I learned a lot writing this work. For example, a preface and an introduction serve two different purposes. The latter introduces the subject-matter for the work, whereas a preface, it turns out, is supposed to tell you about how the book came about in the first place. Because that story has so much to do with others I am combining the preface and acknowledgements for Waypoint.
For almost a decade now I have cut costs by living without a lease in situations where I either exchanged labor as rent or had a hugely reduced rental cost. So many of those people, who I have called “property patrons,” were generous hosts who asked very little in return. Others, though, proved themselves less than reliable. If anything, these experiences taught me that there is practically no correlation between reliability and ideology.
My hosts represented a broad spectrum of belief and lifestyle, spanning from an elderly disabled non-political (normie) Mormon, middle class Democrats, Mexican Trump supporters, anarchists, Bernie supporters, Marxists, left-leaning centrists, and even a third worldist “anarcho indigenous socialist commune” outside of the U.S. (though of course still within its imperial reach).
The overwhelming tendency has been for my property patrons to be nothing more than hospitable and supportive, but in 2019 a couple of my hosts went back on their word and my housing-security was thus compromised. In one case my housing situation was undermined because the relationship between the homeowners was falling apart. In another case, I was invited to stay somewhere to work on my book, but because on one occasion I mildly disagreed with the man of the house, I was told to go back to where I had come from.
When this happened the second time I politely expressed a difference of opinion I decided it really was time to move. In the latter case, they still talk about how they “put me up” like I was a charity case, when in fact they lorded their patronage over me, resorting to power-flexing threats instead of reason whenever simple disagreements arose. All of this while they openly denigrated my work, saying things like I was wasting my time to write a book only twenty people would read.
First of all, it is not a book that “only” twenty people will read. To put it more accurately, this is a book that “only the best” twenty people will read. Haha. Really though, is it such a crime to write a book primarily aimed at a few thoughtful friends, fellow travelers, and crowdfunding campaign supporters? There will be those who imagine my time could have been better put to other uses, but I disagree.
More important than this book making some huge impact and changing the world overnight is the fact that it has helped me get my thoughts in order while providing fellow travelers, friends, and family a chance to see what I have been up to for these last five years. But before we can get into that, I need to talk about the crowdfunding campaign that conceived this book.
There were a couple of years after college when I thought I would try to build up a “presence” “online.” I grew a small following of support on Patreon by creating video “content” about philosophy, theory, and politics. It was there I met some cool people, tried out a variety of mediums and formats for communicating ideas, and was aiming to do some really big creative projects—but my fundamental basis of security in the world, my housing security and privacy, was undermined right when I was to begin. So I had to move somewhere else, and on the very first day I tried to relax at my new place, my channel got terminated by YouTube. In an attempt to bring attention to my terminated channel, to try to get YouTube to reinstate it, I started streaming on Twitch and tweeting a lot. This was the most online I had ever been, that’s for sure.
It was in the process of my campaign to #freethepleeb that I found out my new living situation could not continue. That’s the one where the relationship of the homeowners was falling apart. Suddenly I needed to find a new place to live, but I had nowhere to go. I had just spent my last savings on this move! Twice in a row, people who had promised to help me with my project pulled the rug out from under me without warning.
I felt betrayed, but had no time to reflect on the implications of these betrayals–I had to move. So I started another campaign simultaneous with my push to get YouTube to reinstate my account, this new campaign was called #leasethepleeb. The first campaign only sought to get the attention of someone at YouTube to reinstate me, but this second campaign now asked others for financial support. Being so social for these campaigns, especially across so many platforms and in the midst of a housing crisis, it felt like I was unraveling.
I hate asking for help, or feeling like a charity case, so I made a promise. Thanks to the encouragement of Michael Downs of The Dangerous Maybe blog, with whom I’ve done a bunch of public conversation streams on Baudrillard and Lacan, I promised to write a book. I didn’t even know what it would be about, really, but I just knew it was time to return to a slower medium. If Twitch is go go go, writing is stop. slow down. breathe. think. work it out.
In those days of chaos and ceaseless talking that incessant streaming demands, I made a promise to write “my first shitty book” to anyone who contributed $20 or more to my #leasethepleeb campaign to help me move to somewhere stable and reliable. Not only did I raise the money I needed, but I found a place to move. All my plans for what I would do once at a new place of course were shattered by the events of 2020.
Trying to write a book on quarantine while the world burned, I experienced a train of earth-shattering realizations. I had already been studying up on the history of social change movements and now I felt like I was seeing it all play out again. People were calling it The Revolution, saying “This is it! We are living in the moment when it all changes forever.” Yet the things they were saying, all the sectarian to fusionist feuds, were dumbed down scripts that got written back in the sixties. Repetition without substantive difference is just history repeating itself as farce.
What a cynical thing to say. I had to suspect this had to do with personal experiences, seeing the difference between what people say and what they do. I try to be as self-critical as I am of systems and ideology, so I had to wonder: Maybe it was just my burnout talking, from all the stress of two forced moves within a short period of time. Maybe it was my “bern out” after knocking on doors and making calls for Bernie as he won the first few states during the primary to only fold like a good little boy and step aside to COVID, Biden, and BLM protests.
It became hard to tell the difference between what was really going on and what were my mere feelings of betrayal, from real people in my real life, to this symbol (Bernie) of a promised revolution, to riots and utopian tropes (hundred-year-old slogans) being called “revolutionary.” I realized I could not write the book I was trying to write because I needed to sort myself out first. I almost wrote three books during those agonizing months. Every time I got to about ninety pages I realized I did not even agree with myself anymore. I needed to step back. I needed to cool down. I needed time. Moreover, I needed to figure out how the different parts of my fractured self were supposed to relate. That’s where the book you are reading saved me.
As I tried to gain critical distance, to cool down, to sort myself out, to reintegrate, there were people who stayed close and remained friends, supporters, or fellow travelers, and there was a world of people who fell away. My time of pulling back to write made me realize I had been maintaining too many relations that would instantly fizzle out if I did not take it upon myself to make literally all of the effort.
The difference between relationships built IRL (in real life) versus online were showing themselves as fundamentally different in quality and substance. Even though I got my YouTube channel back, I no longer wanted to use it the same as I had. I went from being like 50% of people these days, wanting to be some kind of influencer, to realizing any degree of what might be called “influence” comes at a cost too great: The cost of actually doing anything different. The toll put on anyone who tries to play by the dictates of algorithmic incentives or best practices. The cost of my freedom to think as a regular person who works a real job, associating primarily with real people in the world of flesh, live verbal responses, and the face of the other.
It all came apart, and I am only now beginning to see how many factors truly impede the kinds of progress I purported to desire. Let’s talk about one in particular, because it is where I met so many of you.
The internet. The invasive communication superstructure built by anti-communists during the Cold War. Of course, we do not see the internet, we instead see the spectacle it displays, which we call the web. It is there we try to congregate, learn, share, and organize on Third-Party Spy Networks, also known as platforms, which farm our attention via technologies of distraction-addiction. It is here we build our false sense of self and world, projecting into the void our desperate hopes for something better.
Algorithmically siloed, structurally stultified, and psychologically gerrymandered, our fractured selves are primally wired into apparatuses of capture that harvest our potential to power intelligent machines that are devising the means to better predict and control the future, i.e. Big Data farming, the arms race that every state and major corporation is racing to monopolize, manipulate, and control.
I would say it is “like” the Matrix, but it’s more literal than that. However, there are no two pills to choose from. Nor is there, as in Star Wars, some all-pervasive magical Force divided between light and dark, good and evil, success and failure. All such terms are hardwired into the very infrastructure of this power-harvesting apparatus itself. Resistance only emboldens the code, accelerating its evolution as it learns from our aggregate thoughts, habits, and idiosyncrasies.
The web is not a place to build trust. It is a place to waste time and empower the enemy. So how can we use it strategically? If at all, I am not sure. For now, I guess I will use Amazon to publish this work because they have quite the distribution reach and printing press. As for the rest of it, I am trying to become independent of online people and platforms. Sometimes, of course, compromises are necessary, but any time I cannot easily justify such compromises, I am saying goodbye, as in the case with Facebook, Twitter, Discord, and so many other social platforms that have made far more use of me than I have of them.
Maybe I will realize this is all unnecessary or overreacting, but for the time being, I will be making up for lost time in the real world. The main way to keep in touch with me will be, for now, through email. Subscribe to my list at theorypleeb.com for updates about future works and IRL organizing events. Anyway, let’s bring it back around to my thank yous.
To the housing patrons who did not derail my projects or put me in harm’s way, I want to say thank you. I don’t care what you believe. I care that you are good people. You’ve taught me that hospitality and reliability are two of the first indicators of a virtuous character. You’ve proven yourselves more than just good people, but the kinds of people who give me hope and insight into the diversity and complexity of the human condition. This book would never have come about without your gift to me—a place to park my Foothold.
“Foothold” is the name of my tiny house, which was built on an 8×18 flatbed trailer for less than $2,200. After living in an RV for a couple of years to cut down on rent expenses, this was the next step in my alternative living experiment. It gets its name from the fact that it provides for me still today a foothold in the world from which to get relative stability and, most importantly, to strategically secure some time-energy freed up from the demands of “rent” and labor power in the market.
I hope that this book will make my former property hosts, patrons, and crowdfunding campaign contributors proud. My patrons online have been an odd assortment of liberal, conservative, leftist, and apolitical philosophers, non-ideological normies, old rebels and “fringe kids.” What has united them all is a thirst for not just knowledge but the conceptual means for making sense of knowledge so as to better navigate the complexities of life in a communally beneficial way. Though I have discontinued my Patreon for the sake of independence, I am deeply grateful to anyone who was a patron.
Special thank yous to Michael Downs of The Dangerous Maybe for pushing me to do this in the first place, not to mention all of our conversations over these last few years. I can’t wait for your book, Michael. To Elton of Working Class Intelligentsia, thanks for organizing Dead Parrots and for all your help and encouragement. To Kenneth, Bert, Astrid, Swol, Frank, Adam Ray Adkins, Matthew Griffin, Bryan Weeks, Justin, Adeeb, and The Dead Parrots Philosophical Society, thank you for your thoughtful questions, criticisms, and suggestions. Huge thank you to Danilo for the simple fixes incorporated into this addition! To the thoughtful interlocutors at The Red Republicans of the DSA, as well as The Platypus Affiliated Society, thank you.
To the liberal, conservative, and leftist professors across the spectrum along my development, from never having studied or written an essay, to my Master’s degree, thank you for your patience, guidance, and support. Especially to Dr. Ed Kaitz for encouraging me to attend my first conference, publish my first paper, and to go on for the B.A. after my A.S. You were the only person in my life who understood, encouraged, and guided my passion. Though we disagree on much, we can at least agree on the idea that “philosophy is not something one does at the beach, for twenty minutes. Philosophy is hard. You have to rise to its challenge!” Your pep talks and consideration impact me still to this day. Thank you Dr. Bruce Beerman for your patience and inspiration in my early years, for introducing me to both Marx and Heidegger, among so many others.
Thank you Dr. Ann Johnson for the philosophical counseling. There are many other professors who have impacted me in important ways too numerous to count or do justice to naming. Thank you for your patience, examples, and thoughtful responses to my questions. Though the names listed and insinuated above have helped me in so many ways, I should probably say that none of what follows in these pages is their responsibility. Any mistakes are my own.
Thank you mom for those times when you mentioned that you would like to see some of the stuff I was working on in college. Though I cannot imagine what you will think of what follows, I am still thankful for the fact that you asked and that I now have something to show you.
Finally, thank you Ann for these last three years of companionship, support, and encouragement, as well as for giving this manuscript a proof read! You are the most amazing partner anyone could ever ask for, and I love how our projects and passions inspire each other.
