Domestic Abuse

Hate Crime

If you are like me you might come from a generation that was raised online before the boom of social networking sites. The Internet was once a secret room that only the freaks could experience. We were trolling before it was called trolling and we didn’t do it for mob sport but intellectual exercise. My first exposure to the Internet was through a free text-based service where you could view alt.newsgroups and send email through a program called Pine. There was no world wide Internet that I could see from miles away.

I remember the act of “scrolling” which was placing ASCII skulls and bongs in AOL chatrooms. A/S/L anyone? I remember deleting the information on AOL discs and putting new material on them. I got suspended in elementary school for “hacking” when I brought these discs into class. Of course it was only a matter of time before people saw outside of Plato’s Cave so when Truman decided to get out of AOL and saw the mountain called the Internet a company called Geocities began hosting websites. (also known as “Geoshitties”) At the same time a bunch geeks like myself were starting our own domains and creating our own content to express ourselves and meet new people. We had no real life friends which was common in early Internet culture. The digital world was like a bar for the socially inept and we were all the bartenders.

The Make Out Club was founded in 1999 and considered to be the first popular social networking site. It was the site that everyone who had their own domain made fun of. After this came LiveJournal which was practically a subculture in itself and the place where I launched my project Acidexia. Next there was Friendster which was the first time the Internet truly opened its doors to the general public. I remember enjoying Friendster because cyberculture was coming into human form. People were dressed up like cyborgs in their profile pictures and you could find them out at clubs dressed the same way.

A lot of people consider Myspace the downfall of the Internet and in many ways I am inclined to agree. Yet I remember when Myspace was cool and it was a great way to meet other musicians. I could always search for Industrial artists in my area. It was a great way to get feedback on my music and present Experiment Haywire to the general public. When Myspace died there was no longer a central community for musicians and to this day the closest thing we have is SoundCloud. Of course Myspace did open the flood gates for a lot of idiots. It’s hard to deny that through the creation of Myspace the general IQ of the Internet population dropped at least 40 points.

The Internet was becoming a fancy strip mall full of ugly icons and flashing lights. With the creation of Twitter (which I’m still not convinced wasn’t predicted by William Gibson in Pattern Recognition) the Internet was now a business in which memes were an economic transaction and hastags were the key to success. The Web 2.0 was beginning to form. There was also Facebook which overthrew Myspace and introduced us to apps. Facebook wasn’t too bad when it first started out but with the rapid growth of the Internet it became the Orwellian conspiracy we all feared. With the rise of the iPhone and Droid it was clear that Facebook was making itself a forced connection to the digital world. Flashbacks to AOL anyone?

There is hope that Google+ will kill Facebook once and for all. In fact it is almost like Google+ has become Obama and since Google+ is not Bush everybody is voting for it. Yet I don’t see anything Google+ing Twitter. Maybe this means that Twitter is here to stay for a while. It turned the Internet into a popular business tool which I now see as a good thing. Information-as-currency is a subject that has always fascinated me. I love going to conferences and contributing to discussion feeds. Maybe the Internet has not become an Idiocracy like it appears to have become on Facebook. As people who used the Internet in the early days we have now grown up and are utilizing our digital knowledge to help a new generation.

Cyberstalking = when a person is followed and pursued online. Their privacy is invaded and their every move is watched. It is a form of harassment that can disrupt the life of the victim and leave them feeling very afraid and threatened. Here is my question. Can anything be done about this?

As many of you know I am the target of a resentful/predatory cyberstalker who has over hundreds of victims. This guy has been after me for over a decade and is hiding in his basement to avoid being served with various restraining orders. (not to mention that thousands of people want him dead) He has dedicated his life to destroying my career as a multi-media artist and inflicting severe emotional distress on me. From spreading libel about me to my business contacts to impersonating people in any industry I work in to sending my friends and family infant rape fantasies about me this guy is absolutely relentless.

I once thought I was his only target until his other victims began contacting me. He was sending us child pornography and threatening to kill us along with impersonating our dead relatives. We started a support network and put all of our case numbers together to make this a federal matter. What now? The hunt for my stalker continues yet has been unsuccessful as of now. The FBI having bigger fish to fry. The police say that he is “good at what he does.”

Can people like this be stopped if they cannot be found? Many people blame Internet anonymity on cyberstalking but I strongly disagree with that sentiment. Anonymity does not create predatory cyberstalkers. Predatory cyberstalkers create predatory cyberstalkers. Without anonymity targets of cyberstalkers have their personal information exposed and are at a much greater risk. In my How Facebook Deleted My Ass article I discussed how my account was deleted because I was accused of impersonating myself. I am no longer allowed to go by my copyrighted pseudonym and thousands of people are now aware of my full first and last name.

Getting rid of Internet anonymity (the ultimate goal of Facebook) is extremely dangerous and certainly not the solution. Is there a solution to Cyberstalking? Nobody seems to have found one yet. People who aren’t in the know say the solution is to “just ignore them” but these people have never been targets of professional stalkers like mine. Here is some background information I have found on Cyberstalking for those of you who are curious about the subject.

“Cyberstalking usually occurs with women or children who are stalked by adult predators or pedophiles. Cyberstalkers have no fear of physical violence since they believe that they cannot be physically touched in cyberspace. Their main targets are mostly women, and children, who are viewed as emotionally weak or unstable. While it is believed that over 75% of the victims are women, sometimes men are also the targets of cyberstalking. Stalkers can comprehensively use the Internet in order to slander and endanger their victims. In such cases, the cyberstalking takes on a public, rather than a private, dimension.

As noted by Gilbert (1999): In real life, stalkers usually stalk in proximity to their victims—they want the victim to see them and know they are there—they feed on the victim’s reaction. On the internet, proximity takes on a new meaning. The stalker exploits the workings of the Internet to assume control over the targeted victim. (Ogilvie, 2000).

Resentful stalker motivations: (Indianchild.com, 2000)

Sexual Harassment

This should not surprise anyone, especially women, since sexual harassment is also a very common experience offline. The internet reflects real life and consists of real people and is not a separate, regulated, or sanctified world.

Revenge and Hate

Revenge vendettas are often the result of something you may have said or done online which may have offended someone.”

I’ll say this one more time. Anonymity does not create predatory cyberstalkers. Predatory cyberstalkers create predatory cyberstalkers. We need a solution that is much better than taking away our right to anonymity. Does anybody have one?

It was a quiet night at our new place. The drama was nil to zero. Or maybe it was high with the relocation and decision to quit Experiment Haywire. One may never remember. Yet I still had my Facebook network didn’t I? 5000 friends to talk to from all over the world. Every post I made sparked debate among the freaks among the freaks. I’d met over 1000 of these beautiful people in real life. I was the connection to The Disconnected. I was the Queen of Antisocial Media! I worked pretty damn hard for my empire of dirt. I was Rachel Haywire. Or was I?

I signed onto Facebook to look at the latest Transhuman Separatist happenings. Behold! Suspended account! Warning! Chaos! Annihilation! Extermination! Decay! At least Charlie Sheen is winning right? That should fix everything. Charlie Sheen is winning!

What had I done now? Was she at it again? Was he at it again? Maybe all of my hate-stalkers had met in one place and decided to fake-report my account simultaneously. The world may never know. Yet were my hate-stalkers really the problem here? What controversial public figure doesn’t have hate-stalkers? Isn’t it the job of the nice people at Facebook to decide when they get reports that are bogus trolling attempts?

Apparently not. Facebook would much rather spend their time targeting ads at their users (I’ve literally shown up in a picture of an ad that was targeting me) than making sure that the reports they receive are actual reports. My friends were texting me with urgent information from people who could only reach me through Facebook. The emo kids were asking me why I deleted them in tears of digital regret. The industrial kids were laughing at the epic stomping of my public persona. Yet I just wanted to check my Facebook email.

It appears that I was deleted for impersonating Rachel Haywire. Impersonating myself. Is this some existential hipster comedy here? Self impersonation. Is this an occult exercise to rid oneself of the digital ego? Even on Myspace (the shit of the shit) my identity was perma-verified.

Suddenly it hit me. I had been placing way too much importance on Facebook. I had so many contacts who I could only reach through that website. Pictures that I would never be able to get back again. Moderator privileges. Why was I living my life on Facebook? Maybe it was good that they deleted my ass. There were other places to go. One of them was outside and another one of them was Twitter.

I see it now. I finally see it. There is a world outside of Facebook and it is a beautiful world full of new potential. Facebook is a digital Disneyworld. AOL 2.0. They will delete your ass. They deleted mine.

[Reprinting the manifesto on my website for those of you who missed it on Humanity+]

We are a new species. We are not superior. We are a different step in the evolution of thought.

Our Human ancestors relied on collectivism and a conscious submission to conformity as was necessary for survival. Culturally and pragmatically they were each other.

We are transhuman, and we are not like our Human ancestors. We have no proclivity to rely on a conscious submission to conformity, and we do not need it for survival. Where freedom of mind was a weakness to our ancestor, it is our strength. Evolution follows the ebb and flow of time. The Human mind was the framework, the foundation of the transhuman one, as the transhuman mind will be for the next when evolution decides it.

It is natural then for us to emerge now. Like all evolved resistance, we will be hated — at first. We will be ignored — at first. We will be ridiculed — at first. In the end, we will merely exist as a new direction in the evolution of thought. We are the one’s who can stand together unified through freedom of thought. Freedom — true freedom of thought — is not the ability to resist all infiltrators of the mind, but the ability to perceive and forsake all those one can manage. We are the one’s who can rely on one another without conscious submission. For that, conscious submission, is choking us, has choked us, and has provoked an acknowledged necessity for disassociation from Human society. Conscious submission, or collectivism, is what a transhuman actively rejects in pursuit of freedom of thought. In the face of conscious submission, we will reject, we will dispute, we will resist.

In the wake of conscious submission lies the Holocaust perpetrated by the Third Reich of Germany during the 1930′s and 40′s, a broad spectrum of witch trials, assassinations, cultural genocides such as that of the Native Americans, cultural stagnation, harassment, bullying, isolationist tendencies, notions of ethnic superiority, hatred, identity confusion — the list goes on.

A Transhuman Separatist’s mind is their sanctuary. Conscious submission seeks to turn our sanctuaries into prisons. We say that those who would silence us and turn our sanctuaries to prisons are the real prisoners. Those who wish us to remain hidden are our oppressors. We say we are suffocating in the weeds of conscious submission. We are leaving the garden of conscious submission in pursuit of our endeavors, for the health of the mind’s of all Transhuman Separatists who can bare living amongst this mentality no more.

Transhumanism is not about intellectual elitism. While transhumans may fit in the Human category: “intellectual,” our existence is due to certain traits intrinsic and acquired through experience. Not all intellectuals are transhuman. From birth, transhumans experience an innate alienation from the Human race. This feeling of unbelonging triggers severe depression, anxiety, confusion, self-loathing, etc, which can often be misunderstood and mislabeled by Human society. For a transhuman, human society is an excruciating place to exist, full of other beings afraid to question not merely the world around them, but existence itself. A transhuman is not afraid and is in fact driven to question existence, to open doors, to accept that there is no black and white, and most importantly to engage in introspection. A transhuman accepts nothing at face value, except for the consistency with which the universe changes without being bound to baseless, fabricated laws of Human conscious submission. Most importantly, transhumanism is concerned with combating all forms of oppression against gender, race, ethnicity, thought, age, and disability.

Transhuman society is a collection of individuals. These individuals may at times come together to form a consensus, one that is not derivative of human collectivism, in-as-much-as transhumans use no binary operating system.

We want a nation. We want sovereignty. Transhuman sovereignty. Time has revealed we cannot co-exist within a society based on conscious submission — we must move on. We must rise above the weeds and take back our breaths, so we suffocate no more. The interests of conscious submission are not our interests. The interests of conscious submission lie in Humanity. We are not Humanity. We are not Human.

What happened? For the past few years I’ve been nailing the death of the Internet into the coffin. I recently posted about The Death of Memetics and was all but ready to give up on creating any sort of digital revolution. The cancer had spread too fast and we were completely outnumbered. The new generation of cyber-thugs decided to shit on the city that we built for them. Anonymous was no longer about free information but getting depressed 12 year old goth girls to kill themselves. The mobbing of innocent people was not related to natural selection but sexual rejection. Bullycide everywhere.

Enter Julian Assange. Enter Wikileaks. Enter the beginning of Information War I. Suddenly Anonymous wakes up and suddenly we are rewriting the manifestos. The cancer is no longer relevant. We are Anonymous. We are Legion. We do not forgive and we do not forget. We support the freedom of information. We are against digital mobbing.

Now we have found secret documents that our own government has kept us from viewing: secret documents that were used to kill innocent civilians: secret documents that gave validation to everything any so-called conspiracy theorist claimed. There are hundreds of mirror sites to Wikileaks. We cannot be stopped.

http://wikileaks.ch/mirrors.html

All of this is completely exhilarating for me. I now feel the pulse of the revolution that I thought had died. We are reclaiming our territory. The Internet is being used for to spread free information again. Memetics are reborn. We are experiencing a new digital culture and I must say that it doesn’t contain very many lolcats. I love the Internet.

Update: This article was just published by Disinformation. http://www.disinfo.com/2010/12/how-the-rise-of-the-information-war-gave-birth-to-a-new-digital-culture

Meme: a cultural item that is transmitted by repetition in a manner analogous to the biological transmission of genes.

Or so it used to be. I remember a time when memes were exciting. Units of cultural information. The viral (r)evolution. I recently declared that “memes died in 2005″ which created a lot of controversy among my readers. How can memes be dead?

I think that memes are dead because we no longer live in a culture where the strongest memes survive. We live in a culture that I have dubbed the great mashup of nothing. A perfect example would be the website Tumblr in which 90% of its users are rebloggers. They repost the images and videos of other users (Tumblr makes this very easy and even promotes itself based on this) without creating any original content. Are these people posting powerful memes that are generating into something greater? I think not.

It seems like everyone on the Internet acts like a 14 year old troll. Can I haz my culture back? I don’t think that lolcats are funny. They might as well symbolize the death of memetics. The fittest memes are parody macros. Can we say cyber-idiocracy?

From my readers:

“This is something I’ve never been comfortable with. How does this word ‘meme’ come to mutate from being a concept Dawkins used to track cultural changes to being internet slang for ‘running joke’?” -Robert Bisno

If you would like to understand memetics I recommend reading The Selfish Gene by Richard Dawkins (also author of The God Delusion) or The Meme Machine by Susan Blackmore. I met Susan at a convention once (isn’t her dyed hair adorable?) and we talked for a bit about what memes had turned into. Was this evolution? I wish I had recorded our conversation. Dawkins and Blackmore did not envision graphics of slapstick violence as the future of memetics.

You can also check out their websites (Richard Dawkins and Susan Blackmore) to find out what memetics are really about. Let’s not let the evolution of ideas be killed by this new stampede of maggots.

Here is the video I made for the “It Gets Better” campaign to fight against gay teen suicide and cyberbullying. I encourage all of you to make your own.

The word on the streets is out. Sanity is slavery!

For this past year machineKUNT Records (home to Experiment Haywire, Trimetrick, Lady Parasyte, Syrenn etc.) are hard at work on the “Sanity is Slavery” compilation to fight against psychiatric abuse through music. This is a 2 digipack CD compilation which also includes a digital bonus disc. 10% of proceeds are going to MindFreedom International which is an organization dedicated to mental health rights. The compilation features 48 diverse (mostly unreleased) tracks from artists across the globe including Attrition, Hanin Elias, Leæther Strip, amGod, Pzychobitch, and Trimetrick. It is mastered by Kolja Trelle of Soman.

machineKUNT is currently giving away packages to anybody who pre-orders the compilation as they count down the last days of their Kickstarter fund. With everything from paintings made specifically for the cause to customized songs by Experiment Haywire and Society Burning to customized photoshoots of machineKUNT models to professional remixes by De-Tached to rare Attrition posters there are 14 different packages available to everyone who helps machineKUNT reach their Kickstarter goal. In an age of digital media the cost of printing physical albums in astronomical but Rachel Haywire of machineKUNT Records is interested in releasing a collectors item that will be remembered for its meaning and message. The large booklet of this digipack will contain pictures, bios, and testimonials from the artists on the compilation along with testimonials from psychiatric survivors all over the world.

You can pledge on one of the 14 packages here: Sanity is Slavery Kickstarter project

Sample clips of the songs are available for listening directly on the machineKUNT website: machineKUNT Records