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Cultivating an image online is a method of erasing yourself from reality — the entire global project of social media is really a gradual means of replacing the real with the unreal, piece by piece, like the ship of Theseus. It is a scandal whenever a single real thing is destroyed — and real things (living souls) are destroyed daily, everywhere, simultaneously, billions of times over; replaced with unreal things (static images). The industrial era destroyed nature, the digital era is destroying inner-nature. A for-profit society — which is what ours, fundamentally, is, or has become — is a covert totalitarianism; a virulent invisible totalitarianism that does not generate the opposition like a visible totalitarianism (the totalitarianism of governments) does. We are doing this to ourselves. We volunteer our neurons for this brain-washing. An economic system which produces media addiction, numbness — dumbness — cannot be working; working for us. (And I am making an aesthetic argument here, to be clear: an economic system which produces an ugly, vapid world, cannot be doing what it purports to do).
