An Introduction To, How to Stop Hurting Yourself by Jerking Off With an Electric Cattle Prod
A preparatory history and epistemology, as groundwork for a re-establishment of a human culture
The Dark Age
We are currently in a “dark age” historically. An age where technology and technique is lost because it is not transmitted intergenerationally. The information age is a dark age, the kind of thing you’re told the middle ages was. It is up for argument whether this to some degree is enforced top down and deliberately encouraged by the engineers of our technological-social sphere. I believe it is – to some degree. But to say anything specific about it is almost impossible, from the fact that we can barely communicate in the first place.
Aqueducts, how do they work. The internet is a series of tubes.
On a micro-level, the skill refers to interfacing with computers. On a macro-level it has roots all the way down to basic human social behaviour – interfacing with other human beings. Interfacing with minds. The computers themselves are already an attempt to reverse engineer this lost technology, and over-reliance on it only exacerbates the core problem.
[Inter – face], face to face – looking in the eye. How many millions of self help books about basic social behaviour are being WRITTEN every year? The liberal world is a world of liberals; of the atomized, singular individual. Sadly no one ever asked him if he wanted to be one, and it’s all he’s ever known, so he thinks this is all life is - if someone asked him, he wouldn’t be able to understand the question. So he has to read self-help books about basic emotional compartmentalisation, conflict resolution, establishing social relationships, learning to talk to girls. All things that used to be informed through parental, communal tutorship and education. Through parents, siblings, friends, neighbours and culture.
The greatest trick the devil ever pulled was tricking you into thinking about movies when you hear the word “culture”, make you think about “objects” and “paintings” and “music” and food recopies - and not about Friendship. That is what “culture” means. “culture” is a relationship between two minds; a shared understanding. It is not an object.
Children of the future
The fundamental cause of this problem is fertility, child raising, familial relations. It started before the pill, the pill only solidified it. It’s a product of industrial society, of global commerce and the overabundance of industrially produced goods.
Children are today not human, but a commercial good. Before industrial society, children, the formation of families and the creation, education, and instruction of children was as self-evident and unconscious as breathing. Breathing itself, incidentally is currently undergoing this very same process; of being deconstructed and sold back to you as meditation, mindfulness, “breathing exercises”.
The process of industrialising human behaviour is as follows: Make it CONCIOUS. You are now manually breathing. Pay me 500$ to teach you how to breathe correctly. Bro why are you hitting yourself. Stop hitting yourself. Stop hitting yourself. Pay me to teach you how to stop hitting yourself.
This has been done to the concept of children. By making “having children” an active choice, and not a self-evident, unconscious behaviour, the children become less-than-human; they become objectified, they become Objects.
Specifically they become consumer-status-signifiers and statements of identity-making. “I am a [Parent]”. My mother wore me like a brooch. I’m sure yours did too. No offence.
It doesn’t have to mean they don’t love you. I don’t say this with resentment in my heart. They got conned. It’s not their fault. They parents did it to them too, and it started at somewhere in the 1800’s, as far as I can tell.
Practically the way this works out is that the child is not initiated into his environment; he is not educated or granted a sense of history, and the rightful inheritance of his lineage and his world; he must reinvent society from the ground up, individually, on his own. And having no instructors, he turns to the television and Joss Whedon to teach him how to be funny, he turns to self-help books to teach him how to be happy, he turns to red pill blogs to learn how to talk to girls, he turns to Jordan Peterson to teach him how religious. He turns to university to teach him how to read. He turns to the Egg Report for God knows what.
Industry sells your own alienation back to you every step of the way. He turns to trad bloggers to tell him to “call your parents” and re-establish a trad relationship of duty and familial obligation. He calls them and they cant understand a word he’s saying. They can’t have a meaningful communication.
Children attempt to reinvent a social sphere, a culture, intuitively, because they are human. Systems are in place at every level of human development to prevent this. Schools aren’t “treating boys like broken girls” - they are treating them like broken brooches. Hammer them into a nice pretty shape to show off: Look at little Adolf, he got an A!
The freedom of the early, unsupervised internet was an accidental gap in these systems, which gave a group of Adolfs an unprecedented and unpredicted opportunity to socialize unsupervised - with all the bullying and fighting and drama (which is a long way of saying HISTORY) that entails. It gave a select few a glimpse of what could be. Ironically, through the use of technology that is grinding all human relationships and potential for genuine culture into dust, it gave them a little glimpse of Culture - what culture really is.
History repeats itself to generate electricity, and David Lynch knows this
Human beings in groups perform predictably and uniformly to stimuli. The election of Donald trump and gamergate was the same process; a reaction from groups of people adapting to a new technological environment (internet, global language-interconnectivity). Gamergate did not “cause” Trump – they are not causally related. But they are mirrored. A microscale and a macroscale.
Everything that happens in “politics” happened on internet forums 10 years ago. It can be mapped one to one. This is because groups perform predictably and uniformly to the same stimuli. Forum drama from ten years ago function as a “test run” of grand societal changes. I don't mean to imply the existence of an evil scientist in this. I don’t think it’s conscious. As I’ve said elsewhere, the basilisk in brain-dead.
If you wasted your youth on 4chan, nothing happening in the world will surprise you, because everything is a mirror of prior movements. History repeating itself, but at incredible speeds; not over hundreds and thousands of years, but less than decades.
There are some who have wasted their life and youth on the internet, because they thought it was something it wasn’t. Many are burned out and bitter about it. The disappointment of what seemed like a wonderful futurism wild-west of raw potential and energy, turned out not to be. “Show me a reactionary and I will show you a heartbroken futurist”.
What they have learned about interfacing with, and the relation between the interface, interfaced, interfacer, and the interrelationship between each moving part and the equivalent moving parts of the Other User, and the “social”, must be passed on. It’s all we have.
New groups and new generations are going online every day, it is still expanding explosively. But due to the nature of the beast, there is no written record. The “rules of the internet”, the informal forum culture and so on, are all at the level of “verbal tradition”. You know because you were there and exposed yourself to it, and was instructed in it by engaging with it. There is no written record. The ones who attempt make shallow imitations; “knowyourmeme” databases of cross-referencing spreadsheets. When the core of the teaching, the core technique, is exactly to break with spreadsheet-thinking. It cannot be reduced to a database. It cannot be deduced and rationalised. It’s explicitly not-rational. It’s an embrace of absurdity, through and through, and this cannot be represented meaningfully in a spreadsheet, in a database, in a Wikipedia. The Tao that can be named *ruins the joke*.
For roughly 15 years the content distribution was from chans → profile forums → mainstream. Today every single thread on 4chan is a screenshot from twitter. Every twitter post is a screenshot from tiktok. Things are changing, rapidly. In terms of design of the frame; chans = freeform, profile forums = spreadsheets, databases, and now, twitter, tiktok, instagram, facebook: these are fundamentally different. They are not designed to be navigable to the user. The “timeline”, the “feed”, these are a return to passive, television monoculture. Twitter, tiktok, instagram, facebook, themselves, the companies, all save everything of course. But the user is fed a controlled stream of content, information, data.
Thesis: forums, antithesis: chans, synthesis: …Television. We regressed. Dare I say, degenerated.
Everything that happens “now”, happened 10 years ago on internet forums. You can use this knowledge to your advantage.
Return to the Tradition of the Future
There is much more detail that could be said about this. A greater and more nuanced introduction must also be written. But for now it is enough to say that the “memes” (not jpgs- the unspoken shared understandings) of early forum culture are emergent proven strategies for interfacing with “the internet”™, which have been amassed and fine tuned over time by the collective brainpower of the subset of people who were early adaptors to the “new tool”, which as it just happens, selected for IQ and autism. So they were quite efficient at it, compared to the general population – more blunt and less emotionally inhibited. The general population are going through the process now, poorly and inefficiently, causing all sorts of trouble. I mean here not the crazy people you see online – that’s bait. I mean your mom watching television, I mean your parents getting addicted to phone games. I mean your sister killing herself because she saw a prettier version of herself in her pocket mirror and went insane from grief.
These informal “rules” for “social” behaviour online, are emergent adaptive evolutionary social strategies – they are “lindy”. They are “Trad”. This is whut mean “Trad”.
At some point someone is going to formalise them, and save the normie from himself. I am not up to that task. But I can do some of the preparatory work.
Keep up the good work man.
We went crazy first to avoid the rush