© 2022 contain___
Substack is the home for great writing
A quick note: I would never reduce the internet to the purely political, attempt to anthropomorphize it, or characterize it in a way that gives total agency to the acts of users within the binary of a political framework. This would completely go against everything I’ve been saying for a while now. Let’s just call this a thought experiment, a particular example of something I have found to be animating under very limited circumstances.
We have to give some context for when the 'Schizopost' style of writing came about - endemic marginalizing and scapegoating of any offhand idea during the Trump years; but also, an aesthetic redirect to avoid an utterly ridiculous culture war that came to define all public discourse.
Some of it was born out of response and intention-it was ‘intended’ to expose the lies of the regime using asymmetrical cultural language so that we wouldn't end up with 8% inflation, poverty, and hopelessness-becoming trendy only after it was clear who regained power and thus, was regrouped with a burgeoning anti-populist cultural sentiment.
You have to understand some of us ‘schizoposters’ have always been post-marxists, populists, etc. We wanted material populism and deeply feared we weren't going to get it if things became too identifiable, too ‘readable’ if you will.
It only became synonymous with passive-nihilism after it had ceased to manifest this. How quickly we forget the recent past. A few savvy VC’s picked up on it I guess, which is why I DON’T fuck with ’monarchists’. Of course, those merely drawn to its heady aesthetics and disinterested in the crypto-egalitarian heartland aims were the first to get theirs, but this is nothing new. Capital selects for the middle man as bios does for courage.
An absence of pure ideology shouldn’t necessarily be conflated with an absence of all political commitments. The false heaven of blockchain might be the last straw that resurrects communism, or a struggle of the commons itself, which might result in a different kind of nightmare depending on where you stand on the whole deal. Sam Frank said ‘I stopped being a leftist when I got crypto rich’...so what is everyone else going to just fucking do? Sit around forever and watch?
Of course, ‘leftism’ is a reactionary political stance. The ‘too scared to vote for Trump/Sanders supporter’ to ‘trad reactionary rw’ pipeline should leave little room for surprise in 2022-just as card-carrying members of Fourth International came to occupy the Council of Foreign Affairs (CFR) decades prior.
Nobody understands this better than these types of high-operating actors who see elite brotherhood as inevitable to dissolve itself across ideological boundaries into Burnhamian ‘natural oligarchy’. The Sanders dirtbag left are their people (Yarvin even admits this). They don’t seem to put up much of a resistance against it, instead advocating for the corporeal overflowing of sacred iconography - a totem for the systemic impoverishment of material reality. I’m sorry for butt fucking you, here’s a meme to make you laugh-let us pray the rosary of the dialectical image.
Of course, ‘direct speak’ has its manipulative undercurrents as well. Derrida remarked on this when talking about Americans. He loved America and Americans, calling it the homeland of deconstruction, but he did say Americans were somewhat manipulative in their ‘probing’ of ideas, or investigations into ‘what things always mean’. He said this is why he refers to ‘Americans’ in a direct and abusive ‘American’ way-sort of abusing them back. He was like, don’t get me wrong I love the fuckers, but they don’t fool me one bit. ‘They want to get me in deep shit, always looking for a reason to get you in trouble’. They can’t just let a statement exist, just as I believe Americans are doing in regards to the exact subject I am talking about right now.
On another note, one can’t cancel anyone on the internet in absence of law and jurisprudence without indicting and canceling the internet as a whole. To say that people are guilty on the internet is to say they have total governance over it and are completely sovereign from all affect/sensations it imparts on this notion of the mind, which is falsely ascribed to humans as absolute subjectivity (there is no subjectivity as we understand it in THIS way). This is, probably, one of the strangest quandaries we face in our time. How can we even view the internet as a psychiatric ward that becomes potentially dominated by its inpatients? How can we pathologize entities and individuals ‘from’ the internet without pathologizing the internet itself?
These are all questions to consider. When I started my own project, this was my (particular) line of thinking. How do we expand the commons through a sort of reverse-gatekeeping? But now that precarity has been something people have tried escaping, we’re engaging in a new culture war. An equally worthless conversation over Gibberish vs. Ted-Talk didacticism.
We weren't reading the situation because we hadn't yet grown accustomed to this new exposure to data layering. There was a real chance to materially shift things in the immediate but unfortunately, it came too late. The thing I’m trying to remember though is that maybe there is no origin, and there is no end, and that I really have no idea.
I’m starting a clothing company that only ships to Middle America.
thought i deleted this to update, sorry i have no idea how substack works. fuk.
whats ur twitter again