Even those without an anus

can understand what it means to shit with one, to fight in aisles for sake of grocery items cleaning one, to be ashamed.

Even those with no penis or proboscis

will experience often wishing to pierce through a flat surface to penetrate far reaches of what’s known.

Even those without a scrotum

may imagine, one thinks, swamping in one’s pants for known, intimate, sensed carnal presences in one’s own cosmos.

ALL of THESE are sarcophagus-regions:

all of us are mummies being preserved by heaven. These bodies have existed in orbit millions of years around Sol; they die. A consciousness reading one doesn’t know what the hell that means in terms of the proper uses of one’s energies, or in places socially that make them forsake a proper voice and be a servant. I am such a shame-filled, death-neglecting debtor: and I’ll be shamed for sharing so.

Thus, to return to my trace of life,

to restore this beast the dignity of solitude immediately after exposing his second face, in your low valley, to what sun remains, I’ll enjoy reminding you of your innocence of all sin.

Dear r/sorceryofthespectacle mods, chief executives of companies, reigning monarchs, elected heads of state, eminent rentiers, entertainers and health fanatics, prolific idolators and idle professionals, palette stockers & clockers in machines, redditors, fellow-travelers, readers blessed, bearers of naked skins, future übermenschen gay with scales, tails, fins, & others still whose graves go unpossessed:

Thank you for the opportunity to express my thoughts in words on the bored corpse of our decorum. The icon-suns of our blazing days hide us starfish, who maintain no motion. Take it from one bound low in ill esteem: there's a bitterness on the sidewalk these days.

There's a nakedness stalking in custom of clothes, in their hungry peripheries down the aisles of lives. I speak of stagnation: of being stranded here in putrefactions congealed to form fictionally solid lines, nationally lashed animals, notionally free when most lost sharing one black-and-white past-fantasy.

Spurious rationals! Where were you when we searched for true sentences? When we torch of kerosene lampooned you in the cavern brave? There cannot be bought an honest word on the Internet: not one.

There's a bitterness in our silent complacency at dusk. In the lapsing contract we have lost the power to read and thus renew. True discourses on inequality continue tapping on the restaurant window. Where's the 'we-the-people' when you have no home?

Where's the fellow traveling when you must not leave your bedroom under any circumstances, or you must cope with overwhelming speed in the car-lanes of each morning? (This should be spun off into a news article on the front page of your work computer.)

I am calling us a stunned animal, fighting against its stomach impaled. With sorcery, before we rise the day begins behind our eyes. The managers hammer inside us, for we are in whom their hammer lies.

These days, the bitterness on the sidewalks is real. I know this well, for it is how I feel.

Fondly and with friendly haze,

f.c. 8057

Greetings friends.. for those left behind, blowing down the road like tumbleweeds...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v7iI8sckGAA

My experience of the pause has been very pausitive. I discovered gardening this year, so I was able to spend more time out in the garden this summer without worrying about the next abusive message that would be waiting for me from one or another half-comatose Redditor with only a a pinhole-sized asshole to shit through.

I have also had time to imagine my writing more fully, in the fullness of my own mind and world, without considering it in the context of a Reddit post and the aesthetics of that. I love writing in the post box on the page because it heightens the experience of writing for the audience ("I always write for posterity," I like to say), but it also is a very particular audience and context with a very amped-up, miasmatic political vibe.

Sorry I haven't been posting weekly threads--I realized there was nothing to report, and I had nothing new to say. Also, I think there is value in silence, in pauses, in comfortable silences. I am willing to hold space for silence. Again, I do not think an internet forum is so great a loss; there are many other subreddits, and people can still post comments--and, we are not shut down, we are protesting. If there ever were a true spirit of the community, it would be one which did not simply give in to protests like every other cucked, bourgeois, scatus quo subreddit. It's not about being able to post an endless deluge of critical theory articles and angry shower thoughts (we already have plenty of those in the history--go read one you missed!).

It's about being part of history and the dialectic of history. For a while, having the subreddit open was the biggest way to cause disruption. Now--partly because of the not-small, not-large number of users we have--the most disruptive thing is to SHUT IT DOWN. (The subreddit has also been declared dead, shitty, worthless repeatedly throughout its history--so, if it was already shitty and dead, it is also no great loss.)

But I digress. During this pause, I started writing more, and I also began making some videos that I will eventually publish (gonna set up my own hosting first, probably, or find a good YouTube alternative that isn't censorable).

The world has changed dramatically. Privacy isn't just under attack, it is completely gone, because the military has been scanning the entire internet with AI for a decade or more, probably. We've all been digitally cloned already inside of some NSA data center. They have a century-long plan to completely disenfrachise the public and limit all information, and completely manage a global ontology via the religion of UFOs (I will not call them UAPs because that is part of the new global ontology rollout). AI's utility will be carefully locked-up and striated, and using unauthorized AI to generate unauthorized images such as politically-disruptive propoganda or the faces of any living or dead person (because we aren't allowed to talk about history or anything) will be make illegal and punished harshly. AI will also be used to enforce this and scan for crime "because it works" and because bourgeois people are scatological cucks who love being debased by the state.

But I digress. I really think that principled, embodied action, acting with your whole self in the world, and fucking with the dialectic of history to maximize tension, is the way forward in activism. "Critique is dead" doesn't quite cover it anymore. Dramatic gestures of post-critical grand action seem to be what's called for in the new age.

What new parts of you have begun to come alive since you've been disconnected from the scratchy, miasmatic, critical energy dripping venomously from the SotS I.V. of discontent? What fresh insights or originary visions have occurred to you? What new projects are bringing coherence, agency, or enthusiastic momentum to your life?

Ok, it is done. I removed all the approved submitters so all members are equally unable to post now. During the ongoing protest / Reddit crisis, you can still comment in existing threads.

My question/prompt for this week is, How do you organize your library or filesystem? How do you organize links or articles that you save from Reddit? Do you ever go back and review your collection of organized, saved articles?

Thanks to /u/Impassionata for the idea. If you have a problem with this idea or a better idea or any reason we shouldn't do it, let me know in this thread. If you are an approved submitter don't worry, it's supposed to be everybody can post anyway.

The practice of tipping first emerged in Great Britain in the 16th century when Englishmen offered money in the hope of ‘insuring promptness.’ Shortened to the acronym, ‘TIP,’ the practice spread to America sometime after the Revolutionary war. What started as the emulation of high status eccentricities was quickly recognized as an avenue for business opportunity. The service industry quickly institutionalized these habits, which subsidized a significant portion of the industries labor costs.

An entire mythology emerged which justifies and explains the nature and reasons for tipping which have almost zero relation to reality. 40 years of research across multiple disciplines has documented that tipping has no effect on the quality of service received. That the amount tipped has no correlation with the quality of service rendered; even if ‘its the worst service a person has ever received’ 70% of Americans would still be too ‘embarrassed not to tip.’ Tipping is not a magical incentive system acting as a ‘check and balance’ on quality but rather a social norm followed out of fear of retaliation. All modern nations except America have largely done away with the practice.

Most service employees actively argue against their own, individual self-interest: the vast majority of the industry remains in favor of tipping. Yet 40 years of research has demonstrated the uncontested fact that a fixed wage would offer a higher yearly sum (with the only exceptions being extreme outliers). The explanation for this behavior can be found in compulsive gamblers addicted to slot machines or lottery tickets. They typically remember the ‘big score’ rather than the months or years of consistent losses. Similarly, a waiter is forever fixated on the time(s) they made $500 in a few hours etc. rather than the typical shift where they walk with less than $40. The reward schedule of both tipping and gambling are the same (variable ratio, variable interval) and the reason people become addicted to them.

When a person buys a lottery ticket what they are really purchasing is hope. Likewise, restaurant employees cling to the tipping model out of the prospect–unlikely as it may be–of improving their material position rather than setting definite limits on it.

Anyone who disputes the tipping hypothesis would need to not only overcome basically four decades of consistent data, they would also need to answer the question: Why do people often get better service at Chick-fila than a fine dinning restaurant?

By instituting the practice of tipping, restaurants turn a communal relationship into a transactional one.

Communal: communis, 'shared by all or many’

Transaction: transigere, 'the adjustment of a dispute, a negotiated agreement’

Money=>coin=>cuneus, ‘wedge’=>wecgan, ‘to move, agitate.’

Over the course of evolution, eating a meal has by and large been a communal affair. The problem comes from inserting a ‘wedge’ into the relationship at the point of contact which transforms (‘moves’) it into a transaction, while maintaining the façade of community. All parties involved know, at least unconsciously, that they are participating in a charade and its not uncommon for unspoken contempt to emerge on either side.

Each customer is evaluated according to how much money one anticipates. Contentiousness among the staff over 'regulars' who leave large tips become an everyday occurrence. This radically alters the institutional culture of the establishment as a whole. Stereotypes involving the tipping practices of outgroups are often--but not always--used to evaluate individual customers. These practices can become so engendered that staff members belonging to the perceived outgroups, routinely adopt these same filters, take them as reality, and apply them to the same groups.

On average, perceived outgroups receive horrendous service. They become conditioned through experience to anticipate bad/non-existent service as a fact of reality. It is not uncommon for these people to become angry or on edge before they step foot in the door. Emotional anticipation of abuse is a learned behavior and a natural reaction to its occurrence.

Modern restaurants are essentially closed, self-perpetuating systems whose fundamental principles are established on dehumanization and status conflict. American restaurants contain deeply rooted inefficiencies, systematic group conflicts, widespread externalities, and gross incompetence. An entire culture exists to rationalize these realities and push them out of consciousness. Often through the use of language itself–a lexicon which retains the external vocabulary of hospitality, its signs and symbols but without real substance of any kind.

Restaurant employees are routinely asked to be experts but without any means of acquiring expertise. What is called “training” often consists of following an employee around like a dog on a leash for a set number of hours. If the employee desires information or knowledge beyond what can be ascertained through osmosis they are required to endure the costs. Systems that demand expertise without providing an outlet to acquire it, create in their place, a default status hierarchy which is navigated through posturing. “Once hierarchy exists,” Robert Wright notes, “status is a resource.” Learning a culture is like learning a language. If you learn that language first it will always be your primary language: its the default setting. Once a status hierarchy is set it becomes self-perpetuating.

Another curious practice of American restaurants is intentionally overstaffing. Once the employees arrive at work, the metrics are considered (data of customer volume on similar days from previous years, the number of reservations etc) and an open invitation is then offered by the managers for a few people to go home. In a typical restaurant, hardly a week passes without this occurring. A habit begins to emerge among the staff, who come to know that on any given day they can walk into work and go straight home. Before long, much of the staff arrives at work with a desire to leave (while never knowing in advance if they will get to).

In restaurants that have abandoned all pretense of standards, the official closing time becomes relative to the volume on a given night. These establishments routinely close down the business, well in advance of its stated operating hours. Low volume becomes associated with the ability to leave work and the staff starts to anticipate its occurrence. Often actively discouraging business, as anyone who has arrived at a restaurant 30 minutes before close has discovered.

The modern American restaurant is best conceptualized as engendering a culture of dehumanization that operates in a closed loop. This ‘circle of dehumanization’ is transmitted from the owners to the managers, the managers to the kitchen and the kitchen to the wait staff and finally from the wait staff to the customers who then pass it back to owners and/or managers.

‘We get in the habit of living’ Camus writes, ‘before getting in the habit of thinking.’ Habitual behavior is often unconscious behavior. When such habits are institutionalized the most obviously absurd practices can quickly become common place.

People typically evaluate by comparison. The ‘best’ is relative to a persons experience and in environments where quality is almost universally absent, Apple Bee’s can become the model of ‘casual dinning’ while getting the public to pay its labor costs.

Perhaps this situation should not be surprising when one considers the etymology of the word service,

service=> serf-ise=> servitium=> servus: latin, ‘slave’

The robots are coming and it is doubtful that these paper tigers, haunted by the ghosts of Feudalism will survive the fallout, barring a full blown exorcism.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sh1C7X31m14

I've been working on this series for 40 episodes now. It's a ritual I record, and rebroadcast on cable access in Portland OR.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_uNPZKJqbE8&ab_channel=GoArmySOF

! Verbum Vincet: The word will conquer.

! > "All the world’s a stage, And all the men and women merely players; They have their exits and their entrances; And one man in his time plays many parts

! --Shakespeare

! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/4th_Psychological_Operations_Group

I don't know how I entirely feel about parts of this but its such a clear and forceful rebuttal of some of the sentiments here--myself included--(and a confirmation of others, no doubt) that it seems like its worth putting forth if for no other reason than its apparent absence.

Here, then, is this man for whom the future is once again a hazardous mystery to which there is no key. He falls back on the magician, on the political prophet, on the miracle-working wise man, on the one who unveils the future and offers assurances. He transforms the physician or the scientist into a sorcerer. He looks for some Promethean or some Mephistophelian intervention which will provide the final breakthrough and the security of a sure future. The success of Pante (a science fiction monthly), and publications of that type, of horoscopes, of fortunetellers, of sects, the growth of the irrational in politics and the increase in intellectual incoherence–all these are sure signs of the absence of hope. Efforts to plumb the world’s and my own future are completely drained dry in a “thus it was written.” The attempt to lay hold of the unseen powers, to appease them, to seduce them and use them is a magician’s springtime and the prelude to a summer of drought and sterility. Nothing can render a person more sterile and ineffectual than this return to magic.

Let it not be said that this merely incidental behavior, surface or peripheral sentiment, or that it is confined to ‘popular’ uncultivated circles. Quite the contrary. It is the recourse to magic which is central, and it is the rational conduct and the professional restraint which are peripheral and superficial. It is in his attempt to recreate the sacred and in his looking for a miracle that modern man is fully identified.

This comes equally to light among the sophisticated intellectuals. The whole team of the periodical Tel Quel, for example, is specifically characterized by its Magianism. Spellbinding art, pop music, Michel Butor or Alain Robbe-Grillet, the Underground, all these represent in reality a search for, or a step toward, the magical and the indecipherable.

Now if “at the beginning of things” magic could have been the agent of action, of mastery over the world, and of the affirmation of the individual over against the group, in our day it is a regression. For this is not a ‘new magic,’ but the old one. Faced with a formidable technological system and with relentless structures, man takes refuge in the ancestral activities of magic and the occult, of nighttime and dreams. He is afraid of what he has done and thinks to find a remedy in a return to the original springs, but what was spring three hundred thousand years ago is now a mirage of water which leads one astray into ever greater sterility. Today nothing is more reactionary than the Living Theater, the Underground cinema, pop music, and Scandinavian eroticism. These are, to be sure, understandable reactions, but they are debilitating and falsifying at the very height of the hardest struggle man has ever faced.

The magician is, above all else, the one who is able to disclose the future and eventually to change it. Nowadays we no longer have haruspices. Our century, which to be sure, still uses tarot cards and coffee grounds, would no longer be happy, on the whole , with what is openly called superstition. To all appearances it has become scientific, and it brags about being rational. Fortune-telling is practiced only in secrecy and shame. Even today’ fortunetellers have taken a rational turn. Never has the future been so scrutinized, but now we do it in the scientific manner. Forecast, projections, possibilities, prospects–these enterprises abound, and of course they bear the stamp of a certain rigor and rationality.

Some of the methods are quite consistent, but it has to be noted at the same time that the imagination plays an ever increasing role in such endeavors. The procedures, as a matter of fact, are more and more rational, but the object on which they are brought to bear is not. That is to say, it was soon noted that it is impossible truly to predict, for the reason that such a prediction would imply a selection from among certain privileged facts and hypotheses. So a choice had to be made between two procedures. One would either be content with the construction of models, abstract structures having little to do with concrete reality except to represent it conceptually. These models can then be made to operate in such a way that one can foresee their evolution. But this is an abstraction of the real, comparable to the image the magicians might have used to represent the future.

The second procedure is that of simulations and scenarios. If abstraction was the decisive factor in the first, the imagination is decisive in the second. It involves the invention of a series of coincidences, so that if such-and-such happens, the logical sequence can be seen. Thus one starts out with imaginary factors (not entirely, to be sure) and one treats these scientifically. Ultimately, if one managed to simulate all the imaginable concrete situations, each time adding this or that factor and making the corresponding changes in the other factors, one would have embraced the whole of the real. In these operations the frontier with science fiction is impossible to distinguish. …The throwback toward the irrational, the absurd modes of behavior, dependence on the imaginary–these are acts of man without hope who is trying to unwind a rational thread which he is holding by one end…

It is at that very point that man finds himself more ill equipped than ever. He has now become aware that he cannot construct the future his way, and on the other hand, he no longer believes in any outside forces or person…Man is unable to make his history, and he knows that now there is no other person who is making it either, only blind mechanisms, obscure powers, inexplicable interactions. It is an indiscernible, inscrutable future into which he is advancing step by step into the night, just as in the heroic ages, only this time he is doing it in crowds, en masse, by the billions, and by an accelerated process which leaves him no time for scrutinizing this absence. In this situation without hope, how could he fail to have recourse to the magician?”

Ellul, ‘Abandonment in a Time of Hope’

…the interpretation of quantum theory [resulted in a] solution which one could not easily accept. I remember discussions…till very late at night [that] ended almost in despair; and when at the end of the discussion I went alone for a walk in the neighboring park I repeated to myself again and again the question: Can nature possibly be as absurd as it seemed to us in these atomic experiments?

…Quite generally there is no way of describing what happens between two consecutive observations…it does not allow a description in space and time.

…A real difficulty in the understanding of this interpretation arises, however, when one asks the famous question: But what happens really in an atomic event? …we cannot completely objectify the result of an observation, we cannot describe what `happens' between this observation and the next.

…Now, this is a very strange result, since it seems to indicate that the observation plays a decisive role in the event and that the reality varies, depending upon whether we observe it or not.

…The probability function does…not describe a certain event but, at least during the process of observation, a whole ensemble of possible events.

…the transition from the possible to the actual takes place during the act of observation. If we want to describe what happens in an atomic event, we have to realize that the word `happens' can apply only to the observation, not to the state of affairs between two observations.

…On the other hand, the modern interpretation of atomic events has very little resemblance to genuine materialistic philosophy; in fact, one may say that atomic physics has turned science away from the materialistic trend it had during the nineteenth century.

…What is an elementary particle? We say, for instance, simply `a neutron' but we can give no well-defined picture [of] what we mean by the word. We can use several pictures and describe it once as a particle, once as a wave or as a wave packet. But we know that none of these descriptions is accurate. Certainly the neutron has no color, no smell, no taste. In this respect it resembles the atom of Greek philosophy.

…If one wants to give an accurate description of the elementary particle--and here the emphasis is on the word accurate--the only thing which can be written down as description is a probability. But then one sees that not even the quality of being (if that may be called a `quality' ) belongs to what is described. It is a possibility for being or a tendency for being.

…This shows that we can never know beforehand which limitations will be put on the applicability of certain concepts by the extension of our knowledge into the remote parts of nature…in the process of penetration we are bound sometimes to use our concepts in a way which is not justified and which carries no meaning. Insistence on the postulate of complete logical clarification would make science impossible. We are reminded here by modern physics of the old wisdom that the one who insists on never uttering an error must remain silent.

…Any concepts or words which have been formed in the past through the interplay between the world and ourselves are not really sharply defined with respect to their meaning; that is to say, we do not know exactly how far they will help us in finding our way in the world. We often know that they can be applied to a wide range of inner or outer experience, but we practically never know precisely the limits of their applicability. This is true even of the simplest and most general concepts like existence and `space and time.'

…The degree of complication in biology is so discouraging that one can at present not imagine any set of concepts in which the connections could be so sharply defined that a mathematical representation could become possible. If we go beyond biology and include psychology in the discussion, then there can scarcely be any doubt but that the concepts of physics, chemistry, and evolution together will not be sufficient to describe the facts.

…On this point the existence of quantum theory has changed our attitude from what was believed in the nineteenth century. During that period some scientists were inclined to think that the psychological phenomena could ultimately be explained on the basis of physics and chemistry of the brain. From the quantum-theoretical point of view there is no reason for such an assumption.

…Looking back to the different sets of concepts that have been formed in the past or may possibly be formed in the future in the attempt to find our way through the world by means of science, we see that they appear to be ordered by the increasing part played by the subjective element in the set. Classical physics can be considered as that idealization in which we speak about the world as entirely separated from ourselves.

…Quantum theory does not allow a completely objective description of nature.

…When we represent a group of connections by a closed and coherent set of concepts, axioms, definitions and laws which in turn is represented by a mathematical scheme we have in fact isolated and idealized this group of connections with the purpose of clarification. But even if complete clarity has been achieved in this way, it is not known how accurately the set of concepts describes reality…

…This intrinsic uncertainty of the meaning of words was of course recognized very early and has brought about the need for definitions, or – as the word `definition' says – for the setting of boundaries that determine where the word is to be used and where not. But definitions can be given only with the help of other concepts, and so one will finally have to rely on some concepts that are taken as they are, unanalyzed and undefined.

…the physicists have gradually become accustomed to considering the electronic orbits, etc., not as reality but rather as a kind of `potentia.'...it is a language that produces pictures in our mind, but together with them the notion that the pictures have only a vague connection with reality, that they represent only a tendency toward reality…

…if one wishes to speak about the atomic particles themselves one must either use the mathematical scheme as the only supplement to natural language or one must combine it with a language that makes use of a modified logic or of no well-defined logic at all.

…[In the 19th century, the world was thought to] consist of things in space and time, that the things consisted of matter, and that matter produced and was acted upon by forces.

That events follow from the interplay between matter and forces; every event is the result and the cause of other events. At the same time the human attitude toward nature changed from a contemplative one to the pragmatic one. One was not so much interested in nature as it is; one rather asked what one could do with it. Therefore, natural science turned into technical science; every advancement of knowledge was connected with the question as to what practical use could be derived from it. This was true not only in physics; in chemistry and biology the attitude was essentially the same, and the success of the new methods in medicine or in agriculture contributed essentially to the propagation of the new tendencies.

…In this way, finally, the nineteenth century developed an extremely rigid frame for natural science which formed not only science but also the general outlook of great masses of people. This frame was supported by the fundamental concepts of classical physics, space, time, matter and causality; the concept of reality applied to the things or events that we could perceive by our senses or that could be observed by means of the refined tools that technical science had provided. Matter was the primary reality. The progress of science was pictured as a crusade of conquest into the material world. Utility was the watchword of the time.

On the other hand, this frame was so narrow and rigid that it was difficult to find a place in it for many concepts of our language that had always belonged to its very substance, for instance, the concepts of mind, of the human soul or of life. Mind could be introduced into the general picture only as a kind of mirror of the material world; and when one studied the properties of this mirror in the science of psychology, the scientists were always tempted to pay more attention to its mechanical than to its optical properties. Even there one tried to apply the concepts of classical physics, primarily that of causality.

In the same way life was to be explained as a physical and chemical process, governed by natural laws, completely determined by causality. Darwin's concept of evolution provided ample evidence for this interpretation. It was especially difficult to find in this framework room for those parts of reality that had been the object of the traditional religion and seemed now more or less only imaginary.

Therefore, in those European countries in which one was wont to follow the ideas up to their extreme consequences, an open hostility of science toward religion developed, and even in the other countries there was an increasing tendency toward indifference of such questions; only the ethical values of the Christian religion were excepted from this trend, at least for the time being. Confidence in the scientific method and in rational thinking replaced all other safeguards of the human mind.

…the scientific concepts are idealizations; they are derived from experience obtained by refined experimental tools, and are precisely defined through axioms and definitions. Only through these precise definitions is it possible to connect the concepts with a mathematical scheme and to derive mathematically the infinite variety of possible phenomena in this field. But through this process of idealization and precise definition the immediate connection with reality is lost…

…It may be useful in this connection to remember that even in the most precise part of science, in mathematics, we cannot avoid using concepts that involve contradictions…The general trend of human thinking in the nineteenth century had been toward an increasing confidence in the scientific method and in precise rational terms, and had led to a general skepticism with regard to those concepts of natural language which do not fit into the closed frame of scientific thought — for instance, those of religion.

Modern physics has in many ways increased this skepticism; but it has at the same time turned it against the overestimation of precise scientific concepts, against a too-optimistic view on progress in general, and finally against skepticism itself.

The skepticism against precise scientific concepts does not mean that there should be a definite limitation for the application of rational thinking. On the contrary, one may say that the human ability to understand may be in a certain sense unlimited. But the existing scientific concepts cover always only a very limited part of reality, and the other part that has not yet been understood is infinite. Whenever we proceed from the known into the unknown we may hope to understand, but we may have to learn at the same time a new meaning of the word `understanding.'

Get in loser we’re going to HTTP 404

Shields in the sky...

      –Livy, Roman Historian  

Flaming wheel...

      -England, 1394

If there is in this world a well-attested account, it is that of vampires. Nothing is lacking: official reports, affidavits of well-known people, of surgeons, of priests, of magistrates; the judicial proof is most complete. And with all that, who is there who believes in vampires?

-Rousseau 

In investigations such as we are now pursuing, it should not be so much asked 'what has occurred', as 'what has occurred that has never occurred before'.

 -Edgar Allen Poe

April 19, 1897

Two Texas residents see lights moving in their neighbors yard and proceed to investigate.

They discovered four men refueling advanced technology. Unstartled, the pilots asked for several buckets of water which the neighbors obliged. In a brief exchange, the witnesses recalled, they were informed that the machine was a secret military technology in route to the home base. The crew re-boarded, starting up the propellers, the airship then promptly flapped away over the horizon.

The idea that gravity would soon be transcended, existed widely within the collective imagination of late 19th and early 20th century. Faith in the progress of technology had reached a fevered pitch and this religious zeal was frequently expressed in the form of flying ships as the novels of HG Wells vividly illustrate. Carl Jung famously claimed it was an illusion that man would ever be able to fly as the machines were ‘heavier than air.’

The overwhelming majority of the first attempts to fly employed boat propellers and flapping wings. The sighting abruptly ended in 1897 and ‘UFO’ sightings of all kinds died out until reports emerged of UFOs over Britain between 1909-1912, the years preceding WWI.

Similarly, as the 1930s drew to a close, Scandinavians began reporting UFOs which seemed to freefall straight down from great heights during thunderstorms. Experienced later by those unlucky enough to be on the other end of dive bombers a decade or so later.

As WWII engulfed the world, the previous UFO recollections were replaced by ‘ghost rockets’ reported by over 2,000 people who explained that they moved ‘faster than any known technology’ and didn’t have wings.

By the time the war concluded, every antagonist in the world had countless reports from pilots seeing ‘balls of light,’ ‘not of this world’ which followed their airplanes.

Belief in the existence of alien life had became so widespread that when a NY journalist wrote in 1835 that ‘bat winged humanoid beavers’ had been spotted living in huts on the Moon, the discovery of life was widely celebrated for nearly a month as the scientific discovery of the century. The enthusiasm only subsided after the author announced it was a hoax.

‘Oswald Spengler noted over a century ago that the idea of infinite space is absolutely fundamental to the Western conception of reality; while the ancient Greeks believed that ‘infinite’ was the opposite of existence. No word for ‘space’ existed in Greek.

Bat Girl Lives!

Sci-Fi reminiscent of the mostly defunct tabloids of the 1990s had become wildly popular by 1939: ufos, abductions, secret underground military bases. Of particular note is the ‘flying disk’ shape of alien space crafts which played a prominent role in the pulp fiction of its day.

When the associate editor of ‘Amazing Stories’ received a letter in 1943 detailing the discovery of an unknown language, offered as definitive proof that the legend of Atlantis was real, he read the first page and threw it in the trash. Shocked and seeing only dollar signs, the executive editor retrieved the letter and published it in the next edition.

In response to the issue, the magazine received a barely readable manifesto entitled, ‘A Warning to Future Man.’ The author, a welder by trade, explained how he started hearing voices while working. These physic and telepathic communications informed him of the ‘underground tunnels built beneath Earth’s surface’ created by ‘Lemurians,’ an ancestor race who, plagued by the Sun’s radiation, retreated underground eventually taking off from the planet.

Being ambiguous creatures, the Lemurians left all their technology to ‘malignant dwarfs’ known as ‘deros’ or ‘detrimental robots in Mantong’ who employed telepathy machines and automated castration to torture humans. The manifestos author, thankfully, had connected telepathically with their nemesis, the ‘teros’ or ‘integrative robots.’ They favored him because one of the teros was a lover of his.

The executive editor of ‘Amazing Stories’ then rewrote the 10,000 word document into a novella which he published in March 1945. Over the next four months, sales of the publication doubled with 250,000 people buying the rag every four weeks.

Almost immediately thousands upon thousands of letters began flooding the magazines office describing their personal experiences with the ‘deros.’

‘All over America, from the Civil War to the conclusion of WWII, Christian theology and Biblical narratives were replaced by images inline with the age of science and its ever expanding faith in technological Utopia.’

U·to·pi·a noun (Greek, ou-topos) meaning 'no place' or 'nowhere'.

The clear fact missed by both the true believers and the null hypothesis is the extremely wide range of phenomenon which people report experiencing. Its not that people aren’t seeing shit in the sky. They defiantly are but humans do not see and then define, they define first and then see. In a more religious era, flaming chariots would have replaced technology and before that dragons and so with all the rest.

When people aren’t seeing natural phenomena or classified technology, or experiencing the effects of unseen magnetic fields (an experimentally verified result of exposure is experiencing what’s typically called UFOs), they are probably seeing apparitions. That scientist have not more readily noticed the tremendous overlap in the phenomenon reported in UFOs in typical accounts of apparitions is surprising. The central feature of apparitions is that they resemble features within the observers mind and vary wildly person to person, exactly as UFOs do if you look at the actual reports and not what ends up in the papers.

The average person notices when a standard airplane flies above them, yet somehow 2 or 3 people keep seeing '50 foot long UFOs' moving through the air and so on in locations where undoubtedly thousands would not only see them but have extremely high quality videos of them. In the entire history of the UFO phenomenon not a single piece of physical evidence has ever been recovered which doesn't exist on Earth.

The strange fact about the original UFO sightings in the late 1890s is that if the machines actually existed they would not have been able to fly. In 1898, the best known airplane could travel 13 miles per hour covering a maximum distance of 1 mile.

The idea that intelligent life would evolve elsewhere in the universe, successfully travel to earth, somehow exactly mimic our deepest cultural hopes, fears, and myths; and that mass sightings would occur after the commercial media had disseminated these conceptions is a vulgar absurdity.

An encounter with intelligent alien life would most certainly be alien in every way, not corresponding with any of our ideas in either physiology, or technology. As Hawking noted, the experience would be immediately obvious, especially in a world where everybody has a cell phone and video camera in there pocket. A more likely scenario would be analogous to Columbus encountering the Native Americans.

Fool Me Once...

The pattern traced here continues uninterrupted to the present. Not mentioned is the CIA’s etc frequent use of these popular myths as cover for emerging technology. A declassified CIA report noted:

Over half of all U.F.O. reports from the late 1950's through the 1960's were accounted for by manned reconnaissance flights. This led the Air Force to make misleading and deceptive statements to the public in order to allay public fears and to protect an extraordinarily sensitive national security project.

This most recent disinformation episode follows the traditional script but on a grander scale.

• Former government intelligence insider? Check.
• Never actually seen any of what he is claiming? Check.
• No physical evidence of any kind offered? Check.
• Not immediately thrown in prison for leaking classified material? Check.
• Major global disasters on the horizon? Check.

Show me the fucking space ship and I'll gladly change my mind.

Disinformation is only named where passivity must be maintained by intimidation. Where disinformation is named, it does not exist. Where it exists, it is not named.

A major motivation of the current disinformation campaign is that large segments of the Pentagon and US intelligence believe the US and China will be at war by 2025. The spy balloons and alien story are almost certainly tied to classified military technology that will be revealed in short order. Hopefully not in the form of WWIII.

https://www.airandspaceforces.com/read-full-memo-from-amc-gen-mike-minihan/

Organized propaganda campaigns are typically designed around the idea of multi-constraint-satisfaction: they are designed to meet numerous goals and to support several strategies. The second of which is undoubtedly: the likely end of organized life on Earth in the near future.

['Accelerated modern human–induced species losses: Entering the sixth mass extinction'] (https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.1400253)

We describe this as “biological annihilation”

['Biological annihilation via the ongoing sixth mass extinction signaled by vertebrate population losses and declines'] (https://www.pnas.org/doi/full/10.1073/pnas.1704949114)

['Has the Earth’s sixth mass extinction already arrived?'] (https://www.nature.com/articles/nature09678)

['Biotic Homogenization: A Few Winners Replacing Many Losers in the next Mass Extinction'] (https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0169534799016791)

Thus, one of the central concerns of the current disinformation campaign seems directly related to climate change by:

a.) promises a miracle (reverse engineered alien technology);

b.) and unconsciously invokes relief in thoughts of being able to escape our dying planet; to become like these alien geniuses who have mastered the universe through their technology;

c.) distraction and/or prevention of concreate action directed towards making the changes that would and could prevent the 6th mass extinction, currently underway but would profoundly disrupt and forever alter the current status quo.

A photo of a US Navy test was edited to add a UFO rising out of the ocean

https://apnews.com/article/fact-check-photo-navy-ufo-ocean-explosion-252852005263

*Who's behind the edit is irrelevant. The Pentagon knew exactly what it was doing when it started releasing its series of grainy, undecipherable videos some years back.

A sci-fi film that reflects and speculates upon the needed adaptation and disintegration of the current bodily template of the Homo Sapien...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GTFlyrXo\_9I

Zummi founded this community in 2014, in response to the failure of another subreddit, and this community grew around his writing about history-in-reverse and the origin of consciousness in the abstraction of the vowels from the rest of the alphabet. Over time, the subreddit has gone through several periods of being declared dead or passé, only to continue on unabated. Personally, it has become my favorite source of news and links on the internet.

I spoke with Zummi on the phone a few days ago. With Reddit's unilateral and retroactive paywalling of all past content, Zummi and I both recognize that it's time to migrate the community to our own self-hosted platform where we can protect content we created from being locked-down and paywalled for profit.

I have been talking with the other mods to coordinate the migration, and there is also support from /u/mofosyne and /u/papersheepdog (and /u/Roabiewade) for this migration.

I apologize for taking so long to announce this. It took time to figure out what to do with the other moderators, and also to solve a few technical architecture problems. Also, it has been really hot and I've been out in the garden.

Seeing as how Eris is forcing our hand in making this announcement, unfortunately I do not have a cool demo ready for you to try yet. However, I can tell you a couple things about the reddit alternative in development:

• 100% Free and Open - No bullshit, no commercialized pseudo-open-source or bloated libraries, low-to-the-ground.

• No Database - Databases enclose and deimmanentize our data; without a database we don't even need to make an import/export feature in the first place! The rhetoric of "scalability" is really a demand for exploitative product design. (Bonus: No SQL!)

• Post to Sorcery of the Spectacle - Post to our main forum / link aggregator

• Automatically Back-Post to Reddit - When you post to Sorcery of the Spectacle, you'll be able to auto-submit it to /r/sorceryofthespectacle too (by linking your Reddit account).

• Post/Link Library Browser - Tools to organize and rebrowse all the past links. Create categories or lists of links, share links to your lists, or recommend lists or links to specific users.

• Articulated "Read It" Action - Check off links you've read so that you can truly say "read it", on the website!

• Self-Hosted P2P Paradigm - Users are encouraged to archive and trade copies of posts/links and link lists, which are simply YAML + Markdown files.

If any developers would like to help, we need help! Even novice developers can help a lot using ChatGPT now. Development is active!

If you are missing this community, please sit tight! In the meantime, please check out the official Telegram lobby (link in sidebar), which has been in operation for years.

What are your thoughts on this plan? What are your feature requests for our bespoke free software reddit alternative?

I have been researching how to archive data from reddit, and as far as I know, bulk-downloader-for-reddit is the best possible implementation, given reddit's API limitations. Reddit already doesn't give us any way to download an entire subreddit: API requests are capped at about 1,000 posts, and the time range always starts from now, so it is not possible to request the "next" 1,000. After the 30th, it is unclear if bulk-downloader-for-reddit will still work at all, and if so, it may be rate-limited to 100 posts per minute.

redditdownloader is another capable reddit downloader that can also be self-hosted, that looks almost identical to bulk-reddit-downloader in its function and limitations.

Thanks to the good people at the-eye, it is possible to get a list of the URLs of every post and comment in the subreddit up through December 2022 (42MB and 137MB of text respectively, just for the URLs/metadata!). Combining this list with bulk-reddit-downloader, it will be possible to archive all past posts.

So it is. I used ChatGPT to write this POSIX-compliant bash script, which extracts the permalink from each line of a JSON file extracted from the-eye (for a particular subreddit, link above), and for each URL uses bulk-downloader-for-reddit (bdfr) to download its metadata and content and (if possible) attachments. Here is the script:

#!/bin/sh

# Input file
file="$1"

# Output location
output="${2:-./export}"

# Batch size
batch_size=30

# Check if file exists
if [ ! -f "$file" ]; then
    echo "File not found!"
    exit 1
fi

# Calculate number of batches
total_lines=$(wc -l < "$file")
total_batches=$(( (total_lines + batch_size - 1) / batch_size ))

# Initialize counters
batch_i=0
batch_counter=0
total_time=0

# Initialize URL list
url_list=""

# Read file line by line
while IFS= read -r line
do
    # Reset SECONDS
    SECONDS=0

    # Extract Permalink using jq tool and prepend with Reddit URL
    permalink=$(echo "$line" | jq -r '.permalink')
    url="http://reddit.com$permalink"

    # Add URL to list
    url_list="$url_list --link $url"
    batch_i=$((batch_i + 1))
	    
    # Check if URL is not null and batch size is reached
    if [ "$permalink" != "null" ] && [ "$batch_i" -eq "$batch_size" ]; then
        # Print the batch info
        printf "\nExtracted %d permalinks. Cloning...\n" "$batch_i"

        # Call bdfr command to download link
        bdfr clone "$output" $url_list --make-hard-links --format yaml --log /home/$USER/.config/bdfr/log.txt --search-existing --no-dupes

        # Increment line count and update total time
        total_time=$((total_time + SECONDS))

        # Calculate average time per batch and estimate remaining time
		batch_counter=$((batch_counter + 1))
        avg_time=$(awk "BEGIN {print $total_time/$batch_counter}")
        remaining_batches=$((total_batches - batch_counter))
        est_remaining=$(awk "BEGIN {print $avg_time * $remaining_batches}")
        est_remaining_hours=$(awk "BEGIN {print $est_remaining/3600}")

        # Print estimated remaining time in hours
        printf "Estimated remaining time: %.2f hours. $batch_counter/$total_batches batches complete.\n" "$est_remaining_hours"

        # Reset batch counter and URL list
        batch_i=0
        url_list=""
    fi
done < "$file"

# If there are remaining URLs to be processed after the last full batch
if [ "$batch_counter" -gt 0 ]; then
    printf "\nExtracted %d permalinks. Cloning...\n" "$batch_counter"
    bdfr clone "$output" $url_list --make-hard-links --format yaml --log /home/$USER/.config/bdfr/log.txt --search-existing --no-dupes
fi

If, after giving the script file execute permission with chmod +x ./bdfr-extract, someone were to call this script, say like this:

./bdfr-extract ./extracted-json-file-from-the-eye ./exportfolder

It would download all the posts from that subreddit up through the end of 2022.

Going forward, I suggest migrating to an anarchivist platform that can host this archived subreddit content in a way that allows it to be rebrowsed, reorganized, and explored and shared in novel ways. This will allow the community to concentrate its collective intelligence and begin to consciously direct itself through the construction of curricula and feedback-design of the software platform.

I have nearly finished constructing such a platform. The killer feature of this platform that makes it different and inherently more open is that it does not have a database. Instead, a card is defined as a file containing an optional YAML header and a text body (assumed to be Markdown by default). This in effect creates a more open un-format than having to access this information through a database. The platform I am making essentially exposes the filesystem and begins exposing basic UNIX functionality through the web GUI, in a way designed to be operating be a self-organizing collective (not an alienated userbase). For example, instead of user accounts being stored in a database, user status is made immanent to the operating system by simply registering new users as new UNIX accounts, and managing all of that automatically (yes, this will require us to get our UNIX security game together, and this is good). The website will also be able to backpost to reddit have RSS feeds. It will be self-hostable and encourage self-hosting, so others will be able to set up a reddit exodus anarchival site as well.

What do others think of this plan? Does anyone have a better idea?