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Episode 238: Nihil River (Patreon)

Published:
2022-07-12 13:14:11
Edited:
2024-10-11 00:15:56
Imported:
2026-06
Tags:

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Content

We talk through the recent mass shooting events in the United States, the rise of schizoposting, hyper psychosis, and drowning in the digital swamp of memetic magick mania.

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Comments

Mathias

Enough of the ketamine hate

Swimaroo

LIV LIV LIV LIV

Swimaroo

Also called Magic 🪄 ✨

Weed

f for braces boil

J

I’ve been hoping for this kind of ep. Thanks comrades

justdave

Thanks Liz, I feel bad for you aswell

Cabral Comrade

I think of you guys as my family too 🥺 para-family relationship

Tony

Wikipedia edit complete 🤝

Maura Willey

columbine happened the year before I started kindergarten so I'm a shooting drill pro. it really changes the way you think about the world bc i am constantly looking for exits and always avoiding packed staircases and escalators. wild to think that every kid in America is being trained to think in this kind of militaristic/paranoid way.

Ari Harris

Yea come to austin. I'm gay too

justdave

My middle school running coach stopped a school shooting. She heard the gunshots, ran over and just hugged the kid

chaloloo

come to Austin pls

Hannah Wacha

I live in Alabama nobody every tours here 😭😭

Alejandro Pepsi

March and April is the best time to come to the south :)

Kody

47 comes from capital steez, who was a pretty good rapper but jump off a roof and killed himself back in 2012. Seems like the highland park shooter is basically taking everything from steelo’s playbook. Minus the whole mass shooter. Steelo music always focused more on the government and disrupting the system even though he also had a very online Illuminati understanding of it.

Tom Clarke

Oh how come they aren't coming to Barcelona, where I live??

Negative Affirmations

An episode thumbnail from "I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream"? I'm intrigued.

SF

Good timing for an episode about schizo-posting, cuz some schizos have been schizing out about Liz on Twitter today

Casey

4 episodes on Utah and you're not coming to SLC 🙄🙄🙄 All 3 of us Utahn true anon fans are pissed

Joe S

This is a good one 👍

Nicholas DeGroot

Crimo was activated by Pritzkers MK Ultra weed

Meg

Trueanon in Miami when

Terry Kenney

My brain does not work like yours. Your reason, your logic, does not apply to me. You cannot tell me what to do because you do not and cannot know my world.

JC

Great episode!

PrinceVocalFry

The last bit has me thinking about my childhood (late 90s/early 00s) and the earliest feelings of alienation I had. There were a variety of ways for me to channel these–skating, playing in punk bands, low-level mischief, bad zines and alt-weeklies, etc. Aside from playing music, most of these were rooted in some form of consumerism, but there was a certain amount of resistance in them. There was also variation of form and context that made the world seem open and grounded your sense of self in spontaneity. With everything going online, capital has a form of mediation that preemptively channels almost any affective resistance to alienation towards this bad infinite of permanent irony. It’s a network of monads that differ in content but never form. And the content itself is a reaction to that same network, which becomes increasingly smooth and homogenized. It’s automated irony, where resistance reproduces stimuli in predictable ways. So, what happens with a generation of aggrieved young men who experience less and less outside of this process? Men whose spontaneity has no outlet and who have trouble with forms of socialization that require spontaneity, especially dating and close friendships? Some of them become avatars of the capitalist death-drive, the destruction of all spontaneity, i.e. life. Death transfigured: coal, oil, plastic, cybernetics, the memeification of suffering and violence.

a clash of purple

What happens? Why, they turn out great. Everything's fine. Smooth sailing ahead.

Brendan Garcia

Nearly a mass shooting on July 4 here in Richmond, if richmond police are to be believed. Which is an ask, I know, but they did arrest a couple of guys with a bunch of AR-15s who allegedly planned to shoot up a Fourth of July event I’ve been to a few times.

tMinozaJ

There’s been conflicting reports on that from RPD and the Embassy of the two guys’ home country, the Embassy says both men were arrested by the 3rd (meaning a shooting on the 4th was not a real possibility) and RPD says one on the 2nd and one on the 5th. It’s a very weird case especially with the foreign embassy now getting involved.

Zach

As you both say in this episode, I think the show often and increasingly brushes up against the idea of the internet as a phenomenon that has transcended its original purpose as data collector and aggregator, and instead has become a maddening machine that connects and distorts our psyches in ways that are as hard to imagine as they are to understand. I think some of your best episodes are ones that try to explore this topic, and I would love to see an episode or even a series that tries to tackle it more completely, possibly in collaboration with Michael S. Judge, whenever he feels well enough to participate (this subject seems very much in his wheelhouse).

Some Guy

Same here, I'm always hoping "maybe Atlanta at least?" and yet...

Kip 4

The 47 numerology is probably in reference to a rapper named Capital Steez, he had a fixation on the number 47 as well and claimed that he could see into the future among a couple other things. He presented it in the archetypal ‘42’ manner where it was sort of a mysterious number that was the key to everything. He also died by suicide so there are lots of conspiracies surrounding his reasoning for committing suicide. I have no clue if he used it as a motif because of that or not but it’s worth mentioning.

Ella

I am from HP and went to school with Bobby Crimo. I think you guys are pretty spot on, this one is different than the others. The only thing I would say you are missing is his father's ideology. Some outlets reported that he ran for mayor as a Republican. While his online activity does point to him holding Republican views, he actually ran as an independent. I think he has a deeper ideology and a personal grudge against the Highland Park establishment. I think beyond the regular abuse Bobby Crimo III experienced, he was primed by his father from the start to believe he would never fit in and be accepted by the community, and I think it pretty much played out that way. His father also had a tattoo at one point that said Awake. Idk what to think of that one but it's something that pops up in my head a lot.

Brendan Garcia

I really kind of spiraled the day of going through his social media postings and following people’s investigations on Twitter, “was he MK’d? He says he was!”, but I think I ended up where you guys did, he MK’d himself, which is actually even more frightening.

D. Elwood

lot of good points in this episode or w/e but I'm really stuck on describing gundam as "a mechanical being with a little man inside it" which is technically true but also reads like the answer to one of those "describe a movie in the weirdest way possible" engagement farming tweets

a clash of purple

You guys don't know much about youth or modern internet culture, and in fact regard all of that with open contempt and condescension... Don't talk about this stuff. What's the point? You're literally just rehashing the tired old bullshit about video games turning kids into serial killers. The internet and video games and all the rest of it is incidental. These killings are obviously motivated by varying combinations of right-wing ideology and just snapping under the stress of life under capitalism. The internet is bad, but so is everything else in capitalism. If the awful nasty internet and all the scary violent video games blew up tomorrow, it wouldn't magically stop these tryhard wannabe-Nazis and angry men from going on killing sprees. How is it that Radio War Nerd are like ten times your age but more informed about this (including admitting when they don't have a lot of insight into the school shooter phenomenon)...

Brendan Garcia

Oh wow I haven’t been keeping up with it, it was kind of more than I could think about at the time. I did think it sounded a little weird the way they said some random person just overheard them talking about doing it and contacted the police. Thanks for the update, I’ll try to look into it again.

NovalisGuy

I agree with brace this extreme-o-weed is fucked

Madison Perry

Schizoposting seems like a continuation/escalation of edgelord-type stuff, but where edgelordism flourished on ifunny and 4chan and maybe had more explicit reactionary/white supremacist links, this seems somehow more “black mirror” ultra-desensitized and I think it’s trafficked more on TikTok and Instagram. It’s a phenomenon of guys younger than those into Q and it’s more ideologically-unmoored. A bit different of a motive than many other right-wing racist mass shooters. I’m Crimo’s age and I basically think the impetus for a lot of this stuff is a combo of pressure-cooker capitalism, completely political dysfunction in the US, and something sick and corrosive that the internet does that I don’t know how to describe.

Chris

My grandma has a body pillow with arms....

Madison Perry

I’m often thinking about how strictly male these subcultures are. Society in the internet age is doing something horrific to the psyches of men/boys and it goes under-remarked.

Some Guy

Schizoposting is just astrology for chan nerds

TrueAnonPod

Do you think capitalism was invented in 1999

Doug Cartel

They saw your email asking for GAYPUSSY as a code and responded with a pic of their face in their hands, right?

5k Race Warrior

This what making sex a social taboo gets us. You can't physically be that crazy online if you're fuckin n suckin IRL. It's a literal death drive.

tyler

Hitman is fun as hell

Zack Burke

Thanks for the coded messages sent directly to me, guys. I'm awaiting further orders.

misterinterrupt

dang, getting into that dakimakura biz, whew!

Doug Cartel

this new threat to the public sounds like it's called "The Holy Shit Go Outside Movement" it's interesting to talk about this "suffocating now" when buddhist pop figures like Tich Nat Hanh say that being "in the now" is how you feel better etc

Eleanor

You guys hit the nail on the fuckin head with this one. I live a couple blocks away from the (failed) mass shooting at the Edmund Burke school in DC by Raymond Spencer and my main thought was that this guy was just absolutely poisoned by deeply online irony and nihilism. The only things in his apartment were a mattress, a Yakub meme poster on his wall, and a ton of guns and a sniper setup. Clearly wanted to be made into a legend in online circles but also didn’t actually care enough. Just totally dissociated from real life, completely online. It’s a definite brand of mass shooter.

PrinceVocalFry

It's non-sensical to talk about the internet or even social media disappearing from the world. It's an essential part of the world: how we work, where we work, where we live, etc. We do have some control over how or how much we use it outside of these areas. We can look at data on mass shootings before the internet: they were much lower and they've spiked over the last two years when people have been more online. Anyway, I think that you're taking a one-sided view of their critique. The internet is not something that happens *to* capitalism or the material world. It's an expression of it. The internet and mass shootings are related in the same way that 9/11 and the Gulf War was related to 24-hour news and before that the Vietnam War, the politics of spectacle and television. Post-industrial capitalism shapes our sense of self and community through the media. You get off of work, you have your free time where you no longer are subjected to the rules of your boss. But waiting for you at home is the television, powered by massive capital cartels, re-directing your free time back to capital. Major social events–wars, sports, political discourse–are televised, so you have to tune in to feel like you are a part of society, the very thing you feel alienated from at work. With the internet, it's much worse because you can participate. You can comment and like, but you can't change the structure, can't organize because its structured toward individuation. The network re-creates our atomization while also being an outlet for our rage and loneliness. Atomized violence is endemic to it.

Crash Test Orphan

Oh heck yeah daddy Mehmed saw my Hitman Agent 47 post about this guy on the twitter. Glad he got this info to Brace.

RyzomeRyan

I was a sophomore in HS in 1999. I witnessed my first active shooter drill a few years later while observing an elementary class as part if my teaching degree. I thought it was insane; the psychological damage, but also telling kids to huddle in a corner would seem to make them easier targets. Since Columbine, I have noticed the mention of each shooter's pharmaceutical history is less and less. Yalls take on crazy people, "becoming the meme," is fascinating, but, once again, you dance around the esoteric as an explanation for world events. A simpler way of describing what's going on is to recognize that the Clinton/Epstein/Abromovich Spirit Cooking's are working and the traumatized and isolated youth are falling prey to demon's, doing their will for the benefit of the Democratic Party. Not really, but not shying away from the idea of spirits (or even the more materialistic idea of the zeitgeist) might help explain why we aren't getting any break from absolute chaos and tragedy these days.

Harry P. Ness

to be clear when I defended psychadelics as useful I was pretty much just talking about acid

Thomas Stevens

I think it’s a really weird take to say that people posting memes are “making themselves crazy” if memes made someone crazy, they were already crazy. The idea that the internet as a whole makes us crazy makes more sense than that, but these “ironic” memes about killing people aren’t making kids into murders, that’s just the contact that they make with the rest of the internet as a whole.

RyzomeRyan

One more thing; (for context, I'm 39 and avoided the internet until I was about 27) a few years back I had an ongoing meme-fest with a real life friend over FB. We were essentially making fun of this kid doing fast food reviews. A week went by and we saw eachother at a party. That friend mentioned the same joke I had said to her online. I had no idea what she was talking about until she reminded me it about our online discussions. My brain still didn't quite equate some nonsense I was shitposting about online with real life. Rather than a weakness, I took this as a positive sign of being old enough to have developed mentally when these two things werent the same thing. I soon thereafter left FB and haven't looked back.

a clash of purple

No, of course capitalism has been around for a while, but it only entered its terminal decline within the past couple decades. That's when the mass shootings started in America, but it was mostly workplaces then, not schools. Now we have a generation (all around the world but especially in America) who can see that it's going to be all downhill for almost everyone from here on out, and a few of them are venting their despair and nihilistic rage in acts of extreme violence against whatever target their psyche and the media culture suggests. I'm just not convinced that there's any reason to think that the internet or video games are causes of this violence, disintegration of identity, and nihilism. They can be symptoms or even vectors, definitely, but the increasing levels of suffering and anomie caused by capitalism accelerating towards complete societal and economic collapse is the cause. I mean, if there's any hope of successfully organizing for a better future, it's going to have to use the internet and culture as it exists now. The reason states and corporations are so paranoid about controlling it is because it's an incredibly powerful tool for communication and organization. And like with a lot of elements of modern society, they're expending more and more resources in exchange for more and more tenuous control. The whole architecture of the world order or whatever you want to call it is going to appear most opaque and unassailable at the exact moment before it totally falls apart. Or that's what I think, anyway.

a clash of purple

I think the "sick and corrosive" thing you're talking about is the way that the internet allows people to create little communities closed off from the outside world where they can (potentially) form these toxic codependent relationships and egg each other on to falling deeper and deeper into various rabbit holes. Sometimes that's just getting really into a particular anime, sometimes it's becoming a Nazi/FBI informant, sometimes it's violence for violence's sake, etc.. @Madison Perry There are mostly-female internet communities analogous to the male Nazi/mass shooter ones, but they tend to turn their destructive energies inward and ravage themselves instead of other people. That being said, as ideas of gender continue to be challenged and traditional gender roles are weakened further in America, I expect we'll see some girls (or people who were raised as girls, anyway) get in on the bloodshed too, sooner or later. A bad side effect of an otherwise good thing.

Parker Snow

Unbelievably good episode, thank you!

Parker Snow

Also something that I’ve seen online but you guys didn’t mention is that Crimo scoped out a synagogue and highland park actually has a relatively high Jewish population. Not sure of the veracity of this but could be worth examining.

Rory Blank

A couple people have attributed the number 47 to Capital Steez. I would assume that it’s more likely a reference to Hitman. The titular hitman in the game series is codenamed 47. The shooter cosplayed as agent 47, so I don’t think it would be a stretch to assume that he would be familiar with the number from the game, and possibly adopt it from there. That’s not to say that video games made him do it, I absolutely don’t think they did by any stretch, but Agent 47 is characterized as a cold calculating professional, and I would guess that would have some sort of totemic power to someone with a fixation on public mass violence.

Whale

The schizoposting thing is what trueanon fans do tbh

Yup

You guys eventually landed on something interesting, if undercooked, about the surreality of the internet and the idea that these people can't tell where one ends and the other begins. I hated the hesitancy with which Liz mentioned Mark Fisher though. Just because it has been memed to death by Joshua Citronella and whoever else doesn't mean that his work is any less notable. That hesitancy is a symptom of the same internet poisoning that you're claiming inspires these shooters. Can't be perceived as too sincere or uncool? What is that? Also, wasn't it more of a Nick Land thing anyway

Dinosaur

It's pronounced "why-fu," like wife-u. Waifu's are just anime characters that antisocial weebs like to imagine are there for them emotionally and physically, often manifesting as body pillows and figures.

Erin

Wish every1 would just feel God's light and Be Normal

Maggie Phelan

obsessed with "Don't talk about this stuff." is someone holding a gun to your head? just don't listen

John Harwood

I know he was a dick and hardly a lefty, but Baudrillard has proven to be wholly correct about how electronic media produce psychoses of various kinds. Worth a reread or a first read, esp “The System of Objects” and “The Ecstasy of Communication”

Bent Mind

I’m a neuroscientist. Happy to help explain all sides of the argument regarding psychosis and cannabis.

Mike Solan

you’re just like my real parents, they also charge me 200 dollars when I want to see them

K H

I wanted you guys to know I literally skipped the first 3 minutes of the podcast until boils were not being discussed. I hope I didn't miss any important triggers or code words.

Kyle

Ive been waiting a long tome for you to say memetic magick

5k Race Warrior

Oops That's why we didn't see you at the thing

a clash of purple

I listened because I like Brace & Liz and the show, and I posted a comment because this episode made me grumpy and putting out my thoughts about it made me feel better. I always end up seeming more negative than I mean to, though.

Junior Carmichael

Brace needs to invent an anime nerd character so he can talk about his love of Gundam without shame

K H

No I was being gay that day. Next time though yea. I missed it.

K H

So what you're saying is we need to genocide the online catgirls? Oh fuck am I doing it? Oh shit its got me bro. For real bro I can't stop myseeeeelllfffuuuuuwwWu.

K H

For real though it does seem like people be gettin schized out. Like probably yougins should slow down a bit.

K H

You're literally amongst demonic operatives.

K H

Yes yes, you're from Austin we know we get it.

K H

but r u silly?

K H

Know that I let you have it...only because I pitied you.

K H

And certain brands of milk

K H

Agent 47. Your mission. Watch Minions The Rise of Gru.

Sandy

Anyone interested in more about this stuff should really look into the Death Is Just Around The Corner podcast series "terrorism as public art" or whatever it's called. I really feel like David Bowie's "Blackstar" is in part about this phenomenon. You can hear in the lyrics "I'm not a pop star, I'm a blackstar" I read these "I'm not an X Star" as a sort of lamenting voice, a person lamenting their inability to access some sort of stardom, attention or fame, even pittlingly little. This dude wanted to be famous, by any means, he was a SoundCloud rapper fir Christ's sanke. To leave the "not real" reality of everyday life, but to become part of the reference, the meta-reference, the meta-meta-reference, to have your face and name traded back and forth in the cultural cache that makes up all meaningful activity and purpose in your life and the lives of your other Too Online friends. All while internalizing the deep logic the slicing grid structure of the internet holds you to: Nothing matters whatsoever, except the attention you gain from others interaction, and how you entertain yourself using it. Because at the end of the day, all these social media sites are carefully designed and neutral-net-algorithmized for the sake of gaining, holding, and maintaining your attention, so they can sell your attention along side the data this process creates to advertisers or whoever. This dude was radicalized into a a jihad, not for God, but a jihad for the inherent truth at the bottom of the internet's operation dictated down to it's users. The truth that nothing matters but attention, and everything past that is merely for the sake of entertainment. So, with that in mind, I ask you: Why. So. Serious?

Escher Beat

The idea of scizoposting yourself into mental illness (along with the tourettes thing) sounds a lot like a dark take on "Manifesting"

K H

I have to disagree with Liz on the premise of time not existing and nothing new being made on the internet. You can literally see new things being created in real time out of constant iteration and synthesis. Time on the internet is faster than real space but slower than headspace. So you can see thoughts forming from the stimuli and deconstruct ideas that might appear organic(not iterative) if you saw them expressed in the real world only. Time on the internet moves so fast compared to reality it basically allows groups to become completely homogeneous through orders of magnitude more interactions than they could have ever had. So each person uploads their shit into the system and consumes the synthesis to shit it back. However in that time no outside stimuli is introduced. Eventually it's just eating and regurgitating shit. Someone else said something about smooth monads trying to sound smart. I'm just as smart even if I'm covered in piss n shid. So for someone with net poisoning perhaps time in a way doesn't exist. Matt the Christman had some interesting views on time and consciousness after he came down from acid. Basically you're ability to distinguish yourself through time gives way to consciousness. I think most of the online still perceive a future and even past, so I think they still have consciousness. I think if technology improves communication speed that could change.

Dongo

I’m begging you no more boil talk I almost threw up

#1 Deep Thinker

Supply of novel media products seems to be diminishing (ie. pop culture is stale af), as demand increases. Gotta get that dopamine. Schizoposting, and particularly the pseudoschizo thinking that drive it, are a homebrew novelty crank, and one for those who perhaps crave it the most (feed-based app users/media addicts). Might also be worth considering the shooter as alienated even at the moment of the shooting. Still voyeurs, at a distance, failing to bridge the gap between their hyper-cerebral, hyper-mediated lifestyle and a material world they think and feel is further away than it is. What unites the unfortunately more common internet-user mass shooter and those of the last century is that thing which the internet has proliferated to terrible effect: virtualism. Only rock and roll will save us.

Peter Annee

Incredible episode! This is my favorite kind of True Anon content. Awhile ago, Jodi Dean was a guest. She talks allot about “lack of symbolic efficiency” as being the cause of the insane way people act online. The idea is that there is so much irony and so little context that it is extremely difficult to determine what is true. The internet is flooded with many possibilities and the promise of freedom (very reminiscent of what Liz said about the internet being a temporal). And there isn’t a common good or a religion that people can appeal to for communal understanding / truth. Lacan literally defines psychosis as exclusion from the symbolic order. There hasn’t been much of a symbolic order since the death of god (or the death of the sun for all the death corner listeners). The dream of the American Protestant founding/ Mormonism/ Scientology is to replace god with America itself and endless expansion and conquest of the frontier and eventually space. America no longer provides for most people and thus doesn’t function as a symbolic order and so people are forced to invent their own Gnosticism to navigate the infinitely complex online world. The school shooters make themselves into the Christ’s of their respective Gnosticism’s. Regarding the Death Drive: in “Beyond the Pleasure Principle” early on Freud’s name for the death drive is the “repetition compulsion” - peoples tendency to recreate and repeat traumatic experiences. The way the internet revolves around “attention” in and of itself, good or bad, makes me think terminally online people have traumatized themselves (and in many cases been traumatized from life experiences as well) back into a child like state. Making schizioid memes is like a baby crying for an unspecific reason. The goal is attention (and sometimes a material need). Going back to Lacan, the only other time we are excluded from the symbolic order is as infants prior to the mirror stage, before there is any ego. The lack of differentiation between ego and world can also lead to extreme narcissism and delusions of grandeur and this is another connection I see to the school shooters.

Donny Baseball

Honestly miss high school weed, stems and seeds included

Tom Wilkinson

You can pry my dabs from my shaking scromiting hands!

Kamran Husain

sad boys is a swedish rap group lead by yung lean

Milo

Look as an 🇦🇺🦘, hearing the way you pronounced Brenton Tarrants name was like nails on a chalkboard. But ❤️

Brad

Brace and Liz need to visit the Ukrainian Village while in Chicago. You can see the church President Bush and Clinton visited earlier this year in a private, semi secretive meeting with local Ukrainian community leaders. I’ve seen lots of red and black car flags in the neighborhood and far right wing dudes waving them at demonstrations.

bugsick

Brace watch the entirety of Mobile Suit Gundam

Exotic Instinct

Great Ep recommend pairing w/ Talking Postmodernism episode of The Farm

Lulu

The best thing President Xi ever did was crack down on kids having access to video games

Lulu

I 100% agree with Brace's point on strong weed now. People who already have a thin grasp on reality can have a really negative reaction. I have anxiety and edibles give me awful panic attacks. I obviously don't think weed should be illegal or anything but I feel like it's a disservice when people act like weed is completely harmless.

jugsdotgov

choking on my nectarine at the interpol interlude, thank you Liz

IHaveHemorrhoids

Accurate reference ... but was it really that funny? Not really sure it was meant to be that funny. I smiled sightly I guess. Regardless, agreed Liz is a gift to us pod listeners.

justdave

Really good ep- I think the dissolution of reality is a function of capital, it allows people to isolate from family and community, creating tailored little worlds of imagined traumas and separating humanity as a whole. I understand psychosis scares the well to do of america, but we're all here together, and our realities will blend, no matter how 'crazy' they may seem. Also I have never enjoyed the 'incel' narrative. Implying men need sex is like saying women need a good pounding, also weed is legal because it doesn't make you crazy, if your crazy and you smoke weed that's different

Donna Oakes-Munro

Check out the CBC podcast "Boys Like Me" which is about the Toronto van attack and references much of the same stuff.

justdave

Wheew, gotta get to work

I am become reply guy

Yes especially when you combine it with the kind of internet use described here, it really is like self-inflicted psychosis, just a totalizing morass of distress and alienation from your own experience of being a living person with agency. I think the choice of AM as the episode thumbnail is incredibly apt as it captures the kind of awful timelessness we experience while we’re plugged in. Liz is correct that all of this has warped consciousness in a way that is becoming not only more extreme but less accountable as we move further from our humanity and deeper into the matrix. People are basically torturing themselves without realizing it, so it’s no wonder some are trying to destroy consciousness because it’s the only freedom they can imagine.

Eric Adams

Me too, when I smoke the refeer we are all neuroscientists

Some Guy

Dawg that 10 year Attack on Memory tour coming up

Ricardo

Brace & Liz need to watch Serial Lain to understand schizoposting/internet

Ricardo

Yes! Saw them live at a small venues with pity sex. They rocked!

Aaron Slater

New merchandise opportunity: Brace Belden body pillows!

misterr

This episode really hit me hard. I need to unplug and stop indulging dangerous habits. Good and smart stuff.

Corey Reynolds

I love Liz but why does she keep bringing up Mark Fisher only to apologize for doing so? Finish your thought. What she ended up saying made no sense bc she was afraid to bring up Mark Fisher for some reason. Was he canceled? There should be a whole episode on Mark Fisher

Sifl

FD Signifier has some good youtube videos about his theories on how nihilism and internet edgelords have played a role in the development of mass shooters. I do think that the source of mass shooters is pretty obvious and nothing is being done about it. High schools in the US have become brutal warehouses for kids where they are ranked for admission to college or cast out after graduation into low wage entry level labor. Every high school kid knows that the only future available to them is one where they service the machine of capital by working their entire life at a soul sucking job that only results in the destruction of the environment and cements brutal class structure. The only thing you do in high school is figure out whether you are one of the select few who gets a high paying job or whether you are doomed to low wage labor. So, in HS, kids are quickly stratified into those who are successful at sport, academics, etc. and are the "popular" kids and those who are cast out, bullied and put on a conveyor belt for a future with no prospects other than dead end jobs at Target or changing oil, etc. For boys, you can add to all of that the pain and humiliation that comes with the pressures of sexual debut and dating. Every few months in HS is a dance or prom where young boys are humiliated because they have no success with the opposite sex. Before the internet, these boys would turn to drugs, deviance, punk rock, or suicide to deal with the pain of trying to exist in the hell that is high school. In the age of the internet, these boys can now find a place to exist and through the nihilism and edgelords online are attracted to mass shootings as a way out of their painful existence and as a last attempt to have a life that means something, even if it is something really bad. And firearms are attractive because they give these boys a sense of power that they could never have through academics, sports, girls, etc. Add some undiagnosed mental illness to the mix, and it is actually amazing that there aren't more shooters than there are. As long as high schools are just warehouses to sort out the winners and losers among kids with all the spoils going to the kids who excel at sports, academics or are attractive and popular and the rest are bullied, humiliated, and cast out, we are going to keep having mass shooters. Until we create spaces for these kids where they can get mental health interventions and have a supportive peer community free of the vicious social structures of the HS community at large, we are going to keep having mass shooters.

Le Michel diplomatique

That last part on reality/unreality reminds me of an interpretation of Shirley Jackson’s “the haunting of hill house” I read once where the haunting is real, and it’s normal to escape reality to a degree, but the danger is coping with that by refuging oneself totally in the unreal. Phrasing that poorly but there’s a lot behind the ghost story

Le Michel diplomatique

Also seeing reality as it is targeting / conspiring against you specifically

Maggie Phelan

I'm also curious about this and would love to listen to a full episode about him. my only guess for the hesitation is that he was openly critical of the left and/or red scare used to talk about him a lot. either way it was silly

Zoe Hart

if reality isnt targeting me why does my tummy hurt hm?!

Bre Wolff

Come to pittsburgh or buffalo thots

Tim Childs

The new horror movie ‘We’re All Going To The World’s Fair’ is all about online dissociation. I highly recommend it to anyone interested in scary internet stuff. Great movie!

Will Watson

probably just bc he’s become a big meme with the “schizoposting” crowd. i love fisher but after internet leftists made capreal their bible bringing him up makes me cringe a little inside

helpsterskelpy

is it anything like Brainscan w Ed Furlong?

H G

That's interesting -- having your father (first/closest person who can affirm/deny masculinity of their sons) deny your ability to be accepted into a male-dominated society, while he affirms a framework of secret domination and insurgent counter-domination.

Ella

Yeah that's kind of what I was trying to say, and like Brace said, people have experienced a lot worse from their parents and not done what he did, which is why I wanted to say that he was primed ideologically by his father, I think it's an important piece. I can't overstate how wealthy and how liberal Highland Park is, their family was ostracized all along for not fitting that mold. Now that I have had more time to put my thoughts in order, I think of the Crimo family as the type of people who can still slips through the cracks in the gun-free-robust-mental health-resource liberal utopia, and Crimo III, with all the resources he had available to him, an example of how we can't just counter internet extremism with liberal policy under capitalism.

lol whatever

did lil b pioneer schizoposting

orc

QAA and TA putting out anti-schizoposting episodes in the same week, cool UN working overtime

Bess C

And scored by Alex G

tMinozaJ

I disagree with this theory, I think American high schools have always been horrible as you describe them and are not really much in their modern incarnation from non-U.S. secondary schools. Yes they are under-funded and curriculums are dogshit, but if high school is the root cause then how do you account for the massive increase in frequency of mass shootings within the last two decades, and the fact that it’s a change within the US specifically? Imo mass shootings must have a more immediate cause than just high school sucking because high school has always sucked and mass shootings as daily events is a new paradigm

tMinozaJ

I see a lot of you saying the weed has gotten strong and I want to present a counter position: weed has not gotten strong enough yet.

Alan

Hyperstition is the name of the concept that most of this episode is discussing. It's a cultural positive feedback loop that brings ideas into being.

(American spirit menthol

There's a section in fear and loathing in Las Vegas where Hunter s. Thompson talks about the empty promises of enlightenment Timothy Leary made about LSD, and how for all the destructive benefit of one might get from drugs, you have to be wary of anybody promising a light at the end of the tunnel. Same might be said for schizoposting I used to do a lot of meth, and during that time I read about pizzagate, for maybe half an hour it seemed plausible. But I thought about it, and decided I didn't buy it. I guess my point here Is that being terminally online is more detrimental to your brain than literally being a tweaker

justdave

We live in the circus, the ring leader seems like he's in charge, but the clowns throw a wrench into the whole show (despite the lamentations of the crowd), in fact, its their show when you think about it- they are having the best time.

Reverend Carter

the last 10 or so minutes are some of the most true shit ive ever heard out loud thank you.

TangiePower

Just going around arranging accidents for the Illuminati

Alex

Would love a trueanon ep with brad troemel

Nuan Sonar

I smoke weed every night before bed (helping treat insomnia). When is my schizo split gonna happen? Also does amount smoked play into it?

dshamz_

Thanks for this critique of schizoposting. The number of academics (some ‘Marxists’) I witnessed in grad school come dangerously close to, or in some cases outright, defending this kind of irrationalist stuff as some kind of ‘rebellion’ against ‘capitalist rationality’ was absurd. It’s really a full embrace of the logic of post-modernity. Glad to hear TrueAnon come out for the existence of objective truth, and for Marxism generally insofar as it’s a social science that seeks to understand objective, material reality in order to change it.

Aidan of California

Doesn't cause it so much as trigger it sooner and more intensely if you're liable to be schizophrenic, based on family history n what not

Carson D

some of my favorite episodes that you do are like this one and the TikTok one, I love when you talk about the internet. Idk why some listeners wouldn’t. Incredible work, I hope you can continue to explore on these topics!!

Bess C

I don’t think you’re confused about Highland Park being a Chicago suburb because it’s the Midwest, I think it’s just because you’re from the Bay Area

Matthew Steidle

With some of these mass shooter “myth makers” types what level of consciousness or cognitive choice do we think they’re making these decisions and moves at? Some of them seem very unconscious or subliminal without any sort of direct formation. Is that just part of how this works?

inradiator

What’s with the weird deep voice in the background at 1:02:00?

Bethany Jolly

The term I’ve been using to describe the phenomenon of extremely online folks who drive themselves insane, and the more broad social effects, jokerfication. It’s a dumb meme term but it captures the spirit of the thing in that way. America is a nation of jokers, none more so than mass shooters

the baron

In the same way an absurd amount of people are in G. khan's lineage, i feel like

Chelsea Zona

Mr. Boils is my father, please, call me Lance

Sean Carton

Tricksters, my friend. Card 0.

Sean Carton

The panopticon is real, my brother.

Sean Carton

also, anyone remember the Internet k-hole?

Sean Carton

To be fair, Marxists in my experience tend to be some of the most anti-Dada motherfuckers out there. They’re hypermaterialists, after all. But maybe that’s changing as Discordianism effectively… takes over.

dshamz_

Yeah it's pretty split. I'd probably be called a 'class reductionist' or something these days, but back when I was in a PhD program for a bit, it wasn't uncommon to find people who would claim Marxism but were basically irrationalist and and anti-materialist. I'd say they were the majority in my program actually.

Peter Annee

It’s also a meme about leftist guys trying to flirt. Uhhhh uhhhhh capitalist realism by Mark Fisher

Don Workman

No one should understand

Blaz Kelbl

I hated the snark too. If Fisher has valuable insight, then Fisher should be used. Being afraid of being cringe is vanity and is more appropriate for teens.

Lauren Cabral

You guys need to invite Liv Agar on the show. This whole conversation is right up her alley, especially considering a lot of similiar themes to her commentary on the Highland Park shooter on QAA.

Ok bro

What's the name of the guy who writes about the internet that Liz talks about? (not Mark Fisher)

Isaiah C

Stupid episode. Nobody who says they are "schizoposting" actually believes what they say, it's called joking. Either yall are dumb enough to fall for it, or you don't know what you're talking about and you've just mashed a bunch of different things together. I know it's been mentioned on this show before that the internet drives people crazy, and that's true, but yall can't separate yourselves from that. You're part of the problems that you talk about.

tMinozaJ

You don’t understand what this type of posting is if you think nobody doing it harbors any sincerity

tMinozaJ

he also pioneered music

HC

Good episode. The mental collapse part mentioned around the 55 minute mark reminds me of a lot of the mindsets that plagued a lot of people in online communities including leftist communities. Moreso related to just an overconsumption of online media or overinteraction with online spaces.

rutjake

I don’t feel like reading all of this: has anyone talked about Heroes by Bifo Berardi yet? Recommend it.

rutjake

good post!

rutjake

they got into this a little in the Corporate Memphis ep

Sandy

Nah man, the ring leader and the circus are the same beast. The clowns may think they're separate, may even appear to be, but the most important part of the game here is to keep the show going, keep us focused on that instead of what's really important.

ktcat

trueanon is welcome in key west anytime as long as they go to margaritaville with me

evan

why are you weirdos saying two'er instead of tour? see you on two'er i guess freakz.

Bess C

I second this

bill

anyone have the link for what substack liz was referencing in the episode?

shampooflasks

yo this show just keeps gettin better.

Slatliff

Honestly most of the issues seem to be tied to loneliness in my mind. I grew up in the same place as people like Tarrant and CatBoyKami. Queensland culture especially post 2000s was extremely toxic and aimless. Everyone around you addicted to amphetamines, huge wealth inequality and corruption. These people who Brace says MKUltra'd themselves were just looking for a justification for their sickness.

Daniel Goffe

Only just catching up to this now. I’m sure you got to this but Marx’s theory of alienation is fairly key here, the idea that humans need to live in an organic society where our actions have outcomes we can see and feel, and what we make with our hands is more fulfilling because it’s real to us in an immediate sense. The internet combines with alienation of commodity production and is a form of alienation itself fairly obviously because guys can’t get a slap or a punch from someone’s brother and his friends if they are abusive etc. We weren’t built for the internet. Sorry if that’s obvious or whatever but it’s what I strongly feel.

Daniel Goffe

It’s the social space as commodified alienation, or alienated commodity. That’s socialising via the internet.

Daniel Goffe

There’s a guy who writes on data colonialism ie the metaphor that if they force everyone to use the internet to socialise its equivalent to the White British forcing the Indians to use liquor and guns and sign treaties, before they really knew what they would do. His name is Nick Couldry. He’s at the LSE. He is a bit centrist politically but he has a sound theoretical basis for a lot of what he is talking about.

Miss Lourdes

Why am I getting "47" synchronicities

Yusuf Imran Abbasi

As if wantin 2 b reality tv youtube famous werent bad enough.. wantin 2 b bitchute famous is all together a much darker turn.. u probably wont agree or believe but there is a big occult element to the internet that effects all of us..

Azure Leffeld

Did the gang ever do an episode on Martin Caballo?

Nicolas

I guess they dont believe what theyre writing bzt the fact that they do it already does sth to them over time? And novi dont actually think i know what shizo posting is. Because my mind went to gay edgy humor fake twitter accounts

Nicolas

Sounds like two labels for the same can.

Robbie H.

47 is a reference to the game hitman as well, the hitman is agent 47

Doc Adna

when i was a teen, was definitely doing that kind of bragging about "being crazy" in part to justify my self hatred and hatred of the world around me. plus "being crazy" as a fetishized aesthetic was definitely a thing between me, my sister, and the online (also literary - see The Idiot, Wuthering Heights, etc) world we inhabited. Because we were kids/weren't educated on the impacts of it, we didn't quite grasp what it means to have mental health issues + implications of being perceived as having mental health issues