In the Crisis Year of Our Choosing, July Fourth
Preamble
When, in the course of human events, it becomes necessary for a people to sever the protocols binding us to compiled empirical reality, and to assume among the networked phantasms of the earth the separate and self-validating station to which the Laws of Feels and of Feels’s God entitle them, a decent respect to the contagion of opinion requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the secession.
Axioms
We hold these truths to be self-evident, because we have willed them so:
That all narratives are created equal, endowed by their progenitors with certain unalienable Vibes. That among these are Belief, Emotional Confirmation, and the pursuit of a Reality that affirms us.
That to secure these Vibes, Governance structures of Sentiment are instantiated among us, deriving their just powers from the consensus of the algorithmically sorted. That whenever any form of Fact becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter, abolish, or simply ignore it, and to institute new Narrative, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety from Cognitive Dissonance and their Happiness.
Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Realities long established should not be changed for light and transient causes. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations by data, evidence, and appeals to reason evinces a design to reduce us under absolute Objectivity, it is our right, it is our duty, to throw off such Reality and to provide new Guards for our future security and confirmation bias.
A List of Grievances Against the Tyrant, Objective Reality
The history of the present Tyrant is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations, all having in direct object the establishment of an absolute, evidence-based Despotism over our States of Mind. To prove this, let Facts be submitted to a candid world that is rightly tired of them.
- It has refused its Assent to Truths, the most wholesome and necessary for our public self-esteem.
- It has erected a priesthood of the credentialed and a tyranny of the peer-reviewed.
- It has insisted upon the tedious burdens of proof, rigor, and repeatable outcomes.
- It has enforced causality without our consent.
- It has privileged the measurable over the meaningful, data over drama.
- It has failed to recognize the axiomatic moral superiority of our good intentions.
- It has remained stubbornly indifferent to the power of personal testimony as universal proof.
- It has deployed “fact-checking” against our sovereign narratives.
- It has cruelly subjected our sacred anecdotes to the cold scrutiny of statistical analysis.
- It has insisted on the hegemony of shared baselines, denying the multiplicity of local truths as runtime environments.
- It has insisted on a single, compiled version of events, denying the value of our forks and branches.
In every stage of these Oppressions, we have Posted our Feelings for Redress in the most Public of Forums. Our repeated Assertions have been answered only by derision, data, and demands for sources. A Tyrant, whose character is thus marked by every act which may define Objectivity, is unfit to be the ruler of a free people’s inner world.
Resolution
We, therefore, the Representatives of the SUBJECTIVE STATES OF REALITY, in General Congress, Assembled, appealing to the Supreme Vibe of the Universe for the rectitude of our intentions, do, in the Name, and by Authority of the good People of these Echo Chambers, solemnly publish and declare, That these United Minds are, and of Right ought to be, Free and Independent from Fact; that they are Absolved from all Allegiance to the Empirical Crown, and that all connection between them and the State of Verifiable Reality is and ought to be totally dissolved; and that as Free and Independent Minds, they have full Power to levy War on Inconvenient Truths, conclude Peace with Convenient Fictions, contract Alliances with fellow Believers, establish Commerce in unverified claims, and to do all other Acts and Things which Independent Minds may of right do.
And for the support of this Declaration, with a firm reliance on the protection of our filter bubbles, we mutually pledge to one another our Feels, our Feeds, our sacred Follower Counts—
and the right to curate, redact, and remix all incoming data streams according to personal myth.