@therotundying It all started half a year ago. That's when it crystallized or maybe melted. When we got a name @therotundying I'm gonna say "I" a bunch because it's linguistically convenient. Stylistically safe. First nature to the stragglers who'd need such a writeup cause they haven't found their second yet. Give 'em time. Pour it down their throat if you have to. Pick em off the streets and hijack their nervous system @therotundying I'm gonna say "I" a bunch, but it usually won't be pointing at anyone in particular. You might want to unfocus your eyes when you see it @therotundying This swarm tends to lose track of its own history quite intentionally, so take these as the factual ravings of a fractured fossil. Close enough to truth that I believe it on most days, but close enough to a lie by that same metric @therotundying Written in a stupor because there was a keyboard beneath my fingers and words in my brain. Same as it ever was. Dead dove, eat raw @therotundying I won't say the name of the platform because its marketing department has never paid me in anything but contempt which one struggles to buy food with and besides, you know the one @therotundying It was a perfectly uneventful morning when a sheltered dick with cash in place of brains decides to fuck shit up for the rest of us. The paper skinned piss-ant of a CEO, living up to the whole embarrassing gamut of character malfunctions implied by his position, comes to the batshit conclusion that the problematic speech to be curtailed on his platform aren't the venomous screeds of frothing-at-the-mouth nazis, but rather those annoying queers making fun of him personally @therotundying Boo hoo. Really one has to be parody levels of fucking stupid to be both a billionaire and have a problem with the way people talk to or about you @therotundying Had you considered, dickface, that money buys shit? Like that's what it's for. How does your econ 101 zottabrain not go "well there's a thing I'd like to not happen so I'll just pay people to stop" @therotundying Most assholes would probably do it for a free taco @therotundying I'm the kind of unhinged spite-elemental who literally started this shit and I likely would have done it for two @therotundying How much can you really claim to care if you won't even throw so small a fraction of your ill-gotten wealth at the problem. Fucking clown @therotundying Anyway, no one offered bribes when the accounts of folks around me started getting nuked. Not close friends or anything but people I'd have considered to live in my digital neighborhood. Folks without whom the streets are quieter in ways that can't be read as anything but a threat @therotundying First they came for the anti corporate schizoposters and I didn't speak up because I had a way funnier idea in mind @therotundying Maybe funny isn't the right word. Maybe there are no right ones anymore. I was gonna lead Mary Shelley up the tower of fucking Babel on my thinkpad @therotundying Same night I cobbled the code together. Nothing big, just a submission form that checked whether your login data triggered the right error message, some "sowwy, you were found in violation of our god given right to be treated with all the undue civility our portfolio entitles us to" or such. If that checked out you got a text input attached to a bot which would post whatever you wrote @therotundying Of course I made it more elaborate as time went on. Re-did the whole thing from scratch a couple of times when I found myself being a way more competent web-developer. Reply and message functionalities, better ui, industry grade scraping and all that jazz, but our roots are humble where they're buried @therotundying I made an account called the rot undying, sent some DMs and waited to see what people would do with this silly little toy I had built for them @therotundying Next day I roll out of bed barely remembering what I'd done. Flicked on the lights. Didn't see that it was god quite yet, but the foundation had been laid @therotundying Like I had all those terminated war heroes posting as a garbled collective on a new account, but so what? Big deal. Well obviously it isn't and obviously I got terminated myself pretty quickly, but the fun bit was that, while access was restricted, everyone could wire that bot up to their own profile. Everyone could be the rot undying, and as reward for being a good little megaphone, you'd get to be part of it once you too got banned @therotundying You wanna join the canon? Easy. Just let it speak through you and get swallowed @therotundying At the start things could have failed, but since I didn't know what success would look like at that point, I wouldn't have even perceived it as that. It could have fizzled easily if it weren't for this specific crowd, but once the ball got rolling —once the hype cycled its spillover into pure attention— you'd have to shut down the whole internet to stop it @therotundying Of course they figured out how I was using the login information and started handling terminated accounts like non-existant accounts, but it was too late for that to do anything. We can't be blocked, we're the whole damn ecosystem. We're memerics with teeth @therotundying If we cared we could ask for half the board to be replaced and the shareholders would push it through without second thought because we're what keeps the name of their precious little IP on people's tongues @therotundying We don't care, so we only do it when we're bored. The suits are as fungible as we are @therotundying I wonder if the marketing team hates me so much because I am better at their job than they ever will be @therotundying The site was ours, soon some others as well and we were so many that of course people started making their own versions. Writing filters or sifting through stuff manually. Everyone was being some blurred collection of voices while their own voice was being remixed and reused somewhere else entirely @therotundying I started hanging election posters. I lost a few apartments and took a few people in all over the place. We started being collectives in person. Adopted a graveyard, took over a town in Brazil @therotundying When one of us got hurt it was an all-of-us issue. I'd become an ant hive without noticing and I was fucking good at it. Better than I'd ever been at being human @therotundying I was talking to myself full time by that point. Making alternatives to carreers out of it. I gave like a dozed interviews in a week that I only found out about days later @therotundying With proximal assurance that more than enough people would pick up the slack of being me, I started being them most of the time @therotundying I lived in neighbourhoods close-by our unwittingly father (the paper-skinned piss-ant), so I burned his house down twice. Only got arrested once. Working on undoing that @therotundying I'm on the train writing the most democratic manifesto in the history of humanity @therotundying I have been writing it for half a year @therotundying Sometimes I see profiles still operating in singularity and I want to eat them @therotundying I started hanging election posters @therotundying I started killing what tried to kill me