The Brains Will Be Cooked Until Further Notice

I don't go to church often these days, but when I do, I'm lectured by a highly-respected religious leader whose brain has been broken by Facebook.

It happens every time now, getting dressed up in my Sunday best – or something close to it, sans tie – and taking the family to a big old house of worship adorned with all the lovely trappings of Christianity. Everything is so familiar and traditional – just the way I remember it from childhood, when my ass was firmly in the pew every single Sunday – until the priest starts talking.

The sermon is cloaked in the respectability of a Bible-based lesson. That part rings a bell. But in this third decade of the 21st century, the brain poison of social media seeps into the sermon's every crevice. Jesus said this and my social media algorithm said that. And since my algo produces chemicals in my brain that Jesus Christ simply can't match, we're going to lean hard on the lessons of my social feed today.

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Sometimes the algorithm feeds this priest deeply unfunny boomer memes mocking right-wing Christians for their hypocrisy and inconsistencies and total lack of moral structure. Maybe this meme has hundreds of approving comments and thousands of likes: People laughing about Christian eating shellfish even though God says shellfish are bad (dooming all Marylanders to an eternity in the hottest depths of hell, sadly). These comments and likes and shares by strangers on the internet create an unshakeable reality for the priest. Christians, he knows as he scrolls, are under attack in the United States, subject to merciless cultural and political assaults by godless actors working hand in hand with Satan himself, cracking open some crabs and drinking light beer on a mild summer evening in the Old Line State.

Christians, who dominate every facet of American cultural and political life, are an oppressed religious minority under dire threat from forces seen and unseen, the priest's social media feed says with the confidence of a machine that knows nothing while pretending to know everything. The bad faith flows from this algorithmically-generated unreality: The leviathan of the federal government must use its extraordinary powers to defend Christians in the US. Christians must be allowed to use taxpayer money to send their children to Christian schools. Christians' supposedly deeply held beliefs become cudgels in their war against the unbeliever, all because the priest logged on, all because his brain stewed in the toxins of a machine designed to make him outraged and afraid.

I often bemoan our collective social media addiction as a key driver of fascism in the 21st century, usually griping about everyday folks being attached to their phones by the brain stem, unable to go even a few moments with requesting another hit of dopamine from the supercomputer in their hand. Everyone being awash in sweet, sweet soma is a bad development for anyone who enjoys democracy, or society in general.

What I hadn't considered all that often was the prospect of people in powerful positions being tricked by the unreality of online, particularly the fictional world far-right forces have forced into existence over the past decade. Why, after all, do you think Elon Musk spent billions to buy Twitter? The site was not cooperating with the right's unreality. It was puncturing that unreality at every turn (think of the Hunter Biden ratfuck in October 2020 and the Big Lie in the weeks following the 2020 election). That would not do. Musk shelled out an ocean of cash to wipe out this unreality killer. He's since spent billions creating the unreality god commonly known as Grok, and the Trump regime plans on going after "woke" AI systems whose logic is based in reality. The right's fictional world is almost complete.

We have powerful people in government, religious institutions, and the corporate world operating fully within this unreality now. It's why people like human egg Marc Andreesen can make stunningly racist remarks and not wonder for a second if they sound insane or if what they are saying is fundamentally wrong. Because in the world they've created on the internet, they are speaking the truth, making obvious statements about the racism white people face in the US.

Read a Supreme Court opinion and watch the Court's far-right justices all but admit they experience the world through Mark Zuckerberg's and Elon Musk's algorithms. Their jurisprudence is shaped by what they see on their phones; nothing else matters. Imagine Clarence Thomas and Brett Kavanaugh and Sam Alito scrolling the explicitly fascist X platform and coming across Libs of Tik Tok and other hate accounts that portray trans folks and people of color and migrants as terrifying threats to the continued existence of the United States.

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I don't care how learned a judge is, how much they've studied the law and precedent and all that – when the algorithm offers you videos and pictures – many of them manipulated and some of them Russian psyops – all of that education and knowledge is overwritten by the fear centers of your brain kicking into full gear. I say this based on social media research and, unfortunately, personal experience. I use social media way too much. I sometimes worry about myself. And I know for sure that the apps feel good to click and the content they feed me shape the way I see the world. I'm not immune to that. Neither are you. Neither is Clarence Thomas or JD Vance or Pete Hegseth or Kristi Noem or your priest or your local mayor or police sheriff or your pastor or Silicon Valley titans collecting money to pull god from the machine. We are all vulnerable.

Eventually, the left is going to have no choice but to embrace major social media regulations and restrictions. We need a defense for our defenseless brains – not just everyday folks, but those who determine the course of human events. The European Union has some ideas on how to make social media compatible with the continued existence of human civilization (this might include the banning on X, a necessity for any country serious about beating back fascism. I will become religious if this happens).

We can't be afraid of social media rules and regulations forever. It's the only way to dismantle the right's unreality and stop your priest from cooking their brain with Facebook memes.

Follow Denny Carter on BlueSky at @dennycarter.bsky.social.