the nest was my first real try [GENESIS]

I didn’t know it at the time, but when I was appointed mod for a left-aligned gaming community, I set off on the only dream of legacy I’ve ever had. The funny thing is, I didn’t even know it at the time. It came at a perfect time for me, a conflux of social situations that left me with the time and energy to enact this role properly. So I did.

Some time later, that community died. A few of us picked up its corpse, gave it a ritual burial, and let the decomposition feed a new community. Not only that, but a new kind of community. One built on all the ideas of care that I had absorbed over the years. It was built on social justice, but gentle. It was built on queer safety, but there was always room for non-queer people to tend to the seeds of queerness that many already had planted without knowing.

A conflux is a weird thing. It’s an odd moment in spacetime when our comprehension of the world is overwhelmed by the coincidence of things. Maybe many good things are happening at once, or a number of stressors are lining up to assault your mental well being. But there was always something about the idea that bugged me.

A conflux is a weird thing. In the abstract, it’s the human mind trying to justify many threads of our life meeting at one point in time. The idea that this can just happen always bothered me. I didn’t quite know what it was, but I think I have a decent idea now. The happy life that I had been presented with was a lie. There was no future where that happened. There was no way to overcome the various circumstances of my life and be in a place where I can have a stereotypical happy life. In reality, we are all suffering.

a series of unfortunate events [CONFLUX]

I was raised conservative. I was taught reactionary ideas. I was indoctrinated into the capitalist death cult of right wing politics. But it never took hold. Looking at my past, there’s no reason it shouldn’t have, but there was something about it that always bugged me. It seemed like being guarded and assuming everyone is out to get you feels exhausting. In retrospect, it was probably the autism, but I’m glad I can channel that power into this document. It always seemed, to me, that it would be easier to just open your heart. I didn’t have those words, but it was what I practiced. I always felt alienated. I was outgoing as a child, always making friends and being a part of things. I did it because it felt good to me, the fact that I was enacting a praxis of love wouldn’t be clear for nearly four decades.

I have always liked the shiny new things. I always want the latest iPhone, the latest Apple Watch, the latest Xbox. I craved seeing what’s new. I would pore through the entire menu tree of the settings of a new phone. I craved knowledge and experience. My first time online was connecting to a local BBS and playing a drug trading game from the IBM computer my dad bought at a garage sale. I have been online ever since.

Being online is a puzzling thing. We went from living our lives without any concept of global interconnectedness or access to information to having the world and beyond at our fingertips. This was a revolution. The online revolution is a perfect example of acceleration naturally in action. The moment the frameworks to build global interconnectivity were constructed, the internet was an inevitability. You could go further back and say the same for the telephone, or for the Pony Express’ routes, or for ship routes. It has always been at our core to explore, learn, and connect with others and the world around us.

I grew up on the internet. This is a literal statement, of course. The cultures I engaged with were primarily digital. I learned and played online. I sought out community online. Much of the history of the internet is viewed with a negative lens, but I think this presupposes that we would be able to recreate any of that history in the future. Since that isn’t the case, I will lay myself open and proudly say the following:

• The SomethingAwful forums were my introduction to nihilism, and taught me to find moments of joy amidst the chaos of society.
• 4chan was full of opinions that forced me to put them into a dialectical focus, teaching me to spot and examine subversive ideas.
• Tumblr fertilized my creativity, showing me that someone with 1 follower can create something I will enjoy as much as any other piece of art. It also taught me to interact with an open heart by default.
• Twitter made me realize the potential of global communicative interconnectedness as well as its necessity.
• Reddit is where I learned to solidify my personal social justice beliefs.

All of these examples are flawed. Each of these major pieces of the internet has done extreme damage to underserved groups. Each of them lived and died with a legacy of suffering but despite this, they taught me many core beliefs. How do we justify the idea that the internet can be so valuable to the common good and yet so harmful to society as a whole? It is my belief that we justify them as inevitable tools of humankind, fixed points in the timeline that we could never hope to control. Powerful rivers flowing down from the peaks.

death before the lifecycle [ROT]

After the gaming community died, its corpse fertilized a successful community project of r/SRS - the ShitRedditSays official Discord. I and a few others were kept as mods due to our roles in the previous community. We cultivated, we made room to grow, we performed community-to-community outreach, we looked for ways to reach an agreement with other communities to provide mutual safety. I am so thrilled to think of the history of The Nest. Its legacy, its place in time, what future impact it may have, and what impact it’s had that I’m wholly unaware of.

I have learned a lot about death. I have experienced the trauma of the death of people, cultures, and communities I loved. I always found it upsetting that these connections between peoples could be severed, and how that is apparently a normal occurrence. Over the years I have watched this evolve into things like cancel culture, and other social objects that were built upon the concept of ostracization. To me, the feeling of ostracization was heavy and fatal. It felt like I was dying. I never understood why.

The Nest died. I don’t know at what exact point this happened, but I know that it has been dead for some time. The process of growth continued to completion, and all it could do was decay. I know that I accepted the death of the nest some time ago, but I’m not sure when. But despite that acceptance, I had not processed it. Moreover, I had not even began to touch on the weight this death would put on my shoulders.

under attack [SEIGE]

August watched The Nest die. I brought her on after a relatively short membership because I saw in her the same desire to connect with love that I had. I brought the idea to the subcommunity of the mods, and we voted. It passed unanimously. August was aligned with my desires for enacting similar philosophies of community building. She was an amazing mod, one of the best we’ve ever had.

August watched The Nest die. She loved the community as much as I did. I cannot imagine how hard it had to be for her to see that process. My inability to understand the responsibilities of my role in the community must have torn her heart. Late one night she posted a message to mod chat. She told me that I was the reason the community died.

I watched The Nest die. I love this community now as much as I ever have. And I have always loved it wholly, fully. I have had the immense privilege of watching the community grow into something that is rare. A galvanized community of love and care. Additionally, I’ve been able to watch the people within bloom naturally because they were given space to grow. I am confident that The Nest has been a part of this for more people than I could imagine. And I’m at ease with feeling pride in that.

During the resultant chaos of mods arguing, a few key things happened. I understood that August and I were no longer aligned, and that she would likely never stop fighting. I chose to remove her from her role as a mod. At the same time, other long time members that had become mods chose to leave. The shift in the community was clear, lines were drawn, and tribes would soon go to war for supremacy. A nearby community - one with largely prescriptivist and dogmatic views on the world - became the enemy.

The Nest buried tribalism early in its life. There was a time that The Nest was often at war with other communities. These communities fall everywhere across the political alignment spectrum. Liberals hated us for being socialists. Socialists hated us because we refused to participate in the leftist tradition of ostracization by banning anyone with a slightly liberal viewpoint. The people of The Nest, and myself, were aligned in kindness. Restoration. Growth. We allowed a spectrum of views, within the bounds of a consideration for safety. While the 2016 culture wars raged around us, we survived, and shared, and created spaces that were safe for processing and grace.

The Nest chose not to participate in the tribal warfare of the online left. At the time, I had no idea what exactly it meant to choose between participation and non-participation, but I felt good about the choice. If they don’t like us that’s fine, they can exist without negative attention from us, and we ask the same in return. But there are certain consequences to non-participation. I’ll never know what all they are for me, or for The Nest, but I also actively choose to not engage with theory crafting the past. What I do know, given some of the community blacklists I and The Nest ended up on, is that our choices caused a reaction, but I wasn’t exactly sure why.

I received news of August’s passing via a Discord DM. This is a surreal experience initially, but receiving very hard news through Discord DMs is commonplace now. The tool has been chosen by many to facilitate communication. Currently, Discord is dominating this space. And thankfully they are doing it with as much love and care as a for-profit commercial company can. I don’t know what hard news I will hear over Discord next, but I know it will happen. In the case of this story, the effects of the hard news were numerous. I had harbored self-loathing ever since I had removed her from the community, and knowing of her death triggered a major depressive spiral that would last for years, and culminate in my losing touch with reality.

August succumbed to the natural lifecycle. While alive, all people suffer constant damage from entropy and capitalism, and some people take much heavier hits than others. I cannot let myself hold on to the corpse of the August we knew. I am finding a place within me to bury her, and I hope that whatever grows from that is beautiful.

the strength of attribution [AUTHORITY]

Attribution is a capitalist tool for the control of knowledge. Knowledge, specifically, because as a tool its purpose is to allow information without knowledge. In other words, it is a censorship filter. If you aren’t socially notable in some way, at least within your local communities, then your words carry less weight. Like all ideas, this idea was born from necessity, grew and evolved, and has recently died. Initially, the idea of attribution was a way to sanitize some of the earlier global spread of knowledge. Society recognized a need to verify information to some extent, and so it was born. But in this decomposing society we must recognize that the corpse of this social object is being propped up by capitalism. The growth of scepticism taught us to overcorrect, and now almost all of our stock is put is who is saying something, rather than who they are and how to provide them necessary care and resources. Even a racist should have food, water, shelter, love, and self-actualization. Our concern must to be to provide this to everyone in a way that avoids harm regardless of harmful opinions.

I don’t have the ability to put August’s ideas into words. It took me this long to put my own down, and the circumstances that led to that jump were less than ideal. But what I do know is that August believed in unconditional love. She also believed in community building, which is a form of love. All I can do is carry that on, the way everyone does regardless of political alignment. We are all oppressed by capitalist manipulation. We cannot stop capitalism. It must continue until it dies, and we must survive. We cannot do this without unconditional love.

the helicopter story [SEIGE2]

Everyone knows that being a social pariah hurts. It has always hurt, and that knowledge has been carried on by human experience and content throughout history. We wield it’s power for change. This methodology is correct - if someone is being harmful, the community must react by placing distance between the perpetrator of harm and the victim. The missing piece of this methodology is the fact that all humans deserve unconditional love. We must continue to be responsible for the needs of all people in our community, even if they hold harmful views, even if they’ve been forced to live on the outskirts.

The choice to rob another person of their access to their community, to strangle them away from their support network, is ineffable to me. Is the purpose of ostracization to kill the recipient? I believe if asked the answer most people would give is “no,“ but there’s a piece that doesn’t quite make sense. If our intent is to survive, and to show love, then launching psychic assaults against those in our community as a way to punitively correct their thought facilitates neither.

I’m not special. There is no element of my life story that is unique. And as an online queer woman, especially one under the trans umbrella, I experienced one of the most common life events any online trans woman does. I was cancelled.

There is a short story. It was published online in a scifi webzine and was about a person who turned into a helicopter. The story is very good, very well written, and has become known as “the helicopter story.” After the writer published this story and it spread around the social parts of the internet, bored leftist netizens did what they always do - they assumed bad faith.

The person who wrote the helicopter story is unimportant to the moral of their experience. Bad faith was attributed to the content. And if the content is written in bad faith - per internet leftist doctrine - then the writer is acting in bad faith. Per this doctrine, if you act in bad faith, you are a bad person. This line of thought is deeply prevalent, and the inability of the online left to evolve is a huge piece of what led to the final death of leftism. The attribution of bad faith caused the online left’s black and white thinking to trigger. The author was cancelled.

I hate the word “cancelled.” It is used so flippantly, and is so common that the implications of the word have lost all meaning. The practice of ostracizing harmful actors is not new, but its implementation in a world where society has decomposed and a new online culture is born from it is flawed. Cancellation is ostracization. Cancellation is forced isolation. When we approach these situations with this thought in mind - so-and-so was driven to forced isolation by a mob of people on the internet - the glaring inequity of this practice is made clear. When a celebrity is cancelled, they lay in their expensive bed and fume. When an underserved person is cancelled - like the author of the helicopter story - they are left with little to no resources or support. When a celebrity is cancelled, they can simply rely on their pooled resourced and supports. When an online trans woman experiences this same effect, as yet another stressor atop a massive pile of them, the effects are much more severe with a potential of long-term lasting trauma.

I was cancelled. When I removed August from her position as a mod, that set in motion a machine whose only purpose is to generate harm. It is a siege machine designed to dish out punitive punishments without the necessity of considering what we are doing. Being on the receiving end of this engine is harrowing. It plants seeds of paranoia that eat away at you, and the more the engine is focused on you the more drastic the harm. It is a weapon that depletes one’s future. It is a tool of destruction, and leftists have made peace with this fact.

It will be a long time before I am able to process all the harm caused by this machine. I must reconcile within myself being responsible for calling upon this machine to do harm to those I had brought myself to believe were deserving of that harm. I have always felt ill at ease about the use of this weapon, but the social contract of the community of online leftism necessitated that I use it. This is something I have to learn to forgive myself for.

The problem with being online is that the physical realities of ones actions are so far detached from the way we think. This siege engine that the online left has chosen as its primary tool is soaked in blood. I cannot, and likely shouldn’t at this moment in time, allow myself to fathom the toll that this weapon has had. The number of lives that have been lost to it. Cancellation has killed underserved members of our community, and leftists must come to understand and process this fact. The siege engine is a weapon capable of fatal harm. People have died due to the emotional and mental distress of being severed from their communities en masse, and capitalism has looked on gleefully.

The helicopter story is notable to me because it was recommended to me after I spent some time talking about my feelings on how leftism is failing to address most actual societal problems. It was recommended to me not because the value of the content itself would be useful to me, but because of the way that it is so indicative of how the left operates that its author was driven wholly from any community they hoped to engage with and draw support from. It’s the same reason I was recommended Hot Allostatic Load. This story is so far from new, but still buried under the iniquities of the community of the left.

Reading the story of the author of the helicopter story, as well as Hot Allostatic Load and various accelerationist and post-left literature, has given me a lot to think about and process over the years. Watching the world unfold, watching society collapse in front of all of us, is what led me to feel the need to create a new framework. We need a new blueprint to follow, that focuses on avoiding harm and building up those in our community.

it’s why i’m so silly and fun [LOBOTOMY]

Tiktok isn’t special. There’s nothing about it specifically that makes it so essential to the social revolution that it caused to play out. The process of subculture deterretorialization - leading into forced decomposition - is one that we have seen play out a number of times, and several of these past tools went through the lifecycle process and have been fundamental in leading to tiktok’s growth.

Musically was an app that let you record lip sync videos to songs. Culturally, lip syncs are considered frivolous, a thing the immature dabble in before they hone the skill to be something useful to capitalism, or before they stop attempting to sing. This was both the result of and led to a deterritorialization of cringe culture - the metaculture that frowned upon the idea of frivolity and fun. The antithesis of magic.

Vine was an app that let you record seven second videos. A lot of these ended up being little microblogs in video form or the like. The time constraints, however, forced a deterritorialization of content. A seven second video was enough to tell complex stories, or to land incredible jokes. The amount of time, effort, and resources that are required to make “quality” content mattered much less now.

Tiktok is an app that used to let people record 15 second long videos. It now allows for the recording of up to 10 minute long videos, as well as a host of other features like filters, streaming, etc. There is nothing special about the way this app functions. It is carrying on the legacy of Vine, and unintentionally carrying a legacy of deterritorialization.

Humor has been the primary way that humans in our culture have interfaced with nihilism. Joking about the ways in which the world will end are the clearest example of this, but there are many. Tiktok, like its many predecessors, continued to facilitate this. Deterritorializing subcultures en masse was unintended, but its effects were powerful as tiktok became the focus of society under a capitalist crisis. It was not just tiktok, of course, but tiktok during the pandemic. It exploded, and with it the deterritorializing effects that came naturally from the metaculture of tiktok and of its userbase.

Tiktok is an amazing place to experience alienation. The variety of content that fell to this new platform where certain types of content were able to thrive without much in the way of censorship. Tiktok was always criticized for its lack of strong moderation, but in retrospect I believe this was an unintentional feature that positioned tiktok to be the one neutral platform. Facebook and instagram are both owned by meta, and are very deeply controlled by capitalist interest. The result was tiktok becoming on par with twitter as a town hall.

I remember a time, deep in the days of the BLM uprising, that I was on tiktok. I remember seeing a funny video, liking it, and scrolling to the next. It was a recounting of - I believe - some of the things happening with the uprisings at the Dakota pipeline. In this moment I felt a pang of alienation that never left the back of my mind.

Alienation is the term I am using to describe the feeling of something being off. Dialectic thought is a built-in feature of humans. When we observe something that doesn’t make sense, it is a default reaction to wonder what causes these seemingly mutually exclusive truths to be true. This is a tool used by therapists and mental health professional, as well as politicians and philosophers, so it seems like an idea out of the realm of the understanding of someone not specifically interested in those fields. However, it is the core mechanic of how we build understandings of ourselves and the world around us. It is crucial that we learn and train that mechanic, to gain proficiency with it, so that it can be applied to bigger thoughts. Dialectic thought is at the core of this document and the bigger philosophical framework it’s based upon. With this tool we can understand the way tiktok sparked a cultural revolution.

One other definition that should be discussed is that of “revolution.” Revolutions are commonly seen as a fundamental shift in the way a government operates, and this makes sense considering what we’ve been able to observe of the past, but revolutions are not always armed uprisings. A revolution is, at its core, a fundamental shift in cultural communication. An armed revolution has typically grown from a need for change in the way the people communicate with the government and visa versa. This is an accurate application of the word, but its greater understanding is necessary.

Tiktok sparked a revolution. The deterritorialization of subcultures en masse, combined with the deep alienation from capitalism that all people had to process during lockdown, led to a fundamental difference in how we communicate. This was already happening, but these moments accelerated the death of how we discuss things and gave privileged society access to new information brought to them by the tiktok suggestion algorithm. These are ideas that likely a person may not have engaged with due to how that algorithm works. I believe theses can be written about the affects of tiktok and its algorithm on society, but for this document we will simply come away with the understanding that the breadth of information, the lack of cultural context that might cause people to be cautious of the platform, and the already present global societal unrest at a time when we were forced to be away from workplaces was the confluence that led to today.

It’s worth noting what twitter’s role in this played. Another major player in the realm of globally interconnected social interactions, twitter was the first to become the online global town hall. We watched as horror after horror play out in front of us. We had access to livestreams of every atrocity, and twitter’s failing moderation allowed all kinds of ideas to grow. This has been detrimental to society in our more hyperlocal spacetime, the negative effects of twitter’s failure to moderate harm are vast, and this was noticed. Ultimately, as the various culture wars raged on, twitter came under fire. When a hoarder with an electric car company decided to play chicken with the governing bodies and offered to purchase twitter, he lost the game and was forced to trade a large portion of his wealth for a dying relic.

Twitter died. As the news that this hoarder may buy twitter spread, the people embraced nihilism. Floods of tweets were sent about how people would leave the site, how it would fundamentally change, how it was on its deathbed. These felt alarmist at the time, but they were correct. Twitter died with the announcement that the hoarder would purchase the service. From that moment onward, the management of its decomposition has been largely ignored. Its death was another moment of alienation for most of its users.

The result of this mass alienation of privileged society led to a strong lean into nihilism. Even twitter can die. Everything dies. And while it’s taboo to mourn the death of things considered unnecessary, many people understood that the necessity of an online town hall was clear. Losing access to this firehose of information - or more accurately having much of the population of the site move away from it - made people realize that we are not allowed control of the things we as a society need.

It’s hard to “prove” this. Proof is its own tool that has seen much use for capitalist purposes, controlling the knowledge that’s seen as worthy of our attention. At one time this was necessary, and will continue to be throughout capitalism, but its presence is also stifling to the conversations we have around important social and cultural phenomenon. The idea that we must prove a statement for it to be true is rooted in dialectics, but forces us to view things from a slant. I can never show proof that twitter entered its decomposition state, but many know - even without the words to state it - that it’s true.

The result is a new type of culture. We must avoid attributing these concepts to age, however, and understand that anyone can allow themselves to perform the dialectic thought and reckless deterritorialization that “gen z” has naturally learned in this new world. This generation still engages with the political content to some extent, but they have leaned into the nihilism of absurdist humor. This is a coping mechanism, ultimately, with which to survive under the oppression of the systems around us. It is not that there is an inherent understanding of the necessary tools of dialectics and deterritorialization, but rather that the world they were born into necessitated them to learn. Those outside of that generation are just as capable of this. They learn early on that information is easily available, and they must find a way to parse it within themselves. All people must learn the same to survive.

drinking from the firehose [REVOLUTION]

The planet is dying. It’s not really, the planet will continue to live. However, if we cannot find a way to influence the trajectory of capitalism, humankind will not survive. It is still, and always will be, necessary for communities to choose to expend their resources and support on the management of this kind of change. We cannot kill capitalism, but we can survive it. That should be the goal.

As the internet continues to decompose, access to digital communication has spread almost universally amongst privileged society. This has given people access to an infinite supply of information, which allows us to create any kind of knowledge we want. The previous hard boundaries within which the political right and left wings lived has eroded. All knowledge has been thrown into a giant mixing pot and what has come from it is astounding. The technological advances due to this phenomenon have become the backbone of acceleration. This is a natural process, and to understand and observe this is necessary for our understanding of society as it stands.

Everyone has been radicalized. There is hardly a person on earth that has not been given wide access to information that has allowed them to create radical knowledge within themselves. This process has also been an accelerant, as it has given the space for works that influence this one. A strong understanding of survival under capitalism exists because of this. The works that will be influenced by all current writing that come after this one will be pivotal to further survival as capitalism evolves new methods of harm and control.

The internet is in a unique position. The entire privileged world has access to any other connected device, and has shaped how we as a society function. If the internet were to be lost, as reductive as that idea is, we would face a global cultural crisis. The internet is at the core of our society, which is why its influence has been so all-encompassing. It makes sense that the reaction would be to make sure that the right ideas are out there so that we can passively radicalize against capitalism. But that methodology no longer works.

The internet influences culture. When looking at metaculture, there is no greater driving force than the internet. For this reason, I believe the internet has replaced metaculture. All content is online now, as is the vast majority of communication. It is no longer a facilitator of global communication, it is global communication. The internet is culture. We must understand and treat it as such. We must understand that nearly nothing can influence metaculture unless it is accessible online. And we must understand that influencing the metaculture means swaying the popular opinion online. Since we cannot focus core resources and support to change that, we must avoid any tactic that relies on swaying the online public opinion.

We drank from the firehose. Everyone did, there was no choice but to do so. The only effect this could have ever had was to radicalize everyone. There are ideologies so similar that it would be hard to note the differences at first blush, and yet they live on opposite sides of the political “aisle.” The core identities of conservatism and leftism are no longer always easily distinguishable. We must understand that there are no longer sides for us to bring people to. This is why it is necessary to shift our focus to a philosophy of community building regardless of the ideologies of its members. We must agree that building enriching lives for all people is the common call. Those who do not yet understand the threat capitalism places upon that idea will come to the conclusion themselves that no matter how hard they work, community survival is far from guaranteed regardless of your ideological positioning. Capitalism does not want everyone to live enriching lives. The more people that focus on that as a goal, the greater the strain on capitalism. The harder it will work to provide, and the closer to collapse it becomes.

brief onset psychosis [BREAK]

I found my footing. As I began to build better support networks - better communities - around me after covid, I found a way to get up every day and know that I will find tomorrow eventually. Despite everything, I started to build upon the keystone of a newly built ego. I got a psychiatrist, a therapist, a doctor. I learned to set boundaries, and to practice self care. I learned that it is possible to need help and have support available. I learned how to reach out and avail myself to those supports.

I began my current job. It has always paid well, and it didn’t take long to recognize that despite it being a capitalist object, the people there were trying to build community. This fact alone was enough to support me through some very difficult days. Soon I saw life in a new light. I learned to conceptualize a future, my future, something I had never been able to do before. I learned to find happiness. I met new people, I began relationships, I saw some of them through to their natural end. Some days, I could be happy.

I found balance. I had enriched my own life enough that I could experience a very hard day and still know that tomorrow I’ll probably be happy again. It felt like a golden age for myself, but the timing wasn’t in my favor. Despite all of this progress, there was an aching anxiety that never went away. Some days, the happiness would be rapidly replaced with dread and I could never pinpoint why. As all of the loose ends in my life were being tied up in pretty bows, I still felt unease. In retrospect, this was alienation. A bigger alienation that I had been used to, but it was the same. The emotional and mental size of the task of looking at society wholistically through a dialectic lens is huge.

As I look back, I understand that this ongoing anxiety was due to the alienation of meeting these situations where I am doing everything I can to act in the best interest of myself and my communities, and still finding failure and despair. And as I process that idea in its context, I understand that this is a core feature of capitalism. It is a constant assault on individuals and communities with the intent to weaken them, to break them. It is also a core feature of capitalism to keep constant pressure with those attacks. Keeping us close to surviving but shackling us with the weights of these stressors is key. Capitalism is four dimensional, it understands time.

they hurt my baby :( [CONFLUENCE]

Confluxes are weird things. Conflux is a shortening of “confluence,” the point at which two rivers meet and combine. In the abstract, it is the point at which a number of strong forces combine. Two lasers may meet at a confluence and create a brighter light than what each could create at once: a confluence of light energy. A flank attack is a confluence of power. Understanding the power of confluences in our lives is a useful tool for surviving the emotional weight of their combined power under capitalism.

It is difficult to focus on capitalism and its effects during a confluence of hardships in your life. The immediate threat to your survival is meant to steal your focus, to prevent you from building communities that can survive, to keep you busy. This has historically been evident in the tactics of the right. The purpose of the ideologies of xenophobia has never really been to eradicate any singular type of people. I do not believe any such ideology could function in practice. But the mental weight of those anxieties, planted into already vulnerable groups, is a way to keep them distracted from the ways in which such a plan would not only fail, but likely actively harm them. This is why those with conservative ideologies are able to build such cognitive dissonance and actively work against their self interests.

I woke up in the morning. I was tired and anxious. My partner laid next to me, exhausted after their own breakdown. It was nearly time for me to cover child duty for a community member that needed to go to work. We decided to watch an episode of Bojack before I left, the nihilist catharsis of it comforted us the night before. I sat up and pressed my back against the cold glass of the window behind my bed. I remember that when I took a deep breath, it felt like my chest was filled with concrete, like I couldn’t exhale any of the energy that a deep breath might. Bojack played on as I drifted to sleep, something I never do. I woke up and checked the time, I was late. I ran to the car and started the drive to the kids.

A confluence is a weird thing. It’s an odd space where strong forces meet and combine. You can use this word to describe any combination of forces, real or imagined. There is no true antonym to this word, but one we could choose to use is detachment. The road was two lanes. My lane continued forward, the lane to my right splitting off to a hard right. Immediately next to this split sits a stop sign, perpendicular to my lane. As I approach the point where the stop sign halts traffic into my lane, a car pulls to the sign and is forced to make a very typical judgement call: am I clear to move through this stop?

Capitalism influences us in weird ways. Some of these ways are so minute that it could be difficult to pin them down until a moment comes when you happen to see them. In this moment I saw a person make a call not in the name of safety, but in the name of efficiency. Capitalism instils in us a drive to make the most cost effective decision, regardless of safety. We focus on capitalism, and it barks orders at us that we often know may harm us. But we have been trained to heed these calls, and so we do. We must, for survival. Capitalism is also inefficient. It is happy to discard safety for the sake of cost effectiveness. I cannot hold this other driver at fault for the decision to judge that the road was clear and pull onto my road, impacting my car.

A detachment is a weird thing. It’s an odd headspace that feels like an out of body experience. Many would argue that out of body experiences are just bouts of detachment. It is a defence mechanism hard wired into our brains, a way to emotionally understand a situation that is physically distressing. Having control wrested from you can cause detachment. And so, detached, I called the police. I knew I needed a police report to make sure that I wouldn’t be forced to pay my insurance deductible. All cops are bastards, but I needed one to perform a task necessary to my survival. I cannot afford an insurance deductible. The weight of that cost would impact not only my life, but the well being of the communities I participate in. This is not a new or unique approach to the world, but it is one that many people choose not to follow.

In Jeff Rosenstock’s 2023 album HELLMODE, he uses the term “soft living.” On the album, the song touches on the difficulties of wanting to live a life of unconditional love, and how difficult that can be under the weight of those living life by a capitalist code - intentionally or unintentionally. I believe that, given the overarching theme of that album, we can describe soft living as moving through the world with an open heart. Caring for those around you, and building ways to survive. I believe Jeff has seen and put into words a feeling many have been actively processing, and I found this album at a vulnerable time in my life that allowed me to take it in and understand it. It was a key factor in my ability to put some of these thoughts to words.

I believe that survival cannot be done alone. One must build communities, and one must participate in them actively. Survival is a community concern, and we must build and participate in these communities to achieve it. This is something I - like so many - have always done. I share my weed, I buy people beer, I pay for lunch when I can. I have always been enacting my own praxis. I am glad to have been an example of what it means to live my internal philosophy, and glad for the success of the communities I have participated in. And I believe that if more were to share my approach, they could do so without changing their ideologies and improve the ability for their participant communities to survive.

lance, i’m scared [CRACK]

The detachment faded, but psychosis did not. As a defence, my mind shifted all stressful thoughts to a hidden corner and forced me to focus on the things that brought me happy. It overcorrected, blocked me from processing the trauma, and left me serotonin-logged for days. I had weathered so many storms, and thrived in my communities. I was fine. Unstoppable.

I won’t describe the event itself, but its effects were simple and gutting. A confluence of traumatic experiences were already piled on and hidden from view, festering. The corpses of decomposing periods and situations of my life were poisoning me. I was unaware of this, and I had little to no time to slow down to process some of the things that had happened. I had no way to be ready for one additional small thing, but that thing found its way to me.

I entered a crisis spurred from a number of traumas that I thought had been buried. These hit me at once, and the timing couldn’t have been more perfect. I had found a community recently that offered safety and security, one where I was safe from capitalism, and safe to process trauma. But in that moment, the decision was made: I would need to distance myself from the community during one of my most vulnerable moments.

The spiral was the most powerful I’ve ever experienced. I could feel how rapidly it was moving, and acted quickly to protect myself, but the isolation was crushing. The next morning it reached a fever pitch, and I found myself in the midst of a break. Despite the severity of the situation, one where I could end up putting myself in fatal danger, the choices made by the community were correct. It was not within the capacity of the community to offer much support or many resources. The praxis was followed: minimize harm. Had I gone through this crisis while within a community space, there was the chance of harm to others.

On the other side of that same coin, however, is what the community did provide. I was provided love and care throughout the entire crisis. While I went through a breakdown alone, I never had to question whether or not the community would be on the other side. It was there, and will continue to be until it reaches its death and begins its decomposition period.

going through it [SURVIVAL]

Throughout everything, my most recent breakdown to every crisis i’ve survived in the past, the nest has been there. A community of people that had aligning goals finding space for care and joy. Providing safety any time it can. Even in my most difficult time, tending to the nest has given me a grounded focus. I have always wanted to model this community in a way that fostered growth, safety and love.

There have been many models I have conformed to in my life. The nest is no different. I feel a deep sense of privilege that I have been able to spend so much time with this community. I also feel privileged that my models have been able to influence the trajectory of growth that this community has experienced. There have been many models that the nest has conformed to, and the community as it is - nebulous, decomposing - is something I’m immensely proud of.

As these models have grown and died, the people that have remained in this community are those that align with my goals in life. These are people who care about being caring, people that want to show unconditional love. This community became, fully without my awareness, my life’s dream; proof that my approach yields the results I desired before I even know how to put them into words. This is a community that cares about the survival of its participants.

i dreamed a dream [FUTURE]

Magic is dead. The social object of magic as referenced here is the ability for humans to hope, dream, and have faith. I have come to the understanding that all of these things are important to most humans. It has always been necessary for all people to engage with a form of magic, and that tool has supported many through extreme difficulties under capitalism.

Magic is dead. But as we reframe death within a new framework as a moment to grow something new and different, we understand that we can build new forms of magic. These new forms don’t need to be significantly different, and it is not the purpose of a new framework to radically change things. This new framework must be compatible with incrementalism, so long as those participants that choose to enact incrementalist change dedicate themselves to the support of their communities first.

Magic is simply the unspoken feeling that there could be something more than the harsh mechanisms we see around us. There is no fundamental difference between believing in a god and believing that capitalism can be stopped or destroyed. These are both magic, the faith that things can be true even if there doesn’t seem to be a clear path to them in this moment. Understanding this, and learning to interface with those who have conflicting faiths and metaphysical beliefs must be a new core tenant of our belief if we are to survive.

Magic is a weird thing. It’s an odd reality-like space where things we can’t logically explain live. We feel that there could be a bigger reality, but we can’t explain the path to it. We know capitalism cannot last forever, so we engage with magic to believe in a new system, then we work backwards from there to try to enact it. I think this is healthy, and an amazing tool for community survival, but it is essential that we understand that all people should be given space to dream of something radically different. If that means we help our community build churches, we do that. It is my hope that when we do that, however, that we reterritorialize those concepts, and work to deterritorialize those institutions from within. The capitalist system of dogmatic religion may never end, but if we can bring those that believe in god into the folds of our community for care and support, this will give them the space to grow new ideas. So long as we are tending to harm, this can be a winning tactic for survival.

The people of this community have always done this. My deity is gaia. I feel that the earth itself has a more active role in our day to day life than most. I can, and do, believe this despite the ways it may conflict with the understand of the world present in other members of the community. I don’t know if gaia is real, but it is the form of magic I engage with to cope, to survive. We already have these tools, we have the ability to engage with people who believe even harmful things and build communities in spite of that. We have the ability to care for those that have differing beliefs. It is my belief that we have the tools to survive this, but we’ve forgotten how to use them. If we can refocus our efforts to community building and hyperlocal outreach, we can get humanity as close to (or beyond) the self-destruction of capitalism.

Everything we need is already here, and everything goes on.