-The Dude
‘Fuck the Facts,’ the slogan of the young and passionate, has been around for at least as long as I can remember. It was at least so when I was an angsty teenager. Today though, we are truly living in a post-fact world, where facts do not so much not matter, as much as what matters is who gets to use them and how. So in effect the facts indeed do not matter. This is obviously a contradictory statement. But contradictions are logical fallacies and so is the statement ‘this statement is false.’ You get the point.
The world in which we live is now entirely hypernormal. We have other words for this state of affairs, fake, unreal, obscurantist, post-truth, but hypernormal fits so well with our current way of life. Strange and terrible things are happening all the time. Events are seemingly coming and going and are entirely out of our control. There is the runaway world of finance, the oligarchy, the cleptocracy, Donald Trump and now Joe Biden. Then there are the lockdowns, the riots and protests, we don’t even remember the Australian forest fire, the largest in recorded history, then the virus and the wonderful reversal of the epidimiologists on their stance toward large public gatherings, the police and politicians taking a knee during a PR event. There is talk of social collapse, a collapse of capitalism, a civil war, a war of the races, the third world war. These are all facts, and they don’t matter. They don’t matter in the way that facts mattered in the ‘old world.’ But in our current not so brave new world, facts and evidence are little more than opinions and ideas. The moving image, once believed to be akin to inalienable truth, is now suspect, because everything can now be manipulated, if not overtly, then definitely covertly. Perhaps decades of ‘interpreting’ the human condition had the unintended consequence of shattering the very reality on which the human condition actually stands. But when we look outside our little abodes, our houses, our apartments and condominiums, the world looks different, calm and peaceful, but this may depend on where one lives. Bill Hicks had a great joke about just this sort of thing, he’d say “I’m at home watching CNN and all I hear is ‘War, famine, death, recession, depression, war, famine, death!’ and then I go outside and” at this point he’d make cricket sounds.
Matt Taibbi wrote an article about the Michael Moore film Planet of the Humans. Right there is the catch. It’s not Michael Moore’s film. It was directed by Jeff Gibbs. Michael Moore produced it. The facts don’t matter. What matters is perception. This is why ‘perception management’ was such a huge component of Henry Kissinger’s campaign of destabilization of the Middle East. But Taibbi’s article is great for one reason, which is coincidentally the reason why Planet of the Humans is also great, it exposes the hypernormalizing tendencies inherent in a technocratic society, perhaps in any society with a bloated, hierarchical, artificial system of social relations. Almost immediately after the release of Planet of the Humans the film was attacked for the way it used facts to smear the liberal class and its strangely logical attachment to the corporatocracy that enabled the environmental and green movements to be coopted and taken over by the worst and most moneyed players in every major industry. The attacks were made by refuting and debunking facts the film made in support of its thesis, while Moore countered with facts of his own. His facts were, in fact, fact-checked by a team of lawyers schooled in ratting out bad facts. They found the facts in the film to be quite sound, at least according to Moore, and that is also a fact. But Gibbs’ film doesn’t actually present anything new. The ‘news’ of greenwashing, of industry cooptation of fringe movements to silence them, these are as old as psy-ops and PR themselves. During the early 2000s the organic and green movements were insidiously coopted by industry giants from Home Depot hawking green zero VOC paint that still uses horrific solvents to this day, to Walmart setting up ‘neighborhood markets’ where they sold ‘organic’ and ‘artisanal’ goods. The facts of Planet of the Humans don’t matter as much as the message of the film. In our world, facts can be used and twisted for all sorts of purposes and reasons. And this is the quantum moment. The ‘truth’ in facts relies solely on those who use them, because facts are always filtered through the point-of-view of the person who uses them. Planet of the Humans’ premise is that the environmental movement has failed, but by extension the film is a critique of the liberal mindset, it uses specific facts to manipulate the message around a specific movement, but the projection is manifest through a series of tie-ins to the larger picture of liberal and leftist politics. So the film is primarily attacked on the grounds of being reactionary, because it dares to criticize the dogma of the liberal left. The right wing is largely spared the critique, but that is mainly because it is assumed by the filmmaker that they’re all terrible and terrifying, which they are. But again, facts don’t matter.
We no longer live in a world where up is up, or down is down. We live in a world that is contradicting itself on almost every major front and technology has everything to do with it. We say that up is down, left is right, in is out and some facts seem to support this idea. The stock market crashes and the economy tanks, because, virus. Then the market rises back to its commanding heights, not so the economy. Hertz Rental Car goes bankrupt, then its stock price soars as investors pile in at the bargain prices. The police take a knee and a few minutes later are seen viciously beating protesters. The absurdity of this moment is on full display across party lines, across all media and platforms and across all social interaction. The Democrats, led by Pelosi, wearing Ghanian scarves, take a knee in what is supposedly an act of solidarity with the Black Lives Matter movement. The public pounces on the event and trashes Pelosi and the Dems. But that is precisely the point of the event. It is perception management 101. The deed was done, people reacted as the politicians knew they would, nothing gets done. Move on. In the financial sector the wild ups and downs are now being attributed to new and young investors piling into the system, empowered by ‘free’ trading apps like Robinhood. Even the name suggests a symbolic reversal. The app that is taking from the rich and giving to the poor? Perhaps, but in a hypernormal world, even the subversive is reined into the status quo. The poor do not take from the rich, they simply join them in a kind of game of ‘playing rich’ which the ruling class calls ‘access.’ Robinhood is the ‘access’ node for the millennial generation and it’ll most likely make a few people very wealthy, but what happens to those holding the bag?
While we are on the subject of the markets and hypernormalization, it was already apparent in the beginning of the crisis how things were going to shape up. When the markets crashed and shed something like half of their entire value, the financiers and their henchmen immediately called on their most hated government regulatory overlords to conjure up trillions of dollars out of thin air to save their failing enterprises. For a sector that believes so strongly in the power of the markets to do what’s best, this was a moment in which we all realized that they do not in fact believe in the markets at all. The supposed risks that the investors were taking were always backed by the socialism of the Fed. So when the Fed refused to bail out the people, the moment of hypernormality was available for everyone and their mothers to see, however briefly. It didn’t make sense and you had to look quickly and not blink.
But, back to the Planet of the Humans. What the film seems to really be about, is the way that liberalism in America has given way to a new kind of conservatism that is perhaps bordering on totalitarianism. Taibbi swims around the issue but never quite gets to it. Rather, Taibbi goes on hammering on the point of censorship, but as we know from the past of places like Nazi Germany, Soviet Russia, Fascist Italy, the entire Eastern Bloc and all the right-wing military dictatorships of South America and Africa, censorship is one of the most powerful tools of all totalitarian projects. A film like Planet of the Humans seems to have been made for one man’s personal reason, but the public’s reaction to it, laid bare the structures that form the basis our own, totally new and postmodern totalitarian project. For there to be a totality a certain amount of the public has to not just go along, but be the arbiter of such moral crusades as taking down films, banning books and preventing people from speaking out. This seems to be the problem of the right as much as it is of the left and today the liberal and conservative media alike are in a mutual race toward who can denounce and censor more content on their platforms, but it is the public, the mass culture that enabled this to happen in the first place. The question over whether censorship is being covertly perpetrated by algorithms is almost irrelevant, because the algos had been written in large part to mimic the response of the public. And this is yet another moment of congnitive dissonance and hypernormalizing nature of today’s societal core value of liberalism, when censorship is used not as a tool of oppression but good public service, not as a last resort, but as a formalized tactic.
*Note: None of the facts in this article have been fact-checked!
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