So there was a time when someone at the Daily Dot wanted me to explain how and why, exactly, Violentacrez got doxed to Gawker. I gave them a fifteen thousand word hyperlinked charlie-at-the-board.jpg oral history of the tedious little ingroups of Reddit when it basically came down to "one of my friends, who is facebook friends with one of my enemies, doxed him for the lulz." It was hyper important to me and I'd edited that document four times to get it shorter but I could not boil it down to something interesting to external observers because fundamentally? It wasn't.

Book four of The Story of Civilization is entitled "The Age of Faith." It covers the era of European history we generally regard as "the Dark Ages" and, in doing, gives chapter-and-verse why we generally don't study this period in history - it's not that nothing happened, it's that it was such a pointless, meaningless, return-to-zero mess that you really can walk into the Renaissance as a tabula rasa with nothing that came before included as context. The Age of Faith is 1086 pages, with a 60-page bibliography and a 70-page index. My copy used to belong to Gore Vidal and I doubt I will ever read it again.

I have never been a member of the TESCREAL community in any way, shape or form. They always struck me as pompous homeschooled assholes whose interest largely lies in rubbing their boogers on you. I have, however, been subjected to their tedium since the drop - because I am a bloviating asshole on the Internet, which means fans of bloviating assholes think we're alike. Blackbootz was one of the worst offenders in that I was constantly being asked for opinions about this, that or the other on Slate Star Codex, The Last Psychiatrist or Lesswrong.

So the first thing I will say to "where should I go to find out more" is "don't." The dramas of online communities (even those with meatspace shenanigans) are self-referential, ephemeral and tedious. The second thing I will say is go here. Cults can only erupt in a specific social environment under specific conditions and I thank my lucky stars that I'd already read Helter Skelter and done some deep dives on Jim Jones when I was in those conditions.

The first thing you need are spiritual people who have rejected other forms of spirituality. They need to be broken. Their life has to be missing something and it needs to be something big - let's call them "seekers." The next thing you need is a seeker with charisma but without humility. One person looking for truth is no problem - I knew a guy who determined Christianity was the One True Faith because he has the most documented miracles on Youtube. A bunch of people looking for truth isn't necessarily a problem either... so long as they don't start turning to that one guy. Even then it isn't necessarily a problem if he has the self-awareness to go "why are they looking at me? What's going on here? How did I end up being the person everyone turns to? How can I help them?"

Every cult you've ever seen or heard of - including several that are now considered major religions - hit that turning point and the charismatic dude went "how can I use this to my advantage?"

That Wired article used to be an article, not a podcast. Wired likely culled it for audio-only because my god, what a read. That article had links to Jack LaSota's blog which Wired likely culled because my god, what a rabbit-hole. Look:

Those who have felt the Shade and let it break their minds into small pieces each snuggling in with death, that cannot organize into a forbidden whole

of true agency, are zombies. They can be directed by whoever controls the Matrix. The more they zone out and find a thing they can think is contentment, the more they approach the final state: corpses.

Those who have seen horror and built a vessel of hope to keep their soul alive and safe from harm are liches. Christianity’s Heaven seems intended to be this, but it only works if you fully believe and alieve. Or else the phylactery fails and you become a zombie instead. For some this is The Glorious Transhumanist Future. In Furiosa from Fury Road’s case, “The Green Place”. If you’ve seen that, I think the way it warps her epistemology about likely outcomes is realistic.

how far have you sailed from the shore for that to seem like a rational, reasonable argument? He's basically saying 'seek enlightenment' but in this weird-ass Agent Smith Shadowrun Harry Potter dipshit patois that he's managed to hide the point from himself. The medium is the message. You can't observe it without swimming in it, and you shouldn't swim in it.

I'll say this: Emile Torrez cares a lot about the TESCREAL posse; he coined the phrase. Like most zealots, he's a heretic fallen from the fold. Ozy Brennan? He's got beef with individuals but he still buys the belief ("we are better than you, the math proves it"). The fact of the matter is, you are your symbology and when you start talking about demons, liches, monsters and gods, you're going to end up with a pentagram on the floor, take it from me. It's the fundamental pareidolia of human nature, the need to make sense out of noise. The original version of this had a Star of David, not a unicorn.

So. Charlie Stross worship? I've seen stupider. I wouldn't bother digging deeper because all you're going to see is a poorly-read opportunist attempting to keep one step ahead of his flock. I'll go one further and hypothesize that the TESCREAL posse is subject to so much schism because they all think they're smarter than everyone else, which makes them harder to keep on top of than, say, Squeaky Fromme.

The reasons these fuckers matter is they have fucktons of techbro money. Jim Jones mattered because he had the support of the liberal political machine of San Francisco so he could do a lot more damage than, say, Heaven's Gate. A whole lotta dipshits in Silicon Valley and adjacencies are firmly of the belief that they know better than you, the math proves it and frankly, gettin' stabby is often the only thing that separates cults from power.