Everything is a Remix: Reality
Tags: Politics, Conspiracy Theories, Video Essay, News, Media Literacy

Many of us are plummeting into crowdsourced nightmares about Bill Gates or 5G or the deep state. How can we prevent ourselves from getting lost in the funhouse?

Everything is a remix. Every song, every movie, every meme, every idea, every invention, every discovery. Everything we create is copied, transformed and combined from our culture.

And just like our creations are remixed from the world around us, our beliefs are remixed from what we watch, read and listen to.

And this is a disturbing idea. It’s one thing to remix a song or a story or a product, it’s another to remix… yourself, your identity. It’s like programming yourself… without really knowing it.

The number of paths you can choose from is endless and each one leads to a different version of yourself.

Our mediascape is an infinity of rabbit holes. You can disappear into any one you like, and when you awaken from the spell, you’ve changed. You’ve absorbed new ideas and they’ve altered who you are. Repeat this process over and over and over, and your identity can be transformed.

If you’re not aware of what’s happening, you can get fooled. You can get lied to, you can get exploited, you can become cannon fodder in someone else’s culture war.

But even more importantly, you can fool yourself. You can repeatedly choose more and more extreme rabbit holes and fall deeper and deeper into an illusion you chose, into a hall of mirrors where what’s reflected back is your own darkest fantasies.

Many of us are plummeting into crowdsourced nightmares about Bill Gates or 5G or the deep state. How can we prevent ourselves from getting lost in the funhouse?

To keep a grip on reality, you need to be aware of how you make sense of media and the world. Having awareness, whether it’s of your habits or your emotions or your biases, gives you back some power and lets you make wiser choices.

And the first thing you need to be aware of is where our sensemaking starts. It starts with patterns.

What media does, all media, is shrink reality way, way, way down into a digestible size. You can’t drink directly from the firehose. Each media outlet features stories it feels are important and from these selections we spot patterns. Vox gives you one type of pattern, Breitbart gives you another, PBS Newshour gives you yet another. And when you use social media, you’re making the pattern yourself, with each click, with each follow, with each like.

These patterns feel convincing, they feel real. But they’re actually just repetitions you spotted from a tiny selection of events.

You then set about distorting what these patterns mean. You turn them into little stories that help you understand and remember.

And in the process you sensationalize them, you turn them into juicier stories. You generalize and exaggerate. You strip away nuance and contradictions, and you add conflict and drama. Then you share these stories based not just on their truth or their importance but based on what they make you feel, and much of the time that feeling is anger.

This process of simplification and distortion then produces a master narrative. It produces an ideology. You turn into some version of conservative or liberal or libertarian or progressive or increasingly now, we’re turning into conspiracists.

Your ideology, this highly imperfect contraption that you remixed, probably without even being aware of it, then molds what you see, it puts a spin on everything. Different people can see the exact same thing and draw opposite conclusions.

Ideology is like a program you’re now running. We like to blame the media for programming us, but we’re just as responsible. We develop our ideologies ourselves over the years and decades, based on what we choose to watch, read and listen to.

By just being aware of this process, we can see how meager and lacking our perception of the world is. Our ideology is a simplification of a simplification of a simplification.

Knowing this can help us be more modest and less defensive. It can make us more willing to learn from perspectives that contradict ours.

But most importantly of all, it justifies us having some small measure of doubt about our own beliefs. Critical thinking isn’t just about doubting everybody else. It’s about doubting yourself.

Conspiracy theories and nonsense and extremism and lies cannot tolerate doubt. They can’t absorb criticism and grow. The truth defeats or incorporates our doubts and grows stronger with time.

In the end, the truth wins… eventually.