Welcome to Weed Church the blog where I write whatever I want until someone gets mad at me.
Before diving into this week’s American exegesis, a quick funny thing I noticed from an email from The New Yorker:
Thanks to the Rasta, this is a good example of what I’ve now come to see as the inherent bias of Western Christian culture and its media. The Pope being a bigot is a “missed opportunity” for recruiting more useless people into the shittiest religious tradition on Earth. If the most prestigious magazine in America writes about the Pope this way, why is it that editors will not allow me to write anything positive about Haile Selassie I in American publications? Kind of funny, if you know your Catholic history. Not funny “haha” though. The kind of funny where you laugh because it’s better than breaking something.
We Solved Propaganda! Thank God.
Congress passed a bill this week about the most important thing happening in America: TikTok, a social media app that is currently owned by a Chinese company. The narrative is that this is a grave threat to American consumers because American user data is owned by a company that isn’t American. After all, the plan is not to rid American smartphones of TikTok, but to merely divest TikTok from its Chinese ownership. Apparently, the idea being sold is that American companies are trying to help American people but Chinese companies are trying to hurt them. TikTok is a dangerous app for American kids (okay, yes, agree) and harvested user data is a dangerous weapon for manipulating people (I’m still on board, all right), therefore American ownership of the company will help ensure that the interests of the average American Joe are protected (does not compute, complete logical breakdown, no evidence for claim).
It’s hard to keep track of all the varying reasons why one would root for the TikTok measures being pressed in congress. Disinformation is in the news, and everybody knows that it’s imperative that Americans only get real information instead of the fake kind. Real information can only be produced by Prestige Publications, many of which are currently or have in the past been credibly proven to have deliberately misled Americans on behalf of the U.S. State Department. Seems a little counterintuitive but it’s an election year so people will pretend it makes sense until after November to avoid confronting their own impotence.
I never downloaded TikTok because I’m in my late 30s and I have a personal distaste for adopting Gen Z trends. I don’t have any interest in reclaiming my youth. My youth involved alcohol, which is an idiotic drug that produces idiotic thinking. Why would I want to experience that again? And why on Earth would anyone get excited about a new app where you can send people pictures and videos of yourself (often after getting drunk)? Are you still an ape? Maybe that’s the real problem here. A bunch of apes got a monolith a little more than a decade ago (myself included, lest the reader think this critique is lobbed from the proverbial tower).
Freedom of Speech is inherent to the American experiment. It’s never really existed outside of day-to-day in-person conversations. Sometimes I think the real danger of the Internet is the illusion that it’s more populist than other means of disseminating information. Social media is a great example of the phenomenon: aside from the content of the posts, the statistics create the illusion of popularity — this thing this person said must be important, or interesting, because look at the numbers — when in reality, there’s a multi-billion dollar industry for social media marketing.
Very little of what “goes viral” is organic in 2024, because virality became a marketing strategy when I worked at an ad agency in 2011. Have you noticed that podcasts — the new beacon of fearless truthtelling as of a few years ago — are now mostly owned by massive media conglomerates? I’d rather gouge my eyes out than listen to another podcast where two or three or however many people who just got done farting on each other make pithy jokes about the Cold War or Palestine. Too much talky talky these days.
It’s an illusion. It’s all pretend as a means of elevating obviously unpopular opinions and making it seem as though these opinions have cultural cachet in Real America. Instead, many of these obviously stupid opinions that show up in The Atlantic, or the Post op-ed page etc. are blatant propaganda to support the war industry. The only people who share the unpopular opinion are the psychos in upper management whose goal in life is to optimize the lives of those they deem lesser. These people spend their limitless money to make sure the opinions they prefer appear in front of the faces of people who would’ve previously never given a shit. Go ahead and ban the app where teenagers do stupid dances and middle aged perverts pretend they’re still 21. That oughta solve the problem.