It’s December and for me that means it is “blog every day month” an effort for which I have long since concocted a list of blog-able reflective topics called my December-ish posts each of which should do little more than offer a leaping off point for some rambling writing to fill up my daily blogging quota.
Today that topic is…
Describe your 2025 in politics, culture, and the universe?
No.
Ugh.
Ok.
I’ll bite …a little bit, for the blog.
I was doing a little experiment the other week. I had a perfectly good reason to post a pointless video clip on social media the other day, but I didn’t want to use my main account. Nor did I want to use any of my other side accounts. So I did what any sane tech savvy nerd would do and I created a brand new account, followed no one, gave it a stupid profile name and pic that pretty much no one would associate with me, and posted my video. I did nothing special, did not share it, followed no one and did not tag it or add any meta data. It was not clever, funny, or controversial. I was merely posting it as a random clip I’d filmed to check how some function of the system was appearing. Within two hours it had received 12 likes.
For context, we just spent nearly three weeks in Japan and I posted a few dozen curated photos representing some of my best work and amazing photography in that country, and my best post, with five hundred and fifty odd followers, got 8 likes. Eight. Just eight. Total.
Somehow, this temporary burner account had received 50% more attention in the duration of our car ride home for a (completely random and the content was not the point) jittery eight second video of a snow plow out the front window of our car (what I just happened to be looking at while I was plotting this technology query) than for something I had purposefully shared for beauty and enjoyment …and to put a little of both out into the world. A fucking snow plow. Twelve likes.
This really isn’t a bitter post about not getting any likes on my content. I don’t actually try to promote my stuff. I just put it out and whatever. And I really don’t even care. I’m not posting for validation. Or money. Or to be found. Or anything other than curating my own public collections of my creative work and personal giggles… whatever.
But “likes” represent something else entirely. They represent exposure. They represent voice. They represent the attention and interests of others. They represent the choices made by programmed, unthinking, not-human algorithms, choices about who gets to see what …and when …and how frequently.
And what most people are sharing these days happen to be things that largely represent culture and politics. And we all kind of understand that those folks… well, they are not trying to represent anything in a balanced or nuanced way. And same are even working and designing content to divide and anger us.
Put those things together into one big brainy thought and you might get a glimpse of the major imbalance and deep illness in our culture this past year (and probably even further back).
I have this (probably controversial) notion that I’ve spoken aloud to a few people this past year about our culture and our political reality in 2025. It basically posits that while were all standing around here in fear of some nuclear world war three, what has happened is that the third world war has come and gone and most of us missed it. That is, WW3 was a war of misinformation and the western world, democracy specifically, has been attacked and has lost …and now most people are wandering around in a state of post-psychic shock trauma not really wrapping their heads around that they and their families have been under literal assault and a kind of emotional and propaganda-based warfare for the last decade or so. It didn’t ravage bodies in the physical sense, but it has destroyed institutions, collapsed trust in each other, broken relationships, and turned our path forward into one strewn with debris and rubble. It was launched by foreign states who understood that they could not win a conventional nor a nuclear war. It was fought on Facebook and Twitter and a list of other social media sites. It was launched through the traditional media who played their role as unwitting vectors of informational violence. It was bolstered by algorithms that we trusted had our best interest in mind but were really just blindly amplifying whatever seemed to be popular or match a narrative that made us each uniquely cozy and comfortable. The truth was shattered. Reality was broken. It weaponized the minds of the weak and easily-swayed. It turned friends and family into dirty bombs of radicalized falsehoods and conspiracy-laden mistruths. And even now most of us, nearly all of us, are simply in denial that it even happened… all while we keep scrolling through the same militarized platforms that caused it all in the first place and each in our own pretending that it is still all ok.
The battle rages unfortunately.
That was 2025.
Does 2026 look better for me right now? For any of us?
Like and subscribe to find out, I guess.
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