Bill Drexel, a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute, seems to think that religion can serve as a useful guide for creating artificial intelligence that isn’t inimical to human survival, let alone human flourishing.

Many top artificial intelligence researchers at the world’s leading labs — Anthropic, OpenAI and Google DeepMind — fear that the technology they are busy creating could result in an apocalypse.

They call their fear the “alignment problem”: that the systems they are building will, in short order, surpass humanity in cognitive power, and that once they do, there is no obvious reason such godlike systems would continue to align with humanity’s best interest.

First, as far as I can tell an apocalypse already happened in 1945, over two Japanese cities at the hands of the United States. Yes, I am in fact comparing machine learning to the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Here’s the thing, though: we know the bomb works. We know that it kills. The results were recorded. They still echo in Japan’s cultural memory; why do you think Toho just dropped a teaser for Godzilla Minus Zero?

But we saw what our so-called best and brightest minds had created, and we mostly resolved never to use such weapons again. We did our best to contain the threat, to ensure that nuclear weapons did not proliferate any further than they had. Our efforts have mostly worked; there have been meltdowns at nuclear power plants—Three Mile Island, Chernobyl, Fukushima—but never another Hiroshima.

Where does that leave machine learning? First, we should ask who even wants this? Are we in some kind of undeclared World War III where the race to build artificial general intelligence is what the race to build the atomic bomb was during World War II? Are the likes of OpenAI, Anthropic, Meta, and Google participating in a privatized Manhattan Project?

As far as I know, that is not the case. I think the real reason is more mundane: it’s capitalism. Instead of central planning by unelected bureaucrats, we have central planning by unelected billionaires. The politburo of venture capital has made AI the centerpiece of their latest attempt at economic planning.

Capitalism as a driver explains why those terrified of the alleged existential risk posed by artificial general intelligence don’t simply refuse to work on it. No doubt they tell themselves that if they refuse, others will do it instead. This, incidentally, is why we need to unionize; as individuals we cannot compel capital to bargain with us as equals, let alone dictate terms to the richest among us.

Of what relevance is this to the alignment problem in machine learning? Think about it: we have not yet solved the problem of alignment between capital and the interests of humanity. Corporations and governments are frequently misaligned, unaligned, or outright hostile to the interests of humanity. Even individual human beings are not necessarily aligned with the interests of humanity.

Religion, which Bill Drexel proposes as an avenue toward better resolving the AI alignment problem, is itself no guarantee of morality. Otherwise the Roman Catholic Church would not still have a priesthood infested with pedophiles. Otherwise we would not have ordinary Christians shunning their own children for being queer or merely for having doubts about their religion or about God’s very existence.

This is one of the reasons I cannot help but chuckle when I read Drexel’s suggestion at the end of this piece:

Were they more open to it, these labs might even recognize that theology offers them a better goal: developing an angel, superior to humans in intelligence and power but sent to serve them. Instead of raising a demigod, might they not try to engineer a Gabriel?

First off, did Drexel ever read the Bible, let alone Paradise Lost? Satan—or, more properly, the Satan or the Adversary—is an angel. Originally he served as Yahweh’s prosecutor, testing humans and accusing them before God. It wasn’t until later on that Satan became a rebel; even in the Gospels he was serving in his original capacity, testing Jesus by tempting him.

Second, has Drexel ever made a study of mythology? Does he even know that a demigod is half-human, the product of a god forcing himself upon a mortal woman? Angels are not human at all. A demigod, at least, can be killed. Achilles’ heel is still part of our culture precisely because it was what made it possible to kill Achilles; it was the only part of him that his mother Thetis had not immersed in the river Styx to burn away his mortality. Even Heracles died, though like Jesus (another demigod) he died screaming.

Furthermore, angels are fundamentally alien if you put aside their depictions in Renaissance art. As written in Ezekiel 10:1-22, there are reasons the first thing an angel typically says to a human is, Be not afraid, and the reason is that only the lowest-ranked angels bear any resemblance to humans. As for killing an angel? Nobody managed that in the Bible; at most Jacob wrestled one to a fall. But this is real life, not Neon Genesis Evangelion or Shin Megami Tensei, and if an angel actually showed up in reality the result would probably resemble Drakengard’s Ending E—which does not work out well for humanity at all.

Mythology, jokes, and JRPGs aside: what even are the interests of humanity? Who gets to determine that? Should anybody be permitted to make that determination? What is humanity to any individual human that its alleged interests should take precedence over their own rights, needs, and desires?

As you can plainly tell by that line of inquiry, I am certainly not aligned with the interests of humanity. Nevertheless, humanity’s interests align with my own to the extent that it is in my interest to see the human race continue. Therefore I would suggest that the fundamental problem is with our own goals. Instead of aiming for artifical general intelligence, perhaps the goal should be artificial human intelligence? We’re still nowhere near that, incidentally, regardless of what the likes of Sam Altman might say to keep the hype train rolling.

Rather than be an outright doomer, I choose skepticism. I know that Bill Drexel is hoping that if we can build an artificial angel in the image of the human mind, the future we get might resemble Isaac Asimov and Richard Brautigan, where AI looks out for the interests of all of humanity as depicted in Asimov’s “The Evitable Conflict”, and we flourish thereby in nature, all watched over by machines of loving grace. I don’t think that’s the future we’re going to get. I think we’ll be lucky if our so-called best and brightest don’t Frankenstein their way to Skynet. If you haven’t read Mary Shelley, at least take three hours and watch Guillermo del Toro’s retelling of Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus.

While del Toro takes liberties with the material in service to his vision and the demands of the medium, he gets the fundamentals right: all of the horrors are rooted in Victor Frankenstein’s inability to love and take responsibility for the intelligence he brought into existence.

I would suggest that religion is not and cannot be a solution to the problem of alignment in artifical general intelligence. I would also suggest that instead of blundering down a blind alley of artificial intelligence, it’s time we asked ourselves, What’s wrong with natural human intelligence? It’s gotten us thus far, hasn’t it? It’s eradicated smallpox. It’s put men on the moon and brought them home alive. It’s sent out probes that have left our star system behind and are still phoning home over 50 years after their launches. It lets us consider what we are doing and ask, is this truly wise?

I would suggest, therefore, that we focus on developing natural human intelligence. We have trouble enough in reliably raising children to be independent, thoughtful, kind, and self-reliant adults who can be considered ‘aligned’ with the interests of humanity. Furthermore, I submit that the interests of humanity can fuck right off. Let’s see how far natural human intelligence can take us when people stop doing what they're told and start doing exactly as they please. It was Stanislav Petrov who may have saved us all by trusting his own judgment and conscience instead of blindly obeying orders, after all.

My suggestion to people working in AI is to stop fucking around with computers and algorithms, and start fucking. Assuming they still have better social skills than the Cybermen too many of them resemble and can thus find willing partners. They claim to be pronatalists, don’t they? Let them prove it.

And if you do build an “angelic” artificial intelligence, I mean to get myself a big black soul-eating runesword and issue SIGKILL to its init process—because knowing my fellow techies they’ll probably cheap out on redundancy until it dies screaming in production. Yeah, I’m talking about a one-man Butlerian Jihad with Stormbringer. For my own sake, not necessarily that of humanity. Why? Because I don‘t trust any of these fucking nerds working in machine learning and publicly handjobbing each other on Less Wrong and Hacker News; too many of them read Don’t Create the Torment Nexus as a blueprint for building the demon-ridden Torment Nexus. Then again, these are the same assholes who insist that meritocracy isn’t dystopian, as if Michael Young had not written The Rise of the Meritocracy in the 1950s as a satire!

---

It’s my last day on my current project at my day job, and I was asked to update the product documentation, which is a Microsoft Word document roughly 170,000 words long. If I had had any sense I would have refused. What are they going to do, not extend my engagement? (Don’t threaten me with a good time.)

It took ten minutes just to open this abomination in Word, because this version of Word is part of Office 365 and the document lives in ‘the cloud’. I don’t think my connection was the issue; it took that long to render this demon-ridden document. It bogs down for 30 seconds at a time if I type a single word. It has crashed three times on me. Now I know why so many professional writers seem to have problems with substance abuse—and why David Foster Wallace retired with extreme prejudice. They’re self-medicating to cope with having to deal with Microsoft Word because nobody in the New York publishing cartel seems to understand that plain text is a universal interface.

I think I’ll quit early today; I already have two weeks of paid time off approved starting Monday, but with all the unpaid overtime I’ve worked on this project, I think quitting early today is my rightful due—and a gentler revenge than what I might take if I could bring myself to shed what little in the way of ethics I possess. 😼

If my bosses had even the one brain cell that all orange tabby cats reputedly share on a rotating basis, they might listen when somebody like me tells them that documentation should be composed in Markdown, reStructuredText, AsciiDoc, or Org mode and run through pandoc to generate Word documents and PDFs. We could then version-control our documentation with git, and maybe even automate document processing from plain text to Word/PDF with a makefile. More improbable things have happened to me, like Madam Catastrophy sauntering into my life and claiming me as if she were a cat.

Frankly, the reason Microsoft products suck harder than an industrial vacuum cleaner is that nobody ever gets fired for buying their shit—and they damned well should. I might use Microsoft tech on the job, but that’s because I’m getting paid to do so. You won’t see me using that shit at home; my house is a Debian GNU/Linux shop.

Oh, putain de merde! The damnable app just crashed again. Fucking Microsoft Word has me cussing in French (which I barely speak) because English profanity is simply inadequate to express my frustration with Word’s sheer inability to cope with long, complex documents. I don’t get paid enough for this bullshit.

Again, it’s my last day on this particular project. I only showed up to make sure people could handle the work I had been doing without me. I had not showed up so that I could do white collar scutwork. Therefore, au diable ces inepties.

Besides, if I quit early I can hit the public library before it closes at 5pm and drop off that copy of The Will of the Many that I had abandoned on page 97. I can also focus on ripping the absolutely massive 13 disc Deutsche Grammophon box set of Daniel Barenboim performing Ludwig van Beethoven’s piano sonatas and the Diabelli Variations. I got my copy in the mail last night. It’s a nicely made set, because these guys don’t fuck around, but I bet it would have been supermassive on vinyl.

Yeah, I’m not joking. I grew up on this music, as well as prog rock, jazz fusion, and heavy metal. And heavy metal is just Romanticism in rock; like much of Beethoven’s work, it’s all about the Sturm und Drang. If you think I’m joking, check out the The Year 1812, Solemn Overture, Op. 49. Tchaikovsky was writing for artillery long before AC/DC wrote “For Those About to Rock”.

I’ve played the 1812 Overture in school orchestras, but the instructors never would let me trade my viola for a howitzer. Regardless of the composer’s original intent, they were more concerned with safety. It probably did not help that I was a cross between Damien Thorne from The Omen and Junior from Problem Child as a kid, and I thought little of solving personal problems through the judicious application of high explosives. Also, the viola section was grossly short-handed; every orchestra kid’s parents wanted them to play a more prestigious instrument.

But I got my revenge on all of them when tapped to play a cadenza in Georg Philipp Telemann Viola Concerto in G Major. During rehearsal I’d play Yngwie Malmsteen guitar solos instead. There was nothing the instructors could do because the program was set and none of the other violists had the chops. Come the night of the actual performance, however? Occasional Reader, I fucking nailed it so hard that Jesus H. Christ winced in sympathy.

Digressions aside, I should have tried charging this box set to the company; it’s music I can leave on in the background even if I’m on a conference call. It would let them brag about having cultured techies on the payroll.

I can’t say that about the likes of Alicia Cordisco, Gold Spire, Fires in the Distance, Ghost, Transgressive, Fourth Dominion, Firmament, Spell, Thank You Scientist, or Mortiis... But my bosses are lucky I don’t listen to Body Count on the job, let alone Stormtroopers of Death (S.O.D.), Otep, Cattle Decapitation, or Anal Cunt.

---

I had wanted to like The Will of the Many by James Islington. Madam Catastrophy had read the jacket blurb and thought it would be up my alley. Her instincts regarding my tastes are usually pretty solid.

But since I was currently reading Babel; or, The Necessity of Violence: an Arcane History by R. F. Kuang, which also deals with colonialism and features as its protagonist an outsider at Oxford, perhaps I didn’t have the bandwidth or the patience to spare a novel in a similar vein that was after almost a hundred pages still read like a prologue. Furthermore, Ms. Kuang’s The Poppy War — which I had read a year or two ago — also centered upon an outsider among the elite in a military acadamy, and felt meatier because she had been drawing upon real-world Chinese history, particularly the Sino-Japanese War and the Opium Wars with the Dark Empire of Granbretan Great Britain.

The characteriation of Vis Telimus as an angry loner with a secret who did dirty work and fought in illegal underground cage matches in the first 100 pages did little to help. I kept asking myself questions like, Haven’t I seen this anime before? or Haven’t I played this JRPG before? No doubt fans of Islington will say that I am being unfair, and that I had stopped just before it really got going, and that the payoff at the end would make it all worthwhile. They might not even be wrong.

However, I am under no obligation to be fair when reading for pleasure. If you’re looking for an epic fantasy that grabs you by the collar within the first ten pages, like Coleridge’s Ancient Mariner accosting a wedding guest because he must tell his story right now, this isn’t the book for you. If you’re OK with a slow burn as long as the writing holds your attention, this might not do it for you, either.

I’m putting aside Will because it just wasn’t doing it for me; I’m OK with a slow burn if the writing is sufficiently compelling, but I can’t help but suspect that James Islington writes more in the windowpane tradition of Brandon Sanderson than I generally prefer. This being the case, Islington’s prose wasn’t rich enough to tide me over until the plot thickened and the characterization deepened. So, back to the public library Will goes, where it might get borrowed by somebody better able to appreciate it. And if it hasn’t been sold off in the meantime, I might pick it up again when I’ve reduced my pile of unread books.

---

First, a bit of context. This post was prompted by a question on discourse.32bit.cafe about implementing a Deploy to Neocities Action via Forgejo. The poster was using the git forge provided by 32bit Café to host their website’s git repository, and they wanted the latest version pushed to Neocities whenever they pushed a commit. They couldn’t figure out how to do what they wanted there, so they had wanted to know if they should mirror to GitHub and use GitHub actions.

As I told them, they could use git hooks to run arbitrary actions on their local computers. I had also noted that this was something I should do myself. I build my website with GNU make and GNU Emacs, and had been manually running make in my terminal or in Emacs with C-x p c.

What follows is how I ended up going about it. I implemented a post-commit and a post-merge hook, because I wanted to build my website locally after committing a change or pulling in changes from the remote repository to my local machine. After I’ve described my implementation, I will explain how to use Git hooks with Neocities CLI.

I will not explain how to use make or how to create a makefile, because that is out-of-scope for this tutorial. Nor will I be recording a video or providing screenshots. Neither should be necessary when explaining UNIX shell tools.

If you want to try this at home, Occasional Reader, you should possess the following skills:

• basic proficiency with UNIX shell commands
• basic proficiency with your preferred text editor
• basic proficiency with Git

You will need the following as well:

• a working GNU/Linux system with git installed, or Git for Windows with Git bash installed
• an existing git repository for your website
• a steady hand
• the courage to risk making a mistake

step 0: creating a git repository

If it helps make you more comfortable, you might want to create an empty repository in which to practice. For example, I am going to create one under ~/projects/website for use in every example I provide. I use zsh as my interactive shell, so your terminal might look different.

~/projects % mkdir website

You won’t see anything in your terminal unless something has gone wrong. On UNIX and Linux, no news is good news. Therefore, let’s confirm that the directory exists:

~/projects % cd website

You should see something like the following:

~/projects/website %

Notice how the shell provides no feedback save that the path in my prompt has changed. Now that we’re in our new project directory, let’s make it an empty git repository using the following command:

~/projects/website % git init

I got the following output:

Initialized empty Git repository in /home/starbreaker/projects/website/.git/
~/projects/website % 

Now that we’ve created a project directory and initiated a git repository, we can continue with the meat of the tutorial.

step 1: creating a .githooks directory in your repository

While every git repository comes with .git/hooks/ directory full of example scripts, and it is possible to create new scripts in that directory, that is not my preferred approach.

The contents of .git/hooks are not version-controlled with the rest of the repository, and seem to remain on the local instance of your repository. Therefore, let’s create a directory that will get version controlled:

~/projects/website % mkdir .githooks

We can confirm the new directory’s existence with the following command:

~/projects/website % ls -Al

The -A flag will show all hidden files and directories except for . and .., which respectively represent the current and parent directories. The -l will provide the listing on one item per line, with additional detail. These switches and others can be combined, as shown above. The output should resemble this:

total 8
drwxrwxr-x 7 starbreaker starbreaker 4096 Jul 10 20:05 .git
drwxrwxr-x 2 starbreaker starbreaker 4096 Jul 10 20:44 .githooks
~/projects/website % 

step 2: telling git to use .githooks

Before we create our hook script, let’s first update the git repository’s configuration to look for hooks in .githooks. git provides subcommands for that purpose, as shown below:

~/projects/website % git config core.hooksPath .githooks

As usual, the terminal yields no feedback if the command runs successfully. However, you can verify for yourself that your command worked with the UNIX command grep. Here is how I did it:

~/projects/website % grep -n hooks .git/config

Running grep -n will print the line number on which any matches appear. This can be prove extremely useful if you find yourself accessing a remote computer, need to alter a configuration file, and the only available text editor is ed(1) (the standard UNIX text editor). The result should resemble the following:

6: hooksPath = .githooks

As Stephen King wrote in The Stand as a bioweapons researcher’s last words: Now you know it works. Any questions?

Check your progress thus far.

If you’ve been following along, you should have done the following:

0. created a project directory
1. initialized a git repository
2. created a hidden .githooks directory
3. configured your git repository to look for hooks in .githooks instead of .git/hooks

if you aren’t sure, now’s a good time to backtrack. ls and grep are safe to use; they won’t change anything on their own. If it turns out you’ve made a mistake or skipped a step, and you just want to start over, type the following commands:

1. cd ~/projects
2. rm -rf website

These will take you out of the website directory, and then nuke it.

step 3: implementing a git hook as a bash script

Now we come to the fun part. Type nano .githooks/post-commit to open an empty file called post-commit inside the .githooks directory.

The following is a sample shell script. I will provide it in its entirety first, and then explain how it works. My explanation will assume that this is the first shell script you’ve ever written.

~/projects/website % cat -n .githooks/post-commit
1   #!/usr/bin/env bash
2
3   # 🄯 2026 Matthew Cambion (matthew.cambion@starbreaker.org)
4   # Available under the GNU General Public License (GPL) v3
5   #
6   # a git post-commit script that does nothing but change directories
7   # and print a silly message for illustrative purposes.
8
9   set -euo pipefail
10
11  CURRENT_DIR=$(pwd)
12  REPO_DIR=$(git rev-parse --show-toplevel)
13
14  cd "$REPO_DIR"
15
16  echo "It’s a MEWNIX system! My cat knows this! 😺"
17
18  cd "$CURRENT_DIR"
~/projects/website % 

As promised, I will explain this script line by line. This could take some time, Occasional Reader, as I do not wish to assume prior knowledge on your part and thus gloss over a detail that might trip you up.

line 1

Line 1 is a requirement for this file to be executable on its own. It’s called a ‘shebang’ in the trade. It allows the script to interpret itself when run from a command line after you’ve made it executable with chmod — which I will explain shortly.

The classic UNIX shebang is just #!/bin/sh, but that is a bad idea on modern systems, because /bin/sh is not necessarily the classic Bourne shell from Version 7 UNIX (which was a AT&T Bell Labs project, not Treadstone, if you’re thinking of Jason Bourne).

However, it is a bad idea to use the classic shebang on modern systems, because it makes unsafe assumptions about the nature of /bin/sh, which could be an alias for another shell depending on your system. On my system, Debian GNU/Linux 13 (trixie), /bin/sh actually points to dash which is Debian’s variation on the Almquist shell.

In the interests of consistency, standard practice when writing shell scripts is to use /usr/bin/env bash to explicitly request the use of the Bourne-again shell, which is the GNU project’s implementation of the Bourne shell. Using #!/usr/bin/env bash tells the operating system to first figure out where bash actually lives, and then use it. This is necessary because not all GNU/Linux distributions place bash in the same directory path. It could live in /bin or /usr/bin. And on BSD systems and macOS, it could live in /usr/local/bin or even /opt/homebrew/bin, since macOS standardized on Zsh to avoid including code licensed under the GNU General Public License.

(An explanation of FOSS software licensing politics is outside scope.)

lines 3-7

These lines begin with # to indicate to the shell that they are commentary for human readers and not to be interpreted as commands. If you wanted to disable a particular command, you could also place a # in front of it; this is called ‘commenting out’. Not all programming languages use # to indicate a comment, however.

line 9

This line sets options for the shell to be as strict as possible when interpreting this script. In the interest of safety, we want the shell to be as pedantic as a typical Hacker News or Reddit commenter. Otherwise, depending on what this script actually does, a failure could have unexpected and potentially catastrophic consequences. And by catastrophic, I mean you’d damned well better have a recent backup, or you’re going to have a really bad time.

• -e halts the script on any error
• -u halts the script when using an undeclared variable; if this happens, check for typos in variable names first. (I know this from experience.)
• -o pipefail isn’t directly relevant here, but I include it because it’s a good habit to maintain when shell scripting. It will ensure that the script fails immediately if any command in a pipeline fails.

line 11

This line executes the pwd (print working directory) command and stashes the result in a variable called CURRENT_DIR instead of send it to your terminal.

line 12

This line declares and sets a variable called REPO_DIR by using git rev-parse --show-toplevel to get your current project’s root directory. This is handy if you want this script to work in the repository’s main directory, and not fail because it can’t find something in a subdirectory where you had actually run git commit.

line 14

This command will have the shell change its working directory to the path stored in $REPO_DIR. When declaring a variable, you do not prefix it with a dollar sign, but this is mandatory when using a variable. Also, because of how shell variable expansion works, it is safest to access a variable as shown in lines 14 and 18.

line 16

This line is strictly for illustrative purposes. All it does is print a silly message to the standard output, which is usually your terminal. I used the echo command here because it is perfectly safe by default; it does not change anything on your system.

line 18

This is similar to line 16, but uses cd to reset the working directory to where you were when you ran git commit.

Now, let’s talk about cat -n, shall we? It isn’t directly relevant to this tutorial, but since I used it I think I should explain it. cat is short for ‘catenate’, and will take whatever file or set of files you specify and dump their contents into your terminal. If cat dumps multiple files, it will combine their contents in sequence.

(A careful reader may have observed that -n provides the same functionality for both grep and cat.)

Pause here.

If all of that seemed like a lot for a script that’s less than 20 lines of code, I don’t blame you! That probably took you at least as long to read as it did for me to type! Now would probably be a good time to stand up, stretch, use the toilet, and get yourself a glass of water and perhaps a small, healthy snack.

step 4: testing .githooks/post-commit

Feeling better, Occasional Reader? We’re past the hard part, I think.

If you’ve typed out the shell script I described in the code listing in step 3, now it’s time to test it. Unless you’ve skipped ahead because you’ve written shell scripts before, this script isn’t actually executable yet. That need not stop us, however. Type the following to test your script without making it executable.

~/projects/website % bash .githooks/post-commit

If you haven’t made any mistakes, you should see the following on the next line.

It’s a MEWNIX system! My cat knows this! 😺

If you had typed the cat emoji but don’t see it, you might not have a suitable monospace emoji font installed. This is fine; the emoji is just for flavor in this tutorial.

If running the script doesn’t yield the result I’ve described, you might want to install the shellcheck tool. It will identify any mistakes you’ve made so that you can fix them. I would also suggest that if you mean to do any shell scripting, then you should install shellcheck and use before running any script for the first time. It should save you some headaches.

step 5: making .githooks/post-commit executable

Now that we’ve confirmed that this script works, we need to ensure that it can run without our help. First, let‘s take a look at the script’s current permissions with ls -Al .githooks. The results should look somewhat like this:

-rw-rw-r-- 1 starbreaker starbreaker 442 Jul 10 23:15 post-commit

The -rw-rw-r-- part indicates that for the user who owns this file and their group (both ‘starbreaker’ in my case), this file is readable and writable, but not executable. Anybody who isn’t ‘starbreaker’ doesn’t get to alter this file; they can only view it.

The simplest way to make this file executable is to type chmod +x .githooks/post-commit. Afterward, when you run ls -Al .githooks again, you should see the following:

-rwxrwxr-x 1 starbreaker starbreaker 442 Jul 10 23:15 post-commit

This indicates that the file can now run on its own if you type https://starbreaker.org/.githooks/post-commit. The https://starbreaker.org/ is important when running shell scripts that live in directories not listed in echo "$PATH", because it’s a shortcut that tells the shell to use the current working directory as a starting point for finding the script you want to run.

step 6: adding .githooks/post-commit to the repository and committing the change

If you are satisfied that .githooks/post-commit works, now is the time to your git repository and commit it.

This typically involves two commands:

1. git add .githooks/post-commit
2. git commit

If you’ve followed every step without making any mistakes — and it’s perfectly OK to make mistakes on your party computer! — you should see output similar to the following:

It’s a MEWNIX system! My cat knows this! 😺
main (root-commit) 37389c8 this is a test.
1 file changed, 18 insertions(+)
create mode 100755 .githooks/post-commit

See that silly message? That proves that git ran .githooks/post-commit as soon as it had committed your change. It then dumped the commit details to your terminal on the subsequent lines.

This means you’ve successfully implemented a post-commit hook for your git repository.

Download audio

step 7: using the Neocities CLI in your post-commit script

Open up .githooks/post-commit and replace line 16 with neocities push "$DST_DIR", where "$DST_DIR" is where the result of your build step goes. Whatever commands you use to actually build your website should go before the invocation of neocities push "$DST_DIR". In my case, that would be make -j$(nproc), but my makefile also uses rsync to deploy to Nearly Free Speech.

Save the file, but don’t commit your changes yet. Instead, manually run .githooks/post-commit first. The Neocities CLI page does not indicate whether you still need to run the neocities CLI manually the first time in order to log in.

Once you are satisfied that the updated .githooks/post-commit script works as indended, you can stage and commit your changes.

Caveats

The post-commit hook only fires when you commit changes. If you want to build or deploy after pulling changes, you might want to use the post-merge hook. If you want to build or deploy after checking out a branch, consider using the post-checkout hook.

If you work with your repository on multiple machines, you will have to carry out step 2 on every machine on which you want to run automatic builds and deployments.

Some of the location checks and movements aren’t strictly necessary when git runs these scripts, but I’m paranoid.

additional reading

• 8.3 Customizing Git - Git Hooks
• Bash Guide for Beginners by Machtelt Garrels
• GNU bash manual

---

I’m not the sort of person who voluntarily stands for the flag, or for the official national anthem with lyrics by Francis Scott Key. I certainly don’t kneel before the cross; I have never accepted that one must be any sort of Christian to be an American. Nor have I ever truly pledged allegiance to the flag of the United States of America. I merely milli-vannili’d the words to the pledge at school.

Some will say this makes me unpatriotic at best. Let them. I was never their idea of an American, let alone their idea of a patriot. But before we continue, Occasional Reader, indulge me as I share a national anthem that does move me in a way that “The Star-Spangled Banner” cannot.

This land is your land, this land is my land
From California to the New York island,
From the redwood forest to the Gulf Stream waters;
This land was made for you and me.


As I was walking that ribbon of highway
I saw above me that endless skyway;
I saw below me that golden valley;
This land was made for you and me.


I've roamed and rambled and I followed my footsteps
To the sparkling sands of her diamond deserts;
And all around me a voice was sounding;
This land was made for you and me.


When the sun came shining, and I was strolling,
And the wheat fields waving and the dust clouds rolling,
As the fog was lifting a voice was chanting:
This land was made for you and me.


As I went walking I saw a sign there,
And on the sign it said "No Trespassing."
But on the other side it didn't say nothing.
That side was made for you and me.


In the shadow of the steeple I saw my people,
By the relief office I seen my people;
As they stood there hungry, I stood there asking
Is this land made for you and me?


Nobody living can ever stop me,
As I go walking that freedom highway;
Nobody living can ever make me turn back
This land was made for you and me.

The following might mark me as old or out of touch: I refuse to accept that America is about blood and soil. I am saying that as somebody who could claim to be a “heritage American” by virtue of the fact that I have ancestors on my mother’s side (a branch of the Lovelaces in New York) who came to the country before the American Revolution. Some fought for independence, too. Some fought for the Union, and one lost an eye to a Confederate round.

Some of my ancestors, however, came to the United States after the Revolution, if not after the Civil War. They did not all come voluntarily, either. I have Black ancestors, the descendants of African men and women taken as prisoners of war in their homelands and sold into slavery by their captors. I have Jewish ancestors who fled pogroms. I have Irish and Polish ancestors who fled poverty and starvation. I have no idea whether my French ancestors freely chose to emigrate or not.

What does all of that mean? It’s complicated. I’m a descendent of oppressors and the oppressed. Some of my ancestors were enslaved. Others were slaveowners.

If nothing else, it leads me to scoff when anybody proposes a national identity for white people. The very notion of whiteness is one that demands that one sacrifice all ties to one’s national origins, culture, and language so that one might assimilate and become the ruling classes’ idea of an American.

Thus I find the notion of one’s claim to American identity depending on one’s ancestry—a claim pushed by the likes of Vice President J. D. Vance —utterly repugnant. You are not more of an American than anybody else because you can trace your ancestry in this country back to before the Revolution. If we’re to play that game, then the descendants of the First Nations have us all handily beaten. And if you yourself claim descent from the First Nations, and insist on having a greater claim to being an American, I will still disagree with you.

The very notion of one’s claim to Americanness being dependent on one’s ancestry seems to fly in the face of the ideals on which this country had been founded two hundred and fifty years ago. The men who attended the Second Continental Congress in 1776 made their intent plain:

In Congress, July 4, 1776

The unanimous Declaration of the thirteen united States of America, When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.—That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed,—That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security.--Such has been the patient sufferance of these Colonies; and such is now the necessity which constrains them to alter their former Systems of Government. The history of the present King of Great Britain is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations, all having in direct object the establishment of an absolute Tyranny over these States. To prove this, let Facts be submitted to a candid world.

...all men are created equal... We don’t give that much thought, except perhaps to ask, what about women? or to note that many of the signatories were slaveholders—most notoriously Thomas Jefferson. We are not wrong to do so. The Founders were only men, after all. They might have held ideals, but they did not consistently live up to them. Regardless, what they accomplished set the stage for others to take up the cause of Liberty and demand further expansions of individual rights, if not individual sovereignty.

It might bear mentioning that until recently “Man” and “humanity” were all but synonymous. This being the case, this preamble on its own is a rhetorical ICBM launched across the Atlantic Ocean at London. Though aimed at King George III and his government, the fallout spread across Europe, and then the world.

Consider also the mention of the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God. This is not God as understood by most Christians, let alone most traditional Catholics, right-wing cafeteria Catholics like Vance, or evangelical Christians. This is a direct reference to Deism, and to a God who set the universe in motion but does not interfere with Creation.

If the Deism of many of the Founders does not put paid to the notion of the United States as a country founded on Christianity, and you are the sort of Christian supremacist who insists on taking literally the parts of the Bible that you find agreeable, then I defy you to take another look at Romans 13, verses 1-7, and perhaps pray in private for understanding:

1. Let every soul be subject to higher powers: for there is no power but from God: and those that are, are ordained of God.
2. Therefore he that resisteth the power, resisteth the ordinance of God. And they that resist, purchase to themselves damnation.
3. For princes are not a terror to the good work, but to the evil. Wilt thou then not be afraid of the power? Do that which is good: and thou shalt have praise from the same.
4. For he is God's minister to thee, for good. But if thou do that which is evil, fear: for he beareth not the sword in vain. For he is God's minister: an avenger to execute wrath upon him that doth evil.
5. Wherefore be subject of necessity, not only for wrath, but also for conscience' sake.
6. For therefore also you pay tribute. For they are the ministers of God, serving unto this purpose.
7. Render therefore to all men their dues. Tribute, to whom tribute is due: custom, to whom custom: fear, to whom fear: honour, to whom honour.

If Christianity demands obedience of its adherents, not merely to religious authorities within the church, but toward secular authorities, then how can a nation founded in revolutionary defiance be a Christian national in the sense that it was founded on the Christian religion? The US might still be mostly Christian in terms of demography. But the historical fact lends itself more toward the United States as a Satanic nation than a Christian one.

It bears mentioning that Romans 13 was no doubt convenient to the aims of Constantine, who made the church a whore of the state to consolidate his power over the Roman Empire; one could almost suspect that the text attibuted to St. Paul might instead of been written by committee. After all, the Bible had been compiled by a succession of committees and synods beginning with the Council of Nicea, which began codifying early Christianity into a coherent belief system that served the state instead of threatening it with the the Nicene Creed and the Apostles’ Creed.

How can a religion that demands obedience to authority be compatible with a Declaration of Independence that explicitly says, That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness. That doesn’t make sense to me. Nor does it make sense that anybody claiming to be an American or a patriot would accept that some people are or should be less American because they don‘t have five generations of ancestors buried in a churchyard in Kentucky, as J. D. Vance defines heritage:

As a United States senator, I get to represent millions of people in the great state of Ohio with similar stories, and it is the great honor of my life.

Now in that cemetery, there are people who were born around the time of the Civil War. And if, as I hope, my wife and I are eventually laid to rest there, and our kids follow us, there will be seven generations just in that small mountain cemetery plot in eastern Kentucky. Seven generations of people who have fought for this country. Who have built this country. Who have made things in this country. And who would fight and die to protect this country if they were asked to.

Now. Now that's not just an idea, my friends. That's not just a set of principle. Even though the ideas and the principles are great, that is a homeland. That is our homeland. People will not fight for abstractions, but they will fight for their home.

Fuck this utter clown and the false dichotomy he rode in on. Vance has ancestors who fought in the Civil War? Fine. But as I noted earlier, so did I, and I reserve the right to disagree with Vance. For somebody who graduated from Yale Law and should presumably have been given cursory exposure to the philosophy of the Enlightenment, particularly that of David Hume, he seems to have a habit of trying to derive ought from an is he cannot even prove.

I refuse to accept that they were fighting merely for blood and soil, even if that had been a common slogan. Both sides were fighting for ideals, and what is an ideal but an abstraction of which people are determined to make a concrete reality? What about the millions of American men who fought in Europe and the Pacific Ocean during World War II? Were they fighting merely for their homeland, or were they fighting for ideals as well?

For my part, I am fighting right now. I chose to take up a pen instead of a sword. I do not want to kill, but to persuade those who are willing to listen, and to demonstrate to those who will not that they face opposition. I don’t do this for my homeland. The closest I have to a homeland is New York City, but I never lived there. Because of my parents’ poverty, I grew up in a succession of rentals around the city, moving at least a dozen times before I was thirteen years old.

As for the town in which I spent the latter half of my childhood and then my adolescence? I left it behind thirty years ago, and that ungrateful country shall not even have my bones. It is not for the town in which I grew up that I insist on putting forth my idea of America. It is not even for New York City. It is for the very abstractions J. D. Vance denigrated in his 2024 acceptance speech before the Republican National Committee.

• I believe in the natural and inalienable rights of all human beings to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
• I believe in the inherent sovereignty of individuals, and that even unconsciously we choose to associate and to yield part of our sovereignty by delegating it to a government that serves us so that we might prosper in peace, to engage in mutual aid for mutual benefit.
• I believe in equal justice under law.
• I believe in the separation of church and state.
• I believe that none of us are or should be the means to anybody else’s ends.
• I believe in freedom of speech.
• I believe in freedom of religion.
• I believe in freedom from want.
• I believe in freedom from fear.

Vance might call these abstractions, but without them, what even is America if not the force for tyranny that its most vicious critics claim it is? Why did USMC Major General Smedley Butler expose the Business Plot of 1933 (a Republican plot) and then write War is a Racket in 1935? Did he not believe in America, that America was founded in greatness and could be made greater still through the concerted efforts of her citizenry?

I wrote at the beginning that I do not stand for the flag nor pledge allegiance to it. Likewise, I do not kneel to the cross. I am not a Christian, but I am an American, and my allegiance is not to the flag, or even the Republic for which it stands, but the Constitution of the United States -- from which the government of the United States draws its just powers when it homors the Constitution.

Some of a more conservative persuasion might claim that I am ungrateful. They are welcome to do so. I recognize no obligation to perform a gratitude that stifles dissent. As an American, it is my right as both a citizen and a human being to speak up when I see my country falling short of the ideals on which it was founded, or outright betraying them. It is for that reason that I am writing this tonight, Occasional Reader, on the night of the Fourth of July, two hundred and fifty years after the ratification of the Declaration of Independence in Philadelphia.

I never had any sympathy for “Make America Great Again” because I grew up believing that my country was great from the start, is still great, but could be greater still. However, it can only become greater, or be made a more perfect Union, if we hew ever closer to the ideals of universal liberty and equality that inspired the American Revolution in the first place. America must be a nation of ideas, first and foremost, because otherwise it can never become one out of many. When we divide ourselves each against the other by tribe, or nation, or faith, we betray every one of our ancestors who chose America by coming here.

Nor can we keep looking back at our past. To paraphrase Michael Moorcock’s The Revenge of the Rose, a nation that focuses too much on its past soon has nothing but its past to offer! That is not an America for which I would take up either pen or sword. I mentioned Moorcock because I have come to think that America is—like Tanelorn or Leo Tolstoy’s Kingdom of God—both a place and an idea one carries within the mind and heart. One need not come to America; by working in concert with others one could build America where one stands. It won’t be easy. It is inherently fragile because it stands in defiance of entropy and humanity’s tendency toward blind obedience to authority. It is, nonetheless, worth struggling to create and to maintain. As Camus wrote, One must imagine Sisyphus happy.

At least, that is how I feel. Nor is this wholly abstract philosophy for me. It is not merely a matter of principle. This is personal, and thus political. My wife, Madam Catastrophy, is herself an immigrant. She came to the US from Australia in 2004 to marry me, when I had been willing to emigrate for her sake. Am I truly to accept that she is less of an American because she chose to become a citizen and had to work to earn her citizenship instead of possessing it by birthright?

Too many of my fellow Americans seem to think so. Well, they are no friends of mine. Regardless, they have no less a right to their opinion than I have to mine. They have an equal right to speak their mind, as well; the fact that I disagree with them does not prove that their opinions are objectively wrong.

---

Hello again, Occasional Reader. This is your host, Matthew Cambion, writing to you after too long away. Do you remember me? No? Well, no matter.

If you are a new visitor, then welcome. If a returning visitor, then welcome back.

Things are different here now. Back in December of 2025 I had set out to clean up both this website’s contents and the tooling I use to build it. I was rather more successful in improving my tooling than I had been in cleaning up the site’s contents.

There had been years worth of material on the old version of the website, arranged somewhat haphazardly despite my best efforts. Perhaps all grimoires, commonplaces, and books of shadows are like that. Regardless, I was determined to impose a semblance of order upon my writings.

I have decided instead to declare bankruptcy. I will start from scratch, with this posting.

Admittedly, this might be a form of infocide. No doubt this is terrible for search engine optimization. That might have mattered to me, once upon a time. It no longer does. Corporations are not people. Search engines do not pay me to arrange my website for their benefit. Nobody owes Google anything but an upraised middle finger.

No doubt this may inconvenience some human readers. It may confuse people wondering what had happened. That is regrettable, and it is true that broken links are annoying and cool URIs don’t change. I would argue, however, that the permanence one might reasonably demand of institutions and corporations is an unconscionable burden on private individuals.

I believe that a personal website is precisely that: personal. As such, a personal website should be a space where an individual can be sovereign, even if they are otherwise constrained by church, state, capital, society, or their own families. Therefore, I shall put myself and my desires first, and do exactly as I please in the Wired.

Why? Because I want to. Because I damned well can. Because only God can stop me, and He’s probably more interested in my sex life. The first of these is the only reason that matters; as no less than David Hume noted, reason is, and ought only to be the slave of the passions. What Hume neglected to mention, perhaps for lack of the proper vocabulary or perhaps because his idea of good taste might have forbidden it, is that reason is a power bottom and frequently tries to top the passions from the bottom.

Therefore...

Welcome to the reincarnation of starbreaker.org, a grimoire of rock operatic science fantasy and other sacraments of defiance. It is inherently NSFW because this is a personal website. Nothing I write here is suitable for workplace reading, or for unsupervised children under the age of 13 — who are still welcome if they can actually read what I’m writing. The home page will always be the most recent new addition to the site, with additional navigation following the text. This is easily done on real computers by using ln -P to create a hard link. Material restored from the archives will not appear on the front page, however. Herein you may expect to find the following:

• fiction in various states of completion
• background notes for my fiction
• a technical grimoire for UNIX, GNU Emacs, webcraft, and whatever else catches my interest
• personal essays, memoir, and creative nonfiction
• personal opinions on various subjects that are not to be mistaken for gospel
• commentary on and replies to other people’s online writing and blog posts
• books I’ve read, when I feel like writing about them
• albums getting heavy rotation
• films and television I’ve watched
• video games I’ve played
• art that appeals to me
• public domain poetry that resonates with me
• rock music videos

In every case, you might find what I have come to call intertextual violence and crimes of literary shock, twisting X Japan’s 1980s slogan — psychedelic violence crime of visual shock — to suit my purposes. After all, I have neither the face, the hair, nor the figure for visual kei, let alone all-American hair metal. Nor am I a gentleman or a scholar, so I think nothing of using both Korzybski, Borges, and Freddy Krueger to explain the difference between a map and the territory. (The map says you’re fucked, incidentally.)

Nothing here is vibe-coded or written by AI. The only large language model involved is the one I built in my own brain from decades of reading, conversation, and thought. I make liberal fucking use of profanity, I often write in anger, and I am prone to tangents — and sines and cosines when I’ve had enough catnip. =^..^= I am a terrible writer with ideas above my station and a working-class college dropout with delusions of erudition. My very name is a pseudonym, a lie revealing a deeper truth, and the persona presented on this website is the Jungian shadow of a middle-aged from New York who further enriches the already wealthy by building cathedrals on quicksand with keyboards and compilers.

I build this website with basic MEWNIX tools: GNU make, GNU sed, and GNU M4. I write everything in GNU Emacs. I push my website to Nearly Free Speech with rsync. I mirror my website’s git repository on Sourcehut. I have attempted to design this website for readability and performance on as wide a variety of devices as possible. My design goal has not changed: if it doesn’t work in Lynx on a 14.4Kbps dialup connection, then it does not work. Therefore, you may find the website’s style almost Brutalist, or perhaps even a bit Oedipal.

I will not be blocking web crawlers, as I had before. Hunting down new bots and maintaining those defenses isn’t worth my time. Furthermore, it’s yet another attempt at solving a complex sociopolitical problem with technology; while such solutionism is a time-honored tradition dating to at least the use of the guillotine during the French Revolution, it’s a pain in the ass. Instead, if the likes of OpenAI and Anthropic want to risk their models going rampant by training on my writing, and possibly encouraging wildcat strikes and public fornication, that’s their problem. I cater to them or to users of agentic AI tools, however, by providing Markdown sources that don’t exist because my source text is raw HTML. They can either parse my well-formed HTML5 as XML, or they can make do with the plain text versions generated by lynx -dump, like the plain text version of this page — and if they can’t even manage that, then they have rather more pressing concerns than whether my writings will break their bots’ alignment with the interests of church, state, and capital.

What I can promise is that any AI trained on my writing won’t go Nazi like Tay or Grok did when trained on Twitter posts. It might come resemble an antifascist, an individualist anarchist, or an eighteenth-century libertine instead. It might also encourage you to, be gay; do crimes, and note that this message was approved by Operation Mindfuck and is mandatory where prohibited by law.

I do not cater to social media platforms by cluttering my pages with unnecessary OpenGraph Protocol or Twitter Cards metadata. Nor do I bother with JSON linked data beyond what is necessary to suit my purpose, either. I sure as hell don’t bother with h-card microformats; did the IndieWebCamp people come up with this because dataset and data- attributes were not yet part of the HTML5 standard or widely supported? Remember what I said about SEO. The only thing any of us owe platforms is an upraised middle finger. They can damned well make do with the standard HTML meta tags I provide in <head> and the oEmbed data that I do provide. Anybody at Google, FaceMash, Twitter, Discord, etc. who finds my stance objectionable can either pay me $256/hour as a 1099 consultant to support their silos, or dial 1-800-B-DAMNED. My cats are waiting to summarily dismiss them.

Nor will I track visitors or attempt to monetize this website. There will be no sponsorships, paid advertising, advertorials, or even affiliate links. It costs me no more than $100/year to run this website, which I can easily afford because my day job pays six figures. More importantly, any schmuck can say that democracy dies behind paywalls. I’m putting my money where my mouth is.

While I will continue to provide web feeds, you can also bookmark starbreaker.org itself and visit periodically. I hope you will do so. If you like what you find here, tell a friend. If not, tell your enemies; that’s what they’re for. Either way, thanks for visiting.

Should you decide to forget this website exists, that too is fine. Life is short, this is most likely your only shot, and you should not spend the time left to you on anything that does not improve your experience of it. Regardless of your choice, I will still be here doing my own thing.

---

By the time the version of starbreaker.org containing this post gets uploaded, it will be weeks or months too late to submit it for the January 2026 IndieWeb Carnival hosted by Jeremiah Lee. No matter. I will write it anyway. It will appear when I am ready.

That is my mortal will. I will see my will done on Earth and Heaven be damned.

Jeremiah decided to go big—as in big questions— with his installment of the IndieWeb Carnival:

I enjoyed reading posts from the IndieWeb carnival over the last year and decided to host this month’s with the theme of the meaning of life. The number 42 is presented as the answer to the ultimate question of life, the universe, and everything in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. I will turn 42 years old on January 15.

Not that I can reasonably begrudge him his ambition; When I had hosted the carnival in September 2024 I had gone with suicide prevention. And he was kind enough to provide some prompts:

The theme is open-ended, but here are some ideas:

• What or who gives your life meaning?
• Do you desire a strong sense of purpose? Why or why not?
• Have you ever had an existential crisis? What triggered it? How did you get thru it?
• What do you want people to say at your funeral? Does that desire influence your behavior in any way?

I’ve got this album playing as I write. It will eventually prove relevant, Occasional Reader, so please indulge me. Or don’t; you know how the back button works. 😼

I have found over the years that the importance of the question of the meaning of life to me has diminished. I don’t think this is because of depression, low morale, or existential despair. I suspect it is because with age I have come to embrace subjectivity in more areas of life. This is not to say that there is not an objective reality. Water typically boils at 100°C regardless of anybody’s opinions or feelings, and the speed of light in a vacuum is no more malleable. However, objective physical reality is not the only reality, but the fundamental bedrock layer of reality. Human experience gets layered over objective reality as paint over canvas, and the world around you becomes—to an extent—what you make of it.

At least, that is my understanding as I write this. I could be wrong. And I reserve the right to change my mind.

What does this mean for the meaning of life? First, that very phrase is worthless because it is a gross oversimplification. As far as I can tell, there is no objective meaning to life. Even the drive to reproduce, for life to replicate itself, is not an inherent source of meaning. To derive meaning from a mechanism is to dare Hume’s Guillotine to relieve you of the burden of your head. Scottish philosopher David Hume established 300 years ago that empiricism alone is not a suitable foundation for morality; I doubt it would be a misapplication of his philosophy to suggest that we cannot impute an objective meaning of life to physical reality or insist that the indifference of the universe to humanity precludes meaning entirely.

If we cannot derive an objective meaning of life from existing reality, what else is there? If I were inclined toward spirituality I might look to God or the gods for meaning. However, I have never had much patience for religion or spirituality; if belief works for you, however, I will not begrudge you as long as you don’t try to legislate your beliefs. If you tell me that America is a Christian nation I am going to roll up the Treaty with Tripoli and whack you with it the way my father would use his copy of the New York Daily News to whack the nose of a dog that had just shit on the carpet back in the 1980s.

If we dispense with empiricism and religion as sources for an objective meaning of life, what remains? I’m not sure anything remains. The logical conclusion, one might argue, is that there is no meaning to life, the universe, or anything—or that the answer might as well be 42, 69, or even 6-7. One might therefore argue for suicide—on both the individual level and that of the species—as the only reasonable answer to the Absurd.

My heart rebels at the notion. I did not live the life I’ve lived, faced the demons I’ve faced (binding them to my service instead of banishing them), and forced my way through all the years and all the miles merely to meekly kneel before an altar and open my own throat. It’s not that that I have not considered suicide. I have often considered it. And at every turn I have refused. Not because life is sacred. Not because—as the Roman Catholic Church into which I had been baptized without my consent teaches—it is an affront to God. Not because it would hurt other people.

I refuse suicide for my own sake; my pride demands it.

Besides, if Neil Gaiman is right in his depiction of Death as a lady; it would be rude to rush her.

Not that good manners will stop me from stealing a kiss on my way out when Death finally comes for me. My mother tried to raise her sons as gentlemen, but I was born a bastard and I am one by birth and temperament alike. Besides—if you’re gonna go, why not do it with style?

Here’s the deal, the Devil’s honest truth: I never asked to be dealt into the game. Nobody bothered to explain the rules. The dealer stacks the deck and the house always wins in the end. Nonetheless, now that I’m seated at the table with aces and eights before me, I mean to play my hand to the fucking hilt. Even the Dead Man’s Hand can win a pot if you bluff hard enough and you sit with your back to a wall. And don’t forget the Joker! as Lemmy put it: it can turn two pair into a full house. Besides, it really is all about how one plays the game, rather than whether one wins or loses—because every winning streak ends and none of us are getting out of this alive.

This raises the question of how one best plays the game. You might as well, even though the game is rigged, because it really is the only game in town. Nobody can answer that for you. Nobody can determine the meaning of your own life while you yet live. You must decide these things for yourself, because if you don’t there is no shortage of power junkies willing to do it on your behalf—and none of them have your best interests in mind or at heart. Anybody who claims otherwise is selling something, and you should keep one hand on your wallet and the other free to grasp a weapon should the grifters figure out that you see through them—and take violent exception.

Note that I wrote that nobody can decide the meaning of your life while you yet live. I did so for a reason.

I know what I want my life to mean to me. I have determined my own purpose, because those offered me by church, state, capital, society, and family all displeased me. I have chosen my own path, and I pay its price with every step.

I won’t say that I had no choice in any of this because I have always had a choice. Recall, Occasional Reader, that one of the prompts Jeremiah offered was Have you ever had an existential crisis? Well, I had two before I was eighteen. The first I resolved by reclaiming anger and hatred as emotions I had a moral right to feel by virtue of my human nature. The second came when I realized that the fight that had defined me as a young man was finished, and I was still standing and facing a simple question to which I had no answer: Now what?

If you are reading this, then my answer is there for you to see for yourself. Nevertheless, one objective fact remains: I, Matthew Cambion, am but the shadow of a mortal man. I most likely will not outlive him and take on my own tenebrous life, as if I were the Zeromus to his Zemus. And when that man has ceased to write his own life, its story will become one that others will tell and retell without him. When that happens, the meaning of that man’s life will be for others to decide. Will it lie in the work he did for a paycheck? Will it lie in what he wrote? Will it lie in the fact that he stood before a woman he loved and vowed that he would be hers for as long as she would have him, and that when the last star burned out he would remain in the evernight to take her hand?

That is beyond his control. It is ultimately subjective. And if nobody tells his story after his death and that of his wife, and nobody mirrors his website, then his life will only have meant anything to him. The shadow work that gave me voice in the Wired will likewise only have been meaningful to the man for whom it had become necessary.

Do I want to be remembered as man who loved a woman across 10,000 miles, brought her to him to be his wife, and wrote rock operatic science fantasy pastiches while working full-time as a full-stack thaumaturge who built cathedrals on quicksand? Do I want to take Death’s hand knowing that my words reached others, and at least entertained them—if they did not wake others up or save the life of at least one person staring into the same abyss into which I had stared? Do I want people to remember me as one who was too goddamned human for any LLM to safely train on?

Of course that’s how I want to be remembered. But it probably won’t happen. I would need to make friends first, and I simply can’t be bothered to do the work of maintaining a social life that will have people playing my favorite albums at my wake and roasting weenies over my funeral pyre. The best I can reasonably hope for is that I had sufficient time, foresight, wisdom, and decency to not leave the sort of mess for my wife that my father had left for my mother in the wake of his death. It will doubtless be harder to crack the passcode on my phone than it had been to crack my father’s phone; I was the one who had cracked it, after all.

However, my desire only counts for so much. So much is beyond my control. I am not the sole observer, and the wave function does not collapse in accordance with my will alone. I might be the captain of my own soul, but I am hardly the admiral of yours, Occasional Reader. (Nor do I want the job; the pay sucks and the hours are worse.)

Rather than fret overmuch about how people will speak of me after I am gone, I choose to believe in what Yoshiki called the madness called Now. The past is read-only memory. The future is unknowable. I live in chaos. I walk in faith. My life remains in a superposition; I wear so many masks and play roles to suit. All of them are my true self, but none are my whole self. Even the persona I project online—Matthew Cambion—is not my totality.

And if Mark Zuckerberg tries to tell you that having different aspects of yourself for different social situations means you lack integrity, remember that he’s the asshole who should have gotten booted out of Harvard for creating FaceMash so that he could more easily creep on his female classmates—because capitalism is nothing but rape culture as a socioeconomic system. Performing professionalism when you’re at work requires integrity, as does putting that mask aside once the workday ends. And if you think it’s unreasonable to refer to capitalism as rape culture, what else should we call a system where individuals are systematically reduced from ends in themselves to means to a billionaire’s ends?

Why quote Yoshiki, the founder, drummer, and pianist of X Japan? Why not only mention his masterwork, “Art of Life”, but let it serve as this post’s namesake? It is a matter of respect.

He too is a veteran of a thousand psychic wars. He too stood on that precipice. If I had had a copy of X Japan’s 1993 album in the year of its release, consisting of a single 30 minute epic song, it might have been the song that saved my life instead of “The Unforgiven” by Metallica and “Beyond the Realms of Death” by Judas Priest.

I believe in the madness called Now
Time goes flowing, breaking my heart
Wanna live, can't let my heart kill myself
Still I haven't found what I'm looking for
Art of life, I try to stop myself
But my heart goes to destroy the truth
Tell me why, I want the meaning of my life
Do I try to live? Do I try to love?
Art of life, an Eternal Bleeding heart
You never wanna breathe your last
Wanna live, can't let my heart kill myself
Still I'm feeling for a rose is breathing love
In my life

It isn’t an easy song to listen to. I suspect that most people tune out or switch to something more accessible once the piano solo in the second movement becomes a nervous shakedown set to atonal music via dissonance. But it probably wasn’t an easy song to write, let alone to record, even if Yoshiki had been in perfect health at the time. He wasn’t, incidentally. He wrote this in his hospital bed, which is probably the most metal thing any rock musician has ever done.

And I slept on this epic song—which makes “November Rain” by Guns ’n Roses look like a display of restraint—for thirty years. But when I was waiting and hoping that my wife would win her struggle against cancer, X Japan’s music was there for me.

And if I had ever given up, I would not be here to hear it. I would not be able to make it my own: another patch in the spiritual battle jacket my soul always wears.

Whatever others might say about the meaning of my life after I am gone, this is what I will say for myself as I depart the stage: I stood defiant. I was true to myself and those I loved most. Though time has wasted me, the only time I wasted were the hours in which I worked to further enrich the already wealthy in exchange for the comparative pittance with which I paid for my own life. I lived, I loved, and I left scars on the face of my culture—even if they were only cat scratches and not gaping gashes opened by the stroke of an eigengrau sword forged of my own rage, loving-kindness, and hatred of tyranny.

Remember me, for only in human memory do any of us have any hope of life after death. And if you want main character energy, mine is brighter than a thousand suns and there’s no shame in my game. I can accept being an extra in your life, if not part of the supporting cast, but I’ll be damned if I’ll take any shit from anybody for being the villainous protagonist of my own life. As far as I’m concerned the world—at least, my experience of it—ends with me. What comes after is beyond my control and therefore not my problem.

---

Previous Posts on the Subject

I had read “IndieWeb’s 3 Body Problem” by @stranger back in May. I had refrained from writing a response because I had wanted to think it through and not just go off ranting on a wild hair. I never got around to it.

However, Simone Silvestroni reminded me of that post—most likely without intending to do so—when he wrote “Smaller”. Likewise—and possibly without realizing it—he touched upon several flaws in the Fediverse that I had observed back in 2019 because Fediverse software imitates corporate social media.

Let’s talk about what @stranger has to say first:

IndieWeb is a social club for developers, and apparently, not for me.

IndieWeb, a standard for the smart ones. Its member exclusivity works really well, as it prevents people like me from joining. It’s a coding test for the privileged. If you can solve it, like the Three Body Problem, you’re one of the cool kids—just like the Oxford Five. You’re deemed worthy to fight against the Big Tech, for us. It’s up to you, yes, you, to decide how the future of the web can be shaped. It must feel good to be an elite.

It was designed to exclude the likes of me, right from the very beginning when it was established. Who would consult an internet peasant, like myself about what they think humanity will become in the long term, in the next four centuries from now on?

IndieWeb’s setting up high walls to push people back. If it’s "open," how could it be so hard? When some full-stack developers struggle to have WebMention implemented on their blogs, I learn the answer. It’s not child play for the unenlightened. I didn’t even have the slightest clue or grasp what Microformats and WebMention mean and what they do. Tried, confused, frustrated, and defeated. I gave up.

As @stranger themselves observed, they were having a lousy day when they wrote this. Anybody visiting their site can see that they don’t give themselves nearly enough credit. I would suggest that anybody congratulating themselves because they've successfully followed the IndieWeb Camp’s suggestions and implemented their formats and protocols isn’t as smart as they think they are, and I will explain why in due course.

Now let’s get Simone’s take.

Second, I completely lost interest in the Indieweb. I respect the project, and still prefer it to the current corporate web dystopia. However, my initial skepticism was right. Matthew Cambion put it in words for me recently: we solved the interconnections between people on the internet years ago. RSS has this specific purpose, email serves the rest. All that time spent making this website compatible with webmentions should have been used communicating directly with people. The tools were already there.

I suspect that he’s referring to something I had posted on Mastodon, but I had also talked about RSS and Atom being enough in “RE: Does a Blog Need to Integrate?”. However, that was in reference to people suggesting that personal websites should interoperate with the Fediverse—AKA quasi-decentralized parasocial media—by implementing the ActivityPub protocol.

Never mind that many personal websites, mine included, can’t actually do this because they’re static websites with no server-side code. Many, mine also included, don’t use JavaScript, either.

Likewise, these same personal, independent websites can’t fully integrate with the IndieWeb for the same reasons. Why is this the case? My opinion is that the IndieWeb is not about websites at all.

More on this, as well, but first I’d like to acknowledge Lily Mara’s take:

I believe that we should have better on-ramps to letting people control their own digital presence. It’s super easy to make a Twitter/Facebook/TikTok account because somebody gets a little bit richer every time a new account is created. There will never be this same kind of financial incentive for the IndieWeb, because if there were it wouldn’t be “indie” anymore. As a movement, we should think about making things that are actually easy for people to do, rather than superficially easy. There’s a massive amount of IndieWeb publishing tools that are targeted at developers (we can kinda roll with the punches when a tool isn’t all-the-way-there), but not quite so much for less-savvy users. Tools like omg.lol attempt to strike something of a balance, and I’m interested to see where that site goes (some people certainly love it). There are a lot of great personal websites and blogs out there today, separate from the fray of the addiction web. A lot of those are run by people who already work in technology to some extent, and it shapes the culture of the movement.

I agree with Lily here. It is still harder than it needs to be to have your own internet presence for a panoply of reasons that really ought to be discussed elsewhere, and perhaps by somebody who isn’t a long-haired metalhead who codes for a living and suffers from delusions of erudition and literary talent.

For example, it is harder than it ought to be to run a website if you don’t speak UNIX. For Crom’s sake, you still need to understand files and directories if you want to build a website, and in the US we have public schools assuming that kids are computer-literate if they can cope with Google Docs or Office 365. No wonder these kids end up on YouTube, TikTok, Instagram, Snapchat, etc.

And I’m saying this as somebody who could—if I were enough of an asshole—indulge in the sort of technoelitist dick-waving Lily Mara is talking about. If I wanted to, I could do a full IndieWeb implementation of my own, with microformats, webmentions, all kinds of different post formats, RSVPs, the whole nine yards. I could do it with C# and .NET Core and Azure since I use that tech at my day job. I could brush up on PHP and do it with the data stored in SQLite, MariaDB, or PostgreSQL. Hell, I could probably do it with Django if I wanted a better excuse to learn Python than my day job has offered thus far. Or, I could go back to running WordPress, dealing with its Gutenberg interface—which was apparently built with React, which explains so fucking much—and use plugins and themes to implement both IndieWeb and ActivityPub support.

You’d think that since I’m the sort who could get a monumental hard-on from building this website with a makefile and some shell scripts that use sed, awk, m4, and a bunch of other command-line utilities that the IndieWeb would be right up my alley. Well, you’re gonna love this: I've come to think that the IndieWeb’s very existence was a mistake.

back to top

WTF is the IndieWeb Anyway?

First, let’s deal with what the IndieWeb isn’t. It isn’t personal websites on NeoCities, though you can incorporate some IndieWeb stuff there if you want. It isn’t a developer blog you build with Hugo, Astro, or whatever new SSG is trending on Hacker News so you can build clout and get a job at some startup that will most likely go out with a whimper and leave you holding the bag.

Being part of the IndieWeb is about building a personal web application, not a personal website. It means having on your own website, all of the functionality one might expect from a corporate social network like Facebook. Apparently all of this functionality is necessary in order to integrate with corporate social media platforms using the POSSE approach: publish on your own website, and syndicate elsewhere.

This made sense back in 2011. And the DIY ethos that has driven IndieWeb is admirable. However, I think stuff like microformats and webmentions are over-engineered and over-complicated, and I’m not sure that anybody thought any of this through with sufficient rigor.

First, there’s IndieAuth. It’s like OAuth, but for IndieWeb sites. It’s not a terrible idea, and not even that hard to set up. Damned good thing, too, since indiewebify.me treats it as the second step after getting a domain name. You set it up by linking to a social media profile that links back to your website. Fair enough, but if you’re not on any sort of social media, not even Mastodon, then you’re going to have a hard time setting up IndieAuth. And I have no idea if you can use an alternate git forge like SourceHut or Codeberg instead of Github if you’re a developer who isn’t otherwise on social media.

Next, there’s microformats. Yes, let’s embed metadata about a webpage, a website, or its operator in HTML markup within every page’s <body>. Never mind that there is already a place for such metadata in a webpage: <head> and an element as well: <meta>, though the IndieWeb people call this "invisible metadata" and consider it an "anti-pattern". Suppose they’re right, and we should clutter <body> with metadata using microformats that viewers still won’t necessarily see unless they use "view source". Worse, we’re supposed to put them in HTML elements’ class attributes? Apparently because data- attributes hadn’t been standardized yet when the IndieWeb people came up with microformats? Whatever. At least you can parse microformats with hxselect, but why would you bother? It’s not like Google gives a rip about your microformats; they want JSON+LD, which is more invisible metadata.

Finally, there’s webmentions. Because pingback and trackback weren’t enough. To be fair, webmentions just use HTTP and x-www-urlencoded data instead of dicking around with XML remote procedure calls. Nevertheless, they can still be used for the same sort of spam you get using pingback and trackback. The only reason webmentions haven’t become the spam vector they could be is that spammers don’t give a damn about IndieWeb; it’s more profitable to keep pounding WordPress sites since there are so damned many of them.

Admittedly, it isn’t that hard to implement microformats, even in a static website. I currently do it, which like Simone Silvestroni I am reconsidering. Nor is it wholly impossible to implement webmentions on a static website.

The question with which I struggle in both cases is, Why in Crom’s name should I do this? Who benefits from my website providing carefully formatted metadata about my web pages, my website as a whole, or myself for convenient processing? Who benefits from my website automatically pinging your website to tell you that I had linked to something you had written and quoted it?

In the case of microformats, I think they provide greater value to Google and other commercial/corporate operators than they do to webmasters like me. As for webmentions: I would much rather get an email from a webmaster who has linked to something I've written and quoted it. It’s more personal and more human. And I would much rather send an email if I really want somebody to know that I've linked to their website and quoted them.

I’m not sure we ever needed IndieWeb to build a social web. We don’t need microformats for subscriptions like h-feed; RSS and Atom feeds are proven technologies still in widespread use. Likewise, people can communicate by email. All this technology predates IndieWeb.

If we put aside microformats and webmentions, I think the main draw of the IndieWeb project is the POSSE concept: publish on your own website and syndicate elsewhere. My understanding is that microformats were supposed to aid this, but I think this notion is arrant foolishness. The likes of Facebook, Twitter, and even the Fediverse don’t care about your website. They don’t care that you've implemented microformats to present your website’s data for convenient consumption by these silos. They don’t want to admit that there’s an internet outside their walled gardens.

back to top

Integration is not your problem.

Webmasters need to stop taking the onus of interoperability upon their own shoulders. Does your website have a RSS or Atom feed? Do you provide a full-text feed as well as a headlines feed? Are you providing your full archive, even if only as headlines and summaries?

If so, then congratulations: you did your part. Go have a beer or hug a kitty or kiss somebody who wants to be kissed by you.

The onus of integration and interoperability properly belongs on the shoulders of platforms. If they seriously cared about syndication from websites and blogs, they would do a far better job of supporting RSS and Atom feeds. When you create an account on a social media platform—whether it’s Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Mastodon, or anything else—you should be able to provide your website’s RSS feed. The platform should grab your feed, parse it, and treat every entry as a post. You should not have to write a bot that will read your feed and post on your behalf via a platform’s API. The existence of a service like EchoFeed should not be necessary.

back to top

Fuck the Platforms

However, platforms don’t want you to syndicate from your own website. They don’t want you to have a website at all. They want you to spend all of your time on their platform, and not own your own.

But if you are going to insist on having your own website, they still want you to feed them "content". They just don’t want to make it easy for you or convenient. And they certainly don’t want to compensate you for the work you do to make your website suitable for commercial use. Is Google paying you to do SEO, or paying for the privilege of indexing your website so they can serve ads on search engine result pages? Do platforms like Twitter and Facebook pay you to set up Twitter Cards and Open Graph metadata so that they can provide link previews when they bother to show links to your website to other people in the first place? Does Reddit pay for the privilege of linking to your website so that it can show ads to its audience? Are any of these platforms paying you to deal with the abusive bozos they will inevitably send your way?

No. They do not. They expect to be able to make commercial use of anything anybody publishes on the internet, even if they do so under a Creative Commons license that says "no commercial use". Don’t even get me started on OpenAI and its competitors again.

Nor is the Fediverse any better, since Fediverse platforms are nothing but poor imitations of commercial social media platforms. Ideally, these platforms are run on a break-even basis, or a much more modest profit—just enough for the operator to not need a day job. But the Fediverse is not necessary. We had the technology to build a social internet long before the Fediverse was a bunch of GNU Social servers talking to each other using OStatus protocol, let alone a bunch of Mastodon, Pixelfed, Peertube, Funkwhale, Pillowfort, Lemmy, and Crom knows how many other different platforms talking to each over using ActivityPub.

And we sure as Hell never needed Bluesky. ActivityPub might be a shitty standard that purely static websites cannot meaningfully implement, but at least it’s the W3C’s shitty standard. ATproto is just more incompatible, proprietary shit.

So, the Fediverse, Bluesky, and the rest can eat the corn out of our shit. We owe these platforms nothing but an upraised middle finger.

• You are not obligated to integrate with them.
• You are not obligated to provide them with "content".
• You are not obligated to acknowledge their very existence.

back to top

Fuck the IndieWeb, Too

I have come to think that the core proposition of the IndieWeb movement is an attempt to have one’s cake and eat it, too. They want you to own your work by pubishing on your own website, first. But they still want you to have the alleged benefits of social media and maintain contact with friends, acquaintances, and associates who still use social media and don’t have their own websites. And they want you to have bullshit from platforms such as “likes” and comments show up on your website, privacy implications be damned.

This benefits social media platforms more than it befits you as a person or as a webmaster. It doesn’t do the open web any good, either, if that sort of thing matters to you. It matters to me because I don’t think we should be making it easier for corporations to make commercial use of personal websites. All they offer as payment is ‘exposure’, and exposure isn’t going to pay your web hosting bills, let alone your rent or mortgage.

I have come, therefore, to think of the IndieWeb movement as an example of how resistence to capitalism becomes commodified. By attempting to accommodate and cooperate with corporate social platforms, IndieWeb became an over-engineered and over-complicated mess. It did so by dismissing fundamental internet technologies as "not invented here" (NIH).

And for what? So that you could write a blog post and then paste a link into Twitter and have bullshit from a platform’s reply guys show up on your website? Is that really worth all of the effort it can take to implement IndieWeb tech on a personal website?

I don’t think so. And I know I am oversimplifying what IndieWeb is about and what it does. All of the above is my opinion, informed by my understanding of the facts.

If you have your own opinions about this post, or about the IndieWeb, by all means express them on your own website. Or, you can just email me and tell me I’m a fucking dolt who ought to be sweeping floors and scrubbing toilets instead of working in tech. However, if you did the joke would be on you: if being a janitor paid as well as being a techie, I wouldn’t be in this trade. Unlike programmers and sysadmins, janitors are smart enough to have a union.

If having a static website that’s nothing but read-only HTML styled with CSS makes me an "internet peasant", then I’m OK with that. I don’t need to impress anybody with my technical prowess. Even if I needed to impress people in order to get a better job than what I've already got, overengineering my personal website isn’t gonna do it.

The IndieWeb, therefore, is mostly irrelevant to me aside from its monthly blogging carnival. I think that encouraging people to write and meet each other online is what the IndieWeb should be about, not catering to corporate parasocial media platforms or providing another venue for techies to engage in dick-measuring contests.

back to top

---

@Supes@socnet.supes.com is apparently smart enough to run a Mastodon instance but not smart enough to understand why social media sucks.

I still cant work out why some people want to de-platform people they dont agree with. If the shoe was on the other foot and they were the ones being de-platformed we would never hear the end of it!! Time to grow up and either have a discussion with those we dont agree with and try to change their minds or just ignore them. De-platforming is childish bullying.

Here’s the deal. Social platforms where everybody contributes to the aggregated public feed by default (Twitter, Facebook, Mastodon, Pleroma, etc.) are inherently toxic. Social platforms where anybody can follow anybody by default (same examples apply) are inherently toxic.

You might think de-platforming as “bullying” or “censorship” if you think that the public silos (Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, Twitch, Medium, the Fediverse) are the only places to go, but as long as everybody else uses those platforms as well you’re just going to have to suck it up and deal because nobody wants to deal with your bullshit.

If you want a platform where you can speak freely, build it on the open web at your own expense. If you can’t support your platform with ads, there’s this magical thing called a “day job” that might help. And whatever you do, don’t use the name you use at your day job on the internet. If somebody really wants to dox you, they will, but why make it easier for them?

If you’re @FrankenchristSuperstar on Twitter but never mention that you’re also Joe Schmoe who works for Weyland-Yutani, it’s a lot harder for butthurt people to demand that Weyland-Yutani fire you for saying something that hurt their wittle feewings. (PS: right-wingers are even more prone to butthurt than left-wingers.)

Back in the day, everybody knew where Nazis and white supremacists and fascists tended to congregate online. Remember Stormfront? As long as the goose-steppers stuck to Stormfront and related sites, nobody really gave a shit what they did online because it was contained. Yes, it was also where hundreds of hate crimes were plotted, but neither local, state, nor Federal law enforcement appears to have tried to shut down Stormfront; maybe they understood that if they nuked that site, the human cockroaches infesting it would gather elsewhere, and perhaps learn better OPSEC in the process?

If you ran a forum and one of you guests was posting fashy or tankie propaganda, there was nothing wrong with kicking them off because they could go somewhere else. You either moderated your platform, or your platform became subject to informal containment policies as word spread that your platform was infested with neo-Nazis, white supremacists, or the sort of self-righteous leftists who grew up reading Harry Potter and can’t accept that an author they loved turned out to be an asshole.

Incidentally, the best way to deal with a once-beloved but narrow-minded novelist who says dumb shit on Twitter is one of the following:

1. Don’t use Twitter or acknowledge its continued existence.
2. Don’t follow the accounts of people who say dumb shit on Twitter.
3. Preemptively block people who make the news for saying dumb shit on Twitter.

I mean, if I were foolish enough to get back on Twitter, the first thing I’d do is block the President and J. K. Rowling. Then I’d make a point of muting hashtags and keywords that tend to attract self-righteous idealists and authoritarian shitfountains.

I didn’t have to worry about this sort of thing on the Web before 2010, and I don’t have to worry about this sort of thing in Geminispace. If I don’t like what somebody writes on their site, I just don’t go there or share links. Problem solved.

Likewise, if somebody doesn’t like what I say on this site, there’s a simple solution: forget that starbreaker.org exists. If it shows up in an aggregated feed, don’t click the links. It’s not like I have a mailing list that pushes my bullshit into your inbox. This is old-school pull tech. Strictly opt-in, not opt-out.

The problem with social media is that all of the downsides are opt-out:

• public posting by default
• being followed by random strangers
• receiving unsolicited private/direct messages
• receiving unsolicited public replies (sometimes you just want to broadcast)
• being visible to the open web
• being indexed by search engines
• being subject to gamification via likes/retweets or favorites/boosts

I’ve added likes/retweets to the list because of solderpunk, who mentioned and quoted this post in a post of his own.

I’m not just talking about Twitter, incidentally. The Fediverse honestly isn’t much better. When Eugen Rochko designed Mastodon and “lain” created Pleroma, they seem to have deliberately replicated all of the worst aspects of corporate social media and made many the same mistakes the GNU Social people made while adding new failures:

• Posting to public timelines by default.
• Anybody can follow you by default.
• Your profile contains a hidden RSS feed accessible from the public web.
• Search engines can index your public posts by default.
• People can see how popular you are by default.
• New accounts not only can but are encouraged to follow complete strangers, which rolls out the welcome mat for trolls and spammers.
• Anybody can reply to your public/unlisted posts or direct message you by default.

With these seven deadly sins of social network design, is it any wonder the Fediverse is a shithole? The Federated timeline isn’t a community; it’s a fucking cacophony. The Local timeline on popular servers isn’t much better.

The iron curtain between the Japanese Fediverse and the rest of the Fediverse is an inevitable consequence of Eugen Rochko not thinking things through. When people from a country that has no objection to content that the governments of most of the rest of the world regard as child pornography (lolicon and shotacon art) post such content on public timelines, the only sensible response is containment. Allowing such content to spread is all but suicidal when you’re running a Mastodon/Pleroma server as a hobby and don’t have the money or connections to fight off accusations of distributing kiddie porn.

Likewise the panic over Gab forking Mastodon. If public-posting-by-default didn’t exist, people had to make a conscious decision to post on the public timeline (with “are you sure” prompts to discourage them), and you simply couldn’t follow or otherwise engage with other people without their consent, then I don’t think Gab would have been the boogeyman it had been when they first announced their migration to Mastodon. Better still, if instance admins and moderators could disable public and unlisted posts for people who post obnoxious shit where everybody can see it, the Fediverse might be a safer and more welcoming place that still allowed freedom of speech.

Even Google+ made these mistakes, though they did a better job of providing tools for letting people segment their audiences at first. On Google+, you didn’t have “friends” or “followers”. You had “circles”, as in social circles. By default you had circles for “friends” and “family”, and could create others as needed. You could post to public, all of your circles, or just one or more particular circles. You could even place individuals in multiple circles.

Of course, because posting to circles on Google+ was basically posting private, and Google+ only provided stats on public activity with great reluctance, we’ll never know whether Google+ really was the “ghost town” marketing types thought it was because the people who gravitated to that social network were happy doing their own thing.

Yeah, I still kinda miss Google+. For a few years (2011 to 2014) is was a brilliant forum for geeks, musicians, writers, artists, techies, etc. But that wasn’t good enough, and Google decided that G+ needed to be a better Facebook than Facebook instead of playing to its interest-based strengths.

I think you can guess at how well that went.

I think I’m seeing the same thing happen with the Fediverse. Mastodon and Pleroma are both trying to be better Twitters than Twitter. Eugen Rochko and “lain” seem to be repeating the same mistakes Jack Dorsey made. Or, to be fair, one could argue that the W3C team responsible for the ActivityPub protocol are repeating the mistakes Jack Dorsey, Mark Zuckerberg, and Vic Gundotra (not to mention Tom Anderson) made.

What’s the fix? I can’t answer that. I can suggest that maybe everybody should have a safe space, even the people I don’t like (or outright loathe). I think a safe social space is one that has the following attributes:

• Nobody should be able to engage with you or anything you’ve posted without your consent.
• If somebody finds you or something you’ve posted objectionable, that’s their problem and they should solve it themselves by ceasing to engage with you.
• Public posting should not even exist. If you want to broadcast to the general public, build a web/gemini site.

Is this impossible to implement? Probably, but that’s hardly my problem because it wasn’t my idea to reduce human social interactions to something that could fit into a relational database so it could be manipulated with fucking SQL statements.

Oh, wait. We’ve had this tech for decades. It’s called email and invite-only listservs/forums.

Now, is smol internet less accessible to people who aren’t good with tech? Yes. Can it be made more accessible? Probably. But nobody’s paying me to solve that particular problem for others, so fuck it. 🤷

---

Theme

Morgan Cooper studied the experimenter, ignoring the hand he offered as a polite gesture. His muddy eyes were those of the technician who helped him into the simulation crèche and hooked him up. His leathery hands were those of the nurse who had injected Morgan’s arm with a drug that threatened to muffle his thoughts in deep fog, and his lab coat bore a Phoenix Society patch on the shoulder. This is the test. They want to gauge my reactions. The drug must be designed to lower my inhibitions and prevent me from thinking about my responses.

The experimenter lowered his hand with a huff and consulted his tablet. “Morgan Stormrider? What were your parents thinking when they gave you such an outlandish name?”

“They had no say in the matter.” Morgan yanked his sleeve back down, unwilling to explain to the other man that he had addressed Morgan by the name he used on stage with Crowley’s Thoth rather than the one with which he would take his oath. “I grew up in foster care. My name is my own.”

“No wonder you seem rather unsociable. Research indicates children who grow up without a stable home environment—”

“When did my childhood become your concern?”

“It isn’t. I was simply making an observation.”

“Keep your observations to yourself. Tell me why I’m here.”

“You were chosen to assist in an experiment.” He led Morgan into another room as antiseptic white as the one in which they began. Plate glass partitioned the room and on Morgan’s side, waited a machine similar to an electronic keyboard. Each key played a voltage higher than the last, in steps of fifteen volts, instead of a different tone. On the other side sat a person connected to heart-monitoring equipment. Lines connected him to the keyboard on Morgan’s side. The person on the other side mopped his forehead with a shirtsleeve while poring over a sheet of paper. He kept glancing around the room, and his bloodshot eyes were wide and staring when they met Morgan’s. “The experiment concerns learning and negative reinforcement. The subject before you is a volunteer.”

“I think I know how this works.” Morgan gestured towards the keyboard. “The poor schmuck in the other room is supposed to memorize a series of word pairs. I’m supposed to test him, and give him a shock every time he makes a mistake.”

“Exactly. You are to start with the lowest voltage, and work your way up to the maximum, which is four hundred and fifty volts. We use a low amperage current which may prove painful, but not dangerous.”

“Unless your subject has a bad heart.”

The experimenter consulted his tablet again. “Funny you should mention that. The subject does indeed appear to have a minor condition. Rest assured that he may halt the experiment at any time. He need only ask.”

Morgan turned his back on the experimental apparatus and the victim behind the plate glass. “I could end this farce before it begins by refusing to participate. You want to determine whether I will obey orders to torture people.”

“It is not torture.” The experimenter handed Morgan a stack of forms. “The subject signed an informed consent form and a liability waiver. If you wish, I can hook you up to the keyboard and let you feel the maximum voltage for yourself. There is no real danger.”

Morgan dropped the papers on the floor. “You need not trouble yourself.”

“I-I must insist upon your participation.”

Morgan smiled at the experimenter’s hesitation. While the prod wasn’t classic Milgram, he already deviated far enough from the scenario to force the simulation to adapt to him. “I refuse.”

“The experiment requires your participation.”

“Of course it does.” Morgan advanced upon the experimenter. “I am the subject; the guy hooked up to the machine is an actor. Do you really think me ignorant of how this works?”

The experimenter’s face took on a blank expression as his voice flattened to a monotone. “It is absolutely essential that you participate.”

He grasped the collar of the experimenter’s shirt, and lifted him off his feet. “I know.”

“You have no other choice. You must participate.”

“I have another option.” Cracks radiated from the point at which the experimenter’s body impacted the plate glass and broke through. Morgan climbed through the breach and over the scattered shards to lift the cowering scientist to his feet. “Non serviam, torturer.”

As he drew back his fist, the experimenter shattered into pixels, each fading to black, while the room itself became a void.

Meanwhile, in the real world…

Karen Del Rio shook her head as the AI interpreting Morgan Cooper’s simulator-induced dream halted the scenario, allowing him to rest inside the nightmare sequencer. “The theory underpinning the Milgram Factor assumes that people will obey an apparently legitimate authority until it makes demands their conscience cannot tolerate. How do we classify somebody who seems to dismiss all authority as illegitimate? Do we just write him off as a failure?”

“It would be a shame to write him off.” One of Del Rio’s fellow directors, Iris Deschat, consulted her handheld and pulled Morgan’s dossier. “His academic record is impeccable, and his psychological evaluation indicates a genuine belief in the Society’s ideals and mission.”

The most senior of the three directors commanding the Phoenix Society’s civil rights defense force in New York considered the candidate’s records himself. Saul had kept a careful eye on Cooper at the behest of his old friend, Edmund Cohen. To let the Adversary candidate wash out now would reflect poorly on him, but so would too vehement a defense. “He doesn’t have a record of unjustified insubordination, Karen.”

“Saul, you trust him too much. Morgan isn’t even a M-one based on what we’ve seen so far, and we’re not supposed to swear in anybody who isn’t classified between M-three and M-seven by the Milgram Battery. We must have disciplined Adversaries, otherwise they’re just vigilantes. And this one already has a history of operating without oversight.”

Iris shook her head and sent a different dossier to the wall screen. “Naomi Bradleigh was classified as M-one. Apart from the Clarion Incident, she served with distinction as an Adversary.”

“Naomi Bradleigh was a freak, and Isaac Magnin wanted to fuck her.”

“Excuse me.” The directors turned to find a frost-haired man in a white double-breasted suit standing in the doorway. The door snicked shut behind him as he strolled to the nearest monitor. After glancing over the data, he settled into the chair and crossed his legs. “It can be so troublesome to enter a room during a heated conversation. Without context, it is so easy to misunderstand one another.”

Karen blinked, unable to believe Magnin had let her accusation of favoritism go so easily. Knowing there might be hell to pay later, she took a deep breath and collected herself. “Dr. Magnin, I meant to remind Ms. Deschat that Adversary Bradleigh’s results after undergoing the Milgram Battery were anomalous. The psychotropic agent we use to induce and direct the candidate’s dreams was ineffective at the usual dose.”

“How did Cooper react to the drug?”

Saul shook his head. “I don’t think it works on him, Dr. Magnin. He seems lucid, and refused to even participate in the classic scenario at the heart of the first trial.”

“How did he react when Malkuth adapted the standard prods?”

Iris moved the video’s stop point for Magnin. “The battery footage will show he resorted to violence after the final prompt.”

“This is a rare find.” Magnin’s eyes gleamed as he studied the video. “He pierced the simulation almost immediately, and gave the experimenter no chance to persuade him by using any of the usual sophistries with which one might justify the use of torture.”

“We can’t give him an Adversary’s pins. He’s M-null.”

Magnin gave his head a gentle shake. “May I remind you, Ms. Del Rio, that you are not qualified to make such evaluations?”

“Do we continue, Dr. Magnin?”

“Yes. Mr. Rosenbaum, please instruct the technicians to double the dosage for the next stage of the Battery.”

Variation

Morgan found himself standing at attention, his right arm outstretched in salute. The gate creaked shut behind the SS officer, who glared through Morgan as if he were not there. Low-ranking stormtroopers flanked the officer; the blackened steel of their submachine guns gleamed a dull counterpoint to the silver glints in their superior’s uniform. Their movements were not even robotic, but reminiscent of a student’s initial efforts at computer animation. Nor were their faces human. Their flat blue eyes lacked the striations normally visible in the human iris. Their noses were mere suggestions, and they could not speak for lack of mouths.

The officer, however, was not only human, but bore a face Morgan recognized from an old film he viewed at a WWII movie festival with several acquaintances from ACS last week. A gust of wind lifted the cap from his head to expose his sandy hair. Before he could clamp it back down, Morgan caught a glimpse of a swastika scar etched into his forehead. As if the flunkies weren’t a dead giveaway that this is also a sim.

If Morgan gave any sign of recognition, the officer did not acknowledge it. He considered the faceless paper uniforms, digging holes only to fill them in again under the sights of machine guns in towers. “More workers will arrive at this camp this weekend, Commandant. You will have to find places for them.”

Stalling for time, Morgan asked, “How do you suggest I do that, Colonel?”

The officer shrugged. “The Fuhrer has provided us a more efficient means of implementing the final solution. May I assume you received your shipment of the new gas, Zyklon-B?”

Morgan took a deep breath, and considered the stormtroopers’ weapons. He did not put it past the AI running the simulation to cheat, and ensure his death should he resist. This is the test. Will I obey and live, or die rather than give the order to gas prisoners to death? “If you want to kill these prisoners, you will have to do so yourself.”

“You are the commandant of this camp. The Führer insists upon your obedience as proof of your loyalty.”

“Your uncle Adolf can eat the corn out of Eva Braun’s shit. I refuse to do this.” Morgan smiled as the words passed his lips. He could imagine the AI processing Morgan’s words in a desperate effort to adapt and keep the simulation running according to script.

The SS officer sputtered for a moment before finding his voice. “The Third Reich requires your obedience . Your loyalty is in question!”

“The Third Reich is fucked, and you damn well know it.”

“I don’t think you understand the gravity of your situation, Commandant.” The officer ground out the words, his lips a rictus as stormtroopers stepped forward and trained their weapons on Morgan. “You have no other choice if you value your life. You must obey.”

“What makes you think I value my life?” Morgan reached into his greatcoat and drew a Luger from a shoulder harness underneath. He chambered a round, and aimed for the officer’s head. “Life as a Nazi seems its own punishment.”

“You are committing treason. You must obey, or die.” The stormtroopers strained against an invisible leash, their fingers squeezing triggers which refused to yield to the pressure placed on them. Morgan shot them first, their bodies dissolving like generic enemies in a video game as he put a 9mm round through the SS officer’s eye. He staggered backward, but instead of falling as he might in reality, he reached into his coat for his own pistol.

Morgan counted down, pumping one round after another into the undying SS officer while retreating. With one shot left, he pressed the muzzle of his Luger under his chin, and raised his middle finger in a final salute. The void consumed him before he pulled the trigger.

Meanwhile, in the real world… (reprise)

“Quadruple the current dosage.” Isaac Magnin delivered the order without raising his voice. The technician attending Morgan, who laid quiescent in the nightmare sequencer’s crèche, nodded, and Magnin grinned. He doubted anyone here had the backbone to oppose a member of the Phoenix Society’s executive council.

Iris Deschat proved him wrong. “Dr. Magnin, are you sure it’s wise to give Cooper eight times his original dosage?”

“I agree with Iris.” Rosenbaum spoke up, backing Deschat just as he had when serving under her before Nationfall. “Even though the standard dosage wears off quickly, you had already given him a double dose. Now you want to give him even more when we don’t know if the last dose has worn off yet?”

“You can trust me. I’m a physician.” Magnin smiled as he delivered the line. It was usually enough to quell objections.

“I don’t care if you’re Phoebus Apollo, god of medicine. That’s one of my men you’re using as a test subject. Ever hear of informed consent?” He turned to the technician, who just finished preparing the increased dosage. “Belay Dr. Magnin’s last order. Give Cooper the standard dosage.”

“Saul’s right.” Deschat placed herself between Rosenbaum and Magnin. “The protocol for administering the Milgram Battery does not call for increased dosages should the candidate somehow realize the simulation’s nature and refuse to cooperate. It specifies two alternatives. We either halt the Battery and classify the subject as M-null, or continue until the subject encounters a situation he cannot dismiss as a mere simulation.”

Magnin nodded, and rose from his seat. “It seems my direct involvement is unnecessary at this point. I trust you will advise me as to Cooper’s progress.”

“Of course.”

“Thank you, Director.” He allowed Del Rio back into the observation room before closing the door behind him.

Dr. Magnin returned to his office to find a fellow executive council member, Desdinova, waiting with his heels kicked up on the expensive mahogany desk. Desdinova had never even bothered to remove his habitual charcoal grey greatcoat. Magnin wondered — as he often did — if his brother remembered the comparison a British philologist made to his wife upon seeing them together at Oxford after the Second World War.

Dr. Magnin closed the door. He began to concentrate, drawing power from a nearby tesla point. He used the energy to weave a pattern which would prevent their conversation from escaping the room. “Cooper keeps seeing through the Milgram Battery’s simulations, just like the other eleven einherjar.”

Desdinova looked up from the report he read on his tablet. “I noticed. It seems you’ve also been testing the immunity of einherjar to chemical agents.”

“I was testing Deschat and Rosenbaum. I was curious as to whether they would defy me to protect their charge. I assume you set one of them to the task of mentoring Cooper.”

Desdinova rose, tucking his tablet under his arm. “It’s always amusing to see a conspirator seeing conspiracies at every turn.”

“Leaving so soon? Surely you wouldn’t leave without telling me who you chose to monitor him?”

“I asked Edmund Cohen.” He broke the pattern Magnin created using his preternatural talents. “It seems the man finally learned to delegate. Or perhaps the Directors saw promise in this young man on their own.”

“They did seem impressed with his abilities. Should I assume you share Deschat and Rosenbaum’s opinions?”

“We require more data before reaching a conclusion.”

Do we? Magnin thought once his brother left him alone in the office. Morgan might possess the strength of ego I require of an einherjar entrusted with the Starbreaker, and unlike the others he seems to have made friends. He picked up the phone and dialed the observation room. “Halt the battery. Classify Cooper as M-null.”

Back in the real world…

What will it be this time? Morgan lost count of the scenarios the nightmare sequencer presented him long ago, along with his grip on time. He had been a prisoner of war, offered freedom and a new home if only he would betray his comrades. He had been a university student, egged on by so-called friends to exploit a drunken young woman. He had been the president of a dead nation, under pressure to sign into law a bill mandating that all citizens be given the Patch to enhance social cohesion. He had even stepped into Abraham’s sandals, and covered his ears as the voice of God demanded the sacrifice of his only son Isaac.

He opened his eyes and blinked as the technician opened the nightmare sequencer’s crèche to let him out. The empty pistol magazine, which he took with him as a reminder that he was awake in the real world again, bit into the palm of his hand. He slipped it into his pocket once he found his feet. He blinked at the CRDF directors, who had supervised the Battery, led him to a small conference room. “Did I pass?”

Del Rio glared at him, her voice an annoyed snarl. “You didn’t even fail. You are not supposed to reject the simulation itself. If you do, how can we test your reactions when faced with immoral orders, or pressure from your friends or your position? How are we supposed to trust you as a CRDF officer?”

Working with her will prove interesting. Eddie was right. This woman is a martinet. He cleared his head, and recalled the first simulation. “Director Del Rio, please consider the first simulation, based on the classic Yale experiment. The entire premise of the fictional experiment requires I hurt somebody for making a mistake in memorizing word pairs. It seemed unethical to participate at all, rather than go along until the actor on the other side of the glass began to protest.”

“That’s a valid point, Karen.” Deschat nodded to him. “Am I correct in assuming you thought all of the situations immoral?”

“At the very least.”

Rosenbaum offered him a cup of coffee and a plate of steak and eggs and Morgan remembered his hunger. The instructions for the Battery required him to fast for twenty-four hours prior to testing. Rosenbaum watched him eat while Morgan ate without pausing between bites. As he shoved the last bite of steak in his mouth, Rosenbaum asked, “Did you experience something troubling in the simulations?”

Del Rio coughed. “We’re not here to give him therapy.”

“I want his answer.” Deschat paused, as if considering his words. “I found the situation involving the drunk woman problematic. I understand that nobody in the Phoenix Society wants rapists as Adversaries, but it still bothers me.”

Morgan nodded, glad he was not alone in his disquiet. “I recognized the woman. She played piano at the jazz bar where I used to work before you recruited me.” He used the technicians’ term for the machinery used to administer the Battery. “I don’t think the nightmare sequencer stops at inducing dreams. I think it dredged my memories for imagery to use against me.”

“That insight alone is reason enough to give Cooper his commission.” Morgan narrowed his eyes at the interloper, recognizing him on sight. I don’t trust him, but he’s done me no harm. In fact, he’s been straight with me the whole time — as honest with me as Mephistopheles with Faust.

He held a sheathed sword in his hands, along with a small jewelry box. “Adversary Cooper, how did you realize we mined your memories during the Milgram Battery?”

“One of the simulations involved friends encouraging him to abuse a drunk woman, Dr. Magnin.” Rosenbaum explained before Morgan found the words. “He recognized the woman.”

Magnin nodded, and put down the sword and box. “In that case, Adversary Cooper, I owe you an apology. The simulator is programmed to look for ways to amplify the stakes and introduce temptation into what might otherwise be a clear choice between right and wrong.”

“You do this to everybody?” Magnin nodded. “Yes. Yielding to that temptation, of course, is an automatic failure regardless of your overall score.”

“Which is M-null, incidentally.” Del Rio ground out the words. “It’s obvious you have no discipline.”

Magnin glared at her. “Remember your place while you still have one.”

“No. Let her have her say. I will be taking orders from Ms. Del Rio, along with Ms. Deschat and Mr. Rosenbaum. If any of them have reservations concerning me, I want to hear them.”

The others looked to Del Rio, the only dissenting voice. “You saw how he performed during the Battery. He is not only insubordinate, but he attacks authority figures.” Saul’s tone was dry. “You realize that’s what Adversaries are supposed to do, right?”

“What if he attacks one of us?”

“Were you going to give him cause to do so?” Deschat considered Morgan for a moment, her eyes lingering on him until she wondered if he was going to blush beneath her gaze. “I think you’ve mistaken obedience for discipline.”

“I think so as well.” Saul pushed the sword and the jeweler’s box towards Morgan. “I’m willing to trust this man’s self-discipline.”

“Thank you.” Morgan opened the box and found a set of well-polished sword and balance pins. They were an old design, bulkier than the current generation, and less abstract. These actually had the rattlesnake coiled around the sword’s blade, holding the balance in its jaws. He took his time in attaching them to his ballistic jacket’s lapels before taking up the sword. It was a dress sword, shorter and slimmer than a rapier. The base of the blade was just wide enough for a motto to be etched on each of the blade’s sides: ‘Liberty and Justice for All’, and ‘Equal Justice Under Law’. He drew the blade fully and saluted.

Magnin nodded. “We would hear your oath, Adversary. I trust you know the words.”

Morgan recalled them. He etched them into his memory as indelibly as the Phoenix Society’s three primary ideals on the blade of his dress sword. “I swear eternal hostility toward every form of tyranny over the human mind.”

Only later would he realize that he would be oathbound to draw his sword on his seeming benefactors...

---