Reality

You could call all of these events surprising, but I’m not sure any of them could be convincingly labeled unexpected. Such is the paradox of our times. While Black Swan events such as 9/11 or the Covid pandemic used to disrupt the regular run of things, we are now thrown off course by predictable events waiting in plain sight. These incidents are n... See more

Reality as we understand it is a phenomenon of social structures, language, and shared processes for engaging with the world. Digital media is remaking all of these in such a way that media consumption more and more resembles the act of playing an alternate reality game.

So what if an alternate reality game really did keep on going, if it had no end point? It would amount to a simulation of the world. All aspects of “reality” that fit into the simulation, including some produced artificially by players for fun and profit, would be incorporated. If the game had no boundary, at some point you could think that the wor... See more

To play an alternate reality game is to be drawn into a collaborative project of explaining the world. It is to lose, even fleetingly, one’s commitment to what is most true in the service of what is most compelling, what most advances a narrative one deeply believes.

I’m not saying material life isn’t a thing. I drink H20 and shit entropy like the rest of the species. I’m saying it’s a lot weirder than we’ve dreamt of in any of these peer-reviewed philosophies. Physics is great. I love satellites and semiconductor chips. But we are, um, aware it’s incomplete, and we can’t begin to describe more if we don’t even... See more

Be willing to have your most fundamental beliefs challenged.

Better , be eager and question them yourself. For YouTuber Ordinary Things, “The real danger of modern times isn’t that we’ll fail to tell the fake world from the real one, but it’s that we’ll know the world is fake and choose to live in that one anyway because it’s comfortable.” How iron... See more

To be a “realist of a larger reality” is not just to dream of something different than what is, nor to be lost in the spectacle or the world of representations. Instead, it’s to see the scene presented to you as well as what created the scene, to see not just the Instagram picture but the camera by which it was taken, the person holding the camera,... See more

The shock we’re experiencing now can’t be summarized as present shock, which happens when we become blindly obsessed with the present moment. Nor is it a form of future shock, which happens when we feel that change is taking place too quickly. Instead, the shock we’re feeling today is an affront to our most basic understanding of reality. And the m... See more

As the media ecosystem produces alternate realities, it also undermines what remains of consensus reality by portraying it as just one problematic but boring option among many.