the cult of the echos

echo and narcissism

i’d like to tie together two pieces i’ve written recently.

the first is the “leaving in a huff” piece about the flight to bluesky.

the other is the isolate, alienate, and indoctrinate piece about how to sustain a doomsday cult when the world fails to end on tuesday.

the two find unsettling confluence around malicious manipulation.

let’s look:

gatopal™ adam coleman: sets the frame here:

it seems like a whole group is mistaking a cycle of abuse for a support group and being led out of hamlin by a pernicious piper who wants to be sure he’s playing the only tune in town.

they are taking “solace and pride in it.”

this is, frankly not great. it’s mistaking the cult for protection and isolation for safety. it’s adopting alienation as a core tenet. those come together into:

“listen to no one but us. the rest of the world is evil and hateful and you can tell who they are because they disagree with us.”

hardly a promising base from which to pursue pluralism.

one might even go so far as to ask some pointed questions about whether this is just reactionary fetal position fact flight or if it’s actual grooming.

whether wittingly or not “cut them off, trust only us!” has been a powerful online tool used by a lot of trans and other activists. making such actions and narrow dependence seem like an act of strength is a longstanding tactic of abusers. i have no idea what KD’s intentions are here and certainly do not mean to imply that i do, but at a certain point behavior does not need to be deliberately malicious or damaging to be so in fact and in the end, these “isolate and alienate” tactics work either way and whether or not you’re a predatory partisan pimp or a well meaning part of a self-assembling dogma mechanism does not really matter. the machine is what the machine does.

this sets the stage for indoctrination and the easiest way to facilitate that is through relentless repetition of one viewpoint, over and over, until it seems like “what everyone knows.” other viewpoints need to be disallowed.

popular twitter account end wokeness got their content blocked and their bluesky account flagged in seconds for posting “there are only two genders.”

i wonder what else gets insta-suppressed. i’m guessing it’s a lot of things. the purpose of bluesky appears to be the creation and extension of an illusion that can no longer be supported in free and fair informational exchange.

so here’s my prediction:

most of those that slunk out or stormed off in a huff will soon be back. they always are.

the folks who loved to crow “so go build your own if you don’t like it” will try it themselves, realize how metcalfe’s law works, and the smart ones will get sick of virtue signaling into the void and having no idea what is going on because they live in the land of telling it like it ain’t.

and they’ll come back.

but some are gone for good.

they are experiencing ideas plurality as some sort of biblical plague.

the true blue believers will just get cultier and cultier as their echo chamber shrinks and intensifies into some sort of self-congratulatory reality denial singularity.

they will cut ties with the outside and keep on with the trajectory of isolate, alienate, and indoctrinate.

their new homeworld revolves around censorship as a defining feature and any miniscule deviation from orthodoxy results in instant expulsion.

it’s perception triage to prop up a failing worldview.

in the end, it’s always the same.

they make it easy. their “influencers” urge you to block all contact.

the need to establish an intellectual monoculture wherein the devotees may once more pretend to be a majority that “everyone agrees with” in a sort of cosseted cosplay cultural involution is crashing their servers.

it’s going to do worse things to their minds.

they are getting really active on “cut everyone not just like us out of your life.”

they will increasingly become unreachable and will lack a common context or language with which to speak to the outside.

their consensus reality will become all consensus and no reality.

to survive, such a system must cut off communication with anything threatening its ideological and perceptual slant.

their rapid move further blue will make them see everyhting else as moving red. (i wrote about this in “the perceptive redshift” back in 2022.)

it’s going to take a trend they have already misapprehended and enhance it exponentially.

and this is not healthy.

the “true blue believers” are in for a really rough ride.

i’m really not sure what’s going to become of this gang, but i fear it’s nothing good…

self selection for solely toxic codependency never is.

well, almost.