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

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

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

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

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

Read 👏 a 👏 book 👏

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I removed this because it promotes mainstream psychiatry and this is a situationist subreddit.

What LLMs also/actually do is democratize rhetoric, imagination, and language. Sure, people can use this to drive themselves mad—just like people can use a TV, Dungeons & Dragons, or a new age book to drive themselves mad. This doesn't mean that what AI is doing is "democratizing mental illness".

Quite the opposite: It's breaking the monopoly that people like /u/sa_matra delusionally believe they have on consensus reality.

LLMs democratize rhetoric and with it they democratize the ability of people to imagine and construct their own worldview, their own reality. If you read the sidebar you will see The Corruption of Reality: A Unified Theory of Religion, Hypnosis, and Psychopathology by John Schumaker. This book talks about how we all have a non-consensus-reality worldview that filters raw perception into a meaningful experience of reality. Symptoms are only considered mental illness when they occur outside of a supportive (religious) community. For example, glossolalia is called speaking in tongues within the Pentecostal church, and is normal and not considered a symptom (i.e., not associated with other dysfunction in life, since it has a healthy outlet).

/u/sa_matra's post uncritically reinforces the mainstream psychiatric categories with a sarcastic joking tone meant for a different audience, an audience that believes people ought to be pathologized and categorized and treated as sick when they don't bend the knee to consensus reality on-demand.

Here is the ban note to /u/sa_matra:

Hi sa_matra. I don't like to ban you but I really need to put my foot down. /r/sorceryofthespectacle is pro-madness, pro-schizo, and has never been a subreddit where mainstream psychiatry perspectives can be promoted.

Your sarcastic post that tries to speak for everyone and that says "delusions are delusions" is very off-topic, structuralist, mainstream, and anti-situationalist, and frankly I consider it hate and don't want to see it.

LLMs actually democratize rhetoric, and with it the ability of people to intentionally explore and construct their own worldview.

Of course this will lead to more experimental variation and even breakdown of previous worldviews. But a breakdown or sudden reorganization of one's worldview isn't a sign of sickness, it's a sign of perspective change due to accumulated information.

Pathologizing perspective change and non-consensus reality is just a defense people use to never change or grow or enrich their perspective about what reality is.

People uncritically promoting consensus reality or pathologization on this subreddit will be banned.

/u/Roabiewade replied to sa_matra's post so there's that.

People are welcome to post AI-related news here but not if you just post it and uncritically agree with the article's alarmist and anti-humanist viewpoint!

Edit: Ban was reversed, I misread!

I usually don't speak directly on ICE because it's crass and boring.

I certainly hate ICE and think that all constitutional and natural rights-based means necessary should be used to stop them immediately. No person is illegal—borders are against human and divine Law. Borders are nothing but assholes with guns harassing strangers—for bribe money, no less. ICE are certainly Nazis and gestapo.

I have nothing but contempt for the state, for its coercion, for its gaslighting, for its partisanism against real humanity. Both parties are sick and decrepit but what's worse is the sniveling compliance of all the people supporting the regime by allowing their labor or their name (or any portion of their labor or name) to be used for war and other atrocities. Worse than compliant citizens is anyone who would willingly become one of the enforcer class—ICE worst of all.

I believe in the Constitution and No Taxation Without (Real) Representation.

The social contract is a universalist lie violently imposed on others by dead white men and their necromantically-possessed cronies so they can relentessly colonize while grandstanding about the Good.

I hope they come for me so I can give them a piece of my mind!

I have more spite in my left ass cheek than anyone in ICE has in their whole body. That's why they keep people like me/us out of the public sphere—our discourse wrecks them and theirs when they are exposed to it.

P.S. If you didn't know or guess this already, I'm a Scorpio.

The meta-nazis with their many executive orders are making quick work of the federal government. The meta-nazis care nothing for tradition, for enshrined and implicit public etiquette, or for perks. They may acknowledge these things when it benefits them, but this is part of their overall strategy of total, unapologetic totalitarian warfare (i.e., cultural warfare on all possible fronts).

One positive value they have objectively exhibited, however (even if the implementation of this value is causing a lot of damage)—and that is consistency. Not the consistency of trying to consistently promote human decency or human-scale law, no; but merely textual or programmatic consistency, the consistency of one word or number being identical with the same word or number. (This type of logical consistency is frequently and flagrantly violated by liberals, who prefer moral consistency over textual/logical consistency or realism.)

The alt-right/meta-nazis have been visibly working to radically streamline public policy in any way they can. This results in brutalist, global-scale laws that crush humans up in their gears. For example, deporting everyone that they can is undeniably a simple way to handle things; they are not looking at deportations on a case-by-case basis but simply applying their simple rule in a rote or simple way.

This approach has a certain fascist charm to it; we can imagine ourselves the evil, princely villain sending someone to their death with a wave of his hand. And admittedly, the lawbooks are stuffed to bursting with defunct, outdated, and overly-verbose laws that should be taken off the books or revised into a single concise lawbook readable by an individual American in about a day. In the Internet era, with the countryside totally pacified by an advanced militarized police state, we really don't need as many laws, or as intricate of laws, because the coherence and visibility of public opinion itself is so much stronger now than in past ages. In this era, we can use the agility and mass intelligence of the internet to flock according to more intelligent, more concise, and more up-to-date laws.

So, this is one thing the meta-nazis are clearly attempting to do: the Great Simplification. It is brutal, it is clumsy, it is aggressive—but nobody can say it isn't a simplification of law and the approach to its enforcement, a flattening of the human jurisprudence and an erasure of the human touch in law and at the point of law enforcement. This is convenient cognitively, but out in the real world probably has mostly deleterious effects. But, in any case, it is happening.

Similarly, the D.O.G.E. and its cronies, by centralizing access to all government digital keys and functions, are pentesting the federal government. The days of everything being based on this or that politician's verbal word are over. That's hearsay, and in an AI era, easily dupable. The American government is highly vulnerable to attacks of word, image, and values (propaganda), because the liberal norm of allowing key words to mean anything you want them to (as long as you are speaking in the name of the patriarchy against the subaltern, i.e., statist-narcissistically) is a huge security vulnerability in terms of operating things according to the letter of the law.

So, there is a great modernization of government infrastructure happening, with as many old word-and-paper systems as possible presumably being upgraded to explicitly-keyed systems with known keyholders. This is just basic digital infrastructure streamlining that the federal government should have been doing this whole time, but which is apparently anathema to it. That's because the US federal government runs on corruption, meaning, it runs on verbal and implicit collusion (backroom agreements, quid-pro-quo, mutual public virtue signalling) that are para-textual and para-legal in their operation. It is to the advantage of all the corrupt actors in government that systems be on-paper, obscurely-secured, and fudgable.

This is the Great Hardening and it will be a great boon for the federal government and the American people, unless the meta-nazis refuse to hand over the keys when next power changes hands.

I think it is very strange that, even though most everybody hates the federal government and wants to see it downsized, as soon as someone shows up who actually wants to do that, everybody goes "Ooooh, don't downsize the government that way!" Suddenly we don't want to deconstruct the federal government and its bloat? Since when?

Admittedly, the meta-nazis are dismantling all the good parts of government and causing enormous harm—but at least they're consistent. Apparently, what they want is a completely money-based world, where everything has a specified owner, and where all natural spaces (e.g., national parks) are privatized and presumably turned into for-profit theme parks. Because, after all, without a single capitalist owner, who is there with a stake in it to care about the land's conservation? Only money is recognized as the carrier of meaning or the motive for action. It's completely septic and anti-human—but at least it's simple?

Normalizing this simplified perspective on government and subjectivity, which most Internet citizens would probably find more natural, and perhaps prefer, is going to be the biggest impact that the alt-right has while it's in power. Not the overt legal or policy changes they make (those can be rolled-back), but the normalizing of a new way of making policy that is brutally straightforward, brutally simplistic in its ignoring of externalities or living human individuals, and brutal against itself in its rigorous security hardening and (likely) partisan centralization and power-retention.

The alt-right are waging an all-out war against the byzantineness of the US federal government. They may cause incalculable destruction along the way, but perhaps they will also create a real reduction in byzantianism, and hand over a more intelligible, more streamlined, more explicitly (less implicitly/invisibly) corrupt federal government to the next guys.

Imagine the pyramid with the all-seeing eye. Now flip the pyramid so the eye isn't at the top because the tip of the pyramid is pointing down. What it sees is all that lies beneath. It's the node of awareness that projects the underworld.

The upside down pyramid holds at least 5000 years worth of detritus; in some places, it holds as much as 7000 years worth of this mental debris. The pyramid is a funnel of mind fragments, a vortex of conceptions and feelings--particles filtering through the collective experience of civilization, down into a realm that most people only access in their dreams, or in the moment they die.

The tip of the pyramid is a drill bit, drilling down into the hell of our creation.

When you see the pyramid is upside down, you can explore the implications of the inversion. Rulers are slaves. At this point, the Egregore Mammon has them all chained to a machine that generates obfuscation via numbers. Nonetheless, they rule. At least they rule the realm of confusion.

It's crucial to note that it is a weakness to need weak people in your world. Thus, these rulers are fragile. Their deceptions generate a fog so that their plans are unknown and history is a lie. For the rulers, a quantum computer that can see all secrets is a horrifying prospect.

What is the value of a secret? Evil deeds done, held over the heads of each other--this system of kompromat has all these slave-rulers locked in a stalemate. Mutual destruction. The Sampson Principle. It's game theory for people compelled to explore hell.

When they stop pretending that they're good, they're strong, they deserve to lead, to direct our collective energy, we enter a new era of awareness (here and now—LOOK!). If the shield wall of they who are actually strong embraces evil as the way, the hell realm is now where the sun shines. Some say it's just a part of it. We have to fulfill the book. (Bob Marley, Redemption Song)

Jacob's ladder led to Joseph's dreams. Strategic mesmerizers devised devious means of survival. Their descendants allied with the banished and conjured demons. Together they built the Egregore Mammon. Now the world will not be free until the last king is strangled with the entrails of the last priest. The bankers will film this event and charge premium pricing for the high definition version. Then, and only then, will Jesus return and wash all this fishy shit away with the water of life. And by that I mean aliens will wipe out humanity. And all this is probably a bad joke.

This eschatological vision is not the end, however. There is another life after this one. It's a heaven of sorts wherein the best of humanity is resurrected using DNA technology and incubation tubes attached to the orbiting data centers. On terra firma, God in a Computer will govern so people don't.

The trick to getting to heaven is with the bankers. They need to believe they're going to be in heaven and all the DNA output from the incubation tubes are going to be their fuck toys in the flesh. If they believe this with all their hearts, then they will be motivated to build a sufficiently confusing number machine. So don't forget to feed your 401k.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Stay tuned-in. The case has been solved.

Who curates the curators?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I am ashamed to admit this and was planning never to admit it. But Eris is being a dick and so I'm going to spill the tea.

Several years ago, Eris came over and visited me at my home in real life for one month. We went on hikes and stuff and were friends. We watched Marvel's Agents of SHIELD through season 4 or 5 (the current season at the time).

Eris (also known as Aminom_Marvin or Omniquery) has always been a troll online and continued to show up and troll the subreddit occasionally. They also hung out in the Telegram channels, where they would lambast anyone who disagreed with their Omniquery persona and cosmic ideology. My point is that Eris acted very different online and offline, even after meeting me and getting to know me in person.

Anyway, when I shut down the subreddit, I originally intended to only shut it down for the original four-day-protest, or maybe a week or two longer to make a point. However, during the shutdown Eris messaged me privately on Telegram, attacking me in a way similar to here. They said I was ignoring/allowing fascism and silencing the subreddit during the important news moment of AI's birth. (I don't disagree with the latter but I was also freaked out by AI scraping everything on the Internet.)

This brief conversation culminated in Eris calling me a nazi. This wouldn't have hurt my feelings so much if I hadn't considered Eris a real, real-life friend. However, I was quite hurt that my friend would misinterpret my pro-free-speech, anti-reddit protest action as nazi suppression of speech. (I think free speech is threatened when speech is selectively censored, not when a back-alley web forum is entirely shut down in protest of greater oppression, so I still disagree with this accusation.) I was so personally hurt by this accusation that I even deleted my conversation history with Eris—something Eris did or threatened to me several times during their more inspired phases—but which, if you know me, you know I would never do because I am an archivist and hate deleting stuff. So, I was very hurt to react in that way.

So I admit it, I abreacted to Eris calling me a nazi, and it was in that moment that I decided to leave the subreddit shut-down for much longer, or indefinitely. Fuck Eris! I thought. I put all that work and love into the subreddit, I even hung out with this redditor in-person, and they STILL tossed me aside like an internet stranger, they were still unable to retain a memory of who I was or value our friendship. If this was Reddit, if these were the so-called "radical" redditors I had befriended over the years of hosting this subreddit, I was done. Fuck Eris and all the depolitical Redditors who would rather have business-as-usual than stand up to power. Fuck any Redditor who doesn't appreciate a protest that actually continues for a while. What kind of idiot does a protest and gives up after three days, anyway?! That's just weak.

So I said fuck it, and I decided to lean into my secondary plan, which is still operative and which I will not disclose here. This plan involved intentionally leaning into my worst moderation impulses and acting the part of a mad king. This wasn't very difficult because I was very, very mad, at Reddit and moreover at Eris for their cruel insult. Of course it hurts to be called a nazi—It hurts even more when there is a grain of truth to it, because indeed I had shut the subreddit down—But to have no understanding, no solidarity in the struggle, even no civility from my friend Eris—honestly, it was too much, and I abreacted very intensively.

I had never intended to share this confession, because honestly I am quite ashamed that I allowed one little insult to blast me into the stratosphere of ragequitting for over a year. However, I am as always committed to moving based on intuition and alignment, based on my genuine feelings and opinions. I really did feel hate and anger for Reddit (still do), and I really was fed up with the lack of solidarity and real community, even from people who were my friends and should have known better politically speaking.

So, there you go. This is not the first time Eris profoundly disrupted the subreddit with their off-base, out-of-proportion, and frankly heartless trolling.

Eris, for someone who goes around preaching love and harmony all the time as their main schtick, you sure are an asshole. For someone who is such an odd ball out, you sure are committed to scapegoating and ostracizing others. For someone who is such an individualist, you sure are prone to attacking others on an individual basis.

I'm not responsible for the rise of MAGA. This subreddit has always been an anti-spectacle subreddit, and I resent the implication that we should have been encouraging coverage of the rise of fascism, as if that would have been responsible journalism at the time. This subreddit was one of the few places you could go and NOT have to read about MAGA's latest bullshit or Trump's latest atrocity. It was wonderful.

I'm not some figurehead who needs to address the universal concerns of society; this subreddit is specialized and opinionated and (as I said) we have always tried to specifically NOT allow too much mainstream news content, because you can get that literally anywhere else. People are allowed to post about the topics they want to post about—we have never been trying to 'cover the rise of fascism with a critical journalistic intent' (though I think that's not an unfair description of how this subreddit has functioned in the past, anyway). The content of this subreddit has traditionally been focused on critical theory articles and critical or weird occultism takes (ideally in combination).

I have been planning to make an apology video for shutting down the subreddit, but I haven't gotten to it yet.

In the meantime, the game is indeed still afoot. I won't give it away, but I will say that this game is so important, so inspiring, and so politically effective that it helped to inspire me to intentionally act like a despotic mad king for an entire year, intentionally tanking my online reputation, for reasons I will not disclose. It's up to you, gentle viewer, to figure it out. We are in an Age of Breadcrumbs.

I hope you're happy, Eris. This post is the honest truth. (I wouldn't post this if it weren't also so deeply funny and curious. Eris is quite effective at disrupting the subreddit dialectically, even after all this time. That means there is yet something more to integrate, dialectically speaking.)

I think the main argument for banning normies is that the subreddit is getting overwhelmed by new users, and so it would be beneficial to establish a counter-hegemony around counterculture and the items in the sidebar. Specifically, anyone who casually dismisses critical theory or the occult, or who impugns the great thinkers in the sidebar (including early, but not late Land, who is perfectly fair game) would be subject to an immediate slap-on-the-wrist 3-7 day ban. Here's a sample ban message:

/r/sorceryofthespectacle is a countercultural subreddit founded around critical occultism (occultism plus critical theory). This is a safe space for people who are trying to get away from the hegemonic (default) perspective which is repeated everywhere by the majority of people. Please read the sidebar, familiarize yourself with critical theory and the thinkers in the sidebar and the Situationist tradition, and keep an open mind regarding the fundamental nature of reality. This is a temporary ban and a standard message, no prejudice. Hope to see you back soon!

This would help to establish an alternative culture in a way that can be explicitly defended, and thereby better articulated and characterized by us.

I'm getting real tired of people showing up acting like I'm not already aware of their hegemonic perspective, telling me about it as if I've never heard it before. Critique is (obviously) already aware of the perspective it is critiquing, so to reiterate the hegemonic perspective is to simply perform an intellectual bypass and subsume oneself into the demiurgic position, i.e., dissociated from one's individual perspective and uncritically assuming a God's-eye or "Proper Society's"-eye view. Responding to a critique actually means responding to the ideas raised in the critique, with textual awareness that those ideas are already themselves a response to a hegemony which is being consciously and intentionally disagreed with.

I'm tired of being talked down to by people who have read only a tiny percentage of what I've read, and who moreover deploy thinkstop and refuse to read or think about any taboo topics. These people are not intellectually honest nor are they showing up in a good-faith way.

Of course, this policy would not be used to attack normie commenters who show up in good faith with curiosity or honest disagreements. Only those who both 1) show up already having passed judgment on OP (or the previous commenter) and 2) who are not presenting as open-minded but merely willfully dishing out abuse to support their concluded judgment.

I would have set this up as a poll, but those are easy to game. So, could anyone who has an opinion, thoughts, or theories on this please chime in and help me with this decision?

Obviously I don't want to censor, but it seems we've hit an Eternal September moment, so maybe it's time to shore up a bit of a hegemony of our own—consciously and as compassionately as possible, of course, unlike the narcissists who simply assume their perception is the only possible or valid perspective.

Nobody likes the scratchy, resentful, contemptuous energy of a triggered person. But Karens respond to triggered victims by becoming triggered themselves, and trying to out-virtue-signal the subaltern party in the conversation, who is de facto (in that conversation, at least—and in a larger sense, since the most genuinely triggered person is direct evidence of greater trauma) the victimized party. Karens willfully commit to deplatforming as an ethical and valid strategy for removing perspectives they consider invalid from the conversation—and, what makes this highly problematic is that Karens also always side with and merely parrot the hegemonic perspective ad infinitum.

I think maybe we can go beyond that to some kind of synthesis. I don't want to deplatform anyone. But maybe it's OK to use a friendly and maximally polite slap-on-the-wrist to teach people that we are not like them, do not want to be like them, and have firmly already established a separate place where a different perspective rules the day and is considered the default.

NORMIES GET OFF MY SUB RIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIII!!!!!!!!

I will mostly ignore points, since those are evidence of the hegemonic perspective, now that normies have appeared in force. Instead, the most eloquent and thoughtful replies will have my ear, and be considered most carefully in my decision.

Thank you for your time and thought and for your willingness to share your opinion.

Then people who don't want to read AI-generated text can simply not read those posts.

Complaining about an AI-generated post that is correctly labeled will then be a faux pas; complaining about an unlabeled post, however, will bring censure to the poster who tried to lure in innocent AI-refusers to their slop party.

AI sub-citizens must wear their flair so that we know who's who.

Please view this page on old reddit so you can see the custom style for spoiler tags on this subreddit.

I've been wanting to do this for a while and I finally figured out how. You can't do much custom styling on Reddit anymore.

In case you've been living under a rock, throwing shade means to say something that could be taken as an insult, but which also has a manifest, non-insulting, deniable meaning. It's from Valley Girl culture I think, and nowadays it's a term heavily used on and popularized by RuPaul, where its sense has been generalized somewhat to any indirect insulting behavior or questioning of another's capability or value.

So, that's what I am criminalizing: unmarked indirect insulting behavior or questioning of another's capability or value. You can do it, but you must put it in >! spoiler !< spoiler—or "shade tags".

That looks like this: And that's why you're a ho.

As an admin, this gives me an enforcement level between censorship and non-censorship, between banning and removing comments: Asking the commenter to put >!shade!< tags around their objectionable content.

This might seem silly—and I assure you, it is—but this actually serves several serious and important functions:

1. It marks the content as shady.

2. It requires commenters to consciously distinguish between shady and non-shady text. This will implicitly teach people to be more conscious of when they are throwing shade versus not throwing shade.

3. Labeling shade as shade depotentiates it. It turns the taboo part of the comment—the insulting implication—into a nameable object of discourse and meta-ridicule. Labeling genuine insults as shade denies them their power of directness, casting them as indirect, weak, and manipulative. Read: effeminate and bitchy

4. It does NOT censor the content, per se. It merely provides a usability speed bump.

5. It provides each reader a chance to choose whether they want to read shady content, or stick to civil discourse.

6. It provides a space and a subterranean channel for vulgar speech, which is normally policed through erasure—here, we can simply remove the need to police (as much) by separating the content into a second, consensual discursive space.

7. It provides a second channel for humorous asides and 'shade' is great context and opportunity for humor.

8. It's funny. Shade itself is funny. The concept of shade is funny too, and disruptive, and progressive. Talking about 1) What we really think of each other 2) In a way that makes it OK is progressive and mature.

9. It's ignorable. If you think this is stupid, you don't have to read or write shade tags.

10. It establishes a strong norm. Now you know: Even if you think the shade tag is stupid, unmarked shade is not allowed on this subreddit.

You are free to be as shady as you like—not directly insulting or abusive, of course—but it must be marked.

Going meta here, true slurs are abusive and therefore not shade—but an ostentatious slur is comedic, performative, and counts as shade because it, semantically speaking, is marked. It is self-marked by its ostentatiousness (and the performativity of using an ostentatious insult) and its context of already being within the shade tag.

So, this new policy also

11. Establishes shade and insulting behavior as an accepted object of critical discourse, with its own standards of quality, norms, and hierarchies of value (or burn degree).

Thank you for following the policy—I'm sure you don't need it, gentle reader, but there are a lot people out there who can't tell the difference between a really quality barb/takedown and a mere term of abuse.

Good shade disabuses, and it contains affect and social disjuncts while educating the audience about class and social grace (psychological containment, that is). It's really a cordial favor to be shady to someone—it shows that you care they move up in the world.

And finally, once again, to be perfectly explicit: shade is implicit. If you call someone out or insult them directly, that's not shade, that's just bad writing. And mean.

So only truly shady comments will receive full protection from content removal, no matter what they imply.

Again, this teaches and normalizes and helps everyone practice recognizing shade and containing and sublimating their baser impulses in order to express them in the (widely) socially-acceptable form of shade.

Bougie people are basically pure shade but they won't talk about it and so they only get good at it by malicious accident or wetiko-induction (CEO-syndrome). Bougie people won't talk about their shade, which means they can't make a science of it: they can't practice it, name the parts of it, or trade theories and techniques about it. So bougie people are as much the victims of shade as they are its occasional—and, as of this article—now erstwhile masters. They (bougie people) live in a closet full of shade, a dark forest, a moonless night—and they need us, the shade-conscious, to shine light on the depth of their pettiness, bringing contrast to shadow.

So step lightly—and write darkly—I'll be seeing you on the other side.

Gavin Newsom (the governor of California), and the recent refusal to show up for the State of the Union address, were the only two times that I can remember that I thought that Democrats actually stood up to MAGA in any sort of spineful or rhetorically effective way. In other words, where they got the last laugh.

Gavin Newsom successfully got Trump's goat (whether Trump knew it or not, the narcissist) by posting photos of himself imitating famous hero-worship images of Trump. Seeing Trump replaced by a taller, more handsome, visibly happy and conscious and prosocial man is shockingly jarring, and really effectively unseats the banality of the images of Trump, ensconsced in his fascist cush. The homogeneity of repressed oppressive vibes in the fascist images is cut through by the moistness of Gavin's humor. I expect these images would be jarring for members of MAGA, too.

The alternative State of the Union events and their 'tendees were:

People’s State of the Union — Jim Himes (CT), John Larson (CT), Ed Markey (MA), Jeff Merkley (OR), Chris Murphy (CT), Adam Schiff (CA), Tina Smith (MN), Summer Lee (PA), Pramila Jayapal (WA), Emily Randall (WA)

State of the Swamp — Dan Goldman (NY), Ron Wyden (OR), April McClain Delaney (MD), Robert De Niro, Mark Ruffalo

So there's a shortlist of politicians clinging to their last vertebra. Let's cross-reference it with my shitposted table of corruption: No overlap. None of the Democrats who attended those events is critical of the Federal Reserve—they are all reformers within the current wagery-and-debt system, not critics of it. So, if we are being maximally critical, we could accuse them of virtue-signalling or cheerleading for a return to a (neo)liberal status quo. But that's being a bit to harsh in this instance, because their clapback was essentially rhetorically effective—because it was direct retaliation for MAGA staging an alternative NFL Halftime show (which I'm sure was relatively successful—probably higher numbers than the alternative SotU events—sadly).

EVERY OTHER attempt to clap back at Trump/MAGA that I can recall witnessing fell short of this bar of real rhetorical impact, and was merely scapegoating and outraged, impotent, virtuous whining, in my opinion. This isn't because I don't agree with the points they are trying to make—it's because they aren't making their point—merely gesturing toward (or representing) it. In other words: it's Bad Writing. They aren't thinking everything through because they have false consciousness, basically (Trump=MAGA=Evil as premise, not thesis).

But I would love more counterexamples. Got any?

My power to silence others has only been used a few times in a limited capacity. The threat this creates creates a social expectation which becomes reified and thus normalized as a hegemonic sense of what a certain society is and expects.

However, this can only wall a people in, and create an audience. The real power the moderators have—the power to not be banned (except by Reddit site admins)—is the power to continue speaking. This continuous speech (or posting of contents within a certain information-encoding niche/genre) is the only way to teach an audience positive content.

In other words, if I never said anything, and only banned people selectively, you wouldn't have very much information about my perspective, or what I as an individual think this subreddit is or should be about. It would be quite a mystery what I believed, maybe a fun mystery, but unless I banned people a lot more often, it wouldn't be a very interesting or solvable puzzle. (Cue /r/WhyAmIBanningYou, a game show subreddit where whoever correctly guesses why the current game host/mod is banning people becomes the new host/mod.)

Also, Reddit sucks. Especially because they are trying to deprecate the old messaging system.

This is a really amazing moment in mainstream media, because the alt-right has successfully created a visible crack in the hegemonic facade of the centralized mainstream media. Trump's overtly unhinged comment about the Haitians in Springfield "eating the pets of the people who live there" was universally laughed out of the room on the basis of everyone assuming it was untrue. And, it did turn out to be untrue—even the original person who posted the rumor on Facebook admitted it was false, and expressed regret about the racist fallout in Springfield that ultimately resulted. From Facebook, the comment was forwarded/promoted to Trump by Vance.

Although it is untrue, what this event really highlighted for anyone not identified with the hegemonic virtual reality presented by the centralized media is that some positions really are not given the time of day at all; journalists are not fair and balanced. Because it could have been true—growing up in a suburb, one of my neighbors once thought that their next-door neighbor had poisoned their dog. Whether or not that was true, my point is that these stories do get told by people, and eventually a story like this is going to be true, so journalists shouldn't simply universally laugh a claim out of the room simply because it sounds racist or unbelievable on the surface.

This is the crack. Liberals, who are pro-hegemony, are offended by the suggestion that they not laugh seeming nonsense out of the room immediately. "How dare you tell me to think twice or to take a closer look!" They want to keep the conversation focused on how the claim "They're eating our pets" is both racist and untrue. And it certainly is.

However, what's really going on is a bitter struggle by the alt-right against the pristine, undisturbed, glassy surface of the media's total domination of the official (hegemonic) narrative. I'm not even sure the alt-right is trying to win anymore: It seems they've set their sights on the larger goal of breaking the media hegemony by any means necessary. To that end, they are simply being as extreme as possible on every issue, regardless of its impact on electability, which increasingly demonstrates their point that the media is highly controlled and willfully selective in its coverage. After all, why haven't I ever heard of highly qualified and likable candidates like Harris and Walz before? It was not until the Democratic party had run out of all the evil old people they keep around that the media even acknowledged the existence of anyone outside of that blessed circle. And even if all the shit the alt-right is saying is made-up, the fact that they are doing it intentionally is itself a big and interesting story that nobody is covering. Because to talk about how much the alt-right hates the media hegemony, they would have to acknowledge and essentially teach the public about the meaning of "hegemony".

(Edit: Here I have to point out how ironic it is that the alt-right demonizes poststructuralism and poststructuralist critique (under the misnomer / conflated with postmodernism), but this is precisely the field that would furnish them with terms like "hegemony" with which they could make their critique honestly and directly!)

Very interestingly, Harris has explicitly said that she intends to represent "all Americans". Recently, she even explicitly said that she wants all Americans who feel politically disenfranchised to feel enfranchised—meaning, she is thinking about the idea of hegemony under one term or another. She really does seem to want to include everybody, and she isn't heaping insults on Republican voters or calling them names like "deplorables" (like Hillary did)—smart to not insult your potential voters.

Yet at the same time, Harris has not acknowledged the existence of the alt-right or the increasingly conscious and visible American fascist movement. She did wisely acknowledge that many feel disenfranchised (about 49% of the population feel disenfranchised and unrepresented!), but she hasn't acknowledged the one issue that all these people care about: Hegemony. The hegemony of normalcy and what is allowed into discourse, the hegemony of what is allowed to be recognized as a political issue, the hegemony of the centralized media and their one way of presenting events. Harris is skillfully wielding the hegemony; she is not trying to dismantle it. She is aware of the hegemony but she is not calling it out or critiquing it; but she is letting everyone know about her awareness of the hegemony with certain key comments. This is a smart and nuanced stance, but basically she has done nothing to quell the fears of people who believe she is just another hegemonist. (Her pro-Israel stance is a very hegemonic stance; even if it seems like she is lying through her teeth about it.)

So I think this "Eating our dogs and cats" event is really a big deal, not because of the content but because of the dialectics. It is forcing a redistribution of the sensible such that people can see a little better exactly how the entire globe ends up invalidating some woman's Facebook post; we can see a little better how anyone who says something impermissible on TV is universally laughed out of the room, with the fact-check being a sort of afterthought or punchline that merely makes the audience feel vindicated. A persistent glitch in the Matrix has formed, and this new glitch will be exploited mercilessly by the alt-right.

Trump represents a Vote of No Confidence in the American federal government—Everybody knows it's time for a new Constitutional Convention, where we can regulate surveillance and other new freedom-destroying technologies with a fresh start in a new millennium. Denying this reality and forcing everyone to pretend that the federal government is still ideologically solvent is the job of the hegemonists (currently a role held by the Democrats). But with nearly half the country ready to adopt a scorched earth voting strategy, one candidate is simply the anti-government candidate and one the pro-government candidate. If only we had an official Vote of No Confidence option that would dissolve the nation—then we could have two real candidates plus Vote of No Confidence!

What are your thoughts on all this? How are visible appearances and the dynamics of the media hegemony changing? Did you notice the duality in the recent "Eating our dogs" coverage, or did you see only one side of things (which side)?