Find your community and forfeit your will!

How can we sanely “find ourselves” in the computer panopticon without losing agency? Is there hope for connection without assimilation?

As you’ve noticed if you’ve been reading this blog, I’ve had a lot of interest in the history of computers, the history of cybernetics (as in, the science of control systems, or automated “governance” through feedback loops), internet history, and the like.

Typically you’d expect recovery from an experience like my psychosis to include prescription medication like anti-psychotics and lots of therapy—not manic study-sessions involving complex and terrifying subjects. In many ways, reading about this stuff made it all worse. I definitely protracted the paranoia and confusion far longer than I “had to”—if we define what I “had to” do as get better for the sake of myself, my family, and my loved ones.

But I was rather in the grips of the culturally-implanted hero’s journey, and I decided to read the tea-leaves and see it out through the end. So instead of seeking treatment, what I “had to” do was find answers, and recreate my perception of, and relation to the world (which is to say, recreate myself) in the form of those answers. And my questions were all related to the sorts of things which seem to bother everyone.

One of the most important answers was the nature of human limitations and the humility of not actually ever being able to come close to one’s aspirational ideals. The taint of new-age spiritualism and mysticism which goes hand in hand with the hero’s journey overwhelms with aesthetics and labels and rituals and conceptual models. I instinctively rejected all that. The point of the journey is not to assume the garb—it’s to get to the end! The transformation comes through the course of the work, not from the adoption of a new style, or label, or role.

I would find leaders and teachers, but they wouldn’t know it. I’d just read old books, and the composite of the many authors would, like stars, form the constellations of my night sky. And when I wanted to study a particular group, it’d be as a self-styled anthropologist. Specifically one who’d never truly go “native.”

The work is tedious and private—or at least it should be. I ensured mine was.

Because we’ve gone and created an entire “virtual world” within which we’ve deeply-hooked our psychological development. And our online world desperately wants you, needs you, to put on a damn role and fit yourself into one of its ready-made “communities” for assimilation. Everyone with broken-open sensory gate needs to find themselves a damned flavour of mystic—tantric shaman or technopagan or post-human cyborg or conspiracy theorist or charismatic lay-preacher or dominatrix goddess or whatever else—and join the roster for easy sorting! Declare yourself! Tell the world (i.e. the cultural liquidation machine) who you are! Find the others using our handy-dandy platforms to do it. Buy the accoutrements and equipment—artisan if you can afford it, or Amazon if you can’t!

Every single obsession one could have, serious or silly, has got a home-office to report-in with—even if it’s just some silly unpaid Reddit moderator driven to maintain the respectability and solidarity of the “community” they’ve built. Read the FAQs, learn the lingo, buy the self-published books, and become one of us. “One of us! One of us! One of us!”

Well, I didn’t want to become anything or anyone on those terms. I reject the entire premise of “going home” to find “my people” as the end-goal of identity formation. The idea of personal development of beginning a “journey” of following the lead of some mythic trailblazing cults-of-personality of venerated originators of some group’s established tradition that I discovered online was too obviously a trap. It’s Gnosticism© Incorporated.

Maybe let’s not find ourselves through the internet?

I was paranoid, and yes, I overthought the fuck out of it. And it stalled my recovery a lot to avoid all the easy answers and open doors and charitable, well-meaning offers of support and community which the world has on offer. I stayed nearly alone, preserving the privacy of my thoughts and deliberations as best as I could for a very long time. I kept my circle of trusted conversation partners very, very very small, and very-little of what I wrote about online, publicly, was personal or intimate or vulnurable of me.

Becoming “less mad” means, to me, gaining security in self control. It means developing competence and growing one’s agency. To have agency is to regularly wield one’s free will in the decisions in one’s life. The 20th century has been, since the development of national cultures as artistic creations in the lead-up to the second world war, a struggle of individualism against mass propaganda and collective tribal myth. The United States of America transplanted the techniques from nation state to corporate advertisers creating consumer markets, but still we are living in an environment shaped entirely to consume us. That environment today is online.

Either you’re inside of the environment, or it is represented within your perception outside of you. I still diligently study computer history and learn more about how to use GNU/Linux and Free Software like Emacs. I will continue to passionately opine on all these subjects. But it’s not because I love computers. It’s because, like it or not, computers are what the world is now made of. And either you control them, or they are going to control you.

We still hear that the internet is a great resource for finding things out, connecting, building “community,” etc. Except instead of hearing it from pioneering netizens as we did in the ‘90s, we hear it from cynical marketers and their earnest dupes. “Communities” are now wholly monitored and marketed-to and messaged-at by ever-sophisticated means.

Now, the question is, can I reasonably prescribe this course of action to anyone else? Who is ready to hear this? Am I trying to help people who are experiencing psychosis by telling them to do what I did? How do I judo flip my cynicism about online community building, marketing, and the like with my efforts to grow and develop this Substack?

I know there is a contradiction in trying to build an internet community around the idea of not joining internet communities. Or wanting you to trust me to help you know how to get by when you feel you can trust no-one.

But contradictions are the heart of paradox, and the very nature of growth, of self-transformation, is perseverance through the paradoxes one’s still-developing mind generates in its incompleteness. It’s the nature of the double-bind.

As I said, the people I followed and intellectually styled-myself after don’t really know I did. I just read their books—often books written decades ago. My leader is a composite creature of well-intending, disciplined, liberal minds who tried to shed light on the world. That’s what I’d like to do too.

I’m told people are reading my stuff and ripping off my content. If they are, they’re doing a real fucking hack-job of it, because I don’t recognize what I’m trying to say anywhere else. But at the same time, maybe that’s the way out of this contradiction. I really need your support, and have plans to continue developing a way to earn a living out of the writing I’m beginning to do here on the blog.

Your subscription would help me a lot, and comments on what I’ve written would be very helpful for feedback. Let’s build a paradox here: an online community for people who don’t want to join online communities.

An aside, for those who hypothetically are reading this blog for it’s main premise: If you’re paranoid, as I was during my psychosis, you’ll overthink it and worry I was creating a honey-pot. That joining my blog was to stick your name on a list. You probably think that about every online subscription.

Well, I think you’re being too self-important if you think that’s true—I certainly was. A major risk of breaking away from society is to end up feeling that the universe is all about you. But, also, joining Substack and sticking your name to a thing is very revealing, and it is being tracked somewhere. So rather than talk you out of your fear, I’d rather tell you to muster the courage. There’s no moving to the woods and escaping the machine. Rather, there is only growing a relation to the world where you know it better than it knows you. That’s my brand of sanity.