Manifestations

Noospheric archetypes, a non-exhaustive list

Apr 01, 2022

Cartographer

The emerging internet noosphere has facilitated extremely efficient information flows, functioning as a unidirectional filter-amplifier network. Nodes (individuals, cliques, communities) mine the best results from any subject one can think of, and then propagate it across. Cartographers are types that create maps of all these different nodes and extract their high ROI information products, without becoming deeply involved themselves. They keep tabs on people and groups of interest and have a top-down view of fields and rabbitholes being worked upon on the internet.

The role of the Cartographer is important because there’s just too much information out there, most of the things that were needed to be said have been said, what research had to be done has been done; what still remains to be done is the efficient filtering of all of those results and their transparent transmission across the different electronic spheres. Aggregation of knowledge is as important as its generation, although we tend to be biased towards the latter, since the former has connotations of “dishonest stealing” of knowledge from those who produce it, who are more “honest” in the traditional authorship/copyright framework.

But relying on the network for cheap information is as efficient as it is seductive. Over-reliance on outsourced work makes it easy to be paralyzed into mental stasis. The Cartographers must be careful not to brainwash themselves into losing all originality they might have. Every person possesses a biological “guiding mechanism” in them, which is positively reinforced every time it’s used/stimulated, in a Hebbian manner, and atrophies when it’s not. This atrophy is what occurs with convenient normie types, after decades of sitting through school being dictated what to learn rather than learn on their own. The school system in this case is an industrial unit that produces in its subjects eternal cognitive slavery, readying them for a hypersocialized life of make-believe work, media psyops, taxes, vaccines, non-drunk driving, death. Be careful not to follow a similar path.

The Cartographer must also remember that, as they have taken from the network, so they must give back to it as well. The egoistic attitude of not contributing back to the community must be resisted, the fruits of exploration are to be shared. I think everyone should have a website or some other form of public archive to aggregate the information accumulated through decades of internet use, to filter the best parts of it and present it conveniently for the benefit of others. But this applies doubly so to the digital explorers - the Cartographers.

Netschizo

Not an actual schizophrenic (most of the time), but shares many characteristics with the mental illness, most notably a completely deranged dopaminergic response that manifests itself as bouts of insane and merciless hypergraphic posting. They are at the frontier of their selected subjects, favoring depth instead of breadth of information just out of pure momentum. Hypercaffeinated they push towards the boundaries of noospheric knowledge, pouring themselves over obscure books, unknown philosophies and web esoterica. This type is a play-making and dominant personality, one that molds rather than get molded, as opposed to the Empty Vessel and Cartographer types. “Schizoposting” really is about decreasing the mental filters or emptying the mental cache memories (note to self: stop with the computer nerd analogies) that facilitate efficient actions in day-to-day life, in order to foster divergent acumen and tap into undercurrents. Lower filter can mean more signal but also more noise, which is some form of balance needs to be found so as to not schiz too hard. The creativity that ensues makes the Netschizos an object of attraction for the Cartographers.

Eccentricity, cascading into apocryphal rabbitholes for prolonged periods of time before re-emerging into reality, paranoia from enhanced ability to see connections, social isolation, substance abuse, all those are traits that distance the Netschizos from materiality and weaken their grip on the world. This way, the foundations of actual schizophrenic psychosis are built. The Netschizo is walking a tightrope between creative madness and ending up on lolcow farm (or a mental hospital). People tend to romanticize schizophrenia, until the realize how thin the line between reality and insanity is.

I have developed a new hobby recently. From the creators of “web surfing”, we now bring you “Netschizo hunting”. 4chan is still the best place for this, I think. The anonymous fast paced interactive nature of discourse allows Netschizos to let go inhibitions and post freely, and they do it across multiple threads/boards. By searching keywords they commonly use or image filenames, I can get more and more of their posts, until I get a complete picture of the person and their theories. It’s like a puzzle game. One day, I might write a whole “SiHKAL: Schizos I Have Known And Loved” book, like a medieval bestiary, to catalog my encounters with this type.

Empty Vessel

Noble children, inappropriate public education environment, early life stress, traumatic experiences. They push themselves to change to avoid further damage to their psyche. Adaptation and re-adaptation become the only constant in their life.

Upon finding similar-minded individuals, they must copycat their way into the tribe. These encounters are rare, so there’s pressure to master the skill of blending into environments, lest they miss the opportunity to slither their way into friendships conductive to wisdom, entertainment, transgression.

Finally, this skills finds its ultimate application in online social media. There, the distance between tribes is completely eliminated, physical and social interspace is null, everyone is one hyperlink or alt-tab away from each other. The Empty Vessel is pleased, pressing this hotkey is as easy as switching aesthetic for them. They have their fun experiments behind the safety of the roles they have created for themselves to allow seamless interfacing with reality. They tend to take the shape of their surroundings, melting and noclipping effortlessly into any digital hyperspace. If you’re acquaintances with one of them and you see them posting with a new persona, it’s sinful to call it out and expose them. You must play along.

In the depths of their subconscious, a crisis ensues: who am I? Conducting a search into the bottomless pit of their personality, they cannot find anything that can be considered a stable identity. It seems they’ve turned into the masks that they’ve been wearing all this time. This produces stress and confusion. It’s easy to get religious about this, so I quote a Bhagavad Gita commentary:

The plan and purpose of life become more mysterious. Life becomes an unbearable burden. So he yields to break down. This attitude bespeaks detachment from worldly concerns. A sort of spiritual anguish has overtaken him. The Messengers of Light advocate this kind of distress as a prelude to spiritual enlightenment.
Blessed are the distressed in heart; they shall be comforted in enlightenment. This is the law of life.

They come into terms with this. They take up the challenge of living life as an aggregate of ephemeral mental and physical elements, pure becoming, monuments of transiency. A non-void personality is just an illusion anyways, most people just haven’t realized yet. Having rid themselves from illusions, they can now let themselves become pure vessels for the Divine. The affirmation produces a sense of blissful freedom.

Little Timmy

A bit of an outlier in relation to the other types I’ve listed, as they’re not as prominent noospheric nodes, lacking the necessary faustian impulses. Type name implies lack of intellectual temperament, but not necessarily a low IQ, as they can possess street smarts. This type is associated with the “Eternal Y2K cultural time trap” rectangle in that famous chart, more specifically I see them congregate around old videogames, Pokemon and WoW are some of the biggest ones. I’ll talk about these but it applies to anything.

Many people have not much to look forward to in the future, and hyperimmersive early life digital experiences combine with this to reinforce nostalgic feelings. Nostalgia is a strange emotion, and it might also be the strongest one felt today, with irony-poison and trauma (and whatever other cause) blunting everything else. That’s my main rationalization for the excessive rumination of the past and inability to leave childhood behind that these types exhibit, at least. Another thing (could be the main reason really) is that we live under a total loss of coherency, there’s no authority to tell people what the hell is going on anymore, and a mix of atomization and novel conditions brought upon by the usual sociological stuff plus media saturation plus expansion of digital culture means it’s hard for us to decide anything as well. The failure of western elites plays into this too. But these deserve a whole post so I leave them out for now.

I remember playing WotLK on a private server (as any self respecting east yuro) like ~5 years ago, no wait wtf it’s been almost 10 years make it stop, anyway I was in the v/wpsg guild and one cozy leveling afternoon during chit chat about playing dead old games a guildmate exclaimed something that has stuck with me ever since:

“I’m too much of a manchild to leave behind the only fun I’ve had in my life”

Imagine how good this guy felt posting this, can you sense the aura. WoW classic release truly felt like a religious pilgrimage, the largest ritual of the past decade. Asmongold leading hundreds of lagging autistics into battle in Azeroth while playing epic LotR music. The enthusiasm it was met with confirms the validity of the post-Halo 2 hellscape time trap scenario. I had some distant acquaintances ditch their jobs, get on welfare, sell their cars to build battlestations and commit themselves to the game.

It’s the same old boring game ofc, so the players need to find ways to keep it interesting. Hyperoptimization is the main one I noticed, they used to practice powerlevelling patterns for days before the actual release, just searching for the best parameters to reach max level fast, down to the minute. Speedrunning and glitchmaxxing are imo the last resorts to extract any remaining bit of fun out of simplistic 20 year old vidya. They’re playing battleships in Pokemon games now.

There are some problem with this:

There are only so many remakes of old games that can be made. I noticed they are already starting to lose traction. The refinement in the refinement culture has a convergence point, and it’s closer than you expect.
Just how many times can you go 1-60lvl until the anhedonia kicks in? I noticed there’s been huge breakthroughs in speedrunning records just in the past couple years, as if the low hanging fruit are finished (almost all the fruit in the tree are gone, really). So there are limits to replayability as well.

We can see that the fountain of copium does not flow forever. Little Timmy will be 40 years old one day, and he’ll have nothing to show for it. NEET, wageslave, crypto-rich, none of these matter anymore, the void’s pull is too strong.

And a cold wind blows…

The Person Writing This Post

Which of the types I listed do I belong to? Maybe all of them. What if this post is pure projection, idk it’s too late now I already clicked publish. Actually, most people are a combination of these types, I think.