![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
I have serious concerns about insurgency and war breaking out in the fairly near future, a possibility I'm not very keen on. In a sense, of course, we already are at war, and have been for awhile now. Our war is a mind war, a reality war, a propaganda war.
In magical terms, you could probably call this type of conflict an astral war. It's a war of emotions, thoughts, ideas. The astral is where those energies are shaped before they come down into full manifestation.
Groups of mages are warring to shape the narrative, to take the descending energies of creation and make reality conform to their wishes. Some of these magicians are the stereotypical guys in robes and secret societies, others are groups of witches and pagans, some are Christians who'd never describe what they do as magic, some are CEOs and their advertising flacks, and some are shitposters on various message boards.
One of them is me. Although I make no claim to being any sort of great magus. One of the worst things about being an apprentice mage is the painful awareness of how little you can accomplish.
Sherdog is a message board devoted to the sport of MMA (mixed martial arts). I remember watching the first couple UFC events on VHS tapes a friend and I rented from the local video store. As I recall they were on the shelf next to the vile Faces of Death videos, which consisted of real scenes of death and disaster that had been caught on camera. The first few UFC events left me cold. I didn't understand grappling and jujitsu and found the whole thing boring (I should have been watching K-1, obviously). Years later, I caught episodes of the Ultimate Fighter reality TV show while I was working overnights in maybe 2007 and got into the sport.
I found Sherdog soon after and thought it was wildly interesting. I absorbed all sorts of lore and discovered factions of fans (some were huge fans of the UFC, while others felt like the Japanese PRIDE organization had the best fighters and fights). I developed a vast knowledge of different fighters, fights that had occurred, different fighter's records and fighting style. A lot of the fights were still kind of boring to watch, but I was enchanted. I made an account but seldom posted.
I learned all about trolling on Sherdog. I learned about paid posters (I was amazed that people got paid to post BS about stupid fights on message boards... there's a lot of money wrapped up in sports, even a niche sport like MMA). I ventured into the unmoderated section of the boards and watched people verbally savage one another. I learned great slang like butthurt and witnessed a bunch of beta males call each other beta males. I learned all about online gambling because of a fake betting game designed to get people to gamble for real. I never gambled real money but got kind of addicted to winning fake money and getting the dubious honor of being on the leaderboard. I became pretty convinced that a lot of professional sports are fixed after awhile, but that may be one of my conspiracy hypotheses.
After a few months, I noticed that people created and shaped narratives. That people would kind of team up and join in to spread propaganda in various ways. I saw the dark side of the internet. I learned to follow certain posters' posts, see what agenda they had, how often they posted and on what topics. I became a sleuth, wading through the dreck of horrible posts, figuring out who had an angle, who was just a fan, who was new to the boards, and who was banned and coming back for the tenth time with some crappy new account.
I learned to be suspicious, to watch for agendas, to watch for trolls, to see who was promoting what agenda and why. Although I have a fair amount of difficulty in interpersonal interactions, a text and image based medium was easier for me to navigate. By the time I adopted social media in 2009 (probably later than most), I was ready. I don't recall social media (Facebook, specifically), being crap right off the bat, but by the time I logged out for the last time about a year ago, I couldn't stand it anymore. I left before they started censoring people and flagging posts that go against the dominant narrative, but it hadn't been fun for a long time. Ultimately, that's why I had left Sherdog years before.
Having written this post, I'm not really sure what the point of the whole thing was. Basically reality is being created by trolls, shitposting, and censorship. Welcome to the mindwar I guess.
In magical terms, you could probably call this type of conflict an astral war. It's a war of emotions, thoughts, ideas. The astral is where those energies are shaped before they come down into full manifestation.
Groups of mages are warring to shape the narrative, to take the descending energies of creation and make reality conform to their wishes. Some of these magicians are the stereotypical guys in robes and secret societies, others are groups of witches and pagans, some are Christians who'd never describe what they do as magic, some are CEOs and their advertising flacks, and some are shitposters on various message boards.
One of them is me. Although I make no claim to being any sort of great magus. One of the worst things about being an apprentice mage is the painful awareness of how little you can accomplish.
Sherdog is a message board devoted to the sport of MMA (mixed martial arts). I remember watching the first couple UFC events on VHS tapes a friend and I rented from the local video store. As I recall they were on the shelf next to the vile Faces of Death videos, which consisted of real scenes of death and disaster that had been caught on camera. The first few UFC events left me cold. I didn't understand grappling and jujitsu and found the whole thing boring (I should have been watching K-1, obviously). Years later, I caught episodes of the Ultimate Fighter reality TV show while I was working overnights in maybe 2007 and got into the sport.
I found Sherdog soon after and thought it was wildly interesting. I absorbed all sorts of lore and discovered factions of fans (some were huge fans of the UFC, while others felt like the Japanese PRIDE organization had the best fighters and fights). I developed a vast knowledge of different fighters, fights that had occurred, different fighter's records and fighting style. A lot of the fights were still kind of boring to watch, but I was enchanted. I made an account but seldom posted.
I learned all about trolling on Sherdog. I learned about paid posters (I was amazed that people got paid to post BS about stupid fights on message boards... there's a lot of money wrapped up in sports, even a niche sport like MMA). I ventured into the unmoderated section of the boards and watched people verbally savage one another. I learned great slang like butthurt and witnessed a bunch of beta males call each other beta males. I learned all about online gambling because of a fake betting game designed to get people to gamble for real. I never gambled real money but got kind of addicted to winning fake money and getting the dubious honor of being on the leaderboard. I became pretty convinced that a lot of professional sports are fixed after awhile, but that may be one of my conspiracy hypotheses.
After a few months, I noticed that people created and shaped narratives. That people would kind of team up and join in to spread propaganda in various ways. I saw the dark side of the internet. I learned to follow certain posters' posts, see what agenda they had, how often they posted and on what topics. I became a sleuth, wading through the dreck of horrible posts, figuring out who had an angle, who was just a fan, who was new to the boards, and who was banned and coming back for the tenth time with some crappy new account.
I learned to be suspicious, to watch for agendas, to watch for trolls, to see who was promoting what agenda and why. Although I have a fair amount of difficulty in interpersonal interactions, a text and image based medium was easier for me to navigate. By the time I adopted social media in 2009 (probably later than most), I was ready. I don't recall social media (Facebook, specifically), being crap right off the bat, but by the time I logged out for the last time about a year ago, I couldn't stand it anymore. I left before they started censoring people and flagging posts that go against the dominant narrative, but it hadn't been fun for a long time. Ultimately, that's why I had left Sherdog years before.
Having written this post, I'm not really sure what the point of the whole thing was. Basically reality is being created by trolls, shitposting, and censorship. Welcome to the mindwar I guess.
Tags:
