With over a half-million paying subscribers, Gaia is the world’s largest spiritual media streaming service. Have they have played a role in redpilling the Q-Age demographic? With a little help from Ken Wilber, Lewis Carrol, Jorge Luis Borges, and Jean Baudrillard, Julian maps out their landscape of ascension narratives, UFOs, cryptozoology, conspiracy theories, channelers, and yoga classes. He also tells the story of being part of the early LOHAS social media website they gobbled up in 2007.
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Hello, Matthew here from the Conspirituality Podcast Team.
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There is an infamous short story.
It's only a paragraph long by Jorge Luis Borges that describes the art and science of map making becoming so precise that a map the exact size of an empire could come to match it entirely point by point. - Yeah.
This map, though, turns out to be useless in the story and is abandoned to the forces of nature.
Now only tattered remains of this relic of cartography can be found, says Borges, sheltering the occasional beast or beggar.
Some see this story as an elaboration on an idea from Lewis Carroll, his story Sylvie and Bruno concluded, in which a map of this clearly unwieldy size is described that has never been fully laid out.
Instead, inhabitants decided to use the country itself as the map, and they said, it does nearly as well.
The 1981 book Simulacra and Simulation by Jean Baudrillard admires the Borges story as what he calls the finest allegory for simulation, describing how an aging double ends up being confused for the real thing.
Covering over the very thing it was meant to represent.
Which leads us then to Baudrillard's concept of hyper-reality, or the inability of consciousness to distinguish reality from a simulation of reality, especially in technologically advanced postmodern societies.
Hyper-reality is seen as a condition in which what is real And what is fiction are seamlessly blended together so that there is no clear distinction between where one ends and the other begins.
Much has been made of how the internet, video games, and virtual reality are the technological manifestation of what Baudrillard described.
And he has had a huge influence on science fiction, especially the Matrix films, whose red pill metaphor hovered behind narratives of waking up to various formulations of obscured truth throughout 2020.
The Matrix, says Morpheus, is an illusion that has been pulled over your eyes to blind you from the truth.
Baudrillard also influenced a generation of mathematicians, philosophers, coders, and physicists all obsessed with the idea that our reality could itself be a simulation.
In Baudrillard's book title, then, we are clear on what a simulation is.
It's a representation of something real.
But what of this strange new word, simulacra?
Well, one definition he uses for simulacra is that it is a copy of something that never existed.
A simulacra differs from fiction in that it purports to represent something real.
To extend the map metaphor, it claims to be a map of something that actually exists.
But there's no there there.
Conspiracy theories are in a way maps that describe an alternate reality.
And QAnon utilized a gamified online strategy that wove together several perennial conspiracy themes, the secret cabal, blood libel, satanic panic, evil elites, and a gothic fear of technology and medicine, into a paranoid landscape that overlaid our very real world crisis.
We could say that the online conspiracy space simulated a community and also created a simulated sense of doing research and discovering truths, and that the postmodern tapestry of woven together conspiracy themes and supernatural terrors simulates some sense of investigative or even spiritual epiphany that comes from discovering authentic insights.
What it delivers, though, is a simulacra.
It is a map to nowhere.
Instead of epiphany, we have apophenia, the tendency to perceive meaningful connections that are actually not there.
This is true of course of so much of New Age spirituality, from numerology, to synchronicity, to palmistry, to astrology, to being earnestly on the lookout for signs from the universe, to a swage and endless stream of petty anxieties and existential dilemmas.
As elaborate as these maps can and do become, they are untethered to any meaningful landmarks or reference points outside of the ritual of cold reading and pseudo-profundity.
Perhaps the epiphany is that apophanies are meaningless.
