This is a post for the New Years 2025 code jam at 32bit.cafe. One of the suggested themes is “Light in Darkness”, where we’re supposed to write about what gets us through the dark. However, I mean to turn this theme on its head. This is what I get for having “Blinded by Light” by Masashi Hamauzu from the Final Fantasy XIII soundtrack on repeat while I write this. It’s also what I get for playing Final Fantasy XIV, including the Shadowbringers expansion, where an imbalance in favor of light can be as perilous as one favoring darkness. And it’s certainly what I get for reading so much of Michael Moorcock’s fantasy fiction, which deals not so much with conflicts between good and evil but with the interplay of law and chaos.
Nonetheless, it is the dark that gets me through the light.
One might think that since I live in the northeastern US, it would be winter here, not only cold but dark. It is indeed cold, but that is easily remedied. As the late former President Jimmy Carter observed, I can put on a sweater. Then I can layer a coat over it if I go outside.
It is not the cold of winter that concerns me, but the feeling that it is never truly dark even when the sun has set. The night is not the refuge it once was, though the moon and stars might still guide me as I walk beneath them when I cannot sleep. Even at night I live beneath lights that can burn and blind but never warm.
I live under the light of surveillance capitalism online, where so many websites and applications seem to want to know I am, what I do online, where I go, and what I read so that they can show me the “right ads”, as if there was ever such thing as a “relevant ad” when you’re not actively shopping. I live under the light of government surveillance, too. Not only do private data brokers sell information about me and other Americans to the Federal government, giving the government information about me without any semblance of due process, but the government itself tries to read every email and gather metadata about every phone call or text message I might send or receive. It’s like the only dick they haven’t seen is Edward Snowden’s.
I live under the light of moral certitude from thoroughly immoral people who hate anybody who isn’t just like them for no other reason than that we have the temerity to be different. With the recent elections they threaten to set the country ablaze in a conflagration of reactionary fervor. Nor is there any meaningful escape; as the UK had once been, the US is a de facto empire on which the sun no longer sets, and even in other countries right-wing authoritarianism threatens to take ascendance.
I live beneath the light of mandatory happiness and compulsory extroversion, a relentless and toxic demand for positivity regardless of circumstances. I have never felt safe expressing negative emotions, whether sadness or anger. It is if I must ask permission to be fully human, which I refuse to do. That I experience the full repertoire of human emotions despite my culture’s demand that I eliminate negative ones is despite the fear of punishment for doing so. My pride demands that I not be less than I am.
I’m not about to see society’s false lights, but if society wants to find Hell with me, I will show them what it’s like and leave them bleeding.
While there are technological countermeasures I can take, they are not as important as the psychological countermeasures I use. The foremost of these latter defenses is my embrace of cold and darkness. The cold of which I speak is that of selective empathy and inner emigration. Where once I had been set apart because I did not fit in, I now choose to stand apart, for I have realized that fitting in isn’t worth the price.
I reserve my empathy for human beings who have not wronged me. It is not not for corporations or for people I have judged to be a threat to others’ lives and liberties. For example, I have no compunction about using ad blockers when surfing the web. I regard targets ads powered by JavaScript as malware, and refuse to allow it to run on any computer I own. Likewise analytics, trackers, etc. I certainly don’t consent to cookies, least of all third-party cookies. Does this make it difficult for ad-supported websites, even those operated by independent bloggers, to stay online? Of course it does, and I refuse to care. Nobody is entitled to make a living from their website, especially using targeted advertising that violates others’ right to privacy, and anybody who seeks to profit from surveillance capitalism has no moral standing to lecture me on ethics.
Likewise, when I write to my representatives in Congress, it is to categorically impose any bill that confers upon the US government the authority to regulate speech online to “protect children”. Such bills, from FOSTA and SESTA to KOSA, are not about protecting children. They are invariably introduced by conservatives, and they are about ensuring that children cannot escape adult supervision and explore viewpoints their parents didn’t approve, explore identities their family, church, or community condemns, or speak their minds. Therefore, whenever I hear a public official or public intellectual express concern for anybody’s children but their own I assume malicious intent on their part.
I refuse to believe anything a conservative or a billionaire says about anything. Anything they say is a lie until proven otherwise. Nothing but self-serving mendacity spews forth from the mouths of Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, Mark Zuckerberg, and their ilk. I don’t care what Jonathan Haidt thinks about the impacts of smartphones and social media on teenagers, especially if his research can’t be independently replicated. As far as I’m concerned, Hilary Cass is the sort of patron quack of transphobes that Andrew Wakefield had become to anti-vaxxers. Moms for Liberty is a neo-Nazi women’s auxiliary; the only liberty they value is the license to intimidate librarians and burn books. Even a relatively reasonable conservative like Liz Cheney could assert that the sun rises in the east and I would still observe for myself and trust the authority of my senses above all.
No appeal to traditional values of God and country will sway me. My understanding of what it means to be an American is more expansive than the average conservative can understand, let alone tolerate or even except, and that is their problem, not mine. I am simply done with anybody who thinks that the law should protect some without binding them and bind the rest without protecting them. If every Republican caught the next COVID strain and dropped dead, my only concern would be the safe disposal of their bodies before they became biohazards.
As for the darkness: as @foreverliketh.is observed using their account on Basement Community, I have “fugging mastered using anger as a life-force”. It is not merely my anger from which I draw strength. It is all of the emotions our society and culture and religions expect us to suppress in favor of more virtuous, or at least pro-social impulses. Spite and defiance drive me, too, and I hate as intensely as I love. Even my fear is fuel; I burn my dread.
I am especially unrepentant when it comes to hatred. I despise those who would hate me for not being like them precisely because I love myself. I detest tyranny, exploitation, and corruption precisely because I value liberty and equal justice under law for all. And I would be no less vengeful in service to the people I cherish and the ideals I hold dear than Edmond Dantès or Gulliver Foyle if I had cause to believe that I could do so without harming innocent people. Only the knowledge of my own fallibility stays my hand.
Then there is my indifference to most people’s opinions. I might soften the impact with humor, like inviting people who object to what I write or how I write it to dial 1-800-B-DAMNED. Nevertheless, I do not fear being disliked as much as I probably should. I had gotten used to it as a child, and rather than change myself to please others I hardened my heart because I realized there was simply no pleasing most people. Therefore, I would instead please myself first and foremost. I’m not going to pretend to be sociable or happy. Most people aren’t worth the effort of masking, and they never were.
No, I am not a nice person. Nor am I especially kind. I refer to my website and my fiction as sacraments of defiance. My answer to how I dealt with suicidal impulses is that I still live because the power of Satan compels me. I also celebrated the assassination of a health insurance CEO as “street justice” last year. Despite frequenting 32bit.cafe, Community remains to me the name of a sitcom that I will never watch, and Solidarity is the name of a trade union in Poland. I am, I think, a bit less heartless than I might otherwise be because of my involvement with the Cafe and my occasional contact with other website operators. It reminds me that I am not alone, even if I see things from a different angle.
Above all, I have my armor. I broke it in years ago, and it is quite comfortable now. I only take it off for my wife. I simply don’t let anybody else get too close. I keep hearing from others that human beings are social animals, but I am not one of those people who need other people. If anything, I am only lonely around others; in my solitude loneliness cannot touch me. That isn’t to say that I can’t enjoy the company of others, but as Paracelsus famously observed, the dose makes the poison.
Likewise, while I do not need to hear from people who read my website, I nonetheless appreciate it when I do hear from a reader. It is for that reason that I sometimes share what I have written. My writing is there if you want it. If not, then no matter; I will continue to do it anyway for my own reasons.
To ward off an inimical light, I armor my heart in ice and shadows — a refrain that first came to me as a child. Within the cold and the dark, however, is a light of my own: one of reason and self-knowledge. I know who I am, what I want, and how far I’m willing to go to get what I want. That is how I force my way, for mine is the left-hand path and its price is well worth paying.
Am I evil? I am man, and if that makes me evil then so be it. It is through the embrace of sin, the acceptance of my entire humanity with all its flaws — rather than repentance in fear of damnation — that I become my own savior. Wearing independence like a crown, I shall be everything that God made me to be, and if He cannot recognize in my fearful asymmetry the perfection He has wrought and accept me as I am, then to Hell with Him.
As for you, Occasional Reader? Shout at the devil, and I might shout back. Stare long enough into the abyss, and it will be I who meets your gaze. Stand up to your fire, and let it light your way. For what good is your Heaven if you dare not storm it?