dutifully refrained from challenging power, embracing foundational dogmas intrinsic to their own training, which was also essential to the training of those who came before them.