technology

That's right. By the time you get to the Stage 3 video game, the audience no longer remembers any of the qualia that make a forest. It isn't interdependent fungi-tree relationships that create certain smells and change certain parts of soil composition, it isn't trophic levels or natural sciences, it isn't the source of your village firewood or your childhood playground or a source of carbon sequestration being threatened by a specific developer. When the video game romanticises a romanticised idea of the forest, the highest-fidelity video game of all time won't have a single actual plant or physical element of a forest. You can play it for a thousand hours in a ranger costume and become a militant environmentalist because of it, but you only have a Plato's Cave relationship with the subject you're passionate about.

As a forum we try to say we're a community gathering space in the same functional way the campfire is, but we aren't gathered and this space doesn't exist in either of our rooms and we're only interacting through references and symbols instead of neighbours engaging with each other in person. If you were to chase that campfire experience as passionately as you can, other posters would tell you to touch grass because we mark the fundamental absence of grass and nobody here will ever be able to post grass. I consider myself more of a digital nomad than I do belonging to any particular place, but that means my identity is detached from my landscape and buying into that identity enriches the tech industry destroying the landscape and community around me.

Stage 4 is a no-man's land of ideas. The hippie>Nazi pipeline is so easy because Nazis use naturalistic imagery to sell agrarian traditionalism. They use pictures of water to say "immigrants want to steal these precious resources", animals to say "masculinity is when you kill this mother", and the planet to say we're destined for space. A hippie already predisposed to magical thinking doesn't critically analyse the signs they're shown, so they can build a love of animals from hunting videos or become Sierra Club conservationists in the same moment they become antisemitic. That video essay comparing the forests in games could be entirely about which forests are woke, it could be about the scientific or biblical accuracy, I could use it as b-roll for a lot of different Marxist topics. The person watching that essay alone in their bedroom at 3AM is maximally alienated from the connection to nature they're subconsciously/consciously craving, so they're vulnerable to being seduced by fundamentally nonsensical symbolslop. Any particular image from the forest is detached from anything apart from references to other romanticised images weighed down with layers of subtext.