The Change Report™: Cy Canterel

Exploring the overlap of digital nihilism, philosophy, and the state of politics with one of the internet's best thinkers.

Welcome to The Change Report™, an interview series exploring and explaining change from people who are making a difference in the world. This interview series is free but def consider supporting The Trend Report™ however you can, either by sharing this story or upgrading to a paid subscription 💚

Also if you’re reading this and are free: join us at 12PM EST / 9AM PST / 6PM CEST today, as I’ll be chatting with Max Berlinger as a part of the new How To Be Creative™ series about fashion writing and trend analysis. It’s free! RSVP here!

Not that this has ever not been the case recently, but it very much feels like we’re experiencing a nuclear meltdown of culture at the hands of technology, specifically the internet. A rapture fueled by social media, digital points of sale placed over warzones, digital money yielding golden calves, artificial intelligence-based cabinet members: these are deeply strange times, each moment a techno dystopia that inspires the now-memetic reply of “Black Mirror can’t keep up.”

None of this is to mention the shooting of Charlie Kirk, which feels like the moment that an already hot room overheated. Maybe it was our being subjected to such graphic violence so casually on our feed or perhaps it was the congregations seeking solace in AI speeches from the deceased, the rot of the internet firmly transubstantiated into rot in life — and the best example of this is the shooter, Tyler Robinson. From “transmaxxing” to Groypers, we’ve gone beyond Pluto and into the unknown, a deep space that collapses political parties and positions political action — and political violence — as shitposts. “Nihilism” has become an easy frontrunner for word of the year, given the circumstances and a larger burn-it-all-down ethos that is defining the Gen Z politic. The world is opening its eyes to something a bit more complicated than the premise of Adolescence or anything in The Anxious Generation: it’s not as simple as “stop playing on your phone”

This very heady but so very normal situation is a perfect time to turn to philosophy for answers, as such techno-politi-cultural crossovers are all expressions of emerging worldviews that many are trying to understand or co-opt or use to create agendas. It’s less that these are “scary times” but more that we’re trying to cram the history book of these times as it' is being written, only to learn that we’re failing the test bigly. Someone I’ve found quite an astute interpreter of the now is Cy Canterel, a media and technology scholar and the writer of the Abstract Machines newsletter.

Cy has had many a breakout moment in the past year via her TikTok, explaining complex ideas in very straightforward — And calm! — ways. From analyzing MAGA as a collective narcissistic movement to understanding power structures via infrastructures of illusion, from chaos and evil as a means to exacerbate entropy to constitutional blindspots as an enabler of current constitutional exploitation, Cy is one of the best thinkers on and offline who people lovingly refer to as “Philosophy Gaga” given the blonde hair and a likeness to Stefani Germanotta. Her video on the shooting and the surrounding thinking attached to it has become a crucial text of these times. I highly, highly recommend watching her full eight minute exploration (TikTok, YouTube) on blackpill aesthetics but here is a crucial passage —

The medium is the message. The meme factory does three jobs at once. Number one, it allows for recruitment at scale, so high contrast, darkly funny, and deliberately absurd images travel farther than policy papers. A kid who would never sit through a speech will swallow a hundred images that say more, faster, and sneakier. Number two, plausible deniability. Irony is a Kevlar vest. If you take it literally, they were just joking. If you miss the reference, you reveal you're out of the club. The ambiguity is the shibboleth and desensitization. Number three: shock is used like a gym routine. The first time you see it, you flinch. The 10th time, you smirk. By the hundredth time, a position that once looked unthinkable has been normalized inside the in-group. That's why the aesthetics feel like a mashup of cartoon frogs and Wojacks and glitch art and millenarian doom and consumer culture parody. The mix says nothing matters. Everything's a joke. Nihilism is the punchline. So, who gravitates to black pill spaces? It's often younger men who feel exiled from status games that they think they can't win, like dating, elite colleges, prestige jobs, coherent communities. It's cheap status. Attention is the currency and it bonds people who may never meet offline.

Such is the reveal of the digital underbelly that so many of us knew about but the vast majority of us had never plunged the death of. Thus, the alcohol with which further creates confusion within these chaotic times.

---

To better understand this situation and to better understand how Cy thinks about these changes , I reached out to her and we had a two-part conversation: I relayed questions via email for us to chat through and she put together ideas on paper. We also hopped on a call, just to chat and meet each other which was going to be brief but we got to talking about other subjects to expound upon her answers. Thus, a two-part interview. Let’s dig into part one, which was via email, where we discuss the nature of change in these times.

KRF: What does change mean to you?

CC: Change to me means really the only constant. I think of change as both a force of momentum and a force of friction when it comes to how people experience it. I think it's probably the most difficult force for any conscious being to contend with, but especially humans because of our reflective, mimetic, and projective psychologies. Equanimity is the cardinal direction that I try to point myself toward, which I know is unreachable. But I think if we can take the view that change is inevitable and is occurring from the scale of astrophysics all the way down to the molecular level, the quantum level, it becomes a source of possibility and growth, albeit painful, rather than solely a source of anxiety and fear. I think change is at base the force that most people fear more than anything else, even if they can't name that as the source of their fear. I think about the ancient Chinese Oracle the Yi Jing a lot when I think about change and how John Cage used it as a structure in his composition “The Music of Changes.” Accepting change really means accepting the constant breakdown and reconstitution of order, and the incursion of chaos into order, and not always trying to ward it off, but not destroying things just to destroy them. I think of the way he used chance and the way the Yi Jing uses chance is a way of constructively contacting chaos. I try to think about that a lot in how I approach active, everyday living.

KRF: How are "these times" changing? Given recent events, it seems like we went from everything happening a little bit to everything happening a lot.

CC: I think the present time is in a state of what Douglas Rushkoff calls "present shock." How he explores that is how our digital technology has fundamentally shifted our experience of time, rendering people overwhelmed by the "endless now." The demands of that now render them unable to orient themselves toward a meaningful future or even a meaningful past. Alvin Toffler referred to “future shock” as living in a consistent state of anxiety and fear about the omnipresent future. But Rushkoff extends this into the present— specifically to the realm of digital devices, which are capable of delivering so much of what is going on at any given moment in real-time to the tip of our noses. He calls this "digiphrenia" (from digital + schizophrenia) to describe the disorientation we get from trying to keep up with all of these simultaneous digital impulses and information, leading to a sense of fragmented attention, chronic stress, and even a fragmented sense of reality. I think this is exacerbated by the echo chambers that algorithms create. It isn't so much that more is happening in the present time than at any time in the past, it's that our technology enables awareness of much more that is happening in real-time, which has become overwhelming for most people to deal with.

KRF: From a political-philosophical point of view, what makes these times and this moment different? If we're thinking about this time as a text, how do you suggest "reading" it?

CC: I think if we're looking at the individual character of this time period we need to look at the fragmentation of what I call consensus reality, which is where a sizable-enough group of people are capable of coming to a consensus about ideas and interpretations that order their reality, and can create a society based on those consensus-derived ideas and interpretations. A unique facet of this time period is that because the mediums we communicate through are owned mediums, the owners of those mediums are driven by profit above all else, and because the fantasy of late-stage capitalism is totally individualized consumption, we are seeing consensus realities get smaller and smaller, essentially to an algorithmic niche or even to a single person. This can easily serve to divide people and keep them in the dark about the larger systemic issues that they might be able to otherwise affect if they could communicate outside of owned filters (and the biases those come with). Toffler has a good quote here: “The illiterate of the 21st century will not be those who cannot read or write, but those who cannot learn, unlearn, and relearn.”

Equally, I think we have to look at what Achille Mbembe calls “necropolitics,” which is a key element of late-stage capitalism and a lot of the underlying currents that are driving the push back to authoritarianism. Necropolitics revolves around political structures that manage populations via direct violence, deprivation, and states of exception. It creates power structures that wield the threat of death to control and subjugate people rather than creating those which focus on the management of biological existence.

If we are reading this time as a text, we need to read it at a high level in order to see the wider patterns that create the specificities that erupt onto the surface of our lived experience. We tend to read this text too closely because it makes so many incursions into our personal bubbles, but those incursions can prove to be so distracting that we miss the larger narrative as well as the breakdown of large narratives, which are incredibly important for founding and maintaining social cohesion.

KRF: You write and talk a lot about the relationship between the internet and politics and it seems like, increasingly, the rot of the internet is colonizing more and more space in politics. How is this changing "society" as we know it, from a podcasting VP to message board meme murderers?

CC: I think it's an interesting way to look at human history through the lens of the tools that we create and how we leverage them. What do we make from these tools? Why are these tools created? How do these tools either serve to reinforce or destroy certain forces in our cultures? The internet is an incredibly powerful and compelling lens through which to look at the closing of the modern era and the advent of the postmodern era and whatever we’re facing next. It simultaneously flattened and bored deep holes into the plane of our shared existence.

In a way, it's always allowed for the formation and scaling of subculture, which is an important function. We did see a lot of homogenization and meta-cultural narratives getting pretty ossified in the 80s and 90s, and I think the internet emerged at the time where people were really hungering for ways to break out of those prisons.

The fact that internet culture is often seen to be based on consumerism and the flotsam and jetsam of throwaway products and advertising and surface-level attributes — to me, isn’t indicative of a larger decline in human capabilities. What is indicative of decline is the way that we're seeing the shadow side of what our culture has pushed out of conscious knowledge and conscious ability to cope with (because of the profit motive and the consolidation of power in these giant structures) erupt through the flimsy membrane of our very flattened consumerist world. I think that is the warning sign that we need to pay attention to more than anything else— it's not the form that cultural expression takes (like a meme being meaningful), it's the hopelessness and despair that comprise the content and thrust of those cultural narratives.

KRF: How can the internet be used for a different type of change? Or are we experiencing that now?

CC: I think the internet and emerging technologies in general can be used to create more sustainable and constructive choices for human society and our habitat by employing it to found systems and structures that prize resilience and cyclicality rather than using tech as a cudgel to enforce a linear idea of progress, growth, and a single-minded obsession with profit. Focusing on resilience and cyclicality might look like things happening on the edges for a while— whether that's mesh networks, edge computing, small language models, blockchains, or alternate, open-source, decentralized platforms. We need to create structures that are more capable of absorbing disruption and supporting smaller models of community while being thriftier with their use of precious resources, transitioning away from and eventually abandoning the mythology of unlimited growth driving progress that is defined by spectacle, profit, and extraction.

If you look at the way that Peter Thiel, a poster child for postmodern techno culture, talks about progress — not only as if it is a kind of ultimate good in itself, but a concrete given, you'll see a rejection of resilience. You'll see a rejection of equanimity. You'll see the yawning chasm of insecurity and death anxiety that has driven this kind of Randian hubris since the post-World War II era. It's my position that the technocrats who see themselves as futurists in this model are actually the proponents of a dying worldview, and the autocrats who seek to profit from the suffering caused by that worldview are the foot soldiers of a losing battle. We must confront our fear of inefficiency, redundancy, and slowness - not to mention gentleness and steadfastness. If we do not confront this, if we choose to ignore it, then the earth will fix that problem for us.

---

Incredible, right? A bit frightening, sure, but what isn’t “in these times”?

After reading her answers, I had a few follow ups and, since Cy and I were hopping on a call for the interview, we chatted for a bit over an hour which spiralled into much more rich territory. There is a lot we left on the table, but alas: this is edited for brevity. If people would like more, perhaps we’ll drop a sequel version: stay tuned — and let me know in the comments. Otherwise, let’s continue.

KRF: An item I was curious about was the notion of “consensus reality,” which reminds me a lot of collective consciousness — which I think about a lot, given my work in television and how that space created the idea, of “watercooler moments.” The internet does a bit of the opposite, reminding of the recent John Burn-Murdoch story about social media amps up extremism on both sides because there’s neither filter nor centralized access point. Paired with dissolving community, be it from “no third spaces” to people abandoning church, having less friends and being lonelier, this makes a bad stew of being lost. I’m curious where you think this will go. How can these things be solved? Clearly it’s not by unplugging the machine.

CC: I don't even think we should seek to unplug the machine. I am seeing a lot of these satirical comments becoming almost a mini-meme surrounding certain events: if you go on TikTok and you look at the comments under a post, you’ll see these phrases repeated over and over again, that “the internet was a mistake.” I don’t think that’s accurate.

If we're looking at the forms that culture takes through the lens of the tools that we create, and the culture that siphons through them, that gives us a really important window into where we are and where we're going and where we've been. As far as the zeitgeist and dominant narratives, when we win these sort of dominant narratives, mass culture emerged from owned mediums. That was the broadcast model, making it so you’re receiving information passively about what consensus reality is. There were a lot of gatekeepers shaping that reality, where you had very little to say about that reality.

Now we have a much more dialogic setup, where you — Anybody! — can go on a post by CNN and type out their grievances or do something destructive and have millions or billions of people react within seconds. It’s not that these things weren’t present before but there was a muffling effect that created dominant narratives, which held people together. We just don’t have that anymore: we have our little portals to our own worlds that might not be reflected by anybody else’s reality. In that sense, there’s an existentialism to this moment versus twenty or thirty years ago.

KRF: The medium really is the message, when we compare on a base level the television versus the phone, a TV show versus a TikTok: the latter is about blurring. Who is performer and who is audience? Where is the center? I’ve said this before but, when brands are your friend on Twitter, that means your friends are brands too. Most of us aren’t equipped for this!

CC: It’s disorienting. We are starting to actually see this breakdown of the structures that undergirded these mass narratives. We can’t make any demarcations in time, from this being the end of the modern era and into the postmodern era: we don’t have a word for “this” yet. But it does feel like, around the 1970s, when we started moving away from Keynesian economics, our relationship to one another and to power structures really changed. Big and complex systems are more resilient than people realize. It can take sixty years for the system and its underlying structures to break down. You see the breakdown of these overarching narratives first because the narratives are like the skin — and now we’re starting to get down to the actual bones, which are bending.

KRF: Which brings me to another subject you mentioned that seems very “in” right now: necropolitics and necroeconomics. It’s very interesting that these ideas are getting tossed around now, these ideas around our world based in ends and death. These concepts are far from becoming mainstream on a language level, but the idea of extreme versions isn’t. Afropessimism is another example. All these things are painting a picture that isn’t too joyful, not that things ever really were. These are of-a-kind and I’m curious about your thoughts on them.

CC: It creates an environment for nihilism to thrive — clearly!

But if you think about things in terms of cycles and cyclicality or even ecology, when entropy maximizes out you get growth percolating up. Structures break down but there are plenty of opportunities. Everything gets very porous, brittle and, yes, there’s a lot of collateral damage. There’s a terminal velocity to things and we are going to see things break apart as new forms emerge. That’s where I’m with John Gray, in the sense that I am anti-utopian but not as pessimistic as he is because utopias are places where fascism can emerge through over-perfection.

When I wrote about kitsch, that idea is that “kitsch” allows us to ignore shit when we actually need to embrace it: embrace inefficiency, embrace redundancy, embrace slowness, embrace the plateau. David Chapman is another philosopher that I love because what he says is that meaning is neither eternalism nor nihilism: meaning exists somewhere in between, both nebulous and patterned. If you collapse onto one side or the other, you have what he calls unstable stances, which are emotionally comforting but inaccurate to how actual meaning emerges and dissolves. If you’re living in this moment, we have a lot of experiences every single day that are emerging and dissolving, which is evidence that the system is on the verge of changing or reinnervating itself. We have to stay present enough in the moment to see where these holes up in the fabric, to allow us to engage with meaning and create more of it — versus shutting down or saying “Screw it. Let’s burn it all down.” We can’t do that. What’s the point of leaning into destruction?

KRF: It’s in these moments where you have to really pay attention to what’s sprouting. These are the moments when something really novel emerges. So, the other question I had was about our relationship to tech. Given all of this, it feels like we’re going to enter into two extremes: the right wing calling for more monitoring of the internet, which is what we’re seeing with TikTok and Chat Control, which will turn the government agent meme into reality, while the left and others are perhaps leaning away from technology, quitting these spaces as they aren’t just uncool but deeply evil. The whole of the industry revealed itself to be bad for you, the planet, communities, your livelihood: it all got bad so fast. While I don’t think this will yield a Her ending where the AI disappears — no is that the solution — but these two simultaneously pro-and-anti- tech stances aren’t ever going to come to agree on a solution. The answer is and isn’t logging off, hence everyone wanting to get online. But to what we talked about earlier, “this” is reality now. The internet and such tech isn’t going to go away.

CC: There’s an inherent conflict within what was called “California ideology,” that these structures will create brand new financial markets and governments, all these new freedoms. Peter Thiel — who adopts Foucault's panopticon with Palantir — is a great example. Luddites aren’t exactly the right idea, as they were protesting working conditions and not technology.

KRF: Is that not the same now? Since all of the internet “is work” now?

CC: You’re right. Those are interrelated — and I think it’s more about this idea of capitalist authenticity. Rob Horning has this great essay that I’ve plugged a million times called “Mass Authentic” which gets into the idea that there is no such thing as authenticity within a capitalist structure because it’s always somewhere else, within someone else, which means you have to buy it and display it in order to have an identity. It’s signs and symbols, trying to make money off of soundbites. It’s like the myth of individualized consumption! It’s like what the poet Ariana Reines said: “be the product you want to scroll.” Why would you want to do any of that in the long term? It’s exhausting! There is no meaning in these spaces. Technology is a tool, many of which can help create identity and connection. But when we reduce it to attention and purchasing habits, to profiting at any cost, it becomes a prison.

KRF: That’s very true and is coming to a head now.

CC: Larger economic structures are enabling a lot of this, these surface level products. Companies make most of their money on ads online — but the ads don’t work. It can feel like the dodo race in Alice In Wonderland, going around in circles until it stops. That’s still the structure of the internet and of these social media companies. When people stop buying so much shit, it might start to go away.

Subscribe to Cy’s newsletter here, catch her YouTube here, and her TikTok here. Some images in this post by Jacob Mitchell.