Fragments of the Unreal

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A couple of things that I read at lunch today kind of gelled into some form of weird gestalt. In this week's New Statesman, the disturbing if unsurprising fact that in 2024, internal documents from Meta '... suggested it was serving fraudulent ads to it's users 15 billion times a day, accounting for more than 10% of [Meta's] global revenue. Press Gazette reported that Meta appeared to be making more from publicising online scams than the entire news media makes from legitimate marketing...' The other piece was in today's Financial Times about Peter Thiel, the tech billionaire and PayPal co-founder [the other being Elon Musk] and the man behind Palantir Technologies, and his trip to Rome to lecture on the antichrist, challenging Pope Leo XIV and the papacy itself in the very seat of world Catholicism.

As weird a confluence of images as all of this represents, especially in the light of the fact that this is supposed to be the modern era - remember progress and enlightenment? - when fantasy and superstition have allegedly been consigned to the realm of literary fiction and left behind in our collective history. Instead of rationality, we again seem to be eager to inhabit the unreal rather than reality itself; to engage in the deliberate falsehoods of high priests and shamans: to place trust and faith in the shibboleths, talismans and relics of the newest of religions: that created by Mammon itself. Tech bros are the new priests and cardinals of this apostasy, setting themselves in opposition to the established orthodoxy of [specifically] Catholicism.

None of this should be of any particular concern to rational thinkers, except for the fact that this new belief system seems to be taking a foothold in the wider population, with people actually actively engaging with the duplicities of the 'high priests' and their 'churches', with their reliquaries and artefacts; their relics as fictive as those fragments of the one, true cross. That one of these high priests has chosen to directly set his stall in opposition to the Catholic Church in Rome itself speaks volumes to the depth of self-belief and hubris of these stupidly rich and self-serving psychopaths: as if we hadn't already had enough of that bullshit from 2,000 years of Christianity itself already...

Comments

  1. Anonymous17 March 2026 at 07:38

    Think that you'll find that "that bullshit" has been going on for as long as humans have been trying to "put one over" on the rest of us; tens of thousands of years if not more!
    ATB
    Joe

    ReplyDelete

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