The world has gone mad. It’s a thought many people throughout human history must have had, especially during the nightly news (or bardic equivalents thereof). But what is different today is the capacity of a mad world to make people mad. Madness is poured into our ears and eyes by the omnipresent power of social media, fuelled by a general disintegration of trust and authority. Those of us who make our livings sailing upon this baleful ocean experience this more than most. 

Like most awful things skittering out of the shadows of a dystopian future, there’s a name for it invented by a French philosopher — hyperreality. Baudrillard argued that the advent of ever more powerful digital technology would cause the virtual to become more powerful and more attractive than reality itself. It isn’t that we would, Matrix-style, literally live in a simulation, or become unaware of the fact that we exist in a physical reality, but rather that we would have a “model” of reality that would overlay our perceptions and overpower our senses. Exposed to continual stimuli, we would experience a sort of synthetic schizophrenia: “a state of terror which is characteristic of the schizophrenic, an over-proximity of all things, a foul promiscuity of all things which beleaguer and penetrate him, meeting with no resistance, and no halo, no aura, not even the aura of his own body protects him. In spite of himself the schizophrenic is open to everything and lives in the most extreme confusion.” 

This excessive openness to everything pervades our life. The market infiltrates far beyond material production and drips into every subtle, invisible social interstice. At the greatest extreme, we no longer encounter other people at all, experiencing them as symbolic presences. 

This process was accelerated by the pandemic, which served to simultaneously isolate individuals, degrade their trust in others, especially institutions, and vastly expand the hold of digital technology on every aspect of our lives. Many people became “lost” in some sense to hyperreality, given up to ideas that seemed more powerful than anything in their actual experience. The pandemic itself, invisible and wrapped up with social authority, was experienced through this veil of hyperreality. 

The positive power of social media — to create connection, community, and solidarity — is, sadly, all too easily perverted by these reality destroying forces. The rise of partisanship in the most online countries on earth, all at a time of disruptive globalisation, is all too easy to understand in this context. The partisan filter is “hyperreal”: we don’t really experience ideas and individuals at all, we interact through our synthetic ideas about them. 

Digital spaces precisely “shrink” our horizons, even as they appear to infinitely broaden them

All of this may sound quite abstract, but for those of us who are, sometimes perforce, denizens of the simulacra that is social media, they take on an awful, visceral reality. In the lexicon of “online” there are terms for it — “brainworms”, “doomscrolling”, “terminally online”. These are lives lost to digital toxicity as surely as those wracked by drugs, booze or mental illness. People pass through some invisible door, an unseen tipping point beyond which there is no return, living in a self-perpetuating world of conspiracy, stimulation or obsession. We all know such people, many of them once sane and ordinary. There’s the hippie friend who somehow transitioned from Covid scepticism to Nazism. The gender critical university pal who rants about groomers and paedophile rings. The paleocon podcaster whose NATO scepticism somehow morphed into supporting the invasion of Ukraine. The colleague who used to fundraise for Palestinian charities who now posts anti-semitic memes on Facebook. 

It would be reassuring to think that this sort of moral and mental collapse was a danger only for the weak minded or poorly informed. But sadly it is just as often the best and brightest who are carried away into the digital darkness. Clever, funny, humane people disappear down rabbit holes, often precisely because of their passion and curiosity. Independence of thought, and the capacity of the internet to facilitate research, are often the starting pistol for self-diagnosing with a disease, or disconnecting from reality. Through the powerful, and algorithmically accelerated feedback effects of online communities, people become monomaniacally focused. 

Everything becomes reduced down to a single question or thesis. The problem with the minds of such a person, as Chesterton wrote, is that “his mind moves in a perfect but narrow circle. A small circle is quite as infinite as a large circle; but, though it is quite as infinite, it is not so large. In the same way the insane explanation is quite as complete as the sane one, but it is not so large.” Digital spaces precisely “shrink” our horizons, even as they appear to infinitely broaden them. 

One such victim is Darryl Cooper, the extremely successful podcast host of “Martyr Made”, who recently appeared on Tucker Carlson’s show, with catastrophic results. Darryl Cooper had, though controversial, been an increasingly popular, and seemingly level-headed member of the populist right. Over the course of the Carlson interview, this rapidly unravelled. Cooper suggested that we should regard Churchill as the “chief villain” of WW2, as well as a “psychopath”, that his support for Zionism was born of debts to Jewish bankers, and that the deaths in the Nazi concentration camps were primarily due to the fact that “Germany went in with no plan”. 

What had happened? Cooper tried to contextualise and walk back some of his statements, framing remarks variously as “hyperbolic and provocative”, excusing himself as “not very good at interviews”, arguing that his claims were unremarkable and comparable to other revisionist historians, and that of course he saw the Nazis as the primary villains of WW2. But in his (lengthy) substack post, he ends up simply doubling down on many of the points that got him into trouble, including claims that the Holocaust was unplanned — rather than the result of an extraordinarily well-documented plan of extermination — and seeking to blame the British for the deaths in the camps. 

Anyone with a modicum of knowledge will be able to spot the huge gaps in Cooper’s argument here. But what is more interesting is how he came to embrace such a grotesque viewpoint. Cooper isn’t stupid, or wicked, or even ill-informed in a conventional sense. Instead, we could say that he is “overinformed”. He is the product of hyperreality, supersaturated with information to the point that his analytical faculties and sense of reality breaks down. One gets a sense of this in the interview alone, where he describes reading, not systematically, but omnivorously, consuming over eighty books for his podcast on Israel/Palestine, and not being able to recall all the titles. In 2021, Cooper rose to fame with a viral thread on Twitter about the possibility that the 2020 US election had been “rigged”. Thus to his voracious autodidacticism was added a massive online audience, one which, in large part, looked up to him and reinforced certain aspects of his thinking. 

It’s impossible to make windows into men’s souls, or to know for sure what Cooper means. Only he knows what he deep down believes. But it’s clear that he has, intentionally or not, ended up with a lexicon stuffed full of dark hints about Zionists, and finds himself soft-pedalling WW2 atrocities, and railing against shadowy “elites”. This weird miasma of fascism creeping like a shadow over the mind of a seemingly rational man appears incomprehensible to us, but is at the end of a long chain of reasoning, which just might make sense if we walk along it for a moment. 

It’s no coincidence that Cooper rose to fame in 2020, off the back of a Twitter thread analysing claims of election rigging. Hyperreality has been on the march for some time. The rise of “woke” exploded into real madness around 2016, when the American Left descended into paranoia over “Russiagate”. This atmosphere quickly turned from external enemies and internal traitors, and on to exposing hidden vices. The #Metoo movement uncovered real monsters, but it also victimised numerous innocents in a fearful, moralistic atmosphere in which victims must always be believed. 

A growing atmosphere of moral panic and identitarianism saw the American media environment declare that ordinary standards of reporting could no longer apply to Trump. But right from the beginning, he hadn’t been reported on ordinarily, with frenzied, obsessive, hysterical coverage of Trump evolving from mockery to anger to terror. 

The stifled atmosphere of the pandemic drove things to a fever pitch. The killing of George Floyd was simply the spark needed to ignite this atmosphere. Journalists were fired for quoting, not saying, racial slurs. A student was kicked out of college for once having repeated a racial slur on video, at the age of 15. White liberal Americans subjected themselves to anti-racism training in which offices were divided by race, and white colleagues were encouraged to affirm their own racism, and these programs continue to this day.

Meanwhile on the streets, protests against police brutality rapidly escalated, with the assistance of anarchists and opportunists, into terrifying, full-blown riots. Some of the poorest and most diverse neighbourhoods in America were burnt down, vandalised and terrorised. Fashionable opinion, as minority storeowners saw their livelihoods go up in smoke, was that violence against property isn’t violence. Minnesota governor, and now Vice Presidential candidate, Tim Walz’s wife opened her windows so she could smell the burning tires during the riots. 

And in the background of this extreme weirdness, were the lockdowns. After years of being warned of populist authoritarianism, it was centrists, across the West, imposing curfews, restricting freedom of speech, detaining people without trial, suspending freedom of assembly and mandating vaccines and masks. Anyone who questioned the extremity and duration of these measures was denounced by much of the media as a dangerous crank. Yet revelations — such as the fact that the virus was not primarily transmitted by touch, that outside interactions carried little risk of infection, that young people were not at great risk, that the pandemic might have been the result of a lab leak, or that vaccines were fairly ineffective at controlling transmission, were variously ignored, dismissed or acted upon too late. 

And at every stage of this process, conservatives, libertarians and populists were looking on in justified horror and scepticism. Millions started waking up to the increasing dishonesty and ideological tilt of much mainstream media, which employed steadily more distorting frames. Basic biological reality was routinely denied as either racist, sexist or transphobic. Information was treated as contaminating, “misinformation” reporters proliferated, and reliably targeted certain points of view but not others. Mass migration and economic globalisation were unleashed on Western populations with catastrophic results, but reporting of those results is routinely denounced by many elements of the media and the establishment. 

When it comes to hyperreality, escape is not as easy as it seems. Ultimately we will always rely on other people to regulate and balance our own perceptions — so if the mass of persons, or even an influential minority, are subject to extreme distortions of their sense of reality, it will affect everyone, even complete digital outsiders. As the centre and left of politics descended into identitarian fantasy, the dissident right simply employed its own versions.

Scepticism about mainstream narratives becomes a credulousness all its own, as right wingers nod along to podcasters dabbling in holocaust denial

Knowing that your sense of reality might be being distorted is no defence, and can, in fact, make the situation worse.  Being made hyper-aware of all this through social media has not only not made conservatives online better thinkers or savvier consumers of media, It has, almost without exception, deranged and distorted their thinking. It has not done so for much the same reason that consuming images of dying children entombed in rubble 24/7 has not made supporters of Palestine better at thinking about the Gaza war. 

This process of rightwing derangement, already well underway in 2022, was given fuel by Elon Musk’s takeover of Twitter. In the past two years, I have watched, in real time, right wing figures evolve from nationalism to Nazism. Twitter accounts, with hundreds of thousands of followers, gradually built up from generic Scrutonian paeans to Western architecture, through to black crime videos before leaping all the way to out and out Hitler-posting. Twitter has become a sewer. 

The many manipulations of speech and thought on liberal-dominated Twitter, with its pile-ons, virtue signalling, and trigger-happy account banning will not be missed. But it is hard to escape the feeling that unadulterated free speech may be the worst thing ever to have happened to online conservatism. Scepticism about mainstream narratives becomes a credulousness all its own, as right wingers nod along to podcasters dabbling in holocaust denial. 

What separates this from the fascism of the past is its extreme unreality. Whilst mass media was at the root of 1930s fascism, today’s Hitler fans are a strictly virtual concern. Veiled in irony, and more obsessed with “owning the libs” than with public policy, this is more internet subculture than political movement. Nobody is marching in the street in uniforms for this stuff, nor are they likely to be. Not even political parties with overtly fascist roots and symbolism, like the Brothers of Italy, have proved to be fascistic in power. Indeed, Meloni’s government has not so much as veered away from neoliberal economic orthodoxy, or had much luck bringing the nations’ borders under control, and has instead pursued a programme that would be familiar to fusionist conservatives world over.

This shouldn’t surprise us. The distorted, virtual world that lets ordinary, 21st century people meme themselves into Nazism, just as much prevents them from connecting their ideas with reality. Indeed, any ideology rooted not in material conditions and social organisation, but a succession of sheerly virtual narratives and language games, will only serve to further the very globalised, atomised world order that its followers imagine they are fighting. 

Refusing such ideologies, of both left and right, and refusing to be sucked in by seductively simple narratives, is more than a matter of politics, or even sanity. It is a moral imperative — it is about saving your soul. If, at any point in your reading, your conversations, and most especially your social media browsing, you feel you are being asked to degrade or ignore the humanity of another person, you are consuming poison, and must spit it out. If you feel your head spinning at the saturation of information and arguments, you are being hypnotised, and you must flee from it. There is no easy answer to the vertiginous horror of hyperreality, except for the old, hard road of virtue; the golden mean. To quote one cancelled poet of the English soul we must dream—and not make dreams our master; think—and not make thoughts our aim.