Plagiarizing God Every time I think

There is something luxurious about not using social media. Whenever I deactivate, I feel “out of the loop” but also richer in time, thoughts, imagination, energy. The lack of feeling leeched upon and bound to a regimen where I must perform or provide some kind of “value” (transient, wasteful value) at regular or at least semi-regular intervals; bound to other people I don’t actually know, mixed in with them and their energies, attached in a way to them and a member of their—“our”—network. It feels as draining as working a minimum wage job, almost, though of course, there are good days sometimes, and just like in any uniform, I love to look at myself in it (I miss looking at my profile). It’s actually better to provide zero value and be left alone. I like being worthless and having nothing to offer because then I can be free, all by myself. 🤍

I’m still thinking about propaganda and pathological.. logic (?). We watched The Cremator last night and even this reminded of the homicidal rationale of brainwashing and coercive psychological pressure. Here is the trailer:

_{the soundtrack is so marvelous, too, so i had to add x}

“The sooner people are incinerated and returned to dust: the sooner they’ll be enlightened, purified, and free.” “The sooner people accept our truth and reality: the sooner they’ll be saved, valuable, happy, and acceptable.”

There is a long history of brainwashing used to build and maintain group harmony and social cohesion, I mean, isn’t that what it always is? There is no form of coercion that is not working towards the harmony and cohesion and unity of a group. Even if that cohesion is against your values, they’re not against the values of the overarching values of the group identity.

Maybe I’m obsessed… It’s all about control and freedom from control. And why then, wouldn’t the most suspicious people be those who are the most arrogant and assured of their freedom from control, the ones convinced they possess the exacting power of implementing order and controls, and the ones who think they are either above or simply beyond influence?

Desiring control and external authority to provide order and divestment of the already limited choices available to a person often seems a way to signal docility, non-threatening, subordinate status. “Don’t be mean to me, I’m not in control!” I know this one because I’m guilty of this. But it can also be threatening because only someone with some kind of authority and power could afford the luxury to proudly announce how non-human they are. Are they trying to ingratiate themselves among those they consider dehumanized? I don’t know, sometimes it feels sincere when I come across this kind of thing, other times it feels predatory, sheep in wolves clothing type of energy.

Personally, I feel like I’ve been trying to be human my entire life. I’ve tried to be human and when I’ve failed (as gauged by the way other people treat me) I retreat back into my non-humanity. It’s easier not being human, then. It’s easier to deny that one has flaws, weaknesses. Related to my narcissistic traits of denying my weaknesses out of a fear of being devalued when I should be more robotic, more controlled, always more disciplined, always more non-human, and always less human.

Except the standard of humanness is, really, maybe non-existent. I said once that humanity gatekeeps its humanity, which I guess is still true being as I conceive of this sentence as a more antagonistic in-group favoritism slogan. The ingroup is always so clever, unique, capable, deserving (human) while the outgroup is dull, stereotypical, dumb, unworthy, (inhuman), etc. [Make all of humanity the outgroup and stereotype the entire species].

I digress. The point is that there is something nefarious and threatening about signaling that one is proud of their inhumanity/dehumanization procedure…I honestly shouldn’t spend so much cognitive energy on these lies. The point is that complacency and pride in dehumanization is a frightening thing. But perhaps it’s only my perception and, possibly, things even that I’ve said could be perceived as an acceptance of dehumanization. In fact, as I mentioned, I would rather expand humanness than whittle down the definition to narrower and narrower terms. Humanity is so ephemeral and truly does not exist. “Humanity” is more like an abstract idea and is best used as a weapon, like all grand ideas.

The fetishization of powerlessness, of being mind-controlled, (with respect to sexual fetishists and people who sincerely believe/know they are victims of mind-control) seems to me to be a sublimation of knowing we’re being controlled and submitting to having no to limited control over those controls… if that makes sense.

An entirely external locus of control, and the engineering of the desire for that external domination, which certainly feeds perfectly back into the global superstructure of control. So true! But where do I see this? Online. On social media. Where the loss of control and sense of being algorithmically micro-managed is severe. It’s a weird fusion of a million things. And it’s so complex, more complex than I’ll ever give the time it deserves. In my opinion, we certainly are controlled by a billion things. The earth itself is controlled by a trillion things. We can’t count the influences or know the limits of those controls, but there is something to be said about forging one’s own relationship to the external, rather than outsourcing it to an external other (crowds, media, software, groups). Some could argue that we outsource the mediation with the external through our bodies and what we ingest. I agree with this. I just wonder, since we are knowingly controlled by the sun, earth’s orbit, water, nutrients, our blood, the air, etc. do we have to exacerbate human to human control? To make coercive communication, persuasion, propaganda, and counter-propaganda the standard “dialogue” with others? Does the entire human culture have to descend into everything being made for control purposes? (yes).

I looked at Twitter today soon after I woke up. Friday will be a week that I’ve deactivated, so it’s not even been a full seven days 0.0. I’ve been having weird dreams. Last nights were somewhat difficult and strange, but the dream interpretations I skimmed gave them a darker hue (…mind control).

My dad was driving me through this terrible ice and wind storm. It felt like an emergency evacuation apocalyptic scenario. We were in heavy traffic and people were driving surprisingly well considering the snow, hail, and violent winds that were so intense that they made buildings wobble, stretch and distend like they were made out of inflatable plastic jelly. We were driving at night and when I sometimes had the POV of being the passenger, the road ahead was barely visible. But I was often watching the car from the outside in third person view and saw the wet streets reflecting lights, the black roads, and crisscrossing lines of hail. The cars were often slipping and sliding across the streets but no one got into an accident. Eventually, we arrived at this hotel on some mountain, reminiscent of The Shining, and I know I’ve been to that same hotel in previous dreams. The hotel was partially like, superimposition of suburban townhouse apartments and remote, isolated hotel. In any case, the elevator shaft was frozen with a thick wall of clear ice in the doorway. There was ice and snow covering everything. The inside of the hotel lobby was cold and when I entered, three people came out of the walls. They were clearly ghosts or dead people but seemed like, employees, which further confirms The Shining infiltration, which is interesting I guess because my dad and I watched that movie when I was about eight and it terrified me. So, I asked the concierge person if I could stay in the hotel and he said that it would be difficult because everything was frozen. Now that I’m typing this, I’m remembering another dream I had about being in a hotel service elevator with people. hmm.. too many dream memories occurring, it’s disorienting. To make it short, my dad walked around the hotel courtyard with me for a little while and it was like, I had to stay there for some time, it was a great relief that I had finally arrived. I wanted my dad to stay and wait to drive back considering the weather but he was insistent that he leave. The drive was six, seven hours or so, so I was worried about him being fatigued. But he wanted to leave. He was fairly distant in the dream, more than he was in real life.

I don’t often have “nice” dreams with my deceased parents, which sucks because when they’re like the dream I had last night, it leaves a sort of depressing aching, and angry feeling.

So, of course, I wanted to look up the meaning instead of meditating to figure it out myself… External Control. Anyway. I don’t care to talk about this anymore.

I sort of miss Twitter. I mostly lurk on TikTok and I don’t use Instagram or Facebook or any other social platform, so it’s like having no social media presence without it. Sometimes, like this morning, I’ll use my puppet account to lurk Twitter, and skimming the timelines immediately reminds me why I don’t need to use it.

The lure of being a mass media propagandist is inciting. And there is no way not to be a propagandist on Twitter, I’ve concluded, and accepting that and then behaving as such, is the “best” way to “win” Twitter. I may reactivate someday, so this will seem silly if ever I do, but I’m trying to think of the benefits of using Twitter because it 100% is a cost/benefit transaction and the costs were too steep for the measly benefits I received. The only thing I can think of that gives value to social media is exposure, contagion, influence, popularity. Which, and I may be biased, seem identical goals to propaganda. And on Twitter, it’s a competition to create the most popular, replicable media possible. And, well, given that I don’t like socializing, I don’t like networking, I don’t like dealing with people, I don’t like recognition, I don’t want to be replicated, I don’t want to influence anything, mostly because I don’t want to deal with other people, none of those rewards genuinely appeal to me. It’s so empty to me now, which is good because I’d like to move on. It’s been decades I’ve lived on social media and I feel like it’s a crutch, I feel there is no one way to genuinely appreciate and encounter others on there, to begin with. I guess I’m just over it for now, and I want to get pregnant and I don’t want to have my potential baby’s development chemically influenced by people I don’t even like very much on Twitter. And I don’t like how easily misconstrued, misinterpreted things are there… and don’t get me started on the hipster façade attitude of typing like a stoned fourteen-year-old. Maybe, you know, it’s likely I’ll never use Twitter like LinkedIn or in a professional sales capacity and I’m not into crypto or digital art, so it feels simultaneously that there is no “place” for me there and also, like I’m too old, and I just don’t have the Twitter Mindset, I suppose.

And it does feel luxurious to live mostly offline, out of the grasp of those micromanager algorithms. I may not actually have privacy, but there is a marked increase in privacy that being offline affords and that increase feels almost decadent. It feels subversive and illicit. Like, okay, this might be just rationalization to justify not wanting to be on social media, but I have this sense of self-sufficiency and privilege to not “need” social media, to be fine without, and to have no needs that must be met through the use of it. I feel so secretive now, too, unreachable, truly; even though I keep this blog, at least it’ll remain hidden and barely anyone will read it. It can’t be spread easily <3. And the values of social media simply aren’t aligned with mine. I don’t value popularity, recognition, exposure, or influence. I’m a hermit, I’ve always been a hermit, and trying to be anything other than a recluse is suicidal. And yes, mostly, I need a break from people. Sever the energetic ties and drawing up the bridges so I can be perfectly isolated and alone. I just love quitting things! 🤍