PIE in the Sky

Confession of a former WAnon

I’m annoyed by Anons. Not anonymous people like myself, but beLIEvers in SomethingAnon fantasies:

• QAnon, beLIEf in ‘Q’ and the Trumplex

• TAnon, beLIEf in the Trumplex but not Q

• ZAnon, beLIEf in Tsar Vladimir and his Z-Non-War

• XiAnon¹, beLIEf in Xi’s PRC

• ShiAnon², beLIEf in the Shiite Islamic Republic of Iran

• ₿Anon, beLIEf in Bitcoin³ (or CAnon, beLIEf in crypto)

ZAnon and XiAnon cover the R and C of BRICS. I haven’t seen BAnon (beLIEf in Brazil) or IAnon (beLIEf in India) yet, though I haven’t looked, and I wouldn’t be surprised if they have beLIEvers, given that I did see someone on Substack pushing what I could call SAnon, beLIEf in South Africa. Didja know the new South Africa really rocks? You don’t know what you’re missing out on. Move there now! I have also seen one KAnon - K for North Best Korea. (Not talking about K-pop fans … though they are a related species.)

All those Anons are cults of personality, country, or digital entity. All appeal to rebels against the Regime. Who reject the lies of the mainstream media about Trump, Putin, Xi, and/or Khamenei and/or see through the fraud of fiat. Who end up buying a different set of lies instead, a de facto religion that cannot be questioned (I’ve tried and failed).

It is quite a sight to see a ‘rational’ atheist have absolute faith in his Great Orange God. For him, the future is orange.

For others, the future is Russian Orthodox, Chinese Communist, Iranian Shiite, or Bitcoin.

To be an Anon is to be high on hopium for a better tomorrow. To be convinced that one is on the path to paradise. The real one, not the false one pushed by the Regime, the mortal enemy of heroes like the President, the Tsar, the Paramount Leader, and the Supreme Leader. Fifth column Demoncrat⁴ demoralizers like AMRX Mark II deny the inevitable victory of our lords of light against the devils of darkness, blah blah blah …

I know the drill because I used to be an Anon. A WAnon. Pronounced “Dubya-non”. A neoCON until I admitted I was wrong twenty years ago.

Where did I go wrong?

I wasn’t always wrong. I wasn’t Republican, much less CONservative. I hadn’t voted for Dubya. In the aftermath of 9/11, I predicted that the War on Terror would be a long disaster.

Why did become a cheerleader for that disaster?

I’ve identified three reasons that form a PIE:

Not Proto-Indo-European, the ancestor of my beloved Sanskrit and the language you’re reading right now. That tastes a lot better than this toxic pastry with three ingredients.

P is for Parasocial. In 2002 I had lost my job and was alone. I had started a blog in 2000 but abandoned it since I had almost no audience. Because there was no politics in it. Two years later, I restarted my blog. And this time I got political. Boom. I was making buddies online. I still talk to some after over two decades. I was part of an online pseudocommunity. I parroted what my peers were typing. Most of it. I never bought into the Dubya personality cult. I never voted for him.⁵

I is for Ideology. At the time I was an idiosyncratic (more like idiotic) transhumanist Objectivist/libertarian with blind faith in progress - specifically, the freeee market technofuture. The pitch that I bought was that the war would set Iraq on track to become a hypermodern capitalist Jamal Galt’s Gulch. That sounds so obviously stupid now. But if everyone virtually ‘around’ you believes it, it seems plausible. That’s how religions work. Shared delusions.

E is for Ego. As a WAnon blogger, I got more attention than at any other point in my life. Big Names linked to me. I had readers from around the world. I was into muh stats.

Factors I and E are also in MICE which I wrote about last week:

Summing up, I supported a “retarded and gay” war because I enjoyed company, bought a narrative that appealed to my technooptimism, and got attention.

Terrible reasons to support tanks rolling in Iraq.

I don’t have time to tell the story of how I stopped being WAnon. But I will mention one bit.

By 2005 it was becoming obvious to me that I was being fed rosy propaganda with little resemblance to reality: e.g., Iraq the Model. That blog was SUS in all caps.

I publicly admitted I was wrong about the war. My readership plummeted to nearly zero. I didn’t care. I never looked at my blog stats again. I’ve never looked at my stats on Substack.

PIE is far in my past now. But I fear it’s in the present of a lot of keyboard warriors. Alone, clinging to a beLIEf system and hoping to find ‘fellow’ beLIEvers.

I could have lots of subscribers and even some money if I became TAnon, perhaps the most popular of them all.

But no.

Today I heard a YouTube talk about driving away everyone but the hardcores.

That’s my philosophy.

No compromise.

NO COPE.

1. I could force this name to fit te one-letter–plus-Anon pattern by spelling it ΞAnon, but (1) that’s a pain to type, (2) few will recognize the Greek letter Ξ Xi, and (3) Ξ represents “ks”, not the “sh” of Xi.

2. Or شAnon using the first Arabic letter of شيعيّ Shī‘a. Some sillier alternatives: シAnon, ሺAnon, ᔑAnon. Or “Shannon”.

3. Instead of going into details about ₿Anon, I’ll just quote anti-CAnon Michel de Cryptadamus giving points to Avraham Eisenberg for not bothering with the standard ₿alderda$h:

“Where other scammers are like ‘we’re building the future!’ and ‘it’s all about the community!’ Eisenberg’s pitch basically amounted to ‘Yeah I took your money. It worked because you're a moron. I take all the other morons' money too.’ At no point have I heard him say a single word about how Bitcoin is going to change the world which actually made me respect him more than basically every other crypto bro.”

4. A likely MAGA assumption. But I have never liked the Democratic Party. When I used to vote, I have only voted for Hawaii Democrats perhaps two or three times in my life only because the Republican and Libertarian alternatives were even worse. Which is saying something given my extremely low opinion of Democrats here.

5. I was going to vote for Dubya in 2004 because he was the ‘lesser evil’ compared to Kerry, but I couldn’t get to the polls in time, which turned out to be a blessing.