The Gangs of TwitYork
Roaring Psychedelies and the Dawning of Next Frontier
It was the Roaring Psychedelie$ in Wild Wild West World.
The Gangs of TwitYork Ruled the World Wide Web and any and all Traffic went through one of them often involving Effective Altruistic Tit for Tats while Justice was Lying and Crying out West.
It was the Worst of Times but people Pretended it wasn’t and made the Best of it.
The World had become so divided politico-economically as well as online and off people began to Lose Touch with each other and eventually with Reality.
The ability to not only live a Second Life online but multiple lives anonymously manifested a Metaverse full of Monsters, Mages, and Muses.
For some the split personalities provide freedom to shed the inhibitions of their offline skin, sparking creativity and creating connections. For others, split personalities provide opportunism, the ability to reinvent themselves over and over and over again and when weaponized for the wrong reasons turns into Cy-bugs that only know how to Disguise, Divide, and Devour (on repeat), whatever they *Deem* Different from them.
The Mixing of Role Playing with Reality and what people did for a living began to take it’s Toll on Society and the Gaps got too Great to Mend.
Brief waves of collective joy were few and far between compared to all the Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail. Gaslit and Upside/Down.
Once the Meme Wars began Memetic Soldiers flooded online. Swarms of bots and sock farmers sprung up everywhere. But there was no purpose, no noble quest, just a never ending rat-fucking fest.
People started to POOF!
Sometimes they came back but as some kind of Stepford Sock Puppet.
Like all Wars whether fought on the battlefield, in the air, or on/under the sea, Cognitive War has casualties, ruins lives, and causes pain that never goes away.
It became more difficult to tell what was real and what wasn’t manifesting in a full blown epistemological crisis aka Collective Freak Out over Truth, What is Known, Not Known, What is Real? Why? Who has the Authority to Decide?
The Meme Wars became Proxy Wars as they spread from Platform Planet to Platform Planet. People were swapped in and out as they POOFed! with cloned versions online as the Cognitive War’s impacts began to ripple offline.
What once seemed far away and foreign, faded into a Sea of Sophistry and began to Trans/Form into something new. What it becomes next will be a combination of all our contributions. The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly.
It’s always been a choose your own adventure so if you’re reading this it’s because you’ve chosen to follow me around online, no one makes you, and if they do can I please speak to the supervisor and politely request a leashed restraining order for some of you that comes with a Jump to Conclusions Mat.
