[unedited]

All artists begin as egotists. There’s something intensely egocentric — not necessarily ego-aggrandizing but certainly ego-intensive, about, as an amateur, believing there to be any value, to yourself or others, in the act of creation. Let’s not, any of us creators, please, pretend to a full abandonment of the ego. If you use the word “I” in your essay, if you include anthropomorphic forms in your drawings, if you use variable names that resonate with you personally in your source code, you are not devoid of ego.

Ego — and I don’t mean the word strictly in the Freudian sense I don’t remember anything about Freud but in the more general colloquial “healthy self-regard” sense — is natural, and nothing to be ashamed of. In real life. But on the internet, that’s a different story.

The internet is a spiritual amplifier, an exponential playground of intended and unintended consequences, the Wild Wild West placed between two mirrors facing each other. In the Real World, feedback loops are bounded by the laws of physics and and the systems that Nature created and that created us. To be sure, Nature has its fair share of exponential interactions. The Butterfly Effect is real. Don’t clap on a mountain in Boulder, Colorado. But these events are infrequent and bounded by physical space. There is only so much snow on the top of the mountain. The amount of it that is perched precariously enough to kill does eventually run out and requires time to be replenished.

Not so on the internet. Resources on the internet are generally not physical, like snow, and therefore not physically bounded. They are immaterial, gameable, infinitely spawnable. Some may exhibit artificial scarcity, like loot drops. Others will avoid all pretension and be infinite, such as the resource known as “likes” on twitter dot com.

Sidenote: Don’t you dare quibble with my definition of resource!! There are millions of people on this Earth who spend a dozen hours a day every day farming for likes. Coffee has no caloric value but elicits several sought-after chemical reactions from your central nervous system when consumed. What do likes do?

Anyway. The resources are infinite. And thus, the conditioning propagated by the giving and taking of these resources are infinite as well. You see, it takes a long time, many countless affirming interactions, ego perforation reconstitution and recuperation time, for a person operating solely in the Real World to develop into a Full Narcissist. You need to be rewarded for thinking about yourself, constantly, by the people around you. This is a challenging feat. The people you meet in the Real World may be curated but usually are not. Only the very wealthy (boarding school) or very deranged (home schooling) are able to prevent their children from meeting different people, of whom many may actively contradict their burgeoning belief that the world revolves around them.

Sidenote: This, incidentally, is why many mediocre people born rich, and many successful people born poor, are both so ego-oriented. Mediocre people born rich have parents who are capable of protecting their children from the realization that they are mediocre, and they retain that belief through childhood. Successful people born poor often have parents or caregivers who intentionally and carefully crafted for them an impenetrable bubble of self-belief that would reject evidence that countered their fundamental self-centeredness, fueling them to succeed despite the odds, by means of benign delusion.

On the internet, an otherwise well adjusted person can become an Ascended Narcissist, pure solipsism-maxxxing self-idealized engaging with other people as objects Warrior of the Self, in a matter of Days. Most of you don’t need me to convince you of this! You’ve known these people IRL or you know their accounts, they post normally, they get some traction for something they said or did or exposed about themselves, they received positive feedback from the Internet, resource rewards, 50 or 60 little tiny red sparkly heart dopamine fireworks. So they posted more and they got more likes, and on and on until every interaction needs to be about Them, on and off the TL — not their friends, not their audience, not other accounts they like or causes that matter to them or Ideas or jokes or. Nothing. Ego enslaved to id enslaved to ego in a neverending cycle of self-affirmation and adrenal reward.

Why does the internet have this effect? Well, from a magnitude perspective, that’s simply what it does. Whatever you put in front of it, it magnifies. The direction of the effect, though, that’s plain ol’ Real World Culture. The internet didn’t create this propensity to egomaxx, the propensity is the natural evolution of an individualist culture deprived of community and spirituality. The internet simply met us at a bad time. (By us I mean Past Us, humanity in the 90s, suffering under the cultural authoritarianism of the coastal United States.) As a result, we are, all of us, trapped in the character of that age, our identities and then our psyches, gently pushed with an unstoppable decelerant hand towards the same archetype of 1990s faux-rebellious faux-ennui’ed-up 30-something yuppie who “yes I do have a favorite Wrapper its between Notorious Bee Eye Gee or Will Smith” and who likes that Bill Clinton plays the saxophone. We are given a little freedom, though: we are allowed to choose between Friends and Seinfeld after dinner.

The source of this corruption is itself a feedback loop between two sources. The first is the mainstream internet’s own powerful inertia, and the second is the Internet spilling out into Real World disease agents, developing new strains and growing more virile, then re-entering the Network Corpus.

The solution is to forcibly disconnect the culture of the internet from the culture of the Real World — this has been done to varying levels of success, but we need a Hard Fork, and we’ve got some malicious admins in our org who are actively working against us.

The perpetrators of this great stultifying evil are, of course, our Internet Overlords, the FAANGs and their lesser brethren and sistren. These companies ignore the potential of the internet as a pure alternate society in service of Giving The People What They Want. (The People, sadly, at this time, are zombies.) Here’s a comprehensive list of what The People want from the internet:

• AOL Instant Messenger

• Free Music

• #BlackLivesMatter

• The History Of Dance

• Driving Directions To The Local Albertsons They Have Been Going To Every Day Of Their Life For The Last Eight Years

• TheFacebook.com

In exchange for these six things, The People sign their lives away to the FAANGs, agreeing to play the role of Elaine or Joey or Phoebe on their carefully-curated social media soap opera sets. The FAANGs study them in order to craft more compelling and demeaning tasks for their little rat-serfs, who are thrown like-treats from time to time when they do a good job being George Costanza or whoever.

The existing system cannot be saved; it is too far gone. Instead we need to repurpose it to our own advantage. We are here on the internet too and we are self-aware, and if we create and hold our own space, we can craft the incentives differently, spiritually. We can Skinner ourselves into egolessness — first performed, and then realized, fake it till you make it, #manifesting, infinite dress rehearsals. Milady, I hope we’re up for it.

[unedited]

All artists begin as egotists. There’s something intensely egocentric — not necessarily ego-aggrandizing but certainly ego-intensive, about, as an amateur, believing there to be any value, to yourself or others, in the act of creation. Let’s not, any of us creators, please, pretend to a full abandonment of the ego. If you use the word “I” in your essay, if you include anthropomorphic forms in your drawings, if you use variable names that resonate with you personally in your source code, you are not devoid of ego.

Ego — and I don’t mean the word strictly in the Freudian sense I don’t remember anything about Freud but in the more general colloquial “healthy self-regard” sense — is natural, and nothing to be ashamed of. In real life. But on the internet, that’s a different story.

The internet is a spiritual amplifier, an exponential playground of intended and unintended consequences, the Wild Wild West placed between two mirrors facing each other. In the Real World, feedback loops are bounded by the laws of physics and and the systems that Nature created and that created us. To be sure, Nature has its fair share of exponential interactions. The Butterfly Effect is real. Don’t clap on a mountain in Boulder, Colorado. But these events are infrequent and bounded by physical space. There is only so much snow on the top of the mountain. The amount of it that is perched precariously enough to kill does eventually run out and requires time to be replenished.

Not so on the internet. Resources on the internet are generally not physical, like snow, and therefore not physically bounded. They are immaterial, gameable, infinitely spawnable. Some may exhibit artificial scarcity, like loot drops. Others will avoid all pretension and be infinite, such as the resource known as “likes” on twitter dot com.

Sidenote: Don’t you dare quibble with my definition of resource!! There are millions of people on this Earth who spend a dozen hours a day every day farming for likes. Coffee has no caloric value but elicits several sought-after chemical reactions from your central nervous system when consumed. What do likes do?

Anyway. The resources are infinite. And thus, the conditioning propagated by the giving and taking of these resources are infinite as well. You see, it takes a long time, many countless affirming interactions, ego perforation reconstitution and recuperation time, for a person operating solely in the Real World to develop into a Full Narcissist. You need to be rewarded for thinking about yourself, constantly, by the people around you. This is a challenging feat. The people you meet in the Real World may be curated but usually are not. Only the very wealthy (boarding school) or very deranged (home schooling) are able to prevent their children from meeting different people, of whom many may actively contradict their burgeoning belief that the world revolves around them.

Sidenote: This, incidentally, is why many mediocre people born rich, and many successful people born poor, are both so ego-oriented. Mediocre people born rich have parents who are capable of protecting their children from the realization that they are mediocre, and they retain that belief through childhood. Successful people born poor often have parents or caregivers who intentionally and carefully crafted for them an impenetrable bubble of self-belief that would reject evidence that countered their fundamental self-centeredness, fueling them to succeed despite the odds, by means of benign delusion.

On the internet, an otherwise well adjusted person can become an Ascended Narcissist, pure solipsism-maxxxing self-idealized engaging with other people as objects Warrior of the Self, in a matter of Days. Most of you don’t need me to convince you of this! You’ve known these people IRL or you know their accounts, they post normally, they get some traction for something they said or did or exposed about themselves, they received positive feedback from the Internet, resource rewards, 50 or 60 little tiny red sparkly heart dopamine fireworks. So they posted more and they got more likes, and on and on until every interaction needs to be about Them, on and off the TL — not their friends, not their audience, not other accounts they like or causes that matter to them or Ideas or jokes or. Nothing. Ego enslaved to id enslaved to ego in a neverending cycle of self-affirmation and adrenal reward.

Why does the internet have this effect? Well, from a magnitude perspective, that’s simply what it does. Whatever you put in front of it, it magnifies. The direction of the effect, though, that’s plain ol’ Real World Culture. The internet didn’t create this propensity to egomaxx, the propensity is the natural evolution of an individualist culture deprived of community and spirituality. The internet simply met us at a bad time. (By us I mean Past Us, humanity in the 90s, suffering under the cultural authoritarianism of the coastal United States.) As a result, we are, all of us, trapped in the character of that age, our identities and then our psyches, gently pushed with an unstoppable decelerant hand towards the same archetype of 1990s faux-rebellious faux-ennui’ed-up 30-something yuppie who “yes I do have a favorite Wrapper its between Notorious Bee Eye Gee or Will Smith” and who likes that Bill Clinton plays the saxophone. We are given a little freedom, though: we are allowed to choose between Friends and Seinfeld after dinner.

The source of this corruption is itself a feedback loop between two sources. The first is the mainstream internet’s own powerful inertia, and the second is the Internet spilling out into Real World disease agents, developing new strains and growing more virile, then re-entering the Network Corpus.

The solution is to forcibly disconnect the culture of the internet from the culture of the Real World — this has been done to varying levels of success, but we need a Hard Fork, and we’ve got some malicious admins in our org who are actively working against us.

The perpetrators of this great stultifying evil are, of course, our Internet Overlords, the FAANGs and their lesser brethren and sistren. These companies ignore the potential of the internet as a pure alternate society in service of Giving The People What They Want. (The People, sadly, at this time, are zombies.) Here’s a comprehensive list of what The People want from the internet:

• AOL Instant Messenger

• Free Music

• #BlackLivesMatter

• The History Of Dance

• Driving Directions To The Local Albertsons They Have Been Going To Every Day Of Their Life For The Last Eight Years

• TheFacebook.com

In exchange for these six things, The People sign their lives away to the FAANGs, agreeing to play the role of Elaine or Joey or Phoebe on their carefully-curated social media soap opera sets. The FAANGs study them in order to craft more compelling and demeaning tasks for their little rat-serfs, who are thrown like-treats from time to time when they do a good job being George Costanza or whoever.

The existing system cannot be saved; it is too far gone. Instead we need to repurpose it to our own advantage. We are here on the internet too and we are self-aware, and if we create and hold our own space, we can craft the incentives differently, spiritually. We can Skinner ourselves into egolessness — first performed, and then realized, fake it till you make it, #manifesting, infinite dress rehearsals. Milady, I hope we’re up for it.