THE RISE OF THE SEIZERS

A Handy Guide to The Players and the Played

Here is a pocket history of contemporary mass control through drama

It started with scripted movies and TV shows. These were filmed theatrical productions using actors who were suited for close ups, not just for beholding across an auditorium. They didn't need to project their voices, for example. They could speak in low, intimate whispers or gravelly drawls. They could have, and ought to have, small and subtle flaws. Scars. Moles. Wrinkles. Crooked teeth.. These vocal, facial, and bodily eccentricities caused a sense of identification in audience members, who knew themselves to be imperfect too.

Then came two intermediate dramatic forms, bridges to the one that dominates and surround us now.

1. Reality TV, which was semi-scripted, based on contrived "situations," and guided by producers or directors giving prompts to participants, private prompts, ones unknown to the other participants, who got their own prompts. This practice, this method of shaping the story action, assured certain predictable conflicts. The resulting dramas felt both participatory and slightly absurd, like a bizarrely heightened version of actual life. Because the performers, of course, were "people" selected by public auditions. These auditions were held all across the country. Even right in your own town or city. Did you go to one yourself?

2. Documentaries. Sober, often disturbing and depressing portrayals of "our society," “our world.” You were a serious, curious person who valued "the truth" when you watched a documentary The performers weren't "performing" at all. They were captured by the camera just doing things. Or maybe the documentary was stitched together from "news" footage and other “found” material. At the end of a typical documentary the viewer thought, “I just learned something important.” Often it was a hard something. Tough stuff. But you're tough too. You can take it. But wow, so heavy!

Which brings us to the present, to an enveloping form I'll call the Seizer, because it goes right through you. A seizer is a dramatic narrative that happens all around you, and inside you. You are a performer. And kind of know it. ("Does someone have a selfie stick?") But you also don't know it, because you’re not that cynical. Because you’re not crazy, which is what you’re called when other audience members are disturbed by your suggestion that you might all be patsies in a play you didn’t write, that isn’t supposed to be a play at all. A lot of the time, instinctively and because you’ve been shamed for suspecting otherwise, you still think of yourself as a member of the audience—who can comment online, of course, sometimes using videos.

How are seizers guided and shaped? Well, in lots of ways, but the main one is by actors and producers who masquerade as "reporters," "politicians," and even, weirdly, as celebrities who have supposedly removed their masks and are speaking and behaving as "themselves." You know, "the real Tom Hanks" etc, the imperfect human who catches viruses and goes into quarantine so they don’t spread. Seizers are also guided, propelled, and colored by completely hidden means—even by the known effects of certain drugs, such as cannabis and various pharmaceuticals. “I shouldn’t have posted that, but I was stoned.” “The news hit me hard ‘cuz I just got off Effexor.”

Seizers are self-reinforcing and self-directing, at least once they acquire sufficient momentum, because this is the age of AI and LLMs. They selectively magnify the actions and statements of the planted actors and producers and the favored, cooperative “creators” (meaning imitators) who very well might be you, particularly once you’ve learned what grabs attention, garners approval from those you want it from, and what gets mocked, ignored, or “ratioed.” What’s loud get louder. What big gets bigger. What’s clever sounds cleverer, until it doesn’t and grows cliched. And the prized or desired narrative threads, they grow stronger, thicker, more resilient. Sometimes they’re used to make weavings, or tie knots. “I just can’t get my brain around what’s happened. It gives me a headache. I don’t know what to think.”

But seizers need potent, engrossing inciting incidents if they’re to reach their full dramatic potentials—and work the changes that they’re supposed to. These incidents tend to happen suddenly and seemingly at random. “Out of a clear blue sky." This fosters a sense of emergence, of naturalness, and it gets us all in on the same story at approximately the same time. Traumatic events work best for this. “I wish I hadn’t watched that clip, but honestly I couldn’t look away.” Concealed in these shocks, which stun and blur the mind, are manifold future story possibilities, some inevitable, some contingent, some major, some minor, some almost imperceptible. And concealed in the mix are "easter eggs," of course, which give that exciting “aha!” when discovered and flatter our sense of our own acuity. “I’ve always been good at pattern recognition, maybe because of the family I grew up in. Kids from dysfunctional backgrounds, we pay attention.”

Seizers are generally—maybe universally—structured as mysteries, detective stories, ever-tantalizing, ever-unsatisfying. Research is required, and rewarded, compelling you to do more research. But their real genius as dramas is that they have many, many streams or branches, and perhaps an unlimited number, or so it seems. In fact, they aren’t open—ended, they just feel that way, like a lot of good stories do when you’re in the middle of them and are stumped for solutions. “I’d thought I’d solved it but then the suspect died, and then it felt like anything could happen.” These forking paths and lanes of possibility are also quietly patrolled by traffic cops, and not just passively. You take a certain road at a certain time and at a certain speed (all factors matter), and you might hit a roadblock. One put there just for you. And perhaps not permanently. Tomorrow it’s gone.

This is the nuclear-level capability that makes seizers something truly new, even if the tropes and games they use are rooted in tradition. (Ancient tradition.) Dramatic productions of the older sort might strike different people in different ways, but, for the most part, they unite the audience. They provoke a common response in a shared space, or a metaphoric shared space. “The nation’s living rooms.”

But seizers are not that way at all. Or they can be that way, but to use them in that manner is to leave their deepest potentials unexploited, like using a samurai sword to chop your vegetables. Seizers, done right, import into the audience the very conflicts inherent in their stories. The show and the story unfold inside the audience, not in front of it. Not even off to the side of it. Within it. What I’m saying is that seizers subdivide the audience and turn these segments into characters, then pit them against one another, or ally them. You finally made it in show business! Congrats! If only you knew it, which you and don't.

But that’s not all that seizers can do. They can also split psyches. Can and do.

MORE TO COME