“Nothing Ever Happens”

Psyops, McLuhan, and You

One of my favorite Internet phrases of all time has been the titular “Nothing Ever Happens.” A response, a reaction, to balk smugly at the headlines that come across our newsfeeds and timelines that update within minutes or microseconds. From OSINT accounts to paid shills (I repeat myself) to the mainstream press, we are inundated with fearmongering, opinion pieces proffered as news, and fact sheets that cleverly hide their methodologies to the public in order to achieve narratives that are fitting for the powers that be.

For many of us, we can be hit with a million takes, facts, half-truths, and talking points within an instant. We scroll through our feeds and group chats trying to find actual data or the best on-the-ground sources possible, while the media continues to do its job as a mouthpiece for the regime, monied interests, and foreign powers. In the United States — it being one of the most, if not the most, psyoped landmasses and peoples in all of God’s Creation — this could mean that every post or headline that comes across our eyes is very much a war for your mind, attention, and soul.

The “Take Economy,” where the hot takes, wild predictions, and bets over cigars can keep your eyes on personalities for their clicks and financial gain, has led to numerous cults of personality over individuals who, in pursuit of financial gain, are happy to take their 30 pieces of silver to the bank — Qatari dollars injected into American politics, a vice presidential candidate having close ties to the Chinese, or even individuals adopting the guise of “MAGA Communism” just to shill for a state actor who has historically been an antagonist to the United States for decades. The siren emoji has been a go-to as of late to deliver news blended with propaganda, while links to various Substacks or BuyMeACoffee abound, as major YouTube accounts reporting on the war have presented scripts from the desk of the National Endowment for Democracy.

Just sifting through the mainstream channels of politics will leave you feeling sick, as if you’ve just spent $20 at McDonald’s: the slop is in your body and tearing at your psyche. Many in this thing of ours will recognize that there very much is a war for your mind, your attention, to steer your thinking toward connecting the dots of their particular worldview. Your foes know this, too, and while they may not succeed with all of you, they know that they can whittle down your own sense of security, or cause your feet to slip from the path that you may be on. We have our friend-enemy distinctions, our friends, those whose work we enjoy even though we don’t always agree; but when it comes to the news, especially on a geopolitical or electoral level, there is a clear effort to have it front and center in your mind and in your consciousness, both physically and digitally.

These observations are part-and-parcel conclusions of what was written sixty years ago by Dr. Marshall McLuhan, in Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. While he would not live to see the Internet and social media, many consider him a prophet of our digital age, and with good reason, as he writes the following:

Electric speed in bringing all social and political functions together in a sudden implosion has heightened human awareness of responsibility to an intense degree. It is this implosive factor that alters the position of the Negro, the teenager, and some other groups. They can no longer be contained, in the political sense of limited association. They are now involved in our lives, as we in theirs, thanks to the electric media.

The corollary to this is that the extension of our awareness also means that our awareness to ideas or nudging can weaken even the most rational or decent person we may know in our lives. How many people were brain-blasted by Covid? Their minds broken and melted down to a puddle of slobbering brainlessness over George Floyd, or even the war in Ukraine? As Charlemagne made quite clear just this Monday:

To our horror, many of us discovered that apparently most other citizens around us were anything but normal; they were deranged freaks, willingly donning a muzzle to shop for groceries, or utterly obedient and slavish followers of regime orders at best (or worst, depending on your perspective).

For many of us, we’re aware of the constant droning of what constitutes “slop” or “digital detritus,” whether it’s U.S. Army e-girls or NAFO. With any medium, whether it be the car or our digital footprints being extensions of our minds and bodies, those who have the discernment to block out the slop will be quick to dismiss breaking news headlines, new information, or propaganda outright with that simple little phrase…

“Nothing. Ever. Happens.”

With technology, our noosphere of digital consciousness is extended to know about the slightest bits of trauma and information around the world. I can go on Twitter right now and see thousands cheering on the deaths of Russians or Ukrainians from high-definition drone footage. I can watch Jews and Palestinian partisans lament or leap for joy over the footage of human destruction that has taken place in the Levant. This is the technological leap that has made Anglos in particular, and their American descendants, open to the curse of telescopic philanthropy — a consequence of this extension and the people’s general good nature towards others, taken advantage of and twisted for leftist ends.

To reject the mass media’s attempt at gaslighting or getting you to care about every little thing is a noble effort, as these are distractions from your goals and your own people. From Live Aid to Kony 2012 to NAFO, there’s a million little activist causes that have taken their orders from State Department and Ad Council officials who would love to spin them towards the ruling ideology. It’s exhausting trying to keep track of all this, even more frustrating what with the years of Anti-White activism and propaganda: I can remember so much more vividly the names of a handful of justifiably shot black criminals, whose deaths led to riots in my country, than I can the thousands more whites dead from drugs, illegal immigration, and black-on-white violence.

McLuhan notes:

Physiologically there are abundant reasons for an extension of ourselves involving us in a state of numbness. Medical researchers like Hans Selye and Adolphe Jonas hold that all extensions of ourselves, in sickness or in health, are attempts to maintain equilibrium. Any extension of ourselves they regard as “autoamputation,” and they find that the autoamputative power or strategy is resorted to by the body when the perceptual power cannot locate or avoid the cause of irritation. Our language has many expressions that indicate this self-amputation that is imposed by various pressures. We speak of “wanting to jump out of my skin” or of “going out of my mind,” being “driven batty” or “flipping my lid.” And we often create artificial situations that rival the irritations and stresses of real life under controlled conditions of sport and play.

If technology is an extension of ourselves (which it is) and it is also exposed to the millions and billions of data points, fandoms, news outlets, and psychic trauma of the images that accompany it, then you can comprehend how irritated one might get or how broken one’s mind might be. One need only check out the “Zero-Covid” community to see what I mean.

McLuhan continues:

While it was no part of the intention of Jonas and Selye to provide an explanation of human invention and technology, they have given us a theory of disease (discomfort) that goes far to explain why man is impelled to extend various parts of his body by a kind of autoamputation. In the physical stress of superstimulation of various kinds, the central nervous system acts to protect itself by a strategy of amputation or isolation of the offending organ, sense, or function. Thus, the stimulus to new invention is the stress of acceleration of pace and increase of load.

This is why (with some caveats) the phrase “Nothing Ever Happens” holds significant weight. It’s a counter-irritant. It’s a “Screw You” to the digital activist telling me with his flyer, his Substack, or his video that I’m really supposed to respect the kid covered in shit from Bangalore. No, thanks. Russian troops have taken New York, New York? Nothing Ever Happens. The smug Chud telling you not to worry, as he calmly listens to your frantic pleas about how bad things are (he knows), but he’s not going to let his psycho-security be torn to shreds by the histrionics of another. This doesn’t, however, mean that nothing truly ever happens, but what does happen is often happening far more plainly between the lines of fine print or omitted from the press.

Things do indeed happen, but one mustn’t fall for the deluge of slop in the same way Boomers can pile a hundred thousand likes onto a clearly AI-generated image on Facebook. However, when you recognize that our foes on the Left are so keenly linked through an intersectional framework that blurs every progressive issue into one hulking coalition that turns PETA donors into radical race communists, then you see how there is no off-ramp from their brand of crazy.

To cite McLuhan one last time:

The principle of self-amputation as an immediate relief of strain on the central nervous system applies very readily to the origin of the media of communication from speech to computer. Physiologically, the central nervous system, that electric network that coordinates the various media of our senses, plays the chief role. Whatever threatens its function must be contained, localized, or cut off, even to the total removal of the offending organ. The function of the body, as a group of sustaining and protective organs for the central nervous system, is to act as buffers against sudden variations of stimulus in the physical and social environment.

“Nothing Ever Happens” is that cut-off, a pressure relief valve from the billions of bits of information that can turn the allegedly rational man into a foaming-at-the-mouth zealot for reparations for infinity Bomalians. So receptive is the average well-to-do liberal to being told this by a mass of talking heads from the media, the state, and other “concerned citizens,” that you can drive down major parts of highways in Texas and see only Ukrainian and Israeli flags fly, with barely anything American to be seen besides your tax dollars at work.

Cut yourself off from the needless white noise of propagandists.

Nothing Ever Happens.

But Everything Happens, Too.