Anti-Lurker Sermon

They say that modern warfare is psychic, yet it seems so invisible. Plain as day though: days of silence.

A good way to measure how much you’re in your head is to check how many words you’ve said aloud.

Another way to measure how much you’re in your head is checking how many of your words register: that is, emit cause and effect in your local reality. This is partly why one may no longer talk. Whether it’s different interests or a standing match, but words used to be different. They’d form agreements, they’d make buildings and worlds with towns. They’d make someone’s day.

Words still carry these functions, but the dark arts supersede, got perfected, perhaps proto-lessons from a hundred-year radio legacy, and now the spells one casts today command another down and up ladders. Gaslit into a short-lived assassin. Words today mean wins or losses in the psychic battlefield: it means preserving your inner front. The age of good-faith argument is over.

The struggle for definition is veritably the struggle for life itself. […] The one who first seizes the word imposes reality on the other; the one who defines thus dominates and lives; and the one who is defined is subjugated and may be killed.

This is why you must make a blog post if you can. It’s why you must not lurk. It’s why it’s not dumb to make your YouTube channel or shitpost anywhere if you’re going to engage. For if you lurk long enough there are no more inner fronts to preserve. You drown in the noise. Your corpse becomes a node.

It may be tempting to delete everything and disappear. But the current cyberpunk dystopic churning is here to stay; may as well pick up a holster, fortify, and not let it destroy by proxy: anyone you run across is surely tapped in. The enemy is faceless and ever present, moving the mouths right in front of you.

You are condemned to be a hollowed out lurker or psychotic spellcaster.

Die or rise.