Political autocatalysis and the feedback loop from Hell

We're living through a time in which positive feedback loops (but of bad things) are amplifying hate, division, inequality, racism and ecological destruction. Trump, but also the general wash of exclusivist authoritarian ethnopopulism around the world, is the backdrop. AI is the accelerant. Full grown men who simp for the orange felon are the foot soldiers. This is a Singularity of sorts, just not the type that the cyberpunk subculture would have been proud of. Technology is enforcing dystopian surveillance and exploitation instead of freedom. Here are some of the elements in this autocatalytic cycle of shit:

* Authoritarian populism and its disdain for liberal democracy, norms and civility.

* The dude-bro podcasters (Rogan, Pool, Fridman etc.), some openly selling MAGA cultural wares, others feigning "I'm just asking questions" while platforming all manner of post-truth slop and opposition to expertise and science.

* AI being leveraged to encourage people to become dumber and lazier. This has the potential to devolve into entropy, in which the algorithms will be trained on data that is increasingly compromised because of the selfsame laziness and inattention to truth and detail.

* Twitter/X, now a cesspool of Russian disinformation, Nazis and liars, basically just a megaphone for stupidity and hate speech pushed by the incompetent thief Elon Musk.

* COVID and its effects on cognitive function.

* Attacks on public health, making cognitive decline even worse while contributing to the people getting harmed being unable to think their way out of voting for the sociopaths and malignant criminals inflicting that harm.

* Monstrous inequality and the lurch toward outright oligarchy. This is qualitatively different to the regular corporatism of the American political duopoly and is, I would argue, as anti-capitalist as any communist regime ever was. The ability to buy influence and control by simply throwing money at stupid people and politicians, while eschewing even the pretense of merit, is the new normal.

* Grift, an increasingly important slice of the economy, feeding whatever conspiracy theory, anti-scientific trope or radicalized belief that one wishes to harbor, is what the lying liars who peddle their grifts are selling.

* The Shit Fountain Donald the Treasonous Pig Trump himself, the carnival barker who doesn't give one single shit about the truth and sees anyone who tells the truth without looking for personal benefit as a wimp. He will lie and cheat for the sake of it or just to show that he can, and Americans, like chumps, let him do it. Trump is a sociopath, malignant narcissist, criminal, racist and anti-American thug, a complete disgrace to the American Republic and a threat to national and international public health, democracy and the natural environmental. And now he's in cognitive decline, becoming more erratic, nasty and infantile by the day. Basically, a toddler with nuclear weapons.

* Putin, the enemy of the West who wants to export his system of government to the rest of the world. His ideology is authoritarian post-modernism and post-truthism for the sake of power itself. Vlad Vexler (the good Vlad) has described Putinism and Trumpism as "fascistized monarchist hyper-neoliberalism" (the latter component being an extension from the economic sphere of competition to the political sphere, in which everything becomes transactional and might-makes-right in all human and political dealings is not simply seen as a possibility but as appropriate). Vexler also remarks that while Russian disinformation and active measures are an important aspect of what's driving the increasing divisions within Western society, we should also recognize that they are not its root cause and are instead amplifying something that was already there. We ignore that at our peril because we then become less able to situate and deal with the true causes when we externalize these issues as emanating from Russian actions. Overstating the Russian influence is, ironically, what the Kremlin counts on.

* Punch-down culture, a long mainstay in America and by no means the exclusive preserve of the right, but gleefully weaponized by the right to attack and malign the most vulnerable people in our society.

* The inclination toward national and even personal self-immolation. "Destroy my medical coverage so that I can own the libs!" is the Spirit of the Age, the Zeitgeist or whatever you want to call it among tens of millions of Americans, a dark poltergeist made manifest by the collective imbecility of people who simply don't want to know better.