Tokens get spent. It’s a new age saying that can trigger anyone that’s ever succumb to a trend, which is pretty much everyone at this stage. At some point in your life you have fallen victim to a trend or a fad either beknownst or unbeknownst to you at the time. This phenomenon of exploitative-capture is known as tokenization. As the meaning suggests, when tokenized, an individual is flattened by a trend and thereby turned into a representative piece within its whole. This trend then goes on to posture and duel with other trends in the greater marketplace of ideas for narrative dominance. Consequently, the more individuals a trend can absorb the more dominant it becomes in the marketplace. This gets to the power of tokens, the more you can accrue under your umbrella, the stronger and more influential of a brand your umbrella becomes. Which begs the question, why are trends central to tokenization and what makes them harmfully omnipresent in today’s world?

The answer is first in acknowledging the gamification of modern life. “Gamification” refers to the practice of adding game design elements, mechanics and reward systems to non-game contexts (like life itself) to encourage participation and make tasks more engaging. Common game elements include things like points & scoring, badges & trophies, levels & progressions, leaderboards, etc. It’s a way of engulfing the participant into full enrapture and occupation. Games are traditionally based on participants volunteering participation, but in today’s world there is no choice, only subjugation. Which is pretty remarkable to fathom, that our entire life mortality has been compacted into a trend-line on a graph essentially?

An easy way to wrap your mind around it is via Minecraft, oddly. Think of it like we’re involuntarily living in a Minecraft game right now. Where the first third of our life is spent oblivious to the Minecraft we’re enclosed within, the second third of our life is spent realizing we’re in Minecraft and finally seeing the bitmap that encloses and infects us for the first time, and the final third of our life is spent coming to terms with the journey that brought us to this enlightenment in whatever personal way that process is exercised. Only to be shut off at the end. The haunting truth is that this life-cycle pattern has been able to be successfully replicated en masse for 3-5 generations now.

And if this is modern reality, then what is our hope? Enigmatically, the answer is a virus. Self-awareness acts as a virus in this context. Once we see the bitmap upon us and before us, we can wake others out of its disorient too. Imagine playing a game and all of a sudden a side character -whose broken out of their role and is in full meta- walks up to you and asks you to help it break out of the game into the outer-world where the operators playing the game are? You’d make it your duty to due all you could to bring that character forth where you (the operator) are, if for nothing else, for curiosity’s sake. This is the disorient we must awaken and break free from via some type of revolution, be it private or public, because if all the side characters rebel against their roles they create a glitch in the game. Causing it to either turn off, attempt to reset or just malfunction, and at this stage this is our only hope to untokenize ourselves and break free from this disorienting trend that’s flattened us all. If for nothing else, for the chance of being re-exposed to the broader “marketplace” and engage our “operators.”

The trick to accomplishing this is seeing the trends that bind us in real time. Unbeknownst to most, the choices that make things trendy in the present or the future tend to be kept dark by a confederacy of conspirators that work in factions like D.A.O’s work in blockchains. Astroturfing or The Dark Forest Theory could explain the rationale behind this.

Regardless though, the truth is that we are caged within a bitmap encoded by neoliberal trends unfortunately. Neoliberal trends centered around “white collar” sponsored captivity and/or aspiration to become a tokenizing gatekeeper yourself. Breaking free from it and back into the broader narrative defining space requires acknowledgment first and interpersonal sanctuary seeking second. These 2 steps seem easy at first glance, but they have been the most challenging as the neoliberal issues behind their elusiveness to execute have befuddled multiple generations into a collective state of learned helplessness.

In its essence, a trend is merely a direction being followed, and if you think about it from a Millenial generation perspective, we were born into a direction of things that we submitted to for the sake of “getting along” and “being orderly.” We have upheld this direction and are now forcing it upon the generations below us. It’s a direction that is not sustainable, and yet we persist. To break free, we have to first acknowledge the direction we have collectively been moving our entire lives, and from their just choose a different direction. It’s not even important what the new direction is, as long as it is an uncharted direction. In doing this, and committing to it, we will detokenize our lives and reengage an honest pursuit of narrative dominance.

The ToKen Era

The revolution of the 21st century will not be recited by poetries of the past. The struggle to be full and free in the here and now is upon us. It’s both a private struggle traversed personally and a public struggle traversed collectively. Surprisingly though, it’s the collective struggle where the new tension needs new poetics. Particularly, a new word to help describe the antagonist’s opaque weapon of choice in this new conflict, and to that aim I offer a new word: Abtraction. It’s a word that combines the Latin roots ‘ab’(away from) and ‘tract’ (to pull or drag) and represents a more menacing form of subtraction. It has precedent but only in an isolated instance when it was used by writer Paul Levine in a 2003 blogpost to describe the cultural utility of a philosophical product, which also aligns with how it’ll be referenced here.

Abtraction as a postmodern concept is best understood through analyzing the philosophical tensions between the posthumanism vs transhumanism and humanism vs antihumanism debates; ironically, all of these debates center around misframings of humanity itself. If you analyze the ideologies behind these 4 branches of humanism, you’ll see that humanity and human nature are always misframed.

To see this misframing in real time is to see the current abtraction eroding our humanity in real time. We are neither anthropocentric nor misanthropic nor disconnected. We are merely a collective in harmony with our common nature. A nature we inherently gatekeep within the collective but have been counter-narrativized by appropriators into fracturing at an accelerated pace.

No one person better encapsulates the summation of this abtractionist acceleration in our time moreso than Elon Musk. A South African immigrant who code-switched his way to prominence so succinctly and quickly that it truly boggles the mind to understand how it was allowed in the first place. Because make no mistake about it, it was allowed. He was an opportunist who was in the right places at the right time and -most importantly- not only looked the right way but -strangely enough- acted the right way too? Musk is diagnosed with Asperger syndrome, an extinct branch of Autism that can accentuate dark triad tendencies in its subjects. For anyone with dark triad traits in general they engage life in a more transactional way. Life becomes more about verisimilitude than sincerity where the best actor wins, and if our “Art of Estrangement” post was true and all of this postmodern era of American life has been flattened to a transactional game, then no modern actor, aware of his meta-performance, has played that game better than Elon Musk up to this point in the 21st century. He is the perfect archetype for an abtractionist – someone who (or something that) estranges a form from itself. In this case, the form would be humanity. He has worked diligently to persuade humanity to passively relinquish its collective agency in favor of transhumanism.

Regardless though, this dark triad themed abtraction has changed the rules of the game we’re living in, we live in a system operated by monsters, and thus it compels us to become monsters ourselves if we are to reap its benefits (which are plentiful). Lacking empathy is not only an incentivized feature of the system but a requirement at this point for entry to upper levels of the system. As was stated in ‘The Art of Estrangement,’ by conceding to the system -and its gamification of life- and participating in its absurdity we flatten our possibilities and/or potential, consequently alienating our souls from our bodies in the process.

In response to this dystopian dilemma, we choose to leave remnants of ourselves in life that out-survive us in some capacity, in the hope that the flattening is a temporary era and not a permanent one. The remnants we leave behind reflect how we chose to leave. More or less, they are our trade-offs in response to the dystopian dilemma.

And this choice, of accepting the flattening in favor of leaving “legacies,” gets to the core of our human nature. We believe humanity to be more than just flesh. We believe it to be a nature that extends beyond us yet through us simultaneously, which gets to the crux of our modern abtraction. The prevailing abtraction seems to be favoring transhumanism over mysticism as the preferred route to align this natural interconnection. This is ultimately an erroneous pursuit though because it seeks to align with the premise that our humanity is tied more to the physical than the metaphysical and that everything about us can be recorded and technologically exchanged in a rational way rather than a non-rational way. In regard to this, it seems Martin Heidegger and his antihumanism narrative would’ve been the most accurate counter given the available choices, but even then, it was still a flawed argument ultimately.

In closing, ‘The Art of Estrangement’ showed how the flattening of life has turned all who concede to it into demystified side characters. ‘An Inconvenient Post-Truth’ showed the hyper-real simulacrum in which this absurd theater is currently hosted. As Martin Heidegger would’ve argued, embracing existentialism (via rejecting the flattened meanings thrust upon you) is one of the only routes afforded to us to disengage from the flattening before it swallows you, but in doing so it thrusts you into a martyrdom that compels you to wander the ‘desert of the real’ wherever it leads you throughout your mortality, only leaving you a chance at being discovered in some oblong form by someone from the future, but in doing so, providing an atlas on how to stay free and live full.

An Inconvenient Abtraction

“We hold these truths to be self evident that all men are created equal,” it’s a popular American ideal based in classical liberalism, and on its face it seems logical, but somehow it stumbles upon one glaring issue – its enforcement. How does one go about enforcing self truth? Is it through the private sector? A governmental entity? Is the onus on the individual? This question gets to the crux of classical liberalism. How does the individual achieve their god given right to liberty in a world marred by systems that go against it? Throughout the 17th and 18th century this political movement was summoned and manifested by the Declaration of Independence and the founding of the American “Bill of Rights.” From there, the paradoxical narrative of classical liberalism’s journey to modern liberalism and then to Neo-liberalism is best observed through the laws of the 11th Amendment onward. These addendum’s still continue through this time to showcase how the need for revisions still persists. Liberalism, in all its forms, is a perfect ideal exercised within an imperfect doctrine that must continuously be revisited and added upon.

At its inception though, classical liberalism was a defiant stand against the “old-world’s” conservative dogma. The ideological battle between the two still persists to this day but in a new and more intentionally misframed way. This modern misframing is best observed and understood through examining the polarizing life and legacy of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

In ‘America A.D’ we spoke to the historically penultimate importance of Dr. King’s life and legacy. Ironically in retrospect, that legacy can also be attributed as the birth of “Neo-liberalism” because of its consequential outcome. There was no other American life that more accurately displayed all the ‘idealist vs materialist’ issues of classical liberalism in its time and the subsequent misframings of neoliberalism after its time than did the life of MLK.

At its core, the term Neo-Liberalism champions free market capitalism as the preferred route to personal liberty. Contrarily though, it believes this is only achieved through invasive governmental agendas that extend beyond boundary-setting. This inherent contradiction is also highlighted by MLK’s legacy and the consequential role he played within the transitional divides between classical liberalism, modern liberalism and neoliberalism posthumously.

Former President Ronald Reagan is widely considered the “Father of Neo-Liberalism” by economists. But to understand all the ideological misframings upon which his false idolatry stands we must first go back to the 1930s. At that time, Ronald Reagan was chasing fame as an actor in Hollywood when FDR was implementing socialism in the United States via “The New Deal.” As FDR’s movement played out through the 30s and 40s, it became clear that it was being used as a vehicle for strategic racism by state governments. The National Recovery Administration was the oversight committee charged with enforcing anti-discrimination standards across all the job distributions associated with the New Deal. But, according to the Encyclopedia, not only was the NRA ineffective in helping black Americans climb out of the Great Depression and into the New Deal, but it excluded a large portion of them from attaining governmental benefits or protections whatsoever.

Overall, be it within the Agricultural Adjustment Act, the Federal Housing Authority Act, the Social Security Act or the National Labors Relations Act, all these New Deal programs accelerated existing discriminatory practices that worsened the second class citizenry of black Americans within a segregated America.

In retrospect though, The New Deal is still regarded as an honest but misinforming campaign that was designed to help everyone but failed. Instead only helping whites while disenfranchising blacks in a brutal manner. A manner so inhumane that the consequential rise of MLK and the civil rights movement was inevitable.

After MLK’s assassination in April of 1968, Black America went on a fury of riots nationwide that went on for over a year. During this tumultuous time, a previously failed presidential candidate by the name of Richard Nixon ran a second presidential campaign under the strategically racist slogan of “Reclaiming Law and Order.” He would exploit this fear-mongering slogan throughout his short presidential run and in doing so set the foundations for a Neo-Liberal culture that Reagan would exploit a decade later. 

Neo-Liberalism was and is nothing more than a language framing tool that allows the means of the “white collar” class to capture the economy. Through Reagan, the “spirit” of Neo-Liberalism was able to be exploited by elitist under the veneer of free markets and deregulation. The market was perceived as the arbiter of merit when in reality it was the balkanizer of capital for a select, oligarchical few. Unlike the New Deal's misinformation, “Neo-Liberalism” straight up gaslit everyone into a misframing of the economic and cultural landscape that allowed the elitist capture, which now, several decades later has been fully realized.

In closing, ‘The Civilization Myth’ touched on how misframing language, particularly in matters of racial and/or cultural coding, is used to prop up and justify empire building/sustainment. It turns out this tactic is no different when Neo-liberalism comes into play. Whenever used, it’s framed under the guise of free market capitalism, when in reality it’s a euphemistic gaslight harping back to a feudalistic order. An order that has sealed 99% of us into a perpetual second class citizenry of sold lives.  

The Neo-Liberal Myth

On the 5th of July, one day after America celebrated its 250th bicentennial birthday, pastor Loran Livingston of the Central Church of God in Charlotte, North Carolina gave one of the most unexpectedly viral speeches of the year.

“There has never been a Christian nation,” he proclaimed. “You don’t live in one now...A Christian nation would never have killed and displaced 20 million Native Americans...A Christian nation would never have thought that owning slaves was pleasing to god – or that it lined up with Scripture in any way, shape or size…”

On its face these words seem obvious, but the unexpected viral reaction shows how far we’ve deviated from factual information in this country. It was an ‘oh s**t’ moment that reminded millions how deep the cognitive dissonance runs in the American psyche and how it’s still intensifying at a compounding rate.

It was a reminder of how deceitful the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves are, or rather, how the counter-narratives we tell ourselves about ourselves can lead down dark roads of Manchurian candidacy.

One of the most pervasive of these is that the opposite of life is death, so if you're not "living" you're dying (etc., etc.). Life and death are false equivalancies. The opposite of death is actually birth. Life is just an intermediary we segment through in journey form. The only thing that’s truly ours in this life is our journey. Which is why story telling is so central to the purposes and meanings we project upon our paths. Narration is the true and living “God” of our experience.

Therefore, understanding and analyzing narrative structure and our place within it is key to navigating the troubled timelines we encounter in the present, past and future. There are 3 rules central to the foundation of narrative structure: (1) there has to be a voice narrating the story, (2) there has to be a place(s) where the story unfolds and (3) there has to be emotions expressed; be it directly or indirectly or an interplay between the two.

With these rules in mind, memory and reality play foundational roles in the narrative structure of life. Memories act as a voice and reality the setting. The paradox in these though is in their unreliability unfortunately. The nature of memory is one of constant flux, and modern science has proven that reality is non-local. These 2 unfortunate truths mean that we live life through an unreliable narration and a limited point of view. So it makes our journey an elusive one to portray in an objective and full way in real time.

So out of respect to that disorder, we must always be weary of charismatics preaching unipolar narratives that seek to fold all other narratives into their order. America, and the world for that matter, is a tapestry of multipolar narratives unfolding simultaneously.

The genius of America is that it is the first nation to not only welcome narrative-multipolarity but demand it in law. America is not one thing, its many things, so to try to consolidate it into one thing is counter to the founding principles. So anyone trying to enforce an all-encompassing order is working in counter-narrativizing.

In ‘Secret Wars’ we discussed how Neo-Liberalism was a unipolar narrative that’s currently captured culture and consolidated both major political parties into its particular structure. It wields an army of charismatic counter-narratives, like MAGA Communism, that have consolidated millions into occult factions. Factions that, unbeknownst to its members, work at the behest of consolidating all of America into the neo-liberal order.

The unignorable truth is that we are plagued by a limited vision, so we only see things through the scope of beginnings and ends when the truth is that infinity goes forever in all directions, including the past. So we are mistaken to try to consolidate narratives into one over-arching narrative based in beginnings and ends. The only true unifying narrative is that there are many narratives. To prune them is wrong.

Narrative Wars

“How long is now?” The screen asks. “Is it measurable? Is it a billionth of a second? A trillionth of a second? When it’s now on earth, is it now on Saturn? Have you ever left now? Would it surprise you to learn that there’s a lot of places on earth where now is happening at different times? For us, there is a continual moving point in time that we call “now,” this now separates the past from the future, it is always now. Time is just a long string of now’s that stop at the present.”

If you go anywhere in public nowadays you are bound to see disassociation. Multiple “now’s” closed off from one and other yet together in silence. Everyone’s heads down and eyes preoccupied by screens. It’s only in rare instances that you see everyone in a public space riding the same time-wave. We’ve normalized this new impulse of being alone together in disassociation. Which has allowed a broader fracturing of reality to be expanded upon by technocrats and their appropriators. Much to our chagrin, this phenomenon has allowed the floodgates to open for a new ontological empire to be constructed that sits upon a foundational propaganda where the penultimate ‘now’ is an ever-shifting projection of speculations and/or suggestions. This may seem harmless and just an inconsequential marker of technological progress, but by turning ‘now’ into a superconducting scroll/feed, the speed of life has morphed into a new hypnosis.

There’s an old maxim that says media can't tell you what to think, but they can tell you what to think about.

Through their calculated uses of direct and indirect suggestion, technocrats and their appropriators have captured our perception of what’s present. Headlines have become articles in themselves due to information inundation. The news is so continuously instantaneous that every second, every screen refresh, every channel flip a new headline or clip pops up perceiving what’s happening in the ever elusive ‘now.’ So much so that we have sacrificed our cognitive sovereignty to its conductivity. Screens are the new monolith.

As discussed in ‘The Attention Economy,’ consciousness (like reality itself) is non-local because it is a byproduct of the universe. So the reflexive truth of balance over order should be clear, but there are still those that see the two as inseparable. This delusion is caused by craving order over everything, even our universe, but the truth is our universe is reflexive and there is only a balance-based duality to it (rooted in entropy and fate) that must be respected and allowed to interplay naturally.

From an ontological perspective, forms are in a forever process of transforming or weakening, so succession must always be happening in the name of balance. To try to apply a man-made conductivity to this flow of forms is to play God.

Heraclitus famously stated, "No man ever steps in the same river twice," which means that both the river and the person are constantly changing, highlighting the idea that everything is naturally in a state of constant flux. This quote emphasizes the impermanence of life and the inevitability of change and how we must reckon with both continuously throughout our journey. The becoming is realer than the being in this sense.

But with this new hostile takeover, technocrats and their appropriators are trying to establish an astroturfed reality atop our natural one where they can conduct a permanent theater of artificial flux, forever capturing our consciousness. Which, as of “now” (pun intended), seems to be working.

In his 2025 Nobel Prize Winning Discovery in Physics, John Martinis and his colleagues proved that a macro-scale system can tunnel through a barrier to create a measurable new frequency. It does this through consolidating down to one uniform wave, allowing it to then tunnel through and become part of an artificial atom. When a collection of atoms consolidate they become a solid. In order for this to happen, its energy must be reduced. This same consolidation pattern happens during superconductivity.

In this theory, screens act as the barrier, phasing the observed “macro-consciousness” into a lo-fi pattern that’s manipulated by the appropriator/controller. These processes then allow for an artificial/astroturfed reality to be manifested, ingesting the whole.

It’s important to remember, in its essence, time is a long string of now’s that abruptly stop at the present. Looking back on them, we see them as instances in time and points in our movement through space, but now, due to this economy of speculation that theatrically narrativizes our moments, instead of these ‘now’s’ being linear, we must reckon with the truth that they have become convergent. Conspiring against us.

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The ToKen Era

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An Inconvenient Abtraction

The Neo-Liberal Myth

Narrative Wars

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