Midnight Pub

I'm gonna become a wizard

~coldwave

What is a witch if not a subaltern sort of person who accesses ways of thinking, channels of knowledge, and power that the observer does not understand? As I see it there's a big easy opening in the world for witches right now, left open by rapid sociotechnological development.

Step outside. Translocate your mind to meatspace (it's looking empty out there right now). See with childhood first sight. See the places that are not where the spotlight of collective consciousness is pointing\; the landamrks and overlit cafe interiors that are reproduced a thousand times on instagram. What's next to that? And don't point a phone camera at it, or even think like a potential camera-holder.

Anyone who unhooks their mind from the internet and inhabits the darkness of meatspace for the next few years must necessarily become a different creature than most people, and something those who wish to influence will not understand.

Anyone who can control their own computer, no software-as-aservice, no 'internet of things', has a rare power already. To even slightly understand what's going on there is power illicitly taken away from those who run the system their way. As is all knowledge found through years of looking into books or by experimenting.

By the way I'm not sure which of these words is my favorite:

wizard - a word without much connotations

witch - connotations of female or queer, threefor higher in that gothic, subaltern energy. Maybe traditional or rural?

warlock - 'one who betrays the faith'. Dangerous to all sides. But the one I can least imagine will be taken over and sold in some sort of self-help seminars for businespeople.

sorcerer - a learned, rule-bound sort of wizard.

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~abacushex wrote (thread):

A distinctly phrased argument for open sourcing one’s self.

I am starting this attempt myself, by degrees and movements. Using the Internet only as it applies to technology itself. It is not for humans; it is for humans to use for their computing machines. For humans there are minds meeting over coffee and good books, and these humans can disengage from the unholy Medusa-ian hypercomplex of corrupting data profiling influences.

To suggest another term I’ve heard, for one who sees the line between what informatic spaces are for and what they are not; who masters their own systems and connections instead of being mastered by them; all while carving their own fully engaged route through meatspace with other humans of like awareness- Technomage