Internet Bad for Braves

2,256 words

Is there a warm, fuzzy feeling in your belly yet? That’s called nostalgia. It’s what you get when your glory days are behind you and all that’s left ahead are the many and grueling indignities of middle and old age. — some daft scribbler

When we talk about modernity, what often gets talked about is the alienating effect of modern technology. It’s become incredibly easy to produce content by merely pointing out that a certain technological innovation, particularly in the area of information technology, serves to distance people from the older way of doing things. Various activists, writers and video producers have made names for themselves out of pointing out all the ways in which online interaction is unnatural, encourages or even creates bad behavior in people, or pales in comparison with the way things used to be in the old world. If I’m being forthright, I’ve done quite a lot of this myself. Sometimes the deadline looms and the temptation is just too great.

But very often when the pronouncement is made that the technological stimulus is dangerous and alienating from authentic experience, what follows is not a path towards a solution but rather a case of the writer or speaker throwing his hands up in frustration, lamenting the loss of older forms of authenticity. Recently, I made the distinction between writing and typing in a livestream. My show is called The Writers’ Bloc, but I’m not really a writer; I’m a typer, and the distinction is not easily apparent until you find that you cannot use non-standard signs or letters in your writing. Having found the need to use the Turkish “i,” because it doesn’t have a dot on top, and hence could be used in a meme of Joe Biden eating ice cream (it makes sense in context), I found myself frustrated because my keyboard doesn’t have this letter and I couldn’t use it, regardless of the fact that I know how to write it. Had I been making the meme by hand, there’d have been no problem. I could always download a Turkish keyboard layout, but it’s a pain in the ass and it would be beside the point. maybe I need to draw a pictograph of an ice cream cone instead of the letter i in Biden—but I can’t do that on any keyboard.

So, there’s a problem. It’s not that big, but then again, considering how much time we spent in school learning to write using a pencil or a pen, it’s gigantic. An entire universe of acts has been whisked away. When I was practicing law, I’d write more often, but still, the bulk of written language production I engaged in was typed. Nowadays I only write down grocery lists. But I never really thought about it until I needed the Turkish i. I’m one of the lucky few who had terrible handwriting even before the advent of ubiquitous computerization. My mom and grandma said that it’s because I’m highly intelligent and likely fated to become a doctor. For my part, I believe that it’s due to the poor fine motor skills of persons with mild to moderate autism.

You can buy Fenek Solère’s Resistance here.

Imagine my amazement when a day or two ago I sat down with a piece of paper and wrote the day’s grocery list in beautiful cursive — or as good as it’s going to get, all things considered. I guess my soul was yearning for the friction of pen against paper. Of course, I wasn’t rushing, which was always the problem I had with writing by hand. My brain forms sentences much faster than I can write them down, and if I can’t write them down, there’s always a risk of the sentence being forgotten. This is not a problem while typing, however. I can type at a speed that doesn’t pose a danger of my forgetting the sentence before it is completed. And nobody can call your handwriting “the most abominable chicken scratch that makes Kurt Cobain’s suicide note look legible by comparison” if, every time you produce text, you type it out on a computer.

But here’s the thing: I’m a writer. Some time ago, I was also a lawyer. Both professions involve a good deal of writing. I gravitated toward them in large part because of my love for writing and because I have a way with words, which is a function of high verbal intelligence. But had I been born before the invention of the computer or typewriter, I probably would have had no chance to succeed in either profession. Either I would have written at the pace required for legibility, and thus found myself unable to follow my own trains of thought due to sheer frustration (think of trains smashing into each other because of hold-ups at the switching yard), or writing illegibly at my preferred pace, and summarily being driven out of any institution for higher — or indeed, any — learning. And while it’s hard to believe, it seems that more than one person reading this fine publication would be miffed were I not around to give my weekly missives.

While writing this piece, I noticed that my esteemed colleague Veiko Hessler had also decided to offer his two cents on this very same question: White Nationalist attitudes toward technology. My first reaction was “Darn, now I have to scrap all that I’ve written and think of something else to do.” But then I read his article more closely and found that he has a perilous blind spot. He makes sport of “[t]he traditionalist gurus who advocated total disengagement and a retreat to the land [and who] largely just ended up tweeting their nostrums with slower Internet connections.” This sentence drew a chuckle out of me, but the phenomenon needs to be thought about more carefully. The trad gurus do indeed get it very wrong, but then again, is there a way to get it right?

Let’s start with the very obvious: Firewater bad for braves. And indeed, the modern Internet is bad for us. It is controlled by the worst people, who made it so that it will modify our thought patterns and behavior to correspond to their own designs. Billions of dollars, both corporate and governmental, are invested in psy-ops, which mostly take place on social media, for the express purpose of mind-controlling and mind-fucking you into compliance or nonchalance. Our minds probably aren’t equipped for the hyperstimuli of social media, just as the American Indians were unequipped to handle alcohol. I’ve had some success in breaking the spell by performing regular reality checks and trying to detect the cold hand of social media manipulation when it reaches into my head. Whenever I feel it (and I’ve gotten good at it), I look up from the screen and loudly proclaim “This is a glowsite.” Sometimes I even tweet it out so that others will feel it, too. “Glowsite” here refers to the popular meme about federal agents glowing in the dark.

But to carry forward the metaphor of the embattled Indian, if firewater bad for braves, then guns and horses certainly are not. Indeed, it is with the guns and horses that braves can take the fight to the white man rather than just passively accept his westward expansion. Indeed, foreswearing firewater — or better yet, learning the heuristics necessary to process it (because our firewater is of the mental kind) — would give us an important edge, as one method of control would be powerless against us. Rather, social media can be turned into a recruiting platform for our cause. Indeed, we turned out to be so good at it that crude, ham-fisted censorship had to be employed to keep us away from the impressionable minds.

The white identitarian cause languished in obscurity before the Internet because the enemy’s control of social institutions made it impossible for our message to get out anywhere. We are here in the year 2022, as strong as we are because we’re technological pioneers! American Renaissance and VDARE have been on the Internet since the 1990s. Counter-Currents can exist as a publisher because of the magic of online books. Social media may have given a new dimension to nationalist messaging. Our growth is possible because there are redoubts like the aforementioned where one can get lost in reading the wisdom of sages both ancient and contemporary. When a dissatisfied bright young man looks for answers, we are here to provide them. Without the Internet, there’d be no way to do it.

The technophobic trad gurus would throw this away, but more importantly, because they refuse to even consider engaging with technology, they prevent the development of methodologies for overcoming the mind control it entails. Every prescription they make is “turn off the computer.” Indeed, turning off the computer every now and then is a very good idea, but eventually, you’ll go back and find yourself on social media again, being preyed upon by would be psy-oppers and mindfuckers. Because the trad guru can recommend nothing but “turn off the computer,” you are now defenseless against these manipulations. More importantly, the trad guru might neglect the fact that mind control might not come from the social media interactions alone, but a lifelong immersion in a specific narrative and moral framework — the Nuremberg Moral Paradigm — which is being activated by the social media manipulation.

Yes, turning off the computer will terminate the connection with the center trying to activate the narrative core for a time, but there’s nothing stopping the enemy from activating that core through television, newspapers, music, the background culture, or even the narrative core’s firmware running on its own. Indeed, the only way we can realistically extract narrative cores from people’s heads is to ruthlessly deconstruct them, replace them with white identitarian narrative cores, and framework and then continually reinforce and activate them through our own media institutions. This entire process is usually done over the Internet, although there is of course nothing wrong with meeting with like-minded people to reinforce conviction and morale. Our enemy invests a lot of energy in making us believe that we are stupid, crazy, and alone. Other people like us are the ultimate proof to the contrary.

In my observation of the trad gurus, I find that they are romantic souls, often people of great physicality (athletes, workmen, etc.), who probably dismissed computers and the Internet as “nerd crap” in the ‘90s (when it was, indeed, nerd crap; let’s not kid ourselves here). They tend to be older and their views of technology are often tinged with nostalgia. While I myself am often nostalgic for the times when “surfing the Web” was only done once a week, this was the period of my early childhood (I got my first computer in 1996, at age 5). For many of these trad gurus, the last technology-free era was the period of their young adulthood, their teens and twenties, when a man is in full bloom, his body is unstoppable, and his future is full of possibility. Hey, I miss the time when I could put away more liquor than a regiment of Cossacks as well. I chased girls on early Facebook and took them to events that I’d have never learned about (and that would never have been put on, in all probability) without social media. It was a good time to be online — before the normies surged onto the Internet, something that our esteemed Mr. Hessler also touches upon. There was a time when online discourse was for a relatively small elite. The advent of the smartphone brought the Internet to the masses, and its discourse suffered for it.

At some point in the future — or maybe it’s already in the past — those who cannot adapt and resist the new form of mind control will become the slaves of those who control the means of mind control. Those of us who can resist it have a chance to fight back against the regime, but we’ll never put an end to mind control for a very simple reason: Around 80% of the population cannot live without it. They are natural slaves. A smaller percentage, somewhere around 16%, has a measure of independent thought, but cannot even conceive of things happening outside of the prescribed framework. These are the natural middle class — the overseers and professionals. An even smaller cohort of about 4% can see the matrix, which is to say they can understand the outline of the prescribed moral and epistemic framework, and maybe think outside of it, compare and contrast it to other frameworks, travel between them as need be, and put them on and off like lesser men change hats. I suspect there’s an ever tinier elite, probably consisting of only 200 men in the whole of recorded history, who can create frameworks and paradigms for lesser men to inhabit. We call them philosophers and great kings.

When the time of reckoning comes and we usurp our enemies, replacing them as the West’s ruling class, we must remember that technology itself — the means by which the masses are controlled — is value-neutral and that it can just as easily be turned toward healthy ends, and toward preserving the existence of our people and a future for white children. Nostalgia-tinged pronouncements that Uncle Ted was right will not, however, ensure such a takeover. Recognizing that firewater is indeed bad for braves, we nevertheless avail ourselves of the paleface’s other technologies in order to defend our lands and people. The way forward is, believe it or not, ahead of us.

* * *

Like all journals of dissident ideas, Counter-Currents depends on the support of readers like you. Help us compete with the censors of the Left and the violent accelerationists of the Right with a donation today. (The easiest way to help is with an e-check donation. All you need is your checkbook.)

For other ways to donate, click here.