I’ll make the assumption that most of my subscribers are aware of the discussion surrounding the rockband Geese and wether or not they are a ”psyop”. I found this debate deeply fascinating. The TLDR is; Geese hired a digital PR firm called Chaotic Good, which operates networks of fake social media accounts designed to make the band go viral on TikTok. It’s to be expected that big brands use all kinds of shady tactics to make you buy their product, but not the authentic band Geese!

But here is the thing. The people who felt betrayed must have been operating under the assumption that ”authentic” human interaction is possible on algorithmic platforms in the first place. I would argue, with near absolute certainty, that it is not - and that this is not an accident. It is the design. The real psyop is that people have been tricked into thinking otherwise.

One of my all-time favourite authors, William Gibson, once said that great way to understand the present is to look at it through sci-fi-glasses. Meaning, take the current cultural trends and emergent technologies surrounding you and try to extrapolate what the logical endpoint of these things are. Gibson has been praised as a prophet, but he himself denounces this, he claims he is merely trying to understand an increasingly weird present by using the method I described. It is less about predicting the future than about reading the tendencies already embedded in the now.

So, let’s give it a go.

In William Gibsons book The Peripheral, he introduces the concept of ”The Jackpot” - something I think about often. The Jackpot is a multicausal catastrophe that reduces the global population dramatically over the course of several decades. This crisis is characterised by being a slow and complex process made of several interlinked parameters, but once they all line up: Jackpot. In the novel, the people of the future argue when the Jackpot began. Was it the industrial revolution? Or when we domesticated animals? Earlier still?

An interesting thought experiment is to ask: What are the parameters in our own, real, Jackpot? I think one is definitely the climate crisis, one is most likely some sort of new global pandemic far worse than COVID-19, one could very well be nuclear war. But one parameter, that I think is easily identifiable if you put on your sci-fi-glasses and observe our world today, is hyperindividualism. What is the end point of this phenomenon? The answer is already visible at the edges of our media landscape.

I recently listened to a short video essay claiming that the adult industry is a great place to look if you want a hint of what the future of media will be like. The porn industry did video streaming before YouTube and live streaming before Twitch. The current frontier is personalised AI-generated content. Two people watching what appears to be the same video, while the AI quietly adjusts physical details in real time to match the preferences of whoever is watching. The content is not made for an audience. It is made for a single viewer, and remade for the next one, and the next.

Liz Pelly, in her excellent investigation of Spotify, Mood Machine, argues that this is essentially where the streaming model is heading for music. The endgame, she writes, is a platform where all human made music is replaced with personalised AI generated content that suits your preferences perfectly. This will finally turn the platform into an infinite money machine, since they can finally eliminate the central problem that has plagued Spotify's business model from the beginning: human artists who expect to be paid.

Now, let’s put on our sci-fi-glasses and take this to it’s logical endpoint: A media landscape in which everything you hear, watch, and read has been generated only for you. Not curated for you (that’s vintage now). Generated for you. No shared cultural references. A fully personalised world does not just fragment public opinion. It dissolves the world that makes opinion (and therefore politics and collective action) possible at all.

The effects are already present in intimate life and relationships. We have developed a world where it is increasingly difficult to find a partner, because no one checks all the boxes in the eyes of the hyper individual spoon-fed with nothing but personalised content for all of their adult life. Our current cultural infrastructure rewards treating other people as opinions to be filtered rather than persons to be encountered. In this landscape, children represent the ultimate invasion of personal space and agency. An irreversible commitment, an exit that permanently closes. Relationships require a quick escape route as a matter of psychological hygiene for the hyper individual. I'm in my me-era!

What drives this is not selfishness per se. It’s structural. It’s the application of market logic to domains of life that was never intended to function as such. When every relationship is implicitly a transaction - an exchange of value, a cost-benefit calculation, a negotiation between two parties with competing interests - then love becomes something you receive rather than something you do. Oliva Sun did a great video on the topic.

I know how this sounds. And believe me, I do not think that ”we need to go back” to normative ideals about relationships and family. Relationshops and kids are not for everyone. That’s not the point here. The ”trad” relationships so heavily romanticised by the far right are also modelled after the same transactional logic, where everything is an investment that needs to pay off.

What if love and healthy relationships are, at its core, about giving up on yourself and commit to someone else? Not for the sake of duty, tradition, norms or potential payoff, but out of a deep feeling of compassion and care, grounded in the real life experience of interconnectivity?

Nostalgia is the other (real) psyop. Images and videos evoking a simpler past, clearer gender roles, more coherent communities, a world in which people knew their place. It feels like a reaction to hyperindividualism, and in a very superficial sense it is. But it is a reaction that goes nowhere because it is based on something that never existed. Baudrillard would have called it hyperreality. It’s a copy of the past that feels more real than the complicated present to people who find it unbearable.

Neither individualism nor conservatism is an exit from the system. Both are products of it. As we become increasingly hyper-individualised, longing for hyperrealities, the wheels of the Jackpot keep aligning, one by one, while the exocapital machinery eats away at the living world.

The Jackpot we face is not an explosion. It is an exhaustion.

Bless,

CM