When Future Shock Meets Mass Formation Psychosis
So What Does “Frazzledrip” Mean?
Anything you relied upon for stability and predictability in the past is over. Governments are near-comedic basket cases, healthcare under nearly every system is a disaster, educational systems near-catatonic. Businesses are moving with the times, some with aplomb, some bomb.
But the most visible casualty of them all is the real-time self-destruction of the corporate, state-approved media complex.
How information travels between nodes has shifted from broadcast to interlocking networks (neural nets) and this will never revert back.
Today we get higher signal news, and faster, on X, than we do from the MSM – the latter of which gets to “breaking news” hours or even days after the fact; and only then after it gets pureed through an intersectional sieve of agitprop.
But the flip side is that in this super-conductive neural net of unrestrained signal, a lot of truly unhinged stuff gains traction.
In the past, we had a centrally organized information publishing ecosystem: news, publications, broadcast, and they all had editorial processes and filters that, for awhile, almost looked objective and neutral – focusing more on “getting it right” than punditry.
That all went by the wayside over the past decades, especially since the twin populist crimes of 2016: Brexit, and the first Trump election. That was when it became clear that the gatekeepers were now curating informational pathways that most people were in the process of abandoning.
In the emergent system – the decentralized, internet system, there is no effective way to manage or control “misinformation” or “disinformation”. In fact, after reading countless NGO and policy papers on the topic, I rarely see one that can even offer a clear definition of what those terms mean.
So we’re all stuck trying to cope with sensory overload – note that I didn’t say information overload, because a lot of it isn’t information – a lot of it is conjecture, conspiracy and shared neurosis.
My catch-all phrase for everything that seems crazy and unprovable is “Frazzledrip”, which is the name of my bookmarks folder where I keep all my clippings that fit in this bucket…
Frazzledrip is my preferred term to “conspiracy theory” (because there are a lot of real conspiracies):
- Directed energy weapons caused fires so that oligarchs could buy property cheap
- Michelle Obama and Brigette Marcon are dudes
- Flat Earth “truthers”
Basically the common theme among Frazzledrips is that everything that happens anywhere is the result of a carefully calculated cabal that rules the world and is intentionally destroying civilization to serve their own ends.
Before you get mad at me because you suspect I don’t subscribe to one of your personal Frazzledrips, we have to acknowledge that:
- Powerful groups do conspire to protect their own power, increase their wealth and wield outsize influence.
- There really is a lot of crazy, unhinged stuff actually happening.
The reality is, those powerful groups conspiring to their own ends are not a monolith, they are factions, and those factions are fractal. There is not only no consensus between these groups, aside from temporary, ever-shifting alignments of interest – there is active conflict between them. Possibly to the point where geopolitical events of the day are more likely the result of internecine factional conflicts than between identifiable sovereigns.
Even still, none of them are in control – let alone one of them, or even all of them: we live in an out of control world, and for many – that is a more terrifying prospect than the possibility that we live in a dystopian caste-based society, lorded over by an insular class of dynastic, elites (who are really shape-shifting lizards).
The reason people are prone to believe these narratives is because, in a weird way, they provide some semblance of structure, some kind of mental model that can explain the high weirdness (not to mention institutionalized incompetence) which typifies our day-to-day existence.
But the reason we live in a world of high weirdness and incompetence, is (you guessed it) Future Shock.
Just to make it even harder to parse reality – it turns out there are heterodox narratives which really do have a higher probability of being accurate (like the Covid lab-leak, Epstein didn’t kill himself, or even 9/11 was an inside job), but are less likely to be widely believed than your typical “Frazzledrip”.
What’s To Be Done
The bitterest pill to swallow coming out of Covid, even after being a Libertarian and aspiring Sovereign Individual for most of my adult life, was the realization of just how on our own, each of us are.
Most normies live their entire lives under this assumption that “the system mostly works”, along with its support structures, governance models and information apparatus.
People like you and me had an awareness that this wasn’t as guaranteed as most others thought, and that we were on a path where this would become less reliable over time.
With Covid it seemed like complete institutional breakdown: our governments became openly tyrannical and the media complex went full brainwashing mode, while the healthcare system imploded. Suddenly, we, as individuals were tasked with shouldering a level of personal responsibility unlike anything we had ever faced before – it was one thing to lean toward self-reliance in the Beforetimes. Now we not only had to fill the vacuum left by a dysfunctional system, that system was openly hostile toward us.
Add to that, yet another technological revolution with AI blowing wide open and posing its own unique existential threat to anything that was still left intact.
I would submit that this actually isn’t the time for radical self-reliance, you just have to be a lot more thoughtful about what and on whom you rely on.
This is probably a major contributor to why the Bitcoin culture has taken such hold. As a zeitgeist (Bitcoin is it’s own kind of morphic field, very distinct from “crypto”) – In addition to providing something an immutable: a globally dispersed ledger secured by Proof-of-Work, Bitcoin places heavy emphasis on personal fitness, contemplative practices (mindfulness, meditation) and family; which overflows into a kind of tribalism that I predict will come to define this era.
We also have to train ourselves to think more in terms of probabilities than binary true or false – if only because the truth is practically impossible for any of us to know when it comes to events and matters outside our own immediate frame of reference. Especially with AI, deepfakes, and botnets.
Finally, we have to focus on our own internal states and own personal goals – if we’re not examining all this wild mayhem happening around us through the lens of how it impacts (or even empowers) our ability to pursue our own goals, then we’re just a pinball being batted around everybody else’s machine.
(Last year I soft-launched an email list focusing on this called Sovereign Mind, which I’m going to get into gear in 2025).
Events are accelerating so fast, we have moved well beyond Hanlon’s Razor (“Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.”) I don’t actually believe politicians, central bankers, technocrats or pundits are stupid.
But they are all, as a group, collectively out of their depth and completely tone-deaf. They’re trying to function in a 3D world that’s in the process of turning into a hypercube.
They keep insisting on trying to apply Cartesian boundaries and frameworks on to a place that has been undergoing a rather disorderly phase shift into another dimension.
(That dimension, was the advent of cyberspace, and I’ll have more to say about this transition from our 3D to a hypercubic world in the next piece. Subscribe here to get it when it drops).
We’ll close with a final warning from the Tofflers:
“Social rationality presupposes individual rationality, and this, in turn, depends not only on certain biological equipment, but on continuity, order and regularity in the environment.
It is premised on some correlation between the pace and complexity of change and man’s decisional capacities.
By blindly stepping up the rate of change, the level of novelty, and the extent of choice, we are thoughtlessly tampering with these environmental preconditions of rationality. We are condemning countless millions to future shock.”
Fast forward 50 years, and we’re soaking in it.
