The Collected Writings

The post-human age

Humanity no longer exists.
For all of history, humans have used tools, but never before have tools used humans. The use of tools, which we use to shape our environment, and our ability for complex socialization in the beauty of culture are the two things which most people would argue define us above all else, they are the very things which make us human. Even as individuals, what creates each of us, what fundamentally makes us up as people, within our own mind and our experience of the entire world around us is our environment and our socialization. -But what happens when our entire environment is industrial? What happens if our socialization, if every aspect of culture and connection, is within the influence of an algorithm? What would happen if humanity was mediated by something which we created, a tool, an environment, and its purpose was to mechanize our complex systems of socialization? Beyond even what is obviously a machine, there exist metaphysical machines within the collective consciousness, a demiurge made of tulpas, a mechanism of social constructs, cultural machines, political machines, economic machines, and those which have no name.
We live in a post-human age.

The function of neurons is to make connections with other neurons. However, the vast majority of neurons exist in other people, physiologically separated, and so the consciousness makes connections in other ways, things like culture, or the collective consciousness/collective unconsciousness. The brain naturally restructures to fit our environment and socialization, and algorithms are designed to specifically exploit that. Your existence is physiologically connected to things which are fake, those things are your only connection to what the world should be. Your mind is naturally rewiring itself to fit your environment and socialization. But your environment is mediated by industrialization and your socialization too.

The Role of Modern History
The political climate of 2015 in particular marks a shift in culture to completely avoid earnestness and to satirize and parody everything and to always communicate with increasing layers of irony and to move away from existing authentically in any capacity, so that by not taking anything seriously or existing as if your personality is real you no longer have any vulnerability to criticism or arguments or bullying from culture at large. This is reinforced by the fact that post-2015 the internet is literally unavoidable in everyday life (and especially after 2020). And on the internet all socialization is exposed to the entirety of culture and everyone in the public at large, nonstop with total uncertainty of who will see what you say (which means unlimited vulnerability), and it is almost impossible to socialize or meet new people by only communicating directly and avoiding all broader culture, so the desire to never be who you actually are is even greater, to a point where people adopt so many layers of irony from cultural exposure that they may not even be able to go back to being a real person in the real world again.

(The “rules of the internet” list, which was first written in 2006, was originally meant as a joking commentary on the internet, which was extremely new to people at the time. The observations seemed kind of obvious but were not understood or seen as important. Rule number one was don’t talk about /b/, rule number two was DON'T talk about /b/. And then, ten years later, the 2016 election happened, people talked about /b/ on a national scale, and now look what the consequences were in the landscape of social media. The real and digital world collided, and then both were ruined. On the one side real life was no longer real, and on the other there was nothing left to post about, there was no origin for content, there was no dream. Political unrest reached never before seen levels of nastiness, there was cultural stagnation, cultural decay, more people became trapped online as part of their daily life, for many of these new users, getting trapped online began with following the news coverage of/on the internet, in massive part as a result of 4chan's influence specifically. Many of the other serious rules turned out to be not only accurate, but much more important and omnipresent and often subliminal than people could have fully understood at the time.) As for 2020, it shouldn't even need saying how massive the migration was. This migration into the digital world has had irreversible psychological consequences for billions of people, and further indebted humanity to the powers of the algorithm. Anyone who was not already tethered to the internet and industrial society when the mainstream media followed the political battlegrounds onto the internet sphere in 2015 and 2016 was forced online anyway.

The Breakdown of Speech, and America’s Role in the Death of Humanity
I think it's far past possible for an AI to pass the Turing test, less because of the advancement in AI, but more because people are increasingly talking like machines. I don't mean that in the sense that people are incapable of feeling emotions, but that emotions are being algorithmically trained. For example, how often do you talk to someone (in-person) and realize they sound like they're talking on twitter? or how often do they sound like they're trying to replicate the prose of a youtube video essay? How often is it tiktok? or any other blend of social media? (It's not just the way they talk, the way they think is affected. People are thinking of the world in terms of posts.) More importantly, how often does someone actually sound like they're not being influenced at all, but are simply talking like they're human? People naturally have a subconscious drive to strengthen neural pathways that give the most social feedback when you're socializing with someone. In the internet age socialization becomes much more open ended by default, as your brain seeks social feedback, you subconsciously find a link between algorithmic patterns of speech (that the internet rewards with attention) and getting that social feedback. When the internet becomes inserted into every single part of life, all socialization is mediated by something mechanical. This goes back to a lot of different cultural problems which are older than the internet There should be a word that's like "terminally online" but for being terminally American, really the two kinds of people are seen in a very similar way by outsiders (who are correct) How often do you talk to someone who sounds like they're subconsciously emulating character in a movie, a show, a game? Or at least someone who cannot separate fiction from the way they talk about the world? even in politics? How often do you talk to someone who sounds like they're using the same fake personality they use in a job interview? How often does someone sound like they're an actor in a commercial?Someone who talks like they are making bullet points of an article they read? It's usually extremely subtle, but it's almost always there to some extent. Do people have fictional personalities without realizing it?

If you're american and you still don't understand what someone means by saying you will never understand culture, or life, or if you can't understand why someone would say work ethic or economic growth could be bad, then just imagine how you feel about California. How do you feel about Silicon Valley? How do you feel about Hollywood? That's how the world feels about you, and the world is correct. Really to a certain extent, it's no coincidence, the progenitor of internet problems is Silicon Valley, the progenitor of the mainstream cultural death is Hollywood and the influence of Los Angeles in general. All of this is in fact defining American culture. I could keep going way back in history, I could talk about the protestant reformation or something,but I don't want it to seem like I'm saying America is the only country capable of cultural problems, it just seems like the most important thing to mention for what I'm talking about here. The destruction of culture follows a common thread in history.

Consequences, not Only of the Internet but of a Post-Industrial Society
As for the specifics of what damage has been caused, by feeling the need to have a personality which is hyper agreeable down to its foundation, you give up having anything interesting to say, and make up with it using edginess. If you don't have any personality or identity hidden then you've made your entire personality surface level. In an attempt to avoid conflict. Edginess and layers of irony not only make up for your lack of interesting personality, but they also shield you from any remaining vulnerability. By not having any inner personality you have absolutely no intimate information or conversation to offer. You have nothing to share as you grow close to someone. Perhaps then by definition- you are not close to anyone- you have nothing to make you close because you are nothing but your surface level.

We also view profound and existential experience as a commodity to such an extent that it resembles fiction, or is completely limited to fiction where it is expressed. We finish a profound book, or a profound movie, or experience profound art in any form, and then we "return to the real world". This absolutely suffocates the human experience and society as whole, and completely kills any real culture. When we think of "returning to the real world" we intentionally imagine the exact opposite of what is profound and existential, we imagine a desultory and commodified modern world as being the "real" world, as even more real than thousands of years of human history and art. And the effect of this has reshaped our psyche so much that even in the presence of true greatness, in the face of something truly profound and existential, we can only bring it down to the level of fiction, of imitation and art, rather than bring our sense of art up, to match reality and allow great art to heighten our experience of the real world.

II. Cultural Entropy
I believe there exists some kind of "cultural entropy", which is opposed to "cultural will to power" in the same way that there exists entropy and will on a physical level in every single aspect of the universe, it exists in the human mind like energy and particles dispersing evenly (chaos) individual people are always exerting individual will, if you think of schopenhauer's books, you know how existing inherently means a constant drive to somehow exert/perpetuate one's existence (called the "will"), even if it's indirectly (+nietzsche writes a lot about how people exert their will through cultural influence, the genealogy of morals etc) Schoppenhauer also writes about how the concept of being individual means that every person, and even every form of life, has a separate will. This separation inevitably creates conflicting interests, as all life wants to exert existence and not all life can coexist (ex; prey wants to live but a predator must also eat the prey to fulfill its will to live) so there's always a struggle in nature.

(this applies to human interactions as well, regardless of how much we may want to care about other people, our individuality means there will be struggles with coexistence to overcome, imagine the example of romeo and juliet, this principle applies to literally everyone in existence at the same time.+If you've watched neon genesis evangelion you might think of the last scene with Kaworu, the show is full of Schopenhauerian themes.)

On a cultural level, people also exist with a neverending instinct to distinguish their own identity. having stronger identity and/or cultural influence makes us feel like we exist more, which satisfies the instinctual will to perpetuate our life
(think of how often a very dedicated artist or scientist will describe a project they care about as being "like a child" to them)

In the will to exert our own existence we require more than to just agree with a bunch of people, we need to create something (different) in order to differentiate "us", even if we're just finding new ways to fit together the same old pieces of culture. But the result is that there can become trends of entropy in culture, every aspect of culture is split up, altered, distorted, and worn down in every possible way until it loses all its energy. Culture is a collection of shared personality, but personality is inherently individual. And in pursuit of existence as individuals, personality is opposed to being shared, therefore...cultural entropy

No culture or artifact of culture or subculture ever actually gets better over time. Absolutely everything in the world is in a constant process of getting worse, what appears to be a culture getting better is actually the introduction of truly new artifacts of culture, new genes are introduced into the populace of the collective consciousness. A small degree of (good) development upon an origin, if any, is actually part of the creation of the original good (i.e the origin is still in the process of being created), and the reality is that further development simply represents an extension of the host artifact, which is not complete yet. Once the host artifact of culture is complete, it only ages. The development of a cultural origin may be better described as *discovering* it's innate good qualities which were not initially known, as opposed to creating them.*

*for those looking to be optimistic, I think it's possible that the good qualities of a thing are not as finite as they seem, as new cultural contexts are created by *other* new cultural origins, and within these new contexts there may be further development to discover in the old cultural origins

It's just like how people always get older, nobody ever gets younger, instead they are just replaced with new people. (After a certain age, development of the origin is complete, and from that point the desired quality comes not from continued growth but from stability.**) In the same sense culture follows entropy. The quality of goodness only comes from cultural youth. A culture only appears to become better though continuous origination.

**although... Just like culture, the value of life and meaning of existence even as we grow beyond some imagined ideal, beyond our simple origination and progenation, our basic childhood development, is the continuous discovery of the self, something ultimately indistinguishable from the *creation* of the self.

People socially and materially invest in the kind of person they are, without even realizing it, until eventually being a different person isn't even a choice, or at least an extremely hard conscious choice. Try to imagine what would be left of your human identity if there were no more algorithms or industrial facades mediating your interaction with the world around you, there would be almost nothing left, for that reason people essentially choose to lose freedom. you stay inside a mental prison you create for yourself because you are incapable of wanting or even imagining that there exists an "outside" to this prison. You become afraid to lose the part of yourself that *IS* the prison.

Unable to realize or unwilling to admit that all our lives have been rebuilt to rely on something which has withered so grotesquely, we sit back as it is kept in this suspended state of rot, rather than destroyed and regrown like everything else in the course of nature and history. Like some cancerous growth on society, we are subconsciously afraid to destroy it because it is now so inseparably part of ourselves.

The Old Web and the New Web
The internet is not inherently bad as a concept, and truly it wasn’t always bad. The switch from chat rooms and webpages to social media represents the beginning of the fall. Almost everything that is wrong with web 2.0 was encouraged further by economic and political opportunity for exploitation. What has been created is perfectly adapted to the destruction of the human mind.

Chatrooms
In the age of chat rooms it used to be that you talked to one person, or a few people. But now we talk to literally everyone. The design of the new web has allowed for us to have the unlimited vulnerability of talking to everyone in the world at once, combined with the knowledge and insecurity that we are competing for attention with everyone in the world at once. We are simultaneously afraid of being seen by everyone and being seen by no one, and as we subconsciously adjust to this social landscape, our human identity and personality changes. Without even noticing, your way of thinking has changed, your capacity for depth of personality atrophies and is erased, your humanity is being destroyed from both sides. It’s a perfectly designed void of social energy and life, and it’s also a requirement to fit into almost any real life social circle as someone growing up in the modern world.

Webpages
If you had a more permanent internet presence it would be centered on a webpage, you would customize everything, and the features of the page would be anchored in place as where you added them. Your webpage was a library, a museum of the self. Everything you put out into the web was your own act of expression, of creation, even to borrow or take inspiration from someone else at least meant showing real admiration of what they created. But the switch to web 2.0 brought many changes, almost none of which were good. Rather than a creative act, web 2.0 was an act of consumption. Personal webpages became replaced with accounts on a larger site. Searching was replaced with being fed a nonstop stream of content. Personal creation replaced collecting what was made by others, reblogging, retweeting, cross posting, sharing, hoarding these fragments of personality to make yourself appear as a whole person. The joy of reading individual messages replaced by lifeless numbers of views and likes.

Userbase
The change is not only in how the internet is designed but also how it's used by individuals. People were extremely anonymous by default. There was no need to create an account for some sites, or at least no need to make an account page where people can see you, and even if you had your own page which mentioned things about yourself, people almost always stayed anonymous by choice (and therefore people often felt more free to talk). The absolute number one rule of the internet for YEARS was to never reveal any personal information, advice which people took very seriously. Often, people would go to extremes that seem silly by modern standards, like being afraid to post any photos at all for fear that someone could find your location.

Lost Art of Surfing the Web
The thing that made the internet worth experiencing in the beginning was that it was dreamlike, and a collective (un)consciousness, it was meant to be a sort of wandering experience detached from reality. But to make the internet inseparable from every part of life is like turning a dream into a permanent catatonic state which you can literally never wake from, destroying the experience of waking life, while also ruining the option of dreamlike detached escapism. To then industrialize the internet is to mechanize that catatonic collective consciousness (to industrialize humanity itself/ to industrialize the way culture operates, and by extension how individuals psychologically operate.

The Internet Bleeds Into Real Life
If you think the problem is becoming addicted to attention, or using the internet too much as a place to socialize, then it's important to remember the social and psychological dangers of replacing creation with consumption, and to remember that distancing yourself from the internet doesn't actually get rid of the problems in society at large. Even if you only use the internet to look at content created by other people, and you want to befriend someone in real life who is the same way, you are still competing for their attention and their interest against the entirety of the internet, against their entire online sphere of personalities which are algorithmically marketed to them. And you still have to account for extreme levels of undue social vulnerability caused by the internet changing the standards of socialization (new negative connotations are invented as a result of the internet, subjects or ways of talking that have lost appeal, are discarded after being used as trends or are simply cringe). As a standard in society, people increasingly (already almost always) expect to talk to someone else who also uses the internet, so the cultural breakdown of socialization on the internet translates into real life, regardless of if you try to personally outgrow the effects of the internet.

I truly believe that second-hand social media usage is a real concept in the same way second-hand smoking is. It doesn't matter if you personally make healthier choices, you're still being harmed within the atmosphere of the collective consciousness. Although I would argue it's a danger to humanity thousands of times greater. The danger is not simply a disease within the body. The danger is within your entire experience of the world. within your fundamental human identity. The danger is within your politics, your media, your art, your literature, all of culture and the future. The danger is within philosophy and the suffocation of every greatest emotion imaginable. It's a cognitohazard to not only the fabric of the individual, not even society, but of reality itself as a human species.

Insulation, Ignorance, Illusion, Safety
One argument in favor of the new algorithmic power is that it can fight against the most poisonous and shocking content on the internet. However, when social media companies train the algorithm and give it more control over the entire internet, they’ve not really gotten rid of anything. It’s just that the average internet user is trained to feel used to the very small space on the internet granted to them by an algorithm highly specialized in showing content to do exactly that, which is still extremely mentally harmful, and even worse than gore in some ways because it is designed by companies to be addictive, rather than repulsive. And because of discomfort with ever taking their attention away from their own small corner, people are “safe” from seeing bad things on the internet. This algorithmic insulation applies to literally all content, not just things like gore. As a consequence of this, people can nurture very unusual perceptions of people and of experiences that are irreconcilable with the real world to the point they seek to feel “safe” within this boundary even in real life.
As a quick note, I want to mention that algorithms are capable of making absolutely all content harmful, and that's essentially what they've trained themselves to do. Seeing something bad on the internet means getting psychological damage because it’s bad, whereas seeing something good on the internet means psychological damage because it’s not real. Trying to say things that make sense to stupid people slowly makes you stupider over time. Same thing with appealing to other people’s bad attention spans or appealing to people who have irrational emotions. It affects the way you think, this definitely is the case with every social media.

If you make something your whole personality that’s because it faced resistance or persecution. And what you’re actually doing is creating a mental prison by trapping yourself further within the space you’ve been condemned to and isolating yourself within your smaller range of personality and lived human experience. (This is a point that I believe fall in line a lot with Nietzsche and even Jung’s analysis) On the new web, it's a given to completely invest your personality into the insulated world marketed to you, especially as people are increasingly incapable of living outside the internet, and will face more social resistance. The act of using the internet itself becomes a personality trait, which leads to further dependence on the internet.

The internet is worse now, but like most things in history, the actual thing that went wrong, that quality that makes it bad, is the hardest thing to explain. And just like with complex historical problems, that’s probably why nobody stopped it. We first solve the problems that are easy to explain, the problems that are easy to understand. We pinpoint the clear and surface level problems, and usually just hope that they can explain the other more complicated problems. We hope that solving all our clear, simple problems solves everything. But we leave behind the far more vast and intangible problems, we may even ignore them because we think they’re being solved, we have to believe they’re being solved because we wouldn’t know what to do otherwise. It’s cultural entropy. Everything gets exponentially more complex and messy. We are left with a world full of only the problems that were not solved by all the generations before us. Often, there doesn't even exist a vocabulary or collectively understood idea for what the most complex and vast of our problems even are. I don't think we have the proper vocabulary to even describe what makes the internet so bad, just like how people of the early industrial revolution didn't really have a vocabulary that could encompass the endless types of complex environmental, psychological, cultural, and political issues that had appeared.

a very rough, third manifesto; my broader view of philosophy, the historical and mythological
5/8
It’s obvious that history isn’t a story about how good always wins. Out of all the wars fought in history, out of all the ideologies and cultures, there was something better, out of all those seemingly horrific enemies, someone was right. Likely many were. At some point there was a fight for the fate of everything, not just a fight but an age of fighting, a conflict of a generation, and it looked the same as every other time in history that people were so self-centered as to think they were fighting the most important fight, that they were on the brink of history's end, but this time it was true. A last chance to save the world before all hope was gone. And that battle was lost.
something archaic, something barbaric or something foreign. Something we can only see as pseudoscience or myth. Something fanatical or zealous from our perspective. Something we can no longer see as sane, was right. Something good was lost forever. Perhaps a thousand times over in history, good did not prevail.
We live in a world that is the culmination of a long history where good does not always win, and doesn’t even win most of the time. We live in a world where much that is lost is lost forever. To these lost worlds people called home, this moment now is the real post-apocalypse, it is their real dystopia.
5/4
I’m increasingly taking the importance of ancient texts more seriously. It’s really surprising how so much was realized from the beginning and then lost to the complexity of history and the entropy of cultures. What Schopenhauer and Nietzsche wrote in their philosophies was already contained across ancient text and systems of belief, only written with a much more poetic, metaphorical, or spiritual tone, which is easy to misinterpret over time. Much of Ancient Greek philosophy, Gnosticism, hermeticism, the Veda scriptures (other than just their record of symbolic rituals), Jainism/ the original Buddhism (before it accumulated it’s more superstitious and pseudoscientific aspects), the same aspects of meaning are to be found to some extent in the original birth of Abrahamic religion, and many other ancient texts I probably don’t even know about. Intuitively it seems that the progression of culture and of society means that these recent philosophers represent growing millennia of advancement and discovery and factual confirmation, but what is to be found is essentially the uncovering of the universal truths which, on account of their nature, are discovered far before they can be truly understood, and as such (being the earliest in an overwhelming lineage of writings) their knowledge disappears into history.
A sort of small scale funny example I noticed was how the “rules of the internet” which was first written in 2006, was originally meant as a joking commentary on the internet, which was extremely new to people at the time. The observations seemed kind of obvious but were not understood or seen as important. Rule number one was don’t talk about /b/, rule number two was DON'T talk about /b/. And then, ten years later, the 2016 election happened, people talked about /b/ on a national scale, and look what the consequences were in the landscape of social media. The real and digital world collided, and then both were ruined. On the one side real life was no longer real, and on the other there was nothing left to post about, there was no origin for content, there was no dream. Political unrest reached never before seen levels of nastiness, there was cultural stagnation, cultural decay, more people became trapped online as part of their daily life, for many of these new users, getting trapped online began with following the news coverage of/on the internet, in massive part as a result of 4chan's influence specifically. Many of the other serious rules turned out to be not only accurate, but much more important and omnipresent and often subliminal than people could have fully understood at the time.
>5/13 addition.
I think many ancient religions and philosophies fall victim to myth, poetic license and metaphor, where as a result they are taken and misunderstood and mutated. people, unable to understand what is being said, will attribute genius observations of the forces that exist in the world, and assign a magical understanding to them, because they assume that there is more to what is described than what they perceive in the literal world, how can the confusing texts describe what happens in the literal world if they fail to see any of it? They rationalize how nonsensical philosophy can be by replacing it with the simpler but more mystical. They cannot understand that these concepts do not describe the literal way of the world in itself, rather than an imaginary hidden spiritual or magical force which is behind and controlling of the world. These magical and spiritual elements are not fictional in origin, they are real but misrepresented and misunderstood until the point where an entire fictional cannon arises. In the most ancient of knowledge there is a literal observation of the world. The magical and spiritual are not beyond or outside of anything, they are the thing itself, it's nature. It is not to be discredited but understood in what it was originally meant to explain.
>6/2 addition.
"Every high civilization decays by forgetting obvious things." — G.K. Chesterton
5/17
Myth should be the childhood of philosophy. When myths that reflect a deeper reality make up our calling to the past, we are driven to our philosophies, they have an important spiritual and cultural meaning ascribed to them, which allows philosophy to serve us as we live, in the form of our emotions.
When myth is not the childhood of philosophy, it becomes the endpoint we strive to in a search for values and culture and spiritual meaning. We will journey no further than the beginning, the moment of wonder. When we go no further we find no more answers, the mythos seems great enough to dictate everything, we feel too impressed by the novelty of spiritual feeling to care that it lacks clear meaning and truths, too impressed to even think that there should be truth in something so mysterious. It’s only the shadow of philosophy, which is not to say it’s false; it’s the intuitive and emotional heart of monumental truths which we will spend our lives trying to fully understand. We simply cannot begin to digest the entirety of truth without illuminating it with wonder.
Without any mythos we never feel this striving to begin with.
The myth is not to be outgrown but to be harkened back to, to inspire wonder. When we remember our past, our roots, our primal development of human emotion, the inspiration is waiting for us.
The childhood remains inside the individual, as a potential for something we might describe as spirituality.
myth is not to replace reality, we are to realize that reality has been mythical all along.
i think i had seen a quote by someone about how we think ancient people told literal stories which we are now smart enough to read symbolically, when in reality they wrote symbolism which we are ignorant enough to try to read literally
>of course ancient cultures always succumbed quickly to fantasy and its even true that the fantasy eventually became a *greater* portion of all their generations' lived experiences(and ultimately a greater portion of the culture's legacy) than the symbolism, but the same can be said of all that is modern.
Now that you know, watch for yourself in real time as every new thing in our world does the same. All becomes fantasy and simulacrum of itself until that's all that's left of its legacy. The fantasy becomes the legacy, the mythical reality does not.
I am also reminded of Ernst Junger's quote “Myth is not prehistory; it is timeless reality, which repeats itself in history.”