End Gaming

By: Devika Brendon

I have some advice to give: Make the most of what days are left to you. Find the work you most like to do, give away or sell what you no longer need, downsize and minimise your possessions - and expand your personal aspirations. No, this is not a late New Year post. It’s a suggestion, to detach yourself from everything that distracts you from happiness or tries to substitute for it. Tune down the noise and mute the most annoying of the people clamouring for your precious attention, be they influencers or even friends and associates. You will wake from a trance, induced by a surfeit of social media. Have you noticed how fashions rise and fade, but how certain preferences are consistently endorsed and normalized, in modern conduct books. Viral this and viral that. Beliefs originating from elsewhere, and seeded and dispersed like actual viruses, amongst us.  People using the same words, and threadbare phrases, and a dolorous sameness permeating the global discourse. We are being herded, everyone. Like the hapless wildebeest in The Lion King, with tech bro billionaires snapping at our heels to make us run. Echo chambers and digitized infomercials and product placement and saturation of our senses - and the manipulation of our consensus.  

So, we may not be living in an actual war zone, but it’s pretty clear that we - our minds, our beliefs and our perceptions - are under siege. Think back to about 15 years ago, and then 30 years ago, before the advent of social media. The first smartphone was released in the year 2000. Facebook was unrolled in 2004. Instagram in 2010. TikTok in 2016. We were told they were designed to build community. It’s now very obvious that these sites have been created to track us and play us. And to corral us into voting blocs, being told what to think, how to interpret what is happening in the world around us, and that we need to ‘keep up’ with the updates, to stay alerted and notified. We actually do not. We are being gamed, and we are being played. We can step back and step out and off the field. We can choose not to receive, and disconnect, and leave.

I ask: Is what we are digesting through words and images and audio material empowering us or disempowering us? Do we feel more confident and calmer, or more anxious and troubled, by what we are being told and shown? What values are being endorsed? What images and conduct are being rewarded, on the flickering screens in front of us? Are we not being baited, driven and triggered? And kept in a constant state of volatile restlessness, boredom and dull acquiescence? Do we understand how the world works? Do we accept that, not being physically present when various incidents occur, what we are being presented with is hearsay? Do we perceive the framing techniques that are used to convey narratives in a certain way, to ensure that the key points land on us with maximum impact? Whether it’s shock jocks on radio or controversial ‘journalists’ platforming misogyny, racism, anti-wokery and slavish worship of capitalism, on Sky News, X, etc., we are being served a stream of truisms, clichés, anxiety-fuelling material: provocations and prompts that are calculated to stir up emotive response and bypass our thinking process. 

Critical thinking and lateral thinking are needed to remedy this learned passivity which makes us willingly receive - and even welcome - what actually harms us: all these programmes are the products of the same mentality. Ambush, hijack, assault people’s peace of mind, wear them down until they surrender, follow orders and do what they are told.  We do not see what people really are, only what they appear to be. Machiavelli said that, in one of the most famous books on power ever written.

Now, with the immersive onslaught and saturation of AI, bots, deep fakes, and human impersonators of all kinds, we are being sold facsimiles of human feeling and experience. Do we know that a specific person actually said a certain thing? Or is it a replica? Is it an approximation? An attribution? So much is derivative and disconnected from a pulsing life force. The only energy being produced is the stimulus of fear and horror. How can we not respond with despair when presented with images of the results of human cruelty? But are they real? Is ‘the enemy’ really the enemy? Or the ‘ally’ truly an ally? Or is our adrenochrome being drained while we are still alive? We are like animals in a maze, being cynically trained to respond to fake stimuli! Our energy - our attention - our focus - our vitality - our commitment - our humanity - are being harvested. And we are being trained to actually participate in our own diminishment. 

The democratization of media has flooded us with thoughts from people attempting to gain followings and subscribers. Algorithms and trends dictate what we are shown, like meals on airport trays, curated by an array of limited choices. For many months now, I have subscribed to various channels on multiple platforms to see what is happening in the world. Through an onslaught of pop ups and pornographic lures, it’s still pretty easy to see that there is nothing new going on. And we are being desensitised, through systematic overloading of our capacities to process incoming data. Just jerking in response to stimuli, predictably and on cue. This is not being alive, or sentient. Have you noticed how short our attention spans are becoming? And how we feel a possibly intense response to a new situation briefly, and then it peaks and fades and we forget about it? Substituted by the next event? Are our responses even distinguishable from each other anymore? Can we even recall why we felt the way we did, at the time? 

The most disturbing outcome is that everything starts to feel random, and arbitrary - as if it doesn’t matter whether we feel positive or negative about a person or an event. We could take either side, and it would not make any difference to any real-world outcome. What we firmly believe to be true can be overthrown in a short period of time, when the facts we were relying on are proved to have been false - augmented or modified or otherwise faked. Being gaslit and told that something which horrifies us is fake news erodes our faith in our ability to discern true from false and friend from faux. Remedy? Not tuning out but tuning in - to a cleaner and higher frequency. We can do this. I suggest exiting the pernicious platforms. Those strident voices will go quiet. No FOMO will be felt. The great juggernauts will crash somewhere other than the peaceful place where you find yourself.