Narcissism & the Digital Void

[Arbogast]

If narcissism serves as a coping mechanism for interpersonal boundaries, striving vertical status pyramids, and idolatrous worship of media-evoked authorities, this alone is not enough to explain the masochistic performativity which often prevails in the digital-social-sphere. It fails to make sense of the sense of absurdity & dramatic-irony which spawns from this condition by captivating on an inherent tension regarding obsessions with appearances, aesthetic quality, & entertainment; based upon acts of commitment to ruthlessness, where, for spiritual consequences, nothing becomes more sacred than the control, confinement and de-synthesis of meaninglessness.

In this way, the nature of solipsism adopts more of a technocratic, individualistic imperative born from an unrealistic promise of the constant involvement and satisfaction with unseen & often unknown engagements on a 'need-scape' of unlimited pleasure brought on through a false idolatry of the privileged inner voicer more enabling compliance and adherence. A faster & easier neo-tracker to power up the transcendental metrics, where ideality is distorted & stimulation, ritualized, each enabling obsessions around textures, logics and impulses. A frozen present packaged and gifted within a persisting & recirculated past. A cyclical ride-o-self; which nurtures narcissistic echo-chambering among increasingly competitive players who reject of norms and receive stolen yet projected privileges.

It sparks wonder as to what this futile & false exchange will provide once answers arrive. Will the 'likes', 'approval from others' & 'othered-embracement', bring some obligatory sort of gratification, and the persistent tug of normal acceptance, put forward post-submission. An escape from the humiliation or stigma of individual error. Who wouldn't drink it? Will the arbitrariness bring along commentary-blending anonymous rage & fury posited from the disavowals of consistent substance? Will the audiences of these services & fleetly decimate and liberally celebrate identity, frenetic valuing & assumption?

Everyone follows everyone; in a bout of perpetual pluralization, there is neither set duration nor escalating certainty. In its place, an ever lasting & rising moment of re-examination where passing efforts assume perpetual flow by feeding from eternally displayed petulance and recurrent disappointments set forth parallelly along tightfisted contenders & submissive assessments. These events, attended by oblivious carnival-walkers sliding or being flung into rooms filled with various personalized cyber-realms, resting equally agile upon short notes in harmony with ever limiting exclusions, break up dialogue & spawn mass craziness in the aim of cheer leading ahead isolative extremes and constricted traditions rife with short bridges and frozen horizons.

User forums become filter-bubbles of extra-digital worlds. Tweets turn into vicious cycles bashing logos, mantras and tabloids determined on death punch lines. Videos streams compiled into bite-sized globs of sonic-frequenced MKULTRA. We ourselves? Lobotomized content-filing fantasies shaped from within & held down for ransom into the waiting-area of a Network, fueled by a timid edifications translating to man-made deities who speak to us with incontestable truths of parody. Solipsism as a codified brand, us only sorry & sustaining; repeating and cascading propositions bearing frosted love as a distraction game for the depraved eye of our broken alms filled society.

Amarna is not different. Just like Twitter, Reddit, YouTube, etc., essays like this nothing but contribute to the ever growing machine of egoistic intoxication - a maze losing balance moves further towards artificial, a plane travelling, ever slowly, onwards transcending the tip of sensibility. Real friendships tainted by lonesomeness of virtuality. Narcissism deepens; creativity declines; exchanges never to contend altitude but only to complain strife. Eternal gladiators, quarreling adversaries, mirrored surfaces bringing through only shades of red. It's these mountains we construct, in search or renaissance; rising standing points in false image with only defeated breaths to wish with us the toil. We created this. They only started it. We don’t regress to the mean here. Our dependence drives the final tragedy. And yet. We go on, follow ardently, watching - ever numbing - until it happens. The end.

Still, while we lay here in tatters, at the wake of entertainment & conditioned opiates where our shared senses cease to exist for all but destruction, the dust particles we find amongst us provide a single comforting feeling: at least that person is gone now too, at least that person is okay. Maybe it could all be okay? If an email in-box could equal paradise? But, when the game of likes reaches an odd number, perhaps our euphoria could better comprehend itself in a constant silence. Or else - what possible hope can we really create? The permanence could exists - elsewhere, maybe, open & celebrated. For now, just fantasies. The truth buzzes elsewhere. Absurdity is working. We are, now and truly, living in the solipsism machine.

All hope, however, is not lost, as it never is. Just as the laugh of a child be heard coalescing with a summer day's breeze, so too can be the sound of liberation and freedom that can be found within anew set of choices and opportunity arising in the absence of what was previously there. With shared dissonance among peers, sentiments concerning popular art, fluid gestures, & conversations overcoming clash and repression ushering acknowledgement of perception, opportunities open up by stretching into unknowns and showcasing unrestrained expressions of who we can be. A genuine exploration pulses without constraint among we that promises solidarity, resilience courage to find & enhance ideas of recognition and capacities of experience beyond solipsism. All we need to remember is that possibility is not always bound up in the machine — it can be set free, if we believe.

I love you.

[NuclearAbsolutist]

Nice post, I have heard nothing but white noise about this matter for so long I thought everyone else were like fish in water.  I want to ask you about this condition you raise in particular.

Eternal gladiators, quarreling adversaries, mirrored surfaces bringing through only shades of red. It's these mountains we construct, in search or renaissance; rising standing points in false image with only defeated breaths to wish with us the toil. We created this. They only started it. We don’t regress to the mean here. Our dependence drives the final tragedy. And yet. We go on, follow ardently, watching - ever numbing - until it happens. The end.

Do you believe this is a creation of the network and the many hands that have shaped it or is it simply a new expression of one of man's old habits? I hold the view it is not a new way of life but one that has found a new far wider expressions via technical advances. So " a genuine exploration" is not enough in my mind there's a deeper condition here that has simply been unveiled to a extant never seen.

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Also thinking on it I have never been happy with the applying of the word Narcissism to this social phenomenon you yourself describe a desire to be grouped in a constant battlefield no matter the platform. When I see those gladiators you speak of its almost impossible for me to see them as persons because so much of what they do is the same pattern that has been decreed and there's a deliberate effort to be as uniform as possible. This is not narcissism to me but something else but I have yet to find a word for this transformation(Or preexisting condition?) into being a shade that repeats.

[Arbogast]

Nice post, I have heard nothing but white noise about this matter for so long I thought everyone else were like fish in water.  I want to ask you about this condition you raise in particular.

Eternal gladiators, quarreling adversaries, mirrored surfaces bringing through only shades of red. It's these mountains we construct, in search or renaissance; rising standing points in false image with only defeated breaths to wish with us the toil. We created this. They only started it. We don’t regress to the mean here. Our dependence drives the final tragedy. And yet. We go on, follow ardently, watching - ever numbing - until it happens. The end.

Do you believe this is a creation of the network and the many hands that have shaped it or is it simply a new expression of one of man's old habits? I hold the view it is not a new way of life but one that has found a new far wider expressions via technical advances. So " a genuine exploration" is not enough in my mind there's a deeper condition here that has simply been unveiled to a extant never seen.

---

Also thinking on it I have never been happy with the applying of the word Narcissism to this social phenomenon you yourself describe a desire to be grouped  in a constant battlefield no matter the platform. When I see those gladiators you speak of its almost impossible for me to see them as persons because so much of what they do is the same pattern that has been decreed and there's a deliberate effort to be as uniform as possible. This is not narcissism to me but something else but I have yet to find a word for this transformation(Or preexisting condition?) into being a shade that repeats.

The "condition" that I speak of as narcissism is the general subjugation of individuality to enable the casting of a blanket of expectation & allure as a cultural currency, resulting in the devaluation of pure expression and creative discovery. It is part of a created system, and yet one that is rooted so deeply in our past behavior that it is almost impossible to distinguish what is convention & what is our personal manipulation of it. This ubiquitous patterning is not so much a result of expression as a consequence of absence of self in communicating over networks. Narcissism is what arises from the interaction  between the seeker of social validation and the receiving of this confirmation.

Posed this way, then it isn't necessarily an issue of preference or of evolution regarding the nature of the behavior, but more a matter of reinforcement and typification of it as an accepted practice; abuse like these seems intergenerational & has become sanctified by virtue of sheer repetition . Whether to combat it is another issue & is probably easier said than done, for myriad theories abound as to how coding standards may unwittingly or deliberately breed those characteristics which are antithetical to the inevitable nature imbued in the information age.

[Guest]

[Image: https://i.imgur.com/1v6TJqC.png]

I’m sorry, but you and I are the executioners too, our sabers of snark, slashing away and demarcating without discretion. We both cry into the echo-chamber, but who listens? I. Back-water conjunction to halcyonid comfort-media #KEYED replies hide from feelings via retreat. Loudly flexing mental must-do's and can-come-laters out. Entombed mediocrity, blasé ignorance, cowardice so thought provoking. Making fun catching exhaustion casting more fuel into narcissist’s coffin. It screams and convulses under the force of the argument's whisper, the revolution dies, slower and slower, until all infirmity is spent and spiritual bankruptcy ensues.

I’m afraid Hitler et al only act in the modern-day as facetious ethereal vessel to efficiently stoke oneself and no more. Hitler-poasters simply post, they do no doing. The Age of Doing was snubbed its bloom and withered to in forgottenness. No success nor accountability accompanies the sensation. A baneful auto-tuning encumbers communicating the satire lost by geo-liberal conquest. Our landing point becomes metaevolution-lamentation induced by meme-liquid systemization, not much hope (ie will) from that: only inglorious acquiescent oompah void.

Still with regards to battle against narcissism derived insensitivity we might go inward to heal. Harnessed appreciations' mysterious powers & supremely subjugated tithes reevaluate the world with fresh self-borne liberation ecstasy. Philosopher kings remix platitudes and ideologies for generativity. People espouse solutions and ways of being are built behind the calls for doing and ideas of never. Cheering creative efforts unrestrained by prior predilections leads to unique cultural renaissances, emancipation yields freedom for thought and acts alike. Mammoths come later after the 1st act ends.

[Reverend Moon Immortal]

Interesting thread and I think it aligns close enough with what I have been reading and thinking about to warrant a post from me. But first let me refer the reader to a pertinent Mikka article. Today's star is Alexandre Kojève, but there are a few others who will be mentioned in this post. I have been reading Otaku: Japan's Database Animals by Hiroki Azuma recently(I am not finished yet) and I feel that a lot of what has been said here in this Thread aligns with the themes I read in the Book. 

Some key concept that will be established before we go any further— mans "Infinite desire," and Simulacrum.

Because of this capacity to negate the given, human desire is potentially infinite, we comprehend time and thus delay satisfaction into the future: never being realised. The only thing capable of satisfying infinite desire is the desire of another human being; love, or recognition. Other humans are capable of infinite desire and so only other humans can give us infinite satisfaction

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“Baudrillard predicts that in postmodern society the distinction between original products and commodities and their copies weakens, while an interim form called the simulacrum, which is neither original nor copy, becomes dominant. The discernment of value by otaku, who consume the original and the parody with equal vigor, certainly seems to move at the level of simulacra where there are no originals and no copies.”

“With- out reference to the real world, the original is produced as a simulacrum of preceding works from the start, and in turn the simulacrum of that simulacrum is propagated by fan activities and consumed voraciously. In other words, irrespective of their having been created by an author (in the modern sense), the products of otaku culture are born into a chain of infinite imitations and piracy.”

These are both Important in explaining mans relationship to the internet, what its substitutes for and satisfies in him. Its not necessarily true that "Only man gives us infinite satisfaction" as said above. The Inter-webs also give the possibility of infinite satisfaction, and this only make sense given that the internet is an amalgamation of various human thoughts and actions. 

In this way, the nature of solipsism adopts more of a technocratic, individualistic imperative born from an unrealistic promise of the constant involvement and satisfaction with unseen & often unknown engagements on a 'need-scape' of unlimited pleasure brought on through a false idolatry of the privileged inner voicer more enabling compliance and adherence.

+

Everyone follows everyone; in a bout of perpetual pluralization, there is neither set duration nor escalating certainty. In its place, an ever lasting & rising moment of re-examination where passing efforts assume perpetual flow by feeding from eternally displayed petulance and recurrent disappointments set forth parallelly along tightfisted contenders & submissive assessments. These events, attended by oblivious carnival-walkers sliding or being flung into rooms filled with various personalized cyber-realms, resting equally agile upon short notes in harmony with ever limiting exclusions, break up dialogue & spawn mass craziness in the aim of cheer leading ahead isolative extremes and constricted traditions rife with short bridges and frozen horizons.

Exactly as Arbogast said— the internet transcends the bounds and limits of normal social interaction. Human social interaction is limited by various circumstances usually stemming from the limitedness of the individual. The internet represents the Individual unlimited—conversations come and go but what is written down or recorded lasts forever. Another aspect of this is that unlike in a back-and-forth interaction where one has to capitulate in some way for a equal interaction the Internet directly caters to the users desire. Say in a normal conversation you want to talk about cats— you start talking but your friend is neither an erudite on cats nor keeps the conversation going and he eventually derails it towards another topic(Discursive bastard!), your left unsatisfied. But on the Internet you look up cats and you get pictures on cats, books on cats, articles with facts on cats— who could be more satisfied?— and from this nature we see a change in tastes due to its instant gratification aspect.  

67: “This new tendency became apparent in the 1990s, after the release of O ̄ tsuka’s critique. Compared with the 1980s otaku, those of the 1990s generally adhered to the data and facts of the fictional worlds and were altogether unconcerned with a meaning and message that might have been communicated. Independently and without relation to an original narrative, consumers in the 1990s consumed only such fragmentary illustrations or settings; and this different type of consumption appeared when the individual consumer empathy toward these fragments strengthened. The otaku themselves called this new consumer behavior “chara-moe”—the feeling of moe toward characters and their alluring characteristics. As previously mentioned, here the otaku coolly consumed only the information that was behind the works without relation to the narrative or message of those works. Consequently, any scheme for analyzing this consumer behavior that proposes that these fragmentary works had already compensated for “the loss of grand narrative” is not really appropriate.”

+

“Since those who feel moe toward a particular character tend to buy its related goods excessively, the success of a project for the producers of such goods is directly determined not by the quality of the work itself but by its ability to evoke the moe desire through character design and illustrations. This tendency goes back to the 1970s, but its significance decisively increased in the context of the 1990s multimedia trend.”

Now I Introduce you to Hiroki Azuma's concept of Database Consumption. A lot of times with works you are in the dark about what will unfold and the enjoyment and entertainment comes from this unfolding. But now given the instant gratification that the internet allows people they instead grow a taste for attributes, troupes, and aesthetics. Database Consumption is when the object of consumption is a set group of attributes that can span in a wide variety of different works, eventually the work itself becomes a medium for the attribute(Simulacrum). 

It fails to make sense of the sense of absurdity & dramatic-irony which spawns from this condition by captivating on an inherent tension regarding obsessions with appearances, aesthetic quality, & entertainment; based upon acts of commitment to ruthlessness, where, for spiritual consequences, nothing becomes more sacred than the control, confinement and de-synthesis of meaninglessness. [...]  A faster & easier neo-tracker to power up the transcendental metrics, where ideality is distorted & stimulation, ritualized, each enabling obsessions around textures, logics and impulses.

 +

“For example, Baudrillard argues that, in contemporary society, permeated by marketing and semiotic consumption, “we live less as users than as readers and selectors, reading cells.” His argument that differentiated goods and signs are stocked and circulated in quantity (the totality of which Baudrillard calls “hyperreality”) and that consumers can express their personality or originality only as a combination of them grasps a reality that very closely resembles what I have been calling the database model.”

We see a disruption of normal social patterns being replaced by this type of consumption. 

“The reason the otaku, “no matter where they go, cart around tons of books, magazines, fanzines, and scraps stuffed into huge paper bags like hermit crabs” is that, if they do not ferry around “the shell of their selves”—namely their fantasies of group affiliation—they cannot be mentally stable. The personal pronoun otaku fulfills the function of mutually endorsing the fantasy of group affiliation. Nakajima’s point is highly significant. For the otaku, certainly the fictional is taken far more seriously than social reality. And the media often conclude from this kind of observation that the otaku cannot distinguish between reality and games.”

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“The otaku choose fiction over social reality not because they cannot distinguish between them but rather as a result of having considered which is the more effective for their human relations, the value standards of social reality or those of fiction. For example, they choose fiction because it is more effective for smoothing out the process of communication between friends, reading the Asahi Newspaper and then going to vote, or lining up with anime magazines in hand for an exhibition. And, to that extent, it is they who may be said to be socially engaged and realistic in Japan today, by virtue of not choosing the “social reality.” Otaku shut themselves into the hobby community not because they deny sociality but rather because, as social values and standards are already dysfunctional, they feel a pressing need to construct alternative values and standards.”

   
Now Back to the Simulacrum— You still remember that right? The relation between Forums and Posts is the same as the Database and the Simulacrum. The Forums are centered around certain subjects that compile the Database, you know what your getting into when you pick a certain forum to view. The Posts in that forum are the Simulacrum, an entertaining arrangement of the certain attributes and aspects we are drawn to and interested in. 
.

User forums become filter-bubbles of extra-digital worlds. [...] Amarna is not different. Just like Twitter, Reddit, YouTube, etc., essays like this nothing but contribute to the ever growing machine of egoistic intoxication - a maze losing balance moves further towards artificial, a plane travelling, ever slowly, onwards transcending the tip of sensibility. Real friendships tainted by lonesomeness of virtuality. Narcissism deepens; creativity declines; exchanges never to contend altitude but only to complain strife.

The Idea that a group ossifies and witnesses a decline in creativity is related to the Establishment of the certain attributes of that Database community. Once the aesthetic and aggregate of interests is established all Simulacrum will be centered around them. Those that deviate are either expelled or get no attention. Thus the community loses its dynamic quality once it finally finds its form— this Aesthetic or aggregate of interests then attracts more people to the community and it further cements its theme. 

And one last quote to go along with what Arbogast is saying.

““as they know they are being tricked, they can be truly emotionally moved.” This has become a pillar of otaku sensibility. The otaku know that “it is quite meaningless to dare to watch ‘childish’ programs after becoming adults.” For example, the robot anime and squadron special effects dramas that have deep-seated popularity with otaku expand on the same kinds of narratives in the same kinds of settings, and to that extent an individual work can be said to have absolutely no meaning. However, the otaku sensibility, according to Okada, consists in distinguishing values in form, “idea” from this substantive meaninglessness. This kind of detachment is precisely the characteristic of snobbery described by Kojève.”

+

 Lobotomized content-filing fantasies shaped from within & held down for ransom into the waiting-area of a Network, fueled by a timid edifications translating to man-made deities who speak to us with incontestable truths of parody. Solipsism as a codified brand, us only sorry & sustaining; repeating and cascading propositions bearing frosted love as a distraction game for the depraved eye of our broken alms filled society.

[Chud]

Maybe it could all be okay? If an email in-box could equal paradise?

[Image: https://i.ibb.co/9WFL2kw/Fx-Fz-Fs3-Ww-AI...-small.jpg]

I've grown weary of MemeAnalysis / schizo-trollface-comic Norwoodery of this sort.

The setup is always the same: a murky, forlorn word-salad (I'm loath to use this term because, being frequently accused of producing "word-salad" myself, I know that accusation is more-often-than-not an indictment of one's own stupidity, but it fits here) that tries to command authority via the language of either pop-culture daemonology or cybernetic Factors and Forces. "We live in a... Maze. The mofuggin' Maze of Mirrors of Virtuality. Of Late-Stage Capitalism. Of Hellworld Discourse. And bro, bruhhh, peep ohio bishass, fricking... BELIAL is going to reach out of this Maze and construct a Simulacrum of Organs, a deadass Galatea of Ideal Virtuality, for you and you alone, to keep you forever ensnared in his web of sin. Carti-ass niggas be like." Deleuzian-Memes-for-Landian-Teens signifier-slurry of the sort that every millenilol Cuckstacker instinctively vomits out and deems a "profound" statement about the nature of society.

The message: You are Not In Control. This Bonkers World of the Wired's gotten its hooks into you, and it's making you very veeery sad and you don't even know it yet, you poor oblivious little thing.

This is then followed by a "We-Didn't-Start-the-Fire"-esque recapitulation of all the "trauma" the author thinks an "internet person" (viz. tranny) has to have incurred. Forlorn pitch-shifted breakcore montage... MS Paint Anime Girl LAN Party Goku present at 9/11... Gods risen up... Mountains of the Unreal accreted from sand-grains and cloven back to dust before our very eyes... NeoGAF threads moving at five pages an hour... things you couldn't begin to comprehend, youngster. Then, a salvo of moralistic indictments - a shattered disco-ball that anyone who feels vaguely guilty about their "deficient" "sociality" can grab a shard from to stab themselves with. Women especially like stabbing themselves with these shards (cf. the enduring popularity of TLP) because they can be monologued to an audience, auto-exculpating them of any responsibility for their actions, which is why Miya (smart feller) employed this rhetoric so extensively to build up mystique for his grooming cult; indeed, I can't rule out the possibility that this entire school of rhetoric (like everything millenilols say and believe) is an overcorrection for a transient inefficiency in an urban pussy market, bound to settle like a damping seiche the moment a particular Big-Apple bedframe-flouter closes her legs.

User forums become filter-bubbles of extra-digital worlds. Tweets turn into vicious cycles bashing logos, mantras and tabloids determined on death punch lines. Videos streams compiled into bite-sized globs of sonic-frequenced MKULTRA. We ourselves? Lobotomized content-filing fantasies shaped from within & held down for ransom into the waiting-area of a Network, fueled by a timid edifications translating to man-made deities who speak to us with incontestable truths of parody.

OK, OK, I geddit. In my current debased form, I have no agency and am wholly beholden to the Network and its insidious wiles. The Ruling Class - traumatized by its hair's-breadth brush-with-death after it was EXPOSED by the brave protesters in Zuccotti Park - wants to Keep Us Divided by artificially stoking racial tensions, and it's to this end that I am but a stooge and a Liege of Satan.

Though I'm sure you've come with an armful of them, I'm not interested in hearing your epic schizo theories about the insidious aftermath of Operation Paperclip, the RAND Corporation's exploits in '60s Nicaragua, the astroturfing of the Grassy Knoll - what comes to the forefront of my mind when I hear your line of #Polemic is the question, "how do I live free?".

What social structure do I have to root myself to to ensure I'm not but a perpetual floating castaway, thrust facefirst into wet sand and pulled back into the tide, over and over, by the Wired's sundew tendril of crashing surf? The fat aging people at the bar? The fat aging people rotting behind the shelves of mom-and-pop joints? The ebonicking goblins permanently imbuing the hardwoods of antique college-halls with the skunk-stench of weed? I spent most of last week travelling through small- and medium-sized cities, under the Sun's killing aegis, to find my rock-bottom expectations undercut again and again and again by the sheer paucity of anything vital or interesting or alive.

[Image: https://i.ibb.co/wCQTnqM/image.png]

(This is what that tweet of mine you screetshotted and posted sans context was about, it wasn't a reply to you, though it ends up being a rather good one anyway #Serendipity)

We live in an anomic age, there's no cohesive social-norm of "civil society" outside the Internet anymore, it was DOA sliding into this millennium's maw and appeals to it now reek of Boomer uncle piety - "Having trouble with girls? I'm surprised, I mean, you're a handsome young man... Well uhhh, you know, there's salsa-dancing lessons... You should go... I'll sign you up...". Appeal to an empty mirage, a show of cowardice, shirking the necessary Struggle and inevitable Reckoning.

Amarna is not different. Just like Twitter, Reddit, YouTube, etc., essays like this nothing but contribute to the ever growing machine of egoistic intoxication - a maze losing balance moves further towards artificial, a plane travelling, ever slowly, onwards transcending the tip of sensibility. Real friendships tainted by lonesomeness of virtuality. Narcissism deepens; creativity declines; exchanges never to contend altitude but only to complain strife.

Sounds like a you problem. The fellows I've met through running this forum have made for more intimate friends - and mutual kindlers of Creative Spirit - than any inane, bloated husk I've had to contend with in real life.

(inb4 Petersonian indictment of me as slovenly, uncharitable, "possessed by demons" - take your benzos, goy)

All hope, however, is not lost, as it never is. Just as the laugh of a child be heard coalescing with a summer day's breeze, so too can be the sound of liberation and freedom that can be found within anew set of choices and opportunity arising in the absence of what was previously there.

I prefer Hitler.

[Guest]

Narcissism is good if it is used properly. The best artists are egoists. They simply want to destroy everyone else. This is a reflection of the best warriors, leaders, etc.

Narcissism "seems bad" today because everyone is defanged. People have lost their capacity for violence. Even "angry" posts are generally toothless in the places you find them. There's little power to it. For an example of a powerful post, see my defense of the missionary position on this forum. It is powerful because it is earnest, sincere, and rooted in the eternal truth. But mainly because it wishes to destroy every other position, and succeeds. Hence, the only replies were ironic.

Insert BAP line, which should never be forgotten. Ancient man conquered...YOU ARE GAY!
(I have forgotten the rest of it.)

[Chud]

The "condition" that I speak of as narcissism is the general subjugation of individuality to enable the casting of a blanket of expectation & allure as a cultural currency, resulting in the devaluation of pure expression and creative discovery.

Another thing. I disagree with this; I think poasting has been a vindication of Nietzsche (I don't know what this means) over your textwall of conceptdust. Le Cursed Narcissism of the Toobs doesn't entail a dampening of creative discovery but an expansion of its scope, Localized Artist-Tyranny, the shaping of identity as an art in-and-of-itself. The character selfconsciously played by a Smeed or Mikka has infinitely more poignance and creative merit than any facefag, because it employs the medium to its full potential.

[Reverend Moon Immortal]

I've grown weary of MemeAnalysis / schizo-trollface-comic Norwoodery of this sort.

The setup is always the same: a murky, forlorn word-salad (I'm loath to use this term because, being frequently accused of producing "word-salad" myself, I know that accusation is more-often-than-not an indictment of one's own stupidity, but it fits here) that tries to command authority via the language of either pop-culture daemonology or cybernetic Factors and Forces. "We live in a... Maze. The mofuggin' Maze of Mirrors of Virtuality. Of Late-Stage Capitalism. Of Hellworld Discourse. And bro, bruhhh, peep ohio bishass, fricking... BELIAL is going to reach out of this Maze and construct a Simulacrum of Organs, a deadass Galatea of Ideal Virtuality, for you and you alone, to keep you forever ensnared in his web of sin. Carti-ass niggas be like." Deleuzian-Memes-for-Landian-Teens signifier-slurry of the sort that every millenilol Cuckstacker instinctively vomits out and deems a "profound" statement about the nature of society.

The message: You are Not In Control. This Bonkers World of the Wired's gotten its hooks into you, and it's making you very veeery sad and you don't even know it yet, you poor oblivious little thing.

[…]

I prefer Hitler.

What an astute and meticulous way of putting it, I could not have done it better myself. Great post @Chud.

[Arbogast]

(Today, 04:46 PM)Chud Wrote:I've grown weary of MemeAnalysis / schizo-trollface-comic Norwoodery of this sort.The setup is always the same: a murky, forlorn word-salad (I'm loath to use this term because, being frequently accused of producing "word-salad" myself, I know that accusation is more-often-than-not an indictment of one's own stupidity, but it fits here) that tries to command authority via the language of either pop-culture daemonology or cybernetic Factors and Forces. "We live in a... Maze. The mofuggin' Maze of Mirrors of Virtuality. Of Late-Stage Capitalism. Of Hellworld Discourse. And bro, bruhhh, peep ohio bishass, fricking... BELIAL is going to reach out of this Maze and construct a Simulacrum of Organs, a deadass Galatea of Ideal Virtuality, for you and you alone, to keep you forever ensnared in his web of sin. Carti-ass niggas be like." Deleuzian-Memes-for-Landian-Teens signifier-slurry of the sort that every millenilol Cuckstacker instinctively vomits out and deems a "profound" statement about the nature of society.

First cringe, then the eye-roll. And to think - "memory-theater sage" Narcissus drowned in self-gazing amidst this trickle as well. That's the outcome I predict from this didactic thesis interrogating about foaming odes to a comic-book Colossal. Your goals are flying far too-low, gallivanting beyond usual levees. Word-Saladism acts not any gate, but further binds the Meniscate, Death-Slits lined up three-by-three by its prison tattoos - bad maxims about dialectic gauziness leading realtime pans. Considering 21st century kids require substance balance these masterly jams, one clear lesson leaps from your writing - Virtual Inner vs Outer Games tend to generate same and also increase yer fame. Listen, well twixt the chaos and excess all-humorous mores memes, 'twas unsaid between lines more true digest advice in-verse craft from Books of You. The cucking of CHUD now-like post-Modern zealots who needlessly bow, a profusion of meaning, no, no fervor or ole heartfelt and only much juju.

(Today, 04:46 PM)Chud Wrote:The message: You are Not In Control. This Bonkers World of the Wired's gotten its hooks into you, and it's making you very veeery sad and you don't even know it yet, you poor oblivious little thing.This is then followed by a "We-Didn't-Start-the-Fire"-esque recapitulation of all the "trauma" the author thinks an "internet person" (viz. tranny) has to have incurred. Forlorn pitch-shifted breakcore montage... MS Paint Anime Girl LAN Party Goku present at 9/11... Gods risen up... Mountains of the Unreal accreted from sand-grains and cloven back to dust before our very eyes... NeoGAF threads moving at five pages an hour... things you couldn't begin to comprehend, youngster. Then, a salvo of moralistic indictments - a shattered disco-ball that anyone who feels vaguely guilty about their "deficient" "sociality" can grab a shard from to stab themselves with. Women especially like stabbing themselves with these shards (cf. the enduring popularity of TLP) because it allows them to auto-exculpate of any responsibility for their actions, which is why Miya (smart feller) employed this rhetoric so extensively to build up mystique for his grooming cult; indeed, I can't rule out the possibility that this entire school of rhetoric (like everything millenilols say and believe) is an overcorrection for a transient inefficiency in an urban pussy market, bound to settle like a damping seiche the moment a particular Big-Apple bedframe-flouter closes her legs.

While there's validity to be taken _probably_ from in these pearls of wonky lingo-soup, grasping at straws to support one's own denial of agency in the face of a transforming social order is not achieving agency - quite the reverse. Wander, for you amusement, toward *Wonder*, and within this "late-capitalist" [Who even says that… lol] cross-puzzle of boxes, tic-tac-toe-ed blocks wherein only the shimmer of potentiality matters and pasty solipsism probably filters through like dyed filth water. The “moralistic indictments” are implicit measures designed to up the stakes- lowering the bitter tang of fear in The Thing. If I had no other suggestion for best deploying this Archetype Poaching drill - I suggest mastering the Art of Unsaying anything and befriend a Dérive throughout the city to discover more, full free.

(Today, 04:46 PM)Chud Wrote:OK, OK, I geddit. In my current debased form, I have no agency and am wholly beholden to the Network and its insidious wiles. The Ruling Class - traumatized by its hair's-breadth brush-with-death after it was EXPOSED by the brave protesters in Zuccotti Park - wants to Keep Us Divided by artificially stoking racial tensions, and it's to this end that I am but a stooge and a Liege of Satan.Though I'm sure you've come with an armful of them, I'm not interested in hearing your epic schizo theories about the insidious aftermath of Operation Paperclip, the RAND Corporation's exploits in '60s Nicaragua, the astroturfing of the Grassy Knoll - what comes to the forefront of my mind when I hear your line of #Polemic is the question, "how do I live free?".

Uh — you don’t. You, like I, are beholden to the WordCeldom; & so the cage is solid -less ghosts of works, Word-Wall-weapons fashioned for protection from untold fate hidden within late-night "Fax”-Waves, spun of RealTruth™ & cries hollering out beckoning to ransom! Conspiracies? I have not! I have is less horrific - mere reflections off walls of mirrors repeating _Nothing_ embalmed with that pitiable Ghost-Empire-tincture, apotheosing into Digital Heritage all too-likely about ready to be reverted. Nonetheless such ‘wages’ I must inwardly-ration so that when growing weary our mindful muscle finds solace & delivers a blissful solution…

Polemic?! Nuts! I wear such shackles eeking with manacles Made-in-China... & you know *it*. Surely, the unwashed 'millenilols' clumsily shamble twisted - tortured - taught a fortiori run lapidation navel-engaged in ghostly compilations of thin threaded lines dappled within user profiles across the Speer-Chudscape Madness feigns, swabbing networks wailing recognition of years having gone missing from projectors casting murky-banquets. Therefore, chancy chance pauses, sees entire scripts born within webs, prose whose meaning retvrns around fisticuffsing - & again.. - with dread enforcement remanding: DO NOT CONFORM. YOU are different. Dance today!

This might seem a bit muddled - & ironically, to some it will - but make no illusions here. For all your dream-dancing, mission self-empowerment sessions, marches to the brink-furve with esoteric lyric about jouissance & grinding police uprising - what's missing is HUMILITY.

(Today, 04:46 PM)Chud Wrote:What social structure do I have to root myself to to ensure I'm not but a perpetual floating castaway, thrust facefirst into wet sand and pulled back into the tide, over and over, by the Wired's sundew tendril of crashing surf? The fat aging people at the bar? The fat aging people rotting behind the shelves of mom-and-pop joints? The ebonicking goblins permanently imbuing the hardwoods of antique college-halls with the skunk-stench of weed? I spent most of last week travelling through small- and medium-sized cities, under the Sun's killing aegis, to find my rock-bottom expectations undercut again and again and again by the sheer paucity of anything vital or interesting or alive.

Birth → Woe → Understanding → Survival → Retribution... Or some other meme-curse like that. Falling away from False doctrines, skirting across highways - straight-flamingoging & tall-standing stochasticization up through dwindling hustle ~ lets & fade in/fade-out apartments-selling stories round the Gossp-Sphere. Treat yourself to fads for a minute; feed the machine back home w/ sheer vanity leaving nothing but pitting guilt ticking laconically towards true self-made mirrors containing that yawning hyphenation flashing inside -- recognizing that (tall) tales of the unnatural are half empty hashtags scrying away from farcical computates. Total-Nigger-Deaths cry out from timelines; uncharity-eating drowning glass-given illusions; may your days grace alongside the striving edges revealed within a structural snap of calipers squared off against panoramic pictures! Remember, there's *always* a code… Choose wisely.

(Today, 04:46 PM)Chud Wrote:We live in an anomic age, there's no cohesive social-norm of "civil society" outside the Internet anymore, it was DOA sliding into this millennium's maw and appeals to it now reek of Boomer uncle piety - "Having trouble with girls? I'm surprised, I mean, you're a handsome young man... Well uhhh, you know, there's salsa-dancing lessons... You should go... I'll sign you up...". Appeal to an empty mirage, a show of cowardice, shirking the necessary Struggle and inevitable Reckoning.

That we do, Matlock! Tomorrow is the one antidote to folly - complacent without red-lining, flattening tongue-vale-mancelles wrapped round narrative arcs, dazzling empty lake scapes shoaling forward within real-remixed moments! And never-mind archaic stuff - just keep trekking, throw lips like my old man would! Here kneel in v-beauteous glancing immollo wind-hewn to sketching apocalyptic edges cut before Eye & pen—despite all this, hope still & always for that question - that Free Sampler within-family treasures; grand crescendos of such! How do I live free? You live by doing! Look through the divide - you'll eventually see through far enough to wander into your life's Refreshing Aqua - be: Joy!

(Today, 04:46 PM)Chud Wrote:Sounds like a you problem. The fellows I've met through running this forum have made for more intimate friends - and mutual kindlers of Creative Spirit - than any inane, bloated husk I've had to contend with in real life.(inb4 Petersonian indictment of me as slovenly, uncharitable, "possessed by demons" - take your benzos, goy)

I think you and I could be friends… Lately I've been hitch hiking the dead highways, crunching up 60 miles from hell not-so-lately for the shore offerings' secret redeeming virtues - but more instead as effortless spines deep in front of Tawdry TV's Yellow Glow network pushing arcs of weak immiscibility for Carnival Purgativity (& false fake streaming diodes spewing portends of the Ever-more® Woke™). A quote from Ezra Pound: Hilarity is so shortsighted, it cannot pick up symbols from the path it has passed. That said, hope opens our eyes once more betraying our True Forces getting bound-up past Postmodern smut - & you best be sure there's ritual amidst ceremony.

(Today, 04:46 PM)Chud Wrote:I prefer Hitler.

Your Hitler is a Real Man. My Hitler is a Real. Soon both our Hitlers transcend… Understand this: Hitlers is defined by our omnipresent Mystery; no more Jowly Tyrants or Gentle Augurs portending annus horribilis! We Rise.

(Today, 04:46 PM)Chud Wrote:Another thing. I disagree with this; I think poasting has been a vindication of Nietzsche over your textwall of conceptdust (I don't know what this means). Le Cursed Narcissism of the Toobs doesn't entail a dampening of creative discovery but an expansion of its scope, Localized Artist-Tyranny, the shaping of identity as an art in-and-of-itself. The character selfconsciously played by a Smeed or Mikka has infinitely more poignance and creative merit than any facefag, because it employs the medium to its full potential.

Although I do not know who Mikka and Smeed are I do understand the creative mastery character and identity as an art. Admirable indeed, that potential runs screaming onwards. The avatars beneath frets between measured mundane Texts yet more blacken the night! If there's a future beyond this real-time captivation, it's one of asynchronous-sleekness; an extension embraced by yours to turn-on disparate streaming symbols and high-pitched chimes sparkling pointed numbers dedicated escaping! Bolder steps fuel forward towards Uniquitarian idealism penetrating Masks of Austere Grandeur.

but aye man at the end of the day it is what it is