Political alienation, echo chambers, online shitstorms and simulated discourse in the rhizomatic transparency of postmodernity

 

I: THE PORNOGRAPHIC EXHIBITION OF ECHO CHAMBERS

 

            A lot of people say that we are more politically divided than ever before. Online echo chambers are commonly thought to create an environment in which people end up segregated based on opinions, not being able to listen to the discourse of people who disagree with them anymore, this tribalism ending up having consequences in real-life interaction as well.

            At the same time, you can notice the opposite tendency as well: the internet allows us unlimited access to information at all times. You are constantly exposed to a huge quantity of information, more information than humans evolved to ever take in at a certain period in time, and this includes political opinions. Newspapers, radio and television provided an environment with limited freedom of choice in which you were “given” the mainstream discourse on socio-political issues, but the internet has allowed a free, unregulated market of political opinions. Hence, at the same time, you are exposed to more opinions you disagree with than ever before. Online, the veil is taken off, social norms and politeness disintegrate, you accelerate or even ‘skip’ to the destination, leading to what Baudrillard may have called a “pornographic obscenity” of information and hyper-communication.

            Deleuze & Guattari describe structures of organizing information by analogies to biology. If the older type of journalism had the hierarchical structure of a tree (a start-point and end-point with multiple “levels” it has to pass through for approval), the internet has the structure of a rhizome:

 

A rhizome as subterranean stem is absolutely different from roots and radicles. Bulbs and tubers are rhizomes. The rhizome itself assumes very diverse forms, from ramified surface extension in all directions to concretion into bulbs and tubers. When rats swarm over each other.

We enumerate certain approximate characteristics of the rhizome:

1 and 2 - Principles of connection and heterogeneity: any point of a rhizome can be connected to anything other, and must be. This is very different from the tree or root, which plots a point, fixes an order.

3 - Principle of multiplicity: it is only when the multiple is effectively treated as a substantive, "multiplicity," that it ceases to have any relation to the One as subject or object, natural or spiritual reality, image and world. Multiplicities are rhizomatic, there is no unity to serve as a pivot in the object, or to divide in the subject.

4 - Principle of asignifying rupture: against the oversignifying breaks separating structures or cutting across a single structure. A rhizome may be broken, shattered at a given spot, but it will start up again on one of its old lines, or on new lines.

5 and 6 - Principle of cartography and decalcomania: a rhizome is not amenable to any structural or generative model. It is a stranger to any idea of genetic axis or deep structure. (...) The rhizome is a map and not a tracing.

(Gilles Deleuze & Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, Introduction: The Rhizome)

 

            So, which one is it, in the age of rhizomatic communication? If we were to view distance on a spectrum in which “closeness” and “farness” are inversely proportional, we would miss the process of alienation. Alienation is distance in closeness and closeness in distance. The internet is the ultimate form of alienation since it makes us able to keep in touch at a far (physical) distance while also putting a barrier or shield when we are face-to-face, hence the double-edged sword.

            Alienation, here, extends beyond the ability to engage in long-distance communication, our opinions are becoming alienated as well. We do not experience political separation right now. We are experiencing political alienation. The commonly-held view that we are more “polarized” and “divided” than ever ignores the other side of the coin, that we are more united at the same time, in a paradoxical fashion. Differences and contrasts are smoothed out, leading to an inferno of the same. Whereas the online echo chambers lead to a polarization of opinions, those people of absolutely different political views are constantly exposed to people who vehemently disagree with them on almost everything. Online political discourse is a discourse of pornographic exhibition.

 

“Obscenity begins when there is no more spectacle, no more stage, no more theatre, no more illusion, when everything becomes immediately transparent, visible, exposed in the raw and inexorable light of information and communication. We are in the ecstasy of communication. And this ecstasy is obscene. Obscenity is not confined to sexuality, because today there is a pornography of information and communication, of circuits and networks”

(Jean Baudrillard, The Ecstasy of Communication, Chapter 2)

 

            Think of how an echo chamber starts and continues. The algorithms on Reddit, Youtube, Twitter or whatever else you are using are giving you more of what you consume – ending up in a positive feedback loop where the more you consume one type of content, the more it is recommended to you. This leads to polarization. A polarization which is reversible insofar as in an echo chamber, you are constantly exposed to the opinions of the ones who disagree with you. But only after they’ve been filtered through your own ideology! In left-wing echo chambers, articles about right-wing politicians are constantly posted, and vice-versa, but those articles are posted in a context in which you have an array of comments already bashing that politician that disagrees with you and the article is also probably already reviewed by someone of your own ideology. In other words, in echo chambers, you are constantly exposed to the opinions of those of an opposing ideology, but only after it’s been filtered through your own ideology. Echo chambers are like a condom: it is a protective space that still allows you to engage with the “other”, but at a ‘safe’ distance.

This is the mind-boggling irony of alienation, everything is connected, like on a map, but at the same time, everything is isolated… Specific points on a graph are getting thicker and more accentuated, “full of themselves”, but it is a graph in which all the nodes are interconnected. Baudrillard uses the analogy of metastasis (ex: cancer) to describe the state of communication in postmodernity:

 

“The uninterrupted production of positivity has a terrifying consequence. Whereas negativity engenders crisis and critique, hyperbolic positivity for its part engenders catastrophe, for it is incapable of distilling crisis and criticism in homeopathic doses. Any structure that hunts down, expels or exorcizes its negative elements risks a catastrophe caused by a thoroughgoing backlash, just as any organism that hunts down and eliminates its germs, bacteria, parasites or other biological antagonists risks metastasis and cancer - in other words, it is threatened by a voracious positivity of its own cells, or, in the viral context, by the prospect of being devoured by its own - now unemployed - antibodies. Anything that purges the accursed share in itself signs its own death warrant. This is the theorem of the accursed share.”

(Jean Baudrillard, The Transparency of Evil, Chapter 14: The theorem of the accursed share)

 

II: IDENTITY CRISIS IN ADHD SOCIETY

 

According to Deleuze & Guattari, capitalism engages in a two-fold process of decoding and over-coding, of deterritorialization and reterritorialization: the old codes of behavior of feudalism are eroding away into the context-less, abstract empty forms of what they call axiomatics. This is due to the globalization of capital: when everything is commodified and has a price, everything has an exchange value, and thus, everything can be compared, the atopic radically Other (the Other that is so mysterious that you cannot even talk about it) is being replaced by superficial diversity. According to Deleuze, postmodernity saw a shift from Foucault’s disciplinary societies to what he calls societies of control:

 

Foucault located the disciplinary societies in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries; they reach their height at the outset of the twentieth. They initiate the organization of vast spaces of enclosure. The individual never ceases passing from one closed environment to another, each having its own laws: first, the family; then the school (“you are no longer in your family”); then the barracks (“you are no longer at school”); then the factory; from time to time the hospital; possibly the prison, the pre-eminent instance of the enclosed environment. It’s the prison that serves as the analogical model (...) But everyone knows that these institutions are finished, whatever the length of their expiration periods. It’s only a matter of administering their last rites and of keeping people employed until the installation of the new forces knocking at the door. These are the societies of control, which are in the process of replacing the disciplinary societies.

(Gilles Deleuze, Postscript on the societies of control)

 

In the societies of control, domination is more and more abstract and virtual, lacking a specific location in space. Both the subjects as well as their contexts for interaction are alike ghosts – Deleuze compares the factory of the disciplinary society to the corporation of the society of control. A corporation is global, it is not tied to a specific physical space, it is an idea, free-floating (just like the transition from the gold standard to fiat currency):

 

“In the disciplinary societies one was always starting again (from school to the barracks, from the barracks to the factory), while in the societies of control one is never finished with anything—the corporation, the educational system, the armed services being metastable states coexisting in one and the same modulation, like a universal system of deformation. (...) In the societies of control, what is important is no longer either a signature or a number, but a code: the code is a password, while on the other hand the disciplinary societies are regulated by watchwords (as much from the point of view of integration as from that of resistance). The numerical language of control is made of codes that mark access to information, or reject it. We no longer find ourselves dealing with the mass/individual pair. Individuals have become “dividuals,” and masses, samples, data, markets, or “banks.” Perhaps it is money that expresses the distinction between the two societies best, since discipline always referred back to minted money that locks gold in as numerical standard, while control relates to floating rates of exchange, modulated according to a rate established by a set of standard currencies.”

(ibid.)

 

The free-floating, flexible identity of the postmodern subject is analogous to a snake, everywhere we are browsing and surfing:

 

“The old monetary mole is the animal of the spaces of enclosure, but the serpent is that of the societies of control. We have passed from one animal to the other, from the mole to the serpent, in the system under which we live, but also in our manner of living and in our relations with others. The disciplinary man was a discontinuous producer of energy, but the man of control is undulatory, in orbit, in a continuous network. Everywhere surfing has already replaced the older sports.”

(ibid.)

 

            The societies of control are societies of cloud capitalism. On top of the material capital that you can touch (ex: machinery), who has power is dictated by access to data, information as well as social capital as well. The principle of reality is slowly eroding away, and we live in a more and more intangible and immaterial virtual reality. Where the line between reality and fiction is becoming blurred, Baudrillard calls this a hyperreality.

            The free-floating, immaterial, “cloud” and unstable reality that we live in is accompanied by the same metaphors for describing subjectivity in our age. Our identities are less fixed and stable, and everything is oriented towards short-term gratification and superficial, fast-paced consumerism. If there is a psychic condition that can be used as a metaphor for 21^st century, it is ADHD: relationships last less, songs and albums are getting shorter, we are going from 2 hour movies to 20-minute Youtube videos to 20-second TikToks and ‘shorts’.

            This has massive consequences upon our sense of self and self-esteem. Identity is slowly eroding away, the postmodern subject is the Lacanian “objet petit a”: a ghost, a silhouette, an abstract form without content whose personality does an 180-degree shift in a few seconds when changing the website, forum or video game one spends their time in – Deleuze’s snake. Eva Illouz describes this shift in her book “Why love hurts: a sociological explanation”: whereas the Victorian period (i.e.: Foucault’s disciplinary societies) was marked by your social status influencing your romantic success, modernity is a transition period finally leading to postmodernity (i.e.: Deleuze’s society of control) in which your romantic and sexual success dictate your social status, and ultimately, your self-esteem and sense of self-worth. In the Victorian period, if you were of a high social class, you felt like a king and your romantic experiences couldn't change that, and if you were a poor peasant, you felt like a loser, and no romantic success could change that either. Now that we lose our sense of community and meaning from the highly unstable labor market and alienated social life, our sense of self-worth is shaped by our romantic success more than the other way around. Your economic and social status is no longer enough to validate your identity and sense of self, so we look for constant short-term validation in relationships, social media, etc. We see here the irony of a huge portion of “sex positive feminism” and other mainstream liberal views on sexual liberation: there is nothing politically revolutionary about not being able to commit to a relationship for more than ten minutes, since this is quite literally the status quo – ADHD society. This is also the same as Slavoj Zizek’s criticism of Judith Butler. 

           

III: SIMULATED ONLINE POLITICS

 

            To connect the first and the second section: in the fast-paced society where we need constant short-term gratification and validation on social media in order to keep intact our sense of self-esteem, this can’t but not have effects on political debates as well.

            Why do people argue about politics and other controversial subjects online? Clearly not to change the world or do anything about those problems concretely, in almost all cases. Internet posting is not political praxis. We post on Reddit, Twitter and Facebook not to change society and the world, we post here for attention. There is a dopamine rush when people agree with you and when you get upvotes. We used to have to socialize in order to do politics, now we do politics in order to socialize. Online debates are entertainment. There is no difference between playing League of Legends and arguing about politics online, the fact that it is rage-fueled does not make it less of a "game". There are secondary benefits, like learning new information or, who knows, that rare occasion where your views are actually changed, but the primary benefit is attention-seeking.

However, the discourse itself on platforms like Reddit and Twitter takes an interesting form. We simulate politics - "after the orgy", as Baudrillard would've put it: We’ve already had the orgy of political, economic and sexual liberation, and after maximum liberation has already been achieved, we can only endlessly simulate it again and again in hyperreality.

 

“The orgy in question was the moment when modernity exploded upon us, the moment of liberation in every sphere . (…) The assumption of all models of representation, as of all models of anti-representation. This was a total orgy an orgy of the real, the rational, the sexual, of criticism as of anti-criticism, of development as of the crisis of development. We have pursued every avenue in the production and effective overproduction of objects, signs, messages, ideologies and satisfactions. Now everything has been liberated, the chips are down, and we find ourselves faced collectively with the big question: WHAT DO WE DO NOW THE ORGY IS OVER? Now all we can do is simulate the orgy, simulate liberation (…) a state in which we are obliged to replay all the scenarios.”

(Jean Baudrillard, The Transparency of Evil, Chapter 1: After The Orgy)

 

            Despite being involved in no political praxis, online arguments take that form. Online, we tend to talk as if we are actual politicians with actual power, and this is mostly unconscious. On subreddits and Discord servers, we talk about how we need to kick out certain people we disagree with for political motives, as if our intent was to actually help society and to not radicalize them. We often talk online about how we are too divided and we need to be more tolerant of the people who disagree with us in order to get them on our side. Or the opposite, we say how it is good that we are divisive, how we don’t need to compromise with the other side, and hence kick off the reactionaries from our forum. We unconsciously roleplay as politicians, as if our motive was to change politics. If our actions online have consequences in real-life politics, as small as they are, this is only secondary, since that is not the reason we came here. We came here out of boredom, to pass the time, maybe have some fun. Rage-fun, since video games in the societies of control are based on rage, and this is a normal consequence of the profit-incentive designed to create addiction: whether that video-game is CS:GO, League of Legends or “let’s argue politics online”.

            The decision to ban someone from a subreddit or Discord server should, thus, not be based on any political argumentation. It shall be based on keeping the community “fun”, since online politics is a video game where we LARP as politicians. You engage in online discourse based on characteristics like fun, interesting, entertaining and, hopefully but also more rarely, “thought-provoking”.

            The fluid identity of Deleuze’s snake, of the subject in 21^st century ADHD society, automatically leads to our pornographic echo chambers described in the first section of the article. What is most important is the rush of dopamine here: the short-term gratification of attention-seeking behavior – Facebook likes, Tinder swipes, Reddit upvotes. The more upvotes I get, the more people agree with me, so the better I feel about myself. The profit-incentive of the corporation is mirrored by the “attention incentive” of the consumer on each platform. Each of them feeds into the other: hence, in the era of cloud capitalism, corporations owning platforms of discourse can easily create value out of “thin air” – think of Reddit Gold, Discord Nitro or the Twitter checkmark. The boundary between Marx’s use-value and exchange-value is blurred here, there is only pumping money in order to have more nuanced and efficient modes of giving online strangers a short-term attention. Thus, our self-esteem becomes a commodity to be bought and sold. This is maximum alienation: distance in closeness and closeness in distance, if anything, the rhizome described by Deleuze & Guattari in the first chapter of “A Thousand Plateaus” is perhaps not a good metaphor for our current state of affairs unless we take the rhizome and add a few “cancerous bulbs” in random places – like pus-infected acne on a face.

            “Talking points” is a common talking point today. Since validation, attention-seeking and the maintenance of an unstable sense of self-worth are replacing stable communities and long-term, meaningful relationships, ultimately the simulated politics of online slacktivism leads to tribalism. What is important is not what the other person actually means to say, what is important is the form in which they say it. If you’re left-wing/right-wing and the other has a right-wing/left-wing “talking point”, it does not matter what they actually say, it matters that they say it in a way that is similar to your opponent. Signifiers are not used to communicate here, but to simulate communication. The political “talking points” signal your affiliation to a certain tribe or the other. The important thing is that you are on my side, and not theirs. After the liberation of communication and information-transfer has reached its peak in modernity, we after the orgy, we can only simulate liberation…

            We often say that politics has turned into a tribal “us vs. them” battle – if the other side likes breathing air, you put a bag on your head. But the tribal battles are simulated as well: there is no political praxis, there is an us vs. them battle about nothing, over nothing and between “nothings” (no-ones, strangers). You do not need to signal your affiliation to one tribe or another in order to engage in a tribal battle, you need to signal your affiliation to one tribe or another in order to segregate who you get your dopamine rush from since almost nothing you do online will have an effect in real-life.

 

“Thus, for example, the idea of progress has disappeared, yet progress continues. The idea of wealth that production once connoted has disappeared, yet production itself continues more vigorously than ever. Indeed, it picks up speed precisely in proportion to its increasing indifference to its original aims. Of the political sphere one can say that the idea of politics has disappeared but that the game of politics continues in secret indifference to its own stakes. Could it be that all systems, all individuals, harbour a secret urge to be rid of their ideas, of their own essences, so as to be able to proliferate everywhere, to transport themselves simultaneously to every point of the compass?”

(Jean Baudrillard, The Transparency of Evil, Chapter 1: After the orgy)

 

            We are in the age of distraction, in ADHD society: TikTok, shorts, short-term relationships, clickbait journalism, social media likes, and politics itself becomes a shitshow. Political debates a century ago in America used to last hours on end and each side would talk for dozens of minutes at a time, now each person gets 1-2 minutes to reply.

            As such, “distraction” is another commonly-used term nowadays. When a large protest is held, musicians and content-creators stop posting in order to not distract from the current events. Some people say that this political scandal is used as a distraction from this other political scandal. Class-first leftists, for example hold that culture wars and identity politics are a distraction from more important issues, like class. If all we do is online slacktivism, what is the criterion by which we decide “important” here? If the ulterior motive for online discourse is to get validation by maximizing the number of people who agree with us, then what issues are important or not is based simply on what issues are fun and interesting to debate or not. In the hyperreal online space, some topics are a distraction from the other distractions, and all connection to reality is lost.

            Byung-Chul Han describes as following the hyperreal nature of online shitstorms:

 

“Digital swarms lack such resolve. They do not march. Because of their fleeting nature, no political energy wells up. By the same token, online shitstorms prove unable to call dominant power relations into question. Instead, they strike individual persons, whom they unmask or make an item of scandal. According to Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, globalization has brought forth two opposing forces. On the one hand, it has erected a decentered, deterritorialized, and capitalist order of domination—“empire.” On the other hand, it has produced “multitude”—an aggregate of singularities communicating with each other over networks and acting collectively. Within empire, it resists empire. Hardt and Negri base their theory on historically antiquated categories such as class and class struggle.”

(Byung-Chul Han, In The Swarm, Chapter 3)

 

            Han criticizes Hardt and Negri for not taking into account the self-exploitation of the neoliberal subject:

 

“It is meaningful to speak of class only when a plurality of classes exists. “Multitude,” however, signifies the sole class. All who participate in the capitalist system belong to it. In fact, “empire” does not refer to a ruling class that exploits the “multitude”: everyone now thinks him- or herself free, even while working to death. The contemporary achievement subject is perpetrator and victim in one. Negri and Hardt do not recognize this logic of self-exploitation, which is much more efficient than allo-exploitation. No one rules the empire. It is the capitalist system itself, which encompasses everyone.

Today, exploitation is possible without any domination at all. Those subject to the neoliberal economy do not constitute a ‘we’ that is capable of collective action. The mounting egoization and atomization of society is making the space for collective action shrink. As such, it blocks the formation of a counterpower that might be able to put the capitalist order in question. Socius has yielded to solus. Contemporary society is not shaped by multitude so much as solitude. The general collapse of the collective and the communal has engulfed it. Solidarity is vanishing. Privatization now reaches into the depths of the soul itself. The erosion of the communal is making all collective efforts more and more unlikely.”

(ibid.)

 

            Han overgeneralizes the claim of auto-exploitation however, claiming that class distinctions have disappeared altogether, and that the master-slave dialectic of the class struggle has been internalized into a war against oneself that manifests itself through mental illness and psychic distress. For Han, the depressive subject is a subject who has waged war against oneself. However, allo-exploitation still exists. The oppression within individuals only accentuates the already existing oppression between individuals, it is added on top. Hegel’s master-slave dialectic still exists in the class-war between capitalists and workers, it is only that inside each class, there is a self-exploitation on top as well: if the slaves exploit themselves, then the master can have even better control over them. Hence, in the case of online shitstorms, the exploitation by the CEOs of social media platforms like Reddit, Facebook, Tinder or Discord still exists, since it is in their own interest to make their users exploit themselves by arguing in the hyperreal space of “simulated politics”: this rage is addictive, and gets people to use their platform more.

            This is why it’s not so simple to say that we are simply becoming polarized: we are constantly over-exposing ourselves to views we disagree with, but only as rage-bait, in a superficial form that does not allow for actual discourse. This is not political isolation, but political alienation. This pleasure mixed with pain from constantly exposing yourself to dissenting views can fit under the large umbrella of what Lacan called jouissance. It is a masochistic pleasure that is so intense that it turns into pain. According to Lacan, repetition (i.e.: the death drive) is a way to regulate jouissance, to get some control over it. Hence, the subject engages in repetitive, addictive behavior in order to get a hold on this masochistic pain-pleasure. This manifests itself, in the context of the article, by the formula: “I hate seeing this so much, that I’m going to watch it over and over again!”. Whatever offends the subject inside the online shitstorm is whatever they will seek – when the progressive hates hearing racial slurs and the conservative hates seeing people burning the flag, they will intentionally look for that content in order to feel that addictive jouissance. In the ADHD society of the 21^st century, everyone is chronically offended.

            Slavoj Zizek differentiates between the negation of a predicate (ex: I would not prefer to do X, I don’t plan on doing X, I am not dead) and the affirmation of a non-predicate (ex: I would prefer not to do X, I plan on not doing X, I am undead). In the affirmation of a non-predicate, negation itself is affirmed, lack is a thing-in-itself, the “nothingness” is something too. Our political alienation can be viewed through the form of the affirmation of a non-predicate: it’s not that we do not engage with views we disagree with, we constantly “not-engage” with views we disagree with. We do not simply passively avoid them, we actively seek them out in order to not engage with them, right in front of them. We do not avoid connection. We constantly seek out disconnection.

 

IV: THE VAGUENESS OF SIGNIFIERS

 

            Postmodern “ADHD” societies of control generate vague signifiers to denote your political opponents that often have no other purpose that signaling the affiliation of your “tribe”. Usually, these signifiers are signifiers that a group identifies with, and shortly after they are used as an insult by the other tribe, and the initial group no longer identifies with them. The alternative right stopped calling themselves that after “alt-right” became an insult that no longer means anything (because it means everything), social justice activists stopped calling themselves that after “SJW” became an insult which also meant everything and nothing at the same time. In 2020, SJW was replaced with “woke” which also means everything and nothing. In order for the owners of the algorithms to satisfy their profit-incentive, information has to circulate at maximum speed and rage-bait is incentivized. Communication reaches maximum speeds when it is no longer authentic communication, but merely simulated communication.

            This has a peculiar relationship towards transparency. It is an obvious fact that one can never say the full truth in a sentence. You can never convey the entire information in the universe, there is always something left out. Yet, there is an interesting-to-observe recent tendency in heated online arguments to assume, in a paranoid-accusatory way, of the other intentionally concealing the part they are leaving out in order to trick or manipulate the discourse. In certain cases, this may be true, but is total transparency possible? Or is it just a fake?

I've criticized aspects of our contemporary transparency society in the past twice ([1], [2]) - the direction of the 21st century is the total erosion of the private, personal space under the transparent threat of mass surveillance, and the smoothing out of the distinction between private and public life, giving life to the homogenous "private-public self": when our private lives become a public performance. Ultimately, the ideological message today is one of transparency, even outside "political" discourse: be yourself, express yourself, communication is the most important thing in a relationship, be transparent about your intentions, don't expect people to read your thoughts, talk to someone if you're struggling with mental health, tell every stranger about your suicidal thoughts. Secrecy is the biggest sin in transparency society.

What I've recently noticed is how this manifests itself in online shitstorms. The paranoid search for red flags in relationships and for warning signs in suicidality is mirrored by the paranoid constant lookout for "dog-whistles". Yet this constant demand for transparency will never be fulfilled, it seems like it is always in reach, you're "almost fully transparent", and yet with each step you take towards transparency, it takes a step back away from you.

Take, for instance, a heated online argument in which someone criticizes aspects of the contemporary mainstream liberal left on culture war issues. There are two possibilities here:

1.     In the first one, you explicitly use the word "woke" or "wokeness", you explicitly label yourself as "anti-woke", etc. Immediately someone will come and tell you are not transparent enough about your true political beliefs, that you are hiding under the veil of a vague, all-encompassing label that you probably are not even able to define. The idea is "Why call yourself anti-woke instead of telling us your true beliefs?"

2.     The second possibility: you never use the word "woke", instead using specific terminology like "intersectionality", "identity politics", "affirmative action", etc. Immediately you are accused again of lack of transparency: "Why are you hiding under all this complex jargon, you should have told me you're one of those anti-woke conservatives from the start so I don't waste my time reading all this..."

So if you call yourself "anti-woke", you are concealing your true political beliefs. If you only express your political beliefs, you are concealing that you are one of those "anti-wokes". Which one is it?

Baudrillard was right: in “Simulacra and Simulation”, he explains reality is replaced by the signs of the real, we rarely deal anymore with the signs that distort/misrepresent reality, instead dealing with the signs that mask the absence of reality. The signifier is no longer a veil for the "true self behind the mask", instead it is a veil for the other mask.

The movement is two-fold however, there is also the situation in which vague signifiers are used and the other plays dumb. We've known ever since Wittgenstein, and then Saussure, that the meaning of a signifier changes depending on context: "woke" or “alt-right”, “SJW” or “fascist”, these signifiers may mean 20 different things in 20 different contexts. There is not always a need for stable definitions. One can only imagine the ironical hypocrisy of statements such as "The left can't define alt-right" or "The right can't define woke" when the statements themselves use vague terms like "the left" and "the right".

And vagueness is not a bad thing in of itself. Maybe the signified itself is vague, maybe I don't have a clear idea in my head of what I am trying to say (this is the typical case in seduction: first person says something ambiguous, the second person is uncertain whether they are being flirted with or not, and so is the first person – if you don’t know what I want, maybe I don’t know what I want either: what I ‘meant’ is retroactively decided based on your reaction). Notice the statements above, like "The right can't define woke" - I know very well what it is referring to despite the fact that I can't properly define the way the signifier "the right" is used in the sentence. But transparency society does not like ambiguity - everything must be explained and made explicit. This is an impossible task since decoding a message is itself a code: recall the typical "/s" which actually adds an extra layer of sarcasm: if I explain to you that I'm sarcastic, this can be an indirect way of calling you an idiot - you are the kind of person that does not get sarcasm, so it needs to be explained to you...

In "The Transparency of Evil", Baudrillard points towards the impossibility of any system towards complete transparency, and that the more a system tends towards transparency, the more its foreign "intruders" become more and more invisible. The more light there is, the harder it is to see the darkness. Hence, transparent systems will have "sublime" intruders such as viruses: they do not get hit by big asteroids, but by viruses, malware, dog-whistles, spies, the more invisible the enemy is, the more you need to be on the constant paranoid lookout. Is this paranoid reterritorialization our fate today? It is always red flags, warning signs and dog-whistles.