THE LIBERATION OF MODERN MAN
These days, when you read the word “manifesto” — and you inevitably read the word, since it’s rare that you find yourself in the polite company in which to utter such a word — you’re immediately forced to reckon with the images of dead children, or dead church congregants or mosque-goers, or dead people laying slumped in the aisles of a supermarket. If you’re particularly left on the political spectrum, you may think of Marx. If you’re particularly schizo, you may think of Theodore “Uncle Ted” Kaczynski.
The fact of the matter is that “manifesto” is an Italian word, naturally derived from the Latin “manifestus,” meaning “clear”. Ironic, isn’t it? Most manifestos written nowadays are filtered through a digital haze of algorithmic scattershot and MKUltra paranoid delusion, often written by broken brains capable of reading at an eighth grade level at best. I have seldom ventured into their pages, flung into dark corners of the digital sea for anyone with a morbid curiosity, as I feel that it’s truly bad for your psyche and soul to absorb such evil slop powering killings random and racially-motivated alike. But what little I have seen and read nonetheless has convinced me: the post-modern manifesto is anything but clear.
Is anything clear anymore? I don’t think much is. There is yet truth to be gained by a thorough application of Occam’s Razor; for instance, the entirety of the “fitness industry” is essentially one giant, self-perpetuating scam, psy-opping hopeless fat people into believing in anything they can throw money at, when the simple reality of CICO, or “calories in, calories out,” is truly all there is to weight loss. There have been many moments in my life where I’ve found myself in a conversation about this or that political goings-on in the world, where someone inevitably says, “How could someone do something like this?” My mom’s favorite variation of this: “I just don’t understand how someone could do something so evil, son.” The answer, in 99.9% of cases, is one word: money. This is a problem that is so old that even the Bible says this in one of the books nobody ever actually reads: “For the love of money is the root of all evil: which while some coveted after, they have erred from the faith, and pierced themselves through with many sorrows,” (1 Timothy 6:10).
Despite the idea of simple truths such as these belying the closest thing we can get to real truth, we also must bear in mind that whatever it is that we’re living in today is hard to discern, because existence as we know it is billions of years old, according to particle physics nerds whom I trust because they are too autistic to lie. People love to say that we’re made of stardust, which is gay to say unironically, but that doesn’t make it any less true when it literally is. Not just that — think about the products surrounding you right now, that you’ve either purchased or had purchased for you. Your clothes, or whatever you’re sitting on, or the device you’re using to read some schizo podcaster screed on the internet in between doomscrolling. Think about how such products were made, and then picture a big factory, a factory so big you can’t really understand how one such factory exists, let alone a dozen of them, let alone how many there are on planet earth. And then think about how everything in that factory was made in other factories, each factory full of machines specifically designed to make the bullshit that other factories need in order to make sense of the bullshit that you buy. It’s a globe-spanning ouroboros clusterfuck of a situation, and the Industrial Revolution itself is centuries old. What the fuck.
Modern man’s decision in the face of the overwhelming contradictions that make up our world has mostly been one of willful ignorance, and I am just as guilty as you are. One example: for the last 25 years, only about 1 in 20 people in the U.S. are vegetarians at any given time, while myself and 95% of the rest of us go about our days enjoying our meats, largely ignorant of the fact that in Iowa — a state that in 2024 had a human population of 3.2 million human beings and 124 million farm animals — you face an $8,540 fine and up to two years in prison if you try to take pics or vids inside of industrial farms.
Whenever broke-ass humanity has been given a choice by our elite owners between the shadow of liberty and the possibility of greater convenience, we thoroughly choose the latter every time. “Sure, send the manufacturing jobs overseas! Fuck working in a factory,” our grandparents said, ensuring that the rich would get richer like always, and that America would be dependent on China and its neighbors until its eventual demise — even the dumbest rednecks know this, and they vote for politicians who bring this issue to light, and said politicians rely on said rednecks’ ignorance of words like “citation” or “research” to keep their careers going, and all of us remain on a landmass that continues to sink down into hell.
Think about how many boomers you’ve seen post some variation of “C’mon Facebook, put me in Facebook jail!” or, even worse and more betraying of their lack of understanding of the world they voted into existence: “I DO NOT GIVE FACEBOOK OR META PERMISSION TO USE MY PICTURES, INFO, MESSAGES, OR POSTS!” Facebook accounts do not grow on trees; they come with a fuckton of terms and conditions that even the people of Facebook don’t read, despite updating them probably every day, and maybe every few minutes, as determined by their shitty AI that, like everything else about Facebook, doesn’t work in [present year]. Yet, the boomers and everyone else make these little Faustian bargains with gargantuan earth-raping tech companies so that their brains can willingly be enslaved by endless cat videos and gooner slop. The AI discourse itself is currently raging on, but a very possible outcome of the debate sees you and me in 2025, hooked up to our AI-powered dick sucking machines, totally unaware of anything as whatever future monstrosity fusion of FAANG companies uses our neural processing power to keep the S&P 500 ticking up, forever.
But that’s not a version of the future that I want, even if some days it seems inevitable that we’re careening headfirst into a really lame version of Nineteen Eighty-Brave New Fahrenheit 451. I think the big issue of today’s ills — besides money, which isn’t going away in our lifetimes, though they may rebrand the USD as the dystopian “credits” at some point — is that people don’t fucking read. People don’t fucking think. None of this is particularly novel to write out, or to say out loud. All manner of rightoid armchair warmongers who bench press less than me love to say shit like “we’re in a war right now over the future of America,” but I do think that there’s truth to that. It’s just that the enemy isn’t blue-haired temporarily confused white women who work in HR, or at your coffee slop company of choice; the battle raging on at present is one between the written word, and the TikTok video / Instagram reel / Youtube short, or whatever other manner of short-form digital psycho-cancer that I don’t wanna know about.
Most people throughout human history have never been intelligent. Most people just wanna eat, and live, and chill out for a while, and cum before the day’s over, and that’s okay. But the world would probably be a better place if everyone on the planet could read past a starting paragraph before their eyes glazed over.
I wrote this inaugural blog entry to attempt to explain my feelings and reasoning for creating a podcast. Who knows? Maybe I’ll look back on this one day and feel differently, but that day is not today.
Why a podcast, if I think people should read? Well, how stupid would it be to try to get people to read by asking that they read? It’d be like that classic situation everyone’s found themselves in where you buy a pair of scissors and don’t have a pair of scissors with which to open up the packaging of a pair of scissors. For better or for worse (so far, worse), we as a culture have decided to elevate the podcasters among us, some of which now occupy some of the most powerful government positions in America, and by extension, the whole planet. If the medium is the message, then podcasting is, unfortunately, the necessary evil medium of our times.
I cannot describe to you how much it makes my blood boil that the average coworker spends time actually listening to morons like Joe Rogan (barbarian Khan from the steppes as he is), or even worse, Nick Fuentes (one day I will fuck the politics right out of his little twink brain). It kills me to know that the dirtbag left has lost its podcasting darlings, as the Cum Town guys become D-list celebrities, and the Red Scare girls march towards an early grave as they attempt to out-ED and out-fascist each other. Am I saying that myself and my co-host are the voice that’s needed? My ego’s big, but it ain’t that big — but at the end of the day, I would prefer it if the voices that emerge from the average commuter’s car speakers are produced by human beings who actually read books, instead of pretending to read, or not reading at all in favor of frying up them brains with even more short-form video content. The only thing that can liberate us is art and especially literature, and I’m increasingly convinced that consuming the best of both is the only hope we have for a better future going forward.
Me and my co-host are always discussing the merits of Luddism. He’s a lot more of a pro-Luddite guy than me, since my professional life (i.e. fake email job) and my personal life (i.e. gay and single) both require me to be online to an extent. But the one thing we can agree on is that very little in the way of liberation will be found in the bleak digital wastelands of Web 2-point-whatever the fuck. So, I invite you to join us as we blab and write about the things that our important to us, while perusing the texts we feel are foundational to explaining the question I find myself thinking with nearly every headline, every unveiling of a new tech torment nexus, every moment of pause that allows the sanity-destroying background radiation of this world we’ve built to fully permeate my being:
What am I living in? It’s the question everyone’s asking.