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Ignore the Howler Monkeys

They only produce noise

Mike Meyer
4 min readJul 18, 2024
Rhesus monkeys are outraged at the Howler Monkey’s stupidity. Photo by Manoj Seenivasan on Unsplash

I expect people to figure this out, but it doesn’t happen.

Our cultural system is in the late stage of collapse. Institutional structures have been disintegrating for many years; this is not a sudden process.

In many ways, this failure is like analog video versus digital video failure. In the old days of analog TV, a degraded video signal produced a snowy picture. Some of you may remember that.

The audio was still there, and you could still make out the images. It was amazing what people would put up with, not realizing that they were mentally remaking most of the pictures they were looking at with only hints from the TV.

Without turning this into a technical lesson, the nature of analog video relies on the human ability to ignore gaps in information and use experience and guesswork to “see” a video image. The original video for TV was 525 interlaced scan lines that acted like a movie presenting a rapid sequence of fixed images that imitated motion.

The analog video was purely a signal-to-noise illusion. The noise could be very high, and you would still have images. This is called graceful degradation.

Digital video, the world we are in now, remains perfect until it fails. Our cultures are still analog.

The degradation of our cultural systems is so significant that we must imagine most of what we know should be there. But, just as with a snowy video picture, what people accept as working varies, but what they see is more imagination than reality.

The degradation of the American political system has reached the point that lies make up most of the image. The absurdity of people seeing anything other than a mentally ill convicted criminal with advancing dementia surrounded by howler monkeys desperate to score wealth and influence at the current RNC convention is stunning.

The message is minimal and mostly designed to trigger a specific population’s desire for various forms of antique discrimination and outright hate. Because what is being triggered is already there and requires only suggestions for that population to fill in their own details, no complex communication is involved.

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Mike Meyer
Mike Meyer

Written by Mike Meyer

Writer, Educator, Campus CIO (retired) . Essays on our changing reality here and at https://rlandok.substack.com/

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