[9.0] Online content is increasingly uncanny.

What does that say about everything else?

The Inversion, by some accounts, has already transpired.

Its semantics emit a spooky aura à la purge or rapture, but “the Inversion” as a term reflects the precariousness of our cyber-ontology, one defined by a seemingly mundane parameter: the percentage of internet activity run by bots.

For product engineers, this proportion carries potentially apocalyptic implications; in 2013, according to the New York Times, YouTube’s nerdy code-jockeys worried that, if and/or once fake clicks and views accounted for more than half of total traffic to the website, “the Inversion” would happen suddenly and dramatically. That is, YouTube’s anti-spam algorithms would treat real content as fake, and fake content as real.

Reality would invert. “Out with the old; in with the new,” a mantra traditionally used to welcome spring cleaning rituals or a new romantic fling, would take on a novel, terrifying meaning.

In this post-Inversion dimension, a soldered, silicon simulacrum would flourish. Actual human content—our home videos, awkward teenage years, and yes, even lofi hip-hop mixes to relax/study to—would be exiled from YouTube in the name of all things anti-spam. Garbage videos sustained by paid clicks would take their place and peddle search engine-optimized junk. The useless widgets advertised therein would proliferate, wielding mealy-mouthed names like “Portable Key Holder/Organizer From Kiartten Eliminates Bulging Pockets Holds Up To 14 Keys Compact Easy To Carry Durable Construction Fits Most Keys Great Gift Idea Find The Right Key Instantly.” Garbage, garbage everywhere: just as our lord and savior, WALL-E, prophesied.

YouTube’s engineers were right to fret over this silent but equally self-imposed sequel to Y2K. What value would YouTube hold if the bots invaded, and won? What content melee would erupt across YouTube’s pages, and far, far beyond?

These questions have nagged me with waxing and waning intensity since I first read of “the Inversion” in 2018. This inquiry persists because, in classic NDA style, no substantive Inversion-related testimonials from current or former YouTube employees have ever been published. Did YouTube avert apocalypse and tweak its spam-filter algorithms in time? I have combed through cyberspace, and even used Bing one or twice as a last-ditch effort in my search for truth; I remain empty-handed, bumbling, clueless. I do not know for certain whether YouTube successfully prevented the onslaught of the Inversion, and I’m not sure if I ever will.

But Max Read, a writer who covers technology and fringe politics, throws his hat in the ring with this incisive piece for New York magazine. He hypothesizes that we already live in a post-Inversion paradigm, a hellscape that came into being without the fire and brimstone associated with end times. It’s a parallel existence within a long apocalypse:

The “fakeness” of the post-Inversion internet is less a calculable falsehood and more a particular quality of experience—the uncanny sense that what you encounter online is not “real” but is also undeniably not “fake,” and indeed may be both at once, or in succession, as you turn it over in your head.

Rather than morphing into a Babel of bot-created drivel, in other words, Read contends that the Internet transmuted into a hybrid, both-fake-and-real universe over time. Neither world survives unscathed; they swallowed each other in the process of birthing this Bardo state of smoke and mirrors.

To Read, the Inversion has seeped into every crevice of reality insofar as nothing feels quite real anymore. And, while we clamor for some storied, genuine past, we eye everything with a debilitating suspicion, including one another:

Such a loss of any anchoring “reality” only makes us pine for it more. Our politics have been inverted along with everything else, suffused with a Gnostic sense that we’re being scammed and defrauded and lied to but that a “real truth” still lurks somewhere… Political arguments now involve trading accusations of “virtue signaling”—the idea that liberals are faking their politics for social reward—against charges of being Russian bots. The only thing anyone can agree on is that everyone online is lying and fake.

The New Horsemen of the Apocalypse push-notify us of our post-Inversion cyberscape. Instagram influencers wield authority as a Pantheon of spornosexual demi-gods, commodities at once embodied and fetishized. Formerly intrepid journalists concoct misinformation in the name of buzz for their new paid newsletters hosted on Substack. And, of course, the current POTUS, with Rudy Giuliani as his messenger, clings desperately to power in a parking lot between a sex shop and a crematorium. He hawks baseless claims of a rigged election, which, in a worst-case scenario for him and his dynasty, have generated a slush fund that can pay off massive debts, and, in his best-case scenario, will help him pull off a coup.

“Everyone online is lying and fake,” okay, yes, Max Read. But (most) influencers are real human beings, many people read and trust journalists like Glenn Greenwald, and now, if polls mean anything, 70% of Republicans believe the election was neither free nor fair. Cynicism and mistrust circulated on the information superhighway affect meatspace, too.

Before we curse the cybernetic gods, fret over neo-theodicies, or deride YouTube or Silicon Valley for our democratic purgatory, it might be worth identifying what beliefs and practices preceded the Inversion. Such an exercise may confirm a lingering suspicion of mine: that the fulsome and deceptive nature of the post-Inversion world is not all that new, but rather the latest mutation of the same monsters that have long haunted humankind.

Paul Tillich, the influential German theologian whose bizarre portrait looms above, spent much of his career discussing systemic moments of reckoning: the fall of civilizations, the crumbling of worldviews. Inversions of a different sort. His own harrowing experiences informed this preoccupation: he fled Germany in 1933 as one of the first academics banned from teaching in the new Third Reich. He landed only months later in the United States to become witness from afar to the brutal expansion and eventual collapse of the fascist régime that sought to punish him.

Tillich saw the zeal and brutality with which Nazi apostles and ordinary men alike proselytized and executed party doctrine. With survival weighing heavily on his conscience, Tillich mulled over various questions in the wake of the destruction of the Second World War. Most urgently, he wondered: What qualities distinguish fascist doctrine or nationalism from “true” religion? What leads a person to worship these brutal, artificial idolatries? And how can we prevent such violent history from repeating itself?

These primeval yet ever-present conundra were, to Tillich, best understood through the language and lens of the “ultimate concern.” A concern is ultimate if “it demands the total surrender of him who accepts this claim, and it promises total fulfillment even if all other claims have to be subjected to it or rejected in its name.” The state of being ultimately concerned is faith, tout court. Central to the power of the ultimate concern is its promise of fulfillment, which the concern taketh away if not fully obeyed. It holds power in demand, threat, and promise.

Crucial to our Inversion autopsy, concern with “success” can take on life as a faith. Tillich wrote:

[Success] is the god of many people in the highly competitive Western culture and it does what every ultimate concern must do: it demands unconditional surrender to its laws even if the price is the sacrifice of genuine human relations, personal conviction, and creative eros. Its threat is social and economic defeat, and its promise—indefinite as all such promises—the fulfillment of one’s being… When fulfilled, the promise of this faith proves to be empty.

The dubious, sweeping “Western culture” label makes me less enamored with Tillich as our nuanced buoy. But his larger point is more than mere truism: by and large, modern social norms value ambition over solidarity, wealth over fulfillment. Our cup of connection doth not runneth over—as if it ever has in a relentlessly extractive settler-colonial “democracy” like the United States. When we can’t distinguish genuine camaraderie from fair-weather friendship, community from corporation, what damage has the Inversion inflicted that wasn’t already there?

Plugging Read and Tillich into each other, it’s easy to identify the latest electoral developments as signs of a dying faith.

Tillich warned that any “faith” worshipping a finite concept—be it success, a nation, or otherwise—was invariably idolatrous and would inevitably fail. Only true ultimate concerns can collapse the chasm between the individual and the absolute. (For Lutheran theologian Paul Tillich, spoiler of all spoilers: a true faith worshipped God!) Otherwise, a false faith’s followers come up for air over time to be “disappointed radically and totally.”

Read helps us see, however, that dogged attempts to return to some utopian, imagined Truth buried in the past—even a past just days old—is one method to hold onto a faith or commit to a new one.

Followers of the current US president are in the midst of an exodus to social media platforms like Parler, oases sans moderation or the libs. Others find solace in a Biden victory, a long-awaited return to decency and a centrist, technocratic mandate. Silicon Valley’s wonks populate the new administration’s transition teams, ready to convert others to the faiths of success and visions of a nation that they espouse—ones ruthlessly privatized, vapidly “innovative,” and profoundly precarious.

These factions are, decidedly, not like terms, but both seem to cling to dying or recycled faiths; efforts to shape and redeem what a “nation” is and does are incarnations of the same idolatries that have tempted and taunted us for centuries. Limited faiths flourish, ambition abounds.

The Inversion has long existed in analog form; uncanny, unwavering, it has abundant digital and material fuel. For now, at least, it’s here to stay.

Divine Innovation is a somewhat cheeky newsletter on spirituality and technology. Published once every three weeks, it’s written by Adam Willems and edited by Vanessa Rae Haughton. Find the full archive here.