Neural Sociology
One way to consider the current state of affairs is this. The average human being exists as a neuron within a larger cranial complex, one whose neural networks are the vehicle for the transfer of two fundamental entities: financial assets and political consent. Both could fall under umbrella labels such as capital or consumerism, but they are also irreducible to each other.
Just as electricity operates as the currency of exchange and communication within the physiology of the brain, so too do money and ideology operate as two corollary vehicles of flux in this parallel model of network exchange. Neurons respond to stimuli. With regard to consumerism, marketing and sales are the technical disciplines directed to stimulate the human node for the sake of eliciting very precise responses of the purchase, the upsell, and the product referral. Some marketing and sales teams are sophisticated enough that they have been able to remold some human nodes as self-stimulating (i.e. addicted) through phone brain and other means. This is how the consumerist sciences can optimize the human nodes. To minimize the financial stimulus (ad spend) required to produce the maximal amount of transferred financial assets.
What must also be considered are the network effects of consumerism. How various nodes are better positioned to influence others into the same kind of consumerist responsiveness. Which is why the consumerist sciences place considerable weight on securing access to influencer nodes as they can have considerable, even exponential downstream effects.
The techniques and processes of the science of material consumerism have been applied with relative success to its sister phenomenon: political consumerism.
A pure democratic system could be said to also operate on this neural model where localized nodes receive ideological stimulus and secrete or effuse ideological output which manifests occasionally in votes but more often in the politics that lies outside the election cycle through discourse, leveraging, and other means. This is why centralized democracy in both monopolistic and oligopolistic flavors tends to instantiate and cultivate ideology factories that aim toward the near constant if not omnipresent informing of political neurons.
Thus the procedure of political information depends on the twofold goal of (1) determining what the political neuron should think about this given here-and-now event as well as (2) cultivating the right kind of responsivity that the neuron will be able to produce the desired kind of opinion in response to future events without external stimulus. More so than even the case in material consumerism, the node should believe themselves the originator of these opinions, interpretations, and ideologies, or at the very least incapable of framing the situation in such a way so as to realize how their thoughts are merely the product of systems of mass consent manufacturing.
Both neural models may be decentralized in that no intent, will, or intelligence is attempting to guide the patterns of stimuli and response across the network.
There may also exist models in which certain agents may have directed ends or goals they wish to meet and possess the tools with which to slowly and gradually transform the stimuli-response patterns of material and political consumers toward certain aligned patterns. This may be called social engineering. To enact social engineering on entire human populations requires both considerable technological, financial, and political resources and is a painstakingly slow and often erroneous evolutionary progression.
What further complicates understanding Intelligent Design in social engineering is that even if a few clusters of agents are pulling the levers so to speak, their goals are often at odds with one another so they may be engaged in tactical neural warfare, or they may simply be incompetent at influencing outcomes so the changes they gradually introduce into the social neural ecosystem is not aligned with their goals or objectives.
One could go on to consider how demography, jurisprudence, religion, and other factors influence the behavior of human nodes, but this is a general lay of the land.
The end result of a neural system where human intent is at play is that the human being is framed as a clinical subject to be completely and fully enclosed within a purely controlled environment. Each node's material and political choices are controlled by upstream factors and levers to produce the desired outcomes for whoever's jurisdiction they fall under. A covert feudalism where lords operate from shadows to leverage mass populations to enact the goals of the few.
It is a world where the masses are subject to the machinations of graph theory. Consensus is coaxed if not coerced. And much of this would have been impossible merely a century ago, but with the advent of many technologies of "colossalism", it is now possible to centrally manage or distribute control both over a wider range of human entities and at an exponentially deeper level than would have been possible before.
Where before it would have required immense effort to track the geographic region and financial resources of even a few individuals, now even the eyeball movements of entire populations can be safely computed and tracked. Generative AI provides immense opportunities for enshrouding each individual within an abundance of custom-tailored content to meld and shape the clinical subject as desired.
Responses to Totalistic Consumerism
This model is not novel. It can be described as post-human or anti-human. For it completely eschews human agency. But one should also wonder, if there are such systems of social engineering at play, would they not also be directed toward whittling down and reducing human agency as much as it can? Receptors are more useful than agents. The degree to which such machinery is able to modify the extent or grip of the human will is a question beyond consideration here.
One thing of material consideration here is the trajectory of such a reshaped neurology. What does it converge to?
This is perhaps best described as the hyperreal.
What in our lifetimes we have taken to be authoritative disbursers of knowledge may become so radically and pervasively (and clumsily) manipulated, that many register a certain degree of mistrust toward any of these instruments of media in both the material and political flavors of consumerism. And while many of us are used to being lied to through such instruments, there are few things as offputting as being lied to poorly. And when the lies upcrank in frequency, it certainly does not mend matters.
And one resoundingly common instrument in this supposed program of manipulation is the Internet.
There will always be many either without the sense or will to recognize the ideological zoos they have been born and bred in. Others may see the zoo for what it is but acquiesce for they understand that significant opportunities for advancement often accompany participating in the exhibition. A dolphin that dances for the masters will get more fish than the grump in the corner. These cynics buy in and do the circus show for the rewards it entails. If needed, forgetting what they give up in the process. They engage in the proxy wars of the hyperreal as the various conumerist-politico wings engage in their endless neural dance.
A third class may also exist of those who feel on some instinctive level the dissonance between the hyperreal of social engineering and the other real world which existed before the Internet. They may sense something is off, but their dopamine triggers are so deeply ensnared and entangled within a neural system, they lack the necessary wherewithal to do anything about it. They remain passive, despondent like animals consigned to experimentation. The roll of dice to decide how things turn out for them.
As often happens, people will not necessarily fall under one single class but have a certain mixture of the different ones to varying degree.
What is likely to happen is the continued growth and perhaps ascension of a fourth class: the offline.
The offline can be described as those who live primarily analog lifestyles that are disconnected the neural machinery of social engineering.
Their senses are not constantly bombarded with ads or digital content, so they have no need to resist or fight the urges and impulses a phone may implant in them.
They are not subscribed to the everyday cycle of news outrage, so their cortisol levels are not inflammed to the same extent the enplugged may be with the ongoing stream of news events.
What an offline lifestyle looks like may vary. Those old enough to be pre-boomer may still persist in this lifestyle (though even these are often subject to network television, even when they do not use the Internet). Those who live in the rural recesses of society often have a greater propensity to live in this degree of disconnection. We have always had the Amish, embedded within American jurisdiction but disconnected from it.
The Offliner
Utopianism emerges in waves, ever since the foundings of America. Here we have a new wave. One digital symptom of this is the effusive growth in the DIY and homesteader genres across many regions and both genders. As digital cynicism deepens so too does a desire for an "off the grid" lifestyle.
But desire does not always produce change. Many dreams are craved for, and few are realized. And in fact pro-offliner content remains still an instrument of the digital. It can be a psychological facade by which the influencers of the genre broadcast how offline they are through online means. And those who spend hours reading DIY content or basking in homesteader images remain engaged in a form of digital consumerism rather than developing the habits by which they become offliners.
To be offline is not to be completely disconnected from the Internet in total. But rather to have one's agency unimpaired and unimpacted by the dual tweezers of smartphone and Internet. They do not subconsciously crave the tingle of haptic feedback or social media viewership. They use the tool without the tool using them.
This community will become more self-aware and well-defined as time goes on.
Perhaps it entails hamlets and communes disconnected from the Internet. Intertribal communication conducted through physical mail and private couriers. Encylopedias and manuals in physical rather than digital form. A return of artisanal apprenticeship for metallurgy, carpentry, etc. The boundary between analogue and digital is not firmly fixed (where does the fax reside?), and it will likely be up to each respective community to develop and ordain the proper restrictions on technology as the Amish do.
In the next decade or two, we will most likely see an upsurge in the popularity of the "offliner" as a concept in the digital sphere. Homestead literature will abound. New forms of courtship that are decidedly post-dating, a return perhaps to practical marriage in response to the current digital burnout. Starter kits and perhaps financing plans for those seeking to go offline. These are not trends that will take over society wholesale, but rather subgroups among the more conservative-minded who want to reject the digital politics of global Internet cosmopolitanism. Those enamored with recapturing the frontier aesthetic as it existed in the American grain.
This of course presuming that regulatory or other action does not directly or indirectly block these neurons from cutting themselves out of the network equation.
There are aspects of this offliner future that reflect trends already underway across the West.
First, a disinterest in anything happening outside the physical community or region, much in the same way of a medieval peasant. Events happening halfway across the world will hold no interest for the offline. The more remote or vast an election, the more likely they are to say, "Who cares?"
This self-enclosure would also entail a greater distrust of the outsider. Not just in the physical presence of visitors but an epistemic xenophobia as we have already seen in the Covid era. Intense skepticism toward knowledge or expertise presented by centralized governmental or scientific bodies, and perhaps a general rejection of "scientific truths" that have been deemed valid for at least a century. Instead, the offliners may depend on local "clerics". Those who live with them who are deemed learned and have expressed their opinion on certain manners. Much in the way medieval ecclesiastical servants would have functioned, though without even a Rome to pay lip service to. Congregationally-approved experts then, and the politics that all entails.
And because these systems will invariably evolve into tribal political entities, federal and state governments may proactively block these developments, but that remains to be seen. There is only so much one can do to force consumer to be plugged in before there are compulsory pleasure pods.
Again, the offliner way of life will not predominate American society. This is merely the emergence of dual lifestyles. The hyperreal urbanite versus the post-digital offliner. The two will likely live in relative antagonism toward each other. The offliner will seek independence from a cosmopolitan system which depends in part on the comprehensive totality of its enforcement. In David Fischer's view, this was the fundamental ideological divide underneath the Civil War. But this all remains to be seen.
The offliner will be a new kind of person, a novel atavism. What more this could look like would need to be the subject of future investigation and speculation.