Not what the robots will do. It’s what we will do when our fantasies control us.

I think it helps us to make sense of the world to remember this: everything is sex (Robert California was right), and the tech lords are obsessed with BDSM.

Hypnotism is up there with their top sexual fetishes. These are magic dorks. Not the good natured kind doing card tricks at parties. But the creepy kind, interested in how sleight of hand and misdirection can make people do their bidding.

Not to sound like an aging hipster, but this old whore was performing as a remote dominatrix when you still needed a landline for phone sex. Back when BDSM was not mainstream, but was very underground.

The internet runs on BDSM–and I don’t just mean in a general, “capitalists want you to submit, man!” way. I mean everything about it is meant to hypnotize you, intoxicate you, blackmail you, humiliate you, degrade you, make you beg, and ultimately be a slave.

The hypnotism is the most sinister part. Because it makes all the other parts possible.

And it’s why I am so vehement that art consumption must have a beginning, middle and an end. Because all art is a kind of hypnotism if it’s any good–it holds you transfixed by visions that are put before you, that you accept as real with your willing suspension of disbelief, in order to reap its benefits. But then it ENDS. You are given back your own mind. You are unharmed. You have more expensive knowledge and are freer.

But the endless scroll holds us transfixed forever. And if the tech lords succeed with implantables, you will not even have the illusion of choice.

The idea of this future scares the fuck out of me. And here’s why:

When I thought I was going to live on a boat I got for free on Craigslist, an article appeared in my Google feed that seemed oddly specifically about me. “I got a $1 boat on Craigslist and it was great!” Or something like this. Then the article was just a little personal essay about how people thought she was nuts, but it was so lovely, blah blah.

But the thing was…it wasn’t advertising anything. It wasn’t depicting a growing trend. There was no conflict in the story. It seemed to exist just to let me daydream. And it was a hot off the presses publication, tailored to my exact situation.

It occurred to me: what if this article was not pulled from the internet based on my interests and put before me–what if it was entirely, instantaneously generated, based on my interests? What if it exists just for me? To tell me, specifically, what I want to hear?

I don’t have any idea if that’s what happened–I couldn’t possibly know.

But that’s the scary thing: I couldn’t possibly know.

But it could be true. If not now, it could be true tomorrow. It could have been at least somewhat true for years already–but WHEN it becomes true, it will be impossible to know that such a switch has happened. With AI voice already a known entity, we are likely to dismiss articles generated specifically for us as AI written, but generally true based on real things that are out there. We will assume there is consensus about articles that are only for manipulating us, specifically and precisely us.

Such a manipulation would be so holistic and complete as to be imperceptible.

But if articles and content were spontaneously generated just for you, based on your most intimate hopes and fears, in a scroll you can never exit–

We will be slaves. For sure. We will be endlessly hypnotized, and willing to endure all kinds of endless degradation, because our hopes and fears play endlessly, pushing us this way and that. You will not be smarter. You will simply be transfixed with no escape. And like those hypnosis volunteers in magic acts, you will commit actions that an un-hypnotized you would be baffled by. Because you were told to do them while in a trance and a fantasy.

Obviously, we can see this playing out right now in its primitive form. We can consider this time before AI has taken off full steam as beta testing. Look at how we’ve already submitted to the tech lords. Already accepted that they control our destiny.

Right now, we can still argue that we are willing participants in this horrible mindfuck experiment. But the scary thing is we will argue the same thing when we are led around by unreality, even in our dreams.

Boys will be made into soldiers, as tech lords attack their fears and manipulate their sex drives. We worry about killer robots doing the killing for the tech lords. But we should be equally worried about how we will be doing the killing. At a robot’s insistence, using all of your most intimate thoughts to control you.

We have to stop fighting each other, and start halting the tech companies. I know we have every reason to hate each other right now –but the hurt we are causing each other right now, is at the urging of algorothms–we already live in the world I’m describing. But the transition is not yet so complete that we can’t extricate ourselves. We have enough of our own minds left, and enough memory of the past, to be able to see what is happening if we let ourselves, and deal with it if we make ourselves.

I keep thinking about child soldiers in Sudan. About how these boys are victims. About how horrifying it is to take young boys and torture them into being killers.

I think about our young boys, and how they are being tortured into being killers. How they are told they are killers because they are hypnotized and controlled by women.

But it isn’t the female images on the flickering light machine hurting you. She is saying I love you. She is saying, “My body is soft and welcoming.” It’s the flickering light machine itself. That never stops flickering. Never stops putting your hopes next to images of your fears, never stops throwing your shame in your face. Never stops telling you to ask for permission to think, act, feel.

You feel lost because you’ve been cut off from all that nourishes you. You’ve been told you are not connected to people who are different, or to the opposite sex. You are deprived of knowledge. You are driven by fear. You want to die because you feel guilty and you don’t know why, but you know it some bitch’s fault.

You want to die because you have been sexually abused, cut off from sex and love, cut off from your own soul. You want to die because you live in a fantasy land, and reality keeps interrupting the dream. You’ll choose the tech lords because they will offer you fantasy forever, at the moment you feel completely unable to cope with what is really happening. And if you ever knew it was their fault, you will quickly forget, being presented with image after image of the REAL culprits, they’ll say: the women, the women, the women. “The women control you,” the algorithms will say. “The women are edging you, ruining your orgasms, manipulating you, hurting you with their infinite Jest…”

These poor young boys. They never had a chance to be good men. Because we forced their whole lives onto a machine built to strip them of their humanity. Turn them into fascists and killers.

When will we say this is enough?

Every moment but now is too late. Every moment that we know we must halt the tech companies is a moment we must be halting the tech companies.

We need to start with Google search.

Using zines to connect to the local community may be the most important aspect of how SmutMag operates. It should be noted that since using zines to promote SmutMag, my stats are as high as when I’ve spent the same money on Google ads to promote. But crucially different: I’m certain the people who found me through zines are real people in my community.

They work. And they are trustworthy–you can trust that they were distributed by a person, and made by a person.

We won’t abandon the internet all at once. But feeling good about going out into the community to find information rather than into the Google scroll is an excellent start. And zines are how we get there.

Next time you want to recommend something, try making a zine about it. It’s fun. And it achieves better results. And it will never, you know, turn people into soulless robots. It’s just one sheet–its your job as the zinester to make it count, because they’re going to get their own brain back in short order.

As it should be.

You do not need permission from the tech lords to do one fucking thing. But if you don’t remember what it’s like to not ask for permission, you’ve got mine: go out there and kill crime with art.

“Process: A Digital Cabaret” is now playing in the menu. If you aren’t anywhere near being able to take action because the world is terrible and too dark to see clearly, then it’s dedicated to you.