Alien Newsletter #24: Too Much Disinformation
Alien Newsletter #24: Too Much Disinformation
In which our alien considers the fracturing of human society into mutually contemptuous Tribes of Truth, and proposes a brand new structure to house them
Network Note: Projecting as we do from the renegade wilds of Substack, it has been obvious to us at Thee Network that we belong to a specific ecosystem of communication which, regardless of our initial intentions, invariably positions us within a specific, emergent belief system that opposes others. While our alien continues to float somewhat disinterestedly within the memetic stratosphere, it has finally gained a rather distinct awareness of this stratosphere’s existence. Reporting back to its home civilization about its discovery, our alien for once appears quite distressed over the possibility that it had been sold the proverbial bill of goods. But as always, it appears that there is a precedent in interstellar history that could be applied to our predicament, which our alien is more than happy to share with its correspondents. Mind you, however, that this is only what we’ve heard.
Before I begin my latest communication, I should share with you a recent image which has excited the Greatest Apes to no end over the past month. Of course, this will mean very little to you — at best, it will resemble something like the scrawls previous visitors from our planet have made in the past in various rocky apertures. You will be quite amused to discover that the GAs have claimed them for their own ancestors, but I digress. So this image has excited several earthbound people who have spent no small degree of resources, time and a liquid substance called “blood” scrutinizing. Thankfully for us, they certainly have no good idea of what exactly they are observing, and I must reward the Phalanthreesians for that wise suggestion to lob a destructive missile at the structure — otherwise who knows what they might have discovered. As you know, some of these galaxies are quite protective of their privacy.
And that is the point I must stress at this moment — that it has become increasingly less and less advisable to presume that the Greatest Apes have any certainty whatsoever about what universe they collectively inhabit anymore. For at this moment in their history, they seem to delight in creating elaborate ways of distinguishing themselves by these infectious mental viruses they call “ideologies.” While physical confrontations around opposing ideologies are common amongst the GAs, perhaps the most powerful weapon at the disposal of these tribes is information itself, which I imagine to be the building blocks of these ideological tribes. This information ends up informing belief, which fuels the ideologies that animate such tribes. To successfully attack an ideology through its lack of correspondence to a peculiarly GA concept called the truth is to dissolve the very ontology of their tribe — to label their information “disinformation,” to render them as misinformed by a nefarious source, and to prevent their voices from rising above more than a mere whisper, is the ultimate victory. However, it is a game that all of these tribes are wise to, and the wars that are being waged amongst these tribes will most likely last as long as the photons in the previous image, at least.
In the Northern Hemisphere Plate 2 alone, I can name several of these tribes:
911 Truth
The Big Lie
Black Lives Matter
Antifa
Oathkeepers
QAnon
Christian Nationalism
The Antivaxxers
Feminism/Meninism
The Beyhive
And so on.
Practically all of these ideological forces has a counterforce that is opposed to them. For instance, The Big Lie is opposed by Stop The Steal, both of which are focused on the ongoing battle for leadership in the NHP2. It appears that there is very little persuasion involved within these tribes, or any effort to convert or understand the other. It is more about maintaining support and increasing the velocity and volume of the central myth which animates the members of the tribe. This is compounded by the means of communication that the GAs use amongst each other. There, speech is turned into a sort of competition, similar to the language battles upon which the GAs shower much of their attention and resources, and one which people spend much of their lives.
Separated from their supersimian substrate, these informational systems, similar to the projectile launchers the GAs spend so much time fighting with and fighting over, are virtually harmless in and of themselves. However, once they impregnate a human, they can make them do all sorts of things, from blow up a massive administrative ziggurat to forego material nourishment in favor of pure oxygen. Because some of these informational systems set the GAs against each other and confound their living arrangements, these entities have to be labeled as “disinformation,” and therefore shunned within the dominant GA society.
This has created a difficult quandary for the leaders of the GA tribes. Most GAs are quick to label disinformation a problem. The question, however, is whose. For instance, a recent initiative to confront the issue through a panel in the NHP1 was crushed by moves from those amongst the tribe called conservative.
A commentator on the incidence remarked of the incidence, “The problem is helping to make us unable to talk about the problem.”As you may recall, a confederation of interstellar civilizations confronted this infinite loop, and attempted to solve it in several ways. The first began with the United Ideations, in which the ideas were anthropomorphized and made to copulate and create syntheses of themselves which could potentially be grafted back into each civilization. However, the repulsion some of these bits of disinformation had for each other was quite extreme, so instead, a centrifuge was constructed by which these entities were forcibly merged onto each other. While this helped to create a temporary peace, it did however lead to several tragic occurrences, such when one particular civilization decided, upon finding out that the core of their planet would detonate if ignited, spared no expense in digging a hole to the center, placing a gigantic fuse in it, and lighting it. While the four astronauts that filmed the stunt from a space station above all agreed it made for quite a lovely explosion, it did register, if only slightly, that they had no home to go back to. Perhaps an opposing bit of information could have saved their race, but that had been utterly eradicated by their technologies.
It would take a few billion more earth-years to finally develop a happy medium, where the wishes and hopes of various groups in that confederation would correspond to their material actualities. Until that happens, I am pretty certain that the GA tribes will shape their information into whatever form gives them the most benefit, regardless of what suffering they or others around them might endure. The universe is filled with the shining afterimages of whole galaxies that once were; whether these were the remnants of what was right and wrong matters little. As we have learned through painful experience, it is best to acknowledge that they exist, and will always insist upon doing so.
Dark Matters
Speaking of the confederation, it appears that the GAs’ newest telescope found its galaxy. Even from so far away, I swear I can still hear them yelling at each other
A GA who apparently never existed was just born a few days ago. For some reason, some GAs care deeply about this.
I have often asserted that cats create great interference in cloaking our presence upon this planet. Now I have proof.
And lastly, if it’s one thing the GAs are good for, it’s making lovely explosions in the sky…
As you may remember, especially in the NHPI, there are many different tribes vying for supremacy, all of them informed by a sort of informational system. There is a tribe called conservative, a tribe called liberal and even, I am told, a tribe called quest, although I have yet to discern their positions.