Time magazine fulminated this month about the rise of the trillionaires. In October, the Brookings Institute deep-dived into the rise of stablecoins. The Economist gave us their thoughts on the rise of singlehood. Straight Arrow News had a think piece on the rise of “Kirkifying” in the wake of the murder of Charlie Kirk (here). The Lancet bemoaned the rise of the far right (here). Everyone’s favorite read, Pool Table Portfolio, introduced us to the rise of the minimalist pool table (here). Trice Media offered thoughts on the rise of Indiana Pacers player Tyrese Haliburton. New York magazine waxed hopeful about the rise of the anti-Trump jury (here). PBS Frontline cobbled together a documentary on the rise of RFK, Jr. (here). CNBC trotted out an “expert” to talk about the rise of AI. Approximately seventy bajillion web pages examine, for your edification, the Rise of Skywalker.

But what does all this rising signify?

Go to virtually any country on earth and you can see, somewhere, monuments to great civilizations of the past. Ambitious men lifted languages, gods, and their ancestors’ glory on their shoulders, building statues and roads and temples to commemorate their and their people’s rise. These ambitions, swathed in blood and destruction, left the world in a different state than it had been before.

The rise of Chinggis Khan meant something, concrete and profound, for a sizable fraction of humanity. The rise of Hindu sacred politics transformed South and Southeast Asia and beyond. The rise of the Tang Dynasty reshaped the political order in eastern Eurasia. The rise of Sargon of Akkad redefined kingship in the Middle East. The rise of Christendom transformed Europe. The rise of Islam threatened Christian rule. The rise of the Comancherian Empire was greatly worrying to the Spanish in Mexico. The rise of Tokugawa Ieyasu capstoned the unification of Japan. The rise of Andrew Jackson caused endless headaches for the moneyed powers on the East Coast of North America. The rise of Nelson Mandela crippled white rule in South Africa.

These rises, and many others one could list, were real. They played out in the physical world. Of course much of any rise will be psychological, a question of what people believe. Napoleon, MacArthur, and Alexander were showmen, and for good reason. If you want to dominate, then you must play the part of the dominator. But the difference between the real Napoleon and the ones who play him on TV is that Bonaparte in the flesh really did invade Russia and Egypt, really did bring “Enlightenment” to Europe at the barrel of a gun, really did accelerate the downfall of the Catholic Church as a political player on the world stage. Napoleon’s rise was a bricks-and-mortar, blood-and-suffering rise. When men and their civilizations and ideas rose, there were indelible consequences. Usually bad ones but, still, rises used to mean huge reworkings of regional and even global frameworks.

Contrast Napoleon’s rise with, say, the rise of the internet user, as explicated at the online outlet Ars Technica (here). With the rise of the internet user, human beings entered into a different topography of being than they had ever known. Things rise and fall in cyberspace in a way utterly unlike civilizations rose and fell in the rest of human history.

Internet rising is just a question of discursive centripetal force. When something or someone “rises” online, it means that more people are talking about that person or thing. No, not even talking. Most people, the vast majority of people, don’t talk at all. Or, if they do, they express themselves in fractured lingua-code in comment boxes. Most people just scroll. “The rise of x” means that someone, somewhere — and quite possibly not even someone but some algorithm — is pushing a topic higher in the planetary hive mind. Nothing is rising to any consequence. It is just a function of people chattering on Facebook.

“The rise of X” is actually a thing, come to think of it. X’s owner, Elon Musk, is, as Time magazine noted, on course to become a trillionaire. But what difference will that make to the rest of us? Huge risings, huge changes online. We plebs just keep scrolling and scrolling. Things rise, and nothing for us is any different at all.

This is what it means, this rise of the internet user. It means that nothing else rises at all. It means we are caught in the amber of changelessness disguised as endlessly changing images and spectacles (for more, see here). We are passive observers of rises that do nothing to change our fundamental online condition of helplessness, vulnerability to what others do to us. We are stimulated with bombast about this or that rise. We are made to get riled up about “the war on” this or that person or thing. There’s a war on women! A war on truth! A war on terror! A war on drugs! RFK, Jr., we are told, is pondering a war on saturated fats. Some people in San Diego are starting a war on cars. There is a war on the judiciary, talking heads cry. There’s a war on immigration, they scream. The war on Christmas apparently ended in Christmas’s defeat, but that doesn’t matter anymore because now we are all shouting about the war on free speech. And so on.

Amid this discursive whirlpool one finds those looking for the next thing to do war on. Hence the internet headline about the thing that “nobody is talking about.” Just you wait, the implication goes. There’s no war on cupcakes now. In fact, nobody is talking about cupcakes much at all. But the rise of cupcakes is imminent. And when the cupcakes rise, then there will be a war on them, in which you must all take part. You must pour your mental energy into memes and snark on the internet until the next thing nobody is talking about rises, at which point the war on cupcakes will be forgotten, nothing having happened in the real world, cupcake-wise or otherwise.

Well, it’s not exactly true that nothing happens in the real world as all of this rising and warring and talking is raging. What happens is that the rich keep getting richer and the poor keep getting poorer. Elon Musk is accumulating money almost faster than Washington can print it. A handful of others are stuffing their pockets, too. Some people have yachts the size of old British battleships. Some people have entire islands all to themselves. As for the other 99.99999% of humans? Well, we get to watch cat videos on the internet platforms the rich people own. We get to distract ourselves with the rise of the war on the thing nobody is talking about, because it’s much easier to do that than to admit that we are hungry, and broke, and lonely, and trapped in our despair.

Earlier this year, Georgia congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene shared a video that a woman in Illinois had posted online about not being able to make ends meet no matter how hard she tried (here). The woman begins her short video already fighting back tears. “Hey, TikTok,” she says. “I’m just on here wondering if anybody is feeling the same way I’m feeling.” She is working and working but still doesn’t have money to pay the bills, she explains. Marjorie Taylor Greene declared the woman’s situation to be “unacceptable.”

Yes, it is unacceptable. But TikTok is where unacceptable goes to be mainstreamed. Human suffering is a punchline in cyberspace. The internet is indifferent to our tears. It feeds off of them, in fact. The more we suffer, and war, and cheer on meaningless rises, and search for the thing that nobody is talking about, the more the rich get richer and the poor get poorer. Marjorie Taylor Greene, who finally understood that nothing ever changes in this new world order, and who was subjected to death threats online for saying so, declared she will be resigning from Congress in January of next year. Greene’s exit signifies the rise of one person of conscience, sick of the war on human beings that the internet has always been.

The billions of prisoners who remain on social media will surely stop talking about Marjorie Taylor Greene, as they have already stopped talking about the Illinois woman, Dianna Allen, whose TikTok pain revealed the reality of the rise of the internet (see here). The rise of the war on the thing that nobody is talking about–this is our fate, one entirely beneath our dignity as children of God.

For God’s sake, let us rise up out of the muck, awake and rise from the nightmare called being an internet user. If Dianna Allen is reading this, I hope she will contact me. I do not have much, but what little I can give is real, worth infinitely more than whatever we will find in the anti-human hellscape online.