The Aaron Rodgers Experience

I’m old enough to remember when this kind of thing usually required some drugs, but now we have social media:

“Camus” by the way is some obsessive anti-vaxx nutter (many citations to Naomi Wolf; intellectual death recorded), who naturally is also obsessed with Bill Gates, globalism, international bankers, the Protocols of the Elders of Washington, etc.

A side issue here is whether if I were the GM of NFL franchise, or of the Jets, I would feel sufficiently comfortable with structuring my whole team around a clinically paranoid starting quarterback. I haven’t thought about that but am just throwing it out. Or maybe this isn’t clinical paranoia but just Twitter doing what Twitter does to people.

Anyway, the difficult thing here is that Rodgers and the millions and millions of people in America elsewhere who are very much like him except for the TD/INT ratio is actually addressing some very valid concerns, about the surveillance state, the power and pervasiveness of Big Tech, the potential for technologically advanced authoritarianism to create a kind of panopticon of bureaucratic tyranny, and so forth. These are real problems, as anybody not comfortably ensconced in the reactionary center will acknowledge.

But he’s expressing these concerns from a kind of crudely conspiratorial and frankly paranoid mindset that’s exactly what’s fueling right wing populist authoritarianism in America and all over the world (Imagine believing that Donald Trump is going to be protecting your freedom!). So there’s a very difficult needle to thread here for liberals and progressives at the present historical moment. Big Tech, Big Pharma, the surveillance society (the company that records classes at the University of Colorado is called . . . wait for it . . . Panopto), the transformation of the entire world into an algorithm for selling you things you don’t need, the production and transport of which are helping destroy the ecosystem: these are all very real problems.

It’s just that the cures being offered by the authoritarian populist right involve exacerbating the diseases in question, via a fire hose of endless lies, deployed for the enrichment and aggrandizement of the worst people in the world, i.e., Donald Trump, Vladimir Putin, Viktor Orban, et. al.

I am impressed that Rodgers seems to have actually read Nineteen Eighty-Four as opposed to merely citing it, although he like many LGM commenters missed the fundamentally satirical nature of the book. The book is not a prediction of the future, any more than Brave New World is a prediction; still less is it intended as a depiction of the present, either Orwell’s in 1948 or our own, forty years after the book’s title date has passed.

Instead, it is among other things a warning about societal trends, carried out through an intentional exaggeration of those trends for polemic effect. It is, one might say, intended to be taken seriously rather than literally — a phrase that seems vaguely familiar to me at the moment, although I can’t remember the exact source.