🐌 Context Collapse: Anti-Aesthetic Memetics & Killing Thomas Ligotti

17 Jun, 2025

🐌Be warned this is a snailpost🐌

In an era of Context Collapse it is extremely difficult to build systems that prevent the flattening of all audiences. The classic example being an ingroup tweet that leaves the intended audience and has to have context reasserted on it post-containment breach. A classic example by @ratlimit, the best writer on Twitter:

By utterly losing control over boundaries in a landscape of algorithmic content unable to differentiate between 'intended effect' and 'effect' - we are limited to new strategies to prevent context collapse. We must signal not only the intended effect, but the intended audience, and we must also countersignal the audiences that must be driven away to prevent catastrophe. Many do this unintentionally with identity, marking themselves in the dressage of woke to deter conservative invasions, or in slurs to prevent the woke mob getting too close. When engaging with more subtle, nuanced positions one must get more creative about the signals and counter signals one deploys. For example, the phrase "one must..." is itself a signal towards sincere unironic intellectualism - it makes you sound like a massive dick to anyone who is unwilling to engage with a genuine attempt at conveying a genuine idea without irony. This is an intended effect - inducing the desire to prove that a self-serious writer is a hack fraud forces direct engagement with a piece or immediate dismissal based on aesthetic - either of which are a successful outcome - prompting engagement by those with the capacity for critique and quick disengagement from those who do not.

Anti-Aesthetic Memetic Defense is necessary to prevent Context Collapse

The aesthetic choices of this blog form a part of this process - it is a default theme amongst many, selected for its resemblance to CCRU aesthetics but requiring absolutely no customisation. This is anti-aesthetic memetics - the meagre attention paid to aesthetic other than to select an unpleasant one is itself a signal to focus on substance and to relate the writings to the category of aesthetic it most resembles - that of schizophrenic cybernetics. Anyone demanding a frictionless experience is driven away to comfier spaces that are less challenging to the senses.

I must emphasise that this isn't inherently virtuous, it is a pragmatic approach to pre-selecting your demographic to prevent context collapse. This defies the modern basic principle of maximising the capacity for virality, leaving doors open to as many people as will enter and will engage, regardless of the type of engagement. To the correct audience it should induce reaction - emphasis on the action. To the wrong audience, your work should be inconvenient or boring.

Convenience and the Death of Boredom

This blog is occasionally hostile in tone, always hostile in design. This is a necessity, hostility induces reaction and energy - I am told to make things more accessible, even as the people demanding it continue to engage. They are demanding the very things that will make them slough off the content frictionlessly, they are furious that they were induced to expend energy on something this stupid. This goes against every modern fundamental design principle of the last 20 years - frictionless access to immediate satisfaction has become a virtue so foundationally baked into culture that it is now invisible. Any design element that requires thoughtfulness to engage with creates immediate frustration and fury - people are unwilling to learn, to develop skills and to understand. UI/UX has become the pursuit of non-existence.

Machinery has been coated in pristine smooth surfaces, made cute, made amenable, made invisible. We no longer look inside the black box and have ceded all control over it. Worse still, we no longer understand it or why it exists or who made it. Objects used to carry humanity in them, the placement of screws imply a thought by a person on where an object needs strengthening, a guide to how to disassemble, adapt it, make it malleable to your needs. Objects used to have a deep humanity to them that has been dissolved into strange alien devices bestowed by monolithic eldritch entities like APPLE. Now it is smooth, opaque, incomprehensible. The conspiratorial instinct to attribute these advancements to genuine outside influence is more humanity-affirming than the reality.

Even at the scale of nations, advanced economies have offloaded the complexity of absolutely foundational industrial intellectual work to China - America does not have the material, infrastructure or even knowledge to produce the billion iphone components necessary to meet demands onshore. They offloaded this capacity to a blackbox nation behind a Great Wall and there is no generation ready to receive the knowledge of dying mentors. Convenience has induced sociogenic decay in such a fundamental way that it is genuinely collapsing neoliberalism - the most successful civilisational construct in human history. The dopamine rush of social media content consumption has infested every aspect of modern human life.

I got incredibly lucky - by a quirk of circumstance I was not onboarded onto social media at any point in my life. I skipped Facebook, Instagram, TikTok etc. I managed to build social networks via proximity and Whatsapp¹ and never got locked into any addictive algorithmic behavioural loops. In the year following covid I suddenly noticed everyone around me got a little stupider - I realised they had all been onboarded on to TikTok. I think we forget that it wasn't normal to check your phone every 7 minutes, in every brief moment of discomfort - and it certainly wasn't normal to do so and immediately get dragged into the doomscroll abyss in a public setting. Suddenly every moment of quiet in a group setting led to a bystander scrolling instead of listening - retreating from any mild hit of social pressure and succumbing to the comforting abyss.

It's happening again with AI. I can see it, I can see everyone around me getting dumber every week they pour their life energy into ChatGPT, every time a piece of art or a piece of writing gets immediately met with "that's good, did you use AI?" flattening all expression into content absent intent. You are not even fucking creating, you are not even intending, you're fucking PROMPTING. An ineffectual fucking poke with a stick to "do something, anything" rather than THE thing.

Every time I see it I feel fear. Every time you do it you are dying, I can see your life essence being sucked from you into the phone. You're going paler, your eyes are losing luster, you're being siphoned. I can see you fucking dying second by second. The worst part is you want this because you were convinced that being alive is not all right.

I want to kill Thomas Ligotti

This decrepit ancient life-hating nihilist fuck laid out a screed against life itself and whether by reflection or induction it has become the default state of being for every human in post-neoliberal sociogenic decay. Every moment of boredom, reflection and discomfort has become so unbearable that it must immediately be combatted by crushing up a TikTok video and snorting it off your iphone. Twitching as if your phone vibrated in your pocket - a fake social cue to justify checking your instagram notifications for anything resembling dopaminergic interaction. Nothing - but you scroll anyway with the rigid mannerisms of fake urgency letting the people you sit next to decay into background noise. Yes I'm mad at you. Fuck you and fuck Ligotti.

His assertion that consciousness is a mistake is correct in only one instance - his. Only a miserable isolated prick demands life be exclusively non-fiction - fiction is more resonant, connective and human than any science and more so for the fictions that make up our delusional lives. Any creature with a sense of mortality requires a delusional construct to survive with any remaining sensibility and this quirk of evolution is the greatest gift ever granted. A finite life and finite world and finite civilisation was unbounded into the infinite, every imagined experience as real as any abstract system of control we created - all equal until lended power we grant. The loss of any one of us is the catastrophic death of a universe and this is why power and politics must be shaped around freedom, freedom of expression and a supportive foundation for all to find and experience their most meaningful potential. No human should die early² and yet everyone is speedrunning their way to a glitchless death any % by wasting their desperately limited youth. Smoking is healthier than TikTok - at least smoking makes your life better now for years off the shittier end. If you made one friend on a smoke break it was worth 5 years off the end of your life. TikTok eats your youth.

YOLO if you're a YOLONER.

Playing in the Landfill

I am determined by my relationship with my sister. We grew up together in the most meaningful sense of that phrase. She's a couple years younger than me and the day she was born I loved her. I tried to hold her and dropped her, I think my earliest memory is going to the hospital to see her after she was born. My second is a pit of despair after I dropped her, I was too small to carry her. We played together every day. The family was fucked but we were always close, we fought and screamed at each other and we still always played together. I made silly voices for her soft toys and made her the main character in her own little childrens show. We did this for too long, well into ages it would have been a social catastrophe to be discovered at.³ She's not dead, I just appreciate her - we're still best friends.

We would go to the local landfill together on weekends and spend hours there scrounging for weird shit. We'd find chairs to pull apart and fight with, weird old board games and forgotten toys, sometimes we made soapbox racers out of broken IKEA furniture that fell apart the first time it went down the hill. We never made a good one but the fun was in crashing in it and it shattering immediately and getting hurt by bent nails and splinters and getting laughed at by the other. I'd look through boxes of old books and find moldy ttrpg manuals⁴ and weird sci-fi books and that's where I found The City and The Stars by Arthur C Clarke - the book I am.

It's set billions of years in the future of humanity in a utopian dome city on a barren Earth. The city is run by AI and populated by immortals given 2000 year lifespans before returning to hibernation until their next lifetime. No one has left or entered the city in billions of years, it is the last known place humans reside and every resident has a deep fear of the outside and the unknown. They engage in pure artistic expression, intellectual stimulation - creating experiences for each other. Occasionally antagonists to the city are produced in the form of a "Jester" who causes occasional disasters as part of the mechanisms of dynamic maintenance to prevent stagnation. The Jester was disruptive, funny, antagonistic - he fucked with the whole city in playful conflict.

The protagonist is the first "newborn" with no previous lives to emerge in millions of years, instilled with a compulsion to leave. He lives in a perfect utopia but must leave it and fundamentally shatter this stable utopic society. I don't know what to make of this. When he leaves the city he's helped by the Jester, but the Jester himself is too afraid to leave, he can't cross the threshold and be part of the new world. I think I identify more with that character - an enabler who won't live in what others create.

I think for me it's meant that purpose, or maybe just my purpose, has to be reactive - that in our world we have to fight for a utopia, and in a utopia you'd have to fight for something else. Bernard Suits has the most compelling vision of utopia for me - that we'd manufacture false antagonisms and contests in the form of games in a post-scarcity society - that if games are the only thing we would have left to do in a utopia then games are the most important thing in the world.

Playing with people is literally the point of life - and everything we do is play - we'd just like it to not be to the death.

Hypervitalism

Footnotes