Collective trap – Weekend – Kommersant
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The enlightened reader despises the words “coach” or “training”, the enlightened reader has developed a deservedly skeptical attitude towards photos on the network, and in general he knows that on the Internet everything is fake. It is quite another matter when serious people speak online or from the screen.
If you are offered for an amount with five zeros to take a course on “realizing your inner self” or “manifesting your true desires” – well, what can I say. A fool doesn’t need a knife. Old-timers can remember the era of primitive accumulation, when every channel you turn on offered 10,000 percent income and a cure for all diseases through a zirconium bracelet. It would seem that the memories are relatively fresh – but, judging by the heyday of coaching, the story of income and a bracelet did not teach anyone anything. Probably, every generation should step on this rake again. Well.
It is clear at the same time why the rake works this way. Advertising trainings or bracelets takes into account all our internal breakdowns and psychological gaps – internal insecurity and self-doubt, lack of purpose and meaning – and knows which buttons to press. In other times, the church was engaged in something similar, and later – large ideological projects that saw the cause of breakdowns in social imperfection: the world is damaged at its very core and must be saved in its entirety. And modernity makes you see imperfection in yourself and save yourself one by one, with a personal guru who will come and fix the unique inner world.
The enlightened reader understands: all this, as they said in the era of primitive accumulation, is a wiring for suckers. We know that gurus do not always practice what they preach, their advice is a smokescreen, not always verified by personal experience. And in general, on the network, wherever you poke, manipulation or photoshop. We understand this – and then we click, for example, on a link with a post about the innate imperialism of Russians.
Or there are still influencers – in a sense, the same gurus who sell the audience not rules and principles, but a way of life, their own brightness and interestingness. The influencer has a different monetization model: rather from the advertiser than from the audience, but the mechanisms are approximately the same. The influencer still presses clear buttons and solves quite obvious problems: subconsciously it seems that if you look at photos of, for example, Bella Hadid in the feed for a long time, then your life (as well as clothes, soul and thoughts) will become just as unthinkably beautiful. Probably, the natives from Vysotsky’s song had something similar in mind when they ate Cook. We also understand that it is foolish to demand ultimate authenticity from him or her: in the information space there is always a gap between the image and the essence, and the conditional Bella, having filmed on the red carpet in all her white-toothed splendor, then can sob into the pillow until morning. We understand this – and then we come across, for example, a text that Russians have resisted the collective West from time immemorial.
And here, of course, we feel that this is written by serious people, there is something behind their words, this is not a selfie in the photo model’s account. They have a model of the world that they consider to be true, one can join it, it can be challenged, it somehow affects the real state of things, and it is obvious that the writer himself sincerely believes in it and is ready to defend it, maybe even to sacrifice for her. You trust such a person if you share his views – you want to follow him, to be like him. No, this is not some rogue coach or a lightweight influencer, this is completely different.
Once I happened to attend a talk show where a well-known journalist and an equally well-known deputy were arguing. During the break, the opponents started talking: it turns out that both were in Florida during the New Year holidays, visited the Hemingway Museum on Key West, in general, there was something to discuss. The “Motor!” I spent holidays with my voters in Altai!” The transition from Florida to Altai was, as they say now, seamless. And it is clear that the deputy was not exactly lying – he was simply saying what his audience should hear. Even if the audience in his case is the authorities, okay, this is just a different monetization model.
To be honest, I myself felt terrible at that moment: my personal counter of sincerity and authenticity, which works so flawlessly in the case of the “Marathon of Desires” training or Bella Hadid’s photos, began to fluctuate noticeably at this point. The deputy spoke with such sincere conviction that I even doubted whether there was now a conversation about vacations in America? Maybe there were no holidays? Does America really not exist? This is also a professional skill – to speak in such a way that it is impossible not to believe you, to pronounce the words that people want to hear, to press well-known buttons that trigger understandable psychological mechanisms. We know that there are people who have this skill to perfection – and God, how brilliant this skill was presented before my eyes – why do we not expect authenticity from Bella Hadid, and in the case of “serious authors” we accept it by default ?
Feeling guilty. Feeling of danger. The desire to join a community that will give protection and a sense of right. The desire to find some superpersonal meaning for one’s own life. All these things have been known since ancient times, and in a situation of the most acute social conflict, when a raid of civilization flies, they begin to work with the same inexorable force as in ancient times. When in this situation you are told: “you have always been like this, and therefore what happens is happening”, “you have always been like this, and therefore you must do this”, “you are like this, and those others, and you are forever enemies to each other” – this creates some clarity, apparently of the same nature as in the final of the training on “analysis of the blockages of your inner self”. It is also clear why a “serious author” needs this: attention, influence, the same feeling of rightness – even in the absence of a financial component, this is a valuable asset. Happiness is when they trust you and follow you, since the current information space allows everyone not only to get 15 minutes of fame, but also to gather 15,000 people of their flock.
And most importantly – as in the case of the conditional Bella Hadid, it is impossible to understand who is behind these words and images. Maybe this fierce hawk, which threatens to incinerate the whole world, is actually afraid to meet the gaze of the ill-wisher from the next office? And this progressive thinker, who demands to get rid of the imperialism that has ingrained in us, shied away from visitors in the street? And this author, who abuses the plural pronoun – “we demand”, “we will not give”, “we will not allow”, the last time he saw a living person at his own graduation and even asks the courier to leave food at his door? And in general, it may turn out that posts of all the above types have long been written by a specially trained ChatGPT neural network, which definitely does not risk anything and is not going to pay anything for its words. Joking aside, but when neural networks really learn to convincingly simulate any emotions and prove any thought – how then to figure out what is true, brother? And how does a “serious author” already differ from such a neural network today – if he also puts together from ready-made text (emotional, ideological) blocks what is better for the audience?
Well, this begs the question: what to do if there are information scammers around who are trying to circle us around the information finger? The only honest answer here is “I don’t know.” Well, or so: set up your internal counters, learn to distinguish living words from dead ones. Probably, they would have answered this question in the same way at the end of the conditional training “Marathon of Desires” – but who among us today is not a guru, let him throw a stone first.
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