# The Rudderless Internet

**Published by:** [Roderick Fruht](https://paragraph.com/@chthonic/)
**Published on:** 2022-06-21
**URL:** https://paragraph.com/@chthonic/the-rudderless-internet

## Content

Charlotte Fang did not Respond to my DMsI sent Charlotte Fang a DM at 10:22pm last evening, Sunday Jun 19th, 2022. The opening to the message was cordial, if not a tiny bit cloying, and I let Charlotte know what a positive impact she has had on me since discovering Milady. The message read:Charlotte, I know you do not know me personally but I am very inspired and appreciative by what you have brought to my life. I have been artistically stuck for a long time and suddenly, in the last month since discovering what Remilia [sp?] has done, I find myself producing and creating at a rate I have not achieved since my 20s. Many things that were once swirling within me have now crystalized, forming prisms I can use to magnify my inner eye. As such, I have decided to reclaim an ambitious project that I once dreamed of but never seized upon: I would like to write a decentralized cyberfiction novel. I have written a pitch for this, and I was wondering if you would gift me just a small amount of your time to read it over and see if what I have put together is a.) compelling and b.) properly presented to maximize incentive for involvement. My hope is that this book will be "Fictional Philosophy" in the tradition of Camus (hopefully a little more action than The Stranger). I will use my fiction to express ideas about Network Spirituality and will use the method of delivery (qua the medium) to express ideas of post-authorship, pseudonymity, and egolessness.Sent. Next message approximately 4 minutes later:Let me know if you would be willing to help and i will send you the link. If it is not a good time, just write "sorry Rod it's not a good time" and then trust and believe I will not be wounded by that in any way. Thanks.Sent. As of the time of publication of this post, I have not received a response. In fact, the grayed checkmark here indicates that it has not even been read:"trust and believe I will not be wounded by that in any way."I am not wounded by this, but I am eager to get started and for some reason a stamp of approval by the maestra herself seemed to be the chef’s kiss I needed in order to rev my engine. In the midst of the cancellation, on twitter threads now buried too deep to reclaim, I was regaled with so many stories of the endless charity of Charlotte’s time. The selflessness and earnest desire to support those who support her vision. I opened my request for help unto a wider audience, and many of those who responded encouraged me to reach out to Charlotte as well. So I did. However, as of the time of publication, Charlotte has not responded to my DM. I’ve re-read my message a few times now. It’s not because I’m upset - I’m not wounded about this. You see I just had to take a look and see if perhaps my delivery was too saccharine, perhaps a bit formulaic. On my third re-reading I decided that my intro sounded like I was making a cold call to someone at IBM in 1992 telling them “it has always been my dream to work on the personal computer.” Would you not take a pass on such a dildonic missive? My letter speaks of Charlotte “breathing new life into my artistic possibility.” This is absolutely true; I have always been a prolific writer and journaler, able to pump out pages and pages in a short period of time. But most of it for the last decade has been drivel. I have rarely felt the lift and rotation to my words that I once did. My writing used to be breezy and lovely and now it was becoming damp and languid, I have been writing words that wilt under their own weight. The introduction to Milady changed all of that, bringing a new springiness and squishiness to my pen. I am dancing around the page, I am high-stepping in the end zone. I am out here having some good ole fashioned mothafuckin’ fun. I am writing the kind of writing that I would enjoy reading, and all because I’m doing it for free. Sounds great to me! Or…it did sound great to me. Until I thought about what a tremendous burden this is to place on someone! Imagine for a moment that you are Charlotte Fang:embattled on all sides because you are literally too funny and love God too muchcultivating a community meshed together by a psychotic ripple of retweets and ripoffs (aka 5k notifications every minute)you’re part of at least two different threads self-tasked with counting to infinitypeople everywhere accusing you of “co-opting the observational obviousness of mimetic acceleration but not considering the way that the only thing novel or singular about the definition presented by Nick Land is that it has not-so-subtle neo-Xenophobic pretense.” (or some such shit)Imagine all of this and THEN also imagine logging onto Twitter and seeing my message!From the preview alone she probably took a hard pass on it. Wouldn’t you? I’m not wounded about this, but wouldn’t you? Imagine seeing this in your inbox:Roderick Früht: Charlotte, I know you do not know me personally but I am very inspired and appreciative…If she would have opened it, it only would have been even worse. She would have seen a wall of text on par with someone breaking up with you after only your third date because their father - who they mentioned recently got his second coronary artery bypass graft - well they’re not sure if they mentioned that but any he is proving to be unable to care for himself and so they would have to spend more time at home and even though you’re a lovely person (really you are an amazing and lovely person) they just can’t see you anymore right now, and because they’re not a sadist who wants to keep you in a state of perpetual torture as they work out the balance between their family obligations and their romantic life and, well, now they’re carrying on so they will leave it at that and good luck to you going forward. That’s the kinda vibe I was giving off. I’m not saying I am weird, but…if I read that message, I’d feel a little weird. I think I’d feel a little bit weird. At this point I’m just hoping Charlotte never does open the message so that she doesn’t even have to be exposed to my weird neediness and feigned pleasantness and placation and flattery. It would be better if Twitter had a feature that used machine learning to recognize when an unread DM would just be better off “disappeared,” launched somewhere in the ether, maybe crash landing in the middle of a disc-tournament in wherever the Tron people live on the server, the data of my DM just smashing Guy and whatever the other guy’s name is from Daft Punk is, right during the middle of their DJ set with Pharrell as guest MC. Can you imagine the mental burden a DM like this must place on someone? To know that someone’s entire artistic output is reliant simply on your “presence” in their life? I mean I am and have never been a threat to anyone, I just want to say that for the record. In fact I abhor violence or even the threat of violence in any way, but reading the message I sent…man…if I was Charlotte, I would have to wonder if this guy also has a “thing” for me and maybe he is at home right now making a collage out of my tweets, maybe he thinks my pfp is actually me, like I’m a neon geisha or something and, and, and…who knows what? I hate to say it. I mean I hate to even say it (mostly because it’s not true and because it just seems like a nasty thing to say), but here I am in the privileged position of not having to say it but now Charlotte has to sit there and think it! She can’t opt out of that! Goddamnit. I swear to God if i was the type of person who regretted things, I would regret this message. I don’t regret it one bit, but if I were to regret it, that would totally make sense. I mean that it would make sense from an epistemological/ontological standpoint (don’t know what either of those words mean so hoping one of them hits the mark). I know what you’re thinking - you’re wondering “what would you do if you could do it all over again.” The problem is that I’m not wired that way, hombre. Sorry daddio. I’m the kind of guy whose very future-focused. I’m the kind of guy who has to wear reading glasses because my future is so bright. Oh the blockchain? Yeah, I’m familiar with it. I read about it in 2012. Yeah, remember 2012? Everyone else was chasing poor Joseph Kony and I was in the sim lab reading about Satoshi. Did I buy any? Hell no…I had way more important things to spend my money on like - you guessed it - ass and grass hehe. So don’t sit here thinking I’m some sort of noob. Don’t sit here thinking i’m some “Backward Looking Lonnie” because that is just not the truth. You’d never get me to look backward, not in a million years. But hypothetically speaking? I mean I dabble in the hypothetical from time to time. So yes - fine. For purely hypothetical reasons, I will play this out. I will consider the question of “what If I could do it all over again.” Which I just want to clarify once more that this is not a question I think about, I’m not wounded by the situation at all and have no desire to go back in time and make it right, but IF I did…if I did think about it and if I could actually turn back the clock and do it over again, I would probably have sent something like this:Roderick Früht: Hey Charlotte, sup. I got a thing you might be interested in. “Hit me back just to chat” [10:22pm]Roderick Früht: (lol you know the rest of the song Stan by Eminem) (I’m just playing tho, i’m not a psycho or somethi [10:23pm]Roderick Früht: damn haha okay last message cut off I was saying I’m not psycho or nothing I was just playing bc at this point you probably get messaged a lot and must feel a little like Eminem sometime in that video. Anyway haha, yah so I got this pretty cool thing I’m working on and if you’d be interested let me know. [10:25pm]Roderick Früht: Hey sorry that i’m flooding your inbox just want to make sure just in case there was any confusion that it’s a writing thing that I’m working on, not a music thing. Don’t know for sure if I was giving that vibe by mentioning Eminem but that was just as a cultural reference/joke. What I’m doing is a writing thing. [11:19pm]Roderick Früht: Music is writing too lol, I know, I know I’m just saying what I’m thinking about doing doesn’t have a beat to it. I do love music tho. I’m into mostly binaural beats and other modern beatss [11:32pm]Roderick Früht: beats* [11:34pm]Roderick Früht: Sorry man I just scrolled up and realized I just sent you a WALL of text and that was def not my intention. I’m a pretty chill guy overall, try to keep things simple and down to Earth. I’m very easy to get along with so no need to worry that I’m like all up in your shit or whatever just interested in you as a person. [11:58pm]Roderick Früht: Damn sorry I know I said I was done but just felt like that last message made it seem that I was like “interested in you” like romantically or sexually or somethi [1:11am]Roderick Früht: FUCK! What is up with that? Every time I type the word “somethi [1:12am]Roderick Früht: LOL CASE IN POINT HAHAHA. As i was SAYING: every time I try to write the word s-o-m-e-t-h-1-n-g my computer for some reason interprets that as like code for the return key or something haha [1:13am]Roderick Früht: Well anyway I was just saying I’m just interested in like your way of seeing things I vibe with it and it makes me more creative and shit (lol I know how that makes me sound but whatev) anyway hit me back if you’re interested [1:15am]Roderick Früht: Yo bro hope you’re still good, no need to respond to this ASAP, hope you’re asleep and have your notifications off so that you can just read this as one long essay in the morning lol. Just wanted to say that my last message made it sound (I think) like being artistic is code for being gay or somethi [4:58am]Roderick Früht: Or some such thing and that’s not what I meant at all so no disrespect on you regardless of your sexuality. Hey - “One Love” [5:01am]Roderick Früht: Hahaha jk about the “One Love” I know that’s what like people’s taglines were in like 6th grade. [6:07am]Roderick Früht: Hey just bumping this message just in case it got buried, hit me back [7:31am]Egolessness is not a turn signal it is not something that you switch on to indicate that you are doing a thing and then once you have concluded said thing you switch it off and resume your normal driving protocol Egolessness is not even a general philosophical mindset one does not say that they are egoless in the same way that one proclaims that they are going to “take it one day at a time” or “try to be more open to new experiences” Egolessness is a consistent and sometimes grueling spiritual practice especially for people like me who have tried to cobble together some sort of pathetic existence to garner the approval of institutions who have in return ground me into a nub of the former glory I was when I emerged from my mother Egolessness is daily practice not like bullshit mindfulness meditation with Eckhart Tolle blaring into your headphones telling you to just count to ten without seeing the numbers fuck Eckhart Tolle this is an actual spiritual practice the kind that when you are done you are capable of raising your internal body temperature to 112 degrees and sleeping with only a bed sheet on the peak of Mount Everest it is the type of spiritual practice that takes constant self-redirection and constant self-disciplining the best way to self-discipline is to embarrass yourself, to make an elaborate record of the way in which you tried to be somebody of the way in which your tried to take away beauty and inspiration and kindness and awe from the rest of the world and horde it to yourself you presented the appearance of egolessness but this truly came from a place of Ego you wanted to be egoic in your egolessness and so for this you are punished 10 lashes or in this case a detailed explanation of just how greedy and small you still are never able to take the reins for yourself yet always sneaking up to the deck and grabbing the captains wheel sneaking the boat just a few clicks to the left because “Oh I’m good with landing on ANY island,” but really you want to land on that one specific island where you are king or actually not even where you are king but where you are the king’s pet you could NEVER deign to be a king because you are terrified of anyone relying on you, terrified of anyone “needing too much” from you (and yet you need all too much all the time), having to be the one that stands up for something so you nestle yourself comfortably on the lap of those who are powerful enough to project royalty outward and you allow them to scratch your ears and tell you “good doggie” so then what is the point - WHAT IS THE POINT - what is the point of seeking spiritual absolution, expiation of sin, resurrection and new life on the network or anywhere if you will just make yourself into the same pet that you always were you DO NOT have control and you DO NOT need permission and you DO NOT report to a commanding officer you report only to yourself and guess what bad news your self is nothing you are melting becoming a puddle of paint and being washed away down a storm drain so your only option it appears my sweet little puddle is to. simply. love. to. drip. Simply. love. the. drip.This Boat has no CaptainLike most people I spent the first years of my life inhabiting the political affectation of my father. His main political position was summed up by his oft repeated phrase “that’s how they fuck you.” In the time since I rebelled fiercely against this worldview but eventually found it to be near perfect in its applicability to nearly everyone, nearly all the time. I have since morphed into several other political positions: anarcho-communist, sensible neoliberal democrat, sensible neoliberal republican, secret online rightoid troll, messenger-bagged socialist. None of these fit. The truth is I don’t care. I do not care. All I really ever wanted from politics was to control the entire world. I wished for a harem of women to worship my God-dick, for men to tremble when I asked them to repeat themselves, I didn’t quite hear you, can you say that again into my good ear…? In other words, my actual political position is totalitarianism. “If you were president tomorrow what’s the first thing you’d do?” Latina CNN reporter Maria Santa Las Cruces asks me. “I would annihilate my enemies, castrate dissidents and feed them their genitals, most of all I would beat up my ex-girlfriend’s husband in front of her and their children.” “Thanks Rod! Steven, back to you in the studio!” We are all authoritarian. We can try to sublimate it into some other more rational sounding political position but in the end we all want to be at the table with Stalin, ruling a nation based on equality and justice, but by the grace of God we want to be part of the one group of citizens who gets to be a little more just and equal than everyone else - fine dining and a country estate are a matter of national security after all! Autocratic rule is the one way we could ever hope to stave off that buzzing sound the rest of us have to suffer while folding our clothes and taking a shit and picking up crumbs from the floor and sighing sighing sighing at the sound: the sound of chaos. It’s that low hum. You’ve heard white noise but then imagine that inverted, folded inside out. Chaos is the darkness at the foot of our bed, the monstrous form that rips us from the anesthesia of our knowingness and routines. It is the one thing that threatens this nice little “situation” we’ve built. Look how nice it is. “Every morning I can depend on the fact that I will wake next to this vile human who I loathe, and cook three eggs with heavy cream (low glycemic index, on Keto now), and then head off to a job where a person one foot shorter than me and spiritually grotesque can order me around for 8 hours.” Fuck you chaos, I need this! As the saying goes, “as in life, so on the internet.” The thing I used to log onto in 1998 is now a walled menslaughter of bright colors and and hover buttons and terms of services. In other words, it is hell. The internet is now akin to bumper bowling. You can bowl as fast as you want, up to and including calling Trump a “nasty pile of dickbags!!!” But unfortunately you may not fall into the gutter and you absolutely MUST NOT drift into the other lanes. God forbid you go into the other lanes. And so, by only a matter of inches, we acquiesce to these rules. We keep the ship straight. We constrain ourselves. We constrain authentic interaction. We perform a series of pretense to explain ourselves, we perform ablutions to mark ourselves pure, we perform three strokes of greeting in the hallways as we pass each other at work: “Hey Ron” [1A] “Hey Steve” [1B] “How are you?” [2A] “I’m good, you?” [2B] “Doing well, see you at 3 for team huddle” [3A] “Yeah sounds good see you there.” [3B] The extant political ideologies promise revolutions in thought, all they actually deliver is insider baseball, or…insider bowling. And of course - regardless of what sort of utopian platform they promise - if they win, they will surely not pass up the chance to be Stalin, or at least a chance to have a seat at his dinner table. In this way, Egolessness stands out as the only actual “political” answer. Look, for example, at cults. Cults are usually corrupted because of two main things:The leader can’t stop themselves from fucking their followers andThe leader can’t abdicated their position of power.If you can solve these two issues, your cult becomes…well…it becomes Christianity. Not quite. Christianity only partially solved these twin dilemmas. Milady completes the solution. In Milady we have no fear of sexual indiscretion because we don’t know what that is, or we do but it’s icky and private. We are sexless angels, pure of body mind and heart. This is especially true for Charlotte who, despite baseless, cowardly, and unimaginative accusations to the contrary, simply prefers to spend her time on other pursuits. We focus our libidinal energies the same way a schizophrenic spends theirs. We much prefer the creation of new worlds to the vulgar act of sex. Why have sex when you can build a true replica of FallingWater in Minecraft? The second dilemma is resolved from the jump. Our leader does not have to abdicate because our leader does not exist. The only time our leader exists is when Miladys like me slip into old personality constructs and begin to assign power to an individual person. This is a fallacy. It is based on the fact that the account of Charlotte Fang attracts more engagement than the others, and there my mammalian brain sees that as the apex. The instinctual parts of myself wish to either challenge or join this apex. But this is a fool’s errand for so many reasons. For one thing, Charlotte Fang is simply a vessel. A Milady such as myself might occasionally fall under the delusion that Charlotte holds true spiritual power, that her words come from a certain innate giftedness that I will never be able to replicate and therefore am left only to align with it or being extinguished. This is the logic of the ego. This is the vulgarity of the ego. The second thing is that Charlotte Fang cannot be our leader because Charlotte Fang is the name of a twitter account. It is not verified, but current estimates put anywhere from 3-9 people who are actually responsible for running that account, and that is not a fixed assignment. People are rotated onto that job seasonally, and a series of redundancies are set up so that people tweeting from that account do not know if they are actually tweeting from that account. Like the firing lines of yore, each of the 3-9 press “send” on their tweet, but only one of them goes to a real account. The others are “blanks,” small javascript shells designed to look like a twitter interface but are not even connected to the web. All of this you do not need to know to believe. Think back to when you were a child. You sang the hymns, you heard the stories, you believed what was true. That is the preferable approach here. Just sing and read and believe. That which whispers through Charlotte whispers through all of us. Perhaps Charlotte has managed to quiet the prattling of her ego long enough to better hear the whispers in her ear. But even then, she is only transcribing. She is only channeling thoughts that are happening to her, not coming from her. But here now is the real truth, the reason this hymn was written and why it must be sung: Charlotte Fang did not answer my DMs. I do not need Charlotte Fang to answer my DMs. The answers that I seek from Charlotte Fang are already being spoken to me. But the whiny little egoic child in me will simply not shut the fuck up long enough to hear them. We are all authoritarian. The spiritual goal in life is not follow the lead of what some other guy tells you is right or wrong. It is to heroically become the righteousness that overcomes whatever type of evil that you have been assigned through the grace and wisdom of the infinite power. My particular brand of evil is a cowardice to think and be who I am. It is an embarrassment over my own thoughts, a fear of taking up too much time from those who are “more important than me,” coupled with a greedy demand to steal the time of those “less important than me.” So then, my heroic spiritual goal is to trust the genius that I channel through me rather than clinging onto the delusion that it must absorbed from someone else or given to someone else. I already have it. They already have it. It’s all free, there for the taking. You just have to open up. Your spiritual goal may be different than mine. It may be the complete opposite. You may be the type of person who needs to feel things more and take up less space. But not me. My goal is to need things less and worry less about space, which by definition is not there anyway. My goal is to say that I am not wounded. My goal is to mean it.The brackish waters leap over the low walls of the hull. This boat, too, is just a vessel. Each of us are rowing in the direction that feels safest to us. Some of us are rowing fast, some slow, some not at all. We are worried that if the boat doesn’t go our way, then we will surely meet our doom. Pause your rowing long enough to consider this, my friend: in a night as black as this, is any direction really better than any other? Would we not save more energy by allowing the tide to take us? Come closer now friend, for I have a secret. I hope you will forgive me for waiting so long to tell it to you. I was afraid you wouldn’t come if I told you from the start. So please my friend, do not be angry. And please do not despair. There is no despair at all, and nor is there a rudder. This boat, it has no rudder. This ship cannot be steered. We may feel that our little oars twisting in their tiny circles are moving us in this way or that. The truth is, my dear friend, the only things that are actually moving us are the water and wind. The water moves us frighteningly. The wind moves us gallantly. We must subject ourselves to them both of these movements. Feel the wind on our face and the water having its way with us from below. We must open our hearts to that which comes from below as well as from above. We must do this if we ever plan to to reach the shore.Oh just one more thing. Here’s the pitch: https://mirror.xyz/0xFcb70a6CE8452447c0E3c47eFabcfD8395A89486/NKmjdywWtYW72VlQgQLmkUM-BrZerAzwoLZpdIX54Cs

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