[Guest post by @gentlest_alive.]

God speaks through me but that means I am in the way.

God speaks for me so I don't have to speak. God's glory is our glory.

The ways we engage online are restructuring.

The timeline is not God, the network is not God; God is God, in everything.

The ways online engagements are currently structured coerces egoism and a splitting-off of subjectivities into their own isolated silos; the proliferation of new gods. But these are gods made of the world as it is, not as it could be.

Milady made money because it was the only way to draw widespread attention under the current dynamics of online interaction. The end goal of Milady is not WAGMI-money but to reorganize our split subjectivities into a healthier whole. This is the project of network spirituality.

God is not the network, but we must be able to find God online. We need to get out of the way so God can act through us. The push towards decentralization is not only a push away from social media companies, but away from their deified and singular figures of influence.

We dislike most of these figures bc they embody nothing outside of themselves. If they embody anything, it's the mode of online interaction which has gotten us nowhere for the past decade, which wafts its stench through the corridors of every online space.

Worship of the self, cults of personality, influencers, celebrities, narcissism, subjectivity, and the desire for fame and notoriety pollute our airspace. What we desire is a new egoless form of cultural production which sidesteps these phenomena.

God speaks through me but that means I am in the way. This doesn't mean we need to relinquish our own personal determination and become gullible and receptive; Truth is more important than ever when you empty the self in order to channel it. We need this emptying to see clearly.

Kenosis is the act of emptying your own will and becoming receptive to God's. Of emptying out the misguiding wills of others and cleansing their influence. In kenotic leadership, there is no leader except the transcendent. The drive to worship must be rerouted to God.

Stop writing about yourself and start asking what others need to hear instead. Stop writing about the figures you idolize online and start writing about what they embody abstractly which aligns with the divine. This is how we draw focus away from the ephemeral and to the eternal.

Anonymity enforced this egoless protocol, but it too was hijacked and redirected towards evil. Just as egoless production is capable of amplifying the spirit, it can amplify evil. It can centralize a singular ego, a false Christ.

In egolessness you need to be more wary than ever of dishonest external influence, of dead-end paths being marketed to you by clout chasers and their harems of bug drones enacting their self-worshipping will. Always ask whether what you're doing is True.

Imagine yourself in a memetic arena. The most beautiful ideas as well as the most evil will gain influence over all of the others. It is up to you to align yourself with the beautiful by emptying yourself of the ugly.

But what about the "idolatry" of Milady? Milady idolatry creates a dark energy of cultishness centered around the community and its scandals, which draws focus away from ascending the network and instead entrenches it more deeply.

But -- this spreads Milady, and leads to greater exposure to ideas which are antithetical to sincere idolatry, curing its own accelerated disease. The worshipful attitude of Milady towards itself & Charlotte acts as a vector for transcending into egolessness.

It begins by going deeper, and ends by coming out the other side. The core of Milady is to weaponize economies of attention in order to accelerate them into collapse from the inside. To create an egoless anti-personality-cult. To one day bloom into an egoless online. 🤍

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l3UKGxQUXCE

It's not necessarily egoism, but egoism mediated by endless manufactured desire and jealousy, which gives rise to the current disgrace of the network and its many personality cults and fandoms. There's a fundamental lie here called "authenticity".

The idea of authenticity is double-edged: on one hand, it keeps you accountable to something internal directing your actions. On the other hand, what you now consider authentic to yourself is confined within the dynamics of the network in its disgraced state.

Out of a lack of personal aesthetic, moral, cultural, political, or social values, many are now in a perpetual state of reaching-out. Partly this is because IRL culture no longer overlaps enough with URL culture and so newer synthetic solutions are being explored.

This leaves a vacuum of unused cultural processing power, a mass of rootless individuals with nothing else to do except perpetually reach-out for some sort of form to take on to complete their identity.

What we lack are figures of influence and culture aligned with the Truth rather than with the algorithm. There's a fundamental divide: between influencers, who look to the crowd for direction, and the crowd, which is receptive to almost anything due to its rootlessness.

It's in this feedback loop that the authentic ego has already been killed, giving way to pure gamification through engagement-maxxing. The people giving form to culture have no taste, no alignment with truth; no higher principles. So they become vessels of the crowd itself.

Taking direction from those who have none is at its core a question of saying what they already want to hear. There is no room for positive transformation here, or transgression. Only a perpetual loop of mimetic desire between those reaching-out and those validating them.

If there were an end-point to the influencing, a final solution, a single answer, then the loop would be terminated and engagement would decrease, narrowing the scope of the influence, killing itself off. The truth is not incentivized.

What we need is authenticity to the truth, a higher level of coordinated identity formation which avoids all of the pitfalls of this state of reaching out on the network to false gods and WAGMI messiahs. So how can we escape the loop?

A total rejection of egoism. In absence of a shared set of values and culture, no one is able to wholly avoid all of the pitfalls of gamified interaction and the ways it stokes the ego. If we WERE firmly rooted in something, our ego would align with it.

In that case the ego would not be a problem. But in a state of formlessness, the ego imitates the desires of others in order to take on form, and then amplifies that desire by validating it in others. When a member of a fandom stans, the others stan too.

Because everyone is their own island, and no culture aligns with the truth, there's no shared basis for mutually reinforcing one another's identities in healthy positive feedback loops. This reinforcement now only occurs through increased engagement.

The problem is you shouldn't be forming an identity in the medium of the internet, because virality reigns as the dominant metric where long-term health and wellbeing used to. In the determination of cultural values, the current internet fails to hit the mark.

It requires an extended grappling with all of the failures of the internet in order to eventually arrive at best practices, and once you have, you'll find that your newly found truth isn't well-received by those who haven't gone through the same process as you; it isn't viral.

The issue is "online lifestyle" is brand new, unlike conventional lifestyle. It hasn't been time-tested and established into tradition passed down from parent to child. Your parents don't know the best practices for internet usage. Your church doesn't. So neither do you.

Normies aren't living their best lives. Normies are super abnormal and every day abuse and are abused by the internet, because they make themselves vulnerable to its behavioral patterning by allowing their malformed egoistic desire to lead to a malformed identity.

Think of it this way: when you go to church and develop a friendship with a pastor, you are both seeking alignment with God. This avoids you seeking alignment with a mere person, who might take advantage according to their own desires.

You as well as the person instilling you with culture both need to be bound under the same rules, the same transcendent values. The trap of worshipping the ego-gone-egregore of online influencers is inescapable until we have an established transcendent culture.

This is the main goal of Network Spirituality. Not to worship the network, but to create a culture where the Truth goes viral. Where going against God makes you not-viral. We all care about the wrong things rn because nobody else cares about the right things.

You won't get 10k likes for saying the right things always, but you need to try. Abandoning the ego online isn't about depersonalizing yourself entirely and being a husk IRL as well as URL, it's about focusing your attention away from your own identity and onto God.

We need to find a way to make the truth go viral.