Conflict on the IoB is shaped not by the strategic intentions of its nominal leaders (who largely have none, beyond keeping the conflict profitably alive and growing), but by emotional energy flows in the field of mooks. The best knights on the IoB, such as Trump, operate by an entirely reactive philosophy: "there go my mooks; I must find out where they are going, so I can get out in front and lead them."
I would frame the whole thing as a game: inside every mook is a fully complex human, but there aren't many niches in this society where you can thrive as a fully complex human, so they spend some time every day allowing their identity to be consumed by a character in a MMORPG. The game is cyber-tribalism, flinging social media comments at the enemy monkey tribe.
I'm optimistic that this is something humanity will grow out of. Look at critiques of television from the 1960's. They imagine all of us turning into TV zombies, just sitting and staring slack-jawed at the screen all day. What happened instead is that most of us learned to integrate TV into our lives in a balanced way.
Looking farther back, a big factor in Hitler's rise to power was radio. It was a new technology, and a voice coming out of a box had a lot more power over people than it does now.
Sometimes I wonder if the internet is a fad. In terms of the quality of the experience of using the internet, it peaked around 15 years ago, and just in the last two years it's become much worse. Ads have won the arms race against ad-blockers, and it's hard to find a website where you don't have click an X, or ignore some unwelcome demand on your attention, to do whatever you came to the site to do. An increasing percentage of the internet does not have the content to be worth the hassle.
]]>It slips between your hands like water
This living in real time
A dizzying lifetime
Reeling by on celluloid
Struck between the eyes by the big time world
Walking uneasy streets
Hiding beneath the sheets
Got to try and fill the void
More things than are dreamed about
Unseen and unexplained
We suspend our disbelief
We are entertained
On the same theme, from Joanna Newsom's "En Gallop":
Palaces and storm clouds
And the rough straggly sage and the smoke
And the way it will all come together
In quietness, and in time
And from Beat Happening's "Secret Picnic Spot":
]]>This is our secret picnic spot turned inside out and made pure
by the heavy wind and rustling leaves
From now til we greet again
Joining hands and feet
Tender teeth
Digging and scraping
Tender feast
Moonlight sway
Over all