By Colby Malsbury

2008 will be recorded in the annals of our Vanished Civilization as the most epochal single year of our demise, I believe. Yes, even more so than either 2001 or 2020.

Those of us who were fortunate enough to be in established career paths during that doleful year really cannot conceive of the hellscape that was awaiting the generation just emerging from the colleges and universities, fresh off the final vestige of financial optimism any of us are likely to ever witness again, enfeebled though it was. Just as Francis Fukuyama and his neocon ilk proclaimed an ‘end of history’ after the supposed demise of the Cold War, so too did the neolib proponents of unfettered global vulture capitalism begin to subtly champion a post-economic era in the hopelessly naive West, wherein jobs didn’t matter, deficits didn’t matter, the sustainability of fiat currencies didn’t matter, and so on and so forth, just as long as the entrenched managerial (((cabal))) managed to further feather their own nests. We were all relentlessly scolded to concentrate on ‘bigger’ things like global warming and racist police forces, and left to fend for ourselves to schlep together enough shekels to be able to attend a centralized Antifa happening in Portland or wherever.

Easy enough virtue to signal when you’re a blood relative of one of the subjects of discussion in Carroll Quigley’s Tragedy and Hope,but considerably more difficult if you were a kid fresh out of some diploma mill, with a boatload of student debt you had to start servicing with paychecks like now.

But the Baby Boomer establishment of the time didn’t see it that way at all. Hey, they were all beginning to reach retirement age en masse anyway, so why not retire the positions they held at the same time as they took their golden parachutes? China could do that all far cheaper, and in the meantime the newly-arrived Guatemalan immigrant was willing to maintain the entire lawn and garden full-time for a few bucks an hour – far less than the ungrateful wretch of a grandson could ever do. So screw him, and screw all the rest of y’all, went the received wisdom.

The moral of this story being: left with little other career options, mid-stage Millennials embraced making a living online in a big way. First via Craigslist merchanteering, then with online stock trading, and then, with the concomitant explosion of social media, with that wonderful bit of innovation known as site/channel monetization. Getting paid for like/share volume based on the bits of creative whimsy you can come up with in the ample amounts of spare time that is your permanent lot? But of course! Why didn’t we start doing this a decade ago??

Well….a lot of folks have been doing just this for well over a decade now. And it is safe to say that they are no longer apprentices. They have gotten good with their craft.

Very good.

Very, very good.

They have mastered the first rule of salesmanship: know your customer base, and cater to it. They have also mastered the first two rules of showmanship: spectacle sells, and no one ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American people, to quote the illustrious P.T. Barnum.

And if you lack even a modicum of shame, well, that’s just good business.

For better or for worse, the dominant strain of viral post now is the short-form vid. Thanks, TikTok! And here I didn’t get you anything for Hanukkah. At any rate, if you’re not into Jackass-style stunts, the easiest way to garner your vid a hashtag is to present a stream-of-consciousness monologue of yourself ranting into a camera with your indescribably-colored hair and pierced eyeballs about capitalism and the patriarchy and slave pens and the advocacy of wholesale slaughter of anyone to the right of Robespierre and the like. It is all but guaranteed that Boomers who are not attuned to your grift will glom onto your vid and spam all their friends with it, accompanied by a caption along the lines of WHY I WOULD HAVE GOTERN MY ARSE TANNED IF I HAD SAID THIS BACK IN THE GOOD OL DAY. If your vid is monetized in some capacity, the result is the easiest-peasiest paycheck imaginable.

And, hey: to drive the point home, what’s the problem with a few little exaggerated mannerisms? After all, since all modern politics are about pissing off the “other side” with maximum obnoxiousness, a few extra lisps and flamboyant hand gestures – along with the requisite diatribes against Trump in foul language – can really help to promote your brand. On YouTube, the vlogger Leon Lush, a veteran of career vidposting, offers some insightful observations on how teenagers rope in irate elders via Valley Girl inflections and the like on this video of his. Begin at the 6:04 mark, and language warning.

Obnoxiousness gets noticed. Arguments presented in any textual form whatever gets relegated to the Ancient Internet Boneyard. Hosted by either Lycos or Excite, name your poison.

And for the culturally-aware Christian just trying to be a good watchman online, this poses a serious problem.

Hey, we want to be on top of trends, that we might be able to point out their inherent ungodliness and document the Babylonian depths that everyday life has plunged into. I get that.

But what are we being presented with? Actual representative examples of online narcissism out of control, or incredible simulations of the same, gussied up for our viewing ‘pleasure’ by trolls who spend their every waking moment concocting scenarios and camera angles? By sharing such material around widely, not only are we enriching them, but we’re ensuring a steady stream of such product will be clogging our newsfeeds ad infinitum. Is this winning, or even holding our own? I sure can’t see either.

Think back to the Days of Olde when Covid was Golde. Remember when we were being presented with a new ‘twerking nurses’ vid seemingly every day? Turns out one such actual vid went viral with extreme negativity, and a whole slew of copycats jumped on board that bandwagon for attention and shekels. What else are you gonna do when you and your friends are unemployed and have access to a near-deserted hospital? Or how about the endless stream of insufferable ‘me in my mask’ selfies? In hindsight, we should have all been paying more attention to the subjects’ eyes. One can only do so much triggering of the Right in a face diaper – even using the First Battle of the Somme-like N95 respirator – but if you can bug out your eyes like Charles Manson used to do, or assume a look of theatrical smugness, complete with the most obvious arched eyebrow in history, maybe some of us rubes will take the hint and make you famous for fifteen minutes.

Then we have the newly-minted “con”servative icons far too much of the Pepe crowd unequally yoke themselves to, only to discover when it’s too late that they’ve been trolled all along. Yes, I’m looking at you, Kanye West. 4Chan’s touting him as a new convert just because he spent Trump’s first term triggering the Left with MAGA hats and Biden’s first term doing the same with “antisemitic tirades” turned out to be as premature as a Christian missionary rejoicing over the conversion of an African chieftain merely because he refrained from eating his enemies in the presence of the Bwana. For not only has it transpired that Ye has gone on record as now liking Jews, he further humiliates his Red State fan base by saying he saw the light once he watched Jonah Hill acting all funny and kosher and whatnot in the hit film 21 Jump Street…a film that is now over a decade old, I must add. Gotcha, racists!!! Turns out he was a member of the larger Triggerocracy all along, which should not have come as any surprise to anyone aware of his past flippancy regarding all matters pertaining to the occult. Epic trolling sure is a lot easier when you are pandering to a group that, for all its profane Twitter posturing, proves to be as shamefully credulous as any other peoples who ought to have known way, way better at a certain point in time. Thank you for coming out once again, Online Right.

Examples are legion. But where does this leave the Christian witness, and more specifically the Kinist witness?

We ought not to kid ourselves. The days where we could evangelize online are over and done with. We’re wrestling an algorithm that looks upon us as useful idiots to be placed before the glazed eyes of spiteful cyber-communists who live their lives to swarm us on a news feed, like irate wasps in an aggressive mood because the autumn has dawned and their time on earth as a potent force is limited. Strategically, the victory is ours in Christ. Tactically, we can’t win under such a rigged setup.

Nor should we desire to.

If our online presence must be relegated to a gathering of the saints, much as the message boards of old, let us eschew sharing obvious triggerposts among each other altogether. We know how bad things are. We don’t need some gorm in an orange wig with hornrim glasses and more metal in its face than Robocop slobbering millimetres away from a camera lens to remind us and depress us. And by playing the ‘didja see this????’ game with one another, we only enrich these unclean spirits. No more!

Nor should we be sharing any links or screenshots that promote any organization drives and/or rallies for perverts and communists. If visibility = vibrancy, doing so only gives them free publicity. Let us discuss such events among ourselves and plan reactions accordingly, without affording them the slightest whiff of assistance. We have powers of description at our disposal. Time to put them to use before they become moribund.

And I say all this as someone who has been every bit as guilty as the next guy for falling into our enemies’ trap in the past. Guile is a learning process, and we all have to take a step back and evaluate what we’re doing and how effective it is from time to time.

Social media in general seems to be peaking in influence, as more and more people realize how stage-managed the entire process has become – a topic I have tackled here. The shattering of organized corporate political interaction into a thousand different isolated but determined online communities may be the best possible outcome of such disillusionment. We who have been fortunate enough to have built close-knit bands: let us never tear them asunder, and let us leave the Triggerocracy to give heart palpitations to those who can not and will not know any better.