Degrade, dismiss, disinform (ft. Cracker Barrel)
How captured social media platforms are weaponised against the public conscience.
Now that it’s been about a month since the ordeal finally died down, I’d like to introduce you to a strategy of public humiliation the tech mafia often likes to employ in tormenting the American public.
I implore you doubly to read on if you are someone who has read the so-called ‘recaps’ about the event in magazines like Forbes or Snopes. You haven’t been told the full story.
Like most astroturfed social media discourses, the Cracker Barrel logo discourse traces its origins to the mobbed up cesspool formerly called Twitter (now called X.com). While Cracker Barrel revealed the logo change to the public on August 18th, it wasn’t until three or so days later that the influencers at the top of the X.com pyramid decided there wasn’t anything more interesting going on and went ahead and aped into it:
Stage 1: Degrade
Once the usual suspects on X.com got a hold of it, it was showtime. The website would be absolutely battered by the overwhelming groupthink of conformist losers that Elon and friends keep around their dying forum, making such shit takes as these basically inevitable:
And following the opening salvos from the Retards in Command, of course they had to sanction the most banal sort of controlled opposition to throw their two cents into the dungheap so the website doesn’t look like the totally empty dumpster fire it increasingly is:
This is stage 1 of the stratagem: Degrading the public.
The uninitiated might find the above interesting or not, but what won’t occur to them to look for are all the dimensions others had about this conversation that they were never shown.
Stage 2: Dismiss
The reason that so many people have a problem with goings on like the Cracker Barrel logo change is that it’s evidence of how helpless they are to the onslaught of massively wealthy stakeholders that have only been getting richer as of late while the rest of us get poorer. Ever heard of BlackRock?
The key people who decide to sanction discourses like this are aware of this well of grievance the public has. That’s actually the very reason why they deliberately open up the floodgates of sentiment about it – think of it like a kind of psychosocial bloodletting ritual. Before we complete that picture though, we have to talk about stage 2 of the stratagem: Dismissing the public.
Some time elapses between the opening of the discourse in mid-to-late August and its closing some time in early September. This is where the dismissal effectively happens: you’re all busy chattering about the subject, sharing your opinions and trying to organically form a consensus about what this is, how you feel about it, and why.
The first order of business the mob has is to ignore all of you while you do that. They don’t engage, they don’t listen, and they explicitly avoid sanctioning anything that looks like organic discontent or strikes at the heart of the real animus for this suffering. When you are ignored, you are effectively dismissed, and your opinion does not count. What you think about this does not matter, and you are explicitly shown this in the form of low engagement and algorithmic hellbanning of your account.
While all of that is happening, the second order of business in stage 2 is to also collect and collate data about what the public is really saying about this. They perform a kind of temperature check on you: how much does this really bother you all? How angry are you actually? They’ll keep that in their notes on the off chance it might be useful to know later, and because it helps them more clearly separate genuine public sentiment from the puppet theatre they’re ramming down everyone’s throats in real time.
Stage 3: Disinform
After a little while though, the dismissals have run their course, and it’s time to finish the whole thing off by finally smearing out of the public record any pretence of genuine discontent. This is accomplished by simply replacing any would-be instances of organic thought with the most banal and thoughtless musings about the event that can be found, usually from accounts that functionally exist as wells for that sort of content. This picture is then completed with a highlight reel of all the worst takes from stage 1 to really jam in the contempt for the public’s thoughts on the matter. Observe:
And no discourse would be truly complete without backpedaling from the unwitting star of the shitshow:
See guys, wasn’t that great? Isn’t it nice how it all worked itself out? They put the picture back, and now this still-owned-by-private-equity carcass of former American glory is going to be good as new! Moreover:
We didn’t address any of the real grievances people have about this.
On the contrary, we gaslit all of them and made them feel alone in thinking that this is a symptom of a really deep, fucked up problem that’s ruining our country right now.
We insulted the public intelligence by reducing their complaints to an utterly retarded caricature about a fucking logo change as if that is the only thing anyone cares about in this.
And above all, we made sure that nobody has to fess up to reality or face consequences for any real harm caused to the public. We lit the PR firm behind it on fire as a show of brutality and contempt for rule of law and consensual business transactions while actively running interference for the true perpetrators of this cultural massacre.
What we have done here is created an actively managed outlet for socially organic frustrations and grievance, where we use the weight of those issues against their holders, like a kind of discourse martial arts technique. It allows the arbiters of the discourse to actively transmute anger into sadness while closing all of the false avenues of redress that are ostensibly open to actually resolve the problem (democratic process, collective action, self-organising, etc.), and further cementing that closure by humiliating whoever thought they would be able to take those avenues and help themselves better their lives. This is mind-bogglingly evil.
With the two notable exceptions of TikTok and to a lesser extent YouTube, all social media platforms are completely captured in this way. They are tools of a self-appointed cabal of billionaire mobsters used to degrade, dismiss and disinform the public by giving them an illusion of participation in public discourse and then promptly stringing up every inconvenient complaint they ever had and whipping them with it.
The hint that none of this is genuine was even dropped early in the reel of controlled opposition:
Truth is, nobody’s hearts is in any of these discourses, any more than they were for Peanut the squirrel or the countless other collections of zombie noise social media produces to drown out and preempt any genuine human consensus. It really is just bullshit for bullshit’s sake, or as Americans used to call it, horseshit.
God knows if the people could form a consensus, they might actually figure out how they’re getting fucked and try to do something about it. That must be prevented at all costs so the looting can continue.
Bonus stage: Discredit
The icing on this cake is in all of the old hat journalism rags unwittingly deputising themselves in service of the disinformation, because in truth they don’t really give a fuck either. This has the effect of creating a fourth D, if you will: discrediting.
If you were one of the unlucky few to serve as sacrificial lambs in the course of the discourse while it was ongoing, trying in vain to share your thoughts and socialise with your fellow man on platforms that now exist only to brutalise you, then whatever friends you have who didn’t keep up with this live are going to start doubting you. They weren’t there for it, but they read the recap on Forbes or Snopes or wherever, and they just can’t find what you’re talking about!
Aw, shucks! Now you sound like a crank for caring about private equity destroying your country, even though it totally is and nothing else is really going on here, and that’s even more demoralising and humiliating, isn’t it? Even your real life friends have been put at a structural disadvantage from even seeing what’s happening here because they don’t appreciate how brazen, shameless and vast the lying about everything has really become. The amount of cynicism required to independently arrive at the truth today is unbearable, perhaps even life-ruining in its own right. Isn’t that a convenient shame?
It’s time to stop choosing appeasement and trying to cooperate amicably with people who have shown no bottom to their appetite for delusions and the expedient denial of reality. This is costing us everything we truly care about in our lives; increasingly we are helpless or immobile when it comes to actualising our goals and living our lives to the fullest potential, and it’s because of this kind of shit.
It’s a false choice to play along or give into this; all you’re choosing is to lose more later, and you will live to regret it. My suggestion? Quit now while you still can and start organising for your lives, because no one else is going to do it for you.