None of us can escape the reach of the media these days. But we need to escape the numbness induced in us by our digital tools.

We need to realize that we, with our digitally extended bodies, now actually are the media. This is the most important insight we can have about our own contemporary digital selves.

Everyone with a smartphone is now plugged into a global network. With this power, we are capable of amplifying and extending our consciousness everywhere.

That’s why it is now obsolete for anyone to hold “the media” in contempt: for example, over fake news. The media are now no longer something apart from our selves or our bodies.

There is a channel or a program or a website or a podcast that caters to exactly what you desire. Google it, and there you have it: you’ve found nothing but yourself.

So, to hate “the media” (as if they could now be anything other than us) is a bizarre form of contemporary self-loathing. It reminds me of people decades ago who talked about the “boob tube” and derided the stupidity of television: they obviously watched a lot of it anyway.

Today this media-hating self-loathing is a very peculiar form of technological denial and postmodern self-hatred that puts us at great risk. Authoritarian political types around the world are now able to use our numbness to it. They can thereby exploit our individual desires and resentments in the service of their own oligarchic aims.

Unless we wise up and realize that the media can only be as fake or authentic as our very own selves, we will be the dupes of every would-be 21st-century tyrant.

As a prime example, consider President Donald Trump, a polarizing figure who seems to vindicate the worst stereotypes about America’s ugliest impulses.

The New York Times documentary Operation InfeKtion (available on YouTube) can introduce you, in less than an hour, to how Trump is flooding the West with Kremlin propaganda, aiming at nothing more than to emulate Putin’s oligarchic ways. The worry is this would turn America into a mafia state like Russia.

For an even more detailed account of how this type of hybrid warfare works by using disinformation, watch the two-hour documentary Active Measures by director Jack Bryan.

Trump is a failed businessman with an autocratic temperament. He’s not a billionaire, but he played one on reality television. He thereby conned people into thinking he was successful, when actually he was only “a clown with a credit card” (according to real billionaires).

Active Measures points to the failure of the Trump Taj Mahal and shows Trump bailed out of debt by laundering money for the Russian mafia. Why else is he trying to keep his tax returns hidden from the public?

Following the kleptocrat’s playbook, Trump is now liquidating U.S. institutions like a corporate raider who uses a leveraged buyout to take over an ailing company. Raiders sell off anything of value that can personally enrich them, not caring about the damage they inflict on hard-won historical institutions.

The evidence shows that Trump lives for nothing more than personal enrichment and power. Unlike any other U.S. president, he emulates the manner of oligarchic authoritarians around the world.

What’s notable about it now happening in America is the way it is leveraging digital technology to buy out the Western world. It’s not a new playbook (see Operation InfeKtion for one of its greatest hits from the 1980s), but the size and scale of its now rapidly spreading devastation are alarming.

To gain an authoritarian grip on government, mafia-state corruption is installed by attacking independent institutions within society. Active Measures allows the viewer to observe Putin’s successful techniques used against Georgia and Ukraine being re-run in America.

Our digitally numbed citizenry is so conditioned by a short news cycle, they are oblivious to even the most obvious of historical patterns which are not even two decades old.

You’ll need to watch the documentary for yourself, but two examples suffice. First, Mikheil Saakashvili’s 2012 electoral defeat in Georgia at the hands of Kremlin-backed tycoon Bidzina Ivanishvili illustrates the hybrid warfare pattern deployed in 2016 with Trump.

Second, the “lock her up” politicization of what should be an independent judiciary is illustrated by the assault in Ukraine against Yulia Tymoshenko. If you merely think of Hillary Clinton in America when you hear the words “lock her up,” then Active Measures shows you why you should think instead of Tymoshenko.

Operation InfeKtion and Active Measures are two powerful vaccinations against that most virulent of viruses: disinformation, the death of the mind.