Sundry Notes II, October

Deep forgeries and identity, more monsters, my words elsewhere, and the compost pile of the soul

Sundry Notes is where I collect all the thoughts that want to become essays but usually don’t because of time. Because I’ve had so many of these thoughts this month, and much less writing time than normal, this is a second edition of October’s.

I.

As you may know, last week I traveled through the United Kingdom. This was my first time traveling by myself since last December, and it was quite a whirlwind trip to multiple cities done only through buses and trains.

Traveling that way is a bit difficult, especially with the shockingly miserable state of the UK rail and bus system. At each station where I waited there were relentless announcements of cancellations along with very long delays, and the feeling of frustration from other passengers was quite palpable.

Regardless, using ground transit (I’d call it “public transit,” but that’s the wrong word for the UK system) is absolutely my preferred method. I enjoy the multiple shifting groups you encounter this way, watching a wave composed almost entirely of one class or nationality board at one stop and then ebb out as another class and nationality surges in a few stations later.

It’s not often that I encounter so many people here in Luxembourg. I find such crowds fascinating, and find myself always observing the way one does in nature. That meant, of course, that I watched a lot of people constantly — no, frantically — scrolling on their social media video feeds like TikTok and Facebook reels. So many of them were doing this, in fact, that it became a bit horrifying.

This has had me thinking about how text-based social media has now been mostly replaced by these short incomprehensible video clips. No one should be surprised that so many people now believe they have attention deficit disorders when they’re bombarding themselves with extremely short video clips for an average of 95 minutes a day.

What interests (well, worries) me most about this is how such a fast flood of “information” makes it impossible to really reflect on what you’re taking in. There’s no time between each thumb flick for the mind to actually comprehend what was seen before the next barrage begins. It’s too fast for actual thought to catch up with it.

And that’s what’s also got people most worried about the matter of “deep fakes,” which are videos made through AI that can convincingly mimic an actual person. As with most technological “advancement,” these were first employed in pornography, making it possible to graft on the face of someone onto the naked body of someone else. And I think feminists are right to be angry at this sort of thing, though I suspect most male viewers of pornography have already been doing this in their heads long before the internet even came about. In other words, this kind of use is just making them a bit lazier.

More broadly, there’s the obvious danger of deep fakes being created to manipulate masses of people. Already there have been such videos created putting false words in both the mouths of Donald Trump and Kamala Harris, but none of these seem to have really influenced the upcoming election. More insidious examples are easy to imagine: a “realistic” fake video depicting an immigrant raping a child, or conversely a nationalist mob burning an immigrant child alive. It’s not hard to see other manipulative uses, like computer-generated videos of cops murdering minorities, or of minorities murdering cops.

But there’s also some context we need to consider here. Forgeries have always been with us, and so also has “fake news.” The Protocols of the Elders of Zion is an obvious example of this, but so too are the anti-communist film reels created during the cold war or the nationalist propaganda created by all sides during World War II. Go back a few centuries and you find books like Fox’s Book of Martyrs, filled with fake stories about Catholics torturing Protestants, or all the false stories which led to the witch burnings. Then, before that, there were the forgeries of false miracles or saints relics and even the stories of most of the saints themselves.

That is to say, “deep fakes” aren’t new, they’ve just taken a different form. What is new is this reliance on video as a more accurate indicator of what is true than personal experience, textual accounts, or trusted witnesses.

Which brings me to something that Jack Dorsey, the former head and one of the co-founders of Twitter, said. This was from an interview he gave to Mike Solana regarding his decision to leave the would-be Twitter/X competitor, Bluesky (essentially, it got just as bad as Twitter had been for censorship). Answering a question regarding deepfakes, Dorsey says:

I hate to sound like a broken record, but one of the beauties of Nostr is you have these public-private key pairs, so it confirms identity. I think a confirmed identity that you own, that is not given to you by a government or corporation, that you truly own, is the way through this, because you can verify authenticity.

No one knows my secret key on Nostr. They know my public key, we know the math equations to match the two, but I can digitally sign my messages so people can know that these things are coming from me.

Now, videos created by third parties are another thing, another problem space I don't have an answer to, but I think it has to start with your own identity, and who owns your identity. Right now, all the companies own our identities. To me, that's super scary because again, can they be compromised? Can a government hold them to account? And the answer is absolutely yes, and you're seeing how that has played out over the years, and certainly in the present, and that will continue into the future.

(Solana): We’ve talked a lot about deleting people, but the idea of a government actually just… taking a person over is really crazy. If you could essentially seize an individual’s identity, and use it to manipulate the public, or for whatever? That’s just —

Yep, it’s crazy. That’s crazy.

What Dorsey’s referring to as “identity” is of course a transhumanist way of understanding it. Meta and X and the rest of them don’t actually own our identities, only a limited form of its expression. How we express ourselves isn’t who we are, though, and this is again what Walter Benjamin pointed out about the machinery of fascism (“fascism sees its salvation in giving these masses not their right, but instead a chance to express themselves”).

Also, he and Solana both assume that governments would be the only actors who would try “to take a person over,” rather than the corporations currently owning these expressions. In their view, which is the general anarcho-capitalist/transhumanist view held by most of the tech set, corporations are at worst neutral actors, rather than potentially malicious feudal lords.

Regardless, the problem of deepfakes — let’s just call them forgeries — is still there, and the digital public/private identity verification system that Dorsey proposes (Nostr) as a solution to this doesn’t really solve anything. You would need everyone in the world who does anything online to use it in order for it to work, which means creating a globally-monopolistic capitalist technology.

This is the problem we see with capitalism at every step. A new social disruption or societal problem occurs due to some capitalist revolutionization of production. Then, another revolutionization is proposed as its solution. It’s like what happens to American dairy cows. They need constantly to be given antibiotics to counter the infections they get from oversized udders caused by recombinant bovine growth hormone and from eating corn instead of grass. The corn and the hormone were revolutions in production that then required mitigation by other revolutions. But the easiest solution would have just been to let the cows eat grass (which is what their stomachs actually want to do) and not try to artificially increase their milk production.

The problem of forgeries and identity online can be quite easily fixed by not relying on the internet as a source of truth. Humans were able to accurately understand events they didn’t see long before videos arrived, just as they were quite perfectly able to amuse ourselves long before smartphones and TikTok or Facebook arrived.

II.

As I mentioned, I was in the United Kingdom last week. The trip was quite amazing, and very much what I needed, though it wasn’t really a vacation. Instead, I guess you could call it a “business trip,” though it’s really weird to think of it that way.

I’ve previously hinted at one of the things I needed to do on this trip, and I’ll be officially announcing it on the 6th of November. I’m more than thrilled about it, really.

Something else happened that is also really cool. As you probably know, there were some … problems … with the release of my book Here Be Monsters. All kinds of problems, actually, but most of them were related to a co-ordinated campaign to smear the book and suppress its publicity by people associated with the publisher. I’d been told by the previous head of Repeater — who has now left — that I wasn’t allowed to publish excerpts of the book or write essays for certain places, and if I went ahead there would be unspecified “consequences.” Also, I was blacklisted from Repeater’s official YouTube channel by the collective who runs it, Acid Horizon. This meant also that interviews I did with other Repeater and Zer0 authors (like Dan Evans, Anthony Galuzzo, and

Daniel Tutt

) were also banned, punishing other people who could have benefitted from the publicity in order to punish me. And obviously, this all ultimately damaged not just me or them, but the publisher itself, all just to keep a “cool cred” with that collective’s own social media followers.

But while in London, I met with the head of Repeater’s parent company, Watkins, who told me there will be a new edition of Here Be Monsters released next autumn. This gives the book an actual chance, and I’m deeply excited for this and quite grateful to Vicky at Watkins for taking the time to meet with me about the book.

I’ll have more details soon about this, and I’ll be able to do a new introduction and make a few changes that I’d originally wanted for the book. In the meantime, it’s been quite incredible to hear from people who found the book despite the cancel crusade and wrote to me saying many variations of the same thing someone said a few days ago: “You made me feel as though I don't need to abandon the left.”

III.

I decided to always feature another Substack in my sundry notes, and because this is the second sundry notes in one month, I’d like to take a moment to tell you about the other one I’m associated with, A Beautiful Resistance.

A Beautiful Resistance is the journal of the publisher I cofounded almost ten years ago (Gods&Radicals Press and now RITONA). It was born before the publisher was, and I had not yet thought about becoming a book publisher. Instead, the point was just to gather writing from all the really fascinating anti-capitalist pagan writers I knew, to have an alternative to the neopagan commercialism seen on sites like Patheos Pagan and The Wild Hunt (both of which I’d previously written for).

We started publishing two articles a week, and within the first six months got up to four a week. The stuff we got from writers was really inspiring, and it was all happening at a time when social media wasn’t throttling external websites, so many of our essays went something like “viral.” During that time, a woman contacted me with an offer of a thousand dollars to fund the project, and it was then that we decided we’d also do print publishing.

That’s how I became a publisher. And the journal kept doing extremely well for the first five years, even into the first year of Facebook throttling. Back then, I also wrote primarily there, and saw unique views regularly averaging 10,000 for my essays and between 5000 and 8000 for other writers.

Things changed, sadly. I’m such an intractable luddite that I never really tried to adapt to the changing social media rules. Also, once I started writing more on my own blog and then substack, the views for the journal went down significantly (average page views for any of my essays were 2.2, meaning the average reader would then go on to read at least one more essay while there).

My decision to stop writing for the journal and instead write for Substack was a good one personally. It freed me significantly to explore other themes, and it certainly increased my writing income. And though the editor I hired for the journal, the endlessly wondeful Mirna, is really brilliant at what she does, it was hard for the journal to recover from both my absence and the new social media rules.

We decided to mirror the journal on Substack, and this has helped get around the social media problem. And I’ve made another decision: I’ll be writing there again as well. So, starting in November, you’ll see at least one new essay from me posted there each month, and the large archive of my essays over the last ten years will also be reposted regularly.

And more great stuff is coming, related to that thing I hinted at in point II.

So, if you’re not already a subscriber there, and you don’t want to miss these essays, do please sign up. There are extra benefits of being a paid subscriber there as well, including a free course every year. So consider that too, if you’ve the means.

IV.

Today’s Halloween, and tomorrow’s Samhain. This time of year is always quite powerful for me, and it always brings about some kind of important “death.” Similar to the rituals of leaving behind the old year at New Year’s, the rituals I do for this time are always quite transformative.

What’s dying for me this time? Where to begin?

As I’ve referenced before, this year saw my husband go through a really intense work burnout, and to help him heal I needed to significantly re-organize a lot of my life to make sure I was available for him. This trip to the UK last week was the first time I could actually travel without feeling I needed to worry (necessarily or unnecessarily) about him while gone. And it was really damn good for me. Lots changed for me on this trip, and it was the first time I’ve really felt so connected to people in about a year.

So, this kind of isolation is one of those things that’s dying, or has already died. Luxembourg is a great place, but it’s definitely not a friendly or sociable place. I’ve realised I need to travel more often (and make real efforts to do so) to see meaningful people and cultivate meaningful friendships.

Other things are dying as well, most notably a kind of fatalistic determinism I think I adopted as a defense mechanism after some turns of misfortune. I just assumed the absolute worst would happen for this trip, and my dark predictions were so morose as to be quite ridiculous. That’s something I really never needed anyway, so it’s quite easy to let it die.

Since this is the second sundry notes this month, I’d like to also make this an open comment post. What thing is dying for you right now? What’s going on the compost pile of your soul, to there be transformed into something that will grow something even better?

Much love,

Rhyd