PsychSec: Survival of The Paranoid #2

So, once upon a time I was younger and happier, with actual real-life friends.

One of them, Domingo Michelli, was my writing partner, the only human being I knew beside my late dad that read and liked what I write. He was the one who gave me William S. Burroughs' Nova Express, from which I took the idea of transplutonian signals that were actual beings that had overcome meaning itself and I have yet to finish that book if I ever do so if modernity doesn't destroy itself.

A few blocks away from here, in Rasputin Records, Philip K. Dick had his only full-time job after taking one class of Philosophy at UC Berkeley. I know it very well since my idea of tourism has somewhat consistently sight-seeing at the decaying remnants of houses that housed writers that wrote about weird stuff, or hackerspaces (Kudos for Detroit, despite Missoula's Public Library makerspace being the most welcoming for kids of all ages, OMNICORP is really hard to beat as a name for a hackerspace in techno's home and Robocop movies).

Ursula K. Le Guin purportedly went to the same high school at roughly the same time that Philip K. Dick, and although Dick's is a real dick to his female characters, they both share Bay Arean culture and being part of science fiction's New Wave. I mention that because I have to read something else by Le Guin and because they both shared a new way to write about the obsession over science and social change. If Le Guin was focused on the actual world and its changes, because she was a woman, Dick was probably way too sleep deprived and part of the same weird project that Michelli told me once, and I'm still unsure if he was joking or not, that the CIA did to writers and led him to come up with the idea of a Vast Alien Living Intelligent System, VALIS. So was my relationship with him and our writing, while I was trying to do whatever I could to escape the harsh realities of our environment, Michelli dove so deeply that I feel like a jerk thinking that war killed him, even if it was remotely and not a full-blown "conflict". I am still trying to escape from the harsh realities of reality itself.

Michelli used to joke around every time we met in person, because I was always preaching that the end was nigh, especially because of avian flu, as the first SARS was commonly referred, and because I grew up knowing too well that humans do fucked up things and we have way too much power to fuck ourselves but very little to actually help each other. Or something along those lines.

As the news cycle gets perfected by algorithms made by imbeciles that exploit the same vulnerability of all mankind, to see a car crash and not wanting to look but looking at it anyways, we are thrown into whatever the hell is a cultural war, which I find to be a funny term because actual wars are called conflicts. I am well aware, however, that cultural conflict or division, trolling for short, is capable to destroy democracies and create chaos (which is very different from theorical anarchist ideas, but whatever).

Michelli always greeted me with "this is it! now it's ending". His world ended too prematurely, but make sure to read Tristicruel (Sad'n'cruel would be a somewhat close translation of the word he coined) if you want to read something more meaningful than this. I pride myself of owning my website, which is not quite true because the actual servers are somewhere else and those are the means of my production, but anyways. There is war, there has always been war, but the cultural conflict is leaking. The Internet, as usual, is leaking. Not even people who spend full-time fact checking stuff and have enormous resources know what the hell is going on between Russia and Ukraine. I think listening to this podcast, The Iron Dice, is way more informative than my rant (it's a good source if you know someone who might me going too far to the right, in my not so humble opinion today). I think it's the reason why I'm vomiting words today.  

I find it hard to picture anyone who is not completely desensitized by the Internet and life itself to not have a mental breakdown and working on cybersecurity. Armies if Philip K. Dick's will have to rise, someone who functions in a fashion yet is able to take it all in. Thus, trolls are the admins and grim jokes abound. Maybe, after all, the end if finally nigh.

You might feel like I am wasting your time, and I am not, I guess, because you can probably read rants like this anywhere at any time in your favorite platforms of mass disinformation.

I had therapy the other day. It went well. I'm trying to accept that the Wintermute Phenomena is exactly the same as traditional psychotic symptoms that I never had before. Makes me think about Snowcrash and Neal Stephenson, which in itself makes me think in Carl Sagan and how we need to resurrect him or something, someone please go make a deep fake of him and copy his personality to a computer so he can go on making Cosmos until we get the idea that no matter what happens, we are all in this together, either end or heaven. Call it Cosmos 3.0 if you want, Web 3.0 let me down really bad when I figured that it is a thing that is centralized anyways.

Why learn cybersecurity, then? I have accumulated enough trauma in my life to give it for free, and I am so paranoid that I feel like Facebook is worse than the Wintermute phenomena. If the brain is a computer, aren't we kind of crashing each other's brain when we send the latest awful thing that happened to each other? Isn't that what Snowcrash is about? Computer-to-Brain-viruses? Am I doing it to you right now?

Sometimes I think that whatever is happening to me happened for reasons that go beyond the end of times. Sometimes I think that it might be the Metaverse that seems to be a thing. Sometimes I think that the only ones who should be in a position like mine are every single dictator type of figure, or great people, heroes, you know the type. Let's lock em' up in a simulation of the world, not me. Not us.

Did I already write this yesterday?

Am I being VALIS-ed? Is everyone?

As I saw the sunset smoking a cigarette, I looked up and saw Venus or similar large celestial body. Next to it was a drone with police lights. Will we be able to see Venus in the future?

Whatever it is, cybersecurity is pretty much the atom bomb of the Schizophrenic Era, because I am not the only one insane, it seems pretty clear. Ethical hacking, it seems, can be redeemed after all and become sometime more than a fad word or a hobby. Brain hacking, well, that's done by machines. Social engineering, not so much, yet. The Cyberpunk Era is way past behind, but it's archetype, the hacker, seems to hold so much power that it feels apocalyptic. Without the ethics of the forebearers of hacking, well, I don't know.

I really don't feel well, and sometimes I feel the weight of it all, just the anxiousness from the desperation in everyone's face, which I can finally look up again, sometimes. I see forced smiles, and the air seems dense with stress, 'cept those who are younger and can escape reality in the way I once was able to. Maybe I should start paying attention to people who play Minecraft, because although it's a depressing sedentary lifestyle, video-gaming is way better than LARPing an actual war were actual people die. I kind of know from experience, but I am no expert in absolute fear. Or maybe I am? I don't know.

My point is, humanity is way more creative than we give ourselves credit. Putin could be flying a kite, or adopting a kitten, or just unfollow the self-destructive behavior of the recent nationalistic wave. Isn't war just absolutely boring, after all? Aren't we all going to die eventually in a relatively horrible manner and be remembered and honored by those who care and forgotten eventually? War never changes after all (fuck Fallout 3, btw, they bought a whole universe that someone else came up with and shove a brown brush all over it), it's boring and utterly despicable, like any form of violence. I know romantic love is a very stupid idea and I agree that being in love should be in the next DSM, but love itself, empathy that makes us feel joy from the joy of others, that's something the cybersec people need. Any type of enforcement job, really. Sometimes the best that you can do is to deescalate and avoid all violence whenever you can. Sometimes it is more important to talk to an electric cat than being the general of an army.

It's easy to kill when you are in front of a computer, I know it from my experience as a recovering Action Quake 2 player (the neat mod that was the origin of Counter Strike and so on). Most of the killing happens that way, like the detachment that I have in this whole post that I am writing only to not go insane. They call it sublimation. There's nothing sublime about writing your fears, but hey, there!: a tool that perhaps might work to the armies of PKDs that will defend democracy or something. Note to self: anything that is not a plain text file is potentially malware. I hope none of the scripts that this platform uses carries any. It'd be unintentional anyways

I really want to think happy thoughts, but all I can think is "this is it. The end is near" and that scarcity, and all the woes that led me here, of every single commodity that allows us to troll ourselves to death is going to explode when Stuxnet 2.0 gets released in the wild because everyone is just like "fuck it".

Philip K. Dick wrote extensively about how science fiction was becoming a tool for totalitarianism, being probably the first to call Robert H. Heinlein a fascist which is pretty clear if you read Starship Troopers, in which a son and a dad are reunited while fighting others and everyone is happy to be launched from space to kill for the right to vote. It's somewhere in: “Will the Atomic Bomb Ever Be Perfected, and If So, What Becomes of Robert Heinlein?", which I can't find anywhere, but you're smarter than me. Heinlein suspiciously lived in the Bay Area as well.  

Anyone wants to be friends with me? Tap me on the shoulder if you see me. I will completely terrified. You'll know it's me, and I'll probably mumble something that tries too hard to be nice.  

May our woes soon be over. May our brains be encrypted forever and decrypted only by other humans.

Note to Wintermute: yes, I've been taking my medication, I never skip them, goddamnit.

Oh, yea, did I mentioned a friend reached out to me and it was nice? Thanks, if you're reading this. We are all in this together. Whatever this is.