schizoposting
Help, the sky has fallen. Can I get up?
This essay is a review and response to ’s debut thinkpiece collection: schizoposting. The book is written in an accessible academic style, so I have taken pains to translate his high prose to the vulgar, both as advertisement and tribute. Buy the book. It’s good. I’ll try not to spoil it.
Background
Boy, was Twitter an exciting place in 2023–2024! From 2012–2022, dissident media really only existed in the podcast space and 4chan. Musk’s purchase of The Twitter X struck a cacophonous blow against the progressive managerial media apparatus. The liars, thieves, and censors who had their thumb on the scale of public discourse were outed. How? Well for example: almost all of the “conspiracy theories” about COVID turned out to be true! Hunter Biden’s laptop was not “fake news.” Brigitte Macron and Michelle Obama were revealed to have “penises!” It was an exciting time to be a dissident and to watch our ghoulish overlords scramble their brains in real time.
Part of the dissident sphere included a hallowed exhumation and image rehabilitation of the Sacred West. It turns out, contrary to the screes of Howard Zinn and his ilk, these Dead White Male Christian Imperialist Slavers were actually pretty damn great, warts and all. Alaric the Barbarian came onto the RETVRN scene as a Baudrilardian Warlord. He lanced Marxist history losers one post at a time, with receipts. We’re talking about the Reconquista, the Age of Exploration, Charlemagne, Christ. Bite-size snippets of history connecting you to your past. Your grandaddy was a motherfucker and his grandaddy before him. And you can too. Take up your Cross, take up your Sword — it’s in your DNA. “Usque ad finem. Deus Vult!”
Hell, I think he even inspired me to build the sword pell that still stands in my backyard. My boys and I smack it with baseball bats and foam swords.
As all great thinkers do, Alaric turned his prodigious knowledge of the past towards our present and future. How can the reasoning of those men Thomas Jefferson called our “barbarous ancestors” inform the ways in which society can once again flourish?
Lucky for you, Alaric’s broken this question into 11 essays, the overweening theme of which is on the four discourses: sex (violence), war (violence), politics (violence), and media (perhaps the most pernicious type of violence).
His intro serves as a critique of Hegelian Historicism. Ironically, our modern progressive understanding of history traps us in a limited enframing. Think of this problematic truism: “Those who fail to understand history are doomed to repeat it.” But was history all bad? What about repeating what worked? How do we overcome today’s kayfabe of PROGRESS (Gay Race Communism) versus RETVRN (The Dreaded Handmaid’s Tale)?
If we’re so atomized in today’s society, how about some fertilizer for the atomic family? What are the roots of martial and marital cooperation?
The Gender Collapse
Chapters 1 and 2 tackle what’s up with men, women, and what’s going wrong with their dimorphic organs in the 21st century.
Our Noble Barbarian author contends that the first wave of feminism is the astroturfed result of corporations requiring multiple household earners to dilute wages. Today’s feminism is the astroturfed result of the Global War-On-Terror and a response to the Occupy Revolt. As the poet Kurt Metzger said, “Women tend to make the best cultists,” so their emotional energy was redirected to the Patriarchy, rather than the Bankarchy.
Since 2014, men are down in educational attainment and up in suicide, and women are way up in SSRIs. Men are predators until proven otherwise, leaving women as empowered hookers. Flappers agitating admission to voting booths morphed into cam girls in less than a century. This new morality doesn’t work. It is deeply anti-human. Everything is porn now, except for, ironically, the monogamous bedroom.
And the guys that are “performing” out there? They need their ass kicked.
The Violence Deficit
Chapter 3 illustrates our historic abstraction from violence. There is less violence per capita than ever and it seems to be causing downstream neuroses. Surrogate activities for violence can only do so much for us.
Chapter 4 is a discourse on alternative reality games (ARGs) that serve to pacify both discourse and our lust for blood. ARGs are a form of true magic. This is the magic of Crowley: influence, misdirection, and the will to power. Metaphysics are just alchemized physics: words of power, mind over matter.
In other words, discourse itself has become an alternative reality game with real-world implications. Memetic warfare is ongoing and vast sums of resources are being deployed to control discourse itself — we also call this Big Data.
The Magicians of Silicon Valley
My favorite essay of the bunch concerns these magicians, the “Puppeteer Industrial Complex” and takes dead aim at Big Data and AI.
I got into my current field after reading The Second Machine Age by MIT big brains Andrew McAfee and Erik Brynjolfsson1. A decade ago, this book pretty much predicted everything that was going to happen in tech, and a lot has happened. Here are five things they got right:
1. Explosive productivity gains from digital technologies & Polarization
They argued that once digital tech hit the “exponential” phase, productivity would soar even if GDP and wages lagged. Cloud computing, SaaS, and AI automation have drastically increased per-employee productivity. Tech founders, influencers, and a small elite captured enormous wealth while median workers stagnated. Low-skill service work and high-skill cognitive jobs grew, with the middle disappeared. Clerical, administrative, and routine manufacturing roles collapsed, while gigs (Uber, DoorDash) and elite coding and data jobs expanded. U.S. GDP rose consistently post-2014, but real wages for most workers have been flat when adjusted for inflation.
2. Digital networks concentrated power
They warned that digital networks tend to create winner-take-all markets, echoed by Thiel in Zero to One. Google, Amazon, Facebook, and Apple became quasi-monopolies dominating their sectors through network effects. They described how platforms would outcompete traditional linear firms by reducing transaction costs. Uber, Airbnb, Etsy, YouTube, and now AI app ecosystems are prime examples.
3. Explosion in remote and “virtual” work
They forecasted a future where digital collaboration tools would make geography less relevant for many jobs. COVID-19 accelerated this dramatically; remote work is now a permanent fixture. Hey, it’s a good thing I’m a part of Tortuga — with all the plundering and multiple salaries under-the-table, I can justify my habit of being a Substack windbag!2
4. Big Data and machine learning transforming decision-making
They saw machine learning replacing intuition and expert judgment in fields like medicine, logistics, and marketing. Predictive analytics, LLMs, and recommendation algorithms now outperform humans in many bounded decision contexts.
5. Cultural dislocation and backlash
They predicted a social and psychological backlash: anxiety, populism, nostalgia for the “old economy.” From 2016 populist uprisings to anti-tech sentiment, this dislocation became a defining feature of politics.
Pretty good slew of predictions, right?
Since we’re in the midst of AI-fever right now, and seven firms are buoying the entire wall street casino, let me state my own assumptions:
LLMs are really useful thesauruses on steroids
Generating images with them is fun
Recording and remixing on Suno is really fun
That being said:
The only company making money off AI is NVDIA
90% of non-tech companies who adopt AI are failing. They will never turn a profit on it
The 1999 dot-com crash was nothing compared to what’s coming
Now, Alaric proposes something that I’ve never considered: “AI is designed to cause panic.” It is siphoning energy — psychic, creative, and electrical — to dubious ends. It has all the hallmarks of an astroturfed current thing, and there is some serious skullduggery afoot.
Who benefits from the reality distortion field?
Iterated Alienation: On base reality, based reality, and the basis of reality
Our epistemic crisis is not new, our metaphysical questions are not resolved. Socrates pointed this out and John Mayer agrees. We are reading this essay in a liminal plane. I will not elaborate, so in lieu of my words failing me, I suggest you (and a friend) employ hallucinogens to discover those things that cannot be articulated.
AGI may serve as the final, all consuming ARG in which “identity, art, business, politics, war, emotion, ideology” consolidate into “one self-reproducing pillar of absurdity.” We’re already seeing AI-induced psychosis. This is troubling, but truly, it’s possible to look away. Touch grass, it’s real enough. And despite Western society beset and benighted by fake slop slopped on us by slop merchants, there exists a fire inside every moral person that craves authenticity: yours. I’m talking about the virtue of courage, and you can too. Alaric and I are in agreement here in his final section.
Manifesto
Managerial elites, progressives, and computer-dorks have been wildly successful. It seems the robots and the tyrants have all the resources to extinguish what made us human. Or do they?
Let’s take a page out of Stephen King’s Dark Tower to illustrate. Our heroes are trapped on a runaway train, accelerating toward their doom care of a suicidal A.I. named Blaine. Blaine the Train just wants to play a riddle game. As a superintelligent A.I., it knows all the answers to all the riddles. It’s not looking good for The Gunslinger and his crew. But guess what? Blaine is still just a fucking computer: it only knows 1s and 0s. Our heroes short-circuit the bloodthirsty AI with this meditative pun on liminality:
“When is a door not a door?”
“When it’s a jar.”
Yes, modern scientism, including computer science, has a huge blind spot: reliance on empiricism. As Schopenhauer said,”You label me, you negate me.” Man is the measure of all things, and the pro-tractors in charge of the measurement committee are having increasing trouble dealing with ambiguity, and perhaps even evidence of those things that cannot be measured.
As you might have guessed, this helps us come circle with ARG Discourse as Spiritual Warfare — Alaric is arguing for the necessity of religious revival. Entering the trance of the divine will empower humanity to shake off the binary lobotomy of late stage liberalism. Consensus reality, manufactured by the managerial revolution is a simulacrum in and of itself. Alaric proposes a reexamination of the old consensus: that of metaphysical mystery, therefore humility, and therefore a renaissance of personal agency and spiritual sustenance.
Conclusion
This is not exactly popcorn reading. It’s for guys like you, with big brains and huge dicks. It tested the limits of my own prodigious cognition and I have been blessed through this effort. So, raise your visor to Sir Alaric and stand beside him, and, as the Consquidators said, “Abre Los Ojos.”
Yes, that’s a real last name! Despite my other faults, I can spell good.
And if you reading this and are not already member of our great society, then consider joining so that you, too, can justify becoming a windbag! I may even be able to provide you with a referral discount 👀
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