Get Off My Internet
You're a poseur pretending to be a friendless social reject. You are not a real loser like I am.
Some People Aren’t Meant for the Internet, and You’re Probably One of Them.
Nazi salute aside, it’s been an eventful month or so for the social web-propaganda device. Downgrading to dumbphones is becoming a luxury, elitist status symbol. Trump’s agreement with the CCP to temporarily shut down TikTok was probably deployed as a psyop to create the Trump Youth. Another mass exodus from Twitter, Tiktok, Facebook/Instagram is currently underway. It seems we’re finally becoming terminally ill with the invasive alien technology that a computer, and especially, a smartphone, fundamentally is.
People are waking up to the reality that being terminally online is the ritualized sacrifice of their embodied, offline life. We are made to pour our vital energy into the digital; to turn our psychic machinations into coded-libations — spilling the contents of our interiors into the restricted access, privatized external container of the corporate data facility.
As popular backlash grows, and calls to “return to real world” proliferate, a subtle confession seems to go unnoticed: to reject the digital world is to humblebraggingly admit that one had the option to live in the embodied world to begin with. They have a world to return to, and they chose, or “were coerced,” as many of them argue, into surrendering their lives to the internet. They have, what Marc Andreessen accurately calls “reality privilege.”
“A small percent of people live in a real-world environment that is rich, even overflowing, with glorious substance, beautiful settings, plentiful stimulation, and many fascinating people to talk to, and to work with, and to date. ( . . . )
Everyone else, the vast majority of humanity, lacks Reality Privilege—their online world is, or will be, immeasurably richer and more fulfilling than most of the physical and social environment around them in the quote-unquote real world.The Reality Privileged, of course, call this conclusion dystopian, and demand that we prioritize improvements in reality over improvements in virtuality. To which I say: reality has had 5,000 years to get good, and is clearly still woefully lacking for most people; I don't think we should wait another 5,000 years to see if it eventually closes the gap. We should build—and we are building—online worlds that make life and work and love wonderful for everyone, no matter what level of reality deprivation they find themselves in.”
— “Marc Andreessen - Interviewed by a Retard.” Niccolo Soldo, 31 May 2021
The opposite of reality privilege is “metaverse privilege” where problems (in the form of games), entertainment, social bonds, and even one’s own human potential, are valued and rewarded online, because none of those things are available to them offline. With a computer or computerphone, we can all possess metaverse privilege. However, not everyone will be able to enjoy a lovely, nutritious dinner, theatre show, party with friends and family, then return to their immaculate home full of satin, biological cotton, and silk. Peasants in the metaverse will simply have to make do with their Sims 4 creations and Netflix from inside their Ikea decorated cardboard boxes.
Did the internet really have to become an opiate and prison for the socially unwanted and unproductive? The least the detritus class of human beings can do is be useful to their elites.
Normie Is a Poseur Is a Hipster Is an Edgelord Is a Terrorist
One of the longest running digital warfare divide and conquer strategies has been the use of the term normie/poseur/local. Without doing any research, I’m going to assume this term originated in the mid-2000s, when being called a poseur was the biggest insult, a hipster was second, and normie? No one would even think to call you that, especially if you were a blue-haired lib, with a septum piercing, drinking a 40oz. of cheap booze alone in your room while livestreaming. That changed with the now famous “normcore” trend, initially appearing in 2013, just as the pink-haired-hipster-manic-pixie-dream-girl-world was going extinct.
What’s interesting is that 2013-2016 seemed to coincide with a groundbreaking increase in the number of users on social platforms. At the same time, global internet traffic jumped from 31% of the world population in 2011 to 43% by 2016. It became normal to be on Instagram, aspirational, even. Digital art was legitimized. Formerly niche and transgressive internet artists were signing deals with mainstream celebrities, and their digital creations were recognized as genuine, valuable works of art. Not only did mid-2010s net artists make it seem cool to be terminally online, they also facilitated the migratory transistion of inviting actual normies online. The iPhone, back then, was still for yuppies — the same yuppies who are now proudly downgrading to dumbphones. The iPhone was cool, and the normies, who are normal by virtue of their need to fit-in and compete in conventional status games and rewards, came online in droves.
While alt-kids, high school weirdos, and dark triad types obsessed with LiveLeak beheading videos may have made places like Blogspot and Tumblr their homes, by at least 2014, the distinction between offline and online was becoming undeniable interlinked. After decades of the internet being a place for nerds, rejects, and freaks, the normies had finally entered the chat, and not just for fifteen minutes on a Monday night after school. The fusion meant the basement dwelling social rejects — whose peaceful escape and perverse internet behaviors, which were once confined to the dens of the net — clashed up against the very normal, decent, polite, and upstanding normies, who had migrated onto the internet and invaded the only refuge these socially undesirable losers had left.
When the normies logged on, they came screen to screen with the cesspit of online freaks, undesirables, and bigots, and so, too, did the human waste of this world come screen to screen with the posturing, privileged, and rampant social signalling that normies cannot help but to participate in. This painful, aggravating friction: of forcing people who would otherwise never interact, into being totally exposed, nearly transparent to one another; aware of the daily minutiae of each other’s private lives, their anxieties, their repressed angers and envies, which were all uploaded for likes, analysis and surveillance, certainly helped fuel the ongoing culture war. I mean, truly, what a utopian, albeit, ignorant, and arguably, hateful ideal, to think the whole world could get along on the privatized internet. Chudjak and Stacy both watching the same double-feature of 2 Girls 1 Cup and an ISIS beheading video, followed by some cuddling and a reading of the most recent terrorist’s manifesto. That’s the future technolibertarians want: the globohomo village, with king CEO loser on top of the trash-pile.
The term normie took on an especially pejorative meaning around the late 2010s, as increasing incel terrorists, and similar dark triad types became cultural figures and livestreaming criminal icons. Even 4chan got, and still receives, the spotlight. The bowels of the psychiatric inmate internet were on full display, and those losers who had been hidden on the cesspits of the digital landscape were becoming household names (Chris Chan, 4chan, Alex Jones, just to name a few, off the top of my head).
This isn’t without precedent though. The normie public has always been fascinated by ugly freaks and violent crime. What’s more normie than a girl doing makeup listening to a true crime podcast? What’s more normie than obedient medieval peasants gathering to watch the travelling freakshow? The normies feed on the destitute, the outrageous, the shock, the trash, the salaciously offensive. They use the lower classes and socially undesirable as entertainment fodder, as tools of measurement to gauge how normal, productive, and morally good they are.
The normies always had reality privilege, but because of the social and market forces of the 2010s — the hipster liberalism of Web 2.0 tech development — they logged on to become influencers, share pictures of sunsets, selfies with celebrities, become content creators and artists. They had their own “normalcy” weaponized against them. They wanted to fit in. They wanted to go where the “cool” kids were hanging out, make a cool digital nomad living. I could argue much of the conservative backlash, originating with the normcore era, was a result of normies coming screen to screen with how alt-kids and extremists on the internet actually are weird fucking freaks. Maybe the normies were trying to rehabilitate us. Or colonize, mimic, absorb, devour, become like us; turn the citizen-user-loser-population into a homogeneity of the so-called “the lowest common denominator,” and let them sink even lower and grow ever larger.
Monarchist Neofeudal Loserdom
“We’re ruled by losers”, acknowledges New Means writer J.P. Hill, just two weeks ago. A few days later, in an already oft-screenshotted headline from The Guardian, Rebecca Shaw confesses, “I knew one day I’d have to watch powerful men burn the world down – I just didn’t expect them to be such losers.” Wow, as if the whole world didn’t already know Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk were weirdos? Did you not know that when you people joined fucking Facebook and Instagram, and never logged off? Why did you normalize them, idolize them, write op-eds admiring them, support policies that deregulated their industries, let them run their companies opaquely, give them the benefit of the doubt at every turn, until now, when it seems it’s too late?
The reality privilege have become sick of the online game. Confronted with the horror of how their infinite desire to exploit others and play abstract status games destroyed their own lives; now that the internet has become, possibly, one of the worst versions of itself: a privatized shithole run by insecure, pathetic, un-elected megalomaniacs, who control national and international conversations, relationships, employment, and data and information flows — now the reality privileged want out. They helped engineer the metasphere in which the peasants still dream in a digital trance. Finally, the privileged can log off. Their work here is done. We’re all losers, and the distance between serf and lord is greater than ever before.
Immunotechnological Memories
On the one hand, there’s an argument to be made that technologies are fundamentally imbued with the sociopolitical, economic and cultural values in which they’re created, meaning you can’t take the US military defense strategy out of the ARPAnet, just like you can’t take the CCP out of the Hikvision surveillance cameras. On the other hand, it may not have been so wise to so thoroughly privatize the internet.
To be read in a passionate, idealistic, political tone: We could’ve had tax-funded libraries running our digital queries, national communications regulatory authorities managing social media, or, better yet, sociopolitical citizens platforms focused on local, national, and international discourse, read by congressmen and women, representatives directly interacting with their constituents in a government regulated infoscape, replete with hate-speech laws and civilizing norms of public space. The possibilities of a fair and balanced internet were and are possible, but for the time being, we have to become terminally ill with the predatory exploitation of private technology. Once the normies log off, once the novelty of this technology wears away, we’ll be able to absorb it, and renegotiate its existence, until it becomes something as mundane and banal as the television.
The internet ‘had’ to turn out this way; it had to invade every aspect of our lives (and perhaps, it might still not be done with us yet). In order for the internet to become normalized, the conventional everyday person had to come online, engage, take it over, become infected with the internet and program all their normalcy into it. By spreading through average person, the internet is adopted, replicated, and submerged into the background, no longer novel or on the fringes, it becomes mainstream, the centerpiece, endemic, its ugly effects exposed for the commoner to contemplate and to which immune themselves. It takes this absolute, all-encompassing digital imprisonment, and the resultant backlash against it, to find a middle-ground. Hopefully. Eventually?
I don’t think the answer is to abdicate the hard technology altogether. We should still use computers and computerphones, lest our adversaries or competitors make gargantuan advances in directions in which we have not taken a single step. “We” (I’m speaking as an French-American) do not want to become Soviet Russia.
“Last month, in Russia, I had the chance to see close up a country that tried to hold back the information age — a country that used to put armed guards in front of copiers.”
— “The National Information Infrastructure”, Al Gore, 11 January 1994
The anxiety is that the bifurcation between the reality and metaverse privileged will grow, until the only people left online are the ones who first joined: the lonely, overworked, unwanted, unproductive; the freaks and losers, chittering away with their Ai bots on their Ai generated social media platforms, where finally, everybot loves them. Worse still, the metaverse prisoners will include those who may have once contributed something more to the world and society, rather than just enriching their king CEO loser’s net worth.
A new, massive underclass, which has subsumed the nonexistent middle-class, too: not addicted to drugs, cigarettes or booze, but instead, dreaming in the metaverse — arguing, flirting, watching — productive datacattle owned, milked, and harvested by their reality privileged elite. And, if you have eugenics brainwashing: why shouldn’t they be? Why should losers be free to invade the purity and beauty of reality?
Those people never really deserved reality to begin with, and containing them in a virtual inferno is more humane than letting them die from substance abuse illness or letting them dirty up and uglify perfect respectable, pure society, right?
“Last night, I was thinking: if I’m so genetically inferior that my only purpose is to be exploited, the only value I create is in my submission, knowing my place in the world is, and always will be beneath; that all I can hope to attain in this life is comfort and security in my [digital] serfdom, while “real humanness” (which I associate with knowledge, invention, creation, learning, discussion) is ordained only to those who have won the #GeneticLottery… Wouldn’t it be MORE ethical to legalize euthanasia?”
— “I Survived the Necrotic Underworld and All I Got Was Eugenicist Mind Control.” Censorine, 5 February 2023
It’s time the elitists log off and go back to their snobby social cliques and Instagram advertisement apartments. They taught the machine how best to manipulate, how neurotypical eyes track objects onscreen, which pixel activates which brain area, and how those associations are linked. They taught the technofascists how to subtly market to any demographic, how psyops can be perfected onto individual targets, how specific strategies of social comparison, violence and pornography can be used to ensnare and entrap the desperate and lonely, prey on anyone, not just those who are desperate and lonely. The Internet has devoured us whole, rich and poor: keep them gooning, gawking, arguing, typing. Now, the losers can go back to their digital for-profit entertainment prisons, hidden way from society, where the elites have always wanted them to be.
The normies diminish the value, possibility, and sheer feat of engineering that is the internet. They surrender the internet and hand it over to fascist platforms. “There’s no way to make it better but to log off entirely.” They surrender these incredible tools to the technofascists, authoritarians, and their platform-addicted cattle without apology. The extremely unequal divide between the haves and the have-nots doesn’t just remain, but widens: those who are enslaved to the metaverse, and those who are not. Well, I’m sorry but I still love the internet, and I love how it has saved me (a personal post for another time, perhaps). I will continue to use it to learn, read, make shitty websites, experiment, try to share and interact with ideas, appreciate the creative output made by any remaining human beings. I’m not going to leave the internet just because snobs, losers, and fascists took it over. I’m not going to give up because it’s difficult to resist the allure of algorithms and the tricks to keep me logged in. They’re not going to steal this miraculous invention and weaponize against it me and the rest of vulnerable humanity, while those with reality privilege get to run for the escape. Not all of us have access to galleries. Not all of us are signed to agencies and have editors. Not all of us have the validation and legitimacy of institutional authority. Not all of us have the luxury to read a book, or the time to watch something longer than a mini-drama. Those with reality privilege are in debt to those of who have been, and continue to be imprisoned in the screen. They get to log off, and selfishly, they leave the unwanted and undesirables to rot.
Personal Reflection & Subscriber Update
Whew… That was sort of intense for me, lol. I’m sorry my rhetoric can be so inflammatory, it’s just… the politician in me. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
In any case, I’m working on multiple articles, doing research for each, reading, working on my paintings, in addition to taking care of my family. I’m also still adjusting to Substack and in the process of quitting Twitter/X, and I’m torn between many ideas, so I appeal to you, my dear subscribers, with a few questions, because I want to be of useful service to you! 🌟(These polls are only open for a week).
Thank you so much!! ♡ &&&;;
Great read. I'll probably read it again in the next days to think about it and probably feature it in my next Sunday's schizophrenization