Fredösphere

Having recently moved to Texas, this is true, but also misleading in the way that all top-level statistics mislead. Namely, the distribution is radically heterogeneous—it clusters blue, as is typical, in the cities. But drop in on most *places* and it still feels Texan. Like everywhere else throughout the West, cities increasingly dominate our culture, thus our politics, with their globohomogenized phenomenology—a phenomenology that derives from a virtual reality far removed from physical reality’s constraints, and that selects for fundamentally imaginary (thus left-coded) images of ourselves. Unfortunately for the right, this phenomenology spreads alongside connectivity itself, which implies technologies like Starlink act as long-run sources of rural entrainment to the Utopian Phenomenological Attractor, regardless of its owner’s politics. This is because light-speed connectivity has long-run network effects isomorphic to modern urbanization upon those it connects: it selects for reduced local friction and global attention / synchrony. In other words, unconstrained connectivity selects against the local, the particular, and one’s unmediated relation to local particularity. It injects global expectations and highly abstracted context into local dynamics—typically in ways that undermine or eradicate information gradients of local relevance. This is why the “right”, to the extent it remains conservative, looks more conceptually “diverse”. Right wing conceptual diversity reflects a behavioral diversity derived from path-dependent particularities of lineage, place, and locale-constrained modes of making a Living. Conversely, the left’s conceptual coherence primarily reflects abstract entrainment with the Utopian Phenomenological Attractor, and the extent to which its No-Place-Nature allows for greater convergence—given its imaginary futures need not compete with information from concrete realities other than the already globohomogenized urban landscapes of their extant power base. Thus we observe Cthulhu Always Swimming Left. And he will continue to swim “left” to the extent we believe that Left and Right constitute political categories rather than conserved adaptive tendencies upon our fitness landscape. Because when you connect all the people cells and induce a light-speed seizure, few remember, let alone feel a meaningful connection to, the particularities of past lineage or present place. In other words, hyper-connectivity blinds us to the value embedded within present and past local maxima. Thus in the face of this structural constraint and its chaotic inertia, most efforts to recover these locally maximal particularities end up looking like little more than superficial larps. So of course the W will keep going to those who advocate for the Next Utopia just over the horizon; we have for centuries dissolved our connections to the particularities of lineage and of place—to the extent that few now feel the past retains any sense of meaning beyond its present utility as a scapegoat for the predictable failures of past utopians. That is, until something major breaks, leaving survivors rushing for the lineal lifeboats. Ultimately, we’ve Messed With Texas in the same way we’ve messed with all other connections to past sources of culturally particular meaning, and are that much poorer for its networked assimilation within the virtual metroplex that now dominates our phenomenological landscape.