If you like the topics discussed in this newsletter, you can buy a copy of my Patchwork Manifesto here.
My investigation draws on ancient teachings to explain why we stand at the edge of radical change.
It’s a challenging read. Consider this tiny manual if you are just starting your journey.
It’s March 2024. I’ve arrived at the middle of the week and there’s a deafening silence amidst the noise.
You see, in the not too distant past, it was easy for me and others to just wedge our way into the discourse of the day.
There was room at the edges, looking over the ruined coliseum formerly known as Big Tent society.
But I’ve noticed something in March:
We’ve covered a lot of ground in just the first couple months of 2024, and the landscape is already deeply different.
It makes less and less sense for me to try and stand outside the insanity and the cultish push to belong to something.
There’s just no room at the margin to do this. No “safe space” where one can breathe the fresh air of rationality.
You are either inside with the inmates or off in another land.
It’s hard to make this kind of statement, because it’s fraught with several types of judgments.
Judgments that are difficult to articulate clearly, because they reek of the lockdown world that has given rise to the cultishness I speak of.
This binding situation is the classic result of anarchic leftist wokeness and right wing “based” ideologies: you can try to do good as someone who doesn’t live in either camp, but the overall context has been so tainted that any effort to critique it immediately gets colorized and categorized as a kind of power play.
Yet, as the conversation about artificial intelligence continues to unroll, you’ll see more and more people speaking up about what I’m about to say:
People are losing their connection with their souls, and it doesn’t require any kind of dystopian science fiction scenario to imagine this.
I’m not talking about individuals who wear virtual reality headsets, or others who want Musk to put electronics in their head.
Instead, it comes down to language, the way it’s used, the way it has degraded and mutated into a residue, rather than an open channel with the divine.
Previously when I scrolled a site like X/Twitter, there was always a sense, even if miniscule, that there was a person dancing behind the mask.
This would allow for a kind of critique, even an avant-garde type, where I could use these instances as examples of a shifting zeitgeist.
But now, I don’t see a person in these instances and utterances. Instead, I see a fragment of a person, a shard of consciousness fossilized in a box on my screen that is supposed to represent truth value.
I don’t see truth. I see a ghost.
It’s frightening, actually. There is nothing to engage with. It’s like looking through a window, into a scene where something happening—but the murder mystery is, you don’t know exactly HOW it happened, you just know the character is deceased.
This is also something of a relief, as morbid as that sounds.
Because it explains the frothy, exuberant, near delusional engagement that these utterances DO get.
If these instances of language were alive, and therefore part of a conversation, then one would see a range of emotions and responses.
Instead, the near religious fervor that these posts are met with goes a long way to explaining what is going on with our world right now.
So let’s dive in.
After Life
Think of how a saint is deified even more so after he is dead, like Ray Peat.
It’s the same way with “takes” and linguistic mash-ups online now: these are all the more exciting precisely because they are dead, so they seem to be like an oracle speaking to us from the other side.
We are way past shitposting and satire and performative shtick accounts like Delicious Tacos. What suffices as “internet traffic” now is a phantom cocktail party of statements that are dead on arrival.
This is an ending to a certain way of being online. Even the 2010s—as rowdy as they were with the advent of smartphones and apps—share more in common with the MySpace days than now.
People go online to “die”—linguistically speaking—and then be resurrected, almost instantly, into an afterlife where they can escape the mundane reality that they believe to be trapped in.
And in that death of verbal meaning, there is risk of a metaphysical death, too—something more basic (yet chilling) than the death of a guy who commits to performing some bit part for the sake of engagement.
It’s so obvious, so commonplace, so everyday—and yet it holds the gravitas of death. \
You open up “social media” and instead of socializing you fall into the whirlpool with the other ghosts, swimming past strings of words that hold schizophrenic charge.
You can consider yourself one among many in the Land of the Dead.
Death is the great equalizer, and in that there is a kind of belonging.
It seems “internet culture” has grasped this truism, and since belonging is the thing that drives this culture now for better or worse, a collective message has been sounded: “We’re all in and all board for a linguistic death.”
“Dead Internet Theory” aside, scrolling online is more like walking up to a message board found at the end of a dark hallway in an abandoned university: “Here lies a poster in rest. He lived, he posted, he died. Long live the poster.”
And for those of us who don’t want to become ghosts, too, is there any other choice?
Resurrection/Renaissance
I’m arriving at the opinion that there is no time left.
No time to wait for the internet to turn around from the internment camp model that it has been stuck in since 2020.
It takes about 90 days to turn around an old habit or create a new one, in my opinion.
Do any of us have that kind of time to “build an audience” or “add value” when most of the people online now can’t devote 90 seconds to considering something outside their fishbowl?
These are judgments that typically I don’t like to dwell on, but here we are at this crossroads.
Right now we’re seeing the formation of entire local meaning economies, though it may take the rest of the decade for them to fully crystallize.
And good for the Raw Milkers, the Ray Peaters, the Homesteaders, the Demographic Repopulators and so on.
I’m sure there will be many heady discussions held over coffee and nicotine pouches and whatever glorified supplement of the day.
But I increasingly feel like I have nothing to offer these people until they can offer to themselves something outside of this ironically cold, phantom need for belonging.
There is no conversation. There are no words.
And I don’t believe I’m alone in this.
I believe many of us are still interested in exploring the main virtues of life—love, work, family, hopes and dreams—outside of the contrived labels and boxes that seem to be the “only” way to exist now.
The online “counterculture” is as much of a trap as the Big Ag, Big Pharma, Big Government matrix it seeks to oppose—especially because that matrix largely exists as a hungry ghost, too, something that’s more just a trail of smoke in an informational war, rather than a concrete building and list of staff you can point to.
Where does this leave us? I don’t know.
But that seems besides the point. The meaning of now is that some things need left behind—especially those camps whose sole purpose seems to be the fact that they will have some large share of power in the future.
My advice?
Rediscover the past on your own, and leave a footnote about it in the present—then open up to the unexpected, rather than believing that you are the chosen tribe who will rectify the past and reign over the future.
Life is ready to point to all the things you could create, if you were to step aside from the noise of those who want to talk over the divine.
Big changes ahead in eclipse season. See you next time.
If you like the topics discussed in this newsletter, you can buy a copy of my Patchwork Manifesto here.
My investigation draws on ancient teachings to explain why we stand at the edge of radical change.
It’s a challenging read. Consider this tiny manual if you are just starting your journey.