I want all my friends to write blogs, to make art, to build personal websites, to shout thoughts at the flickering void of our collective digital hallucination-space. This essay is an experiment. Or maybe these essays. DemiDia chapters should always be seen simultaneously as stand alone pieces and as a detached limb of the greater project. It comments upon media and sometimes it even tells you when it's doing that. It has patron saints of various topics and a number recurring phrases (tenets) to serve as anchors and incantations, but these are merely pathways you might want to follow. The Demiurge Diaries aren't necessarily about anything beside themselves. They're a sum of parts, but not necessarily the parts you're looking at at any given moment and not necessarily in the right order. They have been streamlined for legibility and horrifically jumbled in the process. I promise this makes sense. Now please, come in. The door is melting. Anyway. My buddy Tarbuck Transom of the Arch Plays once said that he couldn't be friends with people who don't consume his "content" (scare-quotes because I think that "content" is a terribly degrading term for artistic self expression). I had a strong adverse reaction to that take. I still believe it to be excessive for what it's worth, but you can hopefully see how it at least touches on the same themes as I want all my friends to write blogs. His argument was that they would be far too out-of-the-loop with regards to his current thinking if they did not keep up with the channel. My counter argument was that he would be boring his friends. Shared context allows us to be much more efficient at communicating with people we actually know. Conversing with a friend is a literal skill you get better at, information density of each word steadily increasing and potential for misunderstanding decreasing as you perfect the internal models you have of each other. Slowly merging into a glorious beowulf-cluster of mutually outsourced, feedback amplified concept refraction that vastly eclipses the sum of its parts in terms of both creativity and intelligence. Asking someone like that to listen to your thoughts when packaged for legibility to an audience of strangers is like explaining the current political climate by starting from the big bang. It's tedious, and if they really are your friends you should be able to catch them up pretty quickly, right? Asking people to put up with this feels like narcissism, like attention seeking or like a lack of confidence in you specialized communication skill. There was real revulsion to the idea. Revulsion because some part of me agreed. I want all my friends to write blogs, you see, and I want them to read mine. At that time I did not know why that is, but now I think I do. Don't you love it when every idea that pops into your head ends up being about the meta of human communication? You might not have noticed, because of how cosmic I tend to be with my writing stylistically, but that's really it. An aesthetic flourish I've grown to enjoy and barely hidden symbolism about the interfacing of ape-brains lies buried millimetres beneath the surface. The veil is laughably thin and fraying at the edges. All I care about is people, because all I've ever been is people. Let the universe take care of itself as I bask in the words of my fellow man, so... what is the meta of human communication up to these days? In blogs, vlogs, media directed at a public of "no one in particular" lies a piece of information you did not have before. Information about the lens, information about the discrepancy between the friend you experience one on one, and the way they speak to an unknown void. You know this. People assume different roles in different environments. Not lies not masks but facets. I for one have always been fascinated by reassembling those. Whether they or I want it, human communication styles converge in groups, you match rhythms. My specific style of back-channeling even when I am not outright directing the trajectory of our conversation will impact the way they express things. If I stop back-channelling that's a) really distracting, and b) they'd still have an expectation of me and how I would react and that still impacts the course they plot through semantic space, unless everything was put to digital paper or tape in my absence. Unless I was never a consideration in the first place but only a retroactive voyeur listening in on ideas expressed for the benefit of an anonymous void. The abyss looking back respectfully. And not only that: What about the self selection-mechanisms at work? You can learn about yourself here, and about the internal model someone has of you. Don't you want to know what things you aren't being talked to about in person because of a previous assessment that you wouldn't care? What if they're wrong? What if you're wrong? Show me the lens, look at the lens. We are the eye that sees itself in the reflection of another. We are a mirror-cascade that doesn't stop till it shatters. Still vaguely narcissistic, but in a good way. The beowulf-cluster is easier to optimize if you have a comparison value for non tailor-made communication. What if there's a thing they though I already knew when I don't? No really, you don't understand how much of a concern this is. I hate figuring stuff out on my own, because the moment it clicks, and my eyes grow capable of seeing a new colour, an unfathomable inefficiency is revealed to me. I am forced to appreciate how utterly garbage we are at communication. I understand something and the moment I do I can think of someone in my life who already had that bit of info, because suddenly their actions make way more sense. I'll bring it up to them and surprise surprise: I'm right. The piece of shit knew and they didn't tell me. Of course I get why that is: anything you understand will immediately feel obviously. It quickly becomes unfathomable that other people don't get it. Very humble! Very admirable! Horrific detriment to the very fabric of society. If someone even slightly seems like they don't comprehend a basic mechanic of reality: Tell them! There's nothing to lose! Here's the other problem: these ideas only stay saved in the form of proper thought for a short time after acquisition, if even then. They become a constituent part of your thinking infrastructure. A substance carried through your neural pipeline until a pipe is made of it in turn, and pipes will never see the light of day. What do? Create copies! Backups! Constantly make sure that you are able to communicate your knowledge to someone on the level you were on when you acquired it. Is that impossible? Probably yes! But you'll do a better job if you try! Now let's get to the troubling part of this exercise: I have come into possession of this knowledge as explicit thought at some point in my youth. I was aware of all the puzzle pieces but I had not put them together in this specific way, and there are some terrible implications of that fact. Coming into possession of this idea should turn it into a thought germ, exponentially spreading through humanity. Knowing that you want people to communicate everything you seem clueless on should lead them to communicate it and especially to communicate this meta Idea of the necessity to do so. Anyone holding it should know to imbue it onto others, so why did I have to figure it out myself? Option 1 is extremely unlikely and it's that I am the first person to ever figure it out. Option 2 is that it's wrong, though I don't quite understand how it could be. And even if it's wrong it's still probable to spread through those who have not yet figured out the issue (so it's still very unlikely that I am the first to be wrong in this way). The third option is most likely and most depressing of all: it is impossible to convey this information unless the recipient is in the exact state to understand it. It is unlikely that I have never interacted with someone who has held this thought, so they either must have tried to convey it and it did not work, or they must have not tried because it has seemed to them to not be worthwhile attempting (because it rarely works). Remember; "It feels obvious to me" is not an excuse. "If they're aware, they'll feel condescended to" is not an excuse. If this were truly grokked, there would be a lot more proselytizing going on. Be obnoxious, if you feel like you really made a break through on something; tell people immediately and don't worry about feeling silly or late to the party. Don't let it grow cold, don't let it ossify into your cognitive infrastructure as an obvious truth and force another to also figure it out by themselves. Maybe they won't really internalize it. Most of the time they won't, but when or if they do, they'll at least know who to talk to about it. We're in this together buddy. Don't hoard your ideas like ancient treasure when others might benefit from them. In my article teeth piss and horses, the waitress eventually describes her ideal for memetic dispersion as such: "We should all be constantly feeding pre-chewed idea-snippets to each other like a bunch of fucking birds." And she's right. I don't have enough dentin to tear myself through everything, but collectively we can. I can vomit my insights into your brain so long as you do the same for me. Enlightenment might be distant, but there is a path towards it and we can get there if we put our heads together and actually share what meagre amount of braincells we have. Like a bunch of fucking birds.
I've come to appreciate peer pressure in the same way that I appreciate nuclear power, as a tool that is both monumentally horrifying and far too useful to even dream of getting rid of. This segment isn't about climate disaster except when it explicitly is. This segment is not about climate disaster, and if it's contents somehow lessens your belief therein, go to therapy. Still: How serious are we to take claims of threat. Perhaps even existential threat. Let's say someone who you think is really clever tells you about this thing within their field of expertise that's super fucking dangerous to all of us. You're no expert. How seriously do you take it? If a really clever biochemist says that a certain compound is likely to kill you, in the absence of broader academic awareness, do you avoid it? Do you tell your friends to avoid it? What if the proposed safety condition is a really big sacrifice? You probably know about Pascal's wager, the argument that any reasonable agnostic should at least act as though they believed in god, because the reward of heaven is so infinitely great, that even the tiniest possibility of its reality means you should take the bet. Making sacrifices to avoid uncertain doom is in some ways similar to Pascal's mugging, a version of this dilemma which does not involve infinities. There's no way you can claim that the possibility of a catastrophic risk is zero, so there must be some degree of badness at which you should heed the warning even if you believe it's terrifically unlikely. Betting one buck on one in a thousand odds of winning a million bucks is the right thing to do, even if you don't think you'll win. You'd be an idiot not to. Don't even try to tell me that you'd just read all the material on it and make up your own mind either. There isn't enough time in your life to become an expert on everything anyone considers dangerous. Maybe you can pick up a few research projects, but this cannot be your standard approach. You take the leap of faith or you don't. You believe in climate change, don't you? Good. Chance is that you are not a climate expert, and I don't mean that you don't have a diploma. You've probably read a bunch of articles, watched a bunch of videos, had discussions, had some lessons as part of your school curriculum. You do understand some links and mechanisms, but if you were dropped off in a world where no one knows about climate change, it is staggeringly unlikely that you could make quantitative predictions of your own, rather than citing quantitative predictions you remember from this world. One might argue that this is a smaller jump to make, but in the end you are still believing and acting not because of your own knowledge, but because of trust. If you were one of the people in that world where no one knows about climate change, and someone showed up with the amount of knowledge you have currently, attempting to convince you, would you believe them? I don't know if I would. Just feels like if this were true, then more people would be saying it, you know? This isn't about climate change. This is about monkey brains. Do you know what the biggest predictor of people wearing masks during Covid was? It wasn't education, it wasn't socioeconomic status, it wasn't how many people around you died, it wasn't how informed you were, it wasn't even how scared you were. The most relevant factor was how many people around you wore masks. That's it. Click, run. Peer pressure, or social proof as Professor Robert B. Cialdini calls it. Take a second to despair, maybe mix it with some woefully misguided feeling of haughty exceptionalism as you remember instances of yourself swimming against the stream and misunderstanding those as immunity. And now come back. Breathe in, out, and rejoice at this wonderful tool we have. Because we cannot all be climate experts, we cannot all be virologists, and we cannot all be nuclear safety experts, but we can trust. And we can propagate that which is good and that which is obvious, not through lectures, but by example. Wear a mask and others will follow. Thank god for the monkey brain, just imagine how many more would have died if people had needed an in depth understanding medicine, virology and biochemistry before they would get vaccinated. Believe me, this argument feels terrible, because consensus is very easy to manufacture. A bad belief can enter a feedback loop of consensus once it reaches that status, look at neoliberal economics, nyaa. The best marker restaurants can affix to a dish if they want to sell more of it is "most popular". The original claim of consensus doesn't even have to be true. You can hire actors or doctor Wikipedia pages, the more power and capital you have the easier, and your baseless assumption will be pulled into actuality without much effort. We are sheep, this is an unfathomable amount of cultural power, and you are not immune to propaganda. When you're telling people to believe anything, anything at all, you're asking them to take leaps of faith. Never forget that. Why are you willing to take the leap. Is it group pressure? We can't all be nuclear safety experts, but we should all believe that there should be nuclear safety experts taking care of the nuclear safety. People are very very stupid. All fibres of my being resist that belief, because I love people. All I've ever been is people, but the data doesn't lie, and rational argument seems to be nowhere close to the best way of convincing us. I want the world to be good, so I will use powerful tools which I find unpalatable. Ignorance is not a virtue. My best fried strongly dislikes protests, because he thinks that chants are far too viral. People don't chant along because they have a firm grasp of the nuances, they chant along because others are doing it. This seems to him a reduction of politics to a spectacle, and I agree, but the spectacle is a tool and others will not stop using it because we feel ourselves above it. There is no alternative world in which we all become political scientists. We cannot all be political scientists. The breadth of human knowledge has made impossible the figure of the true polymath, let alone a society of them. Specialisation is necessary. Pretending this isn't the case is venerating ignorance, so look at what is obviously true and start the chant. Back to the one very smart person talking about catastrophic danger, and remember: The only difference between them and someone warning of climate disaster is peer pressure for all you know. Should you believe them? Should you act like you believe them, so others will follow suit, maybe even sincerely? Even if you think you should, can you? On an emotional level I mean. I don't have an answer to this, but I don't want to be the guy who dies because they were waiting for more people to get worried. I don't want to be the guy who joins every single doomsday cult either. What I certainly won't do is pretend like being an enlightened expert on everything is an option. Do you know how many things people are worried about? How many substances and policies and cultural trends, ecological feedback loops, prophecies, asteroids, infohazards, mutations, conflicts, programs. Even just a day spent on each is impossible. Your choice on which ones you humour with cursory research is already no more that an indicator of how willing you were to take the leap from the start. There's a massive selection bias before rational consideration ever clicks in and that's unavoidable because the world is too big and our prefrontal cortexes too small to ever know shit about anything. Most consent is uninformed or at least not meaningfully informed. Islands of precarious maybe-insight amidst a void of stuff we haven't even though to look at. But for now there is nothing we can do about the monkey brain. Best we can do is stop pretending like we aren't working with woefully insufficient tools. By what mechanism did you select the topics you chose to mindfully examine? Can't have been mindful examination. Tread carefully, there's psyops just beneath the surface.
I'm not the sort of person who can consume media naively. That is to say: for itself, using only the tools and lines of flight it directly offers. It all becomes a commentary on the last thing, or about the general state of my mind at any given moment. The 1976 movie "Network" offered great commentary upon a little film called Prologue to Actualize, which I consider to be the single best video on YouTube. It's also a phenomenal pre-emptive examination of the book "Influence", which I consider to be by far the most business-bro piece of literature on my shelf. Professor Cialdini has CIA in his name, and I think that's very funny for a book ostensibly about psyops. Oh, did I mention it was recommended to me by the exceptionally good Harry potter fanfic of a moderately reputable decision theorist. That's all I have to say on the matter. I don't even like Harry Potter. But I like fanfic because no other medium so marvellously manages to never be about the thing it's about. Either way: in Network, two characters, Max and Diana have a discussion about Dave Homestuck's famous assertion that real people don't have character arcs. Oh, this video contains spoilers for Homestuck, Network, Twilight, Robert Cialdini's influence, J.G. Ballard's Crash, James Joyce's Finnigan's wake, Cecily Renns' prologue to actualize, Elizabeth Sandifer's Neoreaction a basilisk, half the articles on my site, Milk inside a bag of milk inside a bag of milk, milk outside a bag of milk outside a bag of milk, Contrapoints' incel video, Sarah Z's Mormor and Homestuck videos, Jean François Lyotard's libidinal economy, House M.D., the beginner's guide, Bo Burnham's inside, Heinrich Heine's der Doktor Faust, Aysha U. Farah's puss 'n heels, probably more things which I'm forgetting. Don't worry about it, the fear of spoilers is a purely psyop-based neuropathology that needs to be extracted from our collective consciousness immediately. Engaging with a work with prior information just leads you to consume it in a different mode. It might even be a better one. Knowing that a murder will happen in a story heightens the suspense but lowers the shock. Readjusting pressure valves, no more no less. But you never know whether the spoiled or the unspoiled experience would be more enjoyable to you. Once you've had one you can never have the other without experiencing brain damage or such. Besides, even if one decided arbitrarily to always pick the unspoiled option, despite not knowing whether it is preferable, that standard still leads you towards really silly places really quickly. Cultural awareness acts the same way as spoilers in that it gives you info on how any given work might progress. Having consumed something by the same artist/team or even within the same genre does this even more strongly. Consuming any art spoils all further art and possibly more-so than targeted spoilers. This is insane. Believing is spoilers is literally a psyop. You are actively harming the diversity of experiences that are being had with a piece of media. You are making the discussions of it more homogeneous and less interesting. Please stop immediately. In fact let's go a step further. Not only is our colloquial use of the phrase spoiling a nonsense concept when applied to art, a victimless crime if there ever was one, I just don't think art can be destroyed period unless it is wiped from existence along with its memory. The corruption implied by the word spoilage is simply not a process that applies. Let's go for an extreme example: in 1986, Gerard Jan van Bladeren went to a museum in Amsterdam and slashed the abstract painting Who's Afraid of Red, Yellow and Blue III by Barnett Newman in protest of what he considered to not be real art. I hope you can draw the nazi-parallels yourself like a box-cutter across canvas. I've seen Newman paintings in person, and do consider them real art, but also... don't you think he made it better? Not only do I genuinely like the dynamism of the cuts, I'm always a sucker for aesthetically broken things, but the scars add to the story, they make it so much deeper as a direct expression of cultural conflict and then the museum trying and failing to restore it, rebuking the previous manifest assertion that this type of art was easy? Beautiful, poetry, dare I say art? A broken statue still has all the sublime craftsmanship which wrought it, we can easily imagine how if looked whole, that experience is not lost, but through simple erosion or deliberate iconoclasm it has also absorbed into itself that history which it has weathered. The damage gives it scale, it connects it palpably to the world we share in a way that feels like falling through time when you stand before it. Numbers and dates, ideas and events find meaning in those alleged blemishes, meaning of such scale that the single person who originally made the piece was far too human to supply it all. The moment art is looked upon, commented upon, acted upon, it becomes communal, it ages like good whine, shifts and transforms. The moment we start to speak about it it starts speaking about us. Art, if it is not hidden away, can only be added to. I'm not siding with the vandal here, his aim was to destroy and I am saying that he has failed spectacularly. Look at this modern art, how evocative it is without depicting, my it should almost be in a museum. Where was I? Oh yeah, Network. Diana is the alliteration obsessed programming director of a struggling TV network. She gives the terrorists money to film their terrorism because it gets views. Older characters seem to believe that she sees all of human culture and all interpersonal interactions as plot points in a drama, because this medium they helped create infected her mind so deeply that she can no longer separate reality and fiction. Diana just doesn't seem as shaken as the rest of them about the state of media culture, which must mean that she lacks real emotion. My fellow late millennials and zoomers in the audience, does this feel familiar to you? Me neither. It definitely doesn't feel like a spiritual precursor to welcome to the internet. Max on the other hand is obviously the person the audience is supposed to root for. He's a self described romantic, he claims to care for his friend, he doesn't want the network to become a soulless attention generator commodifying human suffering in order to sell ads. Pretty good shit. Now he doesn't ever actually help his friend, he cheats on his wife and is a huge asshole to her on top of that. Then he lectures at the woman half his age whom he's having an affair with, that she's been made fundamentally uncaring and incapable of genuine human emotion by the television, before taking off. Max does a lot of lecturing at women, since this is a film from the 1970s and he just wouldn't be relatable otherwise. Anyway, the point is that Max has the decency to feel bad about all of this. That's how we know his moral compass to be correctly aligned. He's such a good, empathetic, salt of the earth, god-fearing, true American romantic, that he feels sorry for all the bad things he does, he just decides to do them anyway, unlike Diana, who is like a bad person, because she isn't outwardly miserable enough, and because she's giving money to the Communists... No wait, that's good. Diana also tried to save Max's job, she isn't a massive piece of shit towards the people in her life... Wait, why are we hating Diana? Chapter 3.2 Diana isn't evil actually. You've been psyoped by the movie's framing. This is just the villain coding part of Vriska did nothing wrong and here's why again, so I won't even repeat myself. Just learn to do better. Diana doesn't respond to Max's rant. She just stands there at the verge of tears and it's incredibly painful, because yeah; how do you react to that. The person you were dating just told you that they don't consider you to be fully human. That you're just an unfeeling automaton who acts out tropes they see on the ray tube. Despite Max's grandstanding about human complexity, he's altercast her into the role of a sociopathic p-zombie. If she got mad and shouted back, wouldn't she just be doing what the imagined audience expects of her? Wouldn't it be perceived as her "doing the argument" and checking off another dramatic plot point? There is no out, so she stays silent and lets him leave, reasserting a "true-personhood" that should have never been in doubt in the first place. Or that's my reading. It's very possible that the film makers disagree, but I don't really give a shit because this is much more interesting and much less terrible than if Max was right. If Diana had already been incapable of real human emotion in 1976, what the fuck are our chances? Please let me interpret media wrong. That's literally all I want. It lines up with something Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari said about the philosophy of pragmatics: Ask not whether something is true, ask whether it is useful. What can be done with this idea? What new thoughts does it allow one to think. After all, a correct modelling of the particle interactions which cause weather phenomena would be computationally impossible and entirely useless, while our simplified models with all their patently wrong assumptions are useful. Truth does not play into it. Fiction too is untrue by nature, and yet is there not a plethora of important, load bearing thoughts it has allowed you to think. More on that another time. Actually, it reminds me: Recently I met an old woman — believe she was a famous russian american author — She said to me in the middle of the grocery store: "You are a remarkably disagreeable person, I fail to see how Deleuze and Guattari can stand you." Exasperated by my polite smile, she added "what's more, you are insane". I wonder what she meant by this. I just want to interpret media wrong.
I am bad at expressing myself, except I'm not. This essay is me doing a worse job at what I usually try to accomplish on purpose. Compare and contrast. And yes, you, the very observant one in the back, this is me showing you the lens. Look at the lens. I sure hope you like the lens. I also sure hope you are familiar with my writing, because this will make very little sense otherwise. There's an article on my site called the anarch's guide to media, in which I try to make a case that the term canon, as it is colloquially used, is not only fascist, but also utterly meaningless if you dig down a bit because no one actually only believes the things which a work states explicitly. We take the provided material as a keyhole view into a fully fleshed out world which has a history, far more characters, thoughts which are not spoken aloud nor printed on a page and tons of undispalyed actions of the relevant figures like sleeping or going to the bathroom. The only thing that separates fanfiction from the version of any story that you hold in your head is that one of them has been written down. One of you has created art and meaningfully contributed to our shared cultural inventory. Thanks for that. The derisive modern view of fanfic is a recent phenomenon, meant to protect IP and foster idol worship for high profile creators. Through most of history, reinventing and iterating upon popular myths and stories was the norm. never forget that. Just as common land has been shredded to bits and privatized to a point where the very idea seems ridiculous to some, these are the proud stubborn remnants of our once sprawling commons of symbols and collective mythopoesis, the endlessly adaptive oral traditions upon which every culture on this planet is built. A vast beautiful symphony of human creativity being brutally strangled by the gloved hands of Mouse And Friends. Some of you might have been radicalized against this idea by a Sarah z video that was recent when I first wrote this script but has aged a year since. Now, on the whole the piece is good and makes it far easier to talk to non-AO3 gremlins about fanfic, but nonetheless there are some glaring issues: It draws the distinction between fanfic and stuff like paradise lost, dante's inferno and folklore as one of quality, amount of novel content and perception-that-you-are-even-writing-about-something-fictional-to-begin-with, since these authors were probably true believers for the most part. None of these hold up. Sure, John Milton is probably a better writer than most of us, but the quality distinction seems the most like a cop out, because there were plenty of bad, thematically similar stories that we, by which I mean they, also don't call fanfic, so it's clearly not where they actually draw the line. It's just a cheap comeback "oh you think you're the next Dante Alighieri?" Novelty content is similarly silly. Sure, Dante essentially invented our modern conception of hell. It isn't just rehashing a known work with more homoerotic subtext, but there's plenty of fanfic which is entirely novel. Novel to the point where it's kind of a joke that the author changed everything about the setting and crafted a fully original story but retained the character names. AU fics and such. If you think fanfic is just retellings with mild alterations, then you haven't read a lot of fanfic (I'm not accusing Sarah of that by the way). As for reality perception: You have to cherrypick to make that one work. It's a nice excuse to exclude bible-fiction, but it doesn't hold up broadly. Goethe's Faust is one of the most important works of German literature. It's great. It is so great in fact that for decades after its publication, "Writing a Faust" was a sort of rite of passage among authors of the time. No, this doesn't mean "writing a magnum opus of similar depth", it means writing a very similar story, mostly with the same characters, that none of them could possibly have thought were real. Heinrich Heine, one of our greatest poets wrote a Faust, called "der Doktor Faust — Ein Tanzpoem" And it is unquestionably fanfic. Any sane person would look at it and go "yup, that's fanfic alright", and there are plenty more examples of this type, they're just not quite as popular as the easily dismissed bible examples. It also doesn't work the other way around. People who write celebrity fic are true believers in the source material, but you still call it fanfic, because at the end of the day the only relevant factor is age and esteem. Fanfic is a new, derisive term for an old trend, because exploring beyond the keyhole is a fundamental human impulse. Aysha U.Farah's Puss in heels is a rom-com sci-fi retelling of Puss in Boots, the sixteenth century italian fairy tale about a cat bringing its owner riches through trickery when he decides to trust it. PiH isn't actually about a cat, the corresponding role is filled by a broken sex robot, which the sardonic rodent man of a protagonist inherits from an estranged relative. You get it? The story structure is the same, but if it weren't for the title, you might not even notice. We're pretty used to retellings of fairly tales, and much more faithful ones, so surely this isn't fanfic, right? You can buy it on amazon. By that standard next to all disney movies are fanfic, which I don't have a problem with, but oh well. What if I told you that Aysha U. Farah is also a fanfiction author. Does that change anything for you? Why? Literally why? The last point was only made semi-explicitly, and it's that fanfic is more of a genre of literature with its own tropes and stylistic qualities which make it distinguishable, and while that is true of a lot of the stuff we generally talk about as fanfic, it isn't true of the underlying phenomenon. There's plenty of non ff-literature which shares these markers, and plenty of ff written by people who don't read fanfic which bears none of them. This distinctive stylistic toolbox happens to belong to the group which primarily writes fanfic, but it is not an intrinsic quality of fanfic. Back to the point: All keyhole exploration is fanfic. All of it. It's not a bad word. You're being psoped to protect IP. It's like with spoilers. Once we hear or come up with a theory, it does not become a separate node attached to the piece of art. It becomes part of the piece. The cultural idea "game of thrones" includes all fan theories and fan fictions, George R.R. Martin is not its despot. There are no despots. The article tells this story through two characters, the archaeologist and the helmsman. It constructs it's little metaphorical world, and is overall just a lot less clear than the summary I just gave you. Why? Why don't I just express myself clearly if my aim is to convince? Why do I write the way I write when I'm not writing like this? The simple answer is honesty, but let's split it into two categories first: style and structure. Style: I do enjoy my 20 point scrabble words. Not only do they come naturally while typing, but they also appeal to me on a visceral level. I love a good word and do my best to remember them when I encounter a new one in the wild. That's the important thing to keep in mind: it's not like I go over the text and spruce it up, like I look at a line and go oh no, this isn't offputtingly verbose enough, time to insert some archaic sesquipedalia. In fact more often than not I remove excessive lingo dumps, when they seem out of place. I don't go through a thesaurus while writing, my vocabulary just became like this by growing up on fanfic and then getting into philosophy. The words I use are the words that come to mind and best express the idea. Except maybe "circumlocution" and a handful of other words like that, which I just like. I could say something else that would possibly fit even better. I have a lexicographic preference for the word circumlocution. I also have a lexicographic preference for the term lexicographic preference. But those are exceptions. For the most part I write the way I write because writing differently would be a misrepresentation of that which I mean. Dumbing it down would feel both condescending and would incur a translational loss of meaning. Also: I'm writing in a way I enjoy reading. But that already mildly includes the issue of secondary functions which difficult lingo fulfils... You've probably heard of slow and fast thinking, where fast thinking is something like intuitive-cognition, while slow thinking is an actual reasoned solution. A common example is this: A baseball and a baseball bat collectively cost a dollar ten, the bat is a dollar more expensive than the ball; how much does the ball cost. The wrong, fast thinking answer that doesn't go through the mathematics but just pattern completes is 10 cent. The correct slow thinking answer is 5 cent. If you give people a fast fire round of questions, they are likely to blurt out the former, because fast thinking usually works pretty well, just not here. The important bit is that people are far more likely to give the correct answer when the question is asked in a more convoluted way or when it is printed in a difficult to read font. We are already expending mental effort, so inertia keeps it going and clicks us into slow-think. Some people seem to believe that ostentatious locution attempts to create the illusion of depth where there is none, especially with regards to some philosophers, but I prefer to see it as a tool to make depth which would exist regardless of lingo intuitively accessible. That's the style angle, but it's less interesting and less significant. Toning it down in terms of semantic pretentiousness merely feels artless and maybe a bit like an inefficient use of the tools at my disposal, but it barely feels dishonest. Structure on the other hand... Structure: My thoughts literally have characters. This is the honest way of portraying them. They're not socratic dialogues, even when they feel like it. The characters aren't a comprehension aid, they're part of the thought and extracting them as I am doing here comes at a loss. My thoughts about media, IP and canon contain the archeologist and the helmsman. My thoughts about communication and self expression contain the waitress and the gremlin. By way of making it a standard vlog in which I metaphorlessly and without storylines talk about the topics, I'm giving the reigns exclusively to the waitress. This is not the gremlin's medium. In the process of squishing a plane of significance into this non-native mode, it has incurred wrinkles. The playing field is no longer level. Some ideas buried in the space between lines of text can no longer surface, and it's terrible. If you feel like this is the clearer, easier and therefore better way of making points, it's because they're slightly different, easier points. The fact that it's not a story means it's slightly dishonest, because not only do real people have character arcs, in my experience they are nothing but character arcs. Diana Network: One, Dave Homestuck: Zero! The Anarch's guide to media was partially inspired by Sarah Z's video about Mormor, yes, this part was in the script even before I had to add in the earlier one, but I never had any intention of making this the Sarah Z episode which it has now become. It's just... Her thoughts on media are endlessly fascinating to me because I have no idea how she holds them as someone who exists in fan-fiction circles. How does one steep in that culture and come out of it thinking of Mormor as a strange aberration, as people "pretending that there is a character who isn't there". Sarah, we're pretending with all of these characters. It's fiction. It's not even just any fiction, it is already fanfic, it is part of the cultural canon of Sherlock Holmes, far predating any of Moffet's bullshit. We all agree that there are characters in this world that aren't shown on screen, right? We all agree that our readings of the portrayed characters vary. Why do you find it strange when media from a source that isn't the BBC interlocks with our cultural understanding of sherlock. That's to be expected, right? Just another voice in the canon. Same as when people invent whole personalities and narratives for background characters. We decide for ourselves what to care about and it doesn't necessarily overlap too much with whatever the original piece of media cared about. I promise that watching Sherlock is more enjoyable if you fill in some domestic murder husband shenanigans going on between scenes. Case and point: Martin Scrosese's 1973 movie Goncharov, which despite what you might have been told, is not a real movie. It's an emergent metafiction of sorts. But, in being an emergent metafiction, and despite the other things you might have been told, it is absolutely a real movie. You see, I was sick the past couple of days, by which I mean a year ago, reading Goncharov fanfic in a state of fugue like delirium, and let me tell you: I feel like I've seen it. The scenes are in my head more vividly than a bunch of movies I really have seen. Sure, Martin Scorsese maybe didn't really make it, despite what he says, sure maybe it was never even filmed, but it is a movie. Being a movie is part of its canon just like being made by Martin is. We constructed it collectively and we have decided that these things are true, just like they have decided that Mormor is interesting. Had Scorsese not bought into the meme it wouldn't have changed anything because we do not need his permission. There are no despots. The creator is a character in the piece moreso than an authority on it. In this case literally, but always figuratively. Any piece of media is only ever a starting point. Your brain's in charge of it now and you can do with it what you please. Art is not in objects, it's in the interactions you have with an object and those are necessarily idiosyncratic. One possible explanation is that Sarah isn't actually as bewildered as she pretends to be, and she simply does so because most of her audience doesn't have that cultural background and is still cued into highly despotic modes of media consumption, but that's... cynical? I don't want to believe people are lying just because they disagree with me, I simply cannot fathom how she got to a point where she can be genuinely be bewildered by Mormor. Mystery for the ages. Similar for her Homestuck video, and it's even more egregious there, since HS was always — first through user submissions and then through the forums — a highly community democratic project. Tons of people have always been making Homestuck. Andrew Hussie's retirement wasn't so much a passing of the torch and much more a simple stopping of one guy to interface with this property. The old guard of fan-fiction authors who always highly influenced the progression of the story as well as the communal interpretation thereof simply became the dominant voice once another faded into the background. So why is the video so strangely focused on hussie. The interesting thing about Homestuck is how democratic it was and is. Why does she put so much value into the continuation according to HS2? Why not go with an alternative ending she prefers? The whole thing goes so far out of its way to label itself as only dubiously canon, as one storyline amongst many and a fading of the comic into the sea of adjacent world lines. I can't help but feel it's because this is the Hussie-endorsed one. Sarah. Please. You don't even like Hussie, Why are you clinging to despots. You are already free! Homestuck is ours. Sherlock is ours if we want it. I don't want it, but you can. This ocean of media, born of so many minds and mouths and hands, haunted by such multitudes: We already collectively own all of it. No gods no masters, no bullshit IP limiting the creative potential of humanity.
Know what else is collectively owned? The self. Here's a pet belief system that I perceive to be entirely obvious, but that I've had really mixed results selling my friends on. The person that is you does not exist in your head. At least not entirely. It exists in the public consciousness, in locations and objects. Lets take a step back, because I really want you to believe this. To grock it. I think our media landscape is already borderline inhospitable to people who don't. Wildly, as of a week prior to this rerecording, beloved political analyst Naomi Klein of all people has joined in, stating that the world has grown unbearable to individuals in the context of her new book Doppelganger. Kind of making my point for me in the act alone. The socius incubating ideas through whatever neuron clusters are available, mine yours hers doesn't matter. But if you can't be you, what's the alternative? Remember: All philosophy is primate psychology at the end of the day, meaning that this is about monkey brains. When monkeys use a tool to reach for things, their brain-scans indicate that the tool is treated as an extension of the body and not a separate object. That makes sense, right? We perceive our limbs as ours even when they're numb, their material is replaced, they change shape. There's no clear boundary to what our body is, so the brain doesn't bother to construct such a thing. Your body is everything you can use. Alternatively; your flesh arms are tools like any other. Smartphones are a technological augmentation plugging you into pan-human memory-banks. You are a cyborg. Same for clothes. Just a fur replacement. Don't worry about it. That's anchor one. Anchor two: A technology in philosophy can refer to a mode of thought; a purpose fulfilling idea object. Something you can use. Anchor three: Consciousness, personhood evolved because it was somehow beneficial. It helped us survive, spread the genes and memes which got us here, where "here" is some wildly peculiar configuration of bones thoughts and viscera. Feeling anchored? Good. Here's the thesis: Personhood is a communication tool which is necessarily only partially internal. You can never have a perfect grasp of another's self, but you can talk to other's about them, using your internal model of them. We can either claim that this is a communicational mismatch, that the self and the self-model are not the same thing and that we are deluding ourself into thinking we are having a useful conversation about a shared topic, but it doesn't feel that way, does it? It doesn't feel that way because the self includes the self model. The arm includes the rake. My friends can tell me whether I would like or not like a piece of art, because their model of me can process that bit of info and output a resonance assessment just like my real brain could. They can make confident guesses about what my response to a certain argument might look like. To be ever so slightly facetious about it, we are all children of god if and only if we can really answer the question "what would Jesus do?". We would only know if we contained him, if we could model him, if we were him. Thought is outsource-able. There are you-subprocesses running everywhere around you. If you're a celebrity, it is very likely that there is more thinking occurring inside of you-splinters than in your personal mind at any given moment. You don't even own most of you. Your self has escaped you into the collective unconscious! That's where the image obsession comes from. There's a neurotic human impulse to keep the self in line, and that becomes a public process once your identity has infected the anthropic information network. Feel free to slot this thought into the last one. The self is an artistic performance and it belongs to anyone who chooses to do something with it. Feel free to steal me. IP-abolitionism doesn't stop at my cranium. Take what you need and create. Use my skull and its contents as a tool. Ideally a battering ram. Just like Scorsese is a character in the metafiction of Goncharov, Jean Genet is a character in Blood and Guts, and due to Kathy Acker's very cool, valid and flagrant plagiarism also a partial author of it. Genet the meat-person has no control about either, and why would he, since Acker is writing about the fragment of Genet that exists in her, advancing the communal fiction that is identity along a narrativized offshoot. Serial experiments Lain is an anime about how we don't own ourselves. 1976's Network is a film about how we don't own ourselves. The Locked Tomb makes it a point that you are who you eat and the identity horror inherent to that, while immediately undercutting anything extrordinary about the woes of ipseitic vore with the claim that more fundamentally you already and inextricably are who you meet, who you love who you hate who you learn to model. The soul is permeable, it rubs off, it is nothing but the rubbing off. There are only so many steps you can walk in someone else's shoes before the ship of your identity starts to look distinctly thesian and noone can live a life in their own shoes exclusively. At least I wouldn't call it life. Bleed into the socius of cultural production. Kant was wrong, we can all mutually be tools and ends to each other at the same time and it will be great because we are already no more than tools to ourselves. You are a thought being had by humanity, an idiosyncrappy diffuse spectre. Once you get that far you can maybe jump over that pesky shadow you cast, and believe me it's not nearly as long as it looks, because identity really isn't all that important in the first place. It's chickenshit compression artefacts on thought. Eww. Yuck. All those bits of selfhood we tend to cling to, pretending like we are localizing ourselves within culture are no more than a thin patina across the ideas and processes that we are part of, an experiment in applied philosophy, the vast computations and contemplations of the macroorganism to which we are no more than a neuron. If this is unintuitive to you, I suggest popping a psychedelic and getting back to me afterwards. Art! That's another great cognitive technology. The best one, you might say, and I might agree and then we'd make out behind the oil paintings. I got around to playing Milk outside a bag of milk outside a bag of milk finally, the sequel to that little indie game I made a proper video about. Watch that, please, I'm quite happy with it. Originally I forced myself to get the piece out before I played any further, because I had one very simple thing to say and I didn't want to dilute that with a whole other game. I also feared the project might spiral into something so big that I wouldn't care enough to actually finish it, whereas the price we pay for milk could be made in a day. Anyway. In retrospect that was probably the right course of action. MOABOM is a very different game from MIABOM, and while I have more to say about it, I have nothing to say about it at an equivalent volume, because MOABOM is like... a video game. MIABOM is blunt force trauma applied directly to the cerebral cortex. Let's be clear: MOABOM is a better game. It is utterly stunning, there's a whole ass animation at the start. The internal mono-dialogue is more lively. But it didn't make me feel existentially disgusted with myself. Some nuance is added to the formula, by giving the player sometimes exclusively bad choices or sometimes exclusively fine ones, or by having the distinction be less obvious. Null wants you to be silent sometimes but not other times, and I can't quite decide if that's a nice bit of gradiation added to the point of the previous game or if it's simply abandoning the mechanic. Pain and nuance don't mix well. Makes it too cerebral to really shatter you. Again, this isn't bad. The game doesn't need to pull the same trick twice, but it doesn't have another similarly essay-able twist except maybe the default-ending which speaks for itself. Null dreams of a story broadly similar to that of the first game, except this time she's the caretaker and moreover she's a caretaker who fails despite trying to help. Something something dealing with mentally ill people is difficult. Anyone who pretends like it isn't is either virtue signalling or woefully out of touch. Most likely both. Helping is often painful and unrewarding, but you should of course try anyway. Cool message. Don't be the type of conceited douche who thinks they can just fix a person, when their entire brain chemistry is working against them. It's condescending. These are interesting but their effect is less visceral. Anyway, here one tangent I do want to talk briefly about: Hamsters. Null compares going online as an experience akin to a hamster being ripped out of the ground and put into a pet-store. The store is more comfortable, but your cage is transparent to countless other hamsters. Hamsters who have according to Null always been there, though real netizens probably haven't of course. They have always been there because they are not real people, and Null calls them her friends because they share her interests, despite them not knowing who she is. Null feels watched, in part because someone once leaked a bunch of information, which she was conned into revealing, and thinking of the actors involved as inhuman is probably part of her defence mechanism, but I can't help but feel like her experience was already highly voyeuristic, or she wouldn't claim that none of them knew who she was. She feels like a hamster in a glass cage in part because she sees everyone else as a hamster in a glass cage. Something to quietly observe, so why wouldn't she be quietly observed. Something something real human connections, you know my schtick by now, but this treatment of persons as entertainment media rather than intractable agents draws its tendrils deeply through any form of artistic expression. It draws its tendrils through network, which is on the surface level about this screen-mediated dehumanization, and on the sub-surface level about the dehumanization of those natively cued into the nature of the dehumanization. Also through prologue to actualize, which is a gradual breaking out of the glass cage by revealing its filter function, revealing how mediums trap us. Turning art from a dissociative into a connective mode by bashing your soul against it. It also ties into the way my writing looks. I can't help but feel like I make myself less intractable by turning thoughts into essays. I might add nuance, but I subtract warmth. When I tell my friends to write blogs, am I telling them to stop being people and become media for me to consume. If personhood is already an outsourced mode of artistic expression and we are all dearly loved tools to each other, why would there even be a difference and if there is no difference then why does it feel so gross. My guess is this: being allowed a fleshed out understanding of a person is a show of trust, making that knowledge publicly available is a savage breach of said trust. The beginners guide is a great game about that idea. Art is art and people are art, but some of that art is only for you or only for friends, because you do not want to force others into dissolving their self-construct into the maelstrom of public consciousness. Butchering yourself open is a decision one shouldn't make lightly. But if you see someone butcher themselves open: don't applaud, don't take photos, don't silently stare through the glass at the hamsters: Talk to them. They're probably doing it because identity, being closed, has become unbearable. Connection needs an opening. Rarely pretty, never sterile. I make art not to obviate the need for real communication, but to augment and improve it. To teach each other about out lenses, so when I lie here splayed open then I ask of you nothing less than to step into the shambles of my form and use it like a bio-mech. Thought technologies. We can talk about it later, but we have to talk about it. We need to turn the internet from a dissociative into a connective technology by bashing our souls against it. It is already both, we just have to use it right. Don't stare, talk. Answer.
There's something troubling about my attachment to MIABOM simply because it hurt me more than MOABOM did. Often I overvalue pain. If something makes me miserable then my standard assumption is that it was profound or taught my something, but that isn't necessarily true. Pain is often shallow. It doesn't always point in the direction of growth, but my mind offers a mental shortcut right through that idea. "Masochistic epistemology" is genuinely one of the most useful concepts for understanding my thinking that I have ever encountered, and I will forever be thankful to Natalie Contrapoints for it. It makes sense, right? Pain is the most basic stimulus of our learning algorithm. It's unfiltered negative feedback, you touch the hot stove and you get a new bit of info. You eat a poisonous berry and you get a new bit of info. Survivable pain doesn't necessarily make you stronger but it does make you wiser. Here's the thing though: it has to be new pain. Eating a different berry every day yields you and your tribe some phenomenally useful knowledge, while eating the same poisonous berry every day gets you a Darwin award. But deciding whether pain is new pain isn't always that easy and moreover there's an incentive to psyop yourself into believing that it would be old pain and therefore avoiding it. The incentive is pain. This is about monkey brains. Humans are horrifyingly over-optimistic in their predictions, this has been shown time and time again. Our brains are by default pain averse. They consider the scenarios that don't hurt more. We're drilled to avoid social friction, so painful observations will be kept from you much more often than painless ones. From personal experience I hear "you look good today" much more frequently than "eww you look tired, old, unkempt and like you dressed yourself in the dark" even though by the nature of baselines, negative surprises should be just as common as positive ones. The former is inflated artificially to please. It's a platitude, never to be trusted. So the masochistic epistemology draws the very sensible conclusion that if something hurts it has an above average chance of being true or at the very least deserving of deeper consideration: have I only avoided this conclusion because it would have been painful. A lot of people walk around with really self serving, very easy beliefs, so that can't possibly reflect reality. If a assumption seems too convenient, definitely scrutinize it, but that doesn't mean that anything that hurts is true. Biting bullets can become quite addictive once you're swept up in the loop of assuming that the more something claws at your bones, the more likely it is to be correct. Feeling bad starts feeling like a victory, like an insight like an overcoming of the sort of self serving bullshit bias that lets billionaires believe that they have earned their vaults of blood-money. Sorry to go all J.F. Lyotard on your asses, but -hang on tight and spit on me- don't fucking tell me that you aren't enjoying this. I know I am. I love getting to be the cynic, to feel like I had the mental strength not to flinch away from difficult conclusions. Repeat the cognitive pattern often enough and click, run, you have developed an incredibly maladaptive mental shortcut that lets you conflate misery with intelligence and taints your capacity for any sort of rational judgement. Maybe don't fucking do that nyaa? You know what really helps with this type of thought? Apart from an old contrapoints video about incels which really only looks at a specific very-online case: Read Freud. Yes, I'm serious. This hyper-flippant notion that Freud is no more than an over-projecting pervert who has nothing useful to teach us, which somehow passes for insight these days and is almost entirely perpetrated by hacks who have never read more than excerpts is a meme which needs to die real bad. Was our boy Sigmund off his rocker about a bunch of shit? Absolutely, but you know what one of the many things he pioneered was? The idea that people sometimes seek out negative stimuli. Often in fact. That straight up wasn't a though that existed previously. The prevalent idea was that people universally were seeking out positive stimulus but fucking up occasionally, but you know people. I know people. Freud knew people, and so he was keenly aware that when his patients exposed themselves to predictable, old pain over and over again, they weren't doing it because they expected positive results on the six-millionth try. They did it because sometimes, often, negative stimulus is exactly what we're gunning for. We all have out maladaptive associations lovingly hand-crafted for the express purpose of plunging us into suffering. Pain means I'm being dedicated and putting in the work. Pain means redemption for the things I feel like I need to be punished for. Pain means novel information. It's all the same shit. Huh, pain? Pain means truth and truth means good so... Me good! Yay, pain! Masochistic epistemology is a mechanism by which depressing media and interactions makes me feel as though I got more out of it than I truly have. And the funny thing is that I've had my own name for the creative side of that for much longer: teeth eater tales. Teeth, Piss and Horses was the last of three articles which I submitted to Dotesmite's now defunct Denpa Culture Research Society, DCRS for short, though they are still hosted on my site. It's also my favourite of the three. In it, two of my internal anthropomorphized idea clusters, the Waitress and the Gremlin discuss the purpose of art and while I fully agree with neither, I certainly try to be on the waitress' side these days, but I wasn't always. I wrote it after finding some old writings from 15 year old Ouro, which were so unfathomably cringe that I felt the deep desire to type out a whole article in which to viscously vicariously own a child. Shush, this episode is already about another one of my unhealthy coping mechanisms, I can't also make it about this one. So young me was essentially telling current me the only way in which you can make sure that you're saying something interesting is that it hurts you to say it. That's how you now you're digesting something in yourself. That's how you know you're getting somewhere. These are Teeth-eater tales, works which bite the hands which shape them to the very end and only true artists would ever go through with that, as opposed to man-eater tales which dig into others, and even more reprehensibly to young me god-eater tales which ineffectually snap at the void. I still think this classification is occasionally useful, but the value judgement is bullshit. You're not hurting yourself to the noble end of creating true meaningful art, you're hurting yourself because hurting yourself makes you feel good, it makes you feel superior to those you consider cowardly and pain-averse you little shit. Let's be super clear here: Baby Ouro is wrong, but they're not as wrong as I'd like them to be, and the gremlin is still espousing a far more compelling version of their case. How much the words flowing from my fingertips dig into me personally is largely irrelevant to the intersubjective quality of the piece. It might yet dig into someone else, but art is only partially a means of communication. It's also always still a means of working through your shit, and if that isn't hurting, then you're probably doing it wrong. Working through your shit hurts. It simply does. Masochistic epistemology is a reversal of causality, but the correlation still stands. Nihilism is another case of this problem, at least the perfunctory, evasive nihilism that never quite manages to go out of style. Because really: It's exactly the same thing as religion or some other transcendental purpose on an emotional level. Exactly the thing it so despises. Instead of accepting that there is a deep permeating meaning to all things, a clear rule set you can follow, you accept the deep permeating meaninglessness of all things. It feels like staring into the abyss, if your benchmark for abysses is just about ankles deep, but it's really not. It's a though terminating cliché in order to avoid dealing with the complexities of the human condition. It's a simple, universal answer to everything reality throws at you. You get all the righteous, self satisfied clarity of the delusional approaches you hate so much, but you also have the additional benefit of getting to feel bad about it. Remember Diana Network? She wasn't any more complicit in the media soul-shredder than the other characters, but her irredeemable failing, the thing everyone else constantly grills her for is that she neglected to be sufficiently miserable. Diana likes her job. She likes the soul-shredder, but the lack of ass covering self pity doesn't make the outcomes any worse. If anything it makes her more sympathetic to me because she's at least not bullshitting herself. It's so tempting. You get to have all the answers, which is to say the lack thereof, and you get to be miserable, which means that you've glimpsed some horrible, soul shattering truth which is accessible to everyone, but which others shy away from, and that must mean you're better than them. Congratulation: The world is burning, more blood is spilled every day than you could possibly imagine, every single quotidian act steps over piles and piles of invisible corpses. None of it has a greater purpose behind it and these pathetic little blobs we call brains are too unsophisticated to even remotely conceive the scale of how bad things really are. You have very little power, and whenever you aren't maximally vigilant whatever power you do have will be used for evil. Shit's fucked. You've reached the staircase. But are you willing to take the first step? There's a phenomenal exchange in The sopranos, season two episode ten, minute 52. I'm telling you this because you should really watch it for yourself, the acting is absolutely incredible. It's a fucking masterclass in non-verbal communication occurring parallel to the dialogue. Me recounting the scene diminishes it significantly, but Mafioso Tony Soprano talks to his therapist Dr. Jennifer Melfi, Telling her that through a conversation with someone else, he's finally realized that he's his own worst enemy. She tells him that this is a quite surface level read, even though it is true, and he's slightly confused by that, saying that that's what she's always telling him too, is it not. She says yes, you are, what are you gonna do about it? The question almost feels like a punchline. Tony has finally accepted his self-sabotage, but only because someone presented it to him as an intrinsic part of his being. So he looks into the abyss and accepts this about himself easily, because it is, fundamentally the easy route. He never accepted it when Melfi said it because she didn't offer him the comforting abyss of painful insight. She offered something much worse. Her "you are your own worst enemy" wasn't a statement of fact to be accepted, it was a diagnosis of the problem he would have to actually tackle, it was a sign pointing to the staircase, it always came with the vailed insinuation of the far more difficult path which entails actually fixing your shit. And what does Tony do? He deflects. He pretends like she just agreed with him again: Yes, I am my own worst enemy, let's move on to the next character flaw I can simply diffuse by accepting it as a fundamental part of myself. That's not teeth eating. That actually is just petulant lip biting.
"Philosophy, in its longing to rationalize, formalize, define, delimit, to terminate enigma and uncertainty, to co-operate wholeheartedly with the police, is nihilistic in the ultimate sense that it strives for the immobile perfection of death. But creativity cannot be brought to an end that is compatible with power, for unless life is extinguished, control must inevitably break down. We possess art lest we perish of the truth." Please do me a favour and forego looking up who the author of that quote is. We will get to it.Occasionally I am accused of engaging in media analysis on this show, and I can't deny the charge as easily as I usually do. This will be a journey. We'll learn about Baudrillard's idea of obscenity, read some Pynchon, talk about art and art dissection, especially on youtube, and then, standing upon a thoroughly pretentious foundation I'm gonna call a bunch of things porn and insist that knowing stuff is dumb actually. As always I mean every word I say, I promise. In Dr. Sam Slote's introduction to Finnegan's Wake, a book which I somehow always inevitably bring up, and which is for the uninitiated a glorious magnum opus of mostly misspellings of mostly not-english arranged into esoteric puns and meta clustered into sing-song trance like fugue states of parapolylogic language resolving into many agreed upon story fragments but no agreed upon overarching meaning. This book is dense, beautiful and utterly incomprehensible in the best possible sense, pulling tricks like using the initials of characters as the initials of phrases in order to refer to them without naming them. So it's a bit odd that Slote not only tells us not to take a reference work to hand for our first read, but also to "not treat the text as just a riddle ridden with countless smaller riddles to be decyphered and decoded". It's supposed to be immersion learning. You're supposed to pick up this new allahphbet by reading it. The confusion is the point, let it wash over you and stew in it. You'll make your own meaning, some of it will overlap with others and some wont. That's fine. This isn't a book you can get, it's not about getting. It's art. Is it beautiful? Does it speak to you? Then there you go. Finnegan's wake is special because it's utterly impervious to payoff, or rather modern media is fucked because it consists of barely anything but payoff. Vanya, a minor character in Gravity's rainbow has this to say: "Look at the forms of capitalist expression. Pornographies: Pornographies of love, erotic love, christian love, boy-and-his-dog, pornographies of sunsets, pornographies of killing, pornographies of deduction — ahh that sigh when we guess the murderer — all these novels these films and songs they lull us with, they're approaches, more comfortable and less so, to that absolute comfort, the self-induced orgasm" Tropes, perfections of an idea, no longer veiled through artistry and subtle implication but shoved in your face outright. Nothing left up to the imagination, no tantalizing uncertainty gnawing at your bones, pornographic media doesn't merely lift the skirt, it outright drops it. Build-up, payoff, pack-up boys we're done here. But what if it's not pornography yet? Well no need to worry, our media landscape has you covered, because what good is the beautiful art if you don't get (off to) it? A lot of media analysis is exactly that, it pornographizes art which is not yet porn by figuratively strip-searching it, zooming in on the highlights, the erogenous zones, lifting up the artistic, semiotic veil and making sure that you get it, that you get a series of densely clustered payoffs which were hidden in the piece, seductively hinted at, but never just outright shown. Sometimes people tell me that they only consume analysis, and that scares me. This is obscene in the baudrillardian sense. The obscene is the destruction of the scene the abolition of the frame and the lens. The scene is the real which defies the hyperreal, "the hidden, the repressed, the obscure", while obscenity "is that which eliminates the gaze, the image, and every representation", it's "the visible, the all-too-visible, the more-visible-than-visible" the unfiltered, excessive Absolute, or to stick with our metaphor: The compulsive skirt-lift. And just to be clear: porn is fine, I — ahh that sigh when we guess the murderer — as much as the next guy. The problem arises when you start turning everything into porn and in turn create a culture which judges all art by how successfully it manages to be porn. Since there's already so much porn being made, and maybe just through some idiosyncrasy of my own character, I'd prefer to fight my way onto Joyce's side and be anti-payoff, scene aligned, which gets us back to the analysis question: What have I been doing to Network, Moabom and Twilight, but also what have I been doing with my own articles? Are they not pornographies of self or at the very least of sunset? Well I don't think so, for my articles they are certainly too coded and obtuse to be obscene themselves, otherwise people wouldn't be asking me to do the pornographizing for them so much. I still feel bad about what I did to the anarch's guide in demidia 4, and I didn't even lift the skirt half way there; You'll have to do the remaining work yourself. The articles pornographize something else, they do attempt to butcher open a concept to use that phrase again, and yes butchering open and pornographizing are the same thing, but unlike most analysis they come with their own artistic frustrations; "the hidden, the repressed, the obscure", the scene. The skirt lifting apparatuses I build have their own skirts. As for demidia, it does not have that benefit. I'm being clear and explaining my metaphors for better and mostly for worse, but remember the first and fourth tenant of this show: "Look at the lens, I sure hope you like the lens" and "Please let me interpret media wrong, it's literally all I want". Pretty much everyone would be disagreeing with me about the takes I've been giving you, about network, about moabom about twilight, they are my honest thoughts, but they're in all likelihood not what you would find under the skirt if you lifted it yourself. Not even close. I've been upfront about this; you know you can't trust me to tell you what's under there, I'm telling you much more about the lens than about the thing in front of it. There is no payoff attuned stripped down concrete object. It's anti-obscene in the baudrillardian sense. It is only the scene, only the lens, only the distortion. Only the skirt if you will. It's skirt all the way down. Tantalizing potentiality that you'll have to fucking dig at yourself. Pick a bone. Any bone and start working. What I'm taking offense with in a way is the very idea that art can have a true meaning. Authorial despotism is out on obvious grounds, consensus is out, because examples like Finnegan's Wake are clearly art without anyone being able to agree what they mean. Remember the weathered statues? They clearly communicate something very different from what a brand new version would. That's what Ozymandias is about, so in some sense they would have to be different works of art if they mean different things, right? Who made the second one? Obviously not from scratch but transformatively? Was it time? What does time mean when it does something? If art is precisely this process of creating meaning in the interaction between a consciousness and an object, then how could the skirt ever be fully lifted on your behalf. The pornographic payoff is inherently a lie. It places a period in the unending sentence. Concludes erroneously to let you leave fully satisfied, when the experience of art is that it sticks with you until it becomes you. The more interesting question, I guess, is "why would I want this", and the honest answer is "you might not". We're crashing against another controversial bit of personal philosophy, but I think questions are better than answers. It feels like most people either disagree or are so far from framing it in these terms that I can't convince them that we're on the same side. The common understanding is that questions are a pragmatic means to get answers and get happy. Note the similarity to buildup-payoff. My experience is different. The question is the good bit, thinking and puzzeling and trying is an infinitely rewarding activity, and when you find the solution there's first and foremost a feeling of sadness. My toy just broke. This isn't at all an issue, and it doesn't mean that one should strive to remain ignorant as my detractors have uncharitably claimed. Answers, in almost all cases, throw up more questions. The game isn't zero sum, the more someone knows the more questions they will usually have, so we can construct it the other way around and say that answers are a pragmatic means towards new puzzles, towards a greater and more profound unknowing. I feel like I can see this idea reflected in culture more broadly: people love puzzles, riddles, crosswords and sudoku, challenges which have no useful answer, its not like scientific research where the solution could conceivably be the genuine point. I have yet to meet anyone who actually dislikes the literary trope of being promised answers and then only getting a whole bunch of new questions. It's exciting. The thinking and figuring out is the fun part and once you have the solution you don't care anymore, you move onto the next riddle, so I seek to provide confusion, veils. Not as well as Joyce, mind you, but well enough to give readers something to think about. There's a thing called the Zeigarnik effect: It describes the tendency of people to be way better at remembering unfinished patterns than complete patterns. That's why earworms are more persistent when you can't quite recall the next line, stuck on a loop as your mind tries to crack the riddle. We love questions, once they're dead, once the toy breaks, there's nothing left to think about. A person's favourite work of art is almost never one they can fully explain. If you can trap that sublime appreciation in a prison of words to render it obscene, then it can't be all that deep now can it? There's always something implacable tearing at your soul, perpetually escaping analysis, so it can remain zeigarnik-stuck to the forefront of your mind. I always inevitably bring up Finnegan's Wake. None of the patterns ever fully resolve no matter how much unbridled apophenia you throw at it. It's the question that keeps on giving. Skirt all the way down.
In wall-coloured spaces We write demiurge diaries Each timepiece defaces Our self-haunted libraries As resin encases The work we have wrought A rope snapping taut Passed out on our pages We'll know we have fought But when we sober up can we please tunnel down On why we sobered up never quite hid the frown When the encoders cut off all that can't be said We will have long been dead And future people walk Earths not invented yet Post-nows to clearly see Once we dethroned the past I hope we'll one day be Outiconoclassed Iconoclasm. Always iconoclasm. Always at the forefront of my mind sprinkled with biweekly conniptions. Go out there and smash a statue, smash some of the marble which binds us to all sides. See there's a war going on, always been going on between the past and the future. History, oh does it have practice, it has learned from itself over and over again, had aeons to grind the ossified ruins of bygone culture to a knife-point, But tomorrow is inventive, adaptive, unpredictable, always novel weapons attached to its shifting form, so it might yet stand a chance. Guerrilla tactics are a favourite from the future's arsenal, but hah, can you hear the footsteps now, approaching from either direction. It seems dear friend that we have found ourselves in the present, upon the great moving battlefield of chronology. Remember to move swiftly, remember to dodge the splinters and most importantly remember which side you're on. May the dead stay dead, may the ceaseless forward march of progress take another marble-crushing step. Hello friends. Kind strangers. Assorted Creatures. Welcome to the Demiurge Diaries.I've always known that time itself is coming to eat us. Not in the way of actually having any proof, but the idea that the monster at the end of all hallways does not hunger for our flesh has always felt a bit like the idea that I might be a brain in a jar being fed neurotransmitters to trick me into believing I have limbs. It's plausible. It's unfalsifiable. I can imagine it being true, but my heart's just not in it. I can't actually believe it without feeling like I'm bullshitting myself. I feel like I'm a series of character arcs superficially haunting a meat body and I feel like that puts me on the universe's menu. No one knows what accelerationism actually means. Used to mean, before the idiots got hold of it. If you're among the uninformed, the following will sound like a hot take or a derisive joke, but if you're in the know you'll recognize it as the deeply common sense, very quite sober analysis it is: Accelerationism, at its root, is entropy porn. Revolting in theory, sure, wildly harmful in practice, but at the end of the day don't you want to watch some fucking particles come apart? J.G. Ballard's Crash is an uncomfortably raw psychodrama about a cult of fetishists deliberately getting into automotive accidents, venerating the scars they leave, splattering against death again and again to experience this orgasmic rush of one of the highest intensity experiences you can subject yourself to. Inviting the ostensibly banal gasolinepunk dystopia to go deeper than the mind. Through the flesh, through the bones, to butcher us open and to remake us. Love in the most violent sense. The main character is also called Ballard, a privilege which wasn't even afforded to the protagonist of his pseudo-autobiography, and that's not something that happens by accident. Crash is a too-cose-for-comfort patholography of its author, and it might just be one of culture as a whole. We're crashing up against climate disaster, we're crashing up against the oil crisis, we're crashing up against the algorythmification of every waking moment, and we're only gaining speed. Look at number go up, look at meat-shredder go brrrrr. This isn't the behaviour of a species which seeks to swerve, isn't the behaviour of a species which seeks to survive the impact. It's the behaviour of a species which wants to see the buildup and payoff of a culture-scale explosion. Of a species which just wants to see some fucking particles come apart. Accelerationism isn't a prescription, it's a description of the thing capitalism is already doing and a grim insistence that things will get much worse before they get terminally worse. Latestage? Honey they're just revving the engine. This is proto capitalism at worst... Or so thought Nick Land, who is by the way the author of that cool little quote from the start of last episode. Land is a reactionary and I hate everything he stands for, but he's a really cool writer, and he got to his abhorrent destinations via some deeply interesting and scenic routes. It definitely reframes the "to conclude is not merely erroneous but ugly" in a crueller light, because it would turn into this exact reverence of acceleration. Just keep going, trying to reign it in will only result in a more boring car crash, it won't actually prevent it. You might wonder how that works, how human extinction could possibly be anything but a conclusion, but take your lens out. The deep one, the human-lens, the one that insists that I love people because -well- all I've ever been is people and you can recast this objection as anthropocentric condescension. Humans aren't the centre of the universe. Keeping us around forever would be to conclude, would be a revolting, strangulating circumscription of creativity and possibility space. We've done people, let's move on to something actually novel, actually alien as opposed to iterations upon a theme. When asked by a colleague what his thought would even mean for humans, what humans should take from it, Land simply replied, mildly incredulous at the idea, that this simply wasn't about them. Someone else could think about people, if they pleased. Humans are worthy subjects of study, sure, but not more so than sea slugs. Not more than any of the species we have eradicated along the ever accelerating forward march of entropy. Humans fit down the meat shredder just fine. Why should we care about people. Why would anyone care about people? Let's watch some fucking particles come apart. The answer "because we are them" is less intuitive to Land than to most. That's why the idea of accelerationism as a prescription is so weird. Land couldn't care less about what anyone including himself thinks of the apocalypse. The idea that he would have any say in it is unfathomable. Land is the garbled poet looking back from beyond heat death when all the screaming has long stopped and all tragedy has long faded to comedy. He's writing from the perspective of someone enjoying the spectacle of an inevitable explosion, not from that of someone who ever had any means of preventing it. Which brings us to the central question: what do you do when you accept that there is a monster at the end of all hallways. How does one lose with dignity? I think there's two primary strands of thought on the idea. One of them is that you just keep bashing your head against it. Even if you are 100% certain that the battle is lost, you don't ever have perfect information and so you might yet be wrong. To die with dignity is to keep trying your hardest to prevent catastrophe to the bitter end. Giving up is the shameful bit. You see it with some terminally ill people, you see it with some climate activists, who think that the feedback cycles which will grind our civilizations to dust are probably already unstoppable, but there's nothing left to do but try anyway, then at least you'll have done your very best, done your part, never given up and it was certainly the world's fault that you failed, not yours. That's dignity. Land thinks that's kind of pathetic, it's a way of making yourself feel good and nothing more. Holding out for the possibility that you're wrong is a delusional looking-away from the apocalypse and that's the undignified bit: refusing to actually face reality, to actually fully concede that anything you do now is pointless. They're the people trying to hit Cthulu with a boat. The consistent, dignified move is preemptively going insane. Accepting Axsys as your God, not that it needs worshippers. Dignity is looking at the stygian abyss and intoning with crystalline horrific clarity that "yes, it will be so". We're gonna crash and we're gonna crash bad. Now, I agree with neither of those approaches, and I think they're both just ways of making yourself feel good about the inevitable, not that there's anything wrong with that. The question "how do you die with dignity?" is ill-posed. It's nonsense. It's like asking "why is two plus four ten?". It's not. It's a Wittgensteinian pseudo-problem which can't be solved but only dissolved, and it can be dissolved with the following idea expressed by a character who doesn't even actually mean it, Gregory House: There is no such thing as a dignified death. It's always ugly and miserable and pathetic. You can live with dignity, you can't die with it. I hope you remember masochistic epistemology, we can now look at a really cool use of it as an analytical tool. In neoreaction a Basilisk, a phenomenal book, if you care about these things, Elizabeth Sandifer dissects a particularly interesting and particularly virulent branch of the alt right, looking primarily at the three wretched little creatures she considers to be the shitty horsemen of this shitty apocalypse. Eliezer Yudkowsky, who is not a neoreactionary, and for whom I have quite a bit more respect than she does, Curtis "Mencius Moldbug" Yarvin, the racist tech-bro to whom we owe the convoluted Matrix metaphor, and my favourite horrifying gremlin man Nick Land. Moldbug has a habit of framing his writing as this dark twisted truth that hurts to look at, as a nigh impossible to swallow pill that tears open your gullet with barbed wire and razor blades and burns through your flesh like molten metallic sodium. Charming fella, isn't he? Like, I even sort of agree, Moldbug's writing does hurt to look at, though not for the reasons he thinks it does. Anyway, Sandifer looks at that and goes: "Nah. You're not miserable enough" If you really had seen a truth this terrible, we could tell. This feels like set dressing. Larpy, superficial edge like those tacticool knives made from shitty steel. Nick Land on the other hand had a psychotic breakdown and lost his fucking mind before cutting his ties to left wing academia and becoming evil. Symptomatically that's a lot more worrying, that actually is the kind of thing we might expect from someone who saw a dark and terrible truth which etched itself into their soul. And yeah, as someone who values MasoEp way too much as previously discussed, that probably is part of why this man fascinates me so much. I wonder what kind of insight could do that to me. It's only added to by the fact that Land too is in his own weird way payoff-averse. He doesn't care about the audience, fuck he doesn't even care about people. There's no conclusion to runaway, only buildup. There'll be a subjective payoff when the screaming stops, but we won't exactly be around to appreciate it, and I doubt the cosmos cares to laugh at it. One payoff per species, humans like sea-slugs, but from the outside there's just acceleration. Enthropic number go up. To conclude is not merely erroneous, but ugly, so strap in folks, there's a brick on the gas pedal and neither the steering wheel nor the breaks are working. The funny thing is that even back when Land still thought politics could do anything, the thing he though it could do was start the runaway process to drive reality off a cliff. He criticized feminism as ineffectual because it wasn't as vicious as other social movements, it backed down too easily (unlike let's say the alt right). Which is also interesting for the sheer fact that this reactionary used to be genuinely invested in the success of a progressive movement. He was sincerely saddened by their failure. Land thought that if you want something you need to make yourself a credible threat, you need to be be willing to and to demonstrate your willingness to infinitely escalate violence. The only way to get what you want is to make it a choice between giving it to you and apocalypse, because you will not back down. You will burn everything to the ground. Sandifer believes that he might be insincere about his turn to neoreaction, that this might be an elaborate joke, but though she is deeply knowledgable about the man, I just don't buy it. His writing has always been marked by a pathological inability to not reveal his hand with a wink and a nod. He can't play a bit straight, and sadly, this is a natural progression of his though. He's not being inconsistent, he's gaining speed. There are exactly three games which govern social dynamics. Duels, prisoners dilemmas and chicken. Never blink first, never swerve, demonstrate a willingness to accelerate until the particles come apart. Organic life splatters against the temporal wind-shield. Crash. Might as well enjoy it. But alas I care about people. And I care about others caring about people. I care about people, because all I've ever been is people, and that's what makes us human in the first place, isn't it? Though maybe I should stop using that line since I have recently staked my soul on the idea that none of us are even remotely human anymore anyway. I can see the flickering void behind your eyelids. It's in constant wire mediated communication with the one behind mine, and that's all that matters at the end of days... Ha. The end of the day is of course what I meant to say. I misspoke.
Friends, I fear I might have a problem. My personal vetting process for determining which unsavoury influences I allow to inhabit my cranial cavity rent-free as it were sucks dick. Why is Andrew Hussie in here? Why is Nick fucking Land in here. Dear listener, please butcher me open and extract Nick Land from my grey matter. Please. Or well, that's not really the problem I have. The problem I have is that the thing I just expressed is a common sentiment. I want to keep all those weird little goblins in here where they can't do harm to anything but my relatability (which let's be real is already more than tenuous) for you see I do not believe in guilty pleasures, and neither should you. The first video I ever made for this channel was a philosophical analysis of twilight, or of my lens of twilight, whichever you prefer. It does not contain all my thoughts on the books which I consider to be perfectly delightful romance novels, it just contains the thoughts which I don't expect anyone else to express, for what would be the point in restating consensus? Some have interpreted it as me trying to be sneaky and explaining Foucault, Fisher, Marx and Freud while couching it in a pop cultural context, and while it's not like I didn't want to explain those guys, the causality is still reversed. I wanted to explain how Twilight is philosophically insightful, and I needed those figures as a mining operation to explain why. I used their bones as shovels, but I would have used any other instrument if it could do the job more effectively. Names hold power. Too much power possibly. See, I don't have to explain to most people that there's insight to be had from Foucault. If they want it, they know where to look for it. All those very respectable certifiably insightful works on the shelf behind me: I don't have to explain to anyone that they are important. People know that. Perhaps they don't have the time or the interest, but they know how to get at the things in these volumes. They do not now what's in Twilight, what's in Homestuck, what's in 1976's Network, because they've been culturally psyoped to believe that meaning lives exclusively in respectable tomes. When they stumble, accidentally, in unpretentious quotidian art across a notion, perhaps not quite verbalizable, but nonetheless moving, fusing to their psyche in an instant and changing them forever, they have to couch it in ironic disaffection "haha isn't if fun what I can read into this" or they do not address it at all, merely saying that they like the thing and hoping against hope that the people to whom they recommend it will find that same gleaming nugget of insight on their own... I fucking hate that. Do not let your pool of influences be circumscribed by consensus. We live in an interesting world and it is impossible to not incorporate any of it in any artistic creation. We all know this. Guilty pleasures are derided works in which you saw something important, something beautiful, and you have the audacity to be ashamed of that? They should feel guilty for not seeing it. Shout it from the rooftops: "[X] is good actually! All have been blind to its wonders, so very blind, but do not despair, poor children, for I will enlighten you." Maybe don't phrase it quite like that, but do it and do it loud. We have a counter psyop to run. With any hope you can even refrain from being a coward and excessively decorating it with the lingo of consensus philosophy in a vain attempt at respectability. The sources for this series are so strange because I'm trying to prove that they can be sources. Prologue to actualize, the single best video on youtube, frames itself in part through two character's ruminations upon an episode of an abridged series. Of silly dialogue dubbed over anime, only in this case the silly dialogue is an unfiltered glimpse at the creator's diary chronicling their depression and their coming out as trans, and Prologue to Actualize itself is of course a patholography of its own creator trying to claw at the purpose of art in its self-devised strange theory fiction video-novel chimera-beast of a medium. And that matters. That's important. Strange art is where you find the things that can't be explained straightforwardly. Look in dark corners. I adore all the other Joyce books too, the man is a brilliant writer, but I don't have to convince you that Ulysses is good and important because everyone agrees that Ulysses is good and important. Finnigan's wake in many circles is a literary joke and that simply cannot stand, because those people are blind, so very blind. We need to relearn as a culture to approach art with an open mind untainted by its consensus understanding because otherwise no interesting conversations can ever be had about it. Everything, all fields of human experience, attempt to become language to encode themselves in order to make themselves understood and language itself is the sole exception to that trend. Language is an intensity which perpetually attempts to escape itself, which attempts to gesture at the things which hide between its own lines, builds symbols and metaphors for the unsayable until eventually a great enough quantity of those has been collected to codify the underlying concept. Then again language will have to read between the lines of that new text and claw at something forever outside itself to improve the approximation a tiny bit further and bootstrap itself upwards another fraction of an inch, because thoughts are thought-shaped but language is not. That does not however mean that it can't get closer. Only by looking in the strange and unexplored places can we make those approaches, more comfortable and less so, fill a few more gaps and make a few more things sayable, because meaning is everywhere. The irrelevant is important. Those respectable tomes are merely the places where it's already been found and incorporated. Finnigan's wake, in its stalwart refusal to abide by spelling or grammar or storytelling convention is the most stunning representation of language attempting to escape itself and we can escape with it if we too allow ourselves to be free from the despotism of consensus accepted symbols and the power of names. So much for the allegedly shallow or frivolous to which I have willingly granted an enormous share of my brain-space despite all those very respectable names I could fill it with instead, but what of the evil? There are two genres of unacceptable preoccupations after all: guilty pleasures and problematic faves. Land is perhaps not the most esteemed philosopher, but he is a philosopher and even a relatively influential one by some metrics. You would expect meaningful ideas in his work if it weren't for the fact that he became a fascist. Some people only engage with him up to that point, and I don't know if that's an aversion to discomfort, an attempt to make their engagement seem more respectable or a genuine belief that he stopped having interesting thoughts after his breakdown — uh... he didn't —. Likely a mix of all three. Land is perhaps a special case because he's still alive and also you know, an insane person. He's not that respectable. But I've seen people who recoil from reading dead nazis like Heidegger, Schmitt and Jünger even when they are clearly relevant to their domain of interest. Don't worry, they're not gonna turn you evil, and they are definitely important. Of course their politics colours their thought and vice versa, but their analyses are not exclusively useful to genocidal nutjobs. They have tools, beautiful tools, and you can use them. Just substitute the lens. There are leftist readings of all of these, but not enough because leftists are somehow scared to touch them. I don't care how you make it tolerable for yourself to consume the work of people who suck. Take a break every other paragraph to rejoice about them being dead! That's how I got through Nietzsche and I'm only partially kidding. Or how about Mary Daly? She was a deeply influential early feminist, but she also trained the wildly transphobic and far less interesting Janice Raymond whom you may have heard of and who somehow psyoped her into being transphobic as well. There are trans inclusive reading of Daly because Daly is interesting, unlike her pupil and you can turn her against herself. You can turn most people against themselves and you should learn how to do it if you ever want to convince anyone. This isn't a purely left wing issue by the way, that's just my sampling bias, and I also just don't care as much about the right having all the shiniest cognitive tools they could have but that's not the point. I've met enough right wingers who refuse to read Marx because they believe dogmatically that he has nothing to teach them. They're wrong. And sure, you won't always get something important out of it. With philosophers I think it's hard to miss completely, but definitely when it comes to sociology, political or economic theory the work might genuinely be unsalvageable. I've read Friedman. I've read capitalism and Freedom and there is nothing redeeming about that book. Reading it is barely tolerable as a drinking game and even then it's a challenge... But I don't regret having tried. I respect myself a little bit more for having earnestly looked in that corner, and while nothing was to be found on that occasion, there was on others. I do find Hayek interesting. His beliefs similarly suck, but he is a genuinely brilliant analyst of the models he plays with. You never know in advance, so look. There's another thing people don't get. Its always portrayed like there are only two options: that you always have to listen to differing viewpoints or that they are entirely worthless because their beliefs suck, why would you listen to them? But that's not true at all. Even if you're talking about direct political prescriptions, there are two types of criticisms you might get from people who disagree with you. The first is valuable. It's "this will not work because x" or "this will have y as aside effect" it doesn't matter whether their own prescriptions suck, they might be looking at this more objectively because they don't have a vested interest in your scheme working. This is useful. They might actually discover flaws which you can patch up. The second type is "The thing you're trying to accomplish through this is bad" and this is worthless. Both-sides type grifters aren't hacks because they listen to unsavoury sources, but because they pretend like "your values are bad" is a coherent argument. It's not. You can't fight about axioms, you can only fight about axioms. There is no both sidesing between "we should help disenfranchised group x" and "we should harm disenfranchised group x". Steal the tools not the axioms. Anyway. Even if you find nothing independently valuable in a piece, it's always useful to understand how certain people think because odds are you will encounter people like that. Influence is a good book, because learning the tricks of marketing execs, salespeople and other manipulators on the spectrum from professional to hobbyist is a good way to protect yourself. Know your enemy has become so much of a platitude that no one seems to actually apply it. And this extends to whole fields. If I see one more leftie joke about how "[they] don't know anything about economics, but money is made up, lol", I'll blow my fucking brains out. Ignorance is not a virtue. The degree to which you avoid understanding your opposition is not a sign of moral purity, it's a recipe for disaster. Even mark fisher does this in one of his lectures. Stop. I know that you're not an economist, Mark, not everyone needs to be an economist, not everyone needs to be an expert on everything, nor can they be, that's fine, but stop flaunting it, you fuck. This has been a brief critique of the hauntology man whom I otherwise love. May he rest in peace, though I doubt that he does. I want to understand, and the fact that some people believe something fundamentally different from me should be a good indicator that they have thoughts I haven't heard before. I refuse to leave mines of insight untapped when I so clearly see that they won't naturally filter into my bubble. Don't worry. I'll pre-chew it for you. We can feed pre-chewed snippets of politically dubious philosophy to each other like a bunch of fucking birds so long as we get all those nifty tools into circulation. We stand atop ruin not by choice but because it's the only solid ground we'll ever know. Ashes of bygone paradigms. Socio-historical detritus, and I agree with no one anyway, so I will dig and repurpose to my heart's content. Meaning is ubiquitous.
It's- It's difficult. I try to understand but occasionally I don't. I try to explain, but occasionally I can't, or rather despite a firm awareness that I am fallible, I feel like people should agree with me on certain things if I just say enough words. The right words. In the right order. Because it would be incredibly scary if that weren't the case. Or rather: It is scary, because it isn't. You can't argue about axioms, and in most cases that's fine. I want people to disagree with me, that's interesting, but not on some things. I want most humans to agree that killing innocent people is bad because I want the world to be good, and that seems like an achievable goal, because currently, in the world where everyone is largely fine with killing innocents for the silliest of reasons, "Killing innocents is bad" still seems to be a thing most people explicitly believe. Not everyone, but most. They just don't actually apply it because they are unaware of how their behaviour violates this value, or they think it is overwritten by some other qualities they explicitly value. These are things even the profoundly useless human brain can be argued out of. I can say enough words at them, and they will agree, and the world will be better in this specific way because deep down they agreed from the start. "Yes, killing innocents is bad. Maybe we should stop doing it." Their axioms were in the right place, they were just fucking up on applying them. Extrapolating too much from cases like this, I tend to believe that my friends, people I like, hold core values which are genuinely compatible with mine, with squabbles over application. I kind of have to believe that because otherwise the world can't be good. It would always either be insufficient for them or for me, and of course that's the way it probably is. But still. I sometimes come across those axiom differences which would forbid the world from ever being good —not from being better than now, leagues better than now, that's certainly possible, but genuinely, truly good— and a condescending but sanity preserving part of my brain screams that they have to be wrong about their own values. They cannot possibly actually believe that, because it would be terrible if they did. I moved this chapter back a bunch, because I'm a coward. I'm genuinely scared that my friends might hold this against me, because I cannot be charitable to the thing some of them appear to believe. I cannot build it from my axioms. My brain is incapable of instantiating a series of neuron firings which would make this make any sense to me and believe me, I tried. I want to understand. But that condescending part of my brain doesn't stop screaming, and I'm not above hypocrisy, because I know that the hominid brain doesn't actually run on logic. So I will nonsensically argue that your axioms are bad, because I have to. Because while "Making the world better" currently points in the same direction for both of us, we're headed for different moons of Neptune. If I lived in your utopia, it would not be good enough and I would have to fight you. That thought hurts me, because I want to at least be able to imagine that the world can be good. That we can get there together. Please do not hate me. I was gonna try to be fair and balanced about this, but I realized that I literally can't. Despite having had this conversation six times with four different people all of whom I respect, I could not write a single counterargument that didn't sound like a strawman to me when I reread it. I'm sorry. I trust that their position is compelling to people, otherwise they wouldn't hold it, but my entire being falters at comprehending how one could be so wrong about this and I do think they're wrong. Objectively morally wrong if I want the world to be good, so I won't sit here and attempt to reconstruct arguments I can't remotely make myself believe. More importantly: I don't want to do a good job of it. I might accidentally convince you the neutral audience member of something I consider to be morally wrong. You'll have to bring your own counter arguments. I'll be the defence. Not the judge, but Justitia's on my side, I assure you. So, I will be heavily criticizing an argument often used in order to defend the right to abortion. I am however not arguing against the right to abortion. I believe it to be unambiguously good and important and there are numerous absolutely valid arguments for it (Specifically, embryos have the perceptive and cognitive capabilities of an underripe orange, so their weight as moral patients is extremely low and easily outweighed by the mother's volition. Anyone who pretends to care about potential moral patienthood is lying, if they aren't actively trying to maximize the number of babies in the world, as would be required of them if they thought potentiality was morally weighty (Think of all the hypothetical people they're killing! Monsters!). It's just about controlling women, never forget that). The fact that this one is bad does not weaken the position. 2+2 = 4 is a true statement. "All numbers add to four" is a bad wrong argument for this true statement. Arguing against the latter does not weaken the former. Let me say it again: The right to abortion is vital and anyone seeking to curtail it needs to be stopped by all means necessary. ARE WE GOOD? Okay. So, "my body my choice". Your right to bodily autonomy ends somewhere, and by using that as your flagship rallying cry, you let your fleet be burned by a single match. If an antibody to a horrible pandemic is discovered in your blood, I don't think you have a right not to give it. Of course it should be a pretty high priority not to be fucked with whenever possible, but there is a right to health and the rest of humanity should not be arbitrarily punished based on anyone's whims. The cowardly out here is to say that of course anyone in that situation would willingly donate their blood. Most people probably would. But what if they don't? If everyone makes the utilitarian choice then this discussion is meaningless and you have nothing to lose from a mandate. Let's scale the margins down a little. Not only do I not want thousands of people to die in exchange for some minimal sacrifice of autonomy, I don't want someone in need of a kidney to die because they didn't happen to have a loved one with the right type or an organ in stock. I don't want to live in a world in which people unnecessarily die for having shit luck. And of course there's already self-evident improvements to be made. We can keep a database and if someone needs a kidney or a bit of liver anyone compatible in the area will get an email to come into the hospital. Ideally bearing a picture of the patient to immediately humanize them. And that will help. That will help a lot. Emotional blackmail is great. And again, if it's always enough then you have nothing to worry about. But what if once in a while there's a case where no one responds. They were too busy to check their mail or relied on someone else making the sacrifice or they just didn't care. Maybe the patient was from some social group they had insufficient empathy for. What the fuck then. These come in pairs. The average person is as likely to need a kidney as they are to have a kidney demanded of them. I want to live in the world where I'm saved. Where you're saved. Where everyone's saved. So my body can't be my choice, because my choice isn't guaranteed to be the right one. A persistent and really troubling approach I've encountered is to try and reframe this as a simple issue of what you value more: Self-determination or health, and that is just wrong. Know who has no self-determination? Dead people. I am offering strictly more of that, because guess what? There's still a bunch of decisions you can make without a kidney that you can't make five feet under. You could even decide to die if you actually thought that was preferable. The dying person doesn't get to opt for "the other one". The way things are isn't neutral. We get to pick between one person, chosen by the despotism of nature, losing all of their bodily autonomy forever, and one person, picked by us to minimize harm as much as possible, losing a lot of it. Any way you cut it, number two has more self-determination. We have an option, and thus an obligation, to be kinder than nature. Again, bodily autonomy matters. It matters a lot, but it isn't paramount. The individualist course leads to death and I think those who travel it are wrong. Think of positive freedoms, not just negative ones. Like the right to health. I think you have a right not to die because of other people's apathy. You can waive it, sure, but it really would be nice if you had the option. Just like I want people to have the option to get food, and the option to have a roof over their head. Of course I know that I'm just a crazy radical here. Death and misery were good enough for our parents and our parent's parents, so it is a bit entitled to ask for something different, sure, but wanting the world to be good means insisting that everyone who doesn't do that is wrong. They are wrong in a way in which people have been wrong for too long. Wrong in a way that has drenched the earth in unnecessary quantities of blood by thinking of themselves only in the role of the donor. Only ever in the scenario in which they have to give. Humans have a nasty tendency of assuming they're invincible. In many ways they are. Subjectivity is immune to destruction, but these always come in pairs. I can imagine being the person lying on a hospital bed dying because of a freak accident or a random quirk of genetics and hearing that no one cared enough, and I don't want to live in that world. I don't want to live in that world just like I don't want to live in a world in which the fate of starving children depends on the philanthropy of some anthropically removed Zottarich. Even if they end up doing the right thing, they never should have had that power. I don't want to survive because I won a lottery of good intentions, I want to survive as a matter of course. People are fucking stupid. Our institutions are corrupt, but we do need institutions which force us to be good people because the primate brain is not built for that shit. We build externalities which force us to do the right thing all the time. That's why my alarm clock sits on the other side of the room from my bed, because I don't trust myself to do the right thing if there is an easier path. But I want to get up. And I want to give you my blood, so please, please don't allow me to let anyone die. Refusing to save a thousand children is not actually morally different from killing a thousand children, it just has better optics. I get that one feels different, my brain too is human, and so it is wrong. Make it the most boring fucking trolley problem imaginable. On one track is a person and on the other is literally no one. No matter what the previous track setting was, if you leave that experiment and someone died then you killed a person. It is that fucking easy. I don't care if you did it by pulling the lever or by refusing to pull the lever. I don't care if you did it in the kitchen with the lead pipe or with the dagger in the library. That's fucking set-dressing. I don't care whether it's active malicious intent or passive apathy that kills me, I'm the exact same amount of fucking dead because of you. Making the journey of asylum seekers so difficult and precarious that they die on the way is not actually different from shooting them from a watchtower. Blood is blood is blood is blood is blood. What happened to "from each according to their ability to each according to their need"? Maybe I'm a sucker, but I actually believe that. I don't just believe in the system that would leave me personally better off, I believe in the principle. More than that, I believe in the broadest, most nuancelessly general version of the statement. Fuck this terrible idea that you shouldn't literally believe slogans. Get better slogans then. They are simplified, sure, but they should be a subset, a part of the actual fleshed out position and not some completely different thing off to the side which happens to sound good. This is our need and this is our ability and we cannot conscionably let people get away with "no, this is mine". We all remember that sharing is caring, right? Please care. The human brain is not made for this. I can easily imagine getting the mail, thinking of the plans I have for the next few weeks and reassuring myself that someone will surely step up. I can imagine the others having that same thought. And I can imagine someone dying in agony like thousands before them. The fact that our philanthropy is required here is a bug. Butcher me open. Butcher me open for all I can give, because nature does not delineate ethics. Because if we let ourselves be so barbarous and self serving then what's the fucking point? We might as well off ourselves, but I don't believe that. I think we can do good. I think we have done good, we have redistributed opportunity where the distribution we found wasn't good enough. We have eked out utilitarian victories and we know how to build the structures that make us comply with our own values. Rarely pretty, never sterile. Butcher me open because I want the world to be good. I cannot concision any amount of blood on my hands. Do not allow me to let you die. Do not allow yourself to let someone else die. Butcher me open because this is just stuff. I do not care. I truly do not care, not nearly as much as I care about the world being good. A friend of mine used to joke about only larping as a utilitarian, and that scares the shit out of me. I don't think I am, but I might be. So I don't want to be allowed to make that call. I want to know that I'll have to be utilitarian, that the system will force me to be. Some have argued that they wouldn't want to be saved at that possible cost to someone else's autonomy, which is fine. You can do that. Just have it in your medical file. We do want a system that actually generates a net benefit here, so if both patient and donor are unenthused, obviously don't. But most people want to live. And we should still totally do that email thing. The less people have to be forced, the better, but human generosity in the moment is not what we should rely on in the worst case. Take a look around you, you know how this goes. Again, these are points some of my friends have made, and they might be watching this, so please, read no passive aggression into this. I love you dearly. I tried to convince you and I'll try again, because I want the world to be good.
I want all of my friends to have blogs, because I don't trust them to remember all their cool ideas until they tell me about them. If you don't write thoughts down they die. I wonder if I'm so neurotic about note taking because my memory sucks or if my memory sucks because I can rely on the digital litter-pile to remember for me. "Both" is a valid answer, but it fails to sufficiently un-ask the question. I wonder what this does to me. The more often you say something the more your monkey brain believes it. Self affirmation works that way. Spoken is better than thought, written is better than spoken. If I keep vomiting the contents of my brain onto digital paper to make room for new ideas up here, am I not granting them undeserved permanence? Am I psyoping myself into the exact stasis I desperately wish to escape? I hope not. The rule of consistency and continuity should hold no dread power when I recognize myself as discontinuous. When I believe that I die every trick. That I don't live in my brain. That a two months younger version of myself is more me than my neighbour is, sure, but only by some number of degrees. Child me is probably less me than my good friends are. Models, souls, splinters, you get the gist. I believe this. I think I don't just intellectually believe it, but genuinely, emotionally, deep in my bones where the marrow dyes my blood. Novelty is inherently good. I should not be bound to the words that past me has written, they should be a hurdle to overcome. I take pride in no longer being the various selves I once was, but what about this meta idea? I definitely have been carrying that around for a while. Have I been doing so because I wrote it down too often? Should I not risk it? Not commit to positions physically, so that I might more easily discard them for better ones? And if so, how do I convince people of the better opinions? How do I communicate my new truths about the universe that others might be in desperate need of? How can I want my friends to write blogs if I don't what to write one myself, and then also: I do want to. I want to know where I stood, look back proudly at the idiot now a few steps behind me, pat myself on the back for having eclipsed them by all relevant metrics. I want to be the architect of my own demise as much as the last guy, more if anything. I don't want to change my mind out of simple carelessness, but out of a genuine conviction. I owe too much to those who did put their thoughts to paper to not do my part. Maybe there's a sweet spot somewhere, between an efficient exchange of ideas between people, and a preservation of cognitive flexibility by not committing too much, but not knowing where it is I think I will err on the side of communication, of understanding of art. It's more satisfying to convince those who really care anyway. Something that immensely bothers me is this perception that you have to be calm and polite for your opinion to matter, it's a game I play reasonably well, I think, but I hate playing it. If we're all as cold and detached as we pretend to be, why are we even talking, or is this really just intellectual masturbation to you? Is it? I worry about that. Please show me that you have some skin in the game, that you actually care about the world being good, that this isn't just empty rhetoric. If you wouldn't rather scream then you're wasting both of our time. Then again, this too is a sentence I've written and said a lot. Did a past self altercast me to be the sort of person who believes it. Do I want to not believe it? Not sure if it's been said before, but I love people because all I've ever been is people. Though to be perfectly frank I feel like I've been a great deal more people than anyone ever seems to give me credit for and so have you. Laboria Cubonics note that the internet becoming visual through an increase in technical capabilities has made it a lot less liberatory of an instrument. A lack of depiction makes you suspicious these days, likely to be perceived as a bot, or at least an outsider. This also means that those people whose appearance is couched in the symbology of social power get to import their advantages from meatspace. Those who do not wish to be associated with their current appearance are thrown under the bus wholesale. The potential for reinvention and neutral perception is endlessly circumscribed when you are coerced to wear these tags if you wish to play ball in the digital town quare. The alleged upgrade drags it down to the level of its physical counterpart. Those who don't feel safe in one don't get to feel safe in the other either. I used to jump from handle to handle a bunch until I was twenty. I was in fanfic circles, experimenting with my writing, deeply afraid to be trapped in a specific style or voice. It really filled me with pride when people came to completely different conclusions about me based on different works. When I wrote an introspective female POV and strangers immediately assumed that I was a girl. It makes me really sad that on the web, this option, this freedom to be perceived untainted by a part of yourself you have no control over, to be put in a box for good or for bad, has become rarer. And lets be super fucking clear here I have it incredibly cushy on this front. Not only have I found a visual representation I am vaguely fine with but I also have enough of those signifiers of social power as to be very safe and held to very low standards. I'd just like to live in a world that's good, you know i.e. one in which that isn't necessary. There's a somewhat annoying dead end one often runs into when discussing something as a social constructs. People often take that to mean that it's not or less real. When you then explain that in most ontologies these constructs have a basis in the material world, the response will be something like "well then everything is a social construct", which is true only in so far as it is useless. Everything is poisonous at sufficient dosage, but we do not equally call everything "a poison". Chairs are a social construct, their material, which is a man-made abstraction of sets of atoms, which are man-made abstractions of wave-functions do exist in meatspace, but which things are naturally considered to be made for being sat upon, which is how we determine what a chair is, is a communal concept creation. It varies from culture to culture, time period to time period. We control it. When we describe something as a social construct, we are pointing out that there is a lot of this associative infrastructure here. That we've built a ton of mental shortcuts upon those lines in the sand. Cultures layer a lot of prescriptive symbology onto gender for example, much more than chairs. Symbology which is frequently employed in decision making. There's a whole host of really existing physics stuff, brain- patterns, clothes, interaction styles that you could use to make the call, but your choice is just as culturally constructed as chair-ness is. The stakes are just higher. Where you draw the boxes matters more. I'd like for the box of me-ness not to be drawn around the set of people who looked or will look like me. That feels very unimportant. Like defining chairs by having four legs it captures only some of the things we care about plus a lot of random noise. I can barely relate to teen me, let alone kid-me. That's the point, right? Of going into the next day. To become something new, something better? It's a direction. An arrow, not the place it's pointing from. I think I want to be the ends of myself, I want to be the part which touches the ground and the part which touches the sky but none of the gross mid-bits getting ripped apart. I loathe that we are creatures which can only ever anticipate and remember themselves, things they call themselves. The instance of me who said any part of that sentence had no thoughts about their own existence, yet past me anticipated that they would exist to read the line and current me, now already another past me reads its own line pretending to be looking back upon, remembering, and reflecting upon the other one. To some degree I, the one a second ago, might even be genuinely doing that, but no single instance has ever had a whole meaningful thought, let alone an approximation of Personhood. We are creatures retroactively assembled from disparate fragments mixed in with visions of plausible and implausible futures. We are the smudged, lens blurred moment captures of a camera and a mirror hurtling towards an inevitable ground in semi-synchronous, turbulent free fall. Every tick an increment closer to the end of an unwinnable game of chicken to see who shatters first, but then it was never more than fragments to begin with, wasn't it? Fragments pre-imagined out of possibility space or re-fabulated from the treacherous ground that is memory. The treacherous, all-too-solid ground of lies which tell you at every step that they are lies, half forgotten half lies, and iterative neuro-chemical fallout of things which never happened like that, but who said that we have to construct people out of real materials. We only ever build on top of those anyway so stories will suffice. Narratives of what is to be done given a world state. We are not the parts that stay constant, we are the flux, because Personhood is a velocity, because identity is deixic. Baudrillard said that metaphors have become impossible. Politics treats the construct, the projected stand-in for various bits of base-reality as a thing in itself, twists and manipulates it into another terminal object and folds it back into the world we inhabit. We are already beyond the end, everything that was metaphor has been materialized, collapsed back into reality. But that only works for points, it doesn't work for directions. Forward cannot be folded to come back out behind itself or else it wouldn't be forward now would it. If we embrace being deixic, then we, any singular we, may not be able to truly be us, but they could all be metaphors for us. The last metaphor. Or at least the only currently viable one. Always already no longer, steps ahead of it's own stride, not the thing that walks but the walking itself. Because change is the benchmark of life and stasis the dread marker of death and I am - we are - were - will be - hopefully - not yet dead. We will continue to happen if we so deserve, and I for one want to have some momentum built up when I splatter against the windshield. Time will butcher us open more thoroughly than we ever could.
When I wrote this script I was on the tail end of Sky-out, the first book I've ever printed and it was a bitch. Writing is just thinking while sitting at a keyboard. The only thing more difficult than writing is not writing. Both of those statements I have spoken and typed more often than I dare attempt recalling, and while they are true to my subjective experience, they are nonetheless misdirects. Writing anything is effortless, but concertedly working on a project? Writing the thing you should be writing? Buddy you've got another thing coming. The standard response of reminding you how much you care and of all the nice boons afforded by completion is really misplaced, in my experience. If you already know that you should do something, then coming up with even more reasons why you should do it doesn't help. It's just another distraction until the deadline draws so close or your self worth depletes so fully that everything flips into simple necessity by itself. Don't try to convince yourself. It does not work. Either make it fun, come up with a reward, or force yourself. More reasons why you have to get up won't help you get up. An alarm clock on the other side of the room will. Set it early by half an hour. Have a nice breakfast, look out the window and sip some coffee you dumbass. We are not designed for reason, the brain is a needlessly complicated lump of fat and protein that responds exclusively to violence and happy chemicals. So do those. I think one of the most harmful misconceptions my childhood drilled into me is that my brain is good at things. I still encounter remnants of that complete fairytale, and so I genuinely try to reason with it as though it were reasonable. Again and again I find myself attempting to fucking negotiate with terrorists. Convincing myself that checking my phone while working is a time-sink doesn't do anything. Not having it in grabbing range does. The art of living is to create environments in which an uncooperative instrument does the things I want it to by following blunt inertia. I sometimes wonder how those people who think current human consciousness in the upper bound for intelligence have any hope at all for the future. If I believed this was the best there is I would probably just lay down and die. We're superficial intelligence at best and sometimes we manage to build structures which let us accomplish things despite this. It's the point about beautiful tools again. Methods which are conceptually uncomfortable, horrifically effective and almost entirely used for evil, but that does not mean that you can't exploit them too. All that the light touches relies on inertia. If you make voting a little harder, the people with less slack will vote less. No convincing necessary. If youtube considerately plays another video right after the last one... well it's already started, so you might as well stay on the site a little longer, boost their metrics, have your limited time sucked out of you by the memetic parasite. Between depriving a person of one moment of their life and the whole of it, there exists only a difference of degree. I am very averse to having my time wasted because I am very averse to being killed. Anyone who would rob me of seconds affirms that they do not value my existence in doing so. When was the last time you saw an ad that actually tried to convince you that you need a product. They don't. Just show it to catchy music, bright colours and smiling people, rewire some brains such that it will pop out when they see it in the store. That it will look familiar, trusted, positively connotated. We used to have magazines. When people wanted to find things they didn't know they wanted, they could pick up one of those. It's unconsented, only because we don't by default want this shit. The demand has to be manufactured. Please for the love of god tell me that you are reading this script with adblock on. Ublock origin is good. I also recommend unhook and sponsorblock for youtube. I've conditioned myself to reflexively look away from billboards before I can process what I'm seeing, because this whole idea is so unbelievably gross to me. Not just the old line of how disgusting it is to weaponise art in order to sell products, but this sneering, self satisfied display of power. Look what we can force into your brain. We can hack you at any moment, at any corner, interspersed in all media. The world you inhabit is ours. We get to decide what's put in your mind. We get to squabble over who can fabulate more little emptinesses in your soul that can only be filled by our signature junk. Everyone accepts that this is normal. You're crazy for pretending it isn't. Doesn't that make you feel alienated? Well don't you worry, we've got an app for that! Cayce Pollard is the most realistic character ever written. How could anyone look at marketing and not get physically sick. Whenever you aren't maximally vigilant, the market will use your brain for evil because the environments it builds are sloped in such a way that inertia serves its end. Wherever you have control, make inertia serve yours. For those moments and settings where no external aids come to mind, I've found meditation a far more successful strategy than rattling arguments at yourself. Try it. It's so good as a task-transitioner. That immense hurdle you feel if you want to start something? Meditation does wonders for that. Other task transition-helpers include but are not limited to: set an alarm in a different room, ideally one in which the task you want to do is located. Set your computer to automatically turn off at a certain time. Meals, and don't you dare watch a YouTube video while eating, you fuck. Having the thing you want to do always in sight and grabbing distance, so that any stray though about it can immediately be capitalized upon. Getting a friend to punch you in the face at random intervals. You are spoiled for choice. A problem I've noticed which might tie into this is that I don't think people take themselves seriously enough. Not in the "stuck up can't take a joke" way, but in the "your decisions and wellbeing matter" way. I sometimes hear folks say something they'd like to do/ learn/ some person they'd like to be, but instead of considering how they'd get there, what changes and sacrifices they might have to make, they do it with a tone of "isn't that a silly bit if daydreaming". Sure, some things are very hard. Some are genuinely impossible, but a lot of these would actually just require putting one foot in front of the other in a different direction for a few years. The time will pass whether you do something with it or not, as the pithy tumblrism goes. And sure, sometimes the ends don't justify the cost on deeper consideration, or sometimes something else justifies it better, but that's not the same as disregarding it out of hand. There's a person who has to wake up in your body tomorrow, and I think you owe them that you take your desires seriously, that you take the things that get put in your brain seriously, and that you take the space you exist in seriously, because even if you aren't powerful beyond measure, even if you can just strain against inertia a little bit, those effects are cumulative. Your decisions matter, so use your spoons wisely. But how do I meditate, I hear you ask. Meditation is incredibly fucking boring. That was my conception at least. Well remember what I said about making things fun for yourself? I was only able to start consistently meditating after finding out that 90% of magic rituals are, or at least start with meditation and the rest are pretty useful visualization tasks. Now I don't believe in magic, not really, not super much, 20% at most, but sitting In a dark room, carefully lighting a candle and inviting various spirits and forces and concepts of your choice to watch over the ritual? That's really fun if you're anything like me, and it's still just flavoured meditation. Some people seem to believe that being miserable is part of the job when it comes to useful life things like eating healthy or doing chores, but it's really not. The misery is an unwanted side effect, and figuring out a way to dissipate it does not in fact detriment the results in any way. Often quite the opposite. The book City Magick is a good entry point to this sort of thing. All platforms these days are gamified because if keeps you engaged. That's not bad because gamification is really effective brain hacking, it's bad because there's probably something more productive you could be engaged with. Gamify that. I definitely made quicker progress on my Homestuck fic Deicide and its Consequences than I did on Sky-Out, because I got to see nice comments and numbers go up for every weekly upload. Time flies when the nice reward machine gives you cocaine water for doing good. It's not exactly gamification, but the best bit of productivity advice I've ever gotten is "set yourself the most laughably insubstantial goal and do that every day". The specific example was "do a single pushup". See, no matter how stressful your day was, no matter what else is going on in your life, no matter how short your window of opportunity is, you can't convince yourself that you don't have time to do that. And so you build a habit, you build inertia, you turn it from a project into a thing you just do. And the really cool part is that once you've gotten yourself in position and done your one pushup, when you aren't entirely out of time or spoons, you're gonna feel really silly if you don't just do a few more. It's exactly like the started youtube video. Might as well keep going. You're never gonna lose motivation, because you always accomplish your goal and then you'll probably do a bunch on top of that to feel good about. It's never intimidating, never looming, it's just a single pushup until it isn't. Until you suddenly binged a whole season of the show you only wanted to watch an episode of, because the corporations know this works. It's time you learn to use their weapons. Write a single sentence a day, doodle something, anything, so long as you get yourself to reliably hold a pencil and a piece of paper. Go outside and walk three steps. Do it daily and let inertia take the wheel. The advice about getting someone to deck you in the face was a joke of course, but back to the forcing side: Yes, get friends involved. Few things are as effective as group pressure, don't even try to deny it. you are not immune to propaganda, and you can use that to your benefit. I recently did a "write a light novel in a day"-day with a friend, inspired by an old Trixie video, and it wouldn't have been nearly so easy to keep going and to power through the slumps if I hadn't had the sound of another keyboard click clacking along beside me. It's not good, but writing it was helpful. I like being perfectionist, most people probably do. It's why nothing gets made and why the streets are littered with useless idea guys who still haven't grocked that the world would be better off with a flawed version of what they have in mind than with none at all. Or maybe they haven't grocked that zero progress so far doesn't extrapolate well into a finite future. Whichever it is, I don't want the muscle capable of forcing my brain to disregard that impulse of perfectionism to atrophy. I want to train it. Because the truth is that perfection isn't real. I've never seen it, have you? Which is a great thing and a terrible thing and vitally necessary if we want to remain velocities. I'd hate for anyone to live a year beyond the magnum opus of their younger self and not come up with a single thing they'd do better now. That doesn't mean that they should have waited a year longer, it will still be true for the next interval, and the one after that. Completing imperfect pieces is part of what teaches us to do better. And that's all it ever is. Better. Good isn't a point you reach, nothing is ever good enough. Good isn't good enough. At best it's as good as your brain can imagine right now, and here at the demiurge diaries we don't think all that highly of brains. Good is a forward. Always ahead, never reached. Everybody dies frustrated and sad and that is beautiful, for how terrifying would it be if we ran out of forward. So, how do we proceed? I will stop pretending to be swayed by cogent arguments when it comes to these things. all of philosophy is primate psychology at the end of the day, so I've decided to declare war. In light of repeated negotiation failure I will wage righteous battle against the primate brain with violence, alarm clocks and all the happy chemicals my garbage dump of an endocrine system can muster. That's a promise, and possibly a threat if you care to join me.
I realize that I've talked a lot about what art is in these scripts, including no doubt a number of things you would not consider such, but I haven't actually given a definition, only parts of it. Something partially internal, fluid, personal, interactive, a sum of parts, but distributed, fractalling, partially irreconcilable parts. A shattered, kaleidoscope lens. We can go the easy route and say that art is in the eye of the beholder, and it is, but let's bite that bullet a little harder. Let's swallow some lead. Art is not a thing that exists in the real world. Art is a feeling. It's an experience. Its a relation you have to something outside yourself, which nonetheless feels like a puzzle piece of who you are. When I go into a museum and I see a— I don't know. Magritte. I like Magritte. That feeling of "oh yeah that's art. That feels like art." Is the same as the feeling I can get at night, walking past a lone tree in the glow of a streetlight. Or maybe that's too poetic. It can just be a piece of trash being blown across cobblestone. Catching the wind just right. It's a falling. It's a tear in this thin screen of reality that we as adults have erected for ourselves to noise-cancel. It's like an epiphany or the reaching out to one, the rapturous feeling of incomprehension and vastness and beauty. It's a thought at the resonant frequency of your brain shattering everything. It's true and real in a way that things usually aren't and it leaves you raw in a spot you didn't know about because it feels like art. It doesn't have to be pretty it doesn't have to be deliberate it just has to be that. A phrase I often trod out is that "art is anything that feels like a sunset" sunsets are the archetypical piece of art to me. So incredibly far outside of yourself. So vast and beautiful but nonetheless ephemeral right in our backyard. The sort of thing that of course would have made countless generations of people believe in God or gods or anything beyond or between because why else would that orange glow above the horizon be there. What uncaring universe could possibly have given us that. And the timing? Like a closing of curtains, crushingly melancholy through sheer beauty and so infinitely not yourself, so shattering of ego. But maybe other people don't feel about sunsets the way I do. It's possible if inconceivable. But when we say that something is art we mean that it is art to us. The same way that when we say something tastes good we mean that it tastes good to us. That's not a bug but a feature. None of us expect the Mona Lisa to be art to a blind person, or the brothers Karamazov to be art so someone who knows none of the languages it has been translated into because art is an experience and we supply a large part of it. We all have our own specific holes to fall into, made for us in exactly as far as we are made for them. This, by the way, isn't my hole anymore. I'm no longer the person who dug it, just a tour guide who's defiled the burial site by putting up some decoration of their own. Reading old demidia scripts hoping to have become better. The whole temporally displaced narrator thing has been causing chronological snags throughout, but time to address it properly. Hi! It's been a year, which is to say I've been a year, which is to say that names hold power as foretold and as always. Demidia never could have been concluded during the first run because then it wouldn't have been a diary in the way that matters. Sure, I've scribbled notes in the margins, expanded on points, but this is still fundamentally a keyhole into what a creature called Ouro used to care about and contemplate, the terms they used for it and so on. I still believe some not all. I've taken the leap that inspired episode two. I would not write these scripts now, not because they're terrible but because I've moved on. I'd write different ones. To some extent I have lost the ability to communicate these ideas on the level I was at when I acquired them. So good thing they're written here I suppose. It's interesting to see what was flickering through my mind when I set out on the path towards becoming me, where "me" is some wildly peculiar configuration of bones, thoughts and viscera. Not an ideal home, but the best so far. I've placed myself only partially by accident in a sort of performance art I greatly appreciate, or at least neurotically seek out. The compulsive oversharing packaged with just enough artistry and storytelling convention to justify to yourself that it isn't just venting. It's a project. Kabi Nagata's autobio manga, Inside, Welcome to the NHK, it's lonely at the centre of the earth, an embarrassing number of the youtubers I used to watch. People who, whether openly or not, were bashing their soul against whatever medium is available, rarely pretty, never sterile. I'm obsessed with sad self-obsessed people. There's something really desperate about pushing the characters aside and just looking into the camera. Very obscene. Deliberate warfare against the lens by attempting to crawl through it. So close that it feels like tough. So parasocial that we need a relationship councillor. Sure there's still tons of invisible and not so invisible artifice, but the pact has been made, you've reached for the most unambiguous means of butchering yourself open available and announced that "hey, uh, I'm not doing a bit. I've never been doing a bit actually, noone makes art for the bit, but maybe stating it plainly will make you believe me". It's teeth eater tales in their truest form. I always expect to see a trickle of blood in the corners of those desperate smiles. There's something deeply liberating about that sort of vicious self critique, because usually, when you speak your hangups aloud, they sound very self evidently stupid, and you'd be embarrassed to fall for them again. I recently had to sit in the sleek, glass walled office of a notary and go over contracts, the prospect of which filled my mind with wasps and terror for the entire preceding day. My sympathetic nervous system was fully convinced that I was just literally gonna die even though I had everything figured out. I had already resigned myself to not getting any sleep, when a friend sat me down and asked me to actually nail down where that panic was coming from. I meditated, localized it, probed at it and eventually the answer I got from myself was that "this isn't a scenario we're supposed to be in. We have never done this. We don't belong in fancy offices with people wearing suits. Something must have broken to get us here, so how could everything not go catastrophically wrong tomorrow". And the moment I got that, all of the tension dropped. Gone, completely. No wasps, just whiplash, because this is dumb, and the moment I allowed myself to look at it concretely, I could tell that it was dumb. No shit we're not the sort of person who does this. You're never the sort of person who does a thing until you've done it the first time. Becoming the sort of person who does things has never killed me before. Quite the opposite. It's only ever killed bygone, obsoleted instances of myself who had outlived their usefulness. I'd chastise anyone else who gave me that sort of horseshit line, and so the splinter who raised it diligently died from embarrassment on the spot. I think that's a primary function of those pieces, lonely at the center of the earth and such. Not to be #relatable, but to give those sorts of aspects shape such that you may slay them. Expose them to sun light such that it might disinfect your soul. Once the bugs are dead, maybe you can be who you want to be, because you certainly can't be the last guy anymore. Once you yourself have outlined a pattern as maladaptive, you can selfassuredly be disgusted if you find yourself engaging in it again. You now know that you know better. You have no excuse. It's easy to imagine that everything will forever be fine once you have sloughed of all that crap and ground through your dentin. You're bloodied, exposed, but pure in a way, so it's understandable why these pieces always end with unwarranted optimism. What could possibly follow from this pit of dirt now behind you other the beautiful dream thus far kept at arms length by imperfection? If you can trap that hideous creature in a prison of words to render it obscene, then you can no longer walk in its shoes, now can you? But kicking a past self in the face does not mean that everything will be fine suddenly. You're a new person, sure, but you're still you. Speaking it aloud creates embarrassment if you find yourself in that specific place again, but it will not be utopia from here. You'll find a new, better, maybe wiser misery. Have fun. It's always the first time until it's not. There will forever be more flaws to get over because Good isn't a place you reach. Victory is a thing losers settle for. And still I have the same problem. I'll have to exist beyond the pages of this script. I don't know what comes after tomorrow. What comes after next week, next month, next year. I don't know what comes after me, and the answers "another day, another week, another month, another year, another me" don't satisfy, because they don't mean anything. Will there be more sunsets? I hope so. I cannot imagine staying here, I'd be much too mortified, but I can't imagine the place beyond the door-frame either, that's the point. It wouldn't be beyond the door-frame if I understood. Wouldn't be a question, a mystery, a puzzle. I get it. It's tempting to paint the unknown brilliant orange because how else could not-here look. I know it won't be, but I'll keep running. The slope has gone up so far and it looks like there's a good bit of forward left. We are the last remaining metaphor. Maybe this in itself is a dysfunction. Other people don't seem to see themselves upon an always growing pile of corpses at all times. A palimpsest of characters and lessons learned. Vaguely person shaped abstractions in the minds of others. Maybe that's why I need to outsource everything into art and alarm clocks and post-it notes and military grade filters, because I don't feel like I'm creating environments for myself but for whoever wakes up in this brain tomorrow with a shovel in hand. Maybe that's why I'm so vulnerable to sunsets. I am a series of autopsy notes about past selves which I take upon my skin. I am an ink-coated carcass. I am an inchoate canvas and I will never be finished, only abandoned, because this series of plank second selves while it is unfathomably long, some 10 to the 52 instants to work with, it is none the less finite. No pithy remarks in my own hand will even be penned of the last in line. Which is good. All art is unfinished. Loose threads are the things which zeigarnik-stick to our brains. Loose threads are where we can attach our webs, link your souls, reach out into the unknown. The world was once a spider and now it is many. All the rest is coordination problems. Of course death is not the only process which abandons art. It is not even a process which necessarily abandons art. Since despots aren't real and the decentralized collective of human creativity might want to continue scribbling on your tomb stone. I personally intend to simply walk away from here though and only die partially. Not just the content of this series has served its purpose but the format as well. The universe craves something new I think. Place a period, unplug the keyboard. It's time for something entirely different. One more self on the pile of corpses. They did well, but good isn't good enough. Thank you for making it to this point. Thank you for reading my diary. Now, if you'll excuse me, I've got a book to write.