Kyberwarlord

There is, perhaps, an extreme advantage to engaging in slightly manic-depressive modes. While I can often suppress it, there is always a second part of me that invades the ego. The voice tells me that I am being watched. Being cheated. Being controlled.

I tend to be unable to think before I speak. No matter how hard I try. My psychoanalyst says that it is because deep emotions come very easily to me. Something about social isolation as a young child.

There is a point to these two statements. There is a certain risk-taking that comes with that kind of thinking. When others tell me that the way I am acting a certain way is unacceptable, I come back to the control society. My life has been spent attempting to control and tamp down my body and my mind and my spirit.

Over the past several weeks, I have been developing this idea of “Info-antimancy” or “Cyber-antimancy” in opposition to cybernetics. Cybernetics, of course, is primarily concerned with the control of systems. Systems of people, of minds, of computers. This is certainly in the realm of revealing knowledge for the sake of control. This is what we must reject. One must remember that the term cyberpunk is an oxymoron.

There is an ever-present flood of telemetry about our person. Cybernetics seeks to define, as do traditional forms of divination. I think this is why I find myself averse to activities like Tarot or other divination practices. At a certain level, I think it disturbs me. Not in a Satanic Panic kind of way, but in the same way that I find myself averse to Social Media. It seems too easy for it to invade my mind.

There is not really a good word to describe the idea I am attempting to communicate with Cyber/Info-antimancy. My computers, my data, my databases, my code, they are all poetry to me. It is raw poesis. That is not to say my code is beautiful (it most certainly is not), but it certainly is in the same realm.

As computers become more intensively connected to our bodies and minds in the coming decades, we shall see the cultural touchpoint of these emerging technologies will often traffick in appeals to cyberpunk mythologies.

These people will utterly fail to be punk. To move against the control society, one must want revenge against it.

Even librarians and academics, those who are, ostensibly, most in favor of the arguably liberatory potential of information, are utterly impotent in the face of cybernetic realities. There is, I think, a stereotype, which may or may not be always accurate, of the librarian as a timid creature. If there is one metaphysical Good in the world, it is likely that it is the ability of a creature’s mind to consume information and change. Perhaps the problem is that there are only a few who control the means of knowledge production.

There is, of course, a lot to be angry about in the world. I cannot overthrow the government. But I can overthrow some academic publishers. I can make scholarly information flow without the interference of cyberneticians in government and corporations.

There is a reason I am a rather high-functioning adult. It is because of my anger. It is because of hate. It is because of an only-tenuous connection between my ego and my id. It is because of the intrusive thoughts.

If I must choose between mediocrity and anger. I must choose anger.

nullum magnum ingenium sine mixtura dementiae fuit