Welcome, to The Real World

It's time to wake up.

This article was originally given as a speech at the Nomos Manchester even on October 23rd 2021.

The loose fightback against the worst excesses of the modern world, since the turn of the millennium at least, has overwhelmingly gone online. Those in this room are a testament to the fact that the online space is a useful tool for those willing to go outside of the news cycle for gathering information, making connections and accessing ideas that have been excised almost entirely from everyday life. In the past this was the preserve of a small number of academics who had access to the pre-industrial world the population at large did not. This firehose of information is a two edged sword, for every person who has ripped themselves from the myths of history hundreds more have been injected daily with more efficient propaganda.

Online spaces have also functioned as a sandbox, a containment area for any dissident movement. Organising, researching and discussion can only take you so far without venturing outside of the confines of the digital space. Those who were on the pre social media version of the internet knew this implicitly: the internet is not the same as real life and does not constitute action in of itself —that’s why it was never “serious business” back then. Pure information only makes its way into reality through physical action, it seems basic but it’s something we need to keep at the front of our minds. What happens when, as so easily can happen, the online services get turned off? Your support network instantly disappears. Only those you have personal, offline connections to remain in the event of a collapse.

Look to your right, look to your left. This may be all you have.

The Matrix, its metaphors and its imagery has been used as an allegory for the activities of ideological dissidents online since the mid 2000s, “The Red Pill” is a well worn term for waking up to the world around you, but the idea that you then have to enter and live in “The Real World” is somewhat lost on people.

Over the last decade the power of “the internet” to “change the world” has been breathlessly extolled. From Anonymous, to Occupy, to The Arab Spring and even the 2016 election of Trump. The amorphous force of “the internet” is a convenient explanation for events that the power centre either cannot fully grasp or does not want you to fully grasp. The invisible hand of spontaneous action gives us a comforting sense that “people power” is effective against the realities of modern governance and that—at any moment—”the people” will decide that they have had enough, that the line has finally been reached and the rot will stop here and go no further.

At its most naïve this outlook presumes someone in a Kekistan t-shirt will stand up and give the internet autist equivalent of MLK’s “I have a dream” speech and a new age of civil rights will dawn in which a benevolent government—finally rid of the pesky SJWs—will guarantee our sacred rights of “muh free speech” once again. I am of course being facetious, but on some level this is still how many view the struggle, especially within the online space.

There has never been, and can never be, truly bottom up change. All of the instances of activism “changing the world,” especially from the 1960s onward, has been the result of top-down action by the power structure or the interference of an external force. No physical peaceful protest movement on its own can bring about shifts in a determined regime, so certainly no online protest or YouTube channel is going to change the world in isolation. We have, unfortunately, been sold an inflated view of the internet’s and our own relevance and power by the establishment itself.

This does not mean action is futile, don’t mistake acknowledging reality for descending into nihilism, but we have to spend our energies in worthwhile ways.

Many of you don’t need to hear this, you already know, but I’d like to state it again: there is no combination of words that will persuade the boot to remove itself from your neck. The current situation cannot simply be debated away with facts and logic. Winning the argument means nothing without gaining tangible levels of power. Rhetoric is not going to save you from the tightening net of the global panopticon, only those around you can render aid. The online space has gone from Wild West to nightmare surveillance state in two decades, it is now easier and safer to take many of these discussions and ideas offline—and that’s just what I propose we do.

It’s a point I touched on in the Q&A section of my speech at the Scyldings event in August, but I envision something between church hobby groups and Project Mayhem. Low level grass roots organisation is as basic as it gets, but building something step by step is the only way to get to where you want to go when you’re starting from effectively zero. The first hurdle really is this: create an environment for yourself and others in which you feel able to speak your mind. So much of the conditioning we live with forces us to hide from those around us for fear of rejection or reprisal, but we can’t progress anywhere if we can’t be honest to those around us in our everyday lives. Even a step this simple will involve sacrifice, that’s how the system is set up; to punish people for daring to think and live in a different way—especially those who do so vocally without fear or shame.

I’d like to acknowledge the work the Basket weaving people are doing in getting people in the same room, but we need something broader and more formal than simply ad-hoc gatherings in the long term. We all are here because on some level we feel a commitment to community above and beyond that of false party-political tribe: we strive to build places that reflect our inner selves, beliefs and morals. To do so we must build that world first within ourselves, then within our families—and then export it to the communities around us. This fellowship already exists, albeit in a scattered sense, and only shows itself when events like this happen. We must be a manifestation of that lost sense of connection with our fellow man first and foremost if anything is to change. Some of you may struggle with the religious language necessary to express such intangible ideas, but we must be ”the light of the world—like a city on a hilltop that cannot be hidden.” Being people set apart, with ideas that are alien to many, but acting in a way that others cannot help be drawn too. As many have pointed out, we are the men amongst the ruins, but we don’t need to reflect those ruins. I again defer to the biblical: “be in the world but not of the world.”

There is a craving, an emptiness, within modern life that is a near universal experience as we have become atomised, uprooted from our communities and fed a world which is devoid of wonder. It is our lofty task to help fill that void, but simply having a group of people who are willing to invest time in those around them and be there for them is a huge step towards rebuilding the “higher trust” we all clamour for. Despite the rhetoric of those who want a utopian brotherhood of man, there is precious little immediate humanity in their actions. What I’ve learned in my journey through these desperate online communities is that no one else is going to do it for you, by having the balls to put on a shirt and show up in person you differentiate yourself from those who simply bluster.

Gatherings like this should be the norm and not the exception, the online world has become hostile to us and only provides us with a facsimile of a community that is vulnerable to the whims of governments and tech conglomerates. It takes orders of magnitude more effort and resources to come into people's homes, their pubs and social clubs, and to physically remove them—so to speak—than it does to flip a switch and disband a Discord group or mass-ban Twitter accounts. When the time comes for police at the door, and it has come for some of us already, a community of people who are physically there for each other is orders of magnitude more resilient than one which disappears when the internet goes out.