Cybernaut Chronicles 2

My grim future has dissolved into an inscrutable matrix of uncertainty and chaos. There are hazards in cyberspace I’d do well to be cognizant of, if I care for my personal safety.

The psychology of crowds is ever present on the internet and in the communities that we engage with. In fact, its hard to see anything but pathological group psychology going on in virtually every online community I’ve ever been a part of, or lurked on from afar. Its mostly been lurking. Online communities, SO FAR (I hope this changes soon) have held as little interest for me as IRL ones, that is to say, almost none.

Of the most concern is my pet diagnostic category for a mental illness: Cybernetic Psychosis. The primary feature is acquiring delusional beliefs from the internet, and harming yourself and others as a result. You can’t have a comorbid mental illness I don’t think, because then the pathological behaviour could all just be part of that.

Nonetheless, I am searching for my own crowd to join on the internet. They’ve got to be out there somewhere, right? People I actually want to talk to? Conversations that don’t make me feel like shit for weeks after? If nothing else, I have the time to hunt such things down at the moment. They could be on Vocal, but I suspect that I am somehow only working towards further alienation here.

I read a headline from a story on Medium.com that up to half of the negative online comments about The Force Awakens was generated by Russian bots. I’ve not read the article in full, and in some sense I may in fact only be contributing to mankind’s dying information ecosphere by repeating this. What’s really interesting to me is that that movie, and its sequels, didn’t need any help from bad actors to get a ton of shitty fan backlash. The Russian digital culture commandos needn’t have wasted their time. If true, it is in fact evidence that although generally up to no good, world governments are still just as incompetent as the rest of the world.

Much of the vitriol spewed at those movies I think is somewhat sexist, racist, and homophobic. We can never know, if they had had a “diverse” cast, but a good script, they would have attracted the same level of ire. And of course a “good script” is laughably subjective. However, having little shreds of those demonized aspects of human psychology doesn’t make a person stupid or even bad. It just makes them flawed and human like everyone else. Unfortunately, it is a bad look for many of my fellow Star Wars fans when half of their interaction with Star Wars content is just shitting on Disney. I made that half thing up. It makes me think that what they are fans of is not so much Star Wars as it is shitting on things. When you zoom out from the microcosm of Star Wars fandom in general and look at the average of human internet interactions, I think you’ll find that shitting on things is mostly the way that people interact on the internet.

There are protests going on the world over, I am sure, regarding the public health orders and the pandemic. I’m quite sympathetic to their concerns, though the behaviour itself does approach being unthinkable to me. Maybe this is because I am such an anxious worrier. I often worry that things like buying a cup of coffee could have unintended consequences. Under the best of circumstances, I fear that my actions are always somewhere down the line triggering a net increase in the amount of human suffering going on in the world. Now, with a deadly pandemic going on, such fears are given a much clearer shape.

Government tyranny is not a small concern. It's been going on for thousands of years. Really, since the beginning of civilization as far as I’m concerned. Always be skeptical of governments. Their primary concern is for themselves. Fortunately, in the industrialized world, it just so happens that their self-interest coincides with that of most of their citizens. What people concerned with governments almost universally neglect is how religion and religious thinking are so intimately connected with awful government behaviour. They are part and parcel.

I’m not going to fact check myself here because I’m not a journalist and I don’t think anybody is reading anyway. But in my recollection of ancient history writing, organized religion, agriculture, and cities all appear at around the same time. I don’t think that is a coincidence. All of these things need each other and feed each other, and can hardly be separated at all.

The anti-mask demonstrations, in particular one single video, going on in my city give me some measure of evidence for this idea. Many of the people interviewed express some sort of religious conviction that is intimately connected to their anti-mask/virus denial standpoint.

No, I’m not done trying to make the internet get mad at me. It will be interesting to see if these kinds of “hot takes” buried within a classically “TL;DR” document attract the kind of ire they would if presented through more lowest common denominator kind of outlets, like comment sections on youtube or something. BLM was also a demonstration of something that I am very scared of. The way it just seemed to so beautifully and cleanly sort people along demographic lines, I found very disturbing. All of my generally, “liberal” friends on instagram, at the same time posted the same thing. A screenshot of blackness. En masse. I’ve never witnessed such clean and perfect control of human behaviour. What really scares me is I don’t think there was any human puppet master behind any of it. It was “the algorithm” if you will; a sum total of all of the algorithms on all of the social media platforms that alter people’s behaviour. I don’t necessarily think there is anything wrong with BLM. It just seems to me that if my premise is correct, that what I saw all through my insta feed that morning is the result of computer systems feeding behaviour to us, a bad actor could easily take advantage of that system and drive us towards whatever it wants.

No Cybernaut Chronicle is finished without me gushing about tunes. Today I’m vibing to youtube music’s Industrial Cardio playlist. Lots of NIN, Ministry, Suicide Commando, and the like. The perfect soundtrack for worrying about how the digital dimension of 21st century living is destroying humanity and the world. And actually, at some point in the relatively near future, I think I may design some workouts around this soundtrack.

Before I start utilizing these tunes in a more instrumental way, I’ve got to finish one of my various other Cyber projects. For the last 2 months I’ve had a trial membership to an app called “Daily Burn”. It's basically a premium version of youtube for class style workouts. I’ve been enjoying it. My workouts needed a change when I started.

Recently I have finally rehabilitated my labral tear and scapular dyskinesis to the point that I can do a high volume of intense physical work with very little pain. This new physical condition has boosted my mental condition in a way that is impossible to overstate. I feel like myself for the first time in two years.

I needed to expand. Obviously, with my dismal financial situation and the worsening pandemic, actually going to a martial arts class or gym is out of the question, so I had to keep it all inside my house. But I have been blessed by the Northern Chaos Gods with a large living room. Perfect for body weight exercise.

I got the Daily Burn trial through another smartphone app that is very much in line with being a cybernaut. Sweatcoin. Sweatcoin I like because it is a step towards a Black Mirror episode. The premise of the app is to turn a person’s steps into a kind of crypto-currency. Unfortunately, it has yet to build a ton of value. One of the few things that have been worth the price of participation with sweatcoin have been its fitness related offers.

During the summer for example, I used another similar trial for an app called fitplan, and found that to be pretty good. When Daily Burn came up, I had to try it again.

The reason I enjoy exercise so much is partly because of my passion for martial arts. Daily Burn has an MMA fitness course. I am on my second run through of it. Sadly, my trial will end before getting all the way through a second time. There are also a handful of other martial arts style workouts that can be discovered for the curious cybernaut, but I’ve taken them all already. There are other physical disciplines offered. I’ve been mixing it up with Barre and Pilates classes. What I like about those is how they shine with femininity in a way that I think reads to most people as being quite in opposition to something as brutal as mixed martial arts. I think the intelligent cybernaut will see how these things are all complementary to each other, however.

Once my trial is over, I have some plans for creating my own thing. But they are only plans. Buried in my head are thousands of plans and contingencies which will likely never be realized, and are probably fundamentally flawed in some fantastic way. Here it is though. My hope is that somebody will just do this for me so I won’t have to spend all the time developing this insane concept. Somebody please fully flesh out the fictional Star Wars Martial Art, Teras Kasi. There’s a fair amount of in-universe content to use, but primarily you just need to base it off of Pencak Silat, the Indonesian Martial Art which Steve Perry based Teras Kasi on.

Then, once we’ve invented our cyber martial art, we can start putting it out there. I’m thinking that twitch and similar platforms are only going to gain in popularity. We could teach Teras Kasi through twitch courses, under the banner of The Star Lores Podcast. There is my free plug of myself.

Mostly I want to “invent” Teras Kasi for the sole purpose of being able to say that I created the world’s first digital martial art.

We have entered a strange time period. So much of our interactions are with digital phantoms now. I don’t know what it all means. All I can do is explore it all.