I don’t fear Elon, I fear the Elon in me
Elon Musk’s ongoing preoccupation with the notion of everyday Joes overtaking legacy media invariably calls to mind an interview I saw with David Foster Wallace, in which he exuded a frank yet cautiously non-reactionary lamentation with regards the increasing proliferation of endless-choice entertainment.
Of course, a man of Wallace's decorous Midwestern disposition would deign to use such crude terminology as informational ‘rat racing’ to describe the distracting vacuity of modern media’s interminably culturised consumerism, but his disquiet in relation to its now widespread influence was no less palpable in the now low-key YouTube-famous German broadcast on ZDF. “Entertainment is fine in low doses,” wrote Wallace in well-nigh eerie prophecy in 1997, “but there’s something about the machinery of our relationship to it that we don’t stop at low doses.”
So, you can see why Elon’s insistent re-tweeting of this “You are the media now” sentiment brings me to such pontification. For if Wallace’s prognosis of an oncoming distraction culture served as a precursor to the era of scroll-baiting memetics and deliberately inflammatory ‘hot takes’ then surely the current media landscape qualifies as at least vaguely dystopic. That said, Musk has a quasi-libertarian investment to fulfill; and had I the funds to buy Twitter I too would insist you're a blue-ticked demigod for using it. It is what it is.
More recently than Wallace, and certainly more explicitly, Jordan Peterson threw more polemical fuel on the fire in a 2022 interview with Sky News Australia, delivering a characteristically scathing condemnation of the superficiality of large-scale media digitisation, and rather amusingly reserving a special hatred for Instagram in particular. The culturally divisive provocateur-in-chief argued that the growing virtualisation of both the social and professional spheres risks fermenting a curated panoptic of profound “cultural psychopathy”—one that not only normalises but actively encourages a newly fabric-woven “societal narcissism” to an alarming degree, whilst also suggesting that this callous cultural dawn may, ultimately, be untenable. Good times.
It’s not that I’m inclined to stir the cauldron of such black-pill rhetoric, mind you; but many of us, I’d wager, have witnessed this firsthand to some extent or other—the surge of the ‘pick-me’ paradigm entangled with the digitally incestuous, clique-obsessed dynamics of ceaseless algorithmic churning, all mixed in with the abundance of invasive commercialising of things you will never even want, let alone need, for good measure.
Not to mention the quick and dirty dopaminergic surge that comes from clicking on the latest everything you need to know to become ‘insert-your-desire-here’ accounts, which are invariably followed by streams of what can only be presumed as bots feigning naturalistic retorts – all peddling the illusion that you can, in fact, have both “a” AND “b” simply by imbuing and subsequently applying these 10 points of sheer wisdom-training. All of it entrenched in the insatiable deluge of McDonald’s-tier infotainment to boot.
Alright, I don’t mind holding up my hands and declaring that (and you can picture the old hypothetical gun to the head whilst expected to die or speak in candour routine) I am a free-market capitalist whenever found roaming the Mondial warzone, for I am as English as they come. Off the back of Roman colonialism, England was, in fact, born as a nation of oddly concentrated yet highly individualistic Germanic nomads, so this should come as no surprise to you. Or you could very well say a thorough ‘Anglo-Saxon roast-beef’, as our more philosophically literate French neighbours lovingly assert. But allow me to pose the question: With this gargantuan snowballing of social media junk culture, is it any wonder modern society is running on a perpetual treadmill towards a mass-curated, free-market fuelled anhedonia?
And must I, dear reader, waste your precious doom-scroll time by writing multiple paragraphs to convince you that this schizoidal, /consume-content/ phenomenon does indeed have its insidious grip on you – regardless of your self-assured digital sovereignty? No, I suspect you agree with me instinctively, therefore requiring no evidence to the contrary whatsoever…
Minus the unanimously agreed-upon benefits of this mass media egalitaria, then, consider the fact that these multiple-choice streams of endless-info platforms are now the primary source of information for young and impressionable minds alike. Tomorrow’s leaders. Just think about that for a moment.
What is the telos of this theatre of mass distraction? I’m not sure. Well, the truth is, I don’t know; I’m neither a prophet nor a self-proclaimed digital thought leader. But, like any morish toxin, I would certainly venture to declare that this e-maze of instant gratification is both spiritually corrosive and infuriatingly addictive. And while social media has its undeniable merits and use cases, an over-reliance on such data-driven prurience seems poised to usher in a culture marked by a facile and malignant vacuity – altogether spawning a hitherto unexperienced form of collective consciousness manifest as a spiralling contradiction of social self-aggrandisement inextricably paired with a ruminatory self-doubt. No more black pilling though, eh?
As someone who identifies—albeit imperfectly—with a cautiously accelerationist perspective, which holds that we must rid ourselves of both traditional conservatism and progressive utopianism by riding, not resisting, the chaos-roaring tiger of modernity (whether technological or political) to reject nihilism outright while striving to retain the human element of Being, I nonetheless find myself seeking a footing of honest, albeit still performative, nutrition-based information in contemporary media culture; if only to ensure that the next generation—and those after them—aren’t utterly ensnared within these very digital consumer-con webs of poorly executed and ideologically jumbled Poundland plasters of mass-marketed glibness (that’s “Dime-store band-aid” for my American readers).
The faux-Nietzschean ‘Will to Power’ dynamics driving these digital commodification platforms may create the illusion of authentic personal agency, but they ultimately serve only to foster a shallow numerical advantage that values popularity over substance.
Authenticity, that venerated fetish of the digital age, has been gored upon the altar of its own performance. The more one insists upon it, the hollower the proclamation becomes. It’s the great tragicomedy of our times: a mass psychodrama wherein every online sage and lifestyle savant peddles their unvarnished realness, meticulously lacquered with marketing stratagems and algorithmic savvy. Alex Mazey distills it neatly: “The more influencers proclaim their authenticity, the more obvious it becomes that their image is contrived.” The act is so self-devouring it doesn’t even require cynicism anymore—just simple observation.
Moreover, this very theatre of sincerity plays out within a digital milieu that may no longer even be populated by conscious entities in any meaningful sense. Cue Dead Internet Theory (DIT)—a notion so perfectly dystopian it renders even Baudrillard’s hyperreality quaint. The premise? That much of the content you consume, the engagement you perceive, and the discourse you so nobly partake in is not even human—a simulacrum, conjured and sustained by algorithmic apparati operating with all the impersonal ruthlessness of a Lovecraftian demiurge. The ‘authentic’ online self, then, is little more than a cipher within a self-replicating data-maelstrom, its existential function reduced to the generation of metrics, the perverse currency of a system that neither sleeps nor dreams.
This is a paradigm Land saw long before the rest of us stumbled, starry-eyed and virginal, into its machinic grip. The English philosopher writes: “The transcendental unconscious is the auto-construction of the real, the production of production.” And what may we parse from this through the lens of the current day? That our so-called reality in its digital incarnation is a construct that does not need, nor particularly desire, your input beyond that which furthers its own recombinant evolution. What is ‘authenticity’ in such a space but a pre-programmed artefact—packaged, optimised, and sold back to you at an upcharge? The self-obsessed Self as brand. The soul as subscription model.
But if you truly want to see the full grotesquerie of this dynamic metastasised into its most luridly cynical form, look no further than self-help guruism—that odious confederation of self-anointed seers and motivation-peddlers, dispensing epiphanies by the syllable and wisdom as a neatly digestible product line. It is the slickest con in the history of man’s copious list of aeonic folly: the commercialisation of despair, repackaged as the gospel of self-actualisation.
Aye, you’ve seen them. The prosperity mystics, the hustle-preachers, the social media sages pontificating from the glowing altar of their smartphone screens, eyes glassy with the cold, dead sheen of monetised zealotry. "Manifest your destiny! Unlock your true potential! Write your own fate and summon your desires by the power of your inner monologue!"—all regurgitated pablum, that postmodern formula of mid-wit metaphysics lacquered in the faux-spiritual sheen of new-age, capitalist decay. And naturally, all wisdom is gated behind an interminable paywall of courses, masterminds, Patreon exclusives, and life-hacking PDFs.
Buy my book. Follow my Instagram. Upvote my YouTube. Join the inner circle of the select chosen ones (for the negligible sum of your digital dignity in addition to a stable monthly fee).
And so you keep clicking, keep scrolling, keep engaging with the gilded feedback loop of empty affirmations. Consume. Perform. Repeat. The more you struggle towards ‘freedom’, the deeper you entrench yourself in the system. It is no longer enough simply to exist—one must curate, must commodify, must ceaselessly refine one’s market-facing self. Always becoming, never being. And the most avariciously dystopian irony? Even your disillusionment, your anti-consumerist disdain, is another metric to be harvested, another trend to be monetised.
As Land puts it, “They are plastic replacements for hard-wired instinctual responses, routing a sensory-motor pathway through the virtual machine of the unconscious.” This is the new enlightenment in the age of matrixial metaphysique. The simulacrum of narcissistic selfhood, engineered for optimal engagement.
And yet, you play along. Of course you do. But hey—don’t forget to smash that Like button.
Alright, I’m sure by now you’re nodding furiously in agreement, so I don’t wish to labour the point. But observation aside, one might add that – and to finally resolve this diatribe – I’ve never felt inclined to post in prolific seriousness on social media, largely because I’m not entirely comfortable with the idea of people knowing my thoughts and motivations in active real-time.
And while I may be operating under the lay pretentious bio of “Philosophy & Soundscape Journalist,” I’m by no means party to this quantifiably gluttonous trend in aspiring to attain a status of commodifiable, solipsistic sagacity as found in such social media cliques. For I am, above all, little more than a writer of philosophic turn, which I don’t offer as a phony attempt at self-deprecation but rather as a declaration in being content to live one’s life without the need to digitally broadcast its mundane minutiae for the purpose of – well, I don’t know for what exactly.
But what I do know is that there’s something subtly Orwellian-level sinister about how quickly and enthusiastically modern man has embraced this voluntary Truman Show existence, where millions willingly transform their daily musings into open-library scribes consisting of panini-in-a-bistro snapshots and self-defined aphoristic guruisms straight from a Tony Robbins footnote.
Now, don’t get me wrong—I’m not suggesting that our current society’s peculiar penchant for narcissistic self-surveillance is all part of some grand (((psyop, bro))), but surely I’m not alone in finding this radical cultural transformation both voyeuristically fascinating and, at times, unsettlingly myopic?
Yet still, even as I write this, one can't help but wonder—do I, in my own morally corrupt way, contribute to this very tumescence of modern clicky-sickly culture? Am I forgoing the nutritious wisdom of vanguard thinkers-past by virtue of attempting to critique it, and am I not, therefore, already complicit in the very thing I seek to untangle? Well, aye – though needless to say, logical pedantry doesn’t lend itself very well to culture-based philosophy journalism, so we shall swiftly move on from this self-imposed epistemic quandary.
Who was it that called social media the new opium for the masses? Whomever it was, they did not say it in vain. But it’s way more sinister than that. Perhaps Mars won’t be too cold?
References
Land, N. (2011) ‘Machinic Desire’, in Fanged Noumena: Collected Writings 1987–2007. London: Urbanomic, pp. 319.Mazey, A. (2025) ‘Sardonicism in Semiotics’. Icelation Works Publishing.Wallace, D.F. (1997) A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again: Essays and Arguments. Boston: Little, Brown and Company.