How to become popular on social media

And the ontology of evil

A lot of the time, I live in a deranged imaginary fantasy world where everyone still uses pcs, because the truth is too horrible to think about, but I should spell it out: if you are reading this on a phone, stop right now, delete whatever app you were using, go into the phone settings and remove all “vibration” functions and sounds, then put it on flight mode, then cancel your phone subscription, then physically get up and put the phone in a different room, then go back and get it, put it in a microwave and melt it, bury it, dig it up and throw it into the ocean. Then if you absolutely MUST use the internet for whatever reason, only ever use a PC. Then, if you absolutely MUST use twitter or something like that, for any reason, only ever use it in a separate browser you only use for that, which you have stripped down and installed 3 ad blockers on, only ever behind 7 proxies.

Thank you.

A very simple formula to make sure you are having a healthy relationship with technology is the following: You should always be in a relationship where you change the machine more than it changes you. You have to be active. The moment you become passive, basically, demons start possessing you. And the basic difference between a pc and a “phone”, is that with a phone you can only ever be passive. Being active is almost impossible, to the degree that if you have enough knowhow and technological skill to be able to do so, reading me would be pointless.

Modern information technology is a tool that you can use to achieve various aims in the world. If you are using it in any other way, you are being controlled, by the machine, by people, by the system? Who knows. Here there is no gray area or room for negotiations. You can’t do it “just a little bit”.

You should never open up the same website (you should never open up an “app”), more than once in a single day. If there was nothing worth your time on youtube 40 minutes ago, there is a ~0% chance that there will be something now.

Everything that technology, writ large, “frees” us from, it puts us in twice the bondage. It’s always the same movement, which as a metaphor coincidentally happens to fit very well with the idea of the trick the devil pulls on you. He offers you “radical freedom”, freedom from some thing in life, some obstacle, and in return you pay for it by being doubly restricted. Give the devil a finger, and he takes the whole hand – is this a hamlets mill warning us about “touch interfaces”? The answer may surprise you.

Every step of human technological advancement follows this same model. Every technological innovation that frees you from some aspect of labor turns into further bondage. This is the essential mistake of people like Rudolph Steiner, the famous theosophists, and the general worldview of the 19th century, all the way up to the technocrats and transhumanists of today. They believe you can bargain with it. They believe you can tame it, master it, and turn it from a wolf into a dog. They conceptualize “technology” as a wolf, something we have discovered living wild in nature, which can be broken and tamed and turned into a human tool. Their unspoken assumption is one of inherent human supremacy, that there is no possible force stronger than themselves. A kind of ontological narcissism.

But evil is not a force of “nature”. It is a metaphysical force, and simply, categorically, cannot be tamed. You can only ever adopt an ideal position towards it, an ideal response and reaction to it when it arrives, pull a perfect judo move and defeat it, but you can never have final victory over it. And technology, technological advancement across history, models perfectly to being a gradual series of lucefarian exchange. But don't we get the advancements? Don’t we get the material wealth? We sure do.

It doesn't matter if you spend an hour, or 10 million years trying to tame it. The moment you provide the friendship test, lower your guard, and extend it trust, it will bite you. Evil is not a wolf. Evil is not an animal. Evil is a metaphysical constant, and no matter how many simulations you run, no matter how high your calculus goes, it will always bite your hand when you try to test it.

Whenever you use the internet, you have to be in the aforementioned perfect position, the perfect reaction, always ready to pull the judo move that can redirect the force that will try to overwhelm you. The moment you can’t do that any more, the moment your focus is off and you get tired, turn the machine off. Recognize that everything about the internet is enemy territory – unfriendly, dangerous. The moment you feel at ease, is the moment it starts seeping in. Using the internet for fun and games, “shitposting”, is a kind of playing chicken, a young mans game, a stupid exercise in pointless bravado, pointlessly putting yourself in harms way, for no reason except to flirt with death, to make you feel alive. There is nothing to win, except heideggerian actualisation. You will pay more than you stand to gain. You can get dasein everywhere and anywhere, it’s stupid to pay the highest price you could possibly pay for it. It’s really a matter of simple economics.

On the bright side, it literally is that easy. It works by vampire rules, and you have to invite it in, for it to get in. But every attempt has been made to obscure this fact from the people providing you with access to it.

You’ve tried cleaning your room, now get ready for the exciting sequel:

No more than 1 hour of screen time a day. Ideally less.

You’ve tried nofap, noporn, now get ready for the exciting sequel:

No technology where you don’t have root access.

Podoby’s nerfect and I am myself only gradually making small changes for the better here. I don’t mean to preach. But it appears to me that this is the truth, and to the extent that I don’t embody it, I conceptualize that as a personal failure, a lacking of my own strength and character.

We shouldn't be so scared of admitting to failure. I think that’s a big shared cultural behavioural trap. In this mainstream culture of valuing self actualization, the notion of man as the always-improving progressive animal, simply admitting to a mistake seems at first glance like an existential problem. In the ideology of perpetual upwards progression that we were indoctrinated into, a failure to restate a personal failure or trauma as a “good thing actually”, “it tought me to xyz”, “I wouldnt be who I am today” “i regrat nothing”, etc, is the worst moral crime the individual is capable of, because it is a fundamental crime against the deepest assumptions of the philosophy. If a modernist were to accept someone saying that, it would destroy their entire conceptualisation of the world. Saying “I fucked up” without adding an upside, without trying to spin it as the first step in a Hegelian process of self-improvement, is the most radical reactionary action possible today. Saying “I’m sorry”, and genuinely meaning it, is the most debilitating attack on the world we live in today.

I fucked up and now things are worse for me, and they might not ever get as good as they were before I fucked up. I might never make up for it. Life might just possibly be worse from now on, for me, for everyone around me, and for the world at large. I’m sorry. I hurt you, we hurt each other, and now we are permanently worse off, forever.

That doesn't mean we can’t be happy. It just means we have to take things seriously. Entertain the idea that it might never get better, and then try to make the best of the situation. It’s better than living in a denial-fantasy world where you progressively get worse and worse off, while frantically telling yourself you’re getting better and better. Even if you’re not doing too hot, at least you are not being tortured, forever, and turning insane.

Merry Christmas.