>>24603932 (OP)
1/
Welcome to the future, where everything is fake, even if it isn't.
It probably started around the Freud-Barnays era, the leaps and bounds the social psychologists pushed their field by at the behest of paranoid cold-war governments and rising corporations. The world they built is what you see today: every sight, every smell, every sound designed for a pragmatic purpose. Designed to circumvent the human soul and grab each person by the base, animal instincts. A bunch of 18th century guys with funny hats, the guys from the oil paintings, predicated their worldview on the existence of rational people with rational minds, but it's the future, baby, all that's obsolete. Gone. We don't make ads with a Norman Rockwell drawing in one corner and a long-winded essay on why you should buy what's advertised anymore, we just condition you Pavlov-style with associations between pretty colors and social achievement, and the shit for sale.
And everyone knows it. Maybe it isn't a conscious thought in everyone's mind, but the hyperspeed-mach-ten-billion-hypercube human hacking that every corporation, government, political group, etc., and their AI-run botnets pull off at any given second has seeped into the very subconscious minds that the 20th century played like fiddles. So, with a need to be the one, special real person in the sea of fake, the culture shatters into factions, "subcultures", competing for who can be the "realest". Happened in the 60s and 70s, too. Back then all the hippie kids broke free from their square parents, and the powers that be promptly flipped shit until the social psychologists talked the c-suites off their ledges with an idea: Sell realness. Sell authenticity. Sell the revolution. And they did, eventually filling our oceans with broken-down polyester.
It's all about the lizard brain, man. We ain't about that goofy ahh "erm actually" reading shit, we ball, bro, fr. We talk like skateboarders in a 90s movie. We dress like goths and 80s post-rockers. Or we go gangster. It's all fake. of course. Like the advertisements bombarding us, we've become hyper-aware of the image we're releasing of ourselves. A phone could be recording you for TikTok at any moment, bo, you gotta be ready. Get that fake vocal fry going. Keep those eyelids slightly lowered. Remember, the more you can pretend like you don't care, the more your opinions matter. It's all optics, anyways, lizard brain shit. Everyone these days is keenly aware of the impact their image alone has on everything else, their validity, their perceived morality, so in a way we're all social psychologists now. Propagandists in wolf cuts and Vans shoes, post-meta-anti-hyper-post-ironic shirts, sunglasses, and shoes. Ready to let out a breathy little giggle and a side eye look whenever you disagree with us, as if to say to the camera, "Bro, is this guy serious?"
