Tag: cultural commentary

Post Everything: Notes on Prefix Fatigue

Posted in identity, language, modernism, perception, philosophy, podcast, postmodernism, psychology, societyTagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment
3–4 minutes

I’m no fan of labels, yet I accumulate them like a cheap suit:

Post-modern. Post-human. Post-enlightenment.

Audio: NotebookLM podcast on this topic.

Apparently, I’m so far post that I may soon loop back into prehistoric.

But what’s with the “post” in post? A prefix with delusions of grandeur. A small syllable that believes it can close an epoch. Surely, it’s a declaration – the end of modernity, humanity, enlightenment. The final curtain, with the stagehands already sweeping the Enlightenment’s broken props into the wings.

Sort of. More like the hangover. Post marks the morning after – when the wine’s gone, the ideals have curdled, and the party’s guests insist they had a marvellous time. It’s not the end of the thing, merely the end of believing in it.

Have we ever been modern? Latour asked the same question, though most readers nodded sagely and went back to their iPhones. Modernity was supposed to liberate us from superstition, hierarchy, and bad lighting. Instead, we built glass temples for algorithms and called it progress. We’re not post-modern – we’re meta-medieval, complete with priestly influencers and algorithmic indulgences.

Can a human even be post-human? Only if the machines have the decency to notice. We talk about transcending biology while still incapable of transcending breakfast. We’ve built silicon mirrors and called them salvation, though what stares back is just the same old hunger – quantised, gamified, and monetised.

And post-enlightenment – how does that work? The light didn’t go out; it just got privatised. The Enlightenment’s sun still shines, but now you need a subscription to bask in it. Its universal reason has become a paywalled blog with “premium truth” for discerning subscribers.

The tragedy of post is that it always flatters the speaker. To call oneself post-anything is to smuggle in the claim of awareness: I have seen through the illusion; I am after it. Yet here I am, a serial offender, parading my prefixes like medals for wars never fought.

So, what other posts might I be missing?

  • Post-truth. The phrase itself a confession that truth was a brief, ill-fated experiment. We don’t reject it so much as outsource it.
  • Post-ideological. Usually said by someone with a very loud ideology and a very short memory.
  • Post-colonial. A hopeful label, but the empires still collect rent—digitally, algorithmically, politely.
  • Post-gender. Another mirage: we declared the binary dead and then resurrected it for sport.
  • Post-capitalist. Spoken mostly by people tweeting from iPhones about the end of money.
  • Post-ironic. The point where irony becomes sincerity again out of sheer exhaustion.

We could go on: post-religious, post-political, post-work, post-language, post-reality. Eventually, we’ll arrive at post-post, the Möbius strip of intellectual despair, where each prefix feeds upon the previous until nothing remains but the syntax of self-importance.

Perhaps it’s time to drop the “post” altogether and admit we’re not beyond anything. We’re stuck within—inside the compost heap of our own unfinished projects. Every “post” is a failed obituary. The modern keeps dying but refuses to stay dead, haunting us through progress reports and TED talks.

Maybe what we need isn’t post but inter: inter-modern, inter-human, inter-light—something that acknowledges the mess of entanglement rather than the fantasy of departure.

Because if there’s one thing the “post” reveals, it’s our pathological need for closure. We crave the comfort of endings, the illusion of progress, the satisfaction of having “moved on.” But culture doesn’t move on; it metastasises. The prefix is just morphine for the modern condition—a linguistic palliative to ease the pain of continuity.

So yes, I’m guilty. I’ve worn these risible labels. I’ve brandished post like a scholar’s rosary, invoking it to ward off the naïveté of belief. Yet beneath the cynicism lies a quiet longing—for an actual after, for the possibility that one day something might really end, leaving room for whatever comes next.

Until then, we keep prefixing the apocalypse, hoping to stay ahead of it by one small syllable.

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by Bry Willis

microglyphics

Lies as Shibboleth

Posted in identity, intelligence, language, perception, politics, power, psychology, societyTagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment

Watching Sam Harris ruminate on the nature of political lies (still believing, poor lamb, that reason might one day triumph) reminds me of something more sinister: lies today are not attempts at persuasion. They are shibboleths — tribal passwords, loyalty oaths, secret handshakes performed in the broad light of day.

Video: Sam Harris tells us why Trump and his ilk lie.

Forget “alternative facts.” That charming euphemism was merely a decoy, a jangling set of keys to distract the infantile media. The real game was always deeper: strategic distortion, the deliberate blurring of perception not to deceive the outsider, but to identify the insider.

Audio: NotebookLM podcast on this topic.

When Trump — or any other post-truth demagogue — proclaims that penguins are, in fact, highly trained alien operatives from the Andromeda galaxy, the objective is not persuasion. The point is to force a choice: will you, standing before this glistening absurdity, blink and retreat into reason, stammering something about ornithology… Or will you step forward, clasp the hand of madness, and mutter, ‘Yes, my liege, the penguins have been among us all along’?

Those who demur, those who scoff or gasp or say ‘You’re an idiot,”’have failed the loyalty test. They have outed themselves as enemy combatants in the epistemic war. Truth, in this brave new world, is not a destination; it is an allegiance. To speak honestly is to wage rebellion.

Orwell, who tried very hard to warn us, understood this dynamic well: the real triumph of Big Brother was not merely to compel you to lie but to compel you to believe the lie. Koestler, another battered prophet of the age, charted how political movements sink into ritualistic unreason, demanding not conviction but performance. Swift, for his part, knew it was all hilarious if you tilted your head just right.

The bigger the lie, the better the shibboleth. Claim that two and two make five, and you catch out the weak-willed rationalists. Claim that penguins are extraterrestrials, and you find the truly devoted, the ones willing to build altars from ice and sacrifice to their feathery overlords.

It’s no accident that modern political theatre resembles a deranged initiation ritual. Each day brings a new absurdity, a fresh madness to affirm: ‘Men can become women by declaration alone!” “Billionaires are victims of systemic oppression!’ ‘The penguins are amongst us, plotting!’ Each claim a little more grotesque than the last, each compliance a little more degrading, a little more irreversible.

And oh, how eagerly the initiates rush forward! Clap for the penguins, or be cast out into the howling wilderness! Better to bend the knee to absurdity than be marked as an unbeliever. Better to humiliate yourself publicly than to admit that the Emperor’s penguin suit is just a costume.

Meanwhile, the opposition — earnest, naive — keeps trying to argue, to rebut, to point out that penguins are terrestrial flightless birds. How quaint. How pathetic. They do not understand that the moment they say, “You’re an idiot,” they’ve broken the spell, declared themselves apostates, and rendered themselves politically irrelevant.

The shibboleth, once uttered, divides the world cleanly: the believers, who will say anything, do anything, believe anything, provided it marks them safe from exile; and the infidels, who cling stupidly to reality.

The future belongs, not to the true, but to the loyal. Not to the rational, but to the ritualistic. The more extravagant the lie, the greater the proof of your faith.

So raise a glass to the penguins, ye of faint heart, and prepare your soul for abasement. Or stand firm, if you dare, and be prepared to be eaten alive by those who traded reason for the rapture of belonging.

After all, in the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is not king. He’s a heretic.

When Suspension of Disbelief Escapes the Page

Posted in fiction, language, perception, philosophy, postmodernism, psychology, reality, societyTagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , 1 Comment

Welcome to the Age of Realism Fatigue

Once upon a time — which is how all good fairy tales begin — suspension of disbelief was a tidy little tool we used to indulge in dragons, space travel, talking animals, and the idea that people in rom-coms have apartments that match their personalities and incomes. It was a temporary transaction, a gentleman’s agreement, a pact signed between audience and creator with metaphorical ink: I know this is nonsense, but I’ll play along if you don’t insult my intelligence.

Audio: NotebookLM podcast of this page content.

This idea, famously coined by Samuel Taylor Coleridge as the “willing suspension of disbelief,” was meant to give art its necessary air to breathe. Coleridge’s hope was that audiences would momentarily silence their rational faculties in favour of emotional truth. The dragons weren’t real, but the heartbreak was. The ghosts were fabrications, but the guilt was palpable.

But that was then. Before the world itself began auditioning for the role of absurdist theatre. Before reality TV became neither reality nor television. Before politicians quoted memes, tech CEOs roleplayed as gods, and conspiracy theorists became bestsellers on Amazon. These days, suspension of disbelief is no longer a leisure activity — it’s a survival strategy.

The Fictional Contract: Broken but Not Forgotten

Traditionally, suspension of disbelief was deployed like a visitor’s badge. You wore it when entering the imagined world and returned it at the door on your way out. Fiction, fantasy, speculative fiction — they all relied on that badge. You accepted the implausible if it served the probable. Gandalf could fall into shadow and return whiter than before because he was, after all, a wizard. We were fine with warp speed as long as the emotional logic of Spock’s sacrifice made sense. There were rules — even in rule-breaking.

The genres varied. Hard sci-fi asked you to believe in quantum wormholes but not in lazy plotting. Magical realism got away with absurdities wrapped in metaphor. Superhero films? Well, their disbelief threshold collapsed somewhere between the multiverse and the Bat-credit card.

Still, we always knew we were pretending. We had a tether to the real, even when we floated in the surreal.

But Then Real Life Said, “Hold My Beer.”

At some point — let’s call it the twenty-first century — the need to suspend disbelief seeped off the screen and into the bloodstream of everyday life. News cycles became indistinguishable from satire (except that satire still had editors). Headlines read like rejected Black Mirror scripts. A reality TV star became president, and nobody even blinked. Billionaires declared plans to colonise Mars whilst democracy quietly lost its pulse.

We began to live inside a fiction that demanded that our disbelief be suspended daily. Except now, it wasn’t voluntary. It was mandatory. If you wanted to participate in public life — or just maintain your sanity — you had to turn off some corner of your rational mind.

You had to believe, or pretend to, that the same people calling for “freedom” were banning books. That artificial intelligence would definitely save us, just as soon as it was done replacing us. That social media was both the great democratiser and the sewer mainline of civilisation.

The boundary between fiction and reality? Eroded. Fact-checking? Optional. Satire? Redundant. We’re all characters now, improvising in a genreless world that refuses to pick a lane.

Cognitive Gymnastics: Welcome to the Cirque du Surréalisme

What happens to a psyche caught in this funhouse? Nothing good.

Our brains, bless them, were designed for some contradiction — religion’s been pulling that trick for millennia — but the constant toggling between belief and disbelief, trust and cynicism, is another matter. We’re gaslit by the world itself. Each day, a parade of facts and fabrications marches past, and we’re told to clap for both.

Cognitive dissonance becomes the default. We scroll through doom and memes in the same breath. We read a fact, then three rebuttals, then a conspiracy theory, then a joke about the conspiracy, then a counter-conspiracy about why the joke is state-sponsored. Rinse. Repeat. Sleep if you can.

The result? Mental fatigue. Not just garden-variety exhaustion, but a creeping sense that nothing means anything unless it’s viral. Critical thinking atrophies not because we lack the will but because the floodwaters never recede. You cannot analyse the firehose. You can only drink — or drown.

Culture in Crisis: A Symptom or the Disease?

This isn’t just a media problem. It’s cultural, epistemological, and possibly even metaphysical.

We’ve become simultaneously more skeptical — distrusting institutions, doubting authorities — and more gullible, accepting the wildly implausible so long as it’s entertaining. It’s the postmodern paradox in fast-forward: we know everything is a construct, but we still can’t look away. The magician shows us the trick, and we cheer harder.

In a world where everything is performance, authenticity becomes the ultimate fiction. And with that, the line between narrative and news, between aesthetic and actuality, collapses.

So what kind of society does this create?

One where engagement replaces understanding. Where identity is a curated feed. Where politics is cosplay, religion is algorithm, and truth is whatever gets the most shares. We aren’t suspending disbelief anymore. We’re embalming it.

The Future: A Choose-Your-Own-Delusion Adventure

So where does this all end?

There’s a dark path, of course: total epistemic breakdown. Truth becomes just another fandom and reality a subscription model. But there’s another route — one with a sliver of hope — where we become literate in illusion.

We can learn to hold disbelief like a scalpel, not a blindfold. To engage the implausible with curiosity, not capitulation. To distinguish between narratives that serve power and those that serve understanding.

It will require a new kind of literacy. One part media scepticism, one part philosophical rigour, and one part good old-fashioned bullshit detection. We’ll have to train ourselves not just to ask “Is this true?” but “Who benefits if I believe it?”

That doesn’t mean closing our minds. It means opening them with caution. Curiosity without credulity. Wonder without worship. A willingness to imagine the impossible whilst keeping a firm grip on the probable.

In Conclusion, Reality Is Optional, But Reason Is Not

In the age of AI, deepfakes, alt-facts, and hyperreality, we don’t need less imagination. We need more discernment. The world may demand our suspension of disbelief, but we must demand our belief back. In truth, in sense, in each other.

Because if everything becomes fiction, then fiction itself loses its magic. And we, the audience, are left applauding an empty stage.

Lights down. Curtain call.
Time to read the footnotes.