" Internet as a prolonged mystical experience "
A while ago on a discord server, I shared the above-tweet next to the caption : “might have to write an essay about Internet as a prolonged mystical experience” with the hopes of pleasing other shitposting appreciators there. Instead, I got some enthusiastic responses to the notion which awakened that recurring bad feeling in me, the feeling that says “write the thing”. Now I’m here in front of the computer, thinking about all the other things I have to do and starting to regret even starting this newsletter. God I’m so fucking behind, is fomo ever gonna live me alone?
I guess this is my attempt at writing about the too-much-ness of Internet as it compares to the too-much-ness of mystical states of consciousness.
Before I get into the meat of it all I’ll make a quick admission : I’m neither a convinced materialist nor an idealist, I’m an opportunist. I’ll use whatever tool I can use to get to where I want to go and Yes, the internet is not a VALIS-like remote cloud of floating information that transmits pieces of its essence to our pocket-computers/magic-mirrors. There are precise points of access and infrastructure allowing for the flow of all of this information, there are known tools and machines allowing for “us” to make exchanges around the world, this is not magic, it’s industry. That said, when taken at the individual level, there’s a mystery to the titanic scale of these information exchanges taking place every pico-seconds of every day ; there’s a Mystery to processes we can’t individually understand with our direct eyes, ears and minds but only in the abstract and then some.
But this is not what I want to expand on right now, I want to talk about drifting through the continuum. Riding the waves of unrest, recognizing patterns, afflicting oneself with Contact. I want to talk about memes.
In writing this I felt like I was being a bit self-indulgent with my topics and insights so I decided to go full-on and entirely focus on my personal experiences as if they were commonplace, with that in mind there’s this really strange half-memory, half-vivid conviction I have of K-Hole mentioning (in one of their trend reports) an addendum/mutation to Jung’s notion of synchronicity.
Probably a dreamed footnote but i remember it as a bastardised “Hyper”-synchronicity (?) that could accurately describe the feeling/state of being Extremely Online (EXT-ON), where/when you can sort of instinctively understand and apprehend the intended message of internet memes from niches you don’t have a context for ; immediatly grasping a situation based on the tone and aesthetics it manifests itself through rather than relying entirely on contextualised facts and explanations in common written language.
The form supersedes the content, the medium is the message all-a-that, you can recognize the shape of a meme but not what it’s supposed to hold (the specifics, details, message, the story inside) and the shape helps you get a hint of what it’s supposed to hold and in reading around the meme you get a sense of what’s being talked about, somewhat, you might even laugh at it without knowing what the fuck all the nonsense is about. And there certainly is laughter to be had when exposed to a nonsensical serie of words.
A strange sort of magical consciousness, like a background program named Apophenia.exe is running in your brain. Then again it might just be habituation, stress, coffee and I’m trying to catch shadows again ; but that strange feeling that you’re touching the tip of something far bigger and far more strange and complex and still obscured, that feeling’s often what if feels like to be online for me.
Obviously once you dig deep enough Mystery recedes, things cohere into mundanity. Even “weird theory twitter”, even antinatalist theorycel tumblr, even the deepest recesses of an archived putin fanblog can become normal and innocuous to the habituated EXTON person.
And a lot of it is obviously useless garbage too.
But the content is not the most important thing here, what I’m interested in is the process of uncovering information and the way it shifts your understanding of both you and what “Knowledge” is.
Discovering niches, hobbies, communities, bits of information, memes, all of it. Reaching knowledge you previously didn’t have that opens up new realms of specialised/regimented information has the function of making you more humble about your limited perspective even as you can sense it expanding ; It’s the old “the bigger the bonfire, the bigger the shadows”//“the more you learn, the less you feel you actually know.” Exponential unknowing, getting wiser and realizing you don’t know shit.
For me personally, the dark created by that bonfire is not just seductive, it has an active pull, yet Curiosity feels too big and vague a word to describe this longing for the Outside.
Then, let’s assume all of this information, organised or not, “Knowledge” or data, is not important, that what really matters is how and where it’s going ; let’s assume that the curious search has value for itself, the question remains : Is there any transcendance to the seemingly immanent, vortex-like movement of that search, that internet invested information immersion? Is there anything on the other side of the siphon of figuratively stabbing your brain repeatedly by “multitasking” between footage of chinese coronavirus gasmasks memes, articles about invisibilised labor disguised under AI uprising fearmongering, yet another bitcoin pyramid scheme, obscure political theory texts about why cannibalism is actually very cool, gamified propagandist ad-experiences, that movie you can’t keep pausing, etc…?
Is there more to “research” than that ? What will this hunger for knowledge generate ?
All of that because somewhere someone is writing something that could give you an insight ? Somewhere there’s someone writing the right sequence of words to provoke that spark in your brain and after getting away from the computer to grab some coffee you feel like a faucet running empty, save for a few drops fallen to the sink rather than the glass, right ? Or that’s just me.
There’s no real end to that cycle(duh), which makes it both a very exciting and very frightening habit. Time-consuming, doubt-inducing and all around tiring.
And there’s an obvious mental health cost (i hate how engineer/designer linguo that sounds) to that sustained participation in the GSCITC, especially when you don’t take breaks or go for a walk.
I guess there’s a faith to this, even as I pride myself in not believing in anything, even myself. The faith that there’s some finality or at least a plateau to be reached, gains to be brought on by this project, this method, this practice.
A lot of what we do seems futile in the moment and when you take some steps back from yourself it’s incredibly overwhelming to see all of us pouring our ressources and beings in arts, movies, pictures, data, reports, words, code, jokes, how many lines of code were written for scamming bots and bad fanfics? How many were lost to meaningless chitter-chat ?
Is there a transcendance there ? Can you truly contact something “beyond”?
Maybe cram enough stuff in your brain that you change something inside, making yourself into an antenna for weird transmissions and hoping to establish contact with something that’s not even necessarily responsive, get a glimpse of the structures at the higher level because that thing “beyond” might just be a gigantic array of information-nests, buzzing mindlessly, sending data here and there, and there’s no way I can hold all of that information in my own individual wet brain, not even in the auxiliary brainspaces of my phone-notes or many notebooks.
This feels like a partial account of something I’ve been engaged in for a while now. A process that’s not early or late enough for me to name it properly.
William James posits that mystical experiences or “encounters” involve 4 recurring qualities :
1: Ineffability. “It defies expression,[…] no adequate report of its contents can be given in words. It follows from this that its quality must be directly experienced; it cannot be imparted or transferred to others.”
2: Noetic quality. “They are illuminations, revelations, full of significance and importance, all inarticulate though they remain; and as a rule they carry with them a curious sense of authority for after-time.“ ie: insights are gained though these insights can’t be, right away, articulated into common language.
3: Transiency. “Mystical states cannot be sustained for long. […] Often, when faded, their quality can but imperfectly be reproduced in memory; but when they recur it is recognized; and from one recurrence to another it is susceptible of continuous development in what is felt as inner richness and importance.”
4: Passivity. “when the characteristic sort of consciousness once has set in, the mystic feels as if his own will were in abeyance, and indeed sometimes as if he were grasped and held by a superior power”
Mystics diagnose the too-much-ness of some experiences and unspeakable sentiments as symptoms of Contact with Something. They generally call that something god.
An encounter beyond quantifiable knowledge that redefines the boundaries of Knowledge as it relates to some Outside, what’s termed un-knowledge by some cheeky anti-kantian like Nick Land, Amy Ireland and their clique of xenobsessed thinkers. (first coined by Bataille and Blanchot as “non-savoir”)
Now. I guess I should try and narrow down my working definition of Contact because it can be, like Curiosity, a very big and vague word.
I take Georges Bataille’s definition of communication as my basis for what I mean by Contact : Communication is contamination in that it reveals the porous nature of boundaries and tears down the illusion of isolated, autoproducing selves perpetued by liberal society.
Contact in its general meaning describes the act of “touching something” and yes, we’re always touching the Outside with a big O, everything is always touching everything through proxy or direct association, but there are membranes here and there, boundaries that allow and restrict flows of matter and energy to organize the totality, if they weren’t there it would just be freewheeling entropy, everything crashing and melting into everything, atoms dancing in oblivion.
Hence me defining that contact with some “Other”, some “Outside” as conscious contamination : You don’t necessarily choose to reach out; but you definitely are aware of some Other that exists as alien to you. And as boundaries fold away to let you pass through you can feel what is “you” receding, specifics stop making sense and there’s nothing else but the liminal space where two distinct selves melt into blur.
On distinctions : Religion is an explanatory framework, science is an exploratory framework and method, mysticism is an experiential endeheavor; it seeks to feel and experience with the underlying assumption that behind these experiences there’s knowledge to be gained.
A lot of these mystical states invoke in their hosts a sense of being on the threshold of entering an oncoming state of full enlightenment and of being close to acquiring a different kind of consciousness from the profane one, that never actually happens.
A religious experience is to be distinguished from a mystical, hysterical or a spiritual one, how so?
These inner experiences seem to come from trauma: A shock happens and ripples, it impacts and marks, printing out the event onto the conscious and unconscious mind like a bruise. The injure is felt before it’s explained either as circumstancial or as Contact. Religion acts as an explainer, sense-maker ; an attempt at treating the wound, either doing away with the psychic swelling or using it to capture the attention of the traumatised subject.
Then, experiences become religious when they are explained by a Canon, captured by the hegemonic spiritual apparatus of choice, (depending on your reference point, the Talmud, the Bible, the Koran, the Dao, the Vedic hymns, and all of their assorted hadiths, psalms and chants). The experience is compartimentalised into linguistic signifiers, mostly as testimonies to the presence of god or value or sin.
Which can appear as fruitless to some mystics : mystical experiences exist beyond language, at the moment they start to be put into words they enter the territory of the profane and can only breakdown under the weight of their own complexity. Which doesn’t stop people from trying and sharing these experiences.
The urge to share the experience is too strong.
The point of mystical texts is not to explain but to let others bare witness to their effect on subjects, and after all a great part of medieval christian mystics were women, nuns who couldn’t publish their work through the official alleys of the church’s editorial outlets.
So there’s the mind as a conduit for information, there’s the mind as a mecanism for information-seeking and sense-making : malleable, active, adaptive. And then there’s the barriers it meets when it tries to do too much, too fast, too often. We’re all familiar with that : burnout
Burnout is simply the bodymind’s shutting down due to a burning out of energetic ressources, all of it brought down by an unsustainable rhythm.
The tendency to burnout may reveal an inability to recognize limits and the unsustainable rhythm one is engaged in, working oneself to death. Obviously there’s more to burnout than just unconscious and naive selfdestruction: most people know when they’re working themsleves to death, they simply don’t have any other options. most people working three full time jobs don’t do it out of love for activity. They do it out of necessity
Psychological traumatism structures and is structured by a looping/circular temporality.
Judith Herman :
“ Traumatic events are extraordinary, not because they occur rarely, but rather because they overwhelm the ordinary human adaptations to life. Unlike commonplace misfortunes, traumatic events generally involve threats to life or bodily integrity, or a close personal encounter with violence and death. They confront human beings with the extremities of helplessness and terror, and evoke the responses of catastrophe. According to the Comprehensive Textbook of Psychiatry, the common denominator of psychological trauma is a feeling of “
intense fear, helplessness, loss of control, and threat of annihilation”
. ”
Unwilling scarification : your bodymind becomes an exemple and an enactor of the practices of EXT-ON.
“(Extreme)Internet-ing” as a practice traumatizes us repeatedly, or rather : Internet is a great tool for retraumatisation. Depending on wether you want to put the onus on users or platforms. Personally I think it doesn’t matter, what matters is how we get out of it. (Collective, organised response obviously.)
Black people reading obsessively about Black death “for awareness”.
Ruining oneself in the pain of looking.
Curiosity converges with FOMO in a self-destructive way, powered by the misused belief that to know is to be more powerful and prepared to fend off potential dangers. This is trauma talking,
Raising one’s awareness to the detriment of one’s mental health, even when one can feel and see that it’s not doing any good to one’s self, the basic need and desire for security and comfort is overriden by another imperative, another drive.
This is not to say that activists and militants (and folks in general really) should stop raising and maitaining their awareness, just that, once again as with all toxicants, the dose can be fatal if it’s not properly regulated. (And obviously the visible, “social” part of the Internet is regulated, but its regulation doesn’t concern itself with your well-being as end-users. You are cattle to the big platforms.)
Ideology informs and justifies and defines Practices.
Practices mold behavior.
and behavior justifies and informs ideology.
Anyways yeah, Internet affects our consciousness, obviously. I think that was Douglas Rushkoff talking about internet as a psychoactive substance? Very good soundbite, The basic premise is that these (engineered) practices we engage in (the addictive mecanisms, the attention to language, the increase in tribalist affectation, the warping of your self-definition towards self-reinforcing egocentered dynamics) will affect our mind as a substrate would : once we’ve been living long enough in a substrate, like a fish in water, we start to forget the existence of it and internalize the practices required to go unnoticed/somewhat unaffected in that medium ; to be online and/or Extremely Online, is to be exposed and to contribute and feed (into) high-speed data-flows.
Plug in, turn on, etc.
The practice of EXT-ON will make you into a more Extremely Online person as habits and experiential knowledge roll in, it will also drain your personal ressources, it will isolate your interests as well as your reference points towards the niches/echo-chambers you engage with/in, it will probably make you way more anxious and tired too I think?
If you see some of your self in that portrayal, you might have a memory similar to this : stepping away from online for a second or two and going out to do something and realizing that there’s such a thing as a “normal world” and that for some times you were/are not part of it.
Maybe you had a family reunion dinner, maybe you went to a soccer match, maybe you just went to work and realized people outside your circle might not find cumbrain jokes funny or even know what the fuck that means and look at you real weird when you mention it.
What is to be done then ?
Judith Herman, again :
The trauma is resolved only when the survivor develops a new mental “schema” for understanding what has happened.
The answer can’t be individualistic, obviously. If we want to help emerge social structures that can help us cope and heal the constant trauma of current Life we have to come together and organize our energy towards a practice of communal care. No matter under what guise it appears, as a secret society of leftists occultists, a libertarian book-club, a feminist consciousness raising group, an artistic collective, a communal garden, an autonomous gym club there’s no one project that can be a solution to the all complexities in one go, the response to this collective condition of ongoing trauma needs to be generated in accordance with that trauma, wherever it manifests, that response needs to be a negative force in the hegelian sense.
Tldr :
WE DON’T HAVE BANISHING RITUALS FOR INTERNET-ENABLED PSYCHIC INCURSIONS AND WE SHOULD GET INTO THAT: RITUALS WHICH ALLOW US TO SAFEGUARD OR HEAL OUR MINDS OFF THE DAMAGE CAUSED BY MAGICKAL WORKINGS (either our own or others’). THE PRACTICES WHICH TRY TO CAPTURE OUR ATTENTION AND EAT OUR TIME ARE ACTIVELY CONSUMING US AS WE CONSUME USELESS DATA, WHAT WE DO MAKES US.
WE ONLY HAVE WHAT WE BUILD (WITH/IN) EACH OTHERS.
Portrait of the author after a few months of their new/current data-diet.
Thinking about primitivists getting super-angry at biomimicry and chuckling a bit to myself
All my love goes to them and to you
—Send food to ospare@substack.com / I might shift the rhythm of posting to a biweekly rather than the current 8-days cycle, idk let me know what you think/ If you expect an answer, it’ll probably come from ospare@protonmail.com so watch your spams.—
Forgot to add this bit in the last newsletter: thank you to the Nothing.Here newsletter for shouting me out in a previous edition, thank you to the restricted academy for telling me to start this nightmare of a newsletter, thank you to all the friends and pals saying I have interesting things to say and that I should get out there and do them.
May this ongoing project generate useful things.