The State of Palestine is no more. Everything happened quietly and imperceptibly, without military intervention, without loud international statements, without noise and dust. You go to Google Maps or Apple maps - and there, the dotted line to the west of Jerusalem is simply designated the “West Bank.” The decades-long conflict resolved by itself. At least, this can be decided by a person who draws his knowledge of the world exclusively from the Internet approved by global corporations.

There is nothing new in this. Transnistria or Kurdistan, the LPR and the DPR are also absent on the map, although in fact these are completely separate states with their own administrative structure, chapters and laws. And yes, in the geographic atlases of the very large Muslim world, Palestine just exists, but there is no Israel.

Let's go further. Crimea, officially included in Russia, many do not recognize Russian. In some countries of the world, this territory is considered Ukraine, and Estonian textbooks, in which the peninsula was "mistakenly" attributed to Russia, caused a scandal, as a result of which, in the summer, special staff taped the corresponding page in all school libraries. A student who studied geography from such a book will want to go to the Crimea and will be surprised to learn that he needs a Russian visa and that it is not Ukrainian laws that apply there. On the other hand, Iraq and Libya, Somalia and Afghanistan are in atlases, but in fact they are a territory of chaos, where there are no laws, and with sovereignty things are difficult at all.

You already understood what I’m leading to. Not a single card, even electronic, even paper, no longer describes the real world. She simply conveys the ideas about him of a very small group of people who consider themselves entitled to broadcast these ideas. Services created to inform us no longer inform, but form a picture of what is happening. If we go further, the so-called deplatforming (weaning from platforms) of those who are objectionable is a phenomenon of the same order. Alex Jones, Malo Yannopoulos, Gavin McInnes - all these people broadcast through social networks ideas that displeased global corporations to a large audience. They were blocked on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram, deprived of their voice - and now they seem to be gone. And interestingly, for the mainstream western user who won’t bother installing Telegram and looking for their favorite speaker there, they really disappeared. No man - no problem.

Under the new “corporate feudalism”, where we are all subjects of our beloved social networks and corporations that own them, more than subjects of our states, the problem is solved simply.

This state and its power is a “hired manager” for you and owes you a report. Tim Cook and Mark Zuckerberg are simply entrepreneurs and do not owe you anything. One problem: in reality, nothing has gone anywhere. Alex Jones still lives and lives, Palestine periodically grins at Israel and vice versa, a tricolor flies over Crimea. And the collision of virtual reality with the non-imagined can be very, very painful.

In 2016, the world woke up with the realization that Donald Trump became the president of the United States. We all remember the obscene, inhuman tantrums of the American liberal media - crying TV presenters, statements in the style of "how I look into my children’s eyes" and promises to leave the country immediately, given by "beautiful snowflakes." This is because their favorite media broadcasting their picture of the world did not prepare them for harsh reality. To "deep America", which, like Palestine, is not on virtual maps, but which exists in reality. Let me remind you: it was almost four years ago. Before the new, draconian rules on social networks, before mass excommunication from the platforms, before a great war was declared by dissent. The gap between the virtual and the real world is widening, and the main, big tears of those who grew up in the incubator of their ideas are still waiting for us.

The author’s point of view may not coincide with the position of the publisher.