On the General Control of Reality

I’m in between projects at the moment, and in between absurd investigations into the bizarre working practices of the modern world. I have my plans all sorted out, and it’s good to know how precisely the world economy is currently functioning. Hopefully one day once my ship has been steadied I can work out how to break out all of the workers in Third World countries running the tech of Silicon Valley.

Silly Con Valley. The truth always hides in plain sight.

But that’s another thought entirely.

I thought I was here to talk about the General Control of Reality, or GCR for short.

GCR posits that all humans need novel narratives in order to progress their story in order to process information in order to have something to talk about.

In more basic terms, it’s kind of like, a bloke needs some action in order to give the wife some entertainment.

So, in this instance, life itself is not too dissimilar to the TV channel changer on the Netflix box or whatever your service of choice happens to be. You watch your story in order to generate an opinion in order to generate conversation.

Then it goes up into the levels of, if you control the feed of information, you kind of dictate what reality is, what ideas are permissible and what general discourse looks like.

It then follows, that it’s in each person’s interest to find the stream of information that generates the world that you want to participate in. Simples, really.

Unfortunately for the common working man, the current monopoly of information streaming seems to have been co-opted by nefarious actors who like to hoard all of the golden coins for themselves, and really enjoy constructing historical Egyptian pyramid schemes where the world’s population is corralled into boring work constructing algorithms for rich arseholes in California.

It’s all fairly straightforward. If you watch the BBC News, you get the state sanctioned consensus reality that is deemed accessible to whoever is scripting the BBC news. Likewise all around the world, unless you’re able to control your information stream to the point where you become impervious to the effects of subpar programming.

I could bang on about recent events that we’ve all gone through, but I am totally left stupefied by how functionally distracting the whole programming industry seems to have become. It honestly feels as if the group of people writing the show have run out of ideas and are circling things back and forward to try and create appropriate conditions to maintain the status quo.

Fair enough, I suppose, if you’re enjoying the way of the world. But to this observer it seems absurd to maintain the status quo because the status quo is dumb. It is a logically absurd statement for anybody who is alive right now to claim that ‘they know what’s going on’ – nobody knows anything and it’s all a massive mystery as to why this experience called life keeps occurring day after day. I would love to investigate, but apparently whoever is writing the scripts would prefer us not to investigate.

Obvious grounds for an investigation, of course.

The allegory is of an interesting typesetter I found today called Eric Gill.

Here’s a guy who’s brilliant at creating art, typefaces, monuments, all sorts of stuff. He dies a very well lived man, until 30ish years later some woman from The Guardian turns up and says he was having sex with his dog.

Now, I’m not condoning sex with a dog, what I am exploring is that this lady magicked up some diary that the poor bloke had no way to defend himself against. I don’t know about you, but I’d rather not have some weird lady from The Guardian write articles that I was having sex with my car or something 40 years after I’m dead.

Essentially this journalist has become the General Controller of Reality for those that are interested in Eric Gill. All his achievements be damned, this lady says he was boning the dog.

I don’t think anyone will ever be able to know if he was actually getting up to no good with the family hound, so we’re left with a really boring and arbitrary ‘he said she said’ situation and I believe this scenario plays itself out repeatedly in many, many industries.

Even today, Bill Murray’s latest film has been cancelled because he was ‘acting inappropriately’ on set.

I thought the very function of Bill Murray was that he ‘acts inappropriately’ and that’s the whole charm of his character.

I would also wager that his contribution to the General Discourse is far greater than the Fun Police who accused him of getting up to no good. What does ‘acting inappropriately’ even mean? It’s as if there’s a subsection of thought censors out there who want the world to be as boring as possible, with a condition that no one can do anything because we’re all too afraid of the Fun Police coming in and getting us banned from instagram.

I’m getting a bit off track here, but I hope it’s all kind of making sense.

Essentially, I’m going to run investigations into some of the bizarre websites I find on my travels to share the joyful weirdness that exists on the internet.

Because I would wager that if we were all reading those websites instead of The Guardian etc then the world may take on a far more interesting hue.