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Victor Tangermann’s article, “Actually, Social Media Isn’t An Echo Chamber” (https://futurism.com/social-media-is-not-echo-chamber/), claims that: “Social media might not be the filter bubble we make it out to be. Quite the contrary — having access to a social media feed could, in fact, push us to get our news from a wider variety of sources.”
Apparently, he is of the belief, in the Internet age, that a social media ‘echo chamber’ is merely the simplest of self-censorships: “we confine ourselves to news bubbles”; that, “[w]e wrap ourselves in a warm blanket of news that reinforces our beliefs and opinions back to us”; that, “Facebook News Feed is an echo chamber, reinforcing each person’s political and ethical stances.”

This simple equating of levels of information exposure to inverse levels of ‘bubble’ filtration or censorship, is not the significant issue at play. ‘Big, bad, corporations and governments’ do not at all have to engage in such primitive manipulations, though it’s not the case that they have desisted from this. It’s not necessary, not when considerable sections of the public themselves can do it for them. Not only do it, but advocate for considerably more extreme and sophisticated forms of it.
Identity politics, of whatever kind, too often, occurs in corporate-hosted arenas, in which the so-called ‘public’, knowingly and unknowingly, enthusiastically do the bidding of wider, corporate interests, usually because they derive some psychological and/or financial benefit from doing so.
Marketing campaigns are most easily conducted through targeting market sectors according to mass categorical relevance, in short, through market identification. Production imperatives often obligate ‘market creation’, which entails identity construction. Identity construction, is most easily achieved through simple opposition. Without opposition, the identity in question cannot determine itself, at least not according to the classical, Occidental demands for determinate identity, apprehensively delimited and in tangible form. It’s required for all ‘divide and rule’ operations, too.

No one is saying that because people choose to live in a bubble of constrained belief that they are going to practice a total censorship through outright suppression of alternative information. That the article has been written as if such a belief were the case, actually emerges out of, and caters for, the simplistic literalism that it attempts to modify. It’s a typical example of the kind of positivist and dogmatic ghettos wherein lazy, obstinate, and arrogant, thinking, attempt to surreptitiously install their hegemonic dominance. That’s not how it actually works.
At the risk of repeating such stupidity, it might be that further explication is called for.
The article is correct in describing the emotional entrenchment that takes place through oppositional discourse and exchanges. It is through these general and informal discursivities of exchange, that misrepresentations of opposing tendencies are formed. The identity warrior surveys a range of media, not just those directly affirming held identity, but also those media belonging to the opposition, or potential opposition, as a kind of reconnaissance of enemy territory.
This has been observed on the Internet for decades.
On virtual worlds, such as Second Life, it is easy to observe people quite deliberately seeking out ideological opponents, whatever the ideology concerned. Much of this has to do with the domestication of cyberspace, giving familiar and determinate form to the limitlessness of possibility that the Internet enables. There are no passports on much of the Internet, no common set of standards by which to organise identity exchanges. This then eventuates in a general situation of personal obligation and responsibility, as far as identity expression is concerned. What can thus be observed, is a scenario whereby those most inculcated with dogmatic styles of ideological expression, those most hostile to the unfamiliar and the unknown, are the most aggressively proactive of identity warriors, and the most insistent and devious practitioners of disingenuous misrepresentation.
The resulting chaos serves the interests of the same dogmatic cultural groupings that it has served in the past. At the same time as the Internet enables greater communication, this movement produces greater levels of reactionary irresponsibility and denial.
The construction of identity bubbles, previously catered for by national governments and media, has now devolved to islands of local enthusiasm, and their often hysterical productions. Accessibility to all global information is also susceptible to the full range of global interpretations, inclusive of the ignorances of extremist hysteria. These identity-gang tendencies have always been there, they were not necessarily or wholly invented by governments or corporations, even though they might be manipulated by them, or even arise out of them. In fact, a government or corporation itself can be considered as a ‘gang’.
The xenophobic impulse is, largely speaking, the origin of social identity in all militarised regimes. This impulse perpetuates itself through the people, themselves, and the Internet merely allows the expression of that fact.
It’s not that the Internet or social media is necessarily an “echo chamber”. Echo chambers are deliberately desired and constructed, for whatever reasons, to produce echo effects. The desire for an echoic existence is usually positioned psychologically, as a figure of narcissism. The ‘culture of narcissism’, as described by Christopher Lasch, in the 1970s, never went away. What can be observed, is this culture, very much a corollary of consumerist culture, repackaging itself as virtualised, social conflict. As previously stated, this repackaging has been quietly engineered over the last few decades, in virtual worlds and in computer gaming. It’s a repackaging, as both virtualised identity and opposition. What is at play, is the commodification of the unconscious, itself. Ironically, though it expresses and produces conspiracies and paranoia, aplenty, there is no actual conspiracy behind it, at least nothing beyond the people’s tacit consent and desire. The atavistic desire for romanticising fantasy nostalgias, seen in so many contemporary media productions, is merely a commodified escape route from the disciplines of incessant production, but one that has seemingly become itself an ‘incessant production’, showing all else in the light of this productive insistence. Hence, the hysteria and ‘fake news’. The simulacrum has merely announced itself.

The article merely outlines a simplistic, behavioural explanation directed towards altering a simplistic literalism that, in any case, only an ignorant attitude would entertain. That such obviousness requires the expression of an entire article to indicate, is itself a symptom of mass cultural identity presupposition, one that perhaps sustains the slow, decelerating and simplifying obligations of its own identity game.

Image text by Robert Sheckley

The desire for fundamentalist simplicity and insular locality implicit in the resurgence of ‘flat earth’ ideology, flattens the very global ambitions originated by that desire in its imperially expansive mode. The scientific epistemology of actual imperial expansion was global. With the advent of the Internet, a level of electronic homogeneity emerges, both the dimensionality and directionality suggested by the metaphoric of an ‘information superhighway’. Here, at this levelling of information interchange, a communicative superconductivity begins to occur, and epistemology becomes subject to all kinds of cultural reflexivity.

Geometry, is the measurement of Earth (geos).

Whatever the currently dominant geometric figuration of Earth may be, as immediately intuitible, extraterrestrial cosmic shape; such a unitary outline and the epistemology of global responsibility it might suggest, do not account for differential forces of desire residing within the apparent borders of that outline yet not bound to any responsibility for it.

That presidential assent has been given to human exploration and colonisation of Mars, contrasts in a most interesting way with presidential deletion of ‘climate change’ information; the silencing of the ‘call of Earth’. The immediately suggested contrast, is between the Martian symbolics of war and the ‘one world’ ideology of ‘peaceful togetherness’ on Earth.

The actual hegemonic impetus is consumption, with various ideological ‘Earths’ and ‘worlds’ hallucinated in accord with this impetus. Whether the spatiotemporal stability of cosmic process apparently hosting these hallucinations can survive their onslaught; or perhaps require them and their effects, for continued survival; is an open question.

I’m not going to delineate the seemingly destructive factors currently held to be in play. The deep entrenchments of ‘dominion ideology’; various political and religious hysterias; and so on. All of these ideological mechanisms are susceptible to casuistical contextualisations; their essences, natures, and functions, contingent on contextualisation. And as can be seen, at the level of their explicit interchange, concurrence of contexts seems most often to occur as conflict rather than any clarity of unanimous accord. Thus, a complex, multi-dimensional scenario, beyond the flat simplicity of any ideology, and perhaps even beyond the Platonist idea.

Wrote this well over a decade ago, as a text message to Harvey John Brown, the notorious violinist! lol

“It is difficult, now, to understand the controversies that so beset initial performances of the founding works of Unheardism. From the infamous Boulez episode, through to the street protests, the ‘Bring Back Music’ marches, the reactionary critiques. With the decline of such partisan dramatics, a more balanced and measured judgment has come into play, from which, the advances that have been made can be more securely estimated.
  This is not to say that there is a soporific unanimity attendant upon the movement, there are differences, often heated, even amongst the leading proponents of the movement. But the fundamental tenets of the “Revolution of Forgotten Silences” (Schmidt:HRFS, pp.i-vii) are accepted by all, even the soundees, or ‘musicians’, as they like to call themselves.
  We are fortunate today to have the founder of the tradition with us, prior to the inaugural performance of his latest work, and he has kindly agreed to a few words with us before introducing the work.
    The piece is rather short compared to previous works, at two and a half hours long there have been speculations that he is crossing over into the more commercial realms of “Quiet” popularity. He strenuously denies this, and the difficult part writing in the third movement seems to add confirmation to such denials.
  But what is truly revolutionary about the work is the option for the audience to play Bach and Al Di Meola on their m-players, throughout the performance. Some have called it genius. Though, there has been one dissenting voice. The radical Gustavio Zizzo. Although currently conducting a six month workshop in orbit around Saturn (“the hadrons are less noisy there”), he has surveyed the score and declared, unequivocally, “Reactive Dilettante!”, ironically echoing the precise words of the founder when asked about John Cage as a possible precursor.
  AKs response: “Well, Gustavio is a virtuoso, and he has furthered my explorations of molecular noise reduction to an incredible degree, but he misses the point, I think.”   
  Gustavio cannot hear spoken responses at present, as his ears have been surgically removed, a practice he often indulges in to enable fine tuning.”

A compilation of self-quotes,enabling a semantic and thematic clarification, of sorts.

“This is disturbing, it is redolent of other book burning practioners rather than David Hume. Hume’s scepticism emerged out of a genuine philosophic path, rather than the unthinking ‘cult-speaks’ that characterise the epoch of an exploitative ‘modernity’, of which ‘speculative realism’ seems to be the most recent, sub-cultural ‘gang’ argot. A collation of anachronies and out-of-context citations, ‘speculative realism’ attempts to contrive imaginary philosophical contentions by replaying ‘positions’ no one has seriously held for centuries.”
(“Fighting Things You Cannot See: A Quick Response” – http://visionfiction.theotechne.com/WordPress/?p=154)
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“Modernity brought in a fresh consideration of these issues, applying eminently modernist formalisms, reflexively, to the processes of modernity itself. This has obviously proved too much for those who merely chant ‘progress’ as a mantra, believing in the argot of ‘modernity’, even as it displaced the autonomies of everything contrary to its projects, to the extension of its ‘networks’, and supplied them with the booty, the sp(oil)s?, of this regimentation. But this ‘supply’ has been getting a little uncertain, recently. Time to boost the old ‘self-esteem’, the flagging spirits, let’s run the good ol’ narratives of ‘can-do’, no-nonsense reductionism again, the ones that gave us what we have, the simple ones that we can understand, the ones with heroes like Copernicus, Darwin, and Freud.”
(“Fighting Things You Cannot See: A Quick Response” – http://visionfiction.theotechne.com/WordPress/?p=170)

“It isn’t my task to explain anything within such an oneiric regime (”’Oneiric economy’”), in the argots and understandings of a regime necessarily susceptible to the distortions and closures characterising the psychopathology of its governing constitution. One can only ‘show’, as it were.”
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“BROODING ON BIGOTRY: THE USA AS A THEMED THEATRICKS OF IDENTITARIAN ROLES: V. Conclusion

Essentially, what you’re saying, is that anything that sounds like critique to you, of whatever you perceive your identity affiliations to be, is invalid mythology for which you can trot out a weak differential and demythologising critique, but it’s okay for you to indulge in pontifications about those not belonging to your perceived affiliations, in an argot dripping with false assumptions, exaggerations, and outright misrepresentations.
This is why Elif Verney-Eliot, and his Communist ‘witch-hunt’ comrades, called you ‘racist’.
You’re not actually racist, though, you’re just not objective enough to transcend whatever personal trauma you’ve experienced at the hands of black authority figures. Instead, you universalise your personal conclusions in erroneous ways. That’s down to lack of raw theoretical ability; and an astounding naivety, considering you live in New York; but not any explicit racism.”
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“Losing oneself in the Neoreactionary argot of involuted self-understanding: desperately searching for a mythological precursor: generations who can only see global politics as a computor game of imperialised objects: a networked nightmare on the sports channel. That’s entertainment!
Losing oneself in the Neoreactionary argot of involuted self-understanding: Neoreaction loses itself in a replay of fundamental nostalgias, under the banner of “reality”, attempting to deal with radical technological transformation, through ideological resources (traditional identities) long since rendered redundant by the the emerging technoscenography. The essence of Occidental Modernity is expansion. To backtrack from this ‘expansionary understanding’ is for the Occident to self-destruct ”
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Adorno was brilliant. A lot of Neoreactives seem tremendously lacking in critical acumen, to the point of insanity.

Even in your own argot:
1) If a Neoreactionary suggests rampant colonial exploitations, through corrupt and unethical tactics, were justified by a Darwinian ideology, then why should so-called “NeoLiberal” elitism (the “Cathedral”) be denied access to the same justification?
2) Wouldn’t the same Darwinian ideology, carried through, say that Neoreaction is the the most ironic form of defeat? After centuries of privilege, there is a group of disaffected hypocrites, who are unable to prevail in a world of multinational kapital whose very development they worship, but whose functioning they are now unable to withstand without whinging complaint.
3) You’ve been locked out of academic careers because of “affirmative action”? Choose a field requiring the highest IQ, which your HBD mumblings parade so incessantly.
     You’re not popular because you represent a “privileged” group? Wow! That sounds like prejudice! Such bigotry is awful. You must feel terrible. How unfair! But I’m sure the alleged genetic predisposition towards high civilisation can enable a dignified tolerance.
How come we don’t hear the so called “Neoliberal elites” complain? Is it because they’re the winners of the Darwinian race? Or is it because they’re not insane?
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“English tendency towards abbreviation reflects the diminishing of personal expression in favour of the argot of socio-corporate activity, utility-speak. It is the language of the ur-user.”
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“To what degree, is the telegraphic abruptness of the Neoreactionary style (as shown regularly on ‘Outside in’), an argot of dehumanised abbreviations constituting psychotic reduction as linguistic narcotic?”
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“The rhythmics of intensification and release suggested by a “concentration of powers” is largely configured by a deprivation anxiety conditioned by history and a particular ‘evolutionary’ sequence. The notion of an ‘android’, or ‘robot’, is not new, or even a unique characteristic of Modernity. The notion of an artificial being or man goes back millennia, to ancient times. But its contemporary emphasis, and realisation, is a concomitant of larger and ‘deeper’ movements, which can, of course, be aligned in interesting and insightful ways with this or that topoi, ‘metaphysical’ or ’empirical’; but all of these ‘things’, these abbreviations, are in operation; and really, one has to be able to see that, and not ‘reduce’ it to one’s favoured argot of insularity. But this is precisely what the Occident seems unable to do. It has used division and differential classification for so long as weaponry, that it can no longer distinguish itself from its own armoury. The ‘android’ emerges, to the degree that the pretence of this distinction collapses.”

These are quick responses to Matthias Steingass’ “Check out The Imperfect Buddha Podcast => “, FB post, here; & the “9.1 Imperfect Buddha Podcast on the liberating force of non-Buddhism”, there. I’ve only heard about an hour & ten minutes of the podcast, so this responds to the content up to that point.

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The desire for ‘commitment’, for a ‘being together with’, whether with an ideology or communitarian sect, is inherently contradictory, if an identified form is sought, whilst at the same time, all ideological identities are proscribed.

[Laruellean Questioner?]: “Tell me something, but don’t specify anything.  If you do so specify, you are susceptible to narrow literal interpretations of ‘sufficiency’; if you don’t, you are susceptible to accusations of vagueness.”

It’s the demand to free the questioner from his/her habits, & to expand his/her mind, but to conduct this liberation in the language of the habitual; which can actually be done; but then, to do this while the questioner engages in deliberate obfuscation & contradiction, whilst demanding that such deliberations not be analysed or critiqued.
This is an enforced framing, calculated to produce ‘non-communication’ & ‘non-commitment’, lol. This calculated militancy preserves, in a farcical way, an obligatory faceted & controlled critique, within tight parameters, as a superficial commodity that can be bought & sold in the Occidental marketplace, whilst leaving all the iniquities through which that marketplace arose, & continues to be sustained, unquestioned.

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On transcendence: ‘transcendence’ is always specific; it is ‘transcendence from’; it occurs as a relation, not being bound by, specified identity, or identities.

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One of my FB, & SL, friends, has had a ‘white light’ experience, which is often associated with religious or theological ideas. If one wished to absolutise a physicalist interpretation, to totalise the metaphor of scientific phusis, as it were, reducing to anthropically mediated conventional notions of ‘physical process’; it can be said that a ‘white light’ experience is a resonance of being closer to being driven by the liberatory flows of stellar energy, which is an ‘origin’ of the life force coursing through all biological instantiations belonging to ‘Earth’. It could be considered a ‘solar memory’, recalling this ‘origin’; an ‘origin’ we experience, & that is reinforced, everyday.
But to say it is exclusively that, & to identify it as such, is to cut off further contextual resonances & the insights they could bring. To justify such a scission, citing economy of thought in search of some ‘true’ structural necessity underlying an allegedly supervenient ‘phenomenal’ play, is merely to dualise in the service of some ‘purpose’ or expediency, some assumed teleological structure, that equally needs to be taken into consideration, & not left in the slums of unthought dogma. This is precisely what Occidental thought has a tendency to neglect, leaving unquestioned its own animus; & rejecting all other ways of thought, either blatantly, or through some positioning of trivialising exoticism alienated into the Orient or elsewhere, as, let us not forget, an ‘identity’, always an ‘identity’. An ‘identity’ that can then be run through all the regular procedures of an essentially Aristotelian bureaucracy typifying so much Occidental discourse. The algorithm of such bureaucracy, more often than not, stifles imagination & truly effective critique, necessary for the speed of understanding.

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Laruelle’s ideas are just obvious restatements of logics already within; Derrida, for instance; & in Buddhism, in Mahayana, Chan, & Zen Buddhisms; & even in prior Western receptions of those.
One has to ask the question, whether or not it is a conflation to contrast the practices of Buddhist institutions with the philosophical doctrines of a Laruelle, whilst avoiding the engagement of critical comparison between Nagarjuna, say, & Laruelle.

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Both Buddhist & Hindu institutional interventions in the West, are necessarily going to contain traces of, & be constrained by, the sociopolitical distortions which can affect any other institution, whether in the ‘East’ or ‘West. Using & pointing out these factors, can indeed, constitute critique of a praxis already conforming to Occidental (Christian-Islamic) modalities, but it doesn’t constitute an engagement with actual philosophical doctrine, not even to the level of prior Western receptions. It only continues the venerable tradition of exotic inflations & deflations, where the Occident continues to speak only to itself, whilst repeating the insights of others, which initially it always pretends not to understand, as discoveries of its own.

That, in short, is the business of Buddhism.
But the texts are something else, & they are freely available.
My own awareness of Buddhism comes solely from textual encounters, decades ago. I’m well aware of the fragility of collectives & sects, so have no expectations of them. If one expects Buddhism to be yet another social club, it’s obvious that actual textual encounter with its philosophies is not one’s priority.