Online Cults pt. 1
I've been in two online cults in the last six months. Don't ask me to make sense of it.
The digital spiritual awakening is begun. Cults are spawning on the internet like mushrooms popping in a forest after rain. The smell of somnambulance is in the air. Dreams are escaping sleep. Sleep is recovering from a long stasis awake.
Spirituality was, and for many still is, on pause — after all, God is dead and Tom Brady is going strong at age 45. They say that soon science may determine the cause of aging, and create treatments that slow it down so much that — if you were wealthy enough (don’t worry, you won’t be{unless your name is Jeffrey,Jeffrey Bezos}) — you could live to 150, 200, even 250.
Monotheism went viral after Moses came down from Mt. Sinai and ruined Aaron’s cow party. Yahweh killed the 3,000 nonbelievers and went on his merry way, in bloody ink, conquering the world in the pen-nibs and sword-sheaths of unenlightened men.
Something snapped during the pandemic; spirituality was always a force on the internet; slender man, creepypastas, gangstalking, Doxxing, memes, etc. but the internet was always second fiddle; a backwater; a batter in the hole to the at-the-plate reality of spiritual communion taking place on subway waiting platforms and in nightclub bathrooms, quiet-loud cicada-riddled open fields, cribs, Moroccan rugs, showers with shower radios, well-tiled ice cream parlors and sandy fissures underneath exposed wooden decks.
The pool table has seen its break. The balls are scattering; the force of movement is undeniable;;;;——and yet—-you still find, and in not just a few corners of the heart, either, resistance to the chopped up future we’re inevitably inheriting. The fact that the Taliban uses social media to control its country is neither surprising nor irrelevant; we should be proud to have moved into an age of mind-and-thought control as opposed to the more archaic forms of bodily torture. But torture is torture, even if this one reads softer from the outside because it does its restraining more slowly, and in the hidden, repressed landscapes of our unconscious psyches.
Time is the only real resource worth fighting over. And cults do important work in short order. That’s why there’s good reason to go Bullish on online cults and experimental groupings of every kind; Cults Do Shit; the energy of microcultures is supercritical in the sense that it grows exponentially until it hits its peak. Though its unclear if enough internet-savvy rebels have deep ethical anchors to guide their new idols and followers towards pro-social tactics.
The infographic-ization of activism shows how traditional commercial entities (Facebook, Twitter, traditional media publishers) cannot and will not be the diving board for revolution. Instagram was a central communicating hub of the BLM protests last summer, but the ephemeral nature of the platform basically condemned the movement to temporary status, because you can’t sustain centrality in a network designed to promote spiraling newness and schizophrenic spectacality. You can’t have a new video of George Floyd getting murdered every week. The downside to the gorgeous flowering of multi-racial protest is the commodification of woke, the anesthetized somnolence of the left since January 6th, something like Shaun King announcing a clothing line called “A Real One.”
Defund as a political action has been panned from the left and the right, but I’ve yet to hear any other good, simple articulation of a way out of our carceral police state. If the Left gives up this fight — and it seems that’s the case with Biden and Harris — then we’re greasing the wheels for the next iteration of policing done primarily through tracking, surveillance, and the dividing and suppression of revolutionaries. We really can’t afford such a drawout, because it ends in the same place we are now—with massive inequalities in the policing system and continued systemic racism. It would be better to force the hand of city and state governments Now, and build towards a new culture of community care articulated by BLM.