manifesto

disclaimer: this is less judgment than description. you might recognize parts of yourself. i did.

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

the internet person is not even a who, but a what—an amorphous, self-optimizing entity, existing purely in relation to the niche ideological markets that define its every articulation of self. it is meta-aware, reactive, infinitely modifiable, and always shifting to fit the latest memetic lexicon. the internet person does not think independently and does not exist in any meaningful way beyond their own network of reflections. 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 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 an aesthetic choice, a digital posture. the internet person does not go on strike or organize, it argues, 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 articulates ideas not for meaning, but 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. it 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. 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 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 rejected and 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.

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. 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 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.

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 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.