Category: Life

• What is done purely by law can be un-done purely by law.
• Beware of venture capitalists bearing gifts.
• Pain is a small price to pay for excellence.
• Learn by picking a goal and doing whatever is necessary to get as close as you can to it.
• Approach the ideal asymptotically, but make whatever tradeoffs are necessary to actually make it a success. Don't make tradeoffs prematurely.
• Centralized systems are inherently more prone to capture by actors you don't like than decentralized or distributed ones; even if you currently control that system.
• Don't give the state any powers you would not want your political enemies to have.
• 90% of leftist social "discourse" and social dynamics is just people looking for a "morally justified" outlet for tribalism and bullying
• The ultimate union of egoists is a market exchange.
• Automation introduces choice: to do, or not do, a task that you were previously forced to do. Use this wisely.
• Willpower does not exist. Create systems that force you to do what you want yourself to do. (Often useful as a corrective to the benefits of automation: for instance, setting things up so you have to mostly walk places, and can only use your car or public transit when you actually need to).
• I'd rather live in a protocyberpunk dystopia than a primitivist, anti-civ, post-civ, or even localist solarpunk eutopia.

The ideology of self-sufficiency and independence, whether on an individual level or a community level (as localism) is a cancer, and it's annoying how much even anarchists buy into it.

"Oh no I'm depending on someone else who specializes in food growing for my food."

"Oh no my community needs to import goods from other places"

"Oh no division of labor and specialization."

The amount of people that seem to want to go back to everyone having to farm their own food for instance is so annoying, because people that advocate for that are either people who enjoy it for its own sake (usually because they were brought up doing it, but there are also those who adopt it), at which point it's just someone attempting to force their hobby lifestyle onto other people who will almost certainly not want to live that way for the same reason some people have a hobby making furniture but the rest of us don't want to have to make our own furnature, or, on the other hand, people who don't actually use growing food as a means of actually supporting even a significant fraction of their food intake, so they think that their little basil and tomato gardens give them a good idea of how to do it, and what it'll be like, but it doesn't. Growing food fucking sucks; when it's 94° outside and you're weeding the garden so that the mint doesn't try and eat the tomato plants, or spending ho then try and tell me that this is an improvement. And let's be real: among leftists and even post-leftists, it's 95% the latter kind of person. Even those that move to the countryside, buy a farm, and start growing food and maybe farming chickens or whatever are really, fundamentally, larping: they're not actually fully supporting themselves with this typically, they're just doing it because it makes them feel like they're doing something to get "back to the land." It's like someone who plays paintball talking about how good they'd be in war or something.

And this isn't even to mention the practicality of abolishing industrial farming in favor of individualized or even local food-growing. It's deeply unclear whether many communities or individuals would have the space for it, especially in cities, so there's the end of urbanism right there, and even if they could find the space, it would almost certainly drive up food costs and increase scarcity and decrease food variety.

A lot of anarchists might say that the end of urbanism is a good thing; they seem to get really mad at the idea that one place such as an urban center might on a net import food from another place, as if that's somehow inherently exploitative. What they're somehow not realizing is that maybe that urban center might be able to produce things that the more rural areas couldn't or simply don't happen to, that they could provide in return that are worth the food? It's like they've never heard of the basic concept of trade.

Not to mention how beliefs like this make you talk! They basically turn you into a fucking Tylder Durden talking point machine:

In the world I see - you are stalking elk through the damp canyon forests around the ruins of Rockefeller Center. You'll wear leather clothes that will last you the rest of your life. You'll climb the wrist-thick kudzu vines that wrap the Sears Tower. And when you look down, you'll see tiny figures pounding corn, laying strips of venison on the empty car pool lane of some abandoned superhighway.

This is exactly precisely the sort of thing Margaret Killjoy talks about in several of her writings that I've read on anti-civ and urbanism without cities — about letting the infrastructure and civilization around you decay intentionally into moss and tribalism (she specifically seems to advocate a form of tribalism even while claiming explicitly to reject it), and instead of producing new things, spending your life dumpster diving and scavanging, and viewing that as the praxis and ideal life "post revolution." It's really not self aware at all about how the fundamental assumption is that interdependency and mutually beneifical deal-making, and diversity in skills and desires about what we want to do for a living, are all weak or dangerous or restrict our freedom in some way, because we all need to be self sufficient sigma males (but leftist) or tribes (but progressive). It's this same ideology of individual or small community, self-sufficiency and back to the land, the cyclical economy stuff that fascists push, just repackaged in like a transfem anarchist lingo.

Whereas for me, I don't see interdependency as weak or dangerous. The interdependency that comes from accepting division of labor and specialization and market economies and globalization and all of the gifts that capitalism has given us — despite capitalism itself being evil — actually grant us more degrees of freedom than they take away, because they gives us access to — at least in theory, absent the bullshit jobs and artificial increases of work that capitalism creates — far, far more free time and material resources and far more choice over what we do in order to sustain our lives. Every dependency you have, on community, society, technology, all the machines that humans build, increases your degrees of freedom, because it increases your power to do things you never could have done before, acts as a prosthesis for you. You just have to make sure power imbalances don't grow. — and it is possible to create that interdependency in such a way that associations act as extensions of the power of their members instead of caps on them. Where that interdependency creates a mesh network of relations that actually make hurting or controlling others even more difficult because everyone depends on everyone else. We only experience interdependency as a taking away of autonomy under capitalism because of the centralization that it also brings with it.

The interesting thing to me is that there are two ways to interpret the fact that people have been having concerns about the pace of life, technology, and transportation, having nervous breakdowns and feeling mentally overtaxed, having questions about the commodification or obsoleting of art due to generative machines, and wondering whether tech and society and the market are the products of or threats to human nature, or both, since 1910.

One way is to go the primitivist route and say that this proves it was all a mistake as far back as those problems stretch, and we're only making it worse, stacking mistake on mistake the longer we refuse to treat the root issue: that humans can't evolve fast or far enough to adapt to the machine we've created (or that they're inherently wrong, that we shouldn't want to adapt).

The other way is to say that we adapted to bicycles and cameras, and we can adapt to these new changes too — and in fact it's worth doing, so that we get the chance to transcend human nature as we've known it, to co-evolve with our creations, and to do what they enable us to do.

For myself, I only see one of these as a live option. Our desires, expectations, our very cognitive processes, have all been fundamentally shaped by tech, society, and markets. We could never truly want to undo or throw away what we've created, except that is itself predicated on us not knowing what it would mean to do so due to the conditions precisely created by them. And we could never create a way to enforce and maintain, across the distributed adaptive system that is the world, such a discarding, a "proceeding on without." — (quoting myself from elsewhere on this blog)

This first part is an important starting point that's a tough pill to swallow for a lot of primmies and totally lines up with what some friends of mine have learned from the flirting they've done with prepping (or better qualified as preparedness). They've started listening through some of Margaret Killjoy's Live Like The World is Dying podcast, and one of her early episodes is a Q/A about how she lives offgrid on a shared land project:

Even simple things like having a shower especially with hot water become sprawling, constant projects. Setting it up is hard – there's prerequisite infrastructure you need for it too, power and water (there's a reason we have a grid). Oh and shit breaks. Pipes can freeze and burst in many climates, especially since the shower is outdoors.

Her story of how she built the thing and maintains it and deals with ongoing problems really impressed upon me just how hard those lifestyles are and how it doesn't even necessarily imply you're more independent. You still rely on global supply chains to supply your homebrew cottagecore life.

And this is why the idea of independence and self-reliance is a cancer. For better or worse, basically everyone on this planet has a life to a great extent that is based and relies on innovations of at least the past 100 years, and on the specialization and trade with others, and your choice is to either accept that and find a way to maintain it by better means, or to reject that, but understand that literally no one will ever want to join you, and you're artificially hamstringing yourself, and it's just not practicable, not sustainable, less reliable (because it's more brittle; global distributed trade systems are highly adaptive!), and it doesn't really give you any more autonomy.

It is understandable, as our civilization hurtles towards the unknown abyss, however, to have gotten anxious about having a very narrow skillset, and to let that drive you to want to generalize, to be somewhat capable of self-relience and self-protection. But that shouldn't be the goal, that should be the last resort, and you shouldn't focus all your time on that. The way another friend puts it is best I think — you want to be T shaped: broad knowledge in a lot of things, deep knowledge in one or two areas.

None of this is to say I'm against decentralization as a general principle. I'm very much for it! Taking individual self-sufficiency and strictly community-local production as goods in themselves, instead of just means to a greater goal of autonomy, freedom, and better living for all, is what I'm actually against. Having local communities, municipalities, cities, counties, or other geographic units produce something can aid decentralization, which can equalize power dynamics and promote resiliancy to supply shocks; but on the other hand, you can use trade to equalize power dynamics, if both parties have something they see as equally valuable that they're getting from the other; likewise, being able to pull manufacturing from a variety of sources, even if they're far away, can actually increase resiliancy in case something goes wrong, or there are unforeseen demands, in a local economy; not to mention that resiliancy and equal power dynamics must be weighed against efficiency, possibility, and most of all what communities just happen to be good at or want to do (influenced by culture, geographical location, whatever). The law of comparative advantage seems relevant here. Everyone can gain from trade even with far away places. Balancing these should be the focus, not rigid decentralization or localism. Maybe communities, like individuals, should be T-shaped too: able to provide for their basic needs locally if necessary, while much more specialized in certain fields, but not rigidly focused on either.

Theirs is rather a call to enter into the process; to become immanent to the deterritorialising processes of immanentisation in themselves. We must view ourselves from within the depths of things in order to fully recognise the flows that flow through, with and around us. Our task is only to make ourselves worthy of the process…. U/ACC instead argues that what is open to ‘us’ is perhaps only the possibility of, as Deleuze writes in Logic of Sense, a “becoming the quasi-cause of what is produced within us”. There remains much which is inherently outside ‘us’, however. All we are able to do is produce “surfaces and linings in which the event is reflected”. [2]

In accelerating the process, Deleuze and Guattari nod purposefully towards Nietzsche, and, in light of the limits of what we are able to produce, we should remember that what is key for Deleuze in Nietzsche’s thought is his amor fati; his love of fate. Fate for Nietzsche is not our theistic destiny in the hands of God but the affirmation of a life caught up in its own flows. It is in this way that Deleuze writes of becoming worthy of the Event, of a life made impersonal. […] the task is “to become worthy of what happens to us, and thus to will and release the event, to become the offspring of one’s own events, and thereby be reborn, to have one more birth, and to break with one’s carnal birth — to become the offspring of one’s events and not of one’s actions, for the action is itself produced by the offspring of the event.” [5] — Fragment on the Event of Unconditional Acceleration

I'm not totally sure what that means, but I think I have a decent idea. My read of what this is saying, bc I think trying to explain things in our own words is useful for making sure we understand them, is that it's saying that D&G make the point that we can't control society, and that sociocultural flows mostly create who and what we are, what we do and desire, and that the proper response to this is to become intimately familiar and aware in our feelings, our phenomenology of that, instead of trying to resist it, to be pure and moral and totally deconstructed, or rigid and rational, and then to wu wei with those flows to participate through that awareness in the partial creation of ourselves, even if we can't wholly create ourselves, by trying to shape, in what way we can, how we are shaped by the events and circumstances around us, and choosing to love what shapes us (amor fati).

Radical acceptance of the facets that shape you, and then trying to shape those facets in turn.

I think wu wei is a description of the practice they're advocating, separated only by accelerationism's very different (and stronger) analysis of how those impersonal flows are created and how they work and where they go, and why they are. It's also connected to how Martha Graham talks about a similarly unnameable "quickening:"

There is a vitality, a life force, a quickening that is translated through you into action, and there is only one of you in all time, this expression is unique, and if you block it, it will never exist through any other medium; and be lost. The world will not have it. It is not your business to determine how good it is, not how it compares with other expression. It is your business to keep it yours clearly and directly, to keep the channel open. You do not even have to believe in yourself or your work. You have to keep open and aware directly to the urges that motivate you. Keep the channel open. No artist is pleased. There is no satisfaction whatever at any time. There is only a queer, divine dissatisfaction, a blessed unrest that keeps us marching and makes us more alive than the others.

Which is a concept that's very close to a lot of what accelerationists talk about I think: impersonal forces that express themselves in particular ways through us. The opening to fanged noumena actually talks a lot about how Land's work is largely a response to Kant, and he's a really deep reader of Kant — and one of the things it points out is that Kant is super rational and individual and sort of protestant in all his writings except one, where he talks about art, talking about inspiration and genius as this impersonal force that flows around and through humans and is expressed in a unique way in particular ones. And how Land basically took that bit and extended it. (And it is absolutely worthy of scrutiny and extension/expansion, yeah. Why is it just some special folks… and why is it limited to Art (whatever that is)? Cue my frustrated autism noises when people imply engineering/science/computers are mechanistic and procedural.)

It's the same as realizing, from introspection, we don't have free will: lots of people claim they experience free will but that's bullshit. If you spend a long enough amount of time laying on your back staring at the ceiling thinking about how you think, it's clear. What I mean by this is that if you spend long enough thinking about your past choices, you'll often realize that they were either determined by external random chance (e.g. forgetting a detail) or that past-you simply couldn't have done anything else (but this requires deep compassion and understanding of your past self and her imperfections, something people are not good at). Pure libertarian free will just logically entails that our actions are pure chance, because if they were the product of our character and memories interacting with our environment, then they'd be determined! to the degree we could "choose otherwise" given those inputs, the only logical option other than determinism is random chance. whereas determinism is actually what implies that we are in control of our actions. Of course there are some who try to find a third way between randomness and determinism and composites of the two, using quantum tubules or some shit, but I feel like those two categories are logically exhaustive of the conceptual space there.

What people think of when they hear "we don't have free will" is some sort of vulgar Tolstoyan determinism where people can't change and can't break out of loops. They just confuse having "free will" with being able to change their behavior in response to stimuli, or being able to be unique — none of which requires free will. We know that we can break out of loops and make decisions that expose us to new information and change our circumstances so that we do more of the things we want to do, and that feels like free will, but we're doing that deterministically on the basis of our prior experiences, current experiences and environment, and character developed based on prior experiences.

What it really is that we experience is a feedback loop with our past, present, and the ongoing sort of state object shaped by those, that we're in, where we couldn't do otherwise than what we do next, but at the same time, we can still change by adapting and responding to that feedback. Think about a robot that can try new solutions to problems, and store memories on what worked and didn't, and so on, but it's still determined to do those things. It's the feedback and adaptive processes that give us control over ourselves in the way we introspectively experience it: the fact that with each action, the results of that action add further information that change who we are and what we know, so that even if we're a pure function of our inputs, the inputs are different this time. Think about the world state data object in pure functional programming languages.

For sure we're also impacted by lots of RNG, like atmospheric behaviors and all the other things that seem to "just happen" and can't easily be predicted or measured. What I'm just saying, from the perspective of trying to understand why we can still change, and feel like we have free will as in control, even if determinism is the only logical option, feedback loops and adaptation are why; RNG is another factor that feeds in, but more for the "free will as could've gone otherwise."

Understanding this intimately is useful for therapy, or any kind of self directed personal growth: if you believe that anything is possible that leads into "willpower" and "motivation" and other frameworks that aren't very helpful. Whereas if you have a cybernetic understanding you can try to change the environment, or the feedback loops you're in, or what information you're processing. This is probably a gross oversimplification, but maybe there is a point to be made here that we have a lot of afflictions either caused or worsened by what the axiom of free will; if what's actually happening is a feedback loop, one model here is to think about depression in terms of it being partially exacerbated by a lack of new inputs and change. "New inputs" and "shocking the system" underly all(?) improvements my friends and I have been able to make in our own mental health.

Outsideness and cybernetics wins again?

What the fuck does praxis even mean. What the fuck does it even accomplish. Fucking nothing.

If you work at a soup kitchen or a Food Not Bombs at least you can say you fucking fed people, but it's not like even that really makes a lick of difference to you or them in the long run — their life is, what, slightly fucking nicer for a moment? But mostly the same, because you're not fixing any root cause for them. You're feeding a man a fish, not getting him a place to fish and a fishing rod to do it with. And chance are you can't, because you don't have the resources or time to do that.

There are people who do, who try to help people actually get back on their feet and be independent but that helps one person, it doesn't change any of the systems that put them there, and there will always be more where that came from. Hell, most of the time, organizations that do that sort of thing are fundamentally captured and controlled by, and used as PR shields by, the exact fucking system that creates the harmed and exploited people they support, precisely because they need the legal sanction and material resources necessary to help people, and can only get that with the permission of, or even support of, the system. Not to mention that even that is a pressure valve, not a lasting solution: "The poor will always be with you" is a curse and a prophecy with charity work, because the system that creates people who need charity will continue on creating people who need charity for you to help and feel better about yourself, and you helping them doesn't effect the system at all; in fact, most of the time, it helps the system, in the sense that it provides a pressure valve and takes the burden of taking care of its people, which should really be its job, off it.

You don't get anywhere major with just "direct action" either, because operating with affinity-group level resources and under the nose of the state and capital, you fundamentally can't by definition. By definition if you're doing direct action, you're working with individual off the cuff actions and affinity groups with little planning and material support. You won't have the kind of resources and broad scale people power necessary to make any kind of lasting change. So sure, maybe you can stop a pipeline or hold back Cop City, and those are worthwhile aims in themselves, but don't fool yourself into thinking you're stopping the system. It'll just circle back after you're too tired or too old or too low on resources and do whatever it was planning to do anyway, or just shift its plans slightly.

And organizing protests and shit? Don't make me fucking laugh. I saw what that got my community, when I took part in that: worse than nothing. We shut down one Nazi speaker and that just rallied support for the cause on campus, drawing attention to them and making them look good, and it made the campus explicitly set up some policies to support it, and now every year since the same people have invited worse and worse guys, and all they have to do is invite a guy, whereas we have to organize a thousand person protest, and everyone has to show up for that protest for hours. Which is the fundamental problem: there's a fundamental effort asymmetry here, where those being protested, since they're just doing individual actions or perpetuationg/worsening the status quo are going with the flow; those protesting are fundamentally expending orders of magnitude too much energy. Not to mention the fact that protests fundamentally carry almost zero real threat to them. Even if your cause is popular, what does public opinion really matter to the powers that be, beyond a certain point, in the face of their other material interests? They're not going to get unseated by public opinion — especially when it's so easy to turn against you! So they don't have to listen to a thing you say in your protest, at all.

And if you actually make your protest threatening? Turn it into a riot? Start smashing storefronts, looting, flipping cop cars, burning things, attacking cops and suits? Or even just like, blocking traffic, a standard protest tactic? That's so fucking easy to turn against you, not just because people are indoctrinated by the state and capital to respect cops and property and business, but also because those actions do, in fact, have frustrating or even harmful effects on the community you do them in, and the everyday people who have to deal with it: like protests that block traffic regularly slowing or even blocking ambulances, or even just normal people — many of whom will be poor or marginalized and just trying to get to work on time so they don't lose their job. Or protests that wreck havoc on property scaring large businesses out of town and bankrupting small local businesses, or at least putting them in a harder financial spot, making them weaker to the few big corps that are willing to remain, contributing to your community becoming poorer as it has fewer jobs, less access to resources, and maybe becomes a food desert.

So make a law? Good fucking luck. Those with more money and influence will always bend the interpretation and application of laws towards whatever benefits them, if you even get to pass a law that might hurt them in the first place (you probably won't). And lawmakers (whether representitives, or just "the people") are as a whole completely out of touch and uneducated in the fields they're trying to legislate against, leading to laws that generally tend to make things far worse in unintended ways — like the Online Safety Act and similar laws destroying privacy — or they'll hire experts from the industry and end up just serving that industry's interests anyway. Not to mention the effects of regulatory capture.

The system just adapts.

So you either take """direct action""" that does nothing and/or radicalizes people against you or you appeal to the powers that be and either they don't care and don't listen, or they do care but can't do anything, because if they had the power to do anything they wouldn't care.

And ultimately what people hate most is crybaby moralizing, which is what the left is reduced to most of the time because they have no power, and self assured smug dismissal and exhortations to live like a traveling fucking trashcan monk, which is the best the post left really has to offer.

So fuck em all and fuck it all honestly.

The best we can do in this world is try to survive, support ourselves and the people we care about, and be kind of strangers, because no one else will be kind to them that day probably.

So don't worry if you haven't done praxis.

Not to mention that those with the most power and resources to do something, proportional to how much power and resources they have, will continue to be too comfortable in their/our current lifestyles until they are no longer possible. It's sort of a fundamental implication of the position.

You might think that there's something to the praxis that Killjoy has done (traveling punk, dumpster diving, living minimally rough) and does now (living off grid with her friends). Eating reclaimed, sometimes straight up dumpster dived food (produce and similar leftovers that get tossed and brought by folks to free grocery meetups) can feel empowering. It might feel like it meaningfully does something about the ridiculous problem of food waste in our economy to help ourselves out.

But in reality, it's a game you're playing with yourself to make you feel better, just like all the little personal climate change interventions we do. To meaningfully make a dent in the food waste problem you would have to massively restructure several things. Don't fool yourself into thinking that it's materially making a difference at the scale of the problem as a whole, instead if just making a few people's lives better. And ultimately, if your concern is that the way we live isn't sustainable, then dumpster diving may feel like you're going off the grid, but it's not. You're still depending on the exact same food system.

Ultimately, it's probably better to enjoy what we have currently to the fullest and promise yourself that you'll do your best to adapt when the time comes, and if you die you die, then to needlessly deprive yourself and live a life that's full of a lot more shitty nonsense in order to harden yourself against it or something. You know what I mean? Think about it like "life extension," right? Would you rather live like to Brian Johnson, or do you want to live a great 70 years and then fucking keel over.

You might think the way to make praxis "work," to respond to these critiques, is to consciously build up from local affinity groups and personal direct action towards federations and national organizations, things that can actually exert pressure on capitalism and the state. But that won't do you any good either:

I actually brought up this sort of mutualist dual power praxis to Cory Doctorow when he was at my university once. And the thing he pointed out is that there's a bunch of mechanisms that make it really easy for capitalism to sort of automatically dismantle and disintegrate organizations like that, not through any particular intention, but just because of the incentive structures. Just like the way soap kills bacteria, not by intention, but just sort of the physical chemical processes. This happens constantly, and it's really sad to see projects here end up doing the state's work for them, with people's personal resources. Stop The Sweeps helps folks but it also provides infrastructure for the city and police, arguably. It's not even that interesting or evil necessarily. We've all seen how people start making choices for not even horrible reasons that lead to their project entering the nonprofit industrial complex.

And the thing is to a certain degree entering the non-profit industrial complex is actually kind of needed to be effective in the sense that if you're like crime think constantly worrying about any slight contact with or use of the state or capitalism to the point that you're basically forced into like extremely atomized individual action or organization that's so union of egoists that it just uses to be a union of egoists even, then you're just not going to be able to affect anything significantly. But Jesus Christ, I have no idea how to walk that line.

More than that, the system is just far too complex, adaptive, and good at recuperation to be predicted and controlled enough to make a directed change toward any particular thing you want. It is out of our control.

As the nonlinear processes driven by cascading positive feedback intensify and rise, organization itself becomes more complex, more heterogeneous, more multiplicitious, and less congenial to control systems. Rising complexity, in the end, trashes the orderly nature of organic wholeness. … Multitudes of positive feedback processes have long since become deeply entrenched, and the system as a whole is undeniably veering far from order. […] The complexity profile is rising and will continue, and as it does the capability for collective intervention will become all but impossible. […] — Unconditional Acceleration and the Question of Praxis

None of this is to say that trying to locally alleviate some people's suffering, or fight for small wins, isn't worth our time, and we shouldn't do it, because it won't change anything fundamental. I'm not arguing any of that isn't necessary, because I'm not the type of straw man acceleration that just wants to like maximize the contradictions of capitalism and hope that if we reach some kind of singularity of suffering it'll explode. No actual accelerationist theorist has actually ever endorsed this view, to be clear — even the CCRU itself explicitly lists itself as a sort of left-market anarchist organization in one of their communiques, and Deleuze in Guattari's explicit criticism of Marxism is precisely that contradictions can't kill capitalism. But we shouldn't fool ourselves that we know how to do this, or if there even is anything we can do.

There isn't an answer, I dont think there definitionally is one, to how we fix things. This is why I like unconditional accelerationism:

1. the idea that we're probably inescapably fucked
2. We can't go back (primitivism), and we can't undo or ignore (anti- and post-civ) the technologies, knowledge, social structures, desires, and expectations that have been created
3. the systems around us are so insanely complex and adaptive that it's unclear we can do anything to change them, and even if we do change them, we can't control how or which way it turns
4. the only response to that is not to keep saying "there ought to be a law" or the communist or anarchist equivalent, nor to "do nothing," but to let go of the desire to save and control things, and do things because they're What You Do, because you want to
5. without falling into transcendental miserablism that just dismisses all possible change as uninteresting and negative, viewing everything from the bottom of a well of cynicism that is smug in its bottomless despair
6. we can't control how we're socially constructed and influenced, but we can participate in that, through using fiction and aesthetics and narratives so we can participate in that project of trying to create radically new subjectivities that might be able to produce something radically new
7. that we need something radically new and different that must be channeled by communities motivated by the same altered subjectivities
8. and that whatever new thing we create must take into account the desires, needs, expectations, and developments and use them, not moralistically reject them.

Hyperstition and the role of theory-fiction in accelerationism are really cool: the intentional crafting of narratives that might tend to bring themselves into existence, the intentional embracing of the content of what's being communicated in the style itself, to participate in the construction of subjectivity needed for hyperstition. Maybe the only thing we can do is hope as many people can be on board with a generalized libertarian "live and let live" ethical system while we all experiment in the ways we best know how until we keep popping out advancements that slowly make the current world unfathomable to future peoples. Or… we die trying. And there's solace in that too tbh.

Many people struggle to find meaning in their lives.

They worry about their purpose in life, they worry about the overarching narrative of their life and how it fits into the grand narrative of the world, they worry about the purpose and meaning of the things that happen to them and how they fit into all those narratives. They also worry about trying to assign some kind of meaning to the things that they do, the objects in the world around them, and the people in their life.

Importantly, in all these worries, the concern is always with some kind of special meaning, one that they want to feel comes from outside them in some way, or is more reified, more robust, than simple doxastic belief, perhaps one that even has some kind of symbolic or propositional content.

Many people turn to organized religion for this. Most organized religions provide a hierarchy, from their gods and supernatural beings, to wise people of some kind, to the people that are merely members, where those on each lower rung of the hierarchy can be assured that the meanings and purposes assigned to them by those higher powers above them on the hierarchy are, at least for them, objective, absolute, intentional, propositional, and weave into a coherent narrative whole. And, conveniently, the final rung of the hierarchy, the supernatural beings, don't exist – for of course, what does "supernatural" mean, but simply "something we have no reason to think exists"? If something manifestly existed, then it would simply be natural, no matter how fantastic. You think volcanoes and supermassive black holes and stars and gravity aren't as fantastic as any supernatural story? – which means that they at least don't have to worry about the purpose or meaning in their lives – they can grant it to others, but the buck can stop there.

Other people don't gel with organized religion – perhaps they realize that just because a purportedly absolute, objective, harmonized purpose and meaning is assigned to you, that doesn't mean you actually enjoy it or want it; perhaps they realize that meaning is inherently something that exists between a consciousness and its experiences, and so the meaning or purpose assigned to you by others doesn't really mean anything for you unless they're either going to enforce it or you choose to accept it, which means that organized religion isn't a true way out of this problem, perhaps they have more specific concerns – but still feel the need to have some kind of more robust, reified, stable, semi-external (gained from others, written down, etc) meaning applied to things in their lives. These people seek out systems of traditions, rituals, symbolism, myth, community, and philosophy through which they can create meanings themselves, subjectively, but then obscure that process from themselves. This way they can intellectually acknowledge the fact that they created those meanings and purposes, but not have to act or feel as if they do, not have to think about it most of the time. This is the way of spirituality of various sorts, and also many non-spiritual things like Humanism, various political ideologies and movements, scientism, and so on.

In my opinion, these people suffer from a few misconceptions:

The first is caused by the promotion of objectivity even in the realm of things that are inherently subjective; absolutism even in the face of things that should inherently grow and change and develop over time; and reification of abstractions, even in the face of something that should be intimately in touch with the raw experience of life itself. The reason that people want meanings that feel external, robust, reified, is that they are caught up in a game imposed on them by the nature of living in a community of others: the tendency for communities to force their participants to be able to justify one's meanings and purposes to other people, even when it isn't necessary, due to the community's inherent nature to try to subsume and devour individuals into themselves, to force conformity and alignment on them. And justifying oneself to others is always a game that requires objectivity – so that you can point to things the other person will agree on – reification – because language involves expressing things in terms of words and concepts, which are inherently abstractions (as opposed to pointing and grunting) – and absolutism, since you don't want to have to constantly re-explain things to people, and people generally expect you to be the same tomorrow as you were yesterday and will expect an explanation if you aren't.

Thus, if the process of meaning-making is too close to home, if the fact that they are creating their own meanings is too obvious, then people feel that:

• the fact that those meanings are subjective makes them feel arbitrary, selfish, or parochial;
• the fact that these meanings are fleeting and changeable makes them weak and pointless;
• the fact that these meanings are local, inchoate, emotional, personal, instead of propositions and symbols based in traditions, makes them irrational and meaning-less.

Meanwhile, to the contrary, if we live in a world where no meanings are objective, no purposes are given, where it all stems from us no matter what we do, than there is no one that can come up to you and criticize the meanings or purposes that you have assigned to things. What grounds do they have? The ground that they've created, which has no bearing on you – they can set themselves against you with all their might, if their meanings and purposes say they must, and that is their right, but what can something they say from their ground mean to you on yours? Why must it matter to you if your meanings are arbitrary in the grand scheme, if you assigned them for personal reasons that seem right to you, that make you happy, or that get you through life? Why does it matter if they're selfish, if you are that self, and the only judge of them? Why does it matter if they are parochial, limited to your life and the things you care about instead of integrated into a grand global or cosmic narrative, when you can only experience and know about your own life anyway?

Likewise, what does it matter if a meaning changes? If meanings come from us than they will only change when they are no longer fit for purpose: when they no longer raise in us the feelings they once did – no longer make us happy, or motivate us, or reach out and grab us and intrigue us. Maybe we have changed, perhaps our context has changed, but for one reason or another a meaning that was once relevant and important can find itself in a context where it no longer has anything to point to or act on, or where other things are more important, or we change such that we simply don't care about that meaning anymore. Why should meanings not be able to change and develop with us, to ebb and flow in cycles as we live and different things catch our minds and interests?

Likewise, why does it matter if a meaning that you've assigned is inchoate, emotional, personal – incommunicable? People seem to get caught up in the idea that what they are seeking is meaning in terms of language, when what they are really seeking is a feeling, or a practice. This is the ultimate reification fallacy: if you ask someone what they truly want out of a Meaning, they'll eventually tell you, if you drill down far enough, that ultimately they're feeling sad, or lonely, or listless, or undirected, or unengaged, and that what they want is something to make them feel excited, enchanted, connected, engaged, focused, and happy.

That's all.

The "meaning" people seek is, at bottom, just a complex and deep melange of affective stances toward their life and the world around them. But because our culture, our world, even the human mind, is so horribly caught up in abstractions and language, they immediately go looking not for particular things – routines, hobbies, projects, people, places, objects, anything – that bring out those feelings in them, but for words, in the shape of archetypes, symbols, abstractions, traditions, theologies, narratives, to overlay onto life, that they hope will bring meaning to dead things that do nothing for them.

In the process of trying to find these things they often do find new routines, new people and places, new projects and hobbies, however, and so the set of words they eventually settle down with will usually be determined actually by which set of accompanying actual particulars truly evoke those feelings in them, but they don't see this. They confuse things and attribute these improvements in situation to the words and not the actual things themselves.

The fact that this confusion of words – especially narratives – for the sort of meaning one is actually looking for is a mistake can best be illustrated by the fact that, if you were to wake up today and learn without a shadow of a doubt, with all the proof you need, that there was a being in the world that had created all humanity, and had designed narratives for each of us to act out in our lives, that all weave into a grand whole, and that all meet some master plan of theirs, you can still conceive of not liking this objective, linguistic, holistic meaning you've been granted. And in fact having this meaning imposed upon you without your choice or consent if you don't like it, agree with it, or want it, is actually crushing. It would suck all the meaning out of your life! If meaning the feeling that you're seeking out and meaning the word were truly identical, if meaning being external was really such a boon, this would be psychologically impossible to comprehend, but it isn't.

What's worse, when you adopt a set of practices and symbols and words to view the world through to structure it and grant meaning for you, you give up spontaneity: now, when you find something that gives you the affective experience of meaning, you have to somehow fit it into that existing rubric, or risk overturning the entire thing by revealing just how arbitrary that rubric is, how much it is simply your choice to play pretend and follow along with. Adopting such a rubric also merely reinforces these fallacies about meaning that make it far harder than necessary to joyfully embrace, adopt, throw yourself into meanings, that make finding meaning not into a thing that you just bump into all the time, but a difficult journey. And worst of all, such rubrics make it difficult for your meaning to change, to adapt with you. If you become a Jungian occultist one year, but then the rigid myopic structure of the archetypes begins to wear on you and you want to try something new, so you become a Wiccan the next year, and then that doesn't work out so you move on to being a Neo-Pagan the next, eventually all these changes will become exhausting, and will also expose to your subconscious the artifice of the entire game. So you have a strong incentive to pick something and Stockholm yourself into sticking with it.

More than anything, though, reality isn't language. Reality isn't narrative. Reality is not symbols or abstractions. It does not owe you fitting those things, or providing easy ways to map those things onto it, and it will not do so. This means that you have the choice of either allowing your precious linguistic game to break – which threatens the safety of the entire edifice upon which you've staked all the meaning in your life – or you have to ignore things or hammer things until they fit the shape you've chosen.

Thus my advice: don't over complicate things. Throw out all the Christian thinking that makes meaning hard to identify even when it's in front of your face, hard to find, hard to accept for yourself. Throw out the word games, the linguistic farce, that locks you down, that separates you from the spontaneity of life, and detaches you from reality. Don't allow the belief that you must find symbols and meanings that can be described in language to creep back in.

Instead, look out into the world of particulars. Find real, specific things that bring you the feeling you're looking for, that engage you, that cause meaning to flower uncaused and unbidden from your creative nothing. Focus on that, don't get lost in abstractions. Experience is an infinite sea of particulars, many that will depress you, make you despair, suck all the meaning out of your life, and many that will do the opposite. This is a game of focus. Make your reality.

Think about the future when the present is terrible, because the future can always change.

Think about the present when the future looks dark, because at least you have these moments now to enjoy.

Find people who bring out the joy and wonder of the world, who make you feel like more of yourself, to spend your time with. Mercilessly cut out the people you hate, and when you can't do that, find joy in watching their absurdity, in documenting their evil and preparing for their downfall, even if it never comes.

Find something to do that you love doing, that occupies your mind, your hands, and your time. Something that you can improve at. Something that you can show others. This will be the backbone that fills everything else.

Focus on the process, not the destination. Even if you hate the process find the particulars about it that you can love and focus on those – the feeling of your body moving and working, the feeling of fighting through something to get it done, the daring rush of trying to meet a deadline headlong, the crazy pride of pushing yourself, the outlandish absurdity of your situation and what a good story it will make.

Remember that pain, disappointment, hurt – all these are also flavors of life, the bitterness to joy's sweetness and contentment's savory. Learn to throw yourself into these things to, challenge yourself with them, grow through them, struggle, fight, and love the fight and the struggle and the challenge and the growth. Learn even to love the pain and the trauma, perhaps, because that's life as we're given it.

Do, be, look. Don't worry about putting names and symbols to it. The more you try to overlay traditions and symbols and archetypes and rituals onto this the more you affirm the misconceptions about meaning, and therefore the more you turn meaning into something difficult and laborious to obtain, instead of something you can trip over in your local supermarket.

From my DMs:

There's so much that's cool and awesome and wonderful and nice and kind and beautiful and great about the world, from the grand things to the mundane things, for me, I just don't see the need to mystify it behind abstractions and symbolism. And for me, meaning-making is just something that happens without effort — things either mean and matter to me or they don't, it just flowers out of my creative nothing without conscious effort or intention, and never toward abstractions, always toward particulars, and I love that, I love experiencing that. So I don't like being told I need symbols and abstractions to have meaning, or rituals and traditions and communities to construct it — all that ruins the magic, the easy joy of it, for me. I always feel like people over complicate this and it sucks the naturalness out of it for me. Plus, every time I've tried to engage with a community around some set of practices or symbolism or beliefs it sucked and I hated it and I was disappointing and I left; I've tried like ten times in my life now. I just really love life, even the pain and disappointment and trauma is Right in its own way. I dunno.

The classic vulgar individualist quote is that communities don't exist, only groups of individuals. This is false. Communities may not exist as specific located physical entities, but they do exist ontologically, as higher-order meta entities composed of the emergent behaviors, desires, and powers that arise out of the interaction of their component individuals, and perpetuated through time by inherent self-cohesion and self-preservation properties, like gliders in Conway's Game of LIfe. The behaviors, desires, and powers of communities, are not remotely the same as those of any individual member, or even the set of such properties of all of the constituent members together – as I said, their properties are fundamentally emergent.

Therefore I am not an individualist by virtue of my denial of the ontological existence of communities, but by virtue of my belief that communities are evil and should be avoided as much as possible. They are, at best, an evil of necessity, made necessary by how much greater their powers are than any single individual or even the sum of individual efforts, but that does not change the fundamental threat they pose to individual thought, expression, and self-determination.

Thus it is my belief that communities should be viewed as temporary, local, ephemeral, and utilitarian – individuals should get together when necessary to achieve some desire, but then as soon as that job is done, the community should evaporate as much as possible – no remainder of loyalty to the group as a whole, or abstractions such as names for the group or flags for it, should continue to exist to haunt its members after the fact. If the goal to which the community is dedicated is known to be reoccurring or constant, then some low level amount of continuous organization and contact must be maintained, but it should be kept to a minimum. Absolutely no permanent or consistently-recurring organizational structures, such as leaders, organizers, representatives, spokespeople, democratic assemblies, councils, meetings, bureaucracies, or anything else should be maintained between individual instances of gathering – such things should be created in the moment they are needed, constructed of different people and places each time if possible, and torn down completely when they are no longer needed. It doesn't matter if they're nominally "horizontal" or "non-hierarchical", organization in all its forms is inherently a danger to free thought, action, and life. Need for such things should also be kept as minimal as possible through distributed, stigmergic organization whenever possible.

Why do I have this antagonistic view of communities?

I find it very strange that so many so-called anarchists seem to have an intense bigotry against homeschooling, and a strong belief in the superiority and benefit of public schooling. It seems inherently self-contradictory for those who should be fundamentally opposed to centralization, state control, and bureaucracy to embrace public schooling. It seems even more contradictory for those who should reject the regimentation of anyone's lives, the production of people as if by a factory, the structuring of their educational environment by nation-state propaganda, censorship, and corporate interests, and the dictation to any mind what they should learn, know, and be interested in to do so. And yet many do.

I think a large part of this is that in our present culture, the only subculture that has a big enough problem with the culture, structure, and/or teachings of public education, and which is simultaneously powerful enough to carve out concessions and exceptions to make taking their children out of that system possible, has been fundamentalist conservative Christianity. As a result, the homeschooling as a concept seems to be strongly associated with fundamentalist Christianity, bringing with it images of strict, abusive parents, social isolation, poor education, severe indoctrination, and limited life experience. However, obviously, homeschooling is a tool that can be used by others, and in fact I think for anarchists specifically, it offers many great advantages.

Public schooling acclimates children to a world of strict control of where they go and when at all times, of arbitrary control by random authorities, of control over what, when, and how they learn, of arbitrary systems of quantitative assessment being forced on them to make them legible to bureaucratic assessment and control, to police, to institutional punishment. They also raise children in, essentially, a locked cage with a vast mass of largely unsupervised peers, which creates almost prison-like social dynamics, including painful bullying, ostracism, peer pressure and conformism dynamics, and in essence all the absolute worst of the problems of communities, without any of the mitigating factors of adult emotional maturity and experience.

This creates adults who are often deeply and horribly scarred by their experience in numerous ways – think of all the people who learned they can be bullies because they were in high school, or the people who peaked in high school, or those who were savagely bullied and ostracised at the time and carried the trauma of that into adulthood, which can permanently harm their ability to socialize with other adults, or make them resentful – and who are also browbeaten and broken, either into submission or just into burnout and failure.

Public school also places the education of children under a centralized nation-state bureaucracy, and thus subject to political capture and control, and where the corporate nation-state is free to indoctrinate and propagandize them – more subtly than the hamfisted and obvious attempts of fundamentalists, but indoctrinate them just the same.

Additionally, the teaching model of public schools is just horrendous in my opinion: it's far more important to be very deeply knowledgeable and enthusiastic about a small number of things than it is to have a shallow, broad, and unenthusiastic knowledge about a large number of things, and public school, due to its one-size-fits all methodology, can't accommodate that style of teaching at all.

Those who have a small selection of topics that they're deeply interested in and knowledgeable about have something unique and specific to offer the world through that specialization, for two reasons. First, because that specialization – especially with how their individual preferences, other interests, and predilections will mix and change their investigation of any topic – is unique to them, not something many other people have. And second, because you can get exponentially better at a topic through studying it deeply, so they'll be far better in those specializations than other people are even in the sum of the various subjects they know shallow things about. This means they'll feel more purpose, direction, and meaning in their lives, as well as just being more useful to the people around them.

Additionally, by focusing on the selection of topics children are actually interested in, you follow and reinforce their love of learning and exploration. Whereas if you force them to learn an endless litany of factoids about subjects they literally couldn't care less about, they begin to associate learning with listlessness, boredom, resentment – with having things shoved down their throats, with rote memorization, with painful hours bent over a book that is quite literally boring them to tears. This killing of their love of learning is a large part of how we've created such an ignorant, unempathetic, dull society of drones

Implicit in the foregoing is the idea that learning must be student-directed: the job of the teacher should be to teach them how to think, how to read, how to understand, how to remember, how to organize information, how to find it, how to identify reliable sources and cross-reference things, and in general how to be an autodidact; then to keep the curiosity of the students perpetually fed with a feast of reliable textbooks and information as they ask questions, as well as to suggest new avenues of inquiry, or suggest when they may have misunderstood something. The job of the teacher should not be to assign, and certainly not to assign a vast, shallow sea of uninteresting and factory-produced slop for students to consume.

Obviously some general broad base of knowledge is needed, but it should probably be much more limited then it is, and should be provided through the encouragement of students to explore the links between the subjects they're interested in and other subjects, or to satisfy their natural curiosity about the world, which should do enough to provide students with a decent base of general knowledge. Where it does not, we must remember that this is the 21st century, and the vast wealth of textbooks, encyclopedias, and courses available online – if someone knows how to learn, how to identify trustworthy sources, and how to think critically, the internet is a treasure trove. We just don't teach people how to do that in public school, not really.

Furthermore, the strictures of public schooling, with deadlines and due dates, tests with no second chances, quantitative assessments and grades, and all the rest of it, is a recipe for horrible stress and anxiety in students. No one learns well under a deadline, with no second chances before they're just thrust onward, assessed by broad-strokes quantitative metrics that can bring down horrible consequences on their heads if they don't do well on those metrics, because no one learns well under extreme stress. Extreme stress, in fact, tends to make one's mind work worse, and remember less. There's a reason we all joke about not remembering a single thing from high school!

Of course, at this point, some afficionados of fringe educational methods will butt in. What about Montessori education they'll ask – doesn't it satisfy all of the requirements I've outlined above? Yes, and if we had public schools that used Montessori that would be very nice. However, we don't. Moreover, even if we did, they'd still be centralized and state controlled. Why should real anarchists want that?

Moreover, I believe regimentation and quantitative metrics would begin to eventually creep back in, as the general voting population, whose tax money goes to funding the schools, decided they wanted a clear way to see results. When parents are individually on the hook for the costs of their children's education, qualitative metrics are fine, because the parents ostensibly have enough time to assess their children, and are also relatively close to their children and so can absorb a lot of tacit knowledge about how their children are doing; however, when an entire democratic collective is responsible for paying for all their children to be educated, no individual voter has enough time to read through the qualitative assessments for everyone's kids, so they're going to want quantitative ones.

At this point, the inevitable hysteria about "socialization" will arise. How can homeschooled children learn proper social skills, learn to interact with their peers?

Well, I certainly didn't, and I turned out just fine. :)

On a more serious note, it's very easy for homeschooling parents to just drop their kids off to attend public school clubs and/or hang out with the public school kids. My parents did it. You can also form anarchist homeschooling associations in the same way fundamentalist Christians form fundie Christian homeschooling associations, so all your kids can play together or even learn together if you want. It's really not that hard, you just need an ounce of creativity. This also solves the problem of your kids not getting to interact with people from other religions, classes, ethnic groups, queer kids, etc – hopefully, one would think, your local anarchist collective is sufficiently diverse…. right? And if it isn't, you can always fall back on public schools.

One of the things that I've never really understood is the tendency of people to have heroes. To look at one particular idea, achievement, cultural contribution, creation, that someone has made, or even a whole string of them, and conclude from that that they're going to look up to this person as a whole human being – to admire them, imitate them, see them as a role model, whatever.

The reason I don't understand this is that it seems almost like a target location error to me – a confusion. You look up to them, admire them as heroes, for the particular things they've done or contributed, not for their existence as full and complete human beings – in fact, in most cases, you don't even know them as full and complete human beings. So it makes so much more sense to me to admire what they've contributed – the actual thing you care about – and ditch the individual entirely.

Thus, I've never been interested in individuals at all; I'm only interested in ideas, cultures, achievements, creations, contributions. I don't really care very much who made them. To the degree that I even know the names of the people who made them, it's in the same way that I know about brands – vaguely, and usually just as a sort of tag for a Bayesian prior that I'll like whatever else they do in the same domain of the things I previously liked from them. Sometimes I'll pick up fun little anecdotes about them, but that's it. This is especially true for people who were only or mostly notible for their participation in a particular milieu. For instance, I can name a few of the MIT AI Lab hackers, but I don't really care about them as individuals at all. Instead what I care about is what was done at the MIT AI Lab and the culture that was born there.

To be clear, this isn't borne out of some kind of bad experience with meeting your heroes – not at all. I just… don't find individuals as interesting as what they've done. And this is the crucial difference: many people take a retroactive "death of the author" approach when they find out that the creator of something they like also had terrible views or did terrible things, or went on to create some shitty and uninspired things later on; or they'll laugh and shake their heads in a sour grapes manner and say "well, they always say, never meet your heroes!" when they inevitably do meet their heroes, full of hope and respect, and find out they're just people, often shitty ones at that; meanwhile, I'm taking the preemptive approach. I simply don't intrinsically care much who the person is behind a good idea well expressed or executed, or an important contribution, or the core ideas behind a positive culture.

More, my endorsement of one particular idea or contribution to whatever field of theirs is not an endorsement of how they live, how they treat people, anything else they've done or said, or who they hang out with. And for the most part I literally couldn't give less of a shit about any of that either. I might check out the other work they've done along similar lines to the work of theirs I liked, but I don't take it as gospel, or hang my hopes on this also being good. I may support them if I want them to keep doing things, or go to lengths to avoid supporting them if I don't like what they do. But that's not about heroes and hero worship, that's paying for what I want more of. That's market logic. I especially don't back-read the other things they've done or said into the things they've done or said that I like or agree with, if I don't want to – I steal what I want from them and move on, unbeholden to them. Because the insight, wittiness, accuracy, power, or usefulness of (my interpretation of) an idea, even encoded in the original expression it was founded in, doesn't evaporate or change just based on other only transitively related things. That's part of why I have the Mirrors Page on this blog: to hold the ideas that I like and agree with and that have influenced me, detached from their authors – stolen.

This is in contrast to how many on the left seem to process ideas, creations, and achievements, where the author seems to be all-important even as they profess "death of the author": where negative moral properties of the author, or low quality in their other works, or whatever else, seems to cause this need to treat whatever that they liked from that individual as tainted by association, as unclean and impure, and to retroactively rationalize to themselves how it was "really bad all along" in order to make it psychologically easier for them to divest themselves of whatever it was they liked in order to stay morally pure. This is, of course, a horrible tragedy: it causes us to engage with art, or practical achievements, or culture, as an exercise in Christian purity testing and purification, in refusing to associate oneself with things marked impure even for secondary characteristics instead of inherent properties, instead of an exercise in appreciating achievement, passion, and skill. It also causes us to willfully wreck our ability to even clearly see and acknowledge achievement, passion, and skill wherever it arises in an attempt to align our perceptiosn with morality. And worst of all it cuts off our access to these things.

If we instead steal from the author, and kill the author's hallowed place in our heads preemptively, we can allow ourselves to see and engage with art and achievement for what they are and what they bring uniquely to human experience and reality without a moralistic dimension, allow ourselves to take and use what is good and useful for us, without thereby tainting ourselves. This ultimately denies these people power over us, even the power to withdraw their works from us.

I like being anti-social. Those who are pro-social tend not to be able to comprehend this, but I like my independence from the herd, and even my opposition to it. This is not something to be fixed. Any notion of anarchism that does not leave room for someone like me is oppressive. You can't do comrade conversion therapy on me to "fix" my dislike of you people.

Things I believe about intelligence, in no particular order, based on what I've observed in the world:

• Intelligence is multiple, possibly overlapping, innate talents or aptitudes. However, intelligence is not isomorphic to individual skills a person might have. The kinds of intelligence instead grant aptitude for generally broad fields of endeavor, such as:
  • Communication
  • Theory of Mind
  • Visual-Spacial Reasoning
  • Planning
  • Linguistic Reasoning
  • Mathematical Reasoning
  • Pattern Recognition
  • Working Memory
• The last two can generally enhance the speed at which the other forms of intelligence operate, since they allow someone to work faster, or hold more in their head at once, but many very intelligent people have horrible, or just average, memories, and must suppliment them with personal information management systems of various sorts. Likewise, pattern recognition can be as much of a hindrance as a help, and some very intelligent people prefer to manually reason out what a pattern must be instead of jumping to it immediately, to make sure they got it right.
• Intelligence is aptitude, not skill: it means you can learn faster, and have a greater capacity to do complex or novel things with what you learn. But it does not automatically make you good at whatever you try your hand at, or automatically right on first blush about whatever you think about. Don't fall into the trap of armchair reasoning or hubris about fields you know nothing about: intelligence does not absolve you of spending the time to actually properly read, research, and listen to other people to gather information, and understand their perspectives and arguments.
• IQ tests, insofar as they test anything other than being good at tests, being educated, being in good health, etc, test maybe two or three kinds of intelligence (visual-spacial reasoning, pattern recognition and working memory). There are many other aspects which they don't even begin to cover.
• Intelligence is as much about personality as it is about mental capacities/aptitudes:
  • someone who is too prideful or insecure to listen to what others say, revise their ideas when they're wrong, consider alternative ideas or reasons that they might be wrong, or relentlessly pursue possible counter arguments, is likely to be forever locked in a mental prison of their own creation – their stupidity will have a much higher level of complexity, but they will remain stupid, although occasionally have moments of brilliance.
  • someone who is too myopic, who gets so caught up in the technical complexities and details of whatever they're working on that they lose sight of whether their ideas are actually practical to put to use, will actually achieve the overarching goals in the most effective way, or whether their goals are even worth reaching in the first place, is likely to just get stuck digging a rut for their whole lives, missing the larger picture. See also.
  • someone who is too impressed with the beauty of theoretical abstracts which their intelligence allows them to see, despite superficial appearances to the contrary, are really falling into a sub-category of the same failure as the previous point – myopic, useless, missing the forest for the trees, just in a different direction.
  • Someone who has, for whatever reason, become anti-intellectual, who refuses to use their mind, will never gain the benefit of whatever intelligence they may have. Again, their stupidity may be more baroque, but that doesn't change what it is.
  • The most important personality component of intelligence is wanting to think, and being motivated to think and improve one's thinking and learn.
• I don't really know if intelligence can be taught or not. It seems to me that it's probably locked in sometime in early childhood, based on how someone was raised and what they were exposed to, as well as natal or even genetic aptitude factors. But who knows, really. We should try to give everyone the best environment, exposure, education, and support we can, even if they don't seem smart, to see what they can do with it. Doing so will enhance the achievements and lives of even those who aren't notibly intelligent in some way.
• Intelligence isn't a hard requirement for going into any field. It just makes things easier, and makes you more likely to do something really interesting or novel. That's all.
• Intelligence is not an indicator of human worth. We are not equal in intelligence, but there are many other reasons that a human might be worth a lot of things. You can be wise, loyal, have a ton of experience or knowledge on a subject, hardworking, athletic, kind, funny, observant, and any number of other things.

:PROPERTIES:

New horrors are born every day. Many people seem to think there's some kind of obligation to be informed about all of them, to have an opinion on all of them, to have some kind or prepared statement about them to weave them back into the grand narrative of whatever ideological clique you're a member of. More than all of that, many seem to think that there's some sort of obligation to look at these horrors – to stare at them until your eyes bleed, drinking them into your soul, forcing yourself to feel the proper pain, fear, grief, or humiliation. As if that's some kind of penance for not experiencing them yourself, or as if it might help those suffering, or – if it's a horror that may effect you in the future – as if it will do anything to avert it.

They're wrong. This won't help anyone. This won't make you a better person. This won't even make you more philosophically correct.

Instead, focus on what can be practically done, and who is effected, in widening circles.

If you're the one affected by the horror, do what you can to alleviate it; if you might in the future be effected by it, do what you can to prepare for it; and once you've done those things, forget about it for the moment. You'll deal with the rest when it confronts you in the street – only then will dealing with it more become necessary. In the meantime, focus on what you can do to make your life better, and on making sure you continue doing the things that give your life meaning, whether that's taking jogs, or petting your pets, or walking with your partner, or writing, or drawing, or programming.

If the horror affects your friends and/or family, or will in the future, then try to find ways to help or comfort or prepare them. And once you've exhausted the options – again, forget. You and they will deal with the future when it arrives. In the meantime, spend time with them. Enjoy life. Try to relax. Focus on doing the things that are most important to you.

If the horror affects your local community, or a subseection thereof, then do the same things as above, on a community level. This is called mutual aid.

And if the horror affects none of these things, then forget about it entirely, and refocus on other, more important things, local to you, your loved ones, or your community. You are not going to have a meaningful impact on national or global policy or politics unless you've already made it your life's mission to do. Be ready and willing to help those who have, if you see an opportunity to do so, but don't let it drain you.

Worrying about things far outside your realm of experience and control is a recipe for exhausting yourself before you've been able to do all you can for the things you can really, truly, meaningfully effect.

Even at the best of times my predominant intellectual ability is being very good at applied ontology: at figuring out the correct categories and organization and architecture of things, at describing what I want and following the logic through. Not creative or lateral thinking. My brain is like a Bugatti Veyron: very fast in a straight line.

This is very helpful for things like programming and writing in some sense, because I'm very good at seeing the joints in reality and describing things how they need to be described to work correctly. It's also very helpful for things like argumentation and philosophy, because I can usually immediately spot where others have made a leap in logic, or are relying on intuition, because I usually won't be able to automatically follow them. This means I either have to sit down and construct a linear argument to get me where they're going or make them do it, in the process usually clarifying the leap and seeing if it's actually valid. Sometimes I'll make automatic leaps or intuitions too without noticing it (I just can't do it on command) and usually being such a linear thinker can help with that as well, because then I can just revisit the text later and immediately see the gaps, because I won't be able to follow them anymore.

This way of thinking can also be extremely detremental to things like doing proofs, or poetry, or at times even in my own chosen fields when lateral thinking is required: I can sometimes get stuck down one set of train tracks, and not be able to hop the tracks to another path in order to solve a problem. I'm not really sure how to solve this in the general case, but usually asking for help is enough to get me going again.

I'm very tired, but I think it's finally time to talk about this. So excuse the awkward prose, and focus on the ideas.

I've spent a lot of time in leftist circles, via social media (up until a year ago, when I quit cold turkey after a particularly unpleasant couple weeks) and in person. I've begun seeing a pattern in the thoughts and actions of leftists that sincerely and deeply disturbs me. It's not just in other leftists, either, but in myself as well, that I see this pattern of actions and thoughts have taken hold, effecting my instincts and viewpoints in a way that I believe is deeply counterproductive. I haven't written about it anywhere before – just spoken about it in private with my friends (all other trans leftists, who share the same experiences and misgivings) – simply because it's a problem that, at least in part, conservatives have identified first, and given the nature of the problem itself, that's not likely to make me any friends. But no one I don't trust reads this blog anyway, so I think it's worth trying to get my thoughts out on this.

The symptoms of this problem include, but are not limited to:

1. An unwillingness to engage with, and consider the possible nuggets of insight or good analysis that might be found in, ideas, art, or even people, one might disagree with somewhat, or even disagree with overall – unless, of course, the way in which they disagree is that they're "more radical" in a direction you already like. So for instance, deeply considering the work of someone who says insane things in the general vector of what you agree with is fine, but deeply considering the work of someone who might offer a sincere challenge to your premises is not. This creates a dogmatic, intellectually cloistered environment where only pre-approved ideas, nothing challenging, new, or uncomfortable, can be introduced.
2. A use of the source of an idea or a piece of art as a cheap and easy thought-stopping cliche to dismiss it, without grappling with what it is actually saying or what might be worthwhile about it (see point 1). So if something is Western it's automatically imperialist and can be ignored; if it comes from a white straight man, it's "mansplaining" and can likewise be ignored, etc. This stems out of the slow conversion of the geneological method as found among postmodern philosophers – where the origins and development of a work or idea is used to interpret it and its possible influences, successes, and failures – into a mere genetic fallacy. This creates an environment of shallow refusal to engage with ideas, and silencing of individuals for their inherent qualities.
3. A pervasive application of guilt by association. Combined with the previous points, this is a powerful problem: this creates a culture of surveillance and paranoia even for members of the in-group. Worse, it generates a constant policing of the ideological purity of any group or community that has fallen victim to these symptoms, creating a group that is fundamentally insular and exclusive: if you can only associate with people who completely agree with you on every subject that you think matters, then you can't gather a wide, diverse, cross-cutting group of people around some common single goal in order to achieve it (which will automatically garner good will and support from that wide group for your other tasks and possibly eventually woo them to your side). You have to create a small clique of ideologically "correct" people and somehow achieve everything with that small number – this converts no one, or very few people, to your side, and is also deeply ineffective usually, not to mention usually creating unaccountable in-groups that claim to be representatives of much broader communities when nobody elected them or even really agrees with their ideology.
4. A delight in applying what can only be termed as the logic of the pillory: responding to (percieved, or actual) misdeeds by drumming up as large a crowd as possible for a public humiliation of the wrongdoer, with no clear way to atone for the wrongdoing, or appease the crowd, except either perpetual (demanded at random intervals) self-debasement for their pleasure, or disappearance from public life. This creates a situation where:
   • There's no productive path for genuinely rehabilitating and reintegrating someone who's done wrong into their community, so there's no healthy healing process, nothing productive to be had, only eternal vitriol. The mob is simply too decentralized for any concrete "end" to the public humiliation and punishment, and even if there were a possibility of such, it wouldn't happen, because they were unified only around the logic of the pillory – that's the only means of "righting" wrongs they actually know or care about.
   • Those who are accused of wrongdoing will mostly double down, since there's no way out of the perpetual humiliation and ejection from public life anyway, so why also admit you're wrong on top of it; and those who don't are completely broken people by the end of the ordeal, when the mob loses interest.
   • The actual victims of any harm, if they exist, are either further traumatized by the harms inflicted upon them being dragged into the public eye and endlessly discussed and litigated and hurled around, or even discouraged from coming out with their concerns in the first place, because maybe they don't want to see the person who may have harmed them attacked this way. Feelings can be complex.
   • Victims are totally ignored – both in how they want any harm to be settled, and in helping them meet their needs and heal – because all the focus is on attacking and humiliating "the enemy."
   • Lives are permanently destroyed, even if the wrongdoer deserves a second chance, not just because there is no path to forgiveness and reintegration, but because this kind of public humiliation can utterly destroy a person physically and mentally, and also because a common component of the public humiliation is getting them fired from their jobs and cast out of all other communities they may have been a part of, even if they harmed no one else there.
   • No real effort is put in to determine whether the wrongdoer is actually responsible for what they were accused of, simply because it is impossible for a decentralized mob to do such a thing – some may do it, but they won't be able convince the others of whatever conclusion they come to, because once again, the mob was generated and unified around the collective effervescence of attacking a worthy target in unison.
   • The worst aspects of humanity come to the fore: what a "wrongdoer" presents is a "justified" "acceptable" target for all the hate, violence, and meanness lurking in the hearts of people who otherwise must pretend at all times to be "nice."
   • Worst of all, those who are most deserving of this kind of attack, insofar as anyone can be said to be – the powerful, the wealthy, the unempathetic, the abusers, the extremely bigoted, they'll all be able to shrug off all these attacks with ease. They'll ignore the public humiliation or enjoy doubling down or trolling, because they already don't care what the people who call them out think, they already don't care who they hurt, and they already have the power/privilege to survive any impact on their jobs or the rest of their life. Whereas those who are often least deserving – the hyper-marginalized, the ones that actually agree with the values of the mob attacking them deeply – will be the ones most utterly destroyed.
5. A priggish focus on enforcing obscure and constantly-changing linguistic rules, under threat of either pure dismissal (points 1, 2) or pillorying (point 4), as opposed to a sincere analysis of what's in the heart of a person – consequently making it very difficult for those of older generations, or who are simply not as "in the know," or who have slightly different beliefs about certain words, to interact or be heard or feel welcome in their spaces even when their hearts are in the right place. Also refocusing the discussion from matters of serious import to matters of mere linguistic rearrangement.
6. A perpectual race on the euphamism treadmill, concomittant to the previous point.
7. A desire to chase out of existence completely words that are necessary to describe things we experience in our everyday lives – such as the word "stupid."
8. Very relevant to this topic, an immediate and knee-jerk dismissal of any point made which is similar to a point made by someone who is considered an enemy or a heretic, even if that point is made from a different standpoint, or with a different intention or direction, or just happens to be correct despite originating from an evil man or a heretic.
9. The very possibility of someone who has not had personal experience with something having a useful opinion on it is totally dismissed – a sort of vulgar standpoint epistemology. There is some kernel of truth to this – those with personal experiences have a lot more data to work with – but also much falsehood, as it is possible, by carefully listening to many people with differing opinions on an experence, and studying it empiricially, to arrive at a workable knowledge of it, and one's ground-level personal experiences with something can be wildly distorted and selective. Checking your privilege has been transformed from a way to ground yourself in humility and open curiosity, and remind yourself you don't know everything, to a way to humiliate and silence people, to shut them up.
10. A sort of hierarchy of victimization, whereby only the suffering and problems of those who experience the most victimization matter at all. If you experience less – god forbid if you experience the least – victimization as a result of your innate characteristics, your problems simply don't matter; in fact, you'll be mocked for them. As if caring about problems is a zero sum game, or as if dealing with the problems even more privileged people face won't help all of us, because we all live in the same society. So for instance, the problems a cis white straight man might face, or even sometimes a white trans woman if we're not obsequious enough, since we're really seen men (having male privilege, male socialization), will be mocked and dismissed, and things that hurt people only matter if they happen to hurt a marginalized group (so for instance, misandry has to be phrased as hurting trans women or trans men in order to get anybody to listen.)
11. A focus on using guilt as a weapon to get people to support the cause, instead of actually talking about what the cause has to offer each person. This of course never convinces anyone who doesn't already share your values.

In essence, what I'm talking about is "the woke mind virus."

The crucial difference between my analysis and the analysis of reactionaries regarding it is that I'm able to separate the fundamental projects of social justice from the harmful sort of secular religion which has grown up around those fundamental projects and critiques, and I'm only rejecting the latter, not the former. Another difference is that I don't see this as inherent or unique to the left, or the project of social justice, or liberals, or progressives, or anything like that. This is very much in effect across every part of the political spectrum and has been a thing which exists throughout all of history. The final difference is that I'm not arguing for the platforming of deeply harmful ideas – the way the New York Times has platformed transphobic (and totally unevidenced) narratives in their opinion pics – just the ability to seriously consider ideas we may disagree with (including whether they are actually harmful or not) ourselves, through things like reading articles already written.

The difference between my analysis of this issue and some of the nascent analyses from other leftists on this issue is primarily that I don't think this is a problem that remotely only exists with the "online" left. This is a problem I and my friends have seen plenty in person too. This isn't surprising, either – the people that post online also exist in the real world, too, and it's awfully convenient to assume that such people would take no part in real world leftist communities and activism.

My point with this post is that this is a problem, and that we need to stop denying it, and deal with it instead. Part of this problem is that it renders woke leftists intellectually barren, narrow-minded, and dogmatic as well as hopelessly paralyzed in every-tightening circles of internal purity policing. Part of the problem is that this renders the woke left largely utterly useless for achieving anything practical, for really trying to help anyone in their broader community, because they can't engage with and work together with anyone different from them. But the biggest part of the problem is what has been demonstrated by the recent 2024 election of Donald Trump for his second term: the fact that this woke mentality has totally alienated broad swathes of the population. If you're a cis straight white man who's on the fence politically, which ideological movement will you join, the one that seems constantly occupied with internally policing itself for ideological and terminological purity according to rules you can't even begin to comprehend or keep up with, and who will dismiss, silence, and usually revile you unless you roll over and show your belly at every opportunity just due to the very fact of your immutable characteristics, and which seems totally uninterested in actually dealing with any of the problems you have, or will you join the ideological movement that woos you with promises of supremacy and a return to glory days, and which claims to love you for exactly what you are?

Whenever I see jokes or post-meta-ironic (but actually sincere) statements made about how men are all evil, or inferior, or should be castrated, or killed, or how they're all dangerous, or predators, or abusers, or disposable; or even if I see more subtle or toned-down versions of the same mentality, I react very negatively. You might ask why – after all, I'm a trans woman. Those thoughts aren't directed at me!

First, the fact that something isn't directed at me shouldn't mean I can't speak up against something I think is wrong. And that kind of bigotry or prejudice is wrong even if it is directed at a dominant group in society, because that prejudice can still deeply hurt individual members of that dominant group who may not get all the benefits of their social group's dominance for various reasons. The patriarchy might be so far out of your reach that no joke can hurt it, but the shy, deeply insecure man who was probably abused during childhood like we all were, who is isolated from and an outcast from patriarchy in every way, who is maybe poor, or black? He'll feel it. So will the trans man next to him.

This is why the logic that "misandry can't be real, because it isn't systemic" is wrong. Prejudice is always wrong, because it can always still cause harm to individuals it is directed at, even if the vague abstract "group" you think those individuals are a part of, and many other members in that group, may not be harmed by it.

Second, I was a boy once. I identified as one. I acted and lived as one. I had some inkling something was wrong – some sense of longing, but it had not taken solid form yet, so I really was a boy. Don't try to tell me otherwise. And the women who make these jokes, if they had met my boy self, would have made these jokes in front of him too, included him in that group of "men" and thought about him the same way. And they may argue that these jokes and thoughts don't apply to me now, but I have not changed in personality or moral qualities since the boy I was, which means that I don't see why they don't. If they would have made those jokes and thought those thoughts then, then they apply to me now, even if they would deny it based on post hoc logic.

Moreover, thirdly, as a trans woman – a butch one at that – my perceived womanhood, my perceived femininity is constantly percarious, and whenever it falters, whenever I am perceived as a man (as I inevitably will be, even in queer spaces), the attitudes toward men that these spaces have will inevitably be applied to me, so I have a vested interest in ensuring that that doesn't lead to pervasive transmisogyny directed at me for being too masculine (I highly recommend reading that link in full).

Finally, the fact that these jokes and thoughts are born as a reaction to how the patriarchy traumatizes and systemically oppresses women is no justification at all. Trauma is not a fucking excuse for prejudice, all of you should know that by now from listening to TERFs talk about trans women, or Karens talk about Black men.

See also, , which you really must read to fully understand the gravity of what I'm saying.

ADDENDUM: The transmisogyny vignettes got reposted to r/CuratedTumblr again. So as usual, we get a bunch of people pointing out, correctly in my opinion, that the reason the original writer is facing what she is, is fact that AMAB people are viewed as inherently violent and sexual sociopaths, combined with the fact that trans women are viewed as only probationarily women and really just as men in disguise, and thus as invaders into women's spaces and wolves in sheep's clothing, even by other queer people, which makes us a much more clear and present threat than just the average man to people who view men that way. The original writer even points that out – that the problem at the root of many of her experiences is that she's only very precariously viewed as a woman, and one wrong move will have her viewed as an outsider, a threat, a man again.

But of course we can't have anyone point this out without the classic dogpile of Tumblr Queers arriving to say that misandry – this prejudiced view of men, and how it hurts people – isn't real, it's really transmisogyny only, and accuse the people with the correct analysis above of saying or thinking that trans women are men when all they are saying is that other people view us that way, and accuse them of redirecting the conversation from trans women to men when the entire point is to point out that trans women are affected by it more severely, and nitpick their language and pronoun use for evidence to dismiss their actual points.

As if analyzing this through the lens of transmisognyny isn't essentially just playing a definition game to redefine the terms so that you can ignore something that's inconvenient for you. Because it's essentially saying that misandry, which is what this clearly is, when it affects trans women, is this very real thing with this special name, but when it affects anyone else, including trans men, it simply doesn't exist. Even though it's clearly the same thing. They'll even say amazing things like, "it's not massandry, it's just gender essentialism That views men as inherently sexually violent, but this isn't actually discrimination or prejudice against men."

Especially ironic considering this treatment — where your gender is permanently on probation, and if you are perceived as in any way masculine, you are treated as a threat — IS NOT IN THE LEAST WHAT TRANSMISOGYNY EVEN MEANS. That word was defined to mean the negative treatment of trans women for our femininity because we are perceived as failed or feminine men. It doesn't even apply in this situation, but people are just using it as a word to mean any kind of discrimination trans women may face in order to Avoid having to face up to the actuality.

It's ironic that the person who wrote the original series of vignettes is actually one of these people. She has a "DNI if you think misandry is real".