We’re in Virgo season now: a time when the harvest has us looking back and looking ahead.
A time of sorting wheat from chaff—separating yesteryear from tomorrow.
Speaking of change: twenty years ago today, my life changed as I witnessed the events of 9/11.
It put me on the path of the artist and the spiritual seeker. Why? Because that moment pressed me to speculate about the future—about what could be.
I want to get back in that speculating groove for this double-length issue.
Right now I look around and see a whole new crop of kids who are roughly coming of age, like I was then.
Is there a collective defining moment for them, for all of us today, like 9/11?
Obviously, many would refer to the pandemic or to something happening online—perhaps cryptocurrencies or the evolution of social media into Web 3.0.
Computer scientist Tim Berners-Lee has defined Web 3.0 in this way:
It is semantic in nature. It creates networks of meaning that are read by machines.
This helps connect users with the content they desire—or think they desire.
Fundamentally, it is a meaning-based system, not only where humans trust the machines but where the data-sorting machines also trust each other and produce a consistent experience, as Berners-Lee outlines in a hypothetical scenario.
Here I will discuss how a new social order is already re-defining trust and meaning.
To begin with, the Western society that we are heirs of essentially rose to prominence due to the high value placed on trust.
I give you quality wheat, you give me something equivalent in exchange, we shake hands to certify fairness, we repeat at scale.
Indeed, we might say that social media was ready for agricultural-style trust from day one.
Your online clout or harvest became trusted currency to your friends, lovers, family—taken from the digital fields where you sowed content.
But we don’t have to wait for Web 3.0 to transform this social media experience. We already have some version of that, through the micro-tribalism currently taking hold.
Networks of meaning aren’t sorted by machines, but by your group.
However, that still raises the the question whether this sorting action really retains a human touch. Let me explain.
Your tribal participation—the way you reduce the human experience to accumulating units of meaning online—this is the new economy.
Today’s online experience is not about publicly expressing what goes on in your soul when you are alone and offline. That style is a relic of the 2010s—the salad days of social media.
Now it’s about you and your tribe projecting the attainment of a meaningful life, in concert. You reassure each other that every other thought, choice and purchase is loaded with great importance—although you give yourself an out, by ironically claiming this performance is all “fun and games.”
Thing is, no one accepts limitations unless they are emotionally invested in the context. All sports use limitation to transform fun into business.
We love the tribal plantation…and it loves us back. The hippy commune has returned with a vengeance in the digital era.
Again, the fundamental idea behind this Defining Moment is the reduction of meaning into a unit we exchange for tribal membership. Forget China’s social credit system: this hip panopticon is the “new and cool” way to prove your worthiness of human connection.
But what is the new labor for this new economy?
It is simply socializing. It is “life itself.” We rove through physical reality now, like nomadic pioneers, searching for flakes of meaning that others can recognize.
Does a glimmer of meaning appear over brunch, when the waiter serves you Instagram-worthy organic tomatoes? Perhaps it’s when you get some epiphany about what’s wrong with marriage these days. Or maybe some meaning falls your way during a Lindy session at a European cafe. Indeed, meaning strikes when you decide that abstaining from masturbation raises you above the low testosterone soyboys!
But importantly, this meaning doesn’t exist until you post about it online and your tribe deposits it in the collective digital coffers.
Now we come to a third point in this new holy trinity: socializing is the economy and the economy is religion.
When just about any experience can be your token to social heaven, then the lived event simultaneously feels devoid of magic.
The world isn’t allowed to simply “be.” Greed defiles mystery.
As people translate their life into bits of tribe-approved meaning, they assume that “Program or Be Programmed” is how the world works.
Culture gives way to cult-like experiences, and it becomes easy for us to equate the projection of an inspired life with social power.
This is in sharp contrast to our past, where meaning is equated with a surrender to a higher power, such as divinity. Faith and inspiration came from our sense of humility in an uncontrollable, unbounded world.
The self’s sacred relationship with divinity is steadily giving ground to tribal mania. Meaning tokens: gotta catch ’em all.
The Seeds and Blossoms of Collective Trauma
In the 2020s, society isn’t merely the government-media-military complex anymore. Society is us—and we are failing in our duty to transform collective trauma into something other than this memetic labyrinth I’ve described.
If “Program or Be Programmed” truly is our battle cry, then I see very few of us offering a story—excuse me, a “program”—of greater freedom.
We’re ready to kick out the Suits—but are we really the holy saviors of history? Or are we the Cool Totalitarians?
I see tribal hoarding of meaning and strict divisions between these tribes—even as some promote an orgy between Esoteric, Lindy, Neo-Masculine and Money Twitter, under the sticky banner of “We’re All Gonna Make It.”
All these slogans are about as exciting to me as TSA checkpoints in airports. They do not sound like freedom. They sound like greed and status games. They sound like, “Open your luggage and let’s see what kind of tokenized meaning you’re carrying.”
The current online fascination with aesthetics, for example, is often so a person can say, “Hey, look at me, I have an upgraded awareness of life.” It’s no longer about the art or the higher power that inspired the artist.
Everything is put in the service of locating this “better life” and then hoarding it in front of others.
Have we not learned from our past? After 9/11, we emerged from the media’s pornographic coverage and tried to understand what we experienced. We roundly condenmned those who reduced the sanctity of meaning into a consumerist campaign.
And now we lust for the eternal scroll of the social media feed, where someone could advertise a piece of meaning that we might want.
Something doesn’t add up here. Instead of raising our personal standards of quality in this moment, many of us just say, “Ah, to hell with it, the Meaning Revolution will be livestreamed—I want a piece of the pie, too.”
When all of us crowd into this global village of meaning, by design the unique voice is replaced by the tribal megaphone.
Everyone wants to congratulate themselves for being a tastemaker. But very few want to patiently create these meaningful things they associate their ego with.
Creating means that you may piss people off with your message or even fall short, which is not a guaranteed way to find belonging in the new meaning economy.
It’s so much easier to just be a tastemaker on the tribal plantation…with the rub that you’ll likely get lost in the herd, simply because you’re the millionth guy with #MagGang in his bio.
But that cost of entry to neo-tribalism is swallowed by many, simply because tribes define the traumatic present moment as a problematic waystation between two very happy periods: the glorious, glowing past and the bright, shining future they’ll take you to.
Why does every group from the Trad fetishists to the crypto futurists do this? Because portraying yourself as hero is a great way to attract recruits and amass security in numbers. And yet, while these numbers promise you power by association, you lose the individualized essence you set out to grab.
At the root of this problem is identifying the ego with the group’s accumulated meaning. If you simply become “rich” today by associating yourself with a particular tribe of tastemakers, you can literally never be wrong.
It is the definition of tautological thinking, no different than the Federal Reserve printing more money when it is needed. Your power isn’t backed by anything you personally created. It simply exists, by fiat, because you and a bunch of people around you said so.
Consequently, there is a mad rush now to be part of this new tribal economy. Everyone wants to redeem their ho-hum moments and turn them into tokens of meaning. It’s contagious, like the high at a religious revival. When you leave, your personal life seems so dull by comparison, until you can get back to that group lovefest once more.
Compare that to twenty years ago. Subcultures had their basis in philosophies of effort, because the online experience hadn’t developed into a place of simultaneous broadcasting.
By philosophies of effort, I mean that you had to be who you projected, so that you could find the others.
That required an investment of time and energy into understanding a network of meaning, not simply logging on and saying “wgmi.” You had to locate the artifacts, paraphernalia, garments and physical venues, then integrate these into your life so that it didn’t seem like you just showed up for the free keg beer.
“Poser” was a big put-down in the early 2000s for a reason. It differentiated between people going through the motions and those who possessed real value because they personalized the subcultural codes through a unique, individual style.
But now digital life is highly focused on philosophies of accumulation. It rewards tribal grandstanding over the effort of self-definition.
If you can prove you’re a member of a wealthy tribe, you’re minted—just sit back and watch the power roll in.
Today’s sweat equity is pointing a sign towards a utopian kingdom, and painting upon that sign a simple phrase: “Me and the gang, who else?”
This escapism is tied together with a dash of world-weary cynicism, as if to say, “Well, we’re just shitposting.”
Welcome to 20 years after 9/11. Welcome to the hyper-real.
Hungry Hearts: Facing Our Shadow Through Each Other
A long saga is being kicked off by this Virgo New Moon. The next six months are about facing our personal shadows through partners—and facing the collective shadow of greed writ large, too.
This is what we see front and center in this week’s episode of Zeitville.
The theme of projected image is everywhere. Nemo encounters lusty advertisements which prey on his unstable self worth—they remind him of how he’s sacrificed Casey for his business. As for Casey, she is promised fame through a modeling gig with powerful online players.
But, if Nemo and Casey were to have faith in the tempo of their lives, they wouldn’t be treating their environment as if it were a piece of clay to mold.
This is why I have an intense dislike for the “Program or Be Programmed” mantra. At bottom, it is a reactionary attitude of resentment—it is Viagra for a limp soul.
Thus, we see themes of blurred lines and entitlement (Casey’s shadow) as well as deeply paranoid self-doubt (Nemo’s shadow).
To a group like OriginalSyn, such ways of thinking don’t seem immoral. They thrive on others thinking more like this, even the antagonistic rivals, because it recruits them into the OriginalSyn’s philosophy of controlling reality.
No central social experience determines what is widely good and bad anymore. Tribes love that, because now they’re the programmers of reality.
And if you fly solo these days? God help you.
For young loners especially who are seeking a moral harbor now, this makes tribalism all the more tempting.
This is the conundrum Nemo is faced with. Ironically faced with a fake photo of Casey, it’s he who feels like a fake, who feels like he is not strong enough to stand alone. OriginalSyn presses a hot coal into this self-worth struggle, and says, “Join us. You need us.”
Nemo is stoked into jealous rage. He will forcibly take what he desires now, like OriginalSyn. No one will doubt him again after he attains more power—right?
Likewise, Casey is tempted to forcibly take her just deserts. OriginalSyn could be a ticket out of business school boredom, her roomie suggests. Casey already doubts whether she can chase her post-grad dreams without a big leg up.
We’re left with the suggestion that she will rationalize her decision. This modeling gig isn’t technically cheating or betrayal against Nemo, it’s just business. Plus, once she attains more power, she’ll have everything she needs to move forward—right?
Ah, Casey’s transactional entitlement and Nemo’s paranoid self-doubt: this is not what true abundance is built on.
How can we have a truly meaningful experience when we are busy chasing power…the power which we think will make us worthy of love and belonging?
That’s a recipe for suspicion, jealousy, greed, scarcity mindset, revenge and paranoia.
Like Nemo, you can hold the world at gunpoint and tell it to manifest your will—but all you’ve done is turn virtue into a prisoner.
Like Casey, you can build every fortification against disappointment—but despite your empire of control, you are still alienated from the bliss of vulnerablility.
This fall is going to be a really interesting time of karmic turnabout. But we’ll have to double check our judgment: are we really victorious in the moment—or has our inner monster shown us where we wallow in resentment versus love?
There’s a certain taboo deliciousness to the dark side. Both Casey and Nemo are tempted to take the darker path of ego identification. They want to tightly grip a nugget of meaning in their hands and say, “There I am, there is my power and worthiness—it’s not going anywhere.”
This is the type of handshake deal the New Revolutionaries seem to be promising us: pimp out the self, find your way to the promised land where you can be the hero you project.
The projected self is always perfect, or aimed towards perfection.
It tells us that we can program a beautiful mind with esoteric routines, attract better mates than our neighbor, draft ourselves into spiritual wars, run glamorous homesteads. And it can always point to a monster than more evil than itself.
This prideful vanity is not the hallmark of nobility, which is self-confident and prone to reticence. This anxious fantasy is the hallmark of the paranoid revolutionary who seeks to control and reshape. It makes an idol out of Man and replaces the divine.
But we are designed to stand as imperfect beings in the face of God, and to know ourselves as real in that moment.
In this latest episode of Zeitville, we the observer see synchronicities all around Nemo and Casey, interconnecting their lives in mysterious, elegant yet imperfect ways. If only they trusted this was the case!
A single drop of faith would be enough to quench their self-doubt and resolve moral quandaries.
But let’s not say it’s easy for these kids—or for any of us.
Over the coming months, I’ll be writing about our reckoning with the collective shadow.
We’re in store for a Freaky Fall, where hungry ghosts from our past will haunt us for the purpose of resolving our current spiritual struggles.
This is all headed towards a massive societal purge that will take place over winter.
Maybe then we will understand where we are capable of going in the next 20 years.
Maybe. Maybe.
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This piece makes even more sense in 2023...