Professional Documents
Culture Documents
THERE IS MUCH to be learned from understanding where you stand, now that you've taken a couple of steps away from the mental funk
you were stuck in back in your original Prison cell. Out here, you understand that "Reality" is a word that really shouldn't have to be in the
dictionary, but because it is, people feel obligated to give it a new definition every five minutes or so. This is the focus of today's trip
down the Cell Block. You'll find as you navigate through the Prison that not all of the bars standing in your way are simply stubborn
reflections of your own inhibitions. Some of them have been deliberately put there by something else, and it's our aim here to define, or at
least sketch a rough diagram of, what that something else is.
Most people wander around like apes trying to find the perfect banana tree. You're well aware of this behavior, usually, except in those
unfortunate moments when you succumb to it yourself. As they stumble about running into their own inhibitions, buying up the latest
fad craze, taking out personal loans so they can pay somebody to make them go broke there is, as you might not automatically expect, a
tendency to herd themselves and their lives into trendrivers and oceans of idle, stagnant consumption. If everyone were just following
their own bullshit interests all the time, you might expect to see them scurrying around crazily, but not pouring themselves after any
particular trends or lumping their unthinking corpsestobe in with big herds. Yet, that's what they do. So, they must not just be following
their own bullshit interests all the time. Welcome to the ageold Tendency of Humanity to Fuck Itself the THFI, or, for pronouncibility
reasons, the CON.
All you need to know at this point is that the CON is a mysterious force that permeates the universe and causes organisms that otherwise
show signs of intelligence to clump together in herds and jump off of tall buildings or amass themselves into enormous armies in order to
commit mass suicide. It may or may not be intelligent, but it's almost certainly not the Great Big Conspiracy that you think it is. We
know that the Illuminati aren't behind it because it's much more successful at what it does than anyone from Bavaria could ever be.
The CON operates on a number of organizational scales, but becomes most evident when large, segmented populations are viewed from a
historical or timeaccelerated perspective. Our intent here is not to create an allinclusive, hyperabstractualized definition of the CON,
but rather to provide a practical framework for organizations (or, by definition, disorganizations) that find themselves for whatever reason
at odds with the CON. Mentioning the scope of the CON is only to reinforce in your mind the fact that it is based on, rooted in, and
inseparable from Human society as a whole, and any attempt to "destroy" the CON is going to result in madness, death, wasted time, or
new profanities; but it will never end in success.
For those who wish to resist the CON, individualism is the best answer. The CON is much too large to worry about random individuals
living outside its imposed onesizefitsall metagrid. But there are those individuals who insist, probably foolishly, on maintaining some
kind of camaraderie and fellowship with other individuals, with the intention of sharing information without becoming dependent on that
exchange. This requires networking, and the CON fucking hates networks outside of its control, because they circumvent the CON's
rigorously enforced and painstakingly implemented meme bases. So the CON will actively seek to nullify such networks, and its method
of doing that is threefold:
1. Convert and Dissuade. The CON sets up artificial reference points (think BIP Bars) that draw potential members away from
emerging threat networks. These groups become uncool or extremist and are portrayed as dangerous. Their ideas cannot be
entertained as serious options, and their members are laughed right out of any meaningful discussion as soon as their
membership is revealed.
2. CoOpt and Assimilate. When a group withstands the barrage of exclusion and neglect, usually because it has found a useful
marketing ploy, the CON will recruit the entire movement, slowly so that the movement itself hardly notices. Then, the
threatening network can be dismantled and its individual pieces isolated and made into Products for the consumption of the
masses. This has happened to a number of recent networks. See: PunkRock, Democracy, MTV, the Enlightenment.
3. Destruction. The options here are incalculable, but it happens less frequently than you'd think. Most groups never make it
past the Assimilation phase, which only goes to show you how weakwilled even the strongest revolutionaries usually are.
Coming up next: What the Fuck does this mean for MY MOVEMENT?