self-betrayal in women
dated 27/02/2025

there is no spectacle more perplexing & no pathology more exhaustively documented [yet endlessly repeated] than the cyclical return of beautiful, kind women to the soulless husks of men who neither respect nor deserve them. it’s a phenomenon at once predictable and inexplicable, an act of self-betrayal so thorough that it transcends personal misjudgment and enters the public domain of cultural affliction. so i’m saying something about it, & fuck everybody who judges me for it.

we’ve seen this play out in every conceivable form: the woman who justifies, who forgives, who explains away cruelty as complexity, who frames disregard as a challenge to overcome rather than a warning to be heeded. i have witnessed the rationalization of humiliation time & time again both in my personal life & outside of my own circles, and i’m tired of it. tired of hearing that it’s my place to stand by & to ‘let it happen,’ tired of the refrain that it’s not my role, not my right, not my responsibility to speak, to act. i am told by people constantly: ‘this is just how it is. this is the way of things.’ but who is ‘it’? who defines ‘how it is’? what justification is there to keep perpetuating this violence?

i refuse to accept this as ‘just how it is.’ the narrative has been dictated for too long, and i am done listening to the hollow excuse that it is not my place to demand better. it is not my place to stand idly by, it is not my place to excuse injustice under the guise of understanding, and it is not my place to wait for a change that will never happen. because silence, in the face of cruelty, is complicity, and i refuse to be complicit in a lie.

this is the ideological residue of generations of social conditioning that have taught women that true love is earned through what they can withstand rather than what they deserve. the woman who stays is enacting a script older than any modern discourse on agency and autonomy, and yet there is no reward at the end of this endurance. no coronation, no triumphant reveal of a changed man, newly grateful, newly kind, newly aware of the depth of the love he has received.

and what of the men at the center of this cycle? they are not mysteries, not unknowable enigmas whose heartlessness is the result of some rare and ineffable pain. they are nothing if not the banal beneficiaries of a system that has told them, implicitly & explicitly, that they are entitled to the devotion of women regardless of what they give in return. they are neither fascinating nor complex; they are men who have never been required to be better. they are men who learn, through repetition and reward, that disrespect is not a deal-breaker, that apathy does not preclude loyalty, that they may be inconsistent, indifferent, even barbaric—and still be waited for, still be forgiven, still be welcomed back into the arms of the women they have not earned.

and so the ritual continues: she waits for change, he provides just enough illusion of it to keep her hopeful; she rationalizes, he offers no explanation; she forgives, he forgets.

post-literacy
dated 25/02/2025

the new generation is functionally illiterate.

illiteracy, in this form, is not the inability to read, but the inability to sustain thought. to be literate now is not to read, but to be seen as the kind of person who could read. books, as an object, persist; reading, as a practice, does not.

the post-literate generation consumes summaries instead of novels and analysis instead of primary text. the purpose of literacy now is not comprehension, but participation, they do not read so much as they process: scroll, highlight, bookmark, extract the quotable and repackage it for circulation. the more that they interact with text in these commodified forms—quotes, references, titles—the less they develop the faculties once associated with literacy: interpretation, critique, and the capacity for sustained argumentation.

recognition supplants comprehension, meaning that contemporary reading is no longer about understanding but about identifying familiar patterns or key phrases that signal meaning. instead of grappling with a text, people simply register its existence, align it with pre-existing knowledge, and move on. this is the difference between knowing of something and knowing it. post-literate people recognize a famous quote, a reference to a philosopher, or a book title, and that recognition alone feels like enough. comprehension takes time, effort, and intellectual discomfort. recognition, on the other hand, is instantaneous and more socially rewarding.

the internet person
dated 24/02/2025
inspired by ginevra davis’s ‘i don’t want to be an internet person’

the internet person calls itself a person, though it is not.

the internet person has no stable identity, no fixed self. it is not even a who, but a what—an amorphous, self-optimizing entity. it exists purely in relation to the internet and niche ideological markets that define its every articulation of self. it does not develop an identity but borrows one—meta-aware, reactive, infinitely modifiable, and always shifting to fit the latest memetic lexicon. the internet person does not think independently, does not experience privately, and does not exist in any meaningful way beyond their own network of reflections. it does not even feel emotions, but distributes them, distilled into the appropriate tonal package for its audience of choice, endlessly regenerated to fit the mood of the timeline.

in this manner, the internet person is incapable of experiencing anything that cannot be shared.

the internet person does not read books, it exploits its image as a means of self-definition. its perpetual backlog of literature, never to be read, is repurposed into an archive of cultural capital it will never engage with in any substantive way, but with which it continually signals as proof of its sophistication. the so-called "coquette" with a half-read lolita on its nightstand does not seek to understand nabokov’s complexities—it seeks to cultivate a persona of romantic, forbidden allure. the "doomer" that selectively references parts of crime and punishment for their out-of-context profundity is not genuinely grappling with dostoevsky’s confrontation with moral absolustim; it is shaping an aesthetic of existential anguish, a nihilistic stance that presents itself as a tragic, misunderstood intellectual.

the internet person does not watch movies, it indexes opinions and regurgitates its tropes. american psycho becomes less a study of capitalist excess and moral decay, and more a source of raw material for the "sigma male’s" carefully cultivated image. the obsessive attention to bateman’s pristine appearance, his unyielding detachment, and his manicured brutality are not analyzed—they are absorbed, dissected, and then reassembled. the critique of the emptiness that underpins bateman’s life is lost to it. similarly, the "unraveled femme" does not seek to understand the psychological depths of nina sayers’ descent into madness in black swan. it is not interested in the complexities of obsession, perfection, and identity collapse. instead, it harvests the surface, seeking only the external markers, the visual signifiers that can be paraded across its network.

the internet person loves to believe it is radical, but only in a way that does not threaten its own participation in the system. politics are not about action, but an aesthetic choice, digital posture and brand. the internet person does not go on strike or organize, it argues. it constructs elaborate theoretical justifications for why real-world activism is misguided, counterproductive, or insufficiently sophisticated. its political identity is defined by takes and its radicalism exists only within the confines of the internet, which ensures that its dissent is always recycled back where it can be measured, monetized, and ultimately, neutralized. it does not consume for mere hedonistic pleasure, but for positioning. it does not articulate ideas for meaning; it articulates them for placement within a discourse economy.

the internet person believes itself to be free, yet is under the dominion of the very form of control it insists has no hold over it. unlike the industrial worker, who toils under the factory bell, the internet person toils under the soft coercion of interactivity. the apparatus does not demand its labor—it makes its being indistinguishable from it. the internet person cannot simply not engage, not because it is physically prevented, but because to disengage is to suffer ontological death. if the factory worker’s exploitation was material (the extraction of surplus labor), the internet person’s exploitation is metaphysical (the extraction of identity itself).

under traditional capitalism, labor and leisure were at least formally distinct. the proletariat sold their time and kept their interiority. the internet person, however, does not even possess an interiority to withhold. its leisure is indistinguishable from its labor, its self-hood from its production, its interactions from its commodification. the internet person considers itself liberated, yet it obeys the logic of the system more fervently than any fordist assembly-line worker. where the factory boss extracted labor through coercion, the network extracts being through seduction. there is no longer a distinction between work and non-work. the internet person is always working on itself, not in the sense of self-improvement, but in the sense of cultural refinement. every status update, aesthetic pivot, and ideological tweak is an adjustment to market conditions.

it is no longer that one works to live, nor even that one lives to work, but that living is working. the internet person, caught in the infinite recursion of self-optimization, is not merely an exploited subject, but post-subject, existing only insofar as it can be ranked and resurfaced. it is no accident that the internet person thrives on irony, sarcasm, and self-referentiality—these are the only viable defenses against the existential horror of its own dissolution. the internet person floats in a state of detached knowingness, too busy posturing to ever commit to anything of substance.

neoliberal capitalism maintains its hegemony not through overt coercion or direct repression but by structuring reality in such a way that the possibility of alternatives becomes inconceivable. as mark fisher notes in capitalist realism, “it is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism.” capitalism thus extends its dominion not only over the mechanisms of production but over the horizons of our collective imagination. the idea of a system outside of capitalism is not just rejected, but is rendered utterly unimaginable. as fisher emphasizes, “the problem is not so much that the system is unstable but that it is now so pervasive, so all-encompassing, that it has become the only 'realistic' system.” in this way, capitalism organizes our capacity to think about the future, to imagine what could be different, and in doing so, it stifles any substantial opposition. the internet achieves the same effect by creating a totalizing framework for existence. just as capitalist realism forecloses economic alternatives, the internet forecloses existential alternatives. to live outside the digital is not only impractical—it is increasingly unintelligible.

the internet person, despite its performative skepticism, fundamentally accepts this framework. it critiques the system, but always within the system. its “radicalism” is entirely epistemic—an endless churn of commentary, analysis, and reaction that never threatens to materialize into real-world action. it is trapped in an infinite deferral. its medium is discourse, and discourse is a closed loop. the more one engages, the less one acts. this is not accidental; this is the ideological function of engagement. the system does not need to repress dissent when it can simply circulate it—flattening resistance into another consumable object to be exhausted and discarded.

this is the defining paradox of the internet person: it understands, on some level, that it is trapped within a collapsing system, that the material conditions of its life are deteriorating, that its future is foreclosed. yet instead of translating this recognition into action, it transforms it into content. it posts about it, jokes about it, laments it with ironic detachment, turning real structural immiseration into something consumable. the internet person fetishizes the decay of social bonds, the erosion of public institutions, the ever-widening chasm of economic precarity, it perceives all of it as material for it to circulate, an affective style to be performed. the internet person might have a sophisticated understanding of power, of capital, of ideology—but this knowledge is purely inert. it does not guide it toward action, because action would require breaking from the structure that gives it its only real sense of self.

this is not just a psychological condition—it is a class position. the internet person is not the lumpenproletariat, nor the traditional working class, but something closer to the downwardly mobile digital bourgeoisie—educated, precarious, deeply alienated from productive labor, yet still fundamentally insulated from the material realities of true dispossession. its politics are accordingly hollow, it may posture as a revolutionary, but it does not organize. it may speak of systemic collapse, but it is not prepared to survive it. it is aware of its own complicity in the system it claims to despise, but this awareness only leads to deeper paralysis. it is too self-conscious to embrace ideology fully, too atomized to engage in collective struggle, too comfortable to risk anything real. it is trapped in a purgatory of knowing too much and doing too little.

the internet person’s final delusion is the belief that, somehow, the internet itself offers an escape. that if one just finds the right subculture, the right discourse, the right group, it can transcend the crushing reality of capitalist realism. but this is a fantasy. there is no underground left online—only markets. every radical community, dissident space and counter-cultural enclave is either already integrated into the system or awaiting inevitable capture. there is no secret discourse that will save it. there is no correct aesthetic of resistance. the internet person never truly desires revolution, because revolution would mean the obliteration of the conditions that sustain it. it needs the system, the engagement and the thing it claims to oppose, because without it, it is nothing.

untitled
dated 17/02/2025

the so-called “individual” is nothing more than an amalgamation of external inputs, half-digested ideologies, psychiatric labels, personality types & social trends calcified into their identities. psychiatry, therapy culture & pop psychology are all priesthoods of the New Age, glorified forms of social control galvanizing people into believing that being walking advertisements for whatever new diagnostic & its pharmaceutical successor are being pushed that year are achievements to be sought after. being handed a presumed diagnosis by so-called "professionals" gives credibility to their existence, and only then is it considered valid. what better way to pacify a population? produce identities, let the people consume them, adopt them, embody them, & in doing so reinforce the legitimacy of the system itself ad infinitum. humans crafted as much a product of societal engineering as the clothes on their backs or the food they eat.

compliance doesn't need to be forced through jackboots or thought police. it's the most efficient system ever devised because it doesn't require enforcement. it's self-replicating, like a virus. people infect each other with it repeating the same stock phrases, reinforcing the same narratives & reducing themselves to predictable units, & it's everywhere, parroting shit like "i'm an intp borderline type 4 schizoaffective eldest daughter with rejection-sensitive dysphoria" as if that isn't an elaborate way of saying, "heres a list of traits i was conditioned to recognize in myself based on the limited, prefabricated options available to me".

call it cynicism or arrogance or anything that lets people ignore the fact that theyre nothing more than human feedback loops. why does everybody choose to live this way? why does everybody hate & trap themselves in these mental prisons??? i'm always on the outside looking in, watching the herd shuffle forward convinced they're marching toward self discovery while being led to the next feeding trough

why i'm buying CDs again
dated 05/02/2025

the whole concept of streaming as “the future of music” is starting to feel like a really well-done con. the [western] world raves about how convenient it is but the price of that “convenience” is steep, and i’m not talking about the subscription fee.

when i buy a CD, it’s mine. forever. if i want to listen to it on a plane, in the car, on the couch, i can do just that. i don’t need to be connected to a server, i don’t need an app, and i certainly don’t need to worry about it suddenly being gone from my collection because of some corporate backroom deal [which i was sourly reminded of last week when searching for crown the empire’s ‘johnny ringo’ track, only to find it’s been yanked out of existence]. the music’s there, in my hands. i can put it on a shelf, leave it out to collect dust, lend it to a friend, or pass it down someday. it's a real, discrete interaction with the artifacts of culture.

the lords of silicon valley own everything, and you—serf, peasant, data-livestock—own nothing. you do not own your music, your movies, your photos, your words or even your memories. 

the death of physical media—and the rise of subscription models is not, as the corporate behemoths and their cheerleaders would have us believe, the dawn of a new age of progression toward a better, more efficient system. how convenient, we are told, to have instant access to an infinite world of content right at your fingertips. but how convenient is it, truly, when your access to any form of media is no longer tied to your autonomy but to the whims of faceless corporations whose interests lie in controlling not just your purchases, but your consumption patterns, your time, your attention, and yes, your thoughts?

the proliferation of subscriptions, far from empowering the consumer, ensures their subjugation to an endless cycle of rental. it is no longer enough to own a movie, an album, or a book—the new logic is that ownership itself is a relic of the past that holds no place in the future. we no longer possess the objects we claim to own; we rent access to them, as though our entire relationship with culture & memory is now contingent on an ongoing, unstable transaction. you produce value for the system simply by existing within it, like a cow producing milk simply by being a cow. 

the shift from ownership to subscription is not some benevolent gift bestowed upon us—it is a strategic move to extract more wealth from the public by disguising a financial model once known for its greed [renting] in the garb of convenience. this commodification of access has not freed us from the shackles of ownership—it has redefined ownership itself as something that exists only as long as you can afford to pay for it. physical media allowed individuals to, at least nominally, assert control over their possessions. the move toward subscription services, however, asserts control over everything—what we watch, when we watch it and how we interact with it. it’s not simply about content; it’s about the architecture of control.

it narrows our access to knowledge, culture, and self-expression by consolidating it within the confines of subscription-based databases that tell us not what we need, but what we should need. & who decides what we "should" need? marketing experts and data analysts. endless, curated lists of what a service deems fit to offer—a paltry selection at best, heavily restricted by regional limitations, licensing agreements, and the politics of global conglomerates. we are consumers of data, and our consumption is mined, analyzed, and weaponized to ensure that our desires are perpetually nudged into predictable patterns.

this is why modern pop structures have become so aggressively streamlined. the first verse is short, the chorus comes in early, and the runtime barely scrapes past two minutes. anything longer risks losing the listener’s fleeting attention—or worse, getting skipped, tanking its ranking. music is no longer designed to unfold or build over time; it is engineered for maximum engagement in the shortest span possible. this system is fundamentally hostile to anything that requires patience. a sprawling concept album? a slow-burn seven-minute track? a cohesive body of work that demands start-to-finish listening? none of these things fit the model.

it is no coincidence that the death of physical media has been accompanied by an ever-tightening grip of oligopolies, where the same few corporations dictate the nature of the cultural output you are allowed to consume. to consume culture is no longer a personal act of selection; it is, instead, a passive acceptance of the choices offered to you by corporate giants who determine what you can—and, just as importantly, what you cannot—access.

existence 2.0
dated 04/02/2025

once, the internet was a place you had to go to—a destination, a deliberate act, a conscious movement from one reality to another. to be “online” was to adopt a persona—you were a screen name, an avatar, a fragment of identity consciously chosen. you were either online or offline, the two states were distinct, separate, real. you did not exist there by default, and crucially, you could leave.

that internet is dead. its corpse has been picked clean, its bones ground into dust, and in its place, we have the great platforms: monolithic, soulless and inescapable—facebook, google, tiktok, instagram, amazon. the same five websites, dressed in different skins. it follows you, tracks you, anticipates your needs before you articulate them. the distinction between online and offline no longer exists because the network is omnipresent. it does not matter whether you are looking at it, it is looking at you, and like any colonial force, it does not ask permission before it takes. the internet has completed its final transformation not into a tool, not a place, but an atmosphere, ambient and all-encompassing. and if you exist within it, you are not a user. you are an input, a data point, a resource to be mined. when this shift occurred the goal was no longer to provide information or community or even entertainment, but to make every interaction legible to the machine—because once it is legible, it can be owned. and once owned, it can be controlled.

the ethos changed from “creating” to “performing”. content—because that is the only word left for it—is no longer something you make, but something you produce, optimize, and feed into an algorithm in the hopes that it will be deemed worthy of distribution. the dream of democratized creativity has been reduced to an arms race of metrics, where the only way to be seen is to play by rules you did not set, in a game you cannot win through authentic means. even our past is no longer something we remember; it is something we reference. nostalgia is no longer personal; it is a product, a recurring trend cycle, another opportunity for brands to insert themselves into our histories.

google does not index the world’s knowledge; it structures it, narrows it and trims the unsanctioned edges. their search results do not yield information; they dictate the acceptable range of thought. when was the last time you read an article that was not pushed to you by a content recommendation engine, that was not prioritized for engagement, that was not shaped by the unholy trifecta of corporate profit, algorithmic manipulation, and ideological expedience? search results do not offer information; they present ideological boundaries. it is not just that the internet delivers knowledge differently—it is that it has rewritten the definition of knowledge itself. knowledge was once something you sought out. it required effort, engagement, the piecing together of fragments into something resembling truth. this act of searching has been replaced by passive consumption, a never-ending scroll that reduces curiosity to a mechanized reflex. to search is not to discover; it is to be given what has been deemed appropriate.

and that is exactly the goal. you do not need to burn books when you can ensure they never appear in the first place. you do not need to censor thought when you can preempt it. the illusion of information abundance masks the truth: that knowledge, too, has been enclosed and sold to the highest bidder. the promise of the internet was its capacity to decentralize knowledge and power. there was a belief that the tools for creation, information, and dialogue would be democratized, freely available to all who could connect. this has long since been supplanted by an architecture of extraction. extraction, of course, not just of data, but of agency, of culture and identity itself.

it’s easy to blame the rise of these platforms on technological progression—the usual suspects, our most convenient scapegoats: the algorithms, the venture capital, the desire for scale. but the internet is not a passive space, an empty vessel awaiting the touch of corporate, it was and still is being actively shaped and nudged into form through intentional design. google, facebook, amazon, and other platforms weren’t inevitable, as much as they were engineered to function as massive, exploitative feedback loops. the path of least resistance has never been easier.

this is not the future we were promised. it is not even the future we were warned about. nonetheless, it’s the one we have. not because it was inevitable, but because no one stopped it.

on contemporary psychiatry...
dated 19/12/2025

modern discourse of mental illness serves only two masters: capitalism and pharmacology. this nomenclature, while posing as neutral and scientific, is in fact an exercise in epistemic violence.

the word "disorder" itself carries an implicit judgment, suggesting deviation from a norm that’s as artificial as it is unattainable. what is the norm? is it blind compliance with a system that commodifies human labor, destroys communities, and erodes authenticity? is it an existence predicated on the relentless pursuit of productivity at the expense of human life? to feel despair in the face of such a system is not merely natural but necessary. it is the act of feeling that signals our humanity and yet, this humanity is rendered suspect and labeled dysfunctional.

the tautology at the heart of psychiatric discourse—that you’re depressed because you have depression, and you have depression because you’re depressed—exposes the hollowness of its own foundations. bravo. enlightening stuff. as if saying someone is drunk because they’ve been drinking explains anything. meanwhile, this empty-headed garbage parades itself around in the lab coat of “science.” to conflate description with causation is to traffic in circular reasoning, and yet such sophistry is perpetuated through a scientific authority that operates solely on ideology, not fact. the grotesque reduction of said depression to a "chemical imbalance", which is factually incorrect, constitutes as one of the most insidious triumphs of late capitalism. this notion is not only propagated by the pharmaceutical-industrial complex, but also bolstered by the DSM-5—the diagnostic manual whose very existence is financially sustained by big pharma. it pathologizes “symptoms” (which is, in reality, a euphemism for “thoughts & emotions”) while leaving the disease—societal dysfunction—intact.

when we talk about mental illness, we assume that there’s a definite pathology, as there is in physical disease. you can look at the lungs of a lifelong smoker & see the inflammation of the airways, the thickening of the tissue, the scarring caused by repeated exposure to toxins. here one finds concrete evidence of cause and effect. there is no such evidence in mental illness. there are no physiological parameters to mental illness. it is, in this sense, a construct we’re applying, with no real measurement of it. suffering is scrutinized for signs of neurochemical aberration but not contextualized within the lived realities of the individual. the mind, in its inseparable relationship with existence itself, cannot be divorced from its environment. the language of psychiatry does not heal—it categorizes, catalogues, and neutralizes suffering until it’s stripped of its context and rendered another manageable statistic. by offering a lexicon of disorders—depression, anxiety, bipolarity—it transforms psychological pain into objects to be labeled, prescribed for, and tucked away. the relief it promises is not one of healing but of subduing—of making the inconvenient truths of human suffering palatable and profitable.

capitalism is not a neutral backdrop; it is a system that demands human disconnection as the price of its survival. the only agenda of capitalism is the destruction of everything, even human life, so long as the economy thrives. it reduces individuals to economic units whose worth is measured by their productivity. it insists on a reality in which suffering is never understood as systemic but always personal, always the fault of the individual who is insufficiently strong, resilient, or well-adjusted, and the same reasoning is applied to suicide, supposedly another “free choice”. to seek within this society the means of repair is to fall into its trap: you are not challenging your prison, you are rearranging its bars.

in recent years, it has become almost compulsory to celebrate the proliferation of "mental health awareness," a phrase so nauseatingly self-congratulatory it should come with a trigger warning. we are assured, with no small amount of corporate-sponsored pageantry, that society has progressed to a place of enlightenment where stigma is being dismantled. what is paraded as awareness is, in fact, an orchestrated acquiescence to a narrative dictated by the industry that profits most handsomely from it. awareness implies understanding, yet what passes for understanding today is little more than the parroting of industry-approved slogans and the unquestioning acceptance of psychiatric orthodoxy. the act of feeling itself has been medicalized; to experience sadness is to invite suspicion, to admit to grief is to elicit concern. happiness, once understood as fleeting and conditional, has now been commodified as the default state—an entitlement, even—and any failure to achieve it becomes evidence of personal defect. we are told not only that we are broken but that we were born broken—that within our biology lies the origin of our misery.

such claims are more than falsehoods; they are ideological shackles.

whether through psychiatry, therapy, self-help, or the more palatable methods of “wellness,” we engage in an endless cycle of mental gymnastics, attempting to locate solutions within the confines of a system that is the root of our misery. they teach coping mechanisms, breathing exercises, reframing strategies—mental tools for surviving a world that ought not to be survived but changed. they may help you endure your nine-to-five existence, process your grief, or quiet your anxieties, but they cannot question the world itself. they cannot tell you that your despair is not yours alone but a collective, shared condition; that your sense of alienation is not an internal flaw but a logical response to a society that has eroded meaning at every turn.

what we require—what we deserve—is a new world. and it cannot be built from within the old one.