(no subject)

Being on occult twitter is such a constant downer, like it's nice to be so "proximate" to the real world and meet people who are doing interesting things, but you can't step more than five tweets without someone trying to sell you something and ??

It's not just a reflexive moralism about charging money being spiritually dirty or whatever, its the broader way that changes social spaces, like

It sets up people around you as customers or competition. The sense of the collaborative is gone. It's really hard to find people talking about their work with humility - because confidence sells, so you're surrounded by personae more than people.

There's a constant sense of pressure, like responding to people and hearing nothing back and realising - oh right, this is your workplace, you're building a Following rather than looking for friends, when I responded to your words I thought it was an opening for conversation, but it wasn't - it was more of an ad broadcast for your brand, and you're just feeling good about collecting likes on it; or the reverse, like when you do get chatting with people you're never wholly sure if they're present with you as a person or if they're just promoting their thing, doing the emotional labour of running an online business (which is degrading to everyone and everything involved).

I'm reminded of an older woman who I met when I got into queer spaces for the first time, who I met and had great conversations with like four or five times - before realising that every time, she had forgotten we had met before, and her time with me was more of a public relations strategy. She liked having an audience, but only remembered people who would cross-promote her work/personal brand. It was so alienating; and I still encounter her being mentioned favourably in tweets by semi-famous people she's latched onto, and feel this kind of internal groan. She's still doing it, but I guess everyone involved is consenting to this dynamic - idk.

& I don't know how to cope with it emotionally, because the reality of these online commercial strategies is that part of what's being sold is personal access, the illusion of friendship, and I...just don't want that. I don't want other people to perform this for me, I certainly don't want to buy it from them, I don't want to be a cog in somebody's marketing strategy - & sometimes when you start trying to think through this situation, you get responses like "wow nobody owes you time"

but like, the internet is reality now. You're attempting to building an income on the blurring between shopping spaces and social spaces, but simultaneously quite angry when people try to treat it as social spaces. I understand the emotions and financial pressures of it, absolutely; but at the same time, I wish it would piss off into the void. You know? "I build a parasocial online presence in the hope you will perceive me as your personal friend and then buy my things; but heaven forbid, you expect reciprocity or friendship".

Part of this is the autism showing: I get very anxious about social situations and social cues, so transitioning to a model of socialising which is 1. all online, and 2. intermingled with people trying to build their brand and status is intensely stressful. I'm more sensitive than the average person, I think, to "these people are pretending to be friends but aren't actually friends", and a widespread community dynamic where you know people are doing this is like a bed of hedgehogs.

Part of it is being a community abuse survivor; one becomes hypervigilant around the concept of community hierarchy which could be later used as a tool or weapon to do harm. The integration of money-making is a particular red flag for me because, of course, when someone's financial wellbeing is on the line, they are highly motivated to lash out at anyone who might be a threat to it. In a magical context, this could be disagreeing with someone's theory of magic they're trying to sell - that can't be a conversation, because they can't ever approach you as an equal instead of a threat to their dominance. Like all survivors, I'm paranoid and unreasonable about potential dangers; but that doesn't make me wrong, either. When an imbalance of power is present, it is only a matter of time until it is exploited; therefore, scenes must consciously work to undo such imbalances as a basic mark of their safety.

Part of it is being flat broke; so when spaces are dominated by people who rely on them for income, they are actively hostile to the concept of sharing work, time, knowledge or spaces through other methods of exchange. It's cumulatively dehumanising to be around, this message that the purpose of community is to support specific artisans who do important work with money or attention.

Part of it is because when I got into haunted 1970s vibes five years ago, it was this weird niche scene; and now there's been this bizzare, distasteful explosion of like. People selling products or building platforms around it, and I hate that so much. The point at which something becomes commodifiable is the end of innovation; it becomes a tightening noose of fewer and fewer visual/social signifiers. Like, sure, I guess I'll buy a booklet because it's got a 1970s font on it and promises thin political meandering about what folk horror tells us about Brexit. You know? It's transformed into something dead - it becomes retro, not hauntology. As Mark Fisher says: T-Rex no longer reminds us of the 70s, it reminds us of I Love The 70s! television programs. But hauntology is a personal process of exploration, of memory and time; you can't buy memory. Or, I suppose now you can. It's just sort of horrifying feeling, something I loved because of the ways it explores pre-digital, pre-neoliberal, pre-alienation, and the unrecorded, the forgotten, the weird on the margins - transformed into a series of products. & to bring this back to magic, it happens every three months with like - traditional witchcraft, or vulture culture, or voodoo, or whatever we've picked on this month as the thing we can most easily market, or certain phrases or kinds of visual imagery. And I don't want to participate in that. I want my hauntology spaces to be people exploring their own things, and I want my magical spaces to be people exploring their own things - and not this shrinking and conforming to what can be sold. It's only in the weird places we can breathe.

(I keep thinking - maybe I should write some Real Essays and start promoting them, try and be an Authority on this Growing Field - get in there at the start; and then stopping myself, like, fuck. Where does that urge come from, and why does it flood so quickly. Can't I just like watching films and collecting cheap ceramic? Why does it have to be a career choice. How do we resist capitalism in the world when we cannot even resist it in our souls?)

I guess I write this post every three months or so; but I'm housebound and reliant on online spaces for a lot of my social time, so when they're Like This it has a substantial impact on my wellbeing and social connections. I don't want to compete with anybody; and I also don't want to boast about my abilities, or have to spend a lot of time optimising my web presence and building an audience. I want "study buddies", I guess, more than mentors or community leaders.

I read a great article recently about the happy hardcore music scene, & I think that sense of scenes is important: a thing that is built collaboratively with others at a certain space or time. Rave culture gave us the DJ, the person who plays other people's music - and is supported by a network of labels and promoters and mix tapes and empty fields. & like, ishkar's electronic music guide talks about how labels like vaporwave aren't included on the guide because anybody can make a song and give it a genre label. But scenes are crafts honed over time - listening to what your friends make, and then going one better. You know, that remix culture, that - I want to start with someone else's song, but build on it as well. Those kinds of knowledge and development that can only take place in temporal locations. Can they form on a twitter which is chopped up, competitive, and propelled by rage? Does twitter exist in linear time? When the format of where we exist requires me to produce content every day and rewards me for making confident hot takes and never forgets when I fuck up: we lose that gestation time and doubt and room to experiment. A recurrent theme in underground music is the sense of wellbeing that existed at the time the music wasn't marketable, was being made for a tiny devoted audience by broke kids for broke kids; and the fragmentation that followed, as soon as the possibility of fame and fortune got its claws into the human psyche. I dream about going to the forests and the fields and getting lost in the dance.

I just can't tolerate being in an environment, knowing that many people there view me as a potential customer, or a potential rival; I hate it, I hate it, and I'm sure it's always been true in pagan spaces - but there's something about standing in a room with someone, sharing a beer, knowing they're your community and you can't just put them on blast, and knowing that what you're doing together cannot really be sold that feels so reassuring.