It all comes back to Al

Every few months tumblr will try and cancel the Beast, which is...

I don't think it's good that young people are growing and trying to flourish in an atmosphere where they are constantly on the alert for moral cooties, I think it's very scarring. It's not exactly that I think it doesn't matter: it's good to be socially aware and try to build forward, and to know our own history. But one can be forthright about problems under one guise, and still use it in others - especially for the dead.

In the case of Aleister Crowley, I find it especially irking because so much - so much of modern magic - is his, & it leads to an uncomfy situation where someone will very earnestly be cancelling Crowley with their right hand while using his art with their left. The dead aren't owed respect or reverence, nor is something better for being traditional or old. But beyond a point, you have to know where you came from, & there's no value in tabooing it wholesale either.

---

I'm having a very difficult month. I'm trying to stave off the terrors by getting the spirits section of my website together, which like all website work is kinda thankless, but future me loves having it. It's too hot and too horrible to do much else but shelter behind the stone.

As part of that, I've put up a new layout of Liber Astarte - Crowley's lil book on how to do divine reverence, which I come back to constantly. & like a lot of Crowley, it's a book where I've had ideas and then come back and discovered he had them first. (In this case, it was using love songs for divinities.) & of course, its the origin point for so many altar-building practices you'll already know and which are commonplace across the Pagan movement. I'm also making an ebook version to download, so it's easier for me to have to hand.

Thank you to venerable Sacred Texts for keeping this all available.

(no subject)

(With everything going on with reddit, and AI poisoning the web's watertable, and twitter

I'm more grateful than ever for my commitment against the cloud. The cloud is just somebody else's computer. The death of forums and blogs and the centralising towards a single platform trades off control for convenience - and it's so collectively detrimental.

I have all my pictures saved offline...all my books, all my music, and of course I do all my religious writing in handcoded html and here. It's very precious, right, not how you're supposed to do things - but all these technologies still work and work fine and, too, I find that the cloud impacts how I interact with these things psychologically, like I go into this autopilot morass; whereas the download-and-have-offline-or-have-on-my-own-space brings my focus to it in a way that feels physical.

& like, I did have a reddit account for religious community-building there, but wouldn't it have been awful had I actually put time into that. In and around the web, vintage websites lurk like data cockroaches - surviving every implosion, still here, with their hard-coded CENTER tags & JPG size warnings.

---

I feel like a really significant facet of technology is a mood where: everyone agrees a thing is basically worse, and yet they can't opt out of it and don't really want to. Thinking a lot about how frequently discussions of living a more environmentally friendly or anti-capitalist life is met with a wall of 'I can't and neither can anybody else'. I find that construct interesting, because it hides how someone actually feels about it. They don't want to say "I like this thing", because they know the thing is bad and therefore the only possible pose is begrudingly enduring it. But they can't say "I don't like this thing" because that has the risk that someone will let them know change is possible, and then they might have to do it and they don't want to know.

I find this construction chilling to any kind of revolutionary possibility - social justice, ultimately, is not about explaining the status quo but about making a better world. So having every discussion of change met with I CAN'T, DON'T MAKE ME THINK ABOUT THIS is pumping the breaks to avoid sitting with a momentary, necessary discomfort about the world. Without that discomfort, how can change come? Inside that discomfort are interesting things, both emotional and practical, which must be engaged with to move forward.

So I feel frustrated that this moment likely won't lead to any fundamental change in how we relate, like none of the others have. The twitter exodus was a non-starter, & I find it maddening really. Cascades of people whining that on Mastodon you have to do research? into which server to choose?? and learn how to use it??? Your whole digital life is on twitter, wouldn't you want to know how it works and have some agency over its future and some influence over its policies and user experience? Isn't that the measure of how important something is? If twitteresque communications are so essential, then how twitteresque communications take place is really the most important political decisions of our era.

Or like - it's not actually all that much harder to engage with an old school forum than it is a reddit. Or like, it's not actually a problem that dreamwidth doesn't have an app you just visit it with your mobile browser. And yet, and yet. Crary has a great bit about this where he notes that the key appeal is interacting with the technology, not the ends of the technology - and so replacing one tech with another isn't sufficient, even if they're essentially the same.

It just bums me out & like, it's lonely. And so small! All this internet and we've shrunk it down to four websites. But then maybe that's very human, wanting the infinite to be comprehensible. But I find it confining. Prefer the internet of the big strange city to the gossipy village.