social media

The Schitzolumpen Are Not Nihilists

/ geotrickster / 3 Comments

I was mere days from writing up a piece titled ‘Make Asylums Great Again’ when the assassination of Charlie Kirk, or specifically the response to it by the media, had necessitated a slight change of focus. But only a slight one. I have nothing to say about that case individually save that physically attacking the commentariat, loathsome as they often be, for their opinions is the height of moronic adventurism, undermines the ability to have a vibrant society, and risks martyring a partisan midwit class hardly deserving of such laurels. Michael Tracy sums it up well enough that I need not go further. Actors such as Palantir and the FBI love events like this, I am convinced, as it makes selling mass surveillance easier.

What I originally wanted to state before all of this is that a vast untapped market of support exists for those who wish to pivot the past failed mass incarceration around drug use into something more constructive: the rebuilding of the asylum system. Dismantled by Reagan (of course) with the help of social justice do-gooders who had watched too much One Who Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, America’s once large asylum system kept streets clean and safe and provided housing and food for the mentally ill. In order to reduce societal alienation, atomization, and build communal solidarity it becomes imperative that public space be free of the nonfunctioning and often violent mentally ill. This system, which was filled with abuse, it cannot be denied, was still a vastly superior alternative to letting the crazies roam free. When they do so others do not go outside or participate in healthy public life. The schitzolumpen ruin society by being out and about, and their own quality of life is lessened too. The right ignores the role a lack of social spending plays in letting these people out, their own casual cruelty fueling the very things they despise about city living, while the left, stuck in the mentality of being forever fifteen and riddled (often by their own identarian admission) with mental illness, reflexively defends the worst of lumpen behavior and seeks to redirect criticism from the real and visceral into the nebulously structural. They may be right on the big picture, but they ignore the reality on the ground to get there.

People who are less likely to go outside are more likely to spend extra time online, in turn. A process fueled by the outside being less pleasant. There they might find another type of schtizolumpen. Less a public transport ranter and more of soap box grandstander type. The hyper-politicization of everything seems to have turned your average shut-in into Frances E Dec. Knowing (correctly) that the old established world views are wrong and have led us here, they are trying (and so far failing) to come up with new ones. And much as the old school moral panic about television rotting peoples brains was untrue about entertainment but was true about the news, so too does the internet’s entertainment not really fuel this problem so much as social media’s bombardment of contextless current events seem to act as fuel for those on the precipice of mental breakdown.

What we see, especially with domestic terrorists, is nothing that really makes sense to the rational. Therefore we get a lot of commentary that it must be nihilistic. I contend that incoherence is not nihilism, it might be far from it actually.

There is a tendency to conflate what nihilism actually is, the rejection of universal moral principles, with the more teenage understanding of it as ‘nothing matters but my feelings’. The first is effectively a realist position of living in a chaotic world which I myself share, the second is an enraged lashing out that seeks validation through catharsis. The first is more likely to take a bemused, indifferent, or dethatched perspective on life. The second aggressively searches for meaning in action, often through joining conflicts far from any rational concept of their own self-interest.

When one is familiar with extremist recruitment techniques, which I am from having once studied and worked in the countering violent extremism field, it becomes apparent that ideologues and cult-builders prey specifically upon those who are downwardly mobile and clearly seeking a purpose and meaning greater than themselves. It is a way to transcend both death and irrelevance in the eyes of those who see themselves destined for something great but with no means to achieve it. We are used to seeing this manifest in racial supremacist movements, cults, Jihadist networks, and general messianic views. It flatters the true believer inside the dejected. It tells them “You really are the protagonist all along, join us and change the world by taking part in the battle of good against evil.”

One can say that what we see now is garbled nonsense, culture war for its own sake rather than a coherent goal. So far that is the case, but it is (dare I say) earnestly trying to be something more. It is constructing its own mythology from the ground up where its followers can be heroes. As a notorious zoomer-hater when it comes to all things cultural I am hardly sympathetic to this, but I do understand it. But, much like so much of the public space, it is dominated by the schitzolumpen and nothing positive can possibly come from it as long as that remains so.

There needs to be an internet commons and a healthy internet subculture too, the both separate yet playing off each other. Like how a city’s downtown and underground music scene should work. But to have either there needs to be a holding tank for the lumpens that ruin everything. The asylums should not just be rebuilt for violent vagrants, but for the agoraphobic goblins as well. Needless to say, these asylums will not have access to the internet. It really is time to invest in public mental health, so Make the Asylums Great Again should be a rallying cry for people across the spectrum.

I am aware of the danger of what could easily become politically motivated diagnosis. Just look at the Soviet experience with Sluggish Schitzophrenia to see such a thing in practice. I would want this purely based on the quality of public behavior rather than the nature of the views expressed when doing so. But the fact is those who can’t keep their crazy in check are dragging everyone else down. In so doing, they actually become the new monoculture they think they are rebelling against.

T.S. Elliot’s oft quoted line from “The Second Coming” sums it up well: “The best lack all conviction while the worst are full of passionate intensity.” You do not get passionate intensity from nihilism, it comes rather from idealism, however thwarted or redirected it might be. Such idealism could be constructively channeled, but it needs to kept far away from those who promise a quick fix through grand battles of darkness against light.

The Domestic Danger of Allies and Dittoheads

/ geotrickster / 1 Comment

In a poll that should surprise absolutely no one, most republicans support the right to protest- unless it is Israel. Claims from the party of Freedom Fries that they were now the defenders of free speech were obviously idiotic of course, but the clash of the idea of American First with the reality of Israel First has to be the most jarring, if hardly unexpected.

While the neo-McCarthyism of Russiagate was the most famous aspect of that odious and deeply stupid era, I think the worst aspect about it is that there was in fact a foreign nation that pupeteered the GOP all along- it just wasn’t Russia. But the Democrats are almost as compromised by the Israel Lobby as the Republicans are, meaning they could not have brought this up without facing a similar scrutiny themselves.

Strategic rivals have very little influence over a (powerful) states’ domestic politics. Recognized as a threat, their agents are monitored and tracked. This is not so with allied states, who are the true media savvy juggernauts of foreign policy discourse. Rivals may spend as much or more, but their payoff is far less. Closely interlinked nations on the other hand get away with almost anything. Alliances themselves become lucrative intuitions and develop a certain existence independent of their constituent countries. One of the reasons that George Washington warned against overly close attachments with foreign nations is because people tend to romanticize and become too invested in their destinies to the point where it overrides their interest in their own country, creating dangerous commitments and contradictions.

This brings us to another and seemingly unrelated phenomenon of the post-Cold War Era: the Dittoheads. The term is now hopelessly archaic, to the point where I’m surprised I even know of it. It was on the way out before I was even conscious of anything on the news that wasn’t related to Joe Lieberman trying to cancel my beloved games. It described the average Rush Limbaugh listener. A mindless compliant who would call in to agree with everything The Pig and his previous callers had spouted out beforehand. Limbaugh was a product, and his audience mindlessly consumed it.

I think one of the reasons we no longer use the term ‘dittohead’ is because it is so specifically linked with Limbaugh, but he really was a pioneer for the entire media’s eventual fate in the 21st Century. This style of mindless repetition in service of narrative creation rather than critical thought went mainstream with Fox News, and then was copied by the other cable news networks and even what was once (painfully) called the ‘blog-o-sphere’ until it became the messaging apparatus of a two party system in general. The explosion of social media’s popularity in the 2010s at first broke this partisan monopoly but then would go on to reaffirm it in stranger and more unhinged ways. This would culminate in nakedly gamed and astroturfed platforms such as reddit and increasingly ””””””’X””””””’.

Now we live in the postmodern utopia all of the most naïve people I went to grad school with so badly wanted to come true. People choose their own truth out of brand loyalty rather than critical thought. Its called being a good fucking person, you Islamosexual Communazi. It basically doesn’t even matter anymore which of these self-contained echo chambers someone is in, they are all dittoheads. They signal group loyalty and wear their inability to engage in nuanced thought as a point of pride. If you disagree with them, you are assumed to be a diametric opposite of all they hold dear, even if that is far from true.

These are the easiest people in the world to manipulate. Now, who do you think realizes that aside from the usual suspects of political culture warriors and profit maximizing corporations?

I would hazard to guess foreign lobbies. Specifically allied foreign lobbies with media connections and cultural cache. Israel is the big one, but I also (to bring it back to Russiagate) suspect Britain, and possibly in the future a South African diaspora trying to pull a Miami Cuba 2.0. And this isn’t even to bring up the entire mess that is the western-based Ukraine fanboys.

This isn’t new. The pro-France contingent of American politics in the 1790s was so strong it took a major diplomatic incident, an undeclared naval war, and an invasion scare to remove their influence from policy. But I will refrain from talking too much about that now as I will have multiple future publications that go into great detail into the topic, both in book chapter and article form, so stay tuned.

The dittoheads are waiting to be sent their instructions, and as many foreign as domestic actors know of their pliability and narrative shaping abilities. They will advocate against civil liberties at home to protect their beloved proxy-countries abroad. They are fools who vicariously fight battles for a sense of meaning in their little plebian lives. If they are catered to they will drag us all down with them.

Never say ‘ditto’.

Leftbook and the Birth of Contemporary Social Media

/ geotrickster / 3 Comments
The social media avatar vs the person behind it.
  • 2003: ‘No Blood For Oil.’
  • 2013: ‘The 99% vs the 1%’
  • 2023: ‘Date Me, Bigot, Or I’ll Have You Cancelled.’

I think its worth having a brief but honest reckoning of where this process of degeneration actually came from.

There is a lot of anecdotal evidence of President Obama’s fear of Occupy Wall Street and how most of those pick-me gifted kid nerds that made up his administration quite possibly saw it as the most threatening challenge they faced. Occupy was the one and only time the Millennial generation had a chance at doing something effective and meaningful at the structural level, but it went nowhere in terms of actual change. What is undeniable is that there was a conscious pivot away from left wing activism that prioritized class and economics and into activism that prioritized culture, identity politics, individual frailty, and victimhood after the failure of Occupy. Whether the state and Fortune 500 companies had something to do with this, I do not know. But they certainly benefited from it. And once they saw they benefited they switched to outright supporting this pivot to ‘social justice’ at an institutional level in an attempt that has at least partially succeeded at making this the defining ideology of the professional managerial class today.

After Occupy was the hermetically sealed lunatic asylum known as Tumblr banning porn, driving most of its mentally unstable coomer audience into twitter, where they could demand safe spaces on a site known for being a public free for all. Because journalists, those bastions of intellectual rigor and critical thought, get their entire world view from twitter, this led journalists to add to their already lengthy list of stenography-related iniquities by adopting this apparently tumblrified culture. Soon all of social media was dominated by censorious and ostensibly left-wing scolds attempting to re-enact The Tipper Gore Experience for a new generation.

Nothing in this conventional narrative is wrong, but its timing is all off. It is missing a critical ingredient. Namely, that the rise of puritanical hysteria in media and nerd sectors of society predates the Great Tumblr Migration by at least five years. Kony 2012 and Upworthy came first, and failed spectacularly. People back then could still mock the low-information activist openly as a common position. Yet the bizarre spectacle of younger people and more left wing people becoming more and more pro-censorship, pro-safteyism, and evangelical continued on anyway even before the events attributed to it later.

I believe I have the missing piece to this timeline. Though it requires citing things I no longer have links and screencaps of.

Late 2000s and early 2010s Facebook was the best of the mainstream social media sites. It was very freewheeling and easy to separate into more private and public spheres. Nowadays, the website is a hellscape of badly targeted ads, ranting cable news-addled Boomers, and an algorithm that will bury interesting posts from people you actually know in favor of half forgotten acquaintances from decades ago sharing pictures of their poorly prepared food and mewling children. A kind of Millennial-Xer version of ‘Bless This Home’ knitting hanging in an Iowa kitchen. But back then it was actually fun to use.

It had a dark side though. Well, probably more than one. But one I, to my great misfortune, became aware of personally in the wake of post-occupy disillusionment with Obungler and the libs: Leftbook.

I never got sucked in directly myself. But I knew enough people who did. All of a sudden I had all these friends of friends with anime girl ushanka avatars who would shriek at anyone and everyone who deviated from whatever the ever-shifting dream cosmos of the day was. People, including myself, were accused of being ‘self-hating racists’ by people who were entirely white. Cancellation campaigns raged across public groups for the tiniest slights with zero pushback considering the echo chamber like culture that reigned. Rumors became facts in the minds of true believers. Meaningless power struggles broke out over zero stakes. None of these people seemed to live anywhere but online. Most of them, I suspect, were agoraphobic losers rotting away in some kind of hoarder-home whose only chance at ever feeling the tiniest bit of power in their life was through internal policing by serving as a kind of Red Guard for postmodern gender theory and the 1619 Project. The reddit neckbeard but on Facebook.

Some specific memories: There was a Portuguese lunatic of ever-alternating pseudonyms who clearly wanted to start his own cult who constantly postured as the most morally pure person in the world and a ‘philosopher king’. Australian Catholic-Leftist furries, activist groups that had ‘matriarchal coups’ to remove males from moderator positions en masse, and my personal least favorite of them all: A sociopathic Manchester University anime girl avatar sporting student who worked for years to amass some kind of online clout through endless slander of others only to ghost the entire internet one day after what I presume was one too many witch hunts gone too far finally brought the knives out. I would be informed later that this person’s radicalization had occurred after being booted from multiple safe for work anime forums for spamming hentai constantly.

Real Savonarola hours up in here.

No one without a direct window into this was aware of it really. It was self-contained. It either disappeared from FB or I blocked (or, more likely knowing me, antagonized others into blocking) most of the people taking part in it so I came not to see it anymore. But it really spawned what became mainstream online left-activist culture in the past few years. The timing is just a bit too perfect of a fit. Considering their love of extremely cringey nomme de guerres, I wonder how many of the random reply guys and schitzoposters you see out there on other more trafficked websites today are these people in their new form. They are the missing link in the timeline of how the Anglo-left went from the least bad faction in society to people I wouldn’t trust to change a lightbulb.

A culture of weakness and frailty begets performative virtue signaling based on victimhood. The concept of slave morality made manifest. While such people exist among all stripes of life, when they are the ones demanding to be the protagonists of human civilization it becomes even more hilarious. The advocates for violent revolution and direct action unable to go outside, cook their own food, live without amazon, and quaking in fear from words spoken to them or written on a page. They remind me of the Max Boot neocons but for domestic policy. Chickenhawks of the revolution that will never come.

The irony is that the governments these people admire would have committed them to asylums by force. And in many cases, rightfully so. Its interesting to note how much of this could have been contained if not for Reaganism and the deinstitutionalization of society in the 80s and 90s. There may have been a lot of abuse and neglect in the old asylum system, but it was undoubtedly a superior option to letting these desperate and unhinged types of people roam around public transportation, public parks, and now the internet. Foreign visitors to the U.S. in the past used to marvel how there were no random psychos everywhere like in other cities. Now those psychos rule the discourse. And in so doing, they give ammunition to a right wing backlash far more than they contribute to anything constructive. It turns out the Lumpens were politically engaged after all. At least the past political lolcows like Frances E Dec were funny.

I still have very left of center views on economic redistribution, class inequality, the need for a secular state, and the importance of environmentalism in our future. I am thoroughly Turchinpilled. But never in a million years would I claim to be ‘left-wing’ so long as I live in an Anglo-country. Political factions are not determined by Platonic ideals but rather by how something manifests in reality in a practical sense. And the Anglo-Left of today are the children of Leftbook, who are in turn the children of Increase Mather and Judith Butler as channeled through an amount of mental illness so large it really should be its own anthropological subset. They exist only to turn real life into their sad little fear-soaked internet presences. In the end they want nothing but for everyone to be as maladjusted and miserable as they are.

At least we can be assured that for all the irritation and deleterious impact of their presence when culturally pandered to, they will never amount to anything when it comes to hard power. Having concrete goals and wielding hard power, I’m sure, is ableist.

Oversocialization: An Alternative Social Media Theory

/ geotrickster / 8 Comments

gibbering mouther

I have seen a plethora of theories about how social media, the internet, and mass media in general is driving us insane by increasing the number of shut-ins and people who forgo real life social interaction for the sad-sack replacement of dehumanizing cyberspace. They are so common as to not be worth summing up once again here. While I certainly agree that the internet seems to have weaponized a specific type of cheap and clueless discourse that lacks depth and seems to empower the most hysterical and autistic-leaning elements of public speech at the expense of all else, I disagree on why this is with the mainstream theories that are out there.

I believe it is over-socialization, rather than under-socialization, that is the true bugbear of this problem. The internet is enabling more connectivity than ever before, and in so doing it is abolishing private space to think and reflect. This is hardly a new process-it clearly began with television-but it is being accelerated more than ever before by social media in particular. We see people’s opinions unfiltered whereas before they would either have to be teased out or would naturally come out as part of a normal conversation between people who at least sort of know each other. Cyberspace may be filled to the brim with posturing and fakeness but all of human social interaction is. It is just more on display than ever before. Everyone no matter how irrelevant can now behave as golden age of Hollywood celebrities types do…and since our society idolizes those very people it becomes a model to emulate.

None of this is really any faker than normal interaction, it is just jacked up to 11 and dosed with a big helping of agoraphobia. The true alienation is with nature and the outdoors, not with human civilization. It is humanity that is in fact being overdosed on. If people are withdrawing from social interaction in the real world it may very well be because they already have too much of it online.

So what we are seeing with the widespread panics and ever more rapidly shifting zeitgeist of cultural wars, tribalization, and the like is really what happens when we are trained to be too social. People have too many ‘friends’. They have too many people watching them and care about the approval of too many outside forces. Privacy has been abolished as a value and to tune out of the mainstream is now a freakish occurrence rather than a respectable one. A contemporary definition of a thinker is now someone who tweets approval-seeking self-marketing in a desperate bid to thrive in the gig economy. I don’t think any but the most obnoxious among us were designed to be exposed to other people so much for such a large percentage of our waking hours. We need quiet to really be with ourselves. One of the biggest turn-offs for me when I meet a new person are those who clearly cannot be alone with themselves for long stretches of time. It implies that they have little of interest going on inside save perhaps for insecurity.

How does one combat this trend of over-socialization? Well, it is easy. You don’t fully have to disconnect…but rather take a step back and realize that when you say you need ‘me time’ or whatever it is you want to call it, that this also requires that said solo time is removed from the internet, television, or anything like that. Time to oneself, when a person’s most interesting thoughts occur since they are not simply being shaped by extremely temporary trends, is key to self-cultivation. And self-cultivation is nearly impossible in an over-socialized environment. Reading full books rather than articles is a start, but I would say that getting outside and adopting physical hobbies is also a part of it. Writing, even just for practice, helps too. Exploring a city on foot can even work as people who live among high population densities are very good at tuning other people out for necessities sake-a skill perhaps needed on highly trafficked social media websites as well.

Nature is among my favorite refuges. Nothing reminds one more of how things work without pretense than physical processes and less mentally cluttered other animals. The (fictional) writing I do is often most effectively inspired by trips I take to naturally beautiful locations for hiking or whatnot. Much like the life you live in meatspace, your online life should be regulated to a level that works best for you without overloading your own personal time. Otherwise you end up like an algorithm of a person with no depth of character. A human Marvel movie constructed for mass consumption rather than actual contribution beyond immediate gratification. It is the irony of the present times that those who feel the need to be most in tune with current trends are the ones basically guaranteeing their thoughts have no staying power. These are the people who will be first to fade into irrelevance.

The first step is to realize that while humans are social animals, this too must be held in moderation along with our other instincts. To have a meaningful contribution to others in the first place one must first be able to step back and look at things from an angle different from merely going along unthinkingly with trends.

Of course, there are entire industries based around relieving and avoiding self-reflection, so we have a society that incentivizes people not to really be quiet with themselves. But even in order to see that relatively mundane observation, it requires the knowledge that you are being manipulated…and that in turn requires some sense of distance.

………………………………

One announcement regarding the future of this blog-and no, it is not related to the above post. I recently started a position where I will do a lot of foreign policy and strategic writing. Unlike my prior time at the State Department where most of what I wrote was not for public output, this one will be. So, with that being a big part of my near future I feel that is likely that the percentage of foreign policy specific topics on this blog will decrease in proportion to the other topics I like such as philosophy, history, domestic politics (of various nations), etc. When I write something particularly on topic for this blog elsewhere I will probably just link to it with a brief statement and then get to another topic.

I will not cease writing about foreign policy topics here, I am merely stating that its proportion will decrease. And even then, book reviews on that topic are almost certainly staying as is when it comes to output.