Alt Accounts, Insight Roles, and Memetic Mediation
Tomorrow's events:
Collective Presencing w/ Ria Baeck. Every Friday @ 7:30 AM ET. RSVP here. 90 mins.
Men & Women: The Future of Love, Sex and Friendship w/ Nina Power. November 6th, 13th, 20th, and 27th. 10:00 AM ET. RSVP here.
Collective Presencing w/ Ria Baeck. Every Friday @ 12:00 PM ET. RSVP here. 90 mins.
Sensefully Sensemaking the Hollow w/ Bonnitta Roy. November 6th and 13th. 2:00 PM ET. RSVP here.
Shadowplay w/ Arran Rogerson and Alyssa Polizzi. Every Friday @ 6:00 PM ET for the month of November. RSVP here. 90 mins.
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November 12, 2020
I had a wonderful chat with Tasshin Fogleman from the Monastic Academy last month, and a jazzy thought from that conversation emerged that I want to share here. It involves “alt accounts” on Twitter, a repurposed Satanic practice, and memetic mediation.
Tasshin mentioned that he uses alt accounts on Twitter, and he mentioned a Ribbonfarm article from Aaron Z. Lewis, with whom I had an awesome exploration on my podcast last year. The article was about Aaron’s experience with alt accounts, which are profiles you create with pseudonymous names to tweet stuff you would not tweet out on your real profile, but perversely want to.
Aaron writes about how he longed for the pre-Facebook pseudonymous internet life, and on a whim he created a “fake profile” on Twitter, which led him to discover that alt Twitter could be seen as “a domestic cozy lab for identity R&D.”
As Aaron explains: What started as mindless entertainment slowly morphed into a therapeutic exercise in identity experimentation. I always thought that masks were for hiding, but I’ve learned that they often reveal as much as they obscure. They allow you to explore a new identity even as you retreat from an old one.
This is related to all that good psychotherapeutic stuff. I do think we have an ecology of subpersonalities—some we are conscious of and some we are not—that are not “in conversation” with one another. Once they do get into conversation, they have an opportunity to get into the right relationship with one another. Once right relationship occurs, a person becomes individuated, and they become differentiated from others. They become authentic “live players,” who author their lives, with a readiness to enter into true communion, aka communitas.
This maps over to Jordan Hall’s idea of sovereignty, and in my humble opinion, Stoicism is a great life stance to help one become sovereign. And I think the practice of alt accounts is a brilliant and playful technique for us to become sovereign, and it is also a great way to avoid getting one's ass cancelled.
The Cancel God is ever-present in the noosphere, and it especially likes to hover over platforms like Twitter. It does not want a world of live players, because live players can thwart its goal to cancel humanity. It wants a world of dead players, because a world of dead players will lead to a dead world. Dead players can only follow scripts, and if you can only follow a script, you cannot author your life. If you cannot author your life, you cannot help co-author a new world. It is that simple.
Creating a series of alt accounts helps one express what is at the dark edges of their psyche, in a way that affords enough distance to avoid the wrath of The Cancel God, but also close enough for psychological integration to occur. In the Nordic LARP scene, they have a concept called bleed: Bleed is experienced by a player when her thoughts and feelings are influenced by those of her character, or vice versa. With increasing bleed, the border between player and character becomes more and more transparent.
Alt accounts can help with this kind of bleeding, and if done with wisdom, it can help one become individuated. In the memetic tribe white paper, we conveyed that memetic tribes can be seen as subpersonalities that are currently not in the right relationship with one another, referencing Pierre Teilhard de Chardin’s concept of the noosphere:
We view the noosphere as an emergent phenomenon, a consequence of globalization and digitalization. When Pierre Teilhard de Chardin introduced the term, he adopted a teleological perspective and saw the collective consciousness of humanity developing towards an “Omega Point.” While we are agnostic about whether there is an endpoint, we do think that looking at the noosphere as being in the process of evolution can help with regards to making speculative proposals. In this section we shift our focus from seeing memetic tribes as individual entities to viewing them as fragments of the larger noosphere.
Can the noosphere itself have a similar process to individuation? I sense the answer is yes, and I sense some wisdom can be repurposed from a very unlikely source: the Order of Nine Angles, which is a Satanic group that uses the “Left-hand path,” aka black magic. They are associated with neo-Nazi ideologies, but it is uncharitable to reduce them solely to that, as they are much more sophisticated than sharing ZOG memes on Stormfront.
Apparently they have a series of rites of passage for their initiates, some are really dark and involve human sacrifice. One that caught my attention is the practice of “insight roles.” The idea here is that the initiate joins extremist organizations, such as neo-Nazi groups or radical Islamic ones. They do this in order to shed their psychological conditioning of civilization. Being in these extremist groups provide them “insights” on how to become extreme, so they can develop a Satanic character, and be of service to chaos for its own sake.
It is a pretty innovative technique, and it is a technique in service towards a hellish existence. I wonder if this technique could be repurposed towards a heavenly existence instead.
Imagine if people use the alt account technique Aaron mentioned above, not only in service of psychological integration, but for insights to emerge that help with noospheric integration. The idea is this: you consciously take on an alt account that is within a memetic tribe, maybe one that triggers you, which you have a “philosophical allergy” towards. You then become embedded within their ecology of tweeters, in order to get intimate with their memes.
After spending some quality time with the memetic tribe, you can confidently grok them, like we did on the spreadsheet we created for the memetic tribe white paper. You’ll end up knowing the following about them: their telos, sacred values, master status, existential risks, combatants, campfires, chieftains, mental models, and forebears. By doing this, you’ll also know about these things in all the different ways you can know, e.g. propositional, procedural, perspectival, and participatory.
Once these insights emerge, you then engage in the necessary shadow-work to integrate your subpersonality that is related to the memetic tribes you are insight rolling with. Once this is accomplished, you then move to the second step of the repurposed-towards-heaven insight role technique, and that next step is memetic mediation.
I wrote an introductory article for The Side View on memetic mediation, and I currently understand it as the process of getting all the memetic tribes into the right relationship with one another. Now, let us play some 4D chess with this memetic mediation stuff.
Once you grok the memetic tribe, have heavenly infiltrated it with your alt account, and you have garnered its respect, then you start to create multiple alt accounts, from various memetic tribes, some of whom are currently culture warring with each other. You’ll soon have an ecology of alt accounts, from a wide variety of memetic tribes.
These tribes do not normally converse with one another, but that is going to change, because your alt accounts will start memetically flirting, and commenting on each other's tweets, and giving them a retweet now and again. Now imagine not one person doing this, but a whole army (or holy army) of memetic mediators engaging in this practice.
Is this lying? I do not know. Is really expressing authentic things about yourself, under a pseudonym—with the explicit aim to integrate your psyche and then the entire noosphere—really a con? Maybe not.
We need to start “thinking” differently, and I did mention the following in yesterday’s entry after all: to escape the trap, you need a crazy fucker. You need a Coyote Man.
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