I’ve Been Stealing Fire From the Gods.

Dancing the line between genius and madness. Are you not entertained?

Welcome to the very first post on the new center for the online activities of yours truly, James Stratton-Crawley. If you’re very lucky, this may be the first post you are reading!

So much method to my maniacal madness…

I've been spending the last four months reflecting, ever deepening my understanding of my life’s work, and discovering my unique voice. Over the past weekend, I found finally that voice while putting ink to paper. It is, however, much different finding the right words to write upon what remains of a dream, the last breaths of an internet I recognized as hope when I was young, but no longer do.

Connecting ink to paper is organic and private, slow and sacred. The clatter of a mechanical keyboard has the innate bias of the editor. It is ideal for masking, hiding oneself. Being who I think others will like, others I do not know, and frankly, do not care for anyway.

I’ve met a lot of people on the net over the years. In the end, what I was left with was you. A rag-tag bunch of adventurers, about 30 of you, who I conned into subscribing to my nonsense. I’m glad you wanted to keep in touch. It’s been a minute, since all that. I needed to back off. Become immediate. Detach and figure out what was going on. Thank you for giving me space, and supporting me. I’m ready to write now.

Why this, why now?

When I found Substack, I was looking for a mailing list with an old mentality. I’ve learned a lot about the nature of the tools, and how they are evolving in a new paradigm shaped in part by Artificial Intelligence. Times are changing. Technology will cascade into the economy. The fallout will impact society. And to survive and thrive, it will challenge our psychology. I hope we can rise to collective consciousness before it is too late. But that is not why I am writing.

I want to do what I know in my heart I have to do with my life. The faintest of whispering in my inmost being that screams for the rest of me to fall to silence and listen. I’m tired of masking, of hiding. I don’t care what people think, they don’t know me. I don’t even know myself, not completely. What’s worse, when people fail to reserve judgement, they cut themselves off from the compassion necessary to know anyone. I don’t want to be like them. I’ve struggled for a long time not to be.

The only thing I can do is try to connect with the humans I believe are out there, and who are waiting to hear my voice. If I hide my voice, or fail to realize who I am, I am doing my friends, known and yet to be known, an incredible disservice. Would I ever have found the love of my life and this great peace in later life, if I had not been loyal to myself?

Community on the internet.

They use the word “community” on the internet, but it’s a sick joke, you know. Community isn’t just communication. It’s unity. In a perfect world, your community would be a stone’s-throw away. You’d know everyone who shared the local communal garden. You’d recognize faces in your walkable neighborhood. You’d call up your peers on your decentralized physical infrastructure network devices and walk outside the house and go for a walk together. We’re not going to get anywhere without regional support systems.

Twitter? Facebook? Tik Tok? Toxic by deliberate design to appeal to and profit from the lowest common denominator. All these communities or ‘schools’ teaching you the secret skills to succeed in a world on the bring of mass extinction, whose admins can ban me for being ‘disruptive’? I bet a lot of us can relate to that sort of attitude from so called teachers who can’t handle being asked questions. Can you honestly say that any of these are anything like an ideal community? Get real. They are designed to provoke controversy and rage-comments to keep you engaged as content for running advertising and to fragment community and reduce your respect for others, and belief in humanity.

Meanwhile, mega-corporations collect our data, trade it, use it to imprison us in algorithms they control, conduct unethical psychological mass experimentation, and soon, with AI, will be able to steal our emails, our writing style, our art (though we sold out long ago), our private conversations, (Facebook has sold private message history to Netflix for $100 million), and inmost thoughts and create our digital doppelgängers, harnessing the very way we create to squeeze profit from what little ability to be coherent thinkers they’ve left us with. It is a whole new level of intellectual property theft. As much hope as it gives, in the hands of big tech, AI is basically piracy, and we’re only seeing the early-Napster phase.

What you can expect.

I’ll be posting often. Unsubscribe if you don’t like it. You’d be doing me a favor. I’d rather have readers that give a shit. In fact, if you don’t open my emails, I can see your engagement rate and I’ll probably do you the service of pruning my list anyway to inflate my open rate! The above diatribe about community is to drive home a point. I’m not here for you, you’re here to read what I have to say. I’m going to be up front about that. You get to comment, or make your own substack that your very own cult following can subscribe to.

There’s plenty of writers who pretend it’s about you. If this is about you, I’m going to try to cut that out, because I want this to be far deeper than you’re likely to be comfortable with, and would fail if I were to care for your input. This writing isn’t about comfort.

I want to critically examine myself, question everything, level some serious accusations against society and the psychopathic system we’ve created for ourselves. I’m going to challenge myself, and I know I’m up for more a challenge than many. If you’re not, that’s okay you know. But don’t ask me to tone it down. NSFW for life.

You can always copy and paste my psychobabble into chatGPT and translate it into “Neurotypical” so it is dumbed down in bullet point form and becomes legit safe for work. Ask me to write in the style of someone who is selling you a new lifestyle or something. That’d be hilarious... I might do it and post it on LinkedIn.

Since you’re all friends (you must be or you wouldn’t have read this far), there’s probably not one of you who haven’t wondered at some point whether I am an original genius or utterly mad. This endless stream of communiques promises to help clarify that for both of us.

I’ll post when I feel like it, as much as I feel like, and I’ll post what I’m thinking about. I think a lot, and I’m convinced that no one really hears me, and so I never shut up. I feel isolated by my incessant questioning, and an understanding of the world those questions have formed over 22 years of survival mode that depended on critical examination of potential delusion. I’m compelled to share new perspectives. I have tried to put them into words my entire life and failed. I believe I have witnessed a truly incommunicable truth that will be at the core of a coming paradigm shift, and I have indeed been labeled as psychotic and deluded, in my time. Jury’s still out though. So called measurable success tends to change people’s tune.

But I’ve already been successful, and I was loyal to myself. I kept hold of the most important question:

What if it wasn’t me that was the deluded one?

I have tested my hypothesis. I have more grip on things than most. I promise you. That much, at least, I can offer in a paid subscription and a modicum of entertainment. Put a bit of money where your mouth is, and I won’t hold back. Deal?

Or whatever, there’ll be plenty of free content too. (Though I throw up a little using the word “content”.)

Introducing the Electric Skullmeat Collective.

I miss the old days. When a blog was just a stupid website that was easy to add nonsense to.

I used to have some great blogs, back when those were cool. There was [m^2] in 2002, and I posted a few times a day for a whole month before being committed to a psych ward. That was real ‘content’.

Later I had the Poetic Terrorist, a moniker I am still quite fond of, and I’d wax poetic on my enemies far and wide across the internet, including some so called new age gurus trying to brainwash young women into joining their cults in 2007.

Blogs became the birth of this whole passive income bullshit on the internet that’s a never ending grind of content that gets aggregated anyway by tech giants like Facebook. The medium is the message, and all I hear is ‘buy what I am selling’. Usually the product is actually the idea that I’m not good enough to live my own life without someone else’s help and I’ve bought into that for 22 years.

I could give you a massive list of my creative achievements, but you can just google me. The only ones that have ever really been important to me are the ones I didn’t do for money, in fact, probably dried up many options for me in the job market. Thank god. My crowning achievement was finding real love in life, a love that allowed me the peace to heal and begin the work I was put here to do.

That’s where Electric Skullmeat Collective comes in. The first shot fired in an epic battle at the end of all time.

So… Like, Subscribe, Share, show it to your mom… I won’t need to rant at you as much, I can just do it here. Later!

-James

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