The epistemological blizzard has crossed the threshold, and it’s overturned the order of the soul

The title is a reference to this typically-cheerful Leonard Cohen number from 1992.

Basically, humans have always (1) struggled to make sense of a cruel and complicated world. Religion did okay for us – especially when it was the (Greek) gods – a bunch of powerful petulant teenagers (at best), toying with the humans: a good way of explaining how capricious everything always was.

Without getting all McLuhan-ite on yo ass, then came the printing press. And then, 40ish years ago, came hypertext, and then came the smart phone and “social” media. God? Not dead, but alive and well and living in Mexico City, working on much less ambitious projects. The state? Well, it’s complicated – still there, but not pretending to “do” welfare anymore, for anyone except the very very rich. The professions? Captured, compromised, crushed, whatever. The comforting idea that technological progress and the superiority of market civilisation – sorry “Market Civilisation” would lead to the End of History? Yeah, nah.

So, these are crazy(making) times to be alive, and the old ways of sense-making would probably not have coped, even if they hadn’t been comprehensively exhausted. We are left with the (orchestrated and algorithmic) blizzard. I do not know how I would have prepared a child to cope in it. I don’t know that you can. I think it’s like vaccination – it only works if the vast majority of folks are doing it.

Anyhoos, I was far-sighted enough not to breed, so that is all not a problem for me. Any breeders reading this are welcome to chime in.

On the Assault on sense-making capacity I have read a couple of really good things in the last 24 hours.

John Michael Greer post on “cognitive collapse.” The whole thig is worth your time. For current purposes, this –

Despite the dreams of the managerial class, going back to blind faith in mass media isn’t an option at this point; too many people have caught mass media outlets in too many lies, and even if the entire internet gets shut down to stifle the flow of alternative views through social media, other means can easily be found to spread those views. I’m not sure how many people remember that the Iranian revolution of 1979 was largely fostered via cassette tapes of sermons in Farsi, smuggled across the borders and then surreptitiously copied and passed from hand to hand. Information technologies have become much more subtle and flexible since then; for that matter, I sincerely doubt the current crop of tech-company godzillionaires will sit still for the slaughter of the most lucrative of their cash cows.

No, at this point we’re probably in for it, at least over the near to middle term. I would encourage those readers who don’t want to risk undergoing cognitive collapse to take steps to limit their exposure to mass media, social media, and LLMs. “Limit,” by the way, does not necessarily mean “eliminate,” though that’s certainly an option; what I’m suggesting is simply that you restrict your use of any technology that feeds you a torrent of manufactured delusions, whether collective, subcultural, or individual. Make sure, too, that you give yourself competing content; it’s in this spirit, for example, that I read a great many books by dead people, whose biases and agendas are not those of today’s cultures or subcultures. I also follow news aggregator sites whose biases I dislike and distrust, so that I get to hear the voices of those who disagree with me. By all means come up with your own sources if you like.

Then, today “The Great Exhaustion” – by the “Anti-Capitalist Musing” guy. Also VERY worth your time.

The retreat into private life was supposed to offer some relief. If the world outside is grey and exhausting, at least the screen could provide distraction, community, information. But even this last refuge has been poisoned.

The internet in 2025 is drowning in what has come to be called “slop”—a term that captures both the texture and the provenance of AI-generated content that now clogs every platform, every search result, every feed. This is not the utopian future the tech prophets promised. This is industrial-scale text and image generation deployed not to enlighten or entertain but to game algorithms, capture clicks, and extract the last drops of advertising revenue from an attention economy already running on fumes.

Search for a recipe and you will wade through thousands of words of LLM-generated preamble, paragraphs of generic food history written by no one, for no one, existing only to push the actual recipe below the fold and maximise ad impressions. Search for product reviews and you will find entire sites generated overnight, churning out plausible-sounding assessments of items the “reviewer” has never seen. Search for news about Gaza, about Ukraine, about Trump, about anything that matters, and you will find the truth buried beneath an avalanche of synthetic text designed to confuse, to overwhelm, to make verification impossible.

This is not a quality problem. It is an epistemological crisis. The basic assumption that used to underpin internet use (that a human being, somewhere, wrote this, thought this, experienced this) can no longer be made. Every Reddit thread might be bots talking to bots. Every travel blog might be a content farm in Manila employing ChatGPT wrappers. Every impassioned political essay might be A/B tested slop optimised for engagement metrics rather than truth.

Finally, one that hurt to read. Ignore the silly image, this, on Chomsky and Epstein is solid, imo.

The enduring fascination with intellectual figures arises in part from the belief that they stand at a remove from the compromises that shape political and economic life. Their authority rests on the presumption of independence: independence of thought, independence from patronage, independence from the pressures that distort public discourse. Yet the archive undercuts this assumption. It shows how intellectuals, even those whose reputations are built on rigorous critiques of power, become implicated in the very systems they analyse. Not through spectacular betrayals, but through ordinary participation….

The lesson is not that intellectuals should be held to a higher moral standard, nor that their failures should be used as grounds for dismissal. The lesson is that systems of knowledge production are embedded in structures that exert pressures far more significant than individual intention. Understanding these pressures is essential if intellectual critique is to remain meaningful. It requires acknowledging the costs of participation, the seductions of proximity, and the ease with which silence becomes normalised.

No one is coming to save us. we are unlikely to be able to save ourselves, because it would involve saving each other. There’s a hole in my civilisation, dear Lie-za… Oops.

Footnotes

1. Yes, of course things were “simpler” back as hunter-gatherers, or in small relatively static/stratified societies where you didn’t meet strangers and didn’t have to keep your platform profiles up-to-date, but there was still lots of random shit – wild animals, disease, famine, war, desire, assholes etc to cope with.