The Four Ages Of The Internet

A previous essay on this page recounted the life cycle of Internet forums. The Second Hermetic Principle teaches us that as below, so above. As this essay will describe, the Internet itself is running on a life cycle – and we’re moving into the less enjoyable part of it.

The Golden Age of the Internet began in August 1995, with the release of Microsoft’s Windows 95. This operating system took the Internet out of the hands of the technological elite, and put it in the hands of the masses. This was the beginning of the personal computing revolution.

At first, the Internet appealed mostly to nerds, who had been starved of information thanks to the relative inefficiency of the book-and-library system. These nerds did what came naturally, which was to use the Internet to share information. They created all kinds of websites, most of them on subjects appealing to young men, like science, technology and engineering.

In the Golden Age of the Internet, websites consisted of little other than pure information and hyperlinks to more. Being restricted by bandwidth, websites focussed almost entirely on sharing the greatest quality of this info. Search engines such as Metacrawler indexed it all for ease of access. It was like having a library in every house.

The peak of the peak may have been around 2002, when an enormous number of small websites were available on GeoCities (later known as “GeoShitties”). This was also the peak of websites such as SlashDot, which appealed specifically to the programmers who were building the infrastructure of the Internet.

By 2003, the seeds of the decline had become apparent. Google AdSense was launched that year, which changed the web publishing game permanently. AdSense offered something truly revolutionary: cold, hard cash. But as is usually the case when cash is on the table, there were conditions.

The Google AdSense program was funded by advertisers, and those advertisers expected a certain degree of influence. In the same way that advertisers in newspapers 100 years ago exerted influence over what those newspapers published, AdSense advertisers pressured Google to not show ads on sites that carried certain content.

That meant content relating to illicit drugs, erotic literature, serial killers, violent anarchy and political extremism (i.e. all the interesting stuff) was produced less. This was the start of the great decline. Once Google AdSense money got involved, website owners started self-censoring to keep the shekels flowing in. The Golden Age of the Internet ended, and the Silver Age began.

The Silver Age of the Internet began on the 26th of September 2006, when FaceBook became open to everyone, and not just university students. This was the point at which social media really began to take off, a big deal because it meant that users could generate their own content. This steady stream of content could then be exploited by inserting advertising slots in it.

With the arrival of FaceBook, the Internet became a true commercial venture. Now there were billions of dollars involved. This was a Silver Age because of advertising, which corrupted the purity of the information. Although there was a greater quantity of information than ever, it had advertisements all through it.

The advertisers demanded more and more influence over the content. Eventually, FaceBook and YouTube became televisionised, with an extensive list of content restrictions. People started to get banned for calling each other ‘faggot’ or ‘nigger’. But still the Internet grew, to the point where the government decided that they had to get involved.

Once Big Government started to take an interest in what was being said on social media, and making up laws over who was allowed to say what, the Silver Age ended. The Bronze Age of the Internet began in April 2016, when Count Dankula was arrested for a YouTube video of a dog giving a Nazi salute. The freewheeling, freespeaking Internet of free expression was gone.

By the time of the Bronze Age of the Internet, there were so many retards online that much of cyberspace became detrimental to mental health. As the IQ of the average Internet user continued to decline, the quality of the average Internet experience became lower and lower. During the Golden Age of the Internet, the world’s retards bullied people for using computers – in the Bronze Age, they bully people by using computers.

If the Golden Age of the Internet saw its realisation, and the Silver Age saw its commercialisation, the Bronze Age saw its weaponisation. It was realised that, in the 21st Century, wars would be fought with information rather than bullets. The politicisation of the Internet saw people act to restrict the platform access of their ideological enemies.

By the time of writing this article, wrongthinkers are getting purged left, right and centre. Even websites like Reddit, founded in the twilight of the Golden Age specifically as a free-speech platform, are banning entire subforums on a weekly basis. It’s forbidden to discuss any subject that displeases the advertisers.

This has seen the rise and rise of imageboard culture, especially the chans such as 4chan. The ‘anything goes’ nature of these sites appeals to those who appreciated the Golden Age. In the Bronze Age of the Internet, those parts of cyberspace that still uphold the values of the Golden Age are dismissed as “cesspits”. This merely causes the appeal of the chans to grow further.

The Iron Age of the Internet is yet to begin. We can predict what it will look like: a totalitarian surveillance network in which the activities and social interactions of every citizen are tracked to the finest detail. 5G networks offer the bandwidth to transmit high-definition video footage faster than it can be viewed, and the advent of facial recognition technology means that they will know exactly where you are in real time.

Free speech restrictions might be bad now, but they can get worse. Improving AI tech will make it possible for any social media comment to be analysed and, if necessary, shadowbanned before anyone can see it. Even more ominously, the governments of all Western nations appear willing to increase Police harassment of online wrongthinkers.

When the Iron Age of the Internet is fully upon us, the Internet will be unrecognisably different from its Golden Age, much like today’s religions are radically different to those practiced during the Western spiritual tradition’s Golden Age in ancient Greece. We will then, as per Plato’s Republic, have to wait for a movement of philosopher-kings to overthrow the old Internet and institute a new one.

This article is an excerpt from Clown World Chronicles, a book about the insanity of life in the post-Industrial West. This is being compiled by Vince McLeod for an expected release in the middle of 2020.

If you enjoyed reading this essay, you can get a compilation of the Best VJMP Essays and Articles of 2019 from Amazon for Kindle or Amazon for CreateSpace (for international readers), or TradeMe (for Kiwis). A compilation of the Best VJMP Essays and Articles of 2018 and the Best VJMP Essays and Articles of 2017 are also available.

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Clown World Chronicles: What Is A ‘Simp’?

Many people are getting called ‘simps’ nowadays, thanks to a marked rise in simping all across the world. Simping is another phenomenon that increases the further a civilisation decays, so in today’s West it’s all around us. This article explains what simps are and what role they play in Clown World.

Life in Clown World can be characterised by a lack of rectitude. Confucius considered rectitude to be the fundamental characteristic of the masculine, that which attracted the devotion of the feminine. For society to function, men have to have rectitude, because it is this quality that imposes correct order upon society.

In Clown World, men are no longer capable of rectitude. Now, like women, they exhibit devotion instead.

In some cases, gender role reversals can be healthy. But when the masculine principle comes to show devotion to the feminine principle, chaos can be the only result. Confucius spoke about this over 2,500 years ago, having observed that the feminine, being an expression of Nature, cannot order itself.

The masculine, being an expression of Heaven, can order itself. Its doing so is the virtue known as rectitude. In a healthy society, the masculine is esteemed for doing this, in the same way that the feminine is esteemed for devotion in a healthy society.

In Clown World, everything masculine is torn down with venom. Rectitude itself is shunned and mocked, seen as highly unfashionable. As such, there is nothing to correctly be devoted to. In the absence of rectitude, people become devoted to crude material pleasures and base instincts instead, and in doing so they lose touch with the spiritual.

One of the characteristic aspects of the Kali Yuga prophecised in Hindu eschatology is spiritual darkness. Leaders no longer take measures to promote spirituality in their lands, being more concerned with money and power. This absence of correct spiritual order is why Clown World is so rotten in so many aspects.

A simp is specifically someone who actively enables someone else’s bullshit on account of that they lack the rectitude to resist. Enabling is, according to this Psychology Today article, “offering help that perpetuates rather than solves a problem.” An enabler is someone who contributes to another person’s dysfunction.

A common example is a person who enables another person’s drinking by shouting them drinks, or who helps another person score drugs. Just about any vice can be – and is – enabled by friends, including any imaginable form of neglect or abuse. When this enabling is done by a person who should know better, it’s simping.

The archetypal example of a simp is a horny incel who donates money to a roastie‘s OnlyFans account. Society doesn’t really need 15-year old girls selling nude pictures of themselves over the Internet to sex-crazed old men, but the prevalence of simping means that there’s a niche for it.

It’s possible to simp for women, for blacks, for Muslims, Jews or Christians, for drug users, for homosexuals, for rednecks, for children – in principle it’s possible to simp for anyone who behaves poorly and who should know better. Any obsequious behaviour that tolerates that which should not be tolerated falls into the simp category.

That so much shitty behaviour is normalised in Clown World is because of all the simps out there. In a world with the usual amount of rectitude, shitty behaviour gets dealt to in short order. As rectitude declines, this behaviour starts going unpunished. By the time society has turned into Clown World, simping is widespread.

Simping is one of the main drivers of the Weimarisation of the West. As such, it is indirectly one of the main reasons for the rise of authoritarianism – too many simps lead to the dissolution of the social order, and when society falls into chaos people start searching for a man of iron to impose that order.

‘Simp’ is a noun, but it’s common to see it used as a verb. ‘To simp’ for someone is to enable their pathological behaviour. It’s often used in the present continuous tense, in forms such as “X is simping for Y”. It’s usually apparent from the wider context that ‘simp’ is a derogatory term.

It’s unclear whether the contemporary use of the word ‘simp’ derives from its original use in the 2000 A.D. comic strip. The simps in the 2000 A.D. series were passive, dysfunctional degenerates who lived in a cyberpunk dystopia, much link the simps today. The relation may be coincidental.

The difference between a soyboy and a simp is that the former are just weak, whereas the latter have enough strength to actively make the world worse. A soyboy can perhaps be forgiven for his weakness, but the simp is morally defective. Subsequently, his weakness has a much more corrosive effect.

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VJMP Predicts The 2020s

Earlier this week, VJM Publishing paid homage to science fiction author J R Mooneyham and his outstanding website. Because Mooneyham’s website relates to science fiction and to predictions of the future, we at VJM Publishing decided to pay more homage by imitating it. Here are our predictions for the 2020s.

We predict that the current movement across the West towards right-wing populism will increase. This was foretold as early as 2012, when Vince McLeod wrote about a Great Right Shift in his cyberpunk novel The Verity Key. We are seeing the Great Right Shift come into play now, and it will continue for several decades.

Western capitalist economies are built on the belief that all human beings are the same, and therefore that it’s possible to boost economic growth indefinitely through immigration. The reality is that human groups are almost as different to each other as dog breeds are, and so our system is doomed to collapse. This is the fate of all systems built on falsehoods.

It’s possible to predict, then, that social cohesion will continue to decrease across the West. Diversity will continue to increase, and this will eat into solidarity like an acid. This decrease in solidarity will be the immediate cause of most of the phenomena listed below.

It’s hard to tell if Trump will win next year, on account of the vagaries of the Electoral College system. If he loses, America will continue to fracture culturally. Even if he wins, the demographic trends will force a sharp increase in white identity. By the end of the decade, it won’t be unusual for people to openly identify as white nationalists.

The Sweden Democrats are currently polling at around 25% – we predict that they will be close to 50% by the end of the decade. Other nationalist movements in Europe will also gain ground. Marine Le Pen will win in 2022, leading to change across Europe.

There is ample space for a similar nationalist movement in New Zealand, and the lure of power will pull someone into that space. Already it has become apparent that National and Labour are two wings of the Establishment Party, and ten years from now someone will have taken advantage of the sentiments this evokes. By 2030 they will be polling at 25% and the Establishment parties will refuse to work with them.

In the realm of religion, the 2020s will be marked by the further collapse of the Abrahamic cults. Islamic apostasy in particular will be extremely strong, driven by Internet exposure to other cultures and by a reaction to the horrific scriptures. By 2030, organised ex-Muslims will be powerful forces in many countries, including Western ones. This process will lead many Westerners to Satanism.

Nearing the end of the 2020s we will start to see the rise of an esoteric form of Luciferianism. In the same way that Buddha acted to reform Hinduism and Jesus acted to reform Judaism, so too will the common Western religion of Satanism get reformed into an advanced form of Luciferianism. This movement may or may not have a great leader, but an original literature will be composed.

Related to this is an end to the suppression of psychedelic spiritual sacraments. Both cannabis and the major psychedelics will be fully legal everywhere by the end of the 2020s. The War on Drugs will be widely seen as an embarrassment akin to the criminalisation of homosexuality. The suppression of psychedelic science has done 1,600 years worth of damage, but much of this will be repaired by 2030.

Popular intellectual culture will continue to decline in the West as the public discourse drifts ever-closer to its lowest common denominator. This will be exacerbated by Western leftists moving even further away from common sense. By the end of the 2020s, Western leftists will be openly agitating in favour of pedophila, and people who claim that pedophilia harms children will be branded as bigots.

Despite this, small pockets of extremely high intellectual culture will come into existence, guided by the Internet. Because the Internet makes it possible to overcome the tyranny of geography, it can bring together people who are interested in a particular topic from all over the world.

This will lead to extremely immersive online communities relating to all kinds of topics rising up. On the topic of politics, communities like /pol/ on the various chans will grow ever stronger as authoritarian crackdowns on free speech intensify. The Establishment will be aware that it is losing control of the narrative and will therefore crack down hard on alternative sources of propaganda.

The 2020s will see a pronounced rise in the number of hikikomoris and incels. Already the trend towards dropping out of society is worrisome, partially thanks to economic conditions that make it all but impossible to own a home while earning the average wage. In the 2020s it will become extreme. By 2030, many people will have come to see sex as a crude instinct best suppressed.

Interest rates will remain low, bordering on subterranean, until they don’t. The point at which they don’t will mark the point when the shit hits the fan for real. Once they start to rise, many enterprises will fall into bankruptcy. This will lead to panic, and the measures that Governments take to prop up the banking system will be ruthlessly authoritarian.

It’s uncertain what the climate will do over the next 10 years. What we can predict, however, is that climate hysteria will continue to increase. It’s never admitted, but one of the reasons why climate hysteria is pushed so hard is that it induces people to think globally, and to ignore local issues. Hence, climate hysteria is an integral part of manufacturing consent for United Nations dictates, and this will intensify.

The impact of technology on the organisation of human life will become ever stronger. Ted Kaczynski will continue to be vindicated. Some countries will ban personal ownership of motor vehicles as the entire fleet moves to self-driving cars and trucks. Others will force Internet users to declare their identity every time they use the Internet. Mass surveillance will become normalised, and anyone who objects to it will be dismissed as paranoid.

Another phenomenon that will reach fever pitch is spree killings and random murders, whether carried out by firearm or by blade. Mass shootings are already becoming common on account of the general social malaise, and mass stabbings/machete attacks aren’t far behind. In some places, stretches of the 2020s will be like the film Battle Royale. This will cause some very strange alliances and feuds.

By the end of the 2020s, the majority of the population will be on some kind of psychiatric medicine. The idea that people need it because we evolved to live in a different world will become normalised. Social pressures will become so intense that it will be hard to function without sedatives. Related to this, cannabis will replace alcohol as the first choice recreational drug among Western youth.

Culturally speaking, we agree with Rick Giles that the 2020s ought to see a return of physical Honour Culture. The increasing paranoia and worsening economic conditions will cause many to realise that a social collapse is eminently possible. Many have already taken measures to prepare for this by hoarding firearms and precious metals, but there will be a surge in those who prepare by getting fit.

In summary, the 2020s will be worse in most ways, and better in a small number of other ways. It will get worse in terms of society, which will become ever shittier and more soulless and authoritarian. It will get better in the sense that it become possible to reject the system and to carve one’s own niche in cyberspace or in the counterculture that will dominate this decade.

If you enjoyed reading this essay, you can get a compilation of the Best VJMP Essays and Articles of 2018 from Amazon for Kindle or Amazon for CreateSpace (for international readers), or TradeMe (for Kiwis). A compilation of the Best VJMP Essays and Articles of 2017 is also available.

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A Tribute To J R Mooneyham

This is a tribute to American science fiction author J R Mooneyham, creator of one of the most excellent websites on the early Internet. The eponymous jrmooneyham.com was (and is) a treasure trove of hyperlinks to all kind of futuristic and scientific advances, as well as the superb Future History Timeline, which showcased Mooneyham’s predictions for the future.

I discovered this website around 1996. At that time, only people with a special interest in technology had a personal computer with Internet access. If you were friends with such a person, it was possible to access a world of information many times larger than your local town library. For any true nerd such as myself, this was a thousand birthdays all happening at once.

Because the early Internet was populated only by people who could get their heads around the new technology, it was full of the kind of niche interests held by those people. Serial killers and Satanism were favourite topics, one of the highlights being a Richard Ramirez tribute page that said “Hail Satan” through the speakers once per minute – a terrifying experience to anyone discovering the site at night!

Another favourite topic was science fiction. The sort of person who was an early adopter of the Internet was often a science fiction fan. After all, the Internet was clearly the technology of the future, and science fiction deals with the future. Many early Internet users were either science fiction fans or even writers. One of them was J R Mooneyham, who created the website that bears his name.

Mooneyham’s webpage was the first one to really instill in me a sense of awe at what the Internet was capable of. Not only did the page consist of a number of pages all hyperlinked together, but many paragraphs were backed up with hyperlinks to other parts of the Internet. For a young person who had only previously been exposed to books, both of these things were incredible, an entirely new dimension of information arrangement.

On the Signposts of the Future pages, Mooneyham made a number of predictions, some of which I agreed with, and some of which I thought ridiculous but which ended up coming true. Apart from the usual cyberpunk-style predictions about ever-increasing surveillance technology and an ever more precarious geopolitical situation, there were more specific predictions

I scoffed at his prediction that technology would lead to child millionaires, reasoning that the new technologies would be so complicated that it would take many years to study them long enough to have mastered them. Mooneyham had the last laugh, however, as shown by the 8-year old YouTube star Ryan Kaji, who made $26,000,000 this year.

Mooneyham predicted that a major terrorist event would strike New York City near the beginning of the 21st Century. This may have not been too hard to predict, given that there had already been a Muslim attempt to destroy the World Trade Centre in 1993. In any case, Mooneyham was proven correct in spectacular fashion by the events of 9/11.

He also predicted that America would, at some point in the 2010s, start using their military and economic advantage to spark a trade war. This came true with the ascension to power of Donald Trump and the start of the trade war against China. This was part of a wider trend, foreseen by Mooneyham and discussed at length, of hard power giving way to soft power.

My favourite Mooneyham prediction, though, was the “Bounty Economy“. Today we call this the gig economy, but Mooneyham predicted in the 1990s that we would end up with an economy characterised by precarious working conditions, suppressed wages, the mass importation of cheap labour – and tremendous profits for those best positioned to take advantage.

All of this was found in a website that was nothing more than HTML. For a young scholar in the 1990s, the simple genius of this was astonishing. Here was a glimpse of the future of life on Planet Earth, in more than one sense. Although websites such as Mooneyham’s are out of fashion today, thanks to fat data pipes shifting the focus from text to images and then to video, the elegance of the site appeals to the same sort of person that it appealed to in the 1990s.

There will always be a niche, in informational space, for someone targeting the high-IQ sort of forward thinker that actively seeks out information (and who reads, as opposed to passive information seekers who watch YouTube videos). VJM Publishing has targeted this niche, and to that end we have modelled the organisation of our site on jrmooneyham.com.

Some people have criticised the VJM Publishing company page on the grounds that it looks like a Geocities page from the early 2000s. It is our contention, however, that this is what a website ought to look like. It is the excellence of J R Mooneyham’s page, discovered over two decades ago, that inspired the clean, text-heavy and massively hyperlinked look of our own company page.

J R Mooneyham is a pioneering figure in Internet culture, especially in the high Internet culture that has avoided the televisionisation process that has occurred since the coming of FaceBook and YouTube. He ought to be more widely known. Thus, this article is in tribute to him, and to the minds he expanded thanks to reaching people with his excellent website.

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