Whether or not accelerationist theories are true—or whether they are a kind of thing to which “true” and “false” even apply—it certainly feels as if we are swept up in a grand historical dialectic, compelled by some strange new spirit to oscillate back and forth, faster and faster, between an anachronistic tyranny and a futuristic, technocratic totalitarianism. Each pole of this perpetual dialectic seems to summon and strengthen the other. The excesses of the technocratic uni-party, particularly those of its progressive, “reality is fascist” wing, call forth a would-be strongman like Donald Trump who will doubtless redouble the ferocity and legitimacy of the coming technocratic backlash. Perhaps it is too strong to say that the cycle has taken on a life of its own, but no one seems to know how to stop it (or even how to step outside of it) without essentially withdrawing from the world, or at least retiring from it to become an “influencer,” which remains under the domain of Google Earth anyway. In times such as these, the perennial philosophical question “Who are we?” tends to assume a present perfect tense: “What the hell has happened to us?”

We are not well positioned to ask this question because reality seems to have been supplanted by surreality, because we ask it from inside whatever this thing is that seems to have us in its grip—the dialectic, the machine, or the matrix—and because the clinical, economic, political, and sociological forms of explanation that belong to that matrix are ill equipped to discern the movement of the spirit that seems to be impelling us toward various kinds of mass psychosis. None of the usual explanations are very satisfying, and it is difficult to discern their effect upon the soul when you don’t believe you have one. And yet these social and political conditions present us with a question of “political psychology” not unlike the one that confronted Hannah Arendt and other theorists of the 1950s when reckoning with the fact that the totalitarian regimes of the 1930s and 1940s had depended upon mass support. What could induce an entire people to embrace the psychotic unreality of National Socialism? How could something so fantastic have ever happened? And on such a scale?

In invoking this example, I do not mean to suggest a lazy reductio ad Hitlerum, nor am I even making a particularly partisan point. There is more than enough madness to go around. I mean only to indicate the sorts of questions we ought to be asking and the scope and surreality of the circumstances provoking them. Such questions seem to pose themselves afresh with each new day, whether provoked by the geriatric protesters in masks who gather weekly at the intersection near my house to solicit honks from passing traffic, the people screaming into their cellphone cameras to broadcast to the world their hysterical reactions to the latest provocation, the grotesque spectacle of the Charlie Kirk assassination and its aftermath, or the cruelty theater of the Trump administration’s deportation regime. Any of these incidents might have provoked a reflection such as this, but the event that grabbed my attention in this case was the release of a series of “hype videos,” various mash-ups of explosive footage from the Iran War and American pop culture by the gamer boys who apparently run Trump’s War Department.

At one level, this seemed like another instance of the war-as-video-game genre inaugurated with the Gulf War, a genre made possible by precision remote control weaponry, a global broadcast media apparatus, and a voluntary and technologized military that insulates most of the American public from the cost of war. But the callousness, inhumanity, and fundamental unseriousness in this case differed to such a degree that it seemed like a difference in kind. Before I even had the chance to think about what sort of soulless drone might be capable of such a thing, much less put my hand to the plough, there occurred a cascading series of absurdities and outrages, each more absurd and outrageous than the last, making its predecessor seem obsolete. In the span of just a few short days, Donald Trump managed not only to issue what is certainly the most vile and criminal declaration ever made by an American president but to identify himself with Jesus Christ and launch a frothing frontal assault on the pope. (I’m probably leaving something out.) It leaves one breathless trying to remember what it was about the hype videos that seemed so outrageous in the first place. What is so breathtaking is not simply the content of the latest outrage or absurdity but the pace of their never-ending cascade. If we want to understand what is happening to us, we need to understand not only where this absurdity comes from but what this movement is and what it does to us.

It would be too simple if the answer to this question were merely Donald Trump, who is doubtless an effect as well as a cause, and it seems unlikely that his eventual departure from the scene will usher in a restoration of sanity. It is true that Trump is the unlikeliest Great Man of History in the history of Great Men of History—a fact as astonishing now as when he first descended the golden escalator. It is also true that he is perpetually unequal to the seemingly world-historical events of which he is catalyst and center. Peering into the meaning of those events, he sees only himself. He remains utterly inscrutable, not because of the mysterious depths of his psyche but because he seems to be governed entirely by impulse and gives no evidence whatsoever of an inner life. This is what progressive critics have perennially misunderstood about Trump in their zeal to depict him as a fascist. Trump was never disciplined or ideologically coherent enough for that, and his administration is not a rigorous reaction to decadence but its embrace. He is not an American Hitler so much as an American Caligula. This is not exculpating. Tyranny may be preferable to technocratic totalitarianism. It at least has the virtue of being a recognizable political form, albeit a degenerate one, subject to traditional categories of analysis. And it still has recognizable bearers of political responsibility. Someone can be held accountable, at least in theory. But it is still tyranny. And this is only somewhat clarifying. The surreality of this late stage in the American Empire ought to make this relentless movement even more perplexing. What strange new historical circumstances could propel the American populace toward such extremes and with such seemingly unstoppable momentum? What could entice roughly half the American populace to embrace such a figure and the other half to lose their minds over him?

Elements of post-war cultural analysis almost certainly apply here. There are indeed parallels between the Weimar era in Germany and the state of contemporary American culture, as Rod Dreher is fond of pointing out: the moral decadence, the atomization that is so susceptible to mass manipulation, and the widespread loss of faith not only in the founding myths of our political culture but in the common reality that underlies political community as such. We are discovering in real time, in the desperation and anger that characterizes our disintegrating political culture, what happens when a people who have believed only in politics discover that their god has failed them. What buffeted cultural elites in such circumstances typically overlooked in the decadent aftermath of World War I, according to Arendt, “is that an atmosphere in which all traditional values and propositions had evaporated . . . in a sense made it easier to accept patently absurd propositions than the old truths which had become pious banalities, precisely because nobody could be expected to take the absurdities seriously.”

This insight seems as true now as it was then. Trump’s unlikely ascent to political power, fueled by social media, seems to have happened not despite its manifest absurdity but because of it. It is just this absurdity, the fact that he was bullshitting rather than lying, to borrow technical terms from Harry Frankfurt, that seems to be the heart of Trump’s mass appeal. (To this extent, the gamer boys at the War Department are simply following his lead.) There are several important differences between lying and bullshitting, both of which are misrepresentations of reality, but an essential one consists in the fact that while lies are calculated to deceive, bullshit is not. It can be true, false, or neither, because both the bullshit artist and the bullshitted have become indifferent to the reality being misrepresented. It is this detachment from reality that characterizes bullshit, a characteristic it shares with psychosis, which perhaps makes it easy to pass undetected from one to the other under extreme conditions.

The similarities between Arendt’s era and our own must be qualified, however, by the revolution that has taken place in the interim. Digital media represent the algorithmic perfection of the kind of mass manipulation that was only beginning to come into its own during the period of which Arendt wrote—more perfect because more infinite in its scope, more interior in its reach, and more effective in concealing its automatic and formalistic operations. The digital world has no need of a Joseph Goebbels to pull the levers of this vast, centerless system. To appreciate the enormous power exerted by our new digital “reality,” it is helpful to imagine a counter-factual world in which this digital revolution never occurred. While one can never know what might have transpired in an alternative history—that is why it is alternative—such thought experiments do help us to understand what has transpired in this history. It is not only inconceivable that Donald Trump would be the twice-elected president of the United States if the internet had not happened. It is inconceivable that thousands of American adolescents would have simultaneously made the sudden and unprecedented discovery that their gender was other than their sex or that a local police incident in a Midwestern American city could “spontaneously” catalyze massive, organized protest in Europe and around the world.

The line between sanity and psychosis is not clear and distinct, and those of us moving along that line are always the last to know. Perhaps the most we can say is that the digital medium, in detaching us from reality, inclines us toward mass psychosis. Digital life detaches us from reality by obliterating the relations of time and space that define our embodied finitude, unloosing the spirit from these limits to become immediately present at all times—or rather, without respect to time—to everyone else in the world, at least in principle. Accelerationism follows as a matter of course because the obliteration of time and space eliminates the friction between desire and fulfillment, conception and execution, enveloping everyone in the immediacy of a present faster even than thought.

The digital medium conceals its operations by its own ubiquity, making it an exemplary instance of Albert Borgmann’s “device paradigm.” Nothing seems easier or more inconsequential than a click, though behind each thoughtless swipe of the thumb lies a vast digital infrastructure, and beyond that lie potentially innumerable knock-on effects. As this ubiquitous medium becomes our portal to “reality,” it exerts a “bi-polar” distortion upon our relationship to reality beyond the angelism and presentism already mentioned, in advance of any actual content. These no doubt act as aggravating factors in our descent. On the one hand, social media platforms magnify the trivial by enclosing each of us in parallel, algorithmically curated universes without history, context, or resistance, creating an interminable feedback loop of stimulus and response fed by prior acts of attention. Hence the Pavlovian outrage cycles, set in motion by the slightest provocation, that by now are familiar, boring, and predictable. On the other hand, social media trivializes the serious. The superficiality and distraction induced in us are compounded by the way we are compelled to live outside of ourselves, publishing our every thought, documenting our every action, and measuring ourselves by the reaction. Consequently, words have never been faster, cheaper, more plentiful, or more fleeting. We are up to our necks in bullshit.

Coupled with the structural limitations of a platform like Twitter, it creates an inducement to thoughtlessness that rewards sarcasm over seriousness, knowingness over knowledge, and invites its users to keep an ironic distance from their own words and actions. All of this remains concealed, and all of it is compounded by the sheer quantity and evanescence of digital data. Hype videos of the Iran War may be the most callous thing ever published by a department of the American government. The threat to wipe out an entire civilization may be the most reprehensible pronouncement ever articulated by an American president. Comparing oneself to Jesus Christ may be blasphemous, and in former times any one of these might have prompted an impeachment, a revolution, a crusade, or an inquisition. But they are only tweets: here today, sure to be followed tomorrow by something coarser still, emptied of their reprehensible content by their form, and leaving us incensed and numb at the same time. Over and over and over again.

Outrage, absurdity, and hyperbole are not just character traits of this president, though they most certainly are that. Along with knowingness, sarcasm, cynicism, anger, and anxiety, they are the system requirements imposed by the medium: the material shape of a superficial, ephemeral form, a necessity for standing out against an endless sea of data, and an irresistible temptation for un-carnated spirits inhabiting these algorithmically curated universes. But like every addictive substance, they are subject to the law of diminishing returns as the soul grows numb. It takes ever-larger doses of the drug just to achieve the same fleeting high. War hype videos, tyrannical and inhuman declarations, and blasphemy provide only a temporary fix, apparently even for their authors, but also to those who feed off the outrage—not enough to provoke real soul-searching or to bring about an end to the cycle, but enough to numb us just a little more to the insanity that surrounds us and to the real-world gravity of our deeds. Numb and thoughtless souls, we continue to discover, can be compelled to believe and do things that were once unimaginable.

Nearly everyone seems to have some intuition of this, a hopeful sign that human nature endures beneath all the violence and perversions we inflict upon it. It is part of the pervasive feeling that we are all caught up in a movement faster than the speed of thought that we cannot quite name. Still, the breadth and depth of our collective descent into madness are hidden from us by the invisible architecture of this ubiquitous medium, which draws our attention away from the form and dynamics of the medium itself—and what they are doing to us—and redirects it to its content. “It is only too typical,” Marshall McLuhan wrote, “that the ‘content’ of any medium blinds us to the character of the medium.” Or, one might add, to the fact that it has no content. This problem is exacerbated by our tendency to think of digital technologies as mere tools and not as machines, a distinction bearing some resemblance to Borgmann’s distinction between devices and things. On this understanding, which depicts digital technology as something external and subservient to us, it is simply “how you use it” that matters. How we use it does matter, of course, but this picture conceals more than it reveals.

All human action is simultaneously reflexive and transitive, producing both an external effect and an internal transformation of the agent. But whereas with a tool the accent falls on the transitive side of this polarity, machines and mechanical processes are more reflexive. A hammer, for example, is like an extension of the hand. It follows the body’s movement and rhythms. A machine, by contrast, conforms its users to its rhythms, and industrial processes such as an assembly line do this to such a degree that the laborers themselves effectively become part of the mechanical process. This is why industrial laborers have always been vulnerable to automation—to replacement by a better, more efficient machine. It was McLuhan’s great insight to see that media operate this way and have an analogous effect on the mind, introducing changes of “scale or pace or pattern” that control “the scale and form of human association and action,” determining not only what we think about but the meaning of thinking itself.

What is true of all media is true perforce of a digital medium that has vanquished time, space, and the body; eliminated the friction between conception and execution; and restructured expectations accordingly—a medium that has made it all but impossible to live alone in silence with our own thoughts or to give those thoughts time to run their course, a medium that runs out to meet us, as it were, anticipating our every interest and utterance, offering to complete our thoughts in advance of our thinking them. It is an ubiquitous medium that establishes itself in the place of reality, unloosing an army of angry, undead spirits. It does not really matter whether we think of its machinations as belonging to a malign dialectical intelligence, a matrix, or a machine, so long as we begin to recognize the mass psychosis induced by it, with its ever more nihilistic effects. Doubtless the answer to the present perfect question of our imperfect present is legion, but every part of it is refracted through the medium that is the madness.