It's mostly about, if not only, control. perceive me/dont perceive me - every user chasing to develop lore that shouldn't exist, to envelope then emerge from. Desperation lurking of every kind. All impotent, yet deeply inclined to solidify an online legacy whichever way they can to rectify whatever delirious disenchantment they suffer from. Americanos have already priced in and cashed out as much of genuine personhood the world wants to offer now that velocity of identity creation has been fully tokenized & marketable. But behind this reality and pseudo-reality looks really like ersatz countercultures. As someone that feels its futile to be understood met by belittlement, there's only so much one could prove before crossing some fine line that made it authentic to begin with. Not much in what I say, but to hop online and let your nuts hang the way it should is authentic as it can get. Fraud is fraud at the end of the day. I like your sentiment, and overall the "The internet is America" because it sounds true to the nature American tactics along with its monstrous identity swamp of neverending reinventive fantasy culture it drowns in. While the ancient crafted fabled deities enforcers, America crafts accounts of online personalities to cement its pneumatic authority. There's also the historical truth that the internet is a byproduct of American ambitions. Perhaps the internet is just an extreme form of cultural immigration. Its all spiritual, and haram.
The internet isn’t forcing your autonomous identity on others, it’s waiting for people to acknowledge that identity you want to be identified as. As these identities get more and more niche, this becomes nigh impossible --what does average Joe facebook know about tumblr tomato girls? That would require telepathy. It would be great if it could really connect minds in a manner that doesn’t accelerate confirmation bias, but that cultural machinery isn’t built in yet.
If anything it’s a bunch of support groups affirming their own neurosis. Theres nothing americana love more than being allowed to do something; permitted the right to complain under some boardgame rule amendment. That’s why cults are so American, the Book of Mormon was the original alternate reality game. The California ideology is the internet’s founding doctrine. It’s a filter not a megaphone, a bunch of intentional nudist communities, not a sports arena or conference center. Every slot in a server farm is a social Petri dish, and any lab leaks are traceable to their cultural roots, mutating beyond recognition a la Covid.
“In the United States, as soon as several inhabitants have taken an opinion or an idea they wish to promote in society, they seek each other out and unite together once they have made contact. From that moment, they are no longer isolated but have become a power seen from afar whose activities serve as an example and whose words are heeded" (Tocqueville 1840, 599).
"That’s why cults are so American, the Book of Mormon was the original alternate reality game. The California ideology is the internet’s founding doctrine. It’s a filter not a megaphone, a bunch of intentional nudist communities, not a sports arena or conference center. Every slot in a server farm is a social Petri dish, and any lab leaks are traceable to their cultural roots, mutating beyond recognition a la Covid." -- so true
I just ran into this. To me, this phenom of fallen promoters of exemplars, such as your example of trad advos who preach but don't "have" families currently, misses why these advos succeed. That they're "inauthentic" is obviously irrelevant, since they're succeeding, until one wants to bring them down and replace them with someone else. Authenticity then isn't a goal, it's a not-very-veiled attack tactic that's widely available. However, back to why they succeed ... in the math field of category theory, there's well defined notions of diagrams, functor categories, and limits (universal constructions) that illustrate how successful advocacy works. A *diagram* is a simple sketch of objects and relationships, which mesh together and combine naturally. *Functor categories* express how one can embed a diagram in a much larger community, as a template that parts of the community fit into. The larger community becomes a container of instances of the template. Finally, a limit is a special template, one which is "universal" in the sense that every similar template can be explained in terms of a limit. That is, a limit enables an "everything you said says what I said already" translation in all cases. So, one has a diagram, one sets up an embedding of the diagram, one "universalizes" the embedding into a limit, and then one defends the limit by translating everything that trys to mimic it into a thing that uses it. In a way, it is America, since the colonial but independent nature of America made this process of taking a meme from some mother country, distilling it to a few points, building a sermon from it, claiming its universality, and spreading the sermon endlessly as if one owns it (although obviously one is "just a servant", haha), is part of America's special character, especially during that early period called "the great awakening". All that history is Tara Isabella Burton's career obsession to write about. The Internet just makes it easier to do those moves.
Great post! “Everybody wants a label, but nobody wants to be told what to do.” may well be an accurate description of Americans, which is why I, as a non-American resent the Americanisation of everything. In many circumstances I can do without a label, thank you very much, especially because they are used so often to tell people what to do (or at least what to believe). Call this the identity bait and switch:
1. Do you identify as X? (Christian, queer, feminist, whatever)
2. If you identify as X, you must therefore support Y (Trump, the Palestinian cause, banning Nazis on Substack, whatever)
I have been having similar revelations about these pro-family influencers lacking children. A lot of them also seem to be autistic. I hate to say this, but I first noticed this on TPOT rather than on the dissident right. It was through TPOT that childless autistic women appeared to be larping some Jane Austen novel and masquerading as fertility influencers, completely obsessed with gender norms and reproduction stats. As an autistic woman who is about a decade older than these girls, I started to wonder if it was a generational thing. Why were these younger women putting such extreme restrictions on themselves? Being autistic and gender non-conforming is difficult enough. Why were they upping their difficultly setting to 1000? I concluded that trad wife had become the new boss girl and that being a boss girl was actually a lot easier than whatever these new TPOT ladies were manifesting. Thanks for touching on this so I didn’t need to blog about it. The revelation had been on my mind for a while, yet I didn’t want to write another niche article without a substantial audience. Screaming into the void about this stuff isn’t any fun.
What happens when imagination is outsourced? Without true play there is no self discovery, empathy; wire mother, wire personalities, theory of hivemind.
True, but with walled gardens and all encompassing platforms, increasing supervision (state or paternal), the wild west days are coming to an end. Roblox, the most popular game, is more of a stock market than a playground. More monetization means less room for weird communities, drama, experimentation. That would be perilous for the shareholders. Look at reddit - that's the future. Castrated. What happens when everyone has to use their real names on the internet. RIP Omegle.
I think internet identities used to be disconnected from our real identities, which made role play easier when there’s little expectation that anyone is showing their “real life” self. now there’s a lack of anonymity, with many people using their real name and posting their real face (this is especially noteworthy on tiktok where people will post obvious lies/trolling similar to 4chan greentexts, and yet have their face in the video). I think the internet is in a strange place where you are expected to be “real”, and yet, the urge to use the internet as a way to experiment with different identities has never left.
One aspect of Identity that I've been considering is the proliferation of this kind of adolescent yearning for the transcendence of simple and discrete categories. there's this concept within philosophy that I have studied called the sublime, where something, usually nature, is so grand and so overwhelming of your sensory perception that it lacks the possibility of rationalization or calculation. In a way, this is what the notion of "queering" aspires to, but also the facetious esoterica of the e-right, which seeks to induce a kind of mind-fucking "shock of the (old)" that assaults contemporary social mores. Everyone thinks they occupy a privileged position that transcends the mundanity and stratification of contemporary social life. it is not enough to have an identity, but also to reconfigure how identity is expressed and understood. In a way, it is perfectly understandable why people with unbridled variety in the media they consume would want to cohere it into something, when inspiration from highly masculine coded and feminine coded media get reflected upon, an anxiety is induced by the kind of aporia about gender, but this is old news. the same could be correct of computer programmers who think they can introduce age old truths from archaic societies into the cutting edge.
I think that attraction to the sublime is because *everything* is emotional. I think of the term "gender euphoria," and the popularity of stimulants. Everything must be a quasi-ecstatic experience because you are not living physically.
I have this vivid memory of stumbling into some online chatroom on my dad's computer, fooling around and failing to understand exactly what roleplay was. Others kept telling me to use *action marks.* I didn't understand, but I kept going until I got fed up and said WHAT THE FUCK ARE ACTION MARKS? I HATE ALL OF YOU!!!! and quit the room.
It's true, though, that in this time roleplay has totally lost its frame of reference. Every thread is an rp thread, every platform is an rp board. Even the purportedly joyous and playful memetic signifiers are impotent but for their autoerotic fixation on how Extremely Important it is to Do This Kind of Thing in order to, I don't know, bring about the correct kind of genocide? Summon Shiva? Get Bernie elected finally? Baristas? Kids in cages? Is that still a thing?
The distinction between adopting an image out of affinity and cultivating a personality that reflects actual experience is that only one of those offers any expression for what you really need from life. The other, ultimately, is only, and at its best, cope. But none of us have any experience of life anymore. We're all just trying to put together some Megabot assemblage of images and ideas that, we hope, if we just continue to tinker with it, will finally make us feel human, or at minimum, less alone. Only it doesn't work.
> I’m not the only one who’s noticed that a significant handful of the most vocal pro-family Internet personalities are missing one vital thing: a family. But that’s the way it goes online. Many of the most vocal, most popular anti-feminists are unmarried cosmopolitans, hustling their way into a subscriber base that can pay their rent.
That's because the people with actual families are too busy with their families to be vocal online.
I guess I don’t think meaning is super real under this definition. Living in the arena was rarely real for anyone and for those in the arena, life seemed gruesome and short
It's mostly about, if not only, control. perceive me/dont perceive me - every user chasing to develop lore that shouldn't exist, to envelope then emerge from. Desperation lurking of every kind. All impotent, yet deeply inclined to solidify an online legacy whichever way they can to rectify whatever delirious disenchantment they suffer from. Americanos have already priced in and cashed out as much of genuine personhood the world wants to offer now that velocity of identity creation has been fully tokenized & marketable. But behind this reality and pseudo-reality looks really like ersatz countercultures. As someone that feels its futile to be understood met by belittlement, there's only so much one could prove before crossing some fine line that made it authentic to begin with. Not much in what I say, but to hop online and let your nuts hang the way it should is authentic as it can get. Fraud is fraud at the end of the day. I like your sentiment, and overall the "The internet is America" because it sounds true to the nature American tactics along with its monstrous identity swamp of neverending reinventive fantasy culture it drowns in. While the ancient crafted fabled deities enforcers, America crafts accounts of online personalities to cement its pneumatic authority. There's also the historical truth that the internet is a byproduct of American ambitions. Perhaps the internet is just an extreme form of cultural immigration. Its all spiritual, and haram.
The internet isn’t forcing your autonomous identity on others, it’s waiting for people to acknowledge that identity you want to be identified as. As these identities get more and more niche, this becomes nigh impossible --what does average Joe facebook know about tumblr tomato girls? That would require telepathy. It would be great if it could really connect minds in a manner that doesn’t accelerate confirmation bias, but that cultural machinery isn’t built in yet.
If anything it’s a bunch of support groups affirming their own neurosis. Theres nothing americana love more than being allowed to do something; permitted the right to complain under some boardgame rule amendment. That’s why cults are so American, the Book of Mormon was the original alternate reality game. The California ideology is the internet’s founding doctrine. It’s a filter not a megaphone, a bunch of intentional nudist communities, not a sports arena or conference center. Every slot in a server farm is a social Petri dish, and any lab leaks are traceable to their cultural roots, mutating beyond recognition a la Covid.
“In the United States, as soon as several inhabitants have taken an opinion or an idea they wish to promote in society, they seek each other out and unite together once they have made contact. From that moment, they are no longer isolated but have become a power seen from afar whose activities serve as an example and whose words are heeded" (Tocqueville 1840, 599).
"That’s why cults are so American, the Book of Mormon was the original alternate reality game. The California ideology is the internet’s founding doctrine. It’s a filter not a megaphone, a bunch of intentional nudist communities, not a sports arena or conference center. Every slot in a server farm is a social Petri dish, and any lab leaks are traceable to their cultural roots, mutating beyond recognition a la Covid." -- so true
I just ran into this. To me, this phenom of fallen promoters of exemplars, such as your example of trad advos who preach but don't "have" families currently, misses why these advos succeed. That they're "inauthentic" is obviously irrelevant, since they're succeeding, until one wants to bring them down and replace them with someone else. Authenticity then isn't a goal, it's a not-very-veiled attack tactic that's widely available. However, back to why they succeed ... in the math field of category theory, there's well defined notions of diagrams, functor categories, and limits (universal constructions) that illustrate how successful advocacy works. A *diagram* is a simple sketch of objects and relationships, which mesh together and combine naturally. *Functor categories* express how one can embed a diagram in a much larger community, as a template that parts of the community fit into. The larger community becomes a container of instances of the template. Finally, a limit is a special template, one which is "universal" in the sense that every similar template can be explained in terms of a limit. That is, a limit enables an "everything you said says what I said already" translation in all cases. So, one has a diagram, one sets up an embedding of the diagram, one "universalizes" the embedding into a limit, and then one defends the limit by translating everything that trys to mimic it into a thing that uses it. In a way, it is America, since the colonial but independent nature of America made this process of taking a meme from some mother country, distilling it to a few points, building a sermon from it, claiming its universality, and spreading the sermon endlessly as if one owns it (although obviously one is "just a servant", haha), is part of America's special character, especially during that early period called "the great awakening". All that history is Tara Isabella Burton's career obsession to write about. The Internet just makes it easier to do those moves.
Great post! “Everybody wants a label, but nobody wants to be told what to do.” may well be an accurate description of Americans, which is why I, as a non-American resent the Americanisation of everything. In many circumstances I can do without a label, thank you very much, especially because they are used so often to tell people what to do (or at least what to believe). Call this the identity bait and switch:
1. Do you identify as X? (Christian, queer, feminist, whatever)
2. If you identify as X, you must therefore support Y (Trump, the Palestinian cause, banning Nazis on Substack, whatever)
Good point here -- I wonder how much of this is also a sublimation of missing stereotypes
This is so true! And it's not just online..
I have been having similar revelations about these pro-family influencers lacking children. A lot of them also seem to be autistic. I hate to say this, but I first noticed this on TPOT rather than on the dissident right. It was through TPOT that childless autistic women appeared to be larping some Jane Austen novel and masquerading as fertility influencers, completely obsessed with gender norms and reproduction stats. As an autistic woman who is about a decade older than these girls, I started to wonder if it was a generational thing. Why were these younger women putting such extreme restrictions on themselves? Being autistic and gender non-conforming is difficult enough. Why were they upping their difficultly setting to 1000? I concluded that trad wife had become the new boss girl and that being a boss girl was actually a lot easier than whatever these new TPOT ladies were manifesting. Thanks for touching on this so I didn’t need to blog about it. The revelation had been on my mind for a while, yet I didn’t want to write another niche article without a substantial audience. Screaming into the void about this stuff isn’t any fun.
Are you sure they are women?
Yes, but they are very androgynous and seeking to conceal it. So much effort just to be a fertility influencer.
What happens when imagination is outsourced? Without true play there is no self discovery, empathy; wire mother, wire personalities, theory of hivemind.
I think people underestimate how much you can play online. It's no more restrictive than dolls.
True, but with walled gardens and all encompassing platforms, increasing supervision (state or paternal), the wild west days are coming to an end. Roblox, the most popular game, is more of a stock market than a playground. More monetization means less room for weird communities, drama, experimentation. That would be perilous for the shareholders. Look at reddit - that's the future. Castrated. What happens when everyone has to use their real names on the internet. RIP Omegle.
I think internet identities used to be disconnected from our real identities, which made role play easier when there’s little expectation that anyone is showing their “real life” self. now there’s a lack of anonymity, with many people using their real name and posting their real face (this is especially noteworthy on tiktok where people will post obvious lies/trolling similar to 4chan greentexts, and yet have their face in the video). I think the internet is in a strange place where you are expected to be “real”, and yet, the urge to use the internet as a way to experiment with different identities has never left.
One aspect of Identity that I've been considering is the proliferation of this kind of adolescent yearning for the transcendence of simple and discrete categories. there's this concept within philosophy that I have studied called the sublime, where something, usually nature, is so grand and so overwhelming of your sensory perception that it lacks the possibility of rationalization or calculation. In a way, this is what the notion of "queering" aspires to, but also the facetious esoterica of the e-right, which seeks to induce a kind of mind-fucking "shock of the (old)" that assaults contemporary social mores. Everyone thinks they occupy a privileged position that transcends the mundanity and stratification of contemporary social life. it is not enough to have an identity, but also to reconfigure how identity is expressed and understood. In a way, it is perfectly understandable why people with unbridled variety in the media they consume would want to cohere it into something, when inspiration from highly masculine coded and feminine coded media get reflected upon, an anxiety is induced by the kind of aporia about gender, but this is old news. the same could be correct of computer programmers who think they can introduce age old truths from archaic societies into the cutting edge.
I think that attraction to the sublime is because *everything* is emotional. I think of the term "gender euphoria," and the popularity of stimulants. Everything must be a quasi-ecstatic experience because you are not living physically.
I have this vivid memory of stumbling into some online chatroom on my dad's computer, fooling around and failing to understand exactly what roleplay was. Others kept telling me to use *action marks.* I didn't understand, but I kept going until I got fed up and said WHAT THE FUCK ARE ACTION MARKS? I HATE ALL OF YOU!!!! and quit the room.
It's true, though, that in this time roleplay has totally lost its frame of reference. Every thread is an rp thread, every platform is an rp board. Even the purportedly joyous and playful memetic signifiers are impotent but for their autoerotic fixation on how Extremely Important it is to Do This Kind of Thing in order to, I don't know, bring about the correct kind of genocide? Summon Shiva? Get Bernie elected finally? Baristas? Kids in cages? Is that still a thing?
The distinction between adopting an image out of affinity and cultivating a personality that reflects actual experience is that only one of those offers any expression for what you really need from life. The other, ultimately, is only, and at its best, cope. But none of us have any experience of life anymore. We're all just trying to put together some Megabot assemblage of images and ideas that, we hope, if we just continue to tinker with it, will finally make us feel human, or at minimum, less alone. Only it doesn't work.
At least it doesn't for me.
I'm curious about how this will look in Gen Alpha
> I’m not the only one who’s noticed that a significant handful of the most vocal pro-family Internet personalities are missing one vital thing: a family. But that’s the way it goes online. Many of the most vocal, most popular anti-feminists are unmarried cosmopolitans, hustling their way into a subscriber base that can pay their rent.
That's because the people with actual families are too busy with their families to be vocal online.
I don't think that's necessarily true. A lot of moms use FB and I have a bunch of mom friends with locked accounts.
I guess I don’t think meaning is super real under this definition. Living in the arena was rarely real for anyone and for those in the arena, life seemed gruesome and short
What do you mean by arena?
The old quote "The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena" that has kinda grown into an analogy of anyone doing anything meaningful