Being “Woke” in popular parlance may be defined as realising that one is being lied to by the forces of Evil (for want of a better word), and then deliberately refusing to accept their narrative anymore. Hence the “Woke” person is in a position to criticise those who persist in old-fashioned belief systems as being contrary to their own enlightened-perspective.
Except that it doesn’t work like that.
Recently, I looked at my news-feed and realised I was being lied to. The items which came up were meant to sedate me into not realising that I wasn’t seeing any stories which might actually inform, enlighten or challenge me. Filled with righteous anger, I went in search of whoever it was who had subjected me to mental slavery, and soon realised it was someone called “Alex Sumner.”
Yes! Far from the Google/Facebook/etc Algorithm being to solely to blame, I realised that by specifying my favourite news sources, my favourite topics, what I liked browsing, etc, I had turned the internet into a mirror – reflecting what I expected to see. And then I realised:
Because the Algorithm comes up with a result tailored to the individual, Everyone Is Seeing A Different Internet To Everyone Else.
Hence, the right wing people constantly receive a feed of right wing stories because they set their preferences to sites like Breitbart, altright.com and The Daily Mail. However, the Woke people constantly receive a feed from their own preferred i.e. “woke” outlets.
Everyone is being told what they want to hear – woke and unwoke.
There can be no dialogue on the internet between people of divergent points-of-view, because none of them are engaging with the same internet. Moreover, people argue assuming they are talking about the same thing whilst in reality each is speaking a different language to the other.
Becoming Woke is therefore not exchanging illusion for Truth, but one illusion for a different illusion.
It gets worse. In Philosophy, a debate between rival Philosophers could take centuries – literally, because the proponents lived in different time-zones. Likewise, in the Sciences, a scientific theory could hold sway for many years, e.g. it took over two hundred years to demonstrate Newton’s laws of motion are not true in every circumstance.
However: the Algorithm(s) are heavily biased in favour of novelty, to such an extent that to have an in-depth discussion on anything, even if it is not a great philosophical or scientific debate, requires an attention-span longer than that allowed for by the Algorithm. The internet may be a mirror, but we are only “seeing through a glass darkly” because it is not conducive to self-examination. It reflects, but does not allow self-reflection.
Personally I’ve started by deliberately altering my news preferences to read sources I would never read otherwise, although I think this might be the beginning of a plot for a dystopian science fiction series.
Death
A black hole, due to its inescapable gravity, is “death” to all matter which passes beyond its event horizon. Coincidentally, the black hole at the centre of this galaxy, otherwise known as Sagittarius A*, just so happens to be in the part of the sky to which the Golden Dawn attributes the Tarot Key “Death” (i.e. in terms of the “Tree of Life Projected in a Sphere” teaching of which I have spoken in the past). However, given that Black Holes leak “Hawking Radiation,” it would appear that Death is Not The End after all…
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January 24, 2024 · 2:16 pm