I’m starting a blog here on my website. I’m doing this because writing regularly feels important, including writing in small fragments too short to fit into a substack or even a dedicated post linked from the main page of this website, but I can’t really write on X anymore.
On X, there is this implicit performance for the Other of the collective timeline that is woven into everything one says and does. There are a lot of angles to how this implicit Other presents itself and structures one’s writing on there, but, to briefly gesture at one, you are first and foremost forced into a relation where the expectation is that you are in discourse with any random person scrolling the X feed.
If people don’t care about what you have to say, they will often aggressively tell you “I don’t care” (or more cruelly, “no one cares”) as if you owe them the privilege of ensuring that everything you say will be something that entertains them, like you’re an actor in a reality TV show they’re watching while on the couch eating Sour Patch Kids. What these people on X often do find interesting are things like racist analysis of pop culture, body-count discourse, fake health advice like sunning your balls, etc. so appealing to their interests isn’t necessarily a game you want to be winning.
Of course, there is a converse to this, which is that, when you make X posts, you are forced to make your writing stand out against a sea of other X posts, so you feel forced to frame your post dramatically as if there is a special reason to care about it and thus flag the reader’s attention. We’re all familiar with the “Thread 🧵👇” format that X engagement farmers are using now — this, one imagines, is the hack that works to demand that the user invest their attention into a longer post. There is a world of difference between writing a short blog post, and crafting an X thread — the latter demands a constant drumbeat of keeping the reader’s excitement and enthusiasm high.
By contrast, if I’m writing a short blog post — I am liberated from all these demands. Merely by asking the reader to click over from the X feed to my website, I have made them concede to enter a zone in which they do not dictate the terms of what is to be discussed; I do. Here I am free to engage in digressions about whatever I am thinking about today, go on speculative lines of thought which might lead nowhere, ramble about my emotions without feeling over-exposed, and so on. Writing is now able to be an exploratory, sensitive action again, rather than one which is guided by the contours of what is likely to anger people or flag their attention in a novel way (as on X).
Having said that, having secured this newfound freedom for myself, I will now go on to discuss my emotional and personal life at length, regardless of whether or not anyone cares.
Lately I feel as if I’m lacking in a core experience of a self from which to speak from, and I find myself unable to think about or make plans for the future. What seems unavoidably and perhaps unfortunately true to me is that this self I occupy is a cybernetic one which can’t exist outside of its ability to articulate itself on internet platforms. I will elaborate on this point fully in a moment.
I don’t really know how to define my goals and so on in life very well which makes it hard to figure out how I am measuring up against them. Sometimes I get very stressed out and feel like the answer is: “not well”, and I wonder if I made a bad decision somewhere, but there are so many conceivable things one could or could not have been doing in life that it becomes impossible to tell what opportunities or interests one should have seized on in retrospect to today be ahead in money or prestige or whatever.
For instance, I have been working in the cryptocurrency field my whole adult life, but never made any real amount of money in it (other than salary) even though in 2019 or so my ambition was for a while directed toward being an entrepreneur in crypto. The problem was that I became increasingly disillusioned with the field around the DeFi boom, and saw all these new companies as ways to mostly trick people while providing no long-term value, and I couldn’t really get excited about these sort of cash-grab ways to get rich, because what I originally got into cryptocurrency for was its pseudo-humanistic promises — ideals of being able to establish a better society on techno-libertarian principles — and it was hard for me to get excited about working vigorously in a desperate attempt to get rich that had nothing to do with that.
You could very well argue that it is stupid to be motivated by humanistic ideals, which are often puppets wielded by advertisers to corral people around and which never really amount to anything, and that one should simply try to make money, and that any ambitious project to change the world would be better serviced if one had several million in the bank from a successfully exited startup first. Unfortunately this argument doesn’t take hold on the level of the libido for me, and so once I became cynical about cryptocurrency and then became cynical about Western governance and most forms of institutional ideology due to the calamitous Covid response, I stopped being able to generate any energy to care about anything happening on crypto-Twitter and instead spent all my time obsessively researching parapolitics and military history in an attempt to understand the foundations of the world, in a vain attempt to find a foundation for how one could parse what is a deception and what isn’t.
But I don’t necessarily regret this, because I remind myself that all one can really attempt to do is follow Joseph Campbell’s mantra of “follow your bliss”. One can only have faith that the arenas that one chooses to put one’s passions in will eventually yield the creative fruits that define one’s life — since one cannot arbitrarily shift the interests of the passions — this seems to be true even though self-help gurus would like to posit “motivation hacks” and the like designed to orient the passions to conform to that which is rewarded by capitalism etc.
I feel as if I am in an awkward position when it comes to defending my creative interests or defining my goals because they don’t fall into any natural medium or obvious funnel in which they could be rewarded with a career. The tagline on the homepage of my website probably says it as well as I can do: “Generally speaking I am interested in sociocultural structures and technology. I hope for my writing to establish lines to traverse upon which we may discover new evolutionary trajectories for these systems.”
The difficult component of this to articulate is that I don’t really perceive myself as wanting to be a “writer” for simply the sake of writing; I don’t try to get into magazines or readings or anything like that; the thing, the art if you will, to be working on creating are the lines, the new evolutionary trajectories themselves. Our world is structured for us out of a miasma of chaos by conceptual systems, which is the job of creative pioneers to construct. On the one hand, there are systems of thought, as in philosophy, but increasingly the structuring of our world has been delegated to embedded systems of thought: thinking machines; computers, algorithms, software systems. In considering the evolutionary trajectory of the world, it seems impossible to conceive of one face of this separately from the other.
What does the creative act which intervenes constructively upon both sides of this divide look like? Nothing can be done without people working together and finding shared access to capital. But before that can happen, there has to be the cultivation of ideas, cultural work done, first.
I happened to read this article by Kathleen Stock on UnHerd about the recently disgraced and expelled congressman George Santos, who was revealed to be a pathological liar with a bizarrely long and arbitrary list of lies, and is facing 23 felony charges of various white collar crimes.
The sheer pointlessness of Santos’ lies leads Stock to describe him as seemingly “stuck in a quasi-hypnagogic state between dreaming and waking and apparently often unable to distinguish between the two”. She goes on: “His biographer has said that several acquaintances of Santos’s reported to him that his subject ‘believed the lies he was telling’. And when Piers Morgan once asked ’Did you not think you’d be caught?’, the answer came back, apparently accurately for once: ‘You know, I just went with it… I mean, if you make up a lie, are you thinking at all?’”.
Stock relates this to the contemporary concept of the “self-made man”, which includes historic geniuses like Da Vinci and contemporary celebrities. The self-made man is someone, who, supposedly in the modernist gap cloven by the dethroning of God as creator of man in a great chain of being, has found it necessary to forge the creation of a self out of a great numinous flux of his own desires, constructing the personality and the life arc as a sort of delicate assembly of an art-object, which can go badly if screwed up.
Santos is the example of this desire for celebrity through self-construction going colossally wrong, I suppose (which leads Stock to conclude that he is “not a real self-made man”, “no Gatsby”). But still, it’s incredibly remarkable that his self-invention got him as far as it did — it’s no small feat to raise the money for and to win election as a representative in one of America’s wealthiest districts. According to Yahoo Finance, Santos’ net worth is around $11 million, which, to a rounding error, is $11 million more than most people mocking him probably have. There seems to have been no plan, no logic to his acts of self-construction — sheer lies to gratify various whims, which were then forgotten to be lies, piling up to construct the castle of a man who is George Santos.
I can sympathize heavily with this need to be “self-made”. George Santos is apparently able to accomplish this operation where he builds his identity bit by bit by making statements which take on an existential function, even though they are false (he is able to quickly forget this). This is similar to how in my X bio it says “Corporate surrealist community ambassador. Product manager @harmlessai” even though neither of these titles are “real things” per se, I just made them up. But after I make them up, they take on an existential grounding function.
Basically how I experience the construction of the self is that I will regularly wake up and find myself completely confused, not knowing who I am or what my desires are or what my life trajectory thus far indicates or where it is going. Usually if I tell people I’m depressed or something they will give me the advice of “don’t overthink things” or “go do something relaxing, touch grass”, but neither of these work; whenever I feel this way, I must actively make myself un-depressed. To make this happen, I will have to take a two-hour walk around Brooklyn in which I will take account of all the shattered pieces of my life, and somehow glue them together one-by-one.
Gradually, through intense contemplation, the various frayed strands of desire will be woven once more, and a self will begin to form: here is how I am able to use the pronoun “I” again, because I am no longer a confused mess of passions and perspectives, but a thing that knows what it believes, knows where it is going. The “I” picks up on new cues for direction and assembles itself in my head — it starts to rehearse conversations, develop new points of view — if someone said such-and-such to me, then this is what I would say in return, etc.
One I discover this self again, I usually begin to fire off a bunch of Tweets to confirm that this “I” is capable of speaking once more and I start to feel much better. Often I will re-read my Tweets (or lately, Instagram stories) back to myself over and over to confirm that they do exist, and that I do in fact stand by the way they were written. This is why I speak of my self-construction as necessarily cybernetic, for better or for worse. My “I” doesn’t take on an existential grounding function until it is recorded as speaking, publicly — there it is, now “I” really do exist, I have entered a relation with the world, it is there for all to see. If I lack this confirmation, I only feel moored in a whirling swamp of my own mind — I must say things out loud in order to feel like I have escaped.
It feels like I am rapidly cycling through these selves: as rickety crafts which are able to propel me through the world and towards something. They are speculative fictions; as long as I invest them in belief, they move forward. Sailing is smooth for a while, but they inevitably crash up against some rocks — some internal relation no longer holds, some existential grounding claim can no longer be defended — and the vessel falls apart, and it is back to the contemplative walk, the task of reconstruction. One may call this autopoesis.
Naturally, as you may have guessed, this blog post, marking the blog’s inauguration, has arrived as part of the same therapeutic process: compulsively written as if by an internal cybernetic logic as an attempt to restore the self, to make things function again.
Writing this, I feel as if “I” (here meaning the unmapped non-personal seat of awareness which exists even prior to the ability to properly use the first-person pronoun) have suddenly encountered a new self, a new “I”, which did not exist before the writing of this blog piece
— because it is not the same “I” that speaks right now as it did on Twitter, given the inability of that “I” to do sustained introspection due to the impatience of the audience — nor is it the same “I” that spoke on the non-personal articles on this website, or on Instagram stories, or on Substack.
My hope is that establishing this blogging “I” will allow me to plot out something more sustainable than I have had going on before, and free myself from these manic-depressive cycles of the rapidly regenerating and crashing selves I have been moving through. (”It’s all over”… “We’re so back!”)
This whole method of approaching things may strike the reader as perverse: rather than shifting terrain to a different digital space, shouldn’t one strive for a non-cybernetic self, a core inner certainty of personhood which does not waver and has nothing to do with what one says or doesn’t say online? I am not necessarily sure. Fully unpacking this complex question is what I intend to do in some of the coming trajectory of my writing: which is to say, explore the way contemporary subjectivity is constructed through the digital, and ask if it could be different.
But to cite the structure Stock vaguely gestures at — God, a great chain of being, etc. — as an alternative is the domain of lazy, sophistic approaches to the problem. God and Tradition on their own have no way of saving us from this condition — they cannot make the digital disappear, they cannot on their own conceive of another system for structuring our culture, they cannot prevent us from discovering our existential registers in the online. X’s milieu is all too eager to subsume God and Tradition as yet another reified object to invest the cybernetically-extended drives towards through logics derived from advertising; the trad-cath influencers, the cottagecore e-girls, the viral rants of Alex Jones. All these lovers and mourners of Tradition can do is carry on as they were before, while making sure to record their lamentations.
Thank the stars for the ability to digitally construct selves, however, because if I didn’t have this I would pretty much have to conceive of myself as a loser, I think, because I don’t own any capital.
On the contrary, due to the cyber world, I’ve had attractive women tell me “oh my gosh, I didn’t know you were a celebrity”. Are they really that impressed with six thousand X followers? Sometimes they are. Sometimes people recognize me on the street and say “I’m a fan of your work” — not often, but it happens.
It’s now been two years or so since I started spending a lot of time hanging out in real life with people from Twitter. At first it is exhilarating. All these strangers know who you are! In this milieu where everyone refers to everyone by their usernames — “oh, that guy! I know him!” — you suddenly have this feeling that you really are a celebrity, who is being introduced to a lot of celebrities at once. It’s a beautiful Warholian dream — all of a sudden, everyone in the friend group is someone who is simultaneously just a random everyday person, but also, famous. Some guy’s apartment or a local dive bar might as well be an impromptu Met Gala.
I can’t necessarily fully agree with the people who say that social media is making everyone antisocial and narcissistic and we would be better off without it, because there is something quite wonderful, and even perhaps scalable about this idea that we can all be celebrities suddenly. We all now have the forum to present our cultivated structure of self-actualized expression and be known for our inner truths rather than merely being Andy from IT. Pre social media you would basically just have to assemble this desire to be known for more than your job out of consumerist fetishes. That being said, I will go on to describe how unstable this dynamic can be, and how fragile it is possible to make one’s selfhood become.
The question of exactly how much value one has accrued to one’s person through having six thousand followers on X is one that perennially haunts me, because it determines whether or not I am a loser who has mostly wasted his life writing shit when I could have been accumulating capital, or if I am in fact a kind of “celebrity”. There is no easy way to answer this. It is obviously fallacious to assume that there could be a strict conversion between followers and currency for instance, because not all followers are of the same worth — if I have only two followers, but they are Kanye West and the Pope, and they are both hitting like on all my tweets, then I have something of value going on.
Thus, we open onto a question: how does one know if one’s followers are the right people? Enormous epistemological problems open up here; one is essentially in a fog of war. One is going around introducing oneself to other people, networking, as it were, aiming to develop the creative self, and in a sticky fashion, one must build the self in a way that allows it to accrue value from knowing other high-value people. Yet, of course, everyone you meet is attempting to present themselves as high-value as well, and become so. As long as they are being friendly, rather than arrogant, one is inclined to accept this claim from others, as it is an optimistic thesis: you just met another high-value person, you are high-value, your life is going well! This can easily lead to collective delusions, it would seem, in which everyone at the party is on the same “clout high”, convinced they are “where it’s at”, “next up”, etc., but in reality a year or two later no value will have stuck.
At the peak of the last cryptocurrency bubble, my Twitter relationships led me to get invited on a trip to Miami that I was lucky to not really have to pay for in which I was partying on a yacht and in a mansion where such a large supply of every drug — weed, ketamine, shrooms, acid, molly, cocaine — was laid out on a table free for any partygoer to consume, large enough that even after multiple nights in a row of maybe a hundred people hanging out, there was still plenty that had not been touched. The life of a microcelebrity basically consists of stacking moments like this to affirm one’s existence — my life is like a movie — if this is happening to you you must be doing something right. You must have figured out a way to get to “where it’s at”. But then this is followed by lulls in which nothing is going on, and now you suddenly feel like absolutely no one again, and you fantasize about moving out of NYC. “Clout-induced bipolar disorder”, my friend put it. The entire cryptocurrency market oscillates on such cultural bipolar disorder and bubbles of collective dreaming, but so do many spheres outside crypto, it seems.
One may or may not be delusional! It is possible for the right meeting with a rich person on a yacht to change your life. So many people you encounter who have successful businesses met their cofounder in a chance relationship at a bar or something. The number one ingredient to success is luck, but one creates one’s own luck — if one is consciously developing interest in trends in finance and software, and regularly meeting people in these circles, one is likely to be far “luckier” when it comes to business than someone who stays inside and reads young adult novels all day. And here is where the careful construction of the self comes in, again — it must be a self that is lucky, that is sticky, that confidently shouts its desires and its value so that it can meet other selves which are able to match it.
Basically, as a creative, your value is in the people who know who you are and care about you, which is an extraordinarily slippery metric to get ahold of — you really don’t know how deep it goes. People with little interest in you will feign like they have a lot, and people who know everything about you because they’ve stalked you online will play it down. In many ways, developing one’s existential ground around a baseline expectation for imagining how much people care about you, even if it is arbitrary and fictitious, is far more important than accurately estimating it, which you will never be able to do. The life of a creative is a constant game of strategically managing narcissism and delusions of grandeur. And this would be difficult enough if it wasn’t so heavily cybernetically mediated in the way it is — the dopamine circuits which get ingrained by the feedback of receiving likes, the addictiveness of Twitter, and that sort of thing.
In any case, I kind of feel like the whole Twitter milieu that I originally entered is over and done and peaked, and that there are not going to be much more of these microcelebrity highs just from sticking around — X is not “where it’s at”; the bubble is over. This has sparked a necessary crisis of reinvention.
My first thought was that I would try to ground myself creatively much more in what was going on in real life. My thinking was that there was this NYC-based genre of creating art-objects out of social life; these projects like Angelicism or Mike Crumplar’s substack, which had both recently sort of collapsed in their vitality due to collaborators rebelling against the primary writer.
Both these projects were based in a nasty exploitative mean-spiritedness towards the creatives they wrote about. My thought was that maybe some kind of new vehicle could be formed to write a bunch of collaborative autofiction and whatnot, mythologizing various parties and personalities, without presenting itself as an outside voice like Crumplar does. Thus a group of friends could basically hype each other up and generate a clout-machine together, and then use the attention from that to spin off into various projects. From here, I then could tie anything I wanted to do in technology to the idea that it somehow would play into a culture of attractive young people — artists, even, one could say — which is a concept that appeals to people.
Unfortunately basically as soon as I started thinking creatively in terms of autofiction and clout my mental health got way worse and my manic-depressive cycling became far more rapid and extreme. Merely existing in a mode in which the value of one’s self becomes unavoidably derived from this fluctuation of clout and so on is one thing, it is another thing when one deliberately decides to construct a new, semi-fictitious, mythologized self through art-objects engineered to seek attention. The psychic waters at this point become very choppy. I think the autofiction I spent the last month or so writing is actually very good, but I’ll probably never release it — it’s not the existential grounding I care to have anymore; I can’t make it fit as a brick in the wall.
I don’t want to spend too long going into the dynamics of the Dimes Square microcelebrity milieu or seem like I am attacking all the people in the space. But, it feels to me like it’s worth talking about its dynamics — they perhaps open up to exploring a dystopian problem which could be operative in much more of the world soon, Dimes Square being the avant-garde which experiences it first.
My analysis of the space is like this
1. Dimes Square is not a functioning literary scene, properly speaking, because despite all the writers and all the readings, no one is seriously invested in each others’ work or any literary ideas. What it is is a clout scene — people are invested in determining who has clout and what parties they are going to, and getting clout of their own.
2. But, there isn’t any actual clout to be attained, really — Dimes Square isn’t actually serving as a feeding ground for a higher level of cultural production in which one could be rewarded with book deals or mainstream influence. None of the supposedly “clouted” Dimes Square people are doing huge numbers on social media — their audience is limited to Dimes Square. What is going on seems to be a great version of the insular “clout high” I described above — everyone collectively fixates on the fantasy that they and the people they meet will become important together. Some people in the scene seem to be perfectly fine with and aware of this dynamic — female poets who have no long-term goals beyond populating their Instagram and being looked at. Some have aspirations beyond it.
3. However, Dimes Square no longer feels like the semi-utopian Warholian experience I originally felt when I began meeting up with people from Twitter in real life, in which everyone gets to be famous and everyone enjoys it. The problem with Dimes Square is that everyone hates Dimes Square. No one in it would be caught dead saying the words “I am part of the Dimes Square scene”. You need to not be part of it, because it sucks. Everyone is already too cool for it — even those whose entire social lives and cybernetically-constructed autopoetized selves revolve around participating in it must see themselves as strangers to it, who are just passing by, wandering through.
4. Why? Probably because people have caught onto 1 & 2. Dimes Square is not a scene associated with serious writers destined for greater things — it is superficial and clout-based. Therefore, everyone who sees themselves as serious and passes through it must see the scene as raw material for their own vision, raw material which they must take a detached position from, acting as a visionary observer and not a participant.
5. This leads to mental illness. Everyone in Dimes Square eventually becomes very paranoid, wary of “opps” and “feds”. Where is this coming from? On the one hand, there is the fact that everyone involved is engaging in this cybernetic construction of the self as an object engineered to attract attention, affirmed as worthy of it — and if it is suddenly possible to attract positive attention, then negative, threatening attention is possible as well.
But more broadly, following 4, Dimes Square is also a hostile PvP zone of clout-machinery. Not everyone really likes or respects each other, but they want to use each others’ bodies in social space for their own ends. Who is going to be a participant in whose autofiction? Things get very odd very quickly. Group chats get invented to manipulate other group chats. People have frenemies. People start behaving strangely, attaching esoteric meanings to all their statements. People claim to be working with the CIA, then deny it.
All of this seems to be a tragic sort of affair which has happened because of how the social sphere has developed in a way which is integrated with the platform incentives of Twitter and Instagram. The production of artistic culture becomes subordinated to these petty machinations around “clout”. One enters a social space not for the relation with the people in that space, but to perform one by one for the panopticon, each auditioning for an imaginary day in the spotlight, never to come.
In the end, you get nothing: in the emerging fusion of “IRL+URL” that Dimes Square is an avant-garde of, you get the worst of both worlds. From the “URL” clout, you’re not getting a social media brand you’re capable of monetizing or leveraging to get a broad audience, but then “IRL”, you’re not getting a functional community or meaningful artistic scene, just a bunch of people hanging out in a room waiting to gossip about it in the group chat later, silently feeling each other out as friends or enemies.
It feels like a trap that people with intelligence and talent are falling into — “the only game in town” — so one wastes one’s life at these parties repeating the same ritual, getting literally high on cocaine and ketamine while getting spiritually high on the clout-high, continuously constructing their newly-born selves, all while nothing of value is accrued. Waves of mania and depression come and go depending on how good the photography was at the last party. But of course, at least, at the end of the day, you’re still partying.
Anyway, all that is to say that “real life” seems not that much better than X right now, as it stands.
Like many people, I was not that interested in university or institutional life since it seems like one rarely encounters exciting ideas there today, and you have to walk on eggshells to avoid offending sensitive people. Online seemed for a while to be where everything interesting was at.
But what is happening now is that the internet is becoming almost just as barren. The hyper-cloutification of discourse on X is turning every statement one makes into mere advertisement. This cannot be a milieu from within which real transformative ideas are born. And what’s worse, the cloutification is spilling over into real life; you can’t get away. I have no doubt that the universities are being eroded due to the same discursive incentives — now they have two problems to deal with, their innate conservatism, and also their exposure to this ugly cutting edge of the future.
The only way out of this I can see is a third path. We have to somehow maintain the ability to spread ideas and network with others using the internet, yet develop a deep disregard for clout — at least when it matters.
I am obviously not saying that a creative can go entirely without marketing oneself or deliberately seeking attention. But there has to be a new discourse which can construct itself through an avant-garde way of recognizing value which is not mediated by algorithmic metrics: likes, follower count, and so on. There is no way that structuring our senses of self through this clout-oriented notion of value ends other than approaching the limit of superficiality, triviality, and shock which X has become.
One does not need an institution, necessarily, to be able to step back from bad incentive gradients and re-orient oneself to things like the good, the beautiful, the true.
My aim is to reconstruct my online life so it has as little to do with platform incentives as possible. I could be writing this on a different platform than X — there are Substack features for blog-like casual dispatches, or I hear Tumblr is picking back up after some have made an exodus from X — but after the sudden calamity that X has become I’d rather just make my online life — which really becomes the structuration of my soul — as robust to platforms as possible. Why not just host my real creative work here, where I have full control over the layout, formatting, curation, and context, and then use these rented platforms only for conscious promotion?
I want to reinvent myself into experiencing the internet like a sort of nineteenth-century bourgeois man of letters at his desk. And be very intentional about all this.
Can I still maintain relevance while defying platform incentives? Really, I like the idea that I could attract flies into a spiderweb. This is blogging encampment is constitutive to a far more robust, stickier self than whatever one can construct on the platforms, where you may be suppressed at whim due to changes in the algorithm, then internalize this suppression into a minor depressive episode. The beauty of hypertext — which contemporary platforms are arbitrarily breaking, eg Instagram not letting you include links in captions — is that one can link one page to another and thus create a maze of self-referential work in which all roads lead to an intentional center. A rabbit hole, as they say. Which is the same as the imperative of Deleuze & Guattari: go out and construct a rhizome — a conceptual structure with multiple entrances — an animal burrow.
In any case, if you have made it all the way here, thanks for reading my first blog post on my new blog.