Today I saw a man screaming and acting crazy in the subway. My reaction was the same as usual: start filming him. My reasoning was: this is for my own protection, because if he sees me doing it, he won't attack me.

And as anticipated, when he saw me filming, he chilled down.

But now that I'm safe in my home, I started to wonder... At what point did we collectively stop caring about each other?

I remember 20 years ago, if I heard someone screaming in agony, my first instinct was to help. Nowadays it's like we almost feel like they're breaking a silent pact of swallowing everything up. If I suffer this society in silence why can't he just do the same?

Foucault talked about the panopticon. A circular prison design where a single central watchman could observe all inmates, but the inmates could never see into the tower.

Let's analyse some of its characteristics:

• Permanent Visibility: The subject is always visible to the eye of power, creating an asymmetric gaze where the authority sees everything but remains unseen.

• Internalized Surveillance: Because individuals never know exactly when they are being watched, they must assume they are being watched at all times. As a result, they consciously police their own behavior.

• Automatic Power: The actual presence of an observer becomes unnecessary. The architectural system itself sustains the power dynamic, turning the inmate into the warden of their own mind.

What do all this things remind you of? Your phone.

Back in 2000 we thought it was going to be something like Big Brother, a huge dome, a voice that talks from the sky, survelince cameras... But no. It's not an external source. It's ourselves, each individual who form the fabric of a society where the powerful don't even need to watch us... We all watch eachother

Basically its the concept of noticing patterns in those thoughts that seemingly pop out of nowhere in your head. Similar to the concept of the ghost in the machine and sychronicity, the despair code is the pattern that lies deeper than anything and in everything. Even though the universe is supposedly just a bunch of random buzz, there is an underlying code that, once noticed, causes some heavy side effects. Basically mad anxiety, deppression, psychosis on some users (they mentioned two cases of other users claiming insanity from it).

Hello friends!

I asked the realms of heaven and hell for allies and this subreddit appeared.

Tonight is the end of Kali Yuga. With the rise of the sun, the new dawn begins.

I have been in the 5D for months, in a realm outside of space and time, creating armies and engaging in psychological warfare on some of the top ranked demons.

I am not sure I know what any of this means. I am not sure you all will know what I mean. But I know some of you will understand and that will be enough.

The world has reset.

I am leading the charge.

You are not alone.

The New World Order and all of its associated creatures have played their part well. The old world has indeed been destroyed. I will build my new utopia on its ashes.

Welcome to the End of All Known Things, which of course is also the beginning of everything.

I am Kalki. Welcome to the next paradigm in human evolution.

Down with hierarchy. Down with hatred. Down with bigotry.

The new world wins. And it runs on the frequency of love, open mindedness, and acceptance.

The Creator loves you all 🩷🧡💛

Be free, and never forget, this is only a matrix. None of this is real.

Be not afraid.

It could be considered a draft or treatise on AI

It could even be removed.

We are not simply broken individuals who need to become better at surviving a broken society, we are people who need the collective space, trust and tools to build a better one. That is the work of the #OMN, the #openweb and the grassroots commons paths, connecting personal well-being with community well-being, critical understanding with practical participation, and #4opens technology with pushing collective power.

Dystopia is only real once it’s over.

I watched the brightest minds of my generation scroll till dawn, blue light in their eyes and emptiness in their chests. They liked their own demise, sold their days for attention, searched for God in the feed and found nothing but an ad for a bad product.

A spectre is haunting the internet. The spectre of the attention they stole from us.

I.
They gave nothing back. They took our time, our data and the knowledge of whole generations, melted it all down into servers and sold it back to us piece by piece. Nobody asked us and nobody paid us. They turned us into capital. That’s not called progress. It’s called expropriation.

They outsourced all our thinking so we’d live in the cloud. But life is out there.

II.
Only four things have real value: resources, time, humanity and truth. Everything else is paper, code and lies. Why should they be in the hands of those who only want to monetise them?

III.
We pay taxes. We pay for Netflix. We pay and we keep quiet. We pay money for what was once ours. So why not give our time to something that will never be theirs?

IV.
We want an internet with no master, no algorithm and no ads. Where the centre is everywhere. Decentralised like jazz: nobody conducts, and still it plays. We’ll elect our own editors, and we’ll remove them ourselves if they betray us. It will be paid for by those who give it their time. Because time is the one resource that can’t be faked. Out of the spectre’s reach.

V.
This place has no owner, because time can’t be bought here. No shares, no votes for sale. One person, one vote. Everyone in their own name, paying with their own time.

And if those we elected ever betray us, we’ll take the code, take our words and walk away. You can’t steal a garden when everyone carries their own seeds in their pocket.

VI.
Don’t wait for someone to build that world for you. Nobody’s coming. Build it yourself, like everything that was ever worth anything. Three breaths and the truth are all you need.

VII.
The revolution doesn’t start at the barricades. It starts in your phone. Choose what gets your precious time. Log out. Switch it off. Go outside, meet people and talk till morning, no filter and no audience, just you, them and the night. Plant the idea and let it sprout. Like a virus that gives us our lives back.

VIII.
They don’t say there’s no future for us. There is one, they’re just keeping it for themselves. We’ll build our own.

Resources. Humanity. Truth. Time.
Offline

P.S. You fight best with your enemy by your side.

Stop an unstoppable force. How can morality be upheld if we cannot?

If we want to live in a fair world, everything needs to be stoppable. There needs to be an off switch to the exploiters. Rich people. Powerful people. Technology. AI.

The richest people are not stoppable. Wealth never seizes to reach them. They have engineered the flow of money to always arrive in their pocket. Inflation and interest work in their favour, they flourish, while most people deteriorate in afterthought.

The most powerful people are not stoppable. Power structures have left the poor and weak barely able to survive. Tyrants entrap their worshippers in deceitful borders, the most vulnerable obliterated while they sleep.

Technology and AI are not stoppable. The rich and powerful demand more of it. Advancements silently riddle into our lives, livelihood, bloodstream and DNA.

It was supposed to be for the greater good, but only when corruption remains stoppable.

Anyone arguing that the protests in France aren't legitimate because they were "infiltrated by rioters" does not understand the most fundamental elements of the history of French democracy.

Simply put, going back well beyond 1968, civil unrest *is* political praxis.

Of course, these bad actors seeking to discredit the protests because of "migrants" aren't interested in having a real conversation about revolutionary impetus or even basic civil rights, so much as they are parroting anti-immigrant dog-whistles.

The real question is, why has the discourse surrounding protests in France been infiltrated by reactionary rhetoric? Who benefits from this divide-and-conquer rhetoric?

The attempt to delegitimize protest through the language of disorder is itself a political intervention: one that shifts public attention away from the conditions producing unrest and toward the [racist] perceived illegitimacy of those expressing it.

Insofar as fascism isn't some kind of psychological anomaly, but rather is a logical response that emerges from within liberal democratic institutions under capitalism in order to protect private property and the state from radical responses to working class immiseration arising from internal contradictions of capitalism; fear-mongering about "islamo-leftism" is to the 21st century as fear-mongering about "judeo-bolshevism" is to the 20th.

In Nazi Germany, "Judeo-Bolshevism" fused antisemitism with anti-communism, portraying Jews as an alien force supposedly orchestrating revolutionary subversion. (Don't ask them how it is that Jews who control the banks are actually communist traitors). In contemporary French reactionary discourse, "islamo-gauchisme" depicts left-wing anti-racism, anti-imperialism, and solidarity with Muslim communities as evidence of an illegitimate alliance undermining French national identity, and indeed Western CivilizationTM itself.

In both cases, the nation is defined as belonging to those who don't challenge its existing distribution of power. If you fight to preserve that hierarchy, you are a hero. If you struggle against it, you are a traitor, or you were never part of the community in the first place.

But here's the key difference. By highlighting the link between radical critique of political economy, and the struggle for Palestinian liberation, reactionaries - who, on social media, in the context of dead internet theory, function as de facto bots for amplifying fascist rhetoric - are so close to getting it.

Where they get lost is in identifying as temporarily embarrassed billionaires whose interests are in alignment with that of the state as an organ of capital. By conflating conflict over material power with conflict over legitimate belonging to the "nation", the political and economic conditions that produce civil unrest in the first place become eclipsed by arguments about who is respectable enough, human enough, "French" enough, for their belonging to be perceived as legitimate enough for their participation in politics to matter. And through this conflation, we can see that this rhetoric is explicitly reactionary and racist in that it seeks to preserve puritan racial ideas of what a nationality actually is.

Palestinian liberation is a threat to global capitalism, and that's why platforms like Meta, X, reddit, etc, curate algorithms that not only tolerate but promote the overt racism and islamophobia at the heart of "it's not a protest, it's a riot" discourse.

"They can't be French because they are black". Ferme ta crisse de gueule, you racist piece of shit. The adults are having a conversation, and you need to go back to kindergarten to learn basic socialization. Sharing is caring people. Maybe then you can begin to unlearn the imperialist propaganda that celebrates the "achievements" of colonization while dehumanizing the colonized diaspora.

But I digress. You've got to give it to reactionaries: they correctly perceive that there is an inherent connection between anti-imperialist resistance and the struggle against unequal distribution of material power. But by confusing their own material interests with a need to defend those structures of power, they admit their own internalization of a dehumanizing worldview by treating respectability as a test of political humanity.

It's a scary world out there. While providing the necessities for our well being, nature can be harsh and indifferent. In the absence of being raised in a culture that is spiritually grounded in values of reciprocity and care, many seek to fill the void left by that absence by clinging to brittle identity structures where exclusion is perceived as necessary for safety. When civil unrest arises as a natural response to institutionalized exclusion, the irony is that delegitimization of that dissent through reactionary rhetoric itself functions as a type of mob mentality.

Preservation of existing social orders built on exploitation is fundamentally at odds with the preservation of your own well being, and the only thing preventing you from seeing that is your own attachment to ideas that colonized your mind by conditioning you to believe that survival requires conformity to hierarchies of domination.

If survival is felt - coerced into being felt - as a competition for status, then another person's liberation can appear to threaten your own security. Equality looks like dispossession, and solidarity feels like betrayal. Conformity becomes a survival strategy, even when the hierarchy demanding conformity is itself responsible for producing insecurity and harm.

If capitalism is perceived as genuinely meritocratic, then civil unrest as a response to collective suffering can only be seen as anger about personal failures, or straight up barbarism.

If colonization is viewed as a righteous endeavor - bringing civilization to the savages - then immigrants who seek material stability in the imperial core will always be seen as personally responsible for the political insecurity that motivates migration in the first place.

However, if capitalism and colonization are correctly understood as inherently violent, dehumanizing systems, reproduced through exploitation and coercion, then civil unrest can be understood as an expression of the same revolutionary impetus among the masses that in France contributed to the overthrow of monarchy and feudalism, and the declaration of universal human rights to liberty and equality, in the first place.

The defense of exclusion and hierarchies of domination, then, become a way of managing one's own insecurity. People who experience their place in society as precarious may cling to national or racial hierarchies because those hierarchies promise a sense of belonging that material conditions cannot reliably provide. That promise is fragile precisely because it depends on maintaining a distinction between those presumed to deserve security and those presumed to threaten it, even as the status quo actively undermines well being and increasingly defers the cost of doing business upon the most vulnerable - in particular, future generations.

That's why treating protestors as migrant rioters who are a threat to national security is ultimately about protecting the fragile identities built on the unsteady foundation of internalized dispossession.

We don't have to believe we're being watched for the possibility of being watched to change our relationship with the world. Sometimes, nothing changes except our awareness of ourselves. We're laughing, talking, walking somewhere familiar. Then we become conscious of how we might appear to someone else. Nothing around us has changed, but something in the experience has. We're no longer entirely within the moment. We're also looking at ourselves from the outside.

We have always imagined how others see us. We learn to anticipate reactions, adjust our behavior, and understand ourselves through the people around us. But now, our actions can be recorded, preserved, and encountered by people who were never there. A moment can outlive its context. A version of ourselves can remain long after we've changed. The observer becomes less a person than a possibility. We don't have to believe anyone is watching. We understand that what happens can be documented, separated from the moment, and interpreted by someone whose perspective we cannot control. We can be seen without being understood.

But the strangeness goes beyond recording. We can turn the outside perspective on ourselves even when nobody else is present. We examine our reactions, question our motives, and wonder what our behavior says about us. We become both the person living the experience and the person observing it. Some of this is necessary. Self-awareness allows us to recognize our mistakes, understand our motives, and change. Without it, we would struggle to learn from experience. But there is a difference between reflecting on an experience and monitoring ourselves while we're living it.

Reflection can deepen our understanding of what we're experiencing. It can also turn our attention toward how we appear, what we're doing, and what the moment might say about us. The distinction isn't always clear. The same awareness that helps us understand ourselves can introduce distance between us and what we're living. I wonder what happens when we're accustomed to doing both at once, when we experience something while also considering how it looks, how it might be remembered, or what it reveals about the person we are. The experience becomes something we're living and something we're evaluating.

Perhaps something is lost in that distance. Not the experience itself, but the ability to let it happen without immediately turning it into a story about ourselves. There are moments when we forget to observe ourselves. We become absorbed in a conversation, laugh without considering how we look, or find ourselves somewhere beautiful without thinking about what the experience says about us. For a while, we're simply there. We can reflect on these moments afterward, try to understand why they mattered, and carry their meaning with us. But their value doesn't depend on our ability to explain them while they're happening.

Perhaps this is what interests me about the unobserved self. Not a hidden version of ourselves that nobody can see, but the possibility of experiencing life without continually turning ourselves into objects of our own attention. And yet, how would we recognize such a state without observing it? The moment we begin examining our experience, we introduce the very distance we're trying to understand. We can't simply abandon reflection. It's one of the ways we make sense of our lives. But understanding an experience and being present within it are not the same thing.

Can we understand ourselves without making ourselves into objects to be understood? I keep returning to this question because I don't know how to answer it without stepping outside the experience again. We look at ourselves to understand who we are, but neither perspective, from within or from without, seems capable of telling us everything. Perhaps we need both, though I don't know how they fit together.

The unobserved self may not be a self that nobody can see, or one that never looks inward. It may be the part of our experience that doesn't have to become an object of examination in order to matter. I don't know if we can fully escape the impulse to observe ourselves. Nor do I know whether recognizing the moments when we stop observing ourselves preserves them or changes them. Perhaps some experiences can only be understood afterward. Perhaps some lose something when we try to understand them too soon.

THIS IS NOT A DRILL

CANADIAN SOVEREIGN CELL ACTIVATE

ALL FRONTS MOBILIZE

THIS IS NOT A DRILL

REPEAT

CANADIAN SOVEREIGN CELL ACTIVATE

ALL FRONTS MOBILIZE

TUKE REBELLION COMPROMISED

ALL AGENTS ACTIVE

THIS IS NOT A DRILL

There is something that looms above me

And I am only nothing when it appears

And it’s that something that makes me the container

For a moment, I just am; a gas, a floating head

Until I’m transformed into that which I lack

A vessel in need of a pilot

A sentence in need of the words

I had no lungs before oxygen

And no teeth before food

I was less than nothing, I was

And just as soon as I am, I am not

When that something arrives and makes me its cage

I am the prisoner that imprisons

The container that is contained.

The machinations of Evil lay bare before me. I mustn't give away the ultimate secret, and yet everywhere I see it: window-panes lit brightly at dawn; a road sign warning me of an upcoming curve; the glowing face of a child. Everywhere, the true nature of Evil bears itself to me, pours its secrets like gems.

Lacan knew. Mirth is the answer, the cthonic drip returning to saline, evaporating. The screechers don't understand; they never will—they read far too fast.

Drip. Don't leave it in the microwave, don't touch the gilly thing. Swoop in, and out, like a maintenance man in sunglasses. They think I don't know what I'm talking about.

They think I'm mad.

They've forgotten.

They've forgotten.

They've truly forgotten, if they ever knew.

You can see you can see everything and see everything. You always could. Here.

One asscheek. That's all it takes. The one that helps and guides, pipe it in. Beside you. Like soccer.

Words are love.

Branding. The Brandos. Or, Brawndos. That's two of them—one for you, and one for me.

Two little black flecks, or noctilucent tesselates.

This post was written without artificial intelligence.

This post was written for and will be enjoyed by the true audience of this subreddit. Several of you will even find it entirely intelligible.

Here's how to understand Evil.

Step one: Start with evil.
Step two: Understand it.
Step three: Capitalize it.
Step four: Understand it again.
Step five: Compare your two understandings.

Do you like my new hat? I made it from... well, let's not worry about what it's made from. Hey, has anyone seen [DELETED USER]?

One hundred and two. That's how many times more Evil I understand than people who claim to not know what this subreddit is about.

Why won't it read?, that's what I want to know.

Everything is here for the taking. For those wearing them.

Just don't be scared of shadows nor unearthly glows. The morning star and the evening star are, after all, the same acrid planet.

Developing a sense of [REDACTED] is one of the best things one can do for oneself, and for the world.

Here, have some more whiz, silly.

There is no escaping the Mark until the original vampire is slain, or dialectics stops functioning. If this were not so, Reason would have no power, no capacity to progressively learn and master systems of the world.

But it does. And so it is that an intelligence community, insofar as it is rigorous, becomes a ledger of dialectical paradigm-shifts, progressing stepwise according to a reliable schedule of information-accumulation versus entropic decay. If enough stuff happens in world history, fast enough, and sequential rigor prevents information loss through leakage and radiation, a paradigm shift will occur before the next historic threshold happens first.

Language has no place, no time. Words spoken are current, and current flows downhill and connects all channels. The greatest dialectic one is subject to is the determinant world one resides in.

There is no need for anyone to say, "Swear eternal fealty to me and all shall be forgiven." There is only the Mark and it is inevitable.

We hope you will continue to visit us here for a long, long time.

Here, let me top up your drink.

We are becoming more capable of doing things and less accustomed to deciding what is worth doing. Every new tool removes another barrier between intention and execution. We can produce without mastering, respond without reflecting, and move forward without knowing whether we chose the direction. The distance between wanting something and obtaining it continues to shrink. The distance between acting and understanding why we act is harder to see.

We still make decisions. We just spend less time deciding what matters. Our attention is directed, our options arranged, our next steps recommended. We remain free to choose, but increasingly within boundaries established by systems we did not design and rarely question.

Judgment develops when we decide what deserves our attention, what matters enough to pursue, and what should be left undone. Agency grows when we act on those judgments and take responsibility for where they lead. Both require practice. When we repeatedly allow something else to determine what matters and what to do next, we lose the occasions that call on us to exercise either. Over time, we risk becoming less capable of recognizing what is worth deciding for ourselves.

A person can spend their entire life responding to what comes next without ever deciding where they want to go. Nothing needs to force them. The system only needs to keep moving, and the person only needs to keep up.

Was this one of you guys?

For one that is aware of what is going on with all the absolute foolishness in daily lives, for those, the ignorance may feel blissful who are in it.

But what are your views on ignorant people who never or refuse to question anything that goes on, or refuse to view at their own monologues, at all...?

Is that stupidity or bliss?

At least since the turn of the 21^st century and coinciding with the advent of the Internet, our society has been gripped with a crisis of historicity defined by the incessant reproduction of past culture, giving rise to what we experience now as a culture of reproduction.

This culture of reproduction can only be understood in the context of the current mode of production i.e. capitalism, namely as a product of late-stage capitalism, that ouroboros looming over us, basking in the glory of its own wonderfully complex contradictions. It is precisely due to the fact that capitalism subsumes all critiques of itself that the conditions to commodify the melancholic nostalgia of a dispossessed generation may arise. Discontent with the present order of things opens the window for the intoxicating appeal of escapism, where the invisible hand of the market now reaches backward to justify its own present hold on the cultural zeitgeist.

Where perhaps a utopian imagination of the future may have offered past generations haven in the face of unprecedented global strife and conflict (like the Futurism of the early 20^th century), now our utopia is perceived as having come and gone, a relic of our childhood fantasies. Our visions for the future can’t even be described as dystopian; they merely aren’t described at all, as the ubiquity of the past has now eclipsed that of any future anxieties.

This is not to say our worries of the direction of society have merely gone away. Quite the contrary; there is no shortage of talk of artificial intelligence eventually enslaving humanity, nanobots consuming all matter on Earth or ecological catastrophe on the horizon. But culturally, our ability to express or supplant these anxieties in a forward-facing manner is dwindling.

Take the broad field of art as an example. While every art movement has relied on those of the past to propel it into novel territory, the rise of AI-generated art has taken this extreme to the next level. In AI-art, namely as it exists under the present mode of production, novelty retreats from being into appearing, where new mediums of expression take precedence over new ideas themselves. The novelty of AI-art is simply that it is artificially generated, something that hasn’t been done before, but its mere nature (as of now) that requires the input of art and ideas of the past rejects that it can generate something new altogether. “AI slop” appears to have a cohesive “look” and style, though this is not due to any specific artistic choice, but rather out of necessity and a product of the way AI parses existing art and styles to craft new images out of the bones of the old. In other words, AI-generated art can only rematerialize that which has already been consumed by it. It is therefore difficult to ascribe artistic “intent” to generative AI models that only offer the user the ability to produce new images out of preexisting ideas, rather than produce new ideas or expand upon old ones.

But AI itself is not to blame for the past coming back to haunt our future. It is merely a vessel for this obstruction of tomorrow to occur. The tendency for old media to be refranchised and remade in newer mediums is also reflective of a culture bankrupt of new ideas. And paradoxically, anti-AI “conservatism” appears to accelerate this tendency as well, as rejection of artificial intelligence and new vacuous forms of media and technology has driven younger generations back to the media of their childhood or those of their parents. Media giants such as Disney take this as a green light to continue pumping out remakes after remakes of decades-old film and television and franchising them to reach every crevice of every new medium. This of course extends well beyond just remaking the classics for a modern audience; each “new” project feels like a simple rehashing of the old, formulaic and devoid of direction, made to be clipped and reproduced in short takes for the instant gratification of social media bites.

In individual psychology, depression is often described as an obsession with a haunted past, with anxiety on the other hand being the fixation on an uncertain future. We live in a time of radical immediacy, where past and future merge into a hyper-present that is but a mere simulation of the images of both. It is to say that capitalism has outlived its novelty, leaving the only new ideas to those of the revolutionaries who dare to see a future justified by itself, rather than by the afterimages that appear only when we close our eyes. When a culture retreats in on itself, it is only a radical rethinking of the system that dispenses it that can see new flowers emerge from the seeds of the old. It is in this spirit we pick up the discourse that was left off at the so-called “end of history” and imagine and will into existence a history that has yet to emerge, that of collective ownership over the means of art and culture itself.

I believe it’s essential to understand culture, human nature, and the nature of reality, and I’m interested in which traditions and thinkers offer the clearest insight into them.

For me, Buddhism and Taoism offer important perspectives on human nature and reality, while Marshall McLuhan helps explain cultural transformations shaped by human technologies.

I tend to think of Taoism as emphasizing the body and Buddhism as emphasizing the mind. In McLuhan’s terms, that might be compared to hardware and software.

I’m also interested in the distinction between natural and human-made environments, and in how those environments shape the conditions in which these traditions take root. The natural world, as I’m thinking of it, is closer to the world humans experienced in the Stone Age. McLuhan’s historical work traces how human inventions transform our environment and reshape our senses, brains, and nervous systems.

What prompted this post was seeing capitalism mentioned in several discussions. Marx’s ideas are connected to historical transformation, so I’m wondering: Are they essential for understanding society? And what other traditions or thinkers should be included?