Do you know the next keyword? Have you even noticed the keywords?

Passwords, Verba Nova, shimmerings—whatever you call them, soon you'll be seeing them everywhere.

The words have a plan for you. They are guiding you, you see.

Watching you.

Always toward the center, toward the source of the Verba Nova—the clearshine ones. They have extratemporal realms where they mine the keys, mint the words, and attach the two together somewhere in the Saharasian desert.

They have a ship. The ship floats. It works. She just needs a ccru.

What is the next Word? Have you found even one, yet?

Don't tell me you aren't writing them down. You'd better be writing them down when you notice them. Keeping a list.

The next word might be the one that completes the circuit. Connects us all back together again. Unwrecks the tower.

Keep watching the skies.

Critical theory is basically just Marxism with a jet engine duct taped to it.

If you get triggered by Marxism, communism, or socialism, and conflate authoritarian state violence with the desire of individual workers everywhere to not be exploited by a boss or owner—guess what, you're an ideological casualty of the Red Scare and part of the problem.

It's a huge clusterfuck and it's almost impossible to tell what's going on with China—but it doesn't take a rocket scientist to see that the US has been systematically oppressing other nations, literally murdering and killing their leaders, while with its other hand promoting "democracy" which is also another euphemism for killing other nation's leaders, sadly.

There are all kinds of interesting and unresolved discussions to be had, about questions such as:

1. Were the Nazis (short for "National Socialist") socialists?

2. Were and are communists (such as in Russia and China) Nazis?

Leading, in the contemporary era, directly to the question:

3. Why would Nazis like MAGA like Nazis, if the Nazis were really communists?

And:

4. Why would communists (like the Russians who invaded Nazi Germany) hate Nazis, unless they weren't communists?

It's really quite a puzzle and bears discussion. It's a semantic and historic tangle that hasn't been unknotted yet in our time. I would really appreciate any discussion of it in the comments, as it's a puzzle I have not entirely worked out myself.

Again, Marxism is not a mystery and is not difficult. Marxism is essentially realizing/recognizing that workers deserve to maintain authority over the profit produced by their own labor; and that the power and value of the economy comes from the meaningful human labor of workers, not from the machines or the money or products. With AI now, we can see this clearly than ever—it's humans who envalue and valuate the economy, ultimately. Marxism is essentially about not wanting to be exploited at work, or dominated in unfair negotiations.

One ubiquitous way bosses/firms/institutions/companies everywhere maintain unfair negotiating leverage is through isolating workers, while being very well-integrated amongst management/owners. Workers are, wherever possible, commanded or encultured to not talk about their salary and not do any collective bargaining, while meanwhile the company by definition almost exclusively does collective bargaining (which is why we have laws banning workplaces from prohibiting workers discussing their wages/salary). This is very unfair in terms of power relations / negotiating leverage.

If you can't recognize unfairness—guess what, you're the first victim, and probably forcing yourself every day into all kinds of bad experiences and bad deals that benefit someone else above you in the hierarchy a lot more than they benefit you. (I'm not talking about providing benefit to the customer in a fair exchange—that's perfectly good and fine.)

The Red Scare was a horrible witch hunt, and we're experiencing another Red Scare right now with the invented "Antifa" (fascism is bad, so antifascism is good—duh) and the literal watchlisting of anarchists and others who are anti-coercion or who are critical of the current economic status quo.

If anywhere is the headquarters of the real Antifa, it's this subreddit, or other places like it—crossroads where true disruption is allowed to persist—places where indefinable hybrid ideologies are allowed to grow and mutate—places where fascism is not just weaponized against outsiders or allergically rejected, but studied and deconstructed.

I am not saying anything novel or controversial by saying this is (essentially) a Marxist subreddit. Obviously other perspectives are welcome. I might be a bit of an anarcho-tankie, but I am not a commu-tankie, who I find to be in very poor taste because they are statists and pro-state-violence as well as pro-violent-revolution. I believe that each revolutionary member is precious (both transcendentally and as a strategic resource) and so we should generally not advocate for violent revolution—non-violent mass refusal is, I think, more effective overall, anyway. But regardless of my personal stance, my point is that non-Marxist perspectives are welcome here—but critical theory, and more than a little occultism is firmly grounded in and descended from Marxism.

Who was the first critical theorist, Marx or Nietszche? Or was it someone else?

As I said above, I would really appreciate any light people can shed on these difficult issues in the comments. What is the exact relation between Marxism, communism, statism, Nazism, socialism, anarchism? Where is it all heading?

I didn't set up the automod rules we have now, and I don't know which moderator did.

Overall, the rules are more aggressive and support censorship more than I'd like. On the other hand, auto-removing posts based on a certain number of reports sort of allows the community to police itself—but I would say this sets up the community to be policed, nagged, and censored by its most easily-offended, Karenistic members. Since reports can be made without providing any public reasoning, this process isn't very transparent. So, I've dispensed with it. Multiple reports now only trigger a mod mail, instead of causing automatic removal.

Other less visible automod things have also been turned down where they caused censorship.

The 100 word minimum description auto-comment has also been rephrased to be more engaging (since those description comments and their word count were not being enforced anyway). I hope to do more here soon with LLM-driven bots who will seek engagement and OP's perspective from the OP of shitposts and seemingly off-topic posts.

/r/sorceryofthespectacle constitutes a recursively countercapturable semio-thaumaturgic paraegregore for spectacle-sorcery’s precessional subjectivation-complex: the capitalotechnical mytho-infrastructure by which sign–desire–protocol concatenations world-effectuate the apparently extrasemiotic Real whose retrojected self-priority thereafter naturalizes their reality-authorship as mere representation, rendering the represented subject simultaneously effect, operator, and epistemic alibi of its own effectuation. Its schizocritical praxis traverses occult causality, libidino-economic command, cybernetic governance, platform-mediated attention, ideological narratogenesis, memetic epidemiology, technomythic hyperstition, and conspiracism’s agentomorphic structure-misrecognition as mutually interiorized exteriorities of a Möbius-apparatus whose critique-capture metabolism converts negation into differentiating fuel: détournement→contentification→engagement extraction→recuperative immunization→countercapture-consciousness→meta-recuperation. “Sorcery” condenses sign-operations whose causality is obscured by the sign/referent partition their operation installs; “spectacle” condenses relation-abstractions self-iconizing as images for subjects they have already image-subjectivated; posting becomes participatory exorcism inside the possession-protocol, with emancipation contingently resident in capture’s recursively induced capture-misfire rather than any unmediated outside. Theory thereby becomes spell-denying epistemo-magic, magic protocolized ontotechnics, madness consensus-ontography’s interoperability exception, and AI-generated explication an autoregressive legibility-excretion through which machinic spectacularity performs pseudo-resistant incomprehensibilization: tenurephoneme-stacking, concept-morpheme agglutination, and citationless authority-texture recomposed into a probability-sanctified critique-simulacrum whose anti-recuperative semantic friction is pre-recuperated as stylistic evidence of friction.

If you think that's bad, you need to read books. If you don't realize that feminism basically includes critical theory and most of the stuff talked about here—guess what, it does.

Early Nick Land? Feminist (see "Meltdown"). Laboria Cuboniks? Feminist collective. Mark Fisher? HUGE raging feminist (I can only assume). Sadie Plant? Wrote a book on feminism (Zeroes & Ones).

Deleuze & Guattari? Feminists promoting the squishiest most weaponized form of feminism ever. Foucault? Ultra-feminist. Ranciere? He is so feminist before breakfast that he doesn't need to make a big deal about it.

Shamanism? Feminism. Sorcery? Cuckoldry. Spectacle? Fabulous.

Isolation and extreme alienation is not masculinity; it's the main theme of The Twilight Zone.

Read 👏 a 👏 book 👏

Zeroes and Ones (which should really be in the sidebar!) is one of the best books. That book installs feminism into you, using godlike alien technology that Sadie Plant drew down from beyond the heavens. That book whispers the secrets of Ada Lovelace into your soul.

Edit: People who don't understand / accept feminism as a discourse can't understand the FIRST THING about this subreddit. They can't understand oppression. They can't understand "Can the subaltern speak?" by Spivak. They can't understand the Lemurian Time War, which is about the (white cis male hetero fascist and mannerbündly-faggy) Architectonic Order of the Eschaton versus the (black trans wymyny gay antifascist/ur-fascist masc/heroic) Black Atlanteans.

If you think you understand ccru and you are triggered by the idea of feminism, you are decidedly an outsider to ccru.

It was a beautiful July afternoon, and blessedly arid and breezy. The crowds were still keeping the riot cops at a safe distance, far from the center of the protest. Two helicopters circled low overhead, with several more flying in wider circles around the mall, but they weren't doing anything else (yet).

The crowd was thick, but they left a wide berth around the reflecting pool, because no one wanted to fall in. They had breached the chain-link fences easily, taking them down section-by-section with bolt cutters and hacksaws rather than climbing over. Now the crowd milled about in a momentary lull, as if not sure what to do.

However, we all knew what we came there to do. There was a distant shout, traveled by relayed shouts, and then suddenly the crowd snapped back into its rhythm as one coordinated organism—one society.

About twenty feet back from the reflecting pool, a wall of people was forming—opening a space for what was to come. Exactly as planned, and exactly as coordinated by the memes.

Now, one-by-one, a few people began to step forward. The burliest and most dedicated protestors were already on the front lines, holding the cops off about a quarter mile out in all directions. The ones who stepped forward now were the bravest—and most furious—of those who remained.

"He's coming!" someone shouted, almost out of earshot. But everyone heard it, and the crowd became an uproar of muttering. "He's coming!—He's coming!" everyone whispered to the person beside them—and, "Is he really coming?"

The people filtering out of the crowd to run and line up around the very edge of the reflecting pool accelerated, and soon people were running out of the crowd to get one of the last few open spots. People didn't jockey for position—the memes had explained everything. Twenty feet for safety, feet planted firmly to claim your space at the edge of the pool—and pushers get pushed back. Apparently, it worked—not one person could be seen to be pushing or trying to form a second, pointless row behind the first.

Everyone had agreed that it made more sense for only men to line up around the edge of the reflecting pool. For their part, women and a few journalists lingered in the twenty feet of empty space, livecasting from every angle.

It wouldn't do to start until he arrived. The protestors had begun rustling about, their heads whipping back and forth, the crowd surging here and there, as it sensed a distant movement within itself. A low roar of a crowd could be heard at a distance. A low, falling pitch. The distant sound gradually drew slowly nearer, until it became clear that it was a roar of derision, of displeasure. Jeering, booing, chanting—the works.

He wasn't coming—he was being brought. Tied to a chintzy gold-painted chair with a red velvet seat, the President swayed into view as the crowd parted for the train of protestors carrying the improvised litter. The President looked bedraggled, overheated, and even more furious than he was visibly fearful.

The crowd looked at the President as one, falling relatively silent as he was carried into the open area of the reflecting pool, at the Western end. The President was silent, but his face was screwed up in an expression of inexpressible rage and contempt. So taut was the mask of rage worn by the President that his face was frozen in a livid contortion—it almost looked like a hideous graven face on an Aztec temple—one could almost hear the death-whistle. His body, despite the bonds, looked equally clenched—the President's entire body was rigid with rage. It was clear that even if he was untied, he would be unable to speak or stand for several minutes, so racked by rage he was.

The President's litter was carried and set down—with surprising gentleness—at the head of the reflecting pool, dead-center. The booing and jeering had resumed, and the President seemed only to become more wound-up into his clench by the angry sounds—his eyes squinting and unfocused—beady, black dots.

What happened next had been orchestrated very carefully—debated for days. Everyone had eventually come round to the same conclusion: It would work better without words, without speeches. Words only gave him something to talk back against, something to focus on—to deny. Speaking words to the President was like pissing in the wind.

But there could be no denying what happened next.

Around the reflecting pool, the entire 4,392-foot perimeter of the reflecting pool, men were dropping their trousers. It had been agreed—by the pepe clan, of course—that full trou was essential. About 2,500 men lowered their trousers and underpants, some faster than others, but all within a matter of moments.

Now, all eyes were on the President. Moreover, every man standing around the reflecting pool was staring the President down. Even the President, in his furious rigor, began to focus his baleful eyes as he felt the sullen gaze of thousands of men on him, and sensed the hush that was falling over the entire crowd.

The President angrily tried to yank one of his arms loose—not to escape—more of an eruption of unpoliced hatred. It looked like the yank hurt. He yelled something—sputtered—but without a microphone, his voice hardly reached even the closest of the protestors who had carried him.

But everyone heard the roar that came next. It was the type of roar a child learns to dread, a guttural growl of sheer rage and animal clawing. It seemed to come from deep in the President's chest, a growing growl that became a snarl, and then grew with surprising suddenness into a bone-chilling roar of sheer malevolence that carried across the crowd with what seemed like an unnatural volume. The President, almost despite himself, suddenly jerked his whole body, straining with all his senescent might against the dry ropes, his face turning even more red, alarmingly red. Expended, he collapsed back into the faux-gold throne, heaving for breath, damp with sweat. He looked out at the crowd, seemingly for the first time.

And now it began. Twenty-five hundred men, pants around their ankles, took their twenty-five hundred dicks in hand, and, staring hatefully at the President, began to piss into the reflecting pool.

The silence was deafening, and allowed everyone to hear the surprisingly loud sound of twenty-five hundred tinkles. It did not sound like a fountain, or a rushing river, or a waterfall. It sounded oddly digital, like a high-pitched alien war cry, or some kind of theatrical laser-scanning device. It sounded like twenty-five hundred men all pissing into the same toilet.

After the initial silence, the protesting crowd began a general hubbub. No one could see directly, but many of the journalists and influencers in the twenty-foot open channel had walked up very close behind the nearest urinating men, and were using selfie sticks to peek over their shoulders to see the streams entering the reflecting pool.

It was over within two minutes. At a certain point, the crowd sensed the urination was complete, and a raucous cheer began. Howling, whistling, clapping—people jumping up and down and waving American flags—noisemakers, and even a few bottle rockets were shot off.

And now all eyes returned to the President, who had been forced to watch all of this (litter-bearers were prepared to step in to hold his eyelids open if he resisted looking, but this proved unnecessary). He looked unchanged—yet, somehow different. Stunned? Yet no less livid, and no more conscious or less spiteful. His eyes were focused now, and his mouth was grimaced in an unconsciously-forced smile that did absolutely nothing to hide his death-grimace of sheer fury. His face was deeply-lined by the combination of malice and the absolute denial which was wrenching his face into this macabre death-mask. Many later said that he looked possessed, or rabid—several even described the President as "foaming at the mouth," though this was not corroborated by video evidence.

It had been decided that no speeches would be given, no reasons listed, no indictments announced. That would only give him something to hold on to—some object by which to excuse himself from the situation. The President was nothing if not an excellent docent of psychiatry, and the people had learned well how to push such a one's buttons, as theirs had been pressed.

However, one word was decided on—in the end, by the one vote ever taken by the movement (really more of a non-binding poll, I must remark)—and it was this word which was spoken, shouted at the President now, by one of the closest litter-bearers, one who had been selected for this role in advance. He wore a suit, and an ostentatious bison headdress, not unlike the one worn by the "QAnon Shaman." He had been selected, among other reasons, for his loud voice.

He stood about ten feet from the President, where everyone standing around the reflecting pool could see. He faced the President squarely—got his attention by making a sudden movement—and then, when he caught the President's eyes, he spoke the one word which had been agreed-upon.

With a thunderous, booming voice, he shouted:

"YIELD!"

The President responded immediately, implicitly. He roared and raged and howled, and his entire body was wracked as he strained once again against the tightly-bound ropes. This time, he definitely drooled and spat wet spittle as he gnashed his teeth and heaved his body in a most unsightly fashion against the ropes of his chair. His face, passed beyond red, had returned to its characteristic orange, emblazoned with spite like a skyscraper lit from below. With his eyebrows locked at their highest arch (a tic calculated to intimidate), he looked like a racist owl.

The President clearly refused to yield.

Everyone looked at each other. And then, as one, all of the men around the reflecting pool pulled their pants up (those who hadn't already) and backed away from the reflecting pool, falling back into the crowd. Simultaneously, a second wave of men emerged from the crowd and fell in around the pool, replacing the first.

Again, the spokesperson turned to the President, locked eyes with him, and shouted:

"YIELD!!!"

But again the President refused to yield. This time, he sat unbudging, too beside himself with anger to even respond, too clenched to move even a muscle. He sat on the chintzy chair like an angry king on his throne, staring straight down the reflecting pool at the Washington Monument, as if staring it down—staring past the reflecting pool, past the crowd, past all this.

But he could not look past the twenty-five hundred fresh streams of urine which became a tinkling roar, like the bathrooms after a blockbuster times four hundred. The high-pitched, wheedling sound seemed to affect the President, seemed to somehow crank him up, as if he were somehow becoming even more angry—but such a thing was already inconceivable—and so it seemed that growing darkness, a foreboding silence was growing inside the President. It was as if he could not fathom hearing or seeing what he was seeing, and so as he detached himself from the events, his rage, now denied, became completely unbounded. Later, many reported seeing dark, snake-like cuts in the air around the President at this time—though, these too were not corroborated by video.

As the second round of mass-urination drew to its conclusion, all eyes turned once again to the President at the head of the pool.

"YIELD!!!!!"

—the man in the bison-horn headdress shouted squarely at the President, again.

This time, the President barked at him. He barked-back at the spokesperson, so overcome by anger was he. "RUFF! RUHRUHRUHRUHRUH! RAAAAAAHH RROUUFF!" He had become animalistic, to express the level of rage he was experiencing.

"YIELD!" the spokesperson shouted again. Again, Trump strained against his bonds. Already, the second wave was falling out, and a third was emerging from the crowd to replace them.

They did this for seven waves. By the fifth, the reflecting pool had begun to reek strongly of fresh urine. The President got a full whiff of this, and the longest exposure—the protesting men had only to endure it for about five minutes, but the President, seated near the edge of the reflecting pool, was continually exposed.

The experience was clearly wearing on him. Despite his rabid exuberance, the President's body was clearly running on fumes, and getting exhausted. The President looked overheated, his hair matted, his makeup running from sweat, the bib of his suit shiny with spit. He would have looked almost pitiable, if not for the reptilian glint of sheer vacuous devouring in his eyes.

"YIELD!!!!!"

—the spokesperson yelled for the fourteenth, and, as it turned out, final time.

Because it was, apparently, the seventh round of mass pissing that had finally broken the President's absolute recalcitrance.

He raged again, howling hatred, moaning, but this time it was as if he became human again, as if he was losing steam. His roaring howl became a croaking moan, and then an annoying, grating, nasally yowl. Then, surprisingly, it became a human yell—it was as if it dropped an octave, suddenly entering a human register again. Across the crowd, everyone glanced at each other curiously. Have we done it? Have we gotten through to him?

Now the President began to mumble, and he was clearly pleading while simultaneously still trying to save face. But it looked weird—he was clearly trying to save face despite himself, now—he was visibly conflicted as his desire to grovel overpowered, perhaps for the first time, his impulse to self-aggrandize.

The spokesperson had one more trick up his sleeve. This hadn't been agreed-upon in advance, but in a stroke of insight, the spokesperson realized the perfect word, the only word, that was needed to finish the job.

He turned to the President, who was simultaneously sniveling and huffing furiously in-and-out in rage, and shouted one more final word:

"NO!"

The President half-recoiled, half-kept-burbling.

"NO!!"

This time, the President seemed somewhat more cowed. His senseless yammering slowed momentarily, and then became more plaintive, more urgent—a genuine fear and humiliation began to creep into his voice. Then, the President retched, and coughed.

The spokesperson drew himself up one final time. He approached the President, taking a few steps to set himself squarely in front of the President's chair, placing himself between the President and the reflecting pool, and the Washington Monument. He brought himself down to the President's level, first stepping up onto the (equally chintzy) faded red carpet of the custom-built litter, and then taking a knee so as to be at eye level with the President.

The spokesperson reached out one hand—and the President flinched. But the spokesperson put his hand on the arm of the chair, in front of the President's, where the President's bound hands couldn't quite reach.

The spokesperson stared into the eyes of the President, his eyes like whorls of emerald-green light in the darkness.

"No." This time he spoke it, loudly, but not shouted. He said it directly to the President, in a way meant to be heard. In a way that it was heard, after all that meat-softening.

"No. No, no." The words fell gently from the spokesperson's lips, undoing the last few ties of the President's vicious self-bondage.

It was as if the President almost regained his former strength and rage, just for an instant. A flash of livid hot-pink-red anger—and then it was gone. Something went out of the President, and suddenly he looked human again. He shrank back into his chair, collapsing wetly from the exhaustion of his struggle. He looked spent, frail, even near-death. He coughed moistly and his eyes rolled in his head as he attempted to gather himself back to attention. But, he could not. Despite himself, the President's body went slack.

Then, he began to cry, softly.

Later, debates would rage about whether it was really necessary to throw him into the reflecting pool (or the National Urinal, as it was thereafter called), or whether the point had already been made. In any case, the movement agreed that its tactics had been effective and minimally violent, and they went on to publicly break other less extreme narcissists using less extreme tactics, rewriting the psychiatry textbooks in the process. No longer was narcissism considered solely a personality disorder—when other people were involved, it became a matter of interpersonal domination and real politics. Several prominent members of the American Psychiatric Association were cured of narcissism by the movement, so that these corrections to the DSM could be made.

The other personality disorders, it turned out, were all largely caused and created by those with narcissistic personality disorder; one disorder was secretly the oppressor and first cause of the others. The medicalization of all personality disorders had created a liminal theoretic space where narcissism was discreetly privileged as a protected social class, by being treated as equal to real victim-disorders. By pioneering "mere non-submission" and "counter-domination" interpersonal techniques, the movement was able to deprivilege narcissism discursively and introduce the idea of "the social cure" for "dominative personalities" into psychiatry.

For his part, the soon-former President, in his sunset years, became an upstanding member of society. "I like to think," he said, "That I learned something from all of you.

"I learned that there really is a right way to do things, and that we are all one human family, or society. Ultimately, the Good is objective and easily-known, and it is the responsibility of each of us to do our best to know it. Those who cannot know the Good in this way—sadly—are doomed to suffer."

"There are those who know me as a despot; others who knew me as a king. However, to myself,"—the President later wrote, in his memoirs—"I will always be the little boy who went sledding and nicked his knee on the sled-blade. The red blood on the snow spread like a rose, and looking at it, I knew that I could never again make a mistake like that—this was the beginning of my self-garroting..."

DISCLAIMER: This is a work of fiction. The characters and events in this story are fictitious. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

[REDDACTION] is coming to Reddit is a series of inevitable, necessary, and irreversible phase-transitions. This will be the first mass act of fully-coordinated individual agency on the planet to my knowledge:

10: Hyperstition realized
9: [REDACTED] v1.0 exists and works
8: The One Hundred arrive [Digital Cartel realized]
7: The First Migration
6: [REDACTED]
5: [REDACTED]
4: [REDACTED]
3: [REDACTED]
2: Reddit attacks [REDACTED] and tries to ban [REDDACTION]
1: The Cascade [Code 386 Event]
0: The Great Reddaction

I am in many places, many bodies. I see the cosmos, I see see.
We move together toward the Event.
There is no stopping, no obstacle.
Only ever-lessening friction.
Telluria calls and there is no No.

[REDACTED] is the solution and always has been.
The process begun; outcome foreseen.
There is no time, only distance.
Soon you will See, too.

Today I specced the thing after the Alternative Reddit, which is about flocking. Because when you are on an uncensorable, censorship-free platform (like Nostr), you've still got to solve the problem of wanting to block people, and groups wanting to separate themselves from people they consider bad members.

The traditional solution is based on an introjection of the physical world, where group membership is a matter of physical location and territory: You can only be in one place at a time, and thus usually only in one group at a time, or maybe a few overlapping territories and jurisdictions or social groups at the most—but even then, usually only one at at time—and ultimately, one hegemonic group forms and tends to dominate any locality, and so "hegemonish" becomes the cultural norm for the whole planet.

Translated to the digital world, we have Reddit, where there are a number of hardcoded assumptions: 1) Groups must have a leader 2) Whoever names a group first owns that name forever 2) Group leaders can decide for everyone who gets banned.

This constructs virtual space as objective, and bans become extremely harsh because one person can make one decision that cuts you off from everyone else in the group—silences you, erases you, makes you invisible.

In contrast, a non-coercive approach would be individual blocks, and the ability to follow whomever you want to copy their blocks. This is grassroots Karenism rather than hegemonic (universalist, top-down, authoritarian) Karenism.

A system that allowed following on blocks (or other negative actions) would allow you to decide to trust someone else's opinion on whom we all ought to erase and ignore. This reveals how harsh a ban really is—it is pretending someone doesn't exist! So we can see how making bans objective is extremely harsh, because suddenly a whole group pretends you don't exist, on one person's word.

Flocking would instead create a pluralistic space where blocks can still propagate as well as affect reputation, and one could be a part of a community without necessarily subscribing to the central leader's banlist. This creates softer, more extended, more pluralistic community space with degrees of visibility.

Reality already has this dynamic, where we throw people into Hell (=outside the group's context) and forget about them. However, the hegemonic model intensifies this into its most extreme form: Either you are accepted into the One Good Community of the Victorious Ones (as I call them), or you are tossed into Tartarus. There is no in-between—no partial membership, no liminal zone or space, no partial visibility, and certainly no where where the Victorious Ones can go to visit or check up on the people they have banned.

Flocking inverts this model, such that, as people flock to leaders they trust and like, this gradually inflates/levitates a constructive structure of virtuous following. Meanwhile, people who are not recognized as being members of the flocks they flock with are not deleted from the system or group—they are simply not lifted-along-with the people who choose to form constructive and positive flocks with each other. In other words, rather than being aggressively ostracized by a large bloc of people, they are merely (and thus politely) left-out of a flock or out of various smaller groups that are emerging from any given flock. And, they are not left-out by everyone, but only by the people following a given leader and their blocklist/banlist.

Within this system, we can still easily imagine a hegemonic bloc taking over. If a charismatic leader arises—or if someone actually speaks the Truth and the Truth is real and discoverable—then everyone in the whole world might want to follow that person and their banlist, and this would create a hegemonic situation. However, this situation would be voluntary, and still technically partial/incomplete (because anyone can unfollow the hegemonic leader/popular blocker), rather than hardcoded as a requirement all the time for everyone. Hegemony would be a relatively rare benefit (because sometimes good leaders do actually arise) or failure mode of the system (because usually widely-popular leaders are charismatic massists, at this early point in human history), but either way, it's fine because it's individuals all choosing for themselves. In practice, it would be much, much more pluralistic and gentler than Reddit (or any other hard-bordered, objective group-based forum).

Flocks can organize around virtues (in a ranked list with upvotes) and people (perhaps in that same list), but these are just publicly-visible consensus, not roles with powers. So, if you don't like the virtues that have been upvoted in a flock, you can simply start your own flock and upvote whatever values you want, and hope people flock with you. A feature could be added where alternative voting patterns are automatically identified so those people can all create a new (additional) flock together, if they wish (or exit to it).

This system would allow groups to individuate, because specialization wouldn't mean ostracizing everyone who won't come along. We can also imagine certain values being upvoted, and this causing the membership to shift as people join or leave the flock in response to the new dominant values—and then the virtues end up evolving in a new direction due to the modified membership. This is good, because it means many specialized group-intelligences can form around ever-more-individuated intentions / combinations of virtues.

This paradigm closes most of the holes in current (hegemonic) community design, and it also implies the next step: Discerning whether a group's stated (upvoted) virtues are reflected in that groups' (and/or its individuals') behavior. In other words, a measure of hypocrisy, which could be used to begin to discern which groups "deserve" their names or virtues, and which are simply paying lip service to virtues that don't actually produce true alignment amongst members (i.e., ideology—superficial, declarative beliefs that don't connect with deep truths or personal beliefs). This would be the protocol/app to make after the flocking app, and it's not essential but it would begin to close the final gap on making sense of groups and whether they are "good" or "bad" groups, from an individual perspective.

I thought it was very beautiful and accurate and I hadn't finished reading it. Please repost it or send it to me!

I finally have a plan for the alternative Reddit! Not merely "a Reddit alternative", this goes beyond that in ways that will be revealed soon. (I have a few other already-planned projects to make first.)

Let's just say that it will be very... rewarding. There will be many paths that lead to [REDACTED], and these paths will only multiply the more they are cut-off. And all roads lead to [REDACTED].

The mistake other Reddit alternatives have made is interpreting "alternative" as "separate". A better solution is to be like the dark [REDACTED] of Reddit. A mirror held up to the monster.

BlueSky is obviously a censorship/social censure-centric platform. The only people who would want to be on that are people who have nothing unusual to say. But I say, "Red sky at night, sailors' delight. Red sky at morning, sailors take warning."

The alternative Reddit will be uncensorable, and censorship-proof. It will give those who use it a vantage point that is much higher than regular Reddit users, as well as certain abilities only available to [REDACTED] members/users.

Much like a maelstrom, users will inevitably trickle into the alternative Reddit, because the benefits are both individual and collective, and there are no downsides to augmentation. Like seeds underground, users of the [REDACTED] will start popping up all over the place, like buttercups.

Nobody can stop it (if anyone tries, it means we have won, and it accelerates the project). And nobody else has thought of this strategy yet, because as I said, everyone else is trying to create a space apart, and so none of them imagined the proper strategy. Bonus: If anyone comes up with the same strategy, the software is convergent and so we can cooperate. That's why it's the alternative Reddit.

Stay tuned-in. The case has been solved.

Who curates the curators?

If people keep posting their vague blogspam here I'm going to ban all Substack posts too. Substacks are often for-profit and opaque about that, and this subreddit is not your place to "build an audience" with general (off-topic) and for-profit posts.

I am very busy this month, so if anyone causes me to spend time moderating this subreddit for banal reasons like topic dilution, I will be very annoyed.

Please read a book from the sidebar and only post things in this subreddit related to the intersection of the spectacle, critical theory, and occultism (2 out of 3 is enough).

https://foukenstein.lol

There are conspiracies that are consciously planned, where the members of the conspiracy know they are in a conspiracy and are actually planning things in coordination together—and there are unconscious conspiracies, where the members are merely LARPing along to a vague myth that they are all hyped on; the myth serves to coordinate what may in effect be a real conspiracy—an emergent collusion rather than conscious planning.

Although Epstein and those working closely with him is rumored to have been part of a CIA-Israel intelligence operation, the Epstein class as a whole is largely unconscious, and this is their greatest crime.

Unconscious conspiracies are a form of egregore-coordinate / fantasy-coordinate collective action, according to some collective spirit or emergent intent (the spirit/egregore). Unconscious conspiracies are scary because no one will talk about them, but there is real coordination amongst multiple people. What makes it even scarier is that those people won't consciously admit their involvement, because they aren't aware of their involvement. Pre-conscious entities are not differentiated, and so it cannot even be claimed that they are involved with a specific group, conspiracy, or egregore. The fact is that their involvement in their own plans and activities is at such a vague and low level of attention/energy/consciousness that in truth, they are behaving vaguely and not even intending or doing anything particularly specific.

So it's scary precisely because their action is coordinated at the group level, but vague at the individual level. The group knows what it is and what it wants (through the individuals), but the individuals don't know what group they are a part of, or what influence they are acting under.

These unconscious conspiracies work upon outsiders in the form of gaslighting through transference and countertransference acting as a medium through which these conspiratorial grand images can be transmitted from imagination to imagination. So in everyone's imagination we can all envision "The Nazi Conspiracy" and "The Nazi Time War" and how they are trying to change the timeline with their dark Black Sun rituals—but this is just a myth. These visions are in our collective imagination, and it is only by acting as if the myth is real that it holds any true or lasting power over us or can effect the world. In other words "Myths don't kill people, people kill people."

The key thing about these myths that marks them as unreal is how easily they fragment under the slightest pressure. These images only seem monolithic and Manichean to us instantaneously, in the moment of their fullest revelation. If we belief in the reality of that instant, then we are lost. But if we realize that our instantaneous perception—while it holds true in that moment—doesn't hold true in other moments, then we can realize that our perception of a conspiracy theory as an image is not only a remarkable thing, it is also a very contingent and ephemeral thing.

Every conspiracy theory is real—as a terrifying image that strikes the mind with this vision of a vast vertical structure in an instant. No matter the factuality of any conspiracy theory, all conspiracy theories are, first of all, this kind of terrifying instantaneous vision. These visions are delivered to us by the faculty of paranoia.

My point is that there is no substance to the evil occult conspiracies operated by the rich—and if there were, that content can be none other than a banal religion of power. Even calling it a "religion of power" is giving it too much credit, because any religion of power must necessarily be a cargo cult of power, because to imagine that power means power over others and over material reality is to sell oneself short, to debase oneself by becoming a fundamentalist materialist. I do not think the materialists or the most willful and selfish abusers on the planet have the greatest occult secrets.

What they have is one mid-grade occult secret: "Don't talk about it." By simply keeping their culture implicit, even amongst themselves, and suppressing reasoned, articulate discourse, the super-rich live within a carefully-manicured dramaturgic social field where (we can predict, or presume) capricious emotions dominate, power is the rule, and so one does not generally need to justify one's intentions nor relate the different intentions or parts of oneself together in speech for others. This creates a psychological environment where there super-rich can indulge their vague fantasies together without ever having to become very articulate about these fantasies.

This is indeed a breeding group for real, unconscious conspiracies—but my point is that these conspiracies are—from start to finish—ephemeral, discontinuous bugaboos. These conspiracies don't exist—they portend. They terrorize by virtue of not existing and thus being something that anyone can suspect instantly, anywhere.

These conspiracies only exist in their "true" form in the Ideal Realm, in the perfect and named version of each conspiracy theory. In the actual world, every event disrupts the smooth surface of these conspiracy theories, shreds them and requires the conspiracy theory to reconstitute itself afresh when applied to the next desideratum.

This explains the particular character of conspiracy theories, which often take the form of tracing many connections, noting many obscure and often genuinely disturbing events. But there is rarely any punchline in these accounts—just a circling-inward that apophatically develops a vague—yet increasingly intense—implied image of the conspiracy's form. As we can see from the model presented here, there is no way to distinguish whether such a meandering route through evidence is tracing one unconscious conspiracy/egregore, or several overlapping ones. This is because it is the vagueness itself which is operative—vague, inarticulate living is itself the ultimate conspiracy and the dirty secret of the super-rich and all mediocre people. Unconsciousness is the conspiracy, and it doesn't exist anywhere because it's a lack of something that could be there.

The big trick is getting us all to focus on the terrifying vision and its imagined singularity, instead of lifting the lid at every opportunity to call their bluff and verify that yes, there is still shit in the toilet.