(1881 words)
I was asked today why i dislike the queer community in germany. So i wrote a 30 minute rant, and now it's gonna be a blogpost. Here i am specifically talking about my experience with the queer transfem part of the chaos community. I'm sure that somewhere far away, there might be a corner of this community that manages to function well. I just never found it, and probably never will.
I think the problem is twofold...
There is not enough infrastructure in germany. At least outside Berlin. There are no bdsm clubs. No queer meetups. No places you can just sit and chat. Everything is too small. Too clique-y. Unwelcoming. Closed off. There are events, but they're all either too frequent (and thus small) or too rare (and thus big 4 day extravaganzas, which induce fomo and are impossible to fully survive without drugs). Nothing is ever just a meetup. There is always something more to do, than to just talk and chill.
The best kind of events i've had so far here were Pride Parades. They are nice, there are so so many people, everyone shows up. But they are also very rare. Only once per year. And i haven't really managed to make lasting friends on them.
The community has one foot on the internet, either on fedi or on discord or on whatever else they like to use. When people meet in person, they are not just themselves, but extensions of their internet presence. Their personal brands. Their simulacra2. The internet is no longer anonymous. Everyone has a name, and that name is unique, and forever stays with you. With every interaction you make, you carry the weight of your history. The weight of everything you've ever said. You are no longer free to speak your mind. You must self-censor to protect your reputation. Those who fail to do so (or those who are simply disliked) are punished. Canceled. Excluded from the few irl spaces we have by community vote. Basically the irl version of blocking someone without saying a word.
Every friend you make in this community will have more allegiance to the community then they will to you. If you state some incorrect political opinion, something that harms the brand of the community, their instinct is not to communicate and understand you, it is to mark you as "bad", because they also have their own reputation to protect, and "one must not associate with [nazis, abusers, problematic people, etc]".
Everything in those communities is fake. Brands talking to brands. Pretending to be friends. Pretending to be in love. Running their polycules like a corporation, "firing" anyone who damages the brand. Even if such "drama" creates a negative reputation around your little corner of the community, you must protect this imaginary resource. The clout of being part of the ingroup. Access to it must be controlled, for it is limited. You know, being a Hacker is still cool, but being a Hippie is cringe now. We must not let ourselves become the Hippies.
And, of course, this kind of fake life takes a toll on people. They are dissatisfied with their relationships, with their world, not quite understanding why that is. Those hit by the attacks become depressed and angry, bringing down the mood of all their friends. They do self harm, abuse drugs (for the community provides easy access to drugs). Some kill themselves. People go to 4 funerals per year. Everyone is sad and doomed. They cope with it thru self deprecation and kink. Oh so much kink. All of the roleplay kind. The boundaries of reality begin to blur. You can't tell anymore, if someone wants to drink piss as a joke, as a humiliation scene, or because they like the taste. Words like "sister" lose all their meaning. You catch yourself asking, if your friend is talking about their fake parents or their real parents...
Everything is hypersexual but not sex positive. They call themselves sluts, and mean that as an insult. They're just into being insulted. Kink is used as a disguised way to hate yourself, that's socially acceptable and doesn't get people worried about you. If you only want to die, because being kidnapped and murdered in a forest is hot, then nobody has to get sad about you and everything is fine, and you can still pretend to be happy.
This atmosphere of self hate then creates an atmosphere of indifference and disconnection. If someone hates themselves, and you offer them support, they will get mad, cause they don't deserve it. So no one offers support anymore. There's generally not much empathy around. You limit it for self defence, to not get hurt. Sync rate capped at 60%.3 For if you truly understand someone who wants to die, you will desire death yourself.
So you may ask, why am i still here? If i hate it so much, why don't i just leave? Why do i keep introducing more and more people to this huge interconnected clusterfuck? Do i simply want them to suffer? To go thru the same perils i had?
None of it is this simple. We still need community. Someone to talk to to. Somewhere to find new friends. Some place to belong...
«What is the most important thing in life? If we ask someone living on the edge of starvation, the answer is food. If we put the same question to someone who feels lonely and isolated, the answer will probably be the company of other people.»6
So, we cannot really leave. There is no other place to go. The terrible communities are the only ones we know. To make friends outside of this artificial garden on the internet, you need to speak german, to be neurological, good at talking to strangers, etc. The friends you make at work or school are rigid and sterile. Rarely developing further than just acquaintances. And if you leave, if you denounce the community, you'll be forced to leave behind all the friends you made there. They'll be covered in ooze.4
So the only choice is to stay. Distance yourself from the ones who take things too seriously. From the ones failing to communicate clearly. Keep to the edges of the community, on the periphery, where it intersects more strongly with other circles, where it intersects more strongly with the real world. When being conscious of these patterns, it will be easier to avoid them... Or maybe i should actually finish reading that leftist theory...
It has taken me a few days to come up with a title for this blogpost. Every single title i've come up with (and, as you can see in the structure of my website, i have 3 different titles) has some failed to describe what this blogpost is about. They all ended up either too literal or too poetic. If i mention “chaos” or “germany”, this would imply that a familiarity with the subjects is required or even relevant to the topics discussed here. If i mention “Terrible Communities”, that would be an admission that my post is nothing more than an adaptation.
The idea to call it a Horizontal Slice came to be yesterday, when i presented a friend with a Vertical Slice of the same thing. As you might remember from game design, a vertical slice is a kind of distillation of a larger experience into a smaller package, such that all the main features of it are retained, and, at least in part, present in the final smaller product, viz. a game demo or a movie pilot.
A Vertical Slice of whatever this is, can be shared with someone by simply bringing them to a hackspace on a particularly eventful day. However, such a Vertical Slice frequently leads them to the opposite conclusions. It shows just enough of every fun thing imaginable, omitting the deep undertones of whatever uncanny things may be dwelling beneath the surface. To see the conclusions i've reached, one needs the full experience, i.e. a long term stay in the community.
So may this post serve as a warning, if you are just getting into such a community, or even if i myself invited you in. This community is not for beginners.5
It is in the nature of simulacra to be nearly undetectable, especially by someone unaware of their existence. Our world is full of them, and they are so complex and varied, that they form such an intricate, alluring and engrossing illusion of reality, that our brains believe the simulation to be more real than reality itself. This is how hyperreality is born.
In some way, a character is more real then a person. You haven't been drawn yet.7 You don't exist. And you yearn to exist. Like a character does. To model yourself after the people (characters) you see all around you. On the internet. Your sense of self becomes a performance. A grand performance. For everyone to see.
Reality is a actually quite simple. Most of the complexity we experience in our day to day lives is actually just made up. Conceptual. Problems build around other problems, not around reality itself. If you need someone's help to solve a problem, that is a problem in of itself.8
You may think, that now that we're armed with this knowledge, with this small seed of awareness, we might be able to escape. Sadly, it's not this simple. It's no red pill.9 If we want to escape the simulation, we need explicit and deliberate effort to resist the pressures described above, and a specialized social attention, aimed at detecting the presence of simulacra in people, so that we can distance ourselves from them.
This is not easy.