03-02-2023, 02:32 AM
The Warehouse is a spiritual state. A living purgatory for men who have been put aside by the world, but are still willing to work with it and for it.
Warehouse Man does not live well. Nobody is concerned for his plight. He is quite probably the regular subject of abuse and spite. But he is not defined as an enemy of society. And more importantly, he does not identify himself as one. The warehoused man lives as comfortably as he is able within the defined space allowed to him by society, no matter how cruel or uncomfortable this arrangement might get. Taste, beliefs, and actions will always be within the lines imposed from above.
The politics of warehouse man are obviously impotent conservatism or being follower progressive ally. Personal beliefs about his place in the world, that things may be unfair, but he'll only take issue with what he's told he can take issue with.
Taste is the most important area of warehouse man's mind to read. He takes what he is allowed. But he is still simple, and male. There is a consistent note of concession in his taste. Things men like, but strictly within the lines. John Wick, a reactive and defensive killing machine who holds a benign good will towards the world, and would presumably be just like them is scary bad men didn't keep provoking him. Warhammer. A world of perpetual extreme violence and racewar, but couched in absurdity and sufficiently divorced from real present or historic contexts which served as obvious inspirations for denial of underlying drives to be plausible, at least to themselves. DOOM: ETERNAL, more of the same. Defensive male violence against real evil, which dares to aggress and want things. "Cool", "badass" aesthetics which distort male desires into absurd cartoonish jokes. Doomguy is a simple grotesque lump who kills unquestionably evil goblins. Violence is adored, but not spiritual violence. Maximalism and excess are applied within the lines to compensate for spiritual blandness. There is overlap here with "norwood" obviously, but the tastes and neurosis at play are baser. More desperate and survival oriented.
Maximalism and excess within acceptable boundaries also describes perhaps their most essential acquired taste, metal music. The continuity between metal album cover art and warhammer is not a coincidence. They are one spiritual tradition of oversocialised white men trying to have their own cool and exciting things without upsetting or harming anybody. And the tendency in both cases is towards total neutering. I admit I do not know metal music too well, and I know national socialist black metal exists, if someone could elaborate on the place of it in broader culture that would be appreciated. But more particularly we are talking about warehouse metal. Warehouse man will not touch outlier media that goes too far. In all things he's like this.
Some more pointed thoughts on particular elements and appeals of warehouse media, from a learned and thoughtful friend:
Quote:Warehousecore:
- exists within clinicspace whether real or imagined (a doctored, sense-assaulting environment meant to subdue and castrate, this could be an actual warehouse, an actual clinic, the fact that a particular genre of things (like music) being doctored or existing within those bounds; a space where advancement is not conceivable but hellish subsistence is the ideal)
- demands your full attention
- is actually capable of holding onto your full attention: bad skinnerboxes will not qualify
- will aid in suicide prevention but solve no problems
The Warehouse does not give humanity enough to live or die. The above descriptions struck me as strikingly on point for several things I have considered inherently warehoused for some time now.
Total War(ehouse) has been on my mind as an enemy of the human spirit for years now. Awfully made, lame, unsatisfying pieces of work that just keep growing and holding more human attention every year. It lasts forever, is marketed on scale, mass, and content, and tantalises on the edge of masculine fascinations but is ultimately determined to address none of them. The overlap with Warhammer of course was a natural development, and a 40k production seems to be the most desired future direction.
Quote:call of duty is to date one of the most efficacious warehousecore stimcopes available, so is metal "music", so are energy drinks, and joe rogan.
there is a norwood overlap in that most Norwood types exist in some degree of clinicspace but they are not actually reduced to subsistence, norwoodcore imo is fundamentally a bourgeois thing for people with money to spend on masculinity subscription packages advertised on instagram and podcasts [...]
warehousecore items, affects, and media is best described as Tools for Subsistence [...] these tools are for the type of person who would kill themselves without them