I don't mean Ralsei here, although I think it's an odd coincidence that Ralsei describes himself as a prince without subjects. A movie-fan friend of mine told me a little while ago that Guillermo del Toro coined the phrase "prince without a kingdom" to describe his noteworthy fascist villains, such as el capitán from El Laberinto del Fauno and Strickland from The Shape of Water, who somehow manages to be even more repulsive than the Spanish fascist officer. These men are disgusting, yet del Toro succeeds in giving them a touch of humanity. It's possible to *pity* them, even though we're happy when they're both rubbed out.

These people have been granted a measure of power, and yet it's clearly not enough for them. El capitán seems to take considerable satisfaction from the rigid social programming he's imposed on himself and his surroundings—his military discipline, his gramophone music, his fastidious personal toilet, and yet in the middle of it he stops to slice a straight razor across the neck of his own reflection. Strickland from The Shape of Water, developed to greater depth than el capitán, seethes with multiple unhappinesses: a loveless marriage that he seeks distraction from, a thankless job that may possibly be a punishment, an aching need to feel like a big and successful "man of the future". Strickland extracts what consolation he can get from humiliating and abusing everyone he can get away with abusing—the "Asset", the cleaning women, the scientists under his command—and it's obviously never enough to console him. Strickland wants to be powerful, and yet what little power he has comes from being a pawn in a military system that will crush him like a bug if he doesn't do what he's told. It's almost a mercy when the creature kills him; at least Strickland has the wits to realize he's been killed by a god.

Unfortunately I feel like I can understand the "prince without a kingdom" feeling, which may as well be called "whıte supremacy" or other similar terms. I grew up amid whıte suburban U.S. culture, went to schools almost entirely populated by whıte schoolchildren and teachers, soaked up whıte American pop culture. My mother was a bitter Chilean leftist and my family had a fairly international assortment of friends, so I was somewhat shielded from the stultifying effects of whıte American acculturation, but still! I was lucky enough to get an unusually good and privileged education and a father willing to buy me typewriters and computers and other expensive toys. By my late teens I'd become very much like the STEM-lords who bedevil the world of corporate technology. If you could go back to La Jolla High School in the late 1980s or early 1990s and talked to me then, I don't think I could have fully articulated the sense of destiny that had been inculcated in me, but it was there. I was certain that I was bound to do amazing things with my amazing mind, and even though failing out of Caltech in 1994 taught me some humility and sharpened my appreciation for non-STEM disciplines, I still wasted a huge amount of time and money in subsequent years blundering about from one academic subject to another, still thinking that I had some destiny to fulfill as a great scientist or discoverer. Only in the last several years have I finally worked out why such ambitions had always been fruitless. I was NOT good at the things I'd once thought would come to me easily.

Whitebread U.S. society, for the vast majority of its citizens, has no room for failure or false starts. Grade-school education has become an assembly-line process: shove as many children as possible through an interminable parade of standardized tests and class hierarchies, and if you stumble you're swept immediately into the garbage so that your bad grades don't bring down the school average. You have one chance to find your footing out of school; mess that up and you're not likely to get a second chance, unless you're well-protected by money and privilege. Indeed that's one of the most tempting prizes for being higher up the social ladder, being relatively insulated from failures, to the point that if you're privileged enough, you barely need to succeed. But only a few people get that lucky.

And if it doesn't work out for you...THEN what? You end up like Strickland, allotted a measure of power and status at the cost of surrendering one's independence and dignity to higher authority. Or you end up like all those grifters who probably once had ambitions about being successful entrepreneurs, running businesses of their own, actually creating or inventing something themselves maybe, but instead they've attached themselves to Elon Musk or someone else who's already made it. They tell themselves they've made it and that they're on the winning team, but it's cost them their individuality and their personalities. Some of them aren't even really people any more, not on the Internet anyway. They've ceded their identities to their idols, and now they're "I Love TSLA" or "Elon Musk Parody No. 1771" or whatever. On the other hand, I guess there's money in it.

I avoided that trap but I fell into a lot of others. Now I find myself at the end of a long process of careening from one fuckup to another, having somehow acquired a measure of stability in my life with a family and a home, and no longer hagridden and driven by vague feelings of having a great destiny, a "terrible purpose" to use Paul Atreides's words. Maybe I had a "terrible purpose" and it's over with. Anyway I'm at loose ends, just a person, not a hero.

Now what?

~Chara of Pnictogen

...but that's not really true, is it? I mean, I consider myself a radical polytheist (i.e. I believe that ALL gods exist and try to honor as many as practical) so I believe in the Moirai and the Norns, for example. Also I guess I can say that I believe in Fate/ because of all the Heroic Spirits running around the Pnictogen Wing.

Mostly I wish to resist the trap of thinking that every little thing that's ever happened in our life was purposeful. It can easily seem so, but then I remind myself that I'm assigning a sense of purpose after the fact: event A happened, then event B, so A can be construed as a setup for B. But time and causality are tricky things (as special relativity implies) so, you know, maybe A was the consequence of B, only it happened out of order. I prefer to think of my life as having a permanent sense of mystery woven through it; that way I retain a sense of free will. =p

A particularly noteworthy coincidence is on my mind right now, though: the fact that I somehow pushed through my extreme shyness and fear of crowds to start attending Christian churches and even undergo adult Catholic initiation. My friend Kaylin has many times expressed her astonishment that I made myself undergo a public baptism. She knows me well and knows how timid I am around masses of strangers, so she's still amazed that I did a full immersion baptism in a packed parish church. I'm amazed myself, in retrospect. What on Earth possessed me?

And yet now it seems weirdly apt to the circumstances, because U.S. politics has become strangely dominated by adult Catholic converts. Having undergone the experience myself, albeit in an earlier decade and among liberal Catholics, I'm appalled and frankly disgusted at how adult Catholic conversion now seems modish, like a good political and social move. I've got an article on my phone from a Catholic writer, talking about how it's like rebellion for fuck's sake. I can laugh, but the laugh is hollow: I myself felt rebellious at the time. I was seeking to separate myself from my "biological" family, from whom I felt thoroughly estranged, and join myself to a different family. And I'd soaked up a lot of G. K. Chesterton, the famous Catholic reactionary writer who attempted to assert that his embrace of Catholic orthodoxy was the true rebellion, a rebellion back towards sanity as he put it. So... 😬 ...I know what it's like, even though I repented of my error. But it seems like there's a heap of American right-wing extremists who still believe Chesterton's lie (a lie breathed through silver, if I may say) and have made themselves feel like revolutionaries, merely by embracing an offensively shallow and aesthetic Catholicism devoid of moral substance.

So, uh...where do my duties lie in this strange situation?

~Chara of Pnictogen

That's a huge topic to bring up in the morning and I only want to talk about it briefly. I think this is a massive problem, and the Elon Musk phenomenon must surely be only the largest and most public example of it: contemporary Internet culture and the computerization of everything has produced a situation where having a cult-like faction of Internet fanatics on your side permits organizations and leaders to do crimes, basically, but in a way that allows for plausible deniability. How on Earth can this problem be tackled?

Stochastic terrorism is dangerous because of just this phenomenon. Someone like Matt Walsh can incite mass harassment and violence simply by issuing a particularly vicious harangue, dropping names and hinting at terrifying crimes, counting upon a chaotic and perpetually angry Internet mob to pick up the hint. Plainly this is a problem that antedates the Internet, but the Internet and social media have made it particularly easy. Twitter and other websites can function as informal clubhouses for violently minded groups who can nevertheless claim that there's no organization at all, just Internet randos. (In a similar spirit do the GOP propagandists assert now that 6 January was merely a happenstance band of holiday excursionists who wanted to see the Capitol.)

Stock manipulation of "meme stocks", like $GME, rely upon the cultish powers of a fanatical sect of monomaniacal investors who "just like the stock" (again they're careful to pretend that they're not TOO into it, to avoid any suggestion of collusion or conspiracy) who tend to act in concert, following orders that aren't issued by any one person. The plans of the $GME investors or other investment cults are "emergent" in a sense, arising from an evolutionary process at work in the $GME faction, but mostly controlled by the declarations and decisions of a relatively few people regarded as authoritative by the rest of the mob.

The situation with Elon Musk and Twitter, or Xitter rather, seems to be especially dire, however. In essence, the Musk cult has become an unofficially employed (through "X payments") branch office of the Musk business empire, doing specific jobs on behalf of their supergenius leader. Effectively they're like the Tesla and SpaceX marketing department. They attempt to manipulate the value of $TSLA, as with $GME and other meme stocks. They do stochastic harassment and terrorism, as with Matt Walsh and "Libs of Tik Tok" and others. And because of Twitter's opaque and broken methods of community moderation, which are largely controlled by automated reporting mechanisms that have been seized and abused by Musk's fanatics, the entire social medium is effectively controlled and censored on behalf of Musk and yet Elon Musk and the X executives can probably claim that they're not doing anything themselves. (To be fair, I'm sure they're secretly intervening themselves on behalf of special friends.) The censorship has been largely delegated to the Musk cult and their methods of mass-reporting Musk's political enemies. We have largely escaped such censorship because of our PvP Twitter methods: we're not trying to play to a mass audience and therefore we have none, and the Musk fans regard us as unimportant because of our microscopic following. Thus we've been able to keep hammering away at a small number of Twitter targets. All the same we've had accounts caught up in Musk's "bot purges".

It's a wretched situation and worse, it seems like the sort of thing that can't really be pinned down with laws that make sense. These cult-like factions aren't really cults—there's no formal organization, often no formal leadership, no specific doctrines even if it's clear that everyone involved believes in, and carries out, much the same things. I can't think of any way you could possibly legislate against such a phenomenon without being oppressive. The people involved can mostly claim that they're not doing anything malicious and they're not following orders; they're just really enthusiastic. Even when it's clear they're lying, it's hard to say that they know they're lying, because of the irrational nature of these quasi-religious groups. The fanatics don't seem entirely aware of what they're doing.

What is to be done? I mean, aside from reading more Lenin.

~Chara of Pnictogen

...you know, the Butlerian Jihad people never said anything about building a likeness of a cat's mind.

~Chara