The Nezperdian Hivemind of Chaos

"To invoke the hive-mind representing chaos.
Invoking the feeling of chaos.
With out order.
The Nezperdian hive-mind of chaos. Zalgo."

-"lews", 2009-02-15

Woke. It's a word I rather loathe, for a myriad of reasons. Primarily what it represents in the current cultural context- what it alludes to; but if I'm honest, a large portion of that loathing is simply that I think it sounds stupid. The term was taken from the self-aggrandizing of low IQ progressive social strivers among Gen Z and Millenials a few years ago, who aimed to use it as something of a Left-wing counterpart to the term "redpilled" amonst the online Right. It was quickly picked up and used derisively and mockingly by those on the Right against those same people, but unfortunately it has stuck long after the "woke" have stopped using the term themselves. It now is used to refer to the modern Left almost in general, in complete earnest. This illustrates a longstanding problem on the Right: that being the constant accepting of not just the framing (another, altogether more pressing problem for another time), but the verbiage of the Left. They constantly let them set not just the terms of the culture war, but the way those terms can be described. This matters greatly; words are one of the greatest weapons in this war and it seems only one side knows that, though things are starting, if only just, to change.

Before they were "woke", they were "social justice warriors", and who knows what they'll be next. Both adoptions and abandonments of those terms were driven by two incredibly important developments: the power of mockery from the dissidents on the Right, and the need for the Left to be taken completely seriously. That second one is, again, a problem to address in a later post, but what's important for this article is that the mockery of those two terms is undeniably what ended their use amongst their creators. It's imperative for the Left to be seen as cool, to be thought of as "having a normal one" and not be cringe or otherwise be committing anything interpretable as a valid social faux pas. It's only natural: drastic reorderings of the social fabric are either popular, or percieved as popular, or they don't happen at all. How many people died to lung cancer because of decades of marketting painting smoking as cool? How many have been spared today solely because of decades now of PR blasts painting smoking as totally uncool? Not unhealthy: uncool. My generation does plenty, if not a myriad more things than previous generations, that are incredibly unhealthy and will likewise take decades to become popularly unpopular. No, smoking died because having a hole in your throat with a device in it that makes you sound like a broken squeaker toy looks lame as hell. Potentially harming kids by huffing and puffing near them or an expectant mother makes you look like an asshole- and that's what matters, you look like an asshole. The same people who bristle at someone having a smoke on a park bench will happily let children get mutilated because they want to play with toys or wear clothes typically associated with the opposite sex- harm, to children or otherwise, is not something people generally actually care about. They care about whether they're percieved to care about the things they percieve everyone else to care about.

The Left understands that a single word to describe a complex of ideas or notions can be extremely powerful- don't like anything they do? Congratulations, you are now a "fascist". Are you actually one? Probably not, and they know that (well, actually, they probably don't on an actually rational level- likely their comprehension of the ideology is colored by people like Umberto Eco or Noam Chomsky via proxy by middling college professors or Tiktok rather than gleamed from its actual aherents. I doubt any have ever touched the works of Gentile or Evola, let alone even just Mussolini's Doctrine of Fascism.), but what matters is that you're associated with something popularly considered bad. Because the Left generally controls the levers of cultural power, you can't really shake this off when you're accused, you can name exactly what you really are- be it libertarian, conservative, or even a social democrat depending on the brand of brainrot accusing you, it doesn't matter, to them the Gadsden flag, the elephant of the Republican party, whatever; it's all fascisti and swastikas to them. At some point though, due to the internet and the viral nature of meme culture, it became possible to create a similar effect from the Right, chief examples being the aforementioned terms "social justic warrior" and "woke". The issue arises when you remember that the Right is not in control of cultural output nor how it is proliferated on an institutional level. They can just basically say "uh, well we don't call ourselves that and in fact we never did that's cringe you sound like a Facebook boomer lol" and it largely works because you don't have the media conglomerates or activist groups working in tandem with Twitter freaks doxxing people for being accused of being "woke" or an "SJW". Social media corpos aren't going to censor or supress your account and its posts over accusations of "wokedom". There have been entrenched laws since the 60s throughout the West that in tandem with web 2.0 make it practically an instant home arrest sentence if you post anything online or are recorded saying anything that could be even uncharitably interpreted as being the popular nonunderstanding of fascist, and there are plenty of wannabe commisars out there who would happily narc on you or outright make shit up so they can get good boy points from the Organization and the rest of its sycophants.

What the Right needs to do is stop letting the Left set the actual terms: the very words that define the ideas duking it out in this meme war. Neo-Reactionary, Reactionary, hell since it's very inception the Right has been letting the Left name everything- including not just the various factions of the Right but the very Left-Right dichotomy itself! There were no Rightists until there were self-defined Leftists who named their myriad and diverse enemies all under the label of "The Right". There's probably no going back on that one though, though that could also be a discussion for another day, but the first thing that needs to be done is take a page out of their book and stop letting them name themselves. As ridiculous and cringe and just begging to be mocked as the once self appointed titles of SJW and woke are, in letting them name themselves, you are granting them the ability to reframe that name's context later down the line. Stop doing that.

"So what do you suggest?" Well, for a while I was stumped, but it came to me out from the past into today as if it had always been there to one day serve this purpose. Anyone who was there for the heyday of creepypasta or remembers early net horror in general recalls that strange meme more than story called "Zalgo". It all started in 2004 when a SomethingAwful goon upped two vulgar and unsettling-for-the-time comic strip edits to his website that both feature references to some kind of intrusive entity referred to as "Zalgo".

The original comics made by "Shmorky" in July of 2004

"Zalgo" was thenceforth, and for aesthetically obvious reasons, made into a kind of eldritch elder deity who "Waits Behind The Wall"- much in the vein of the Old Ones and Outer Gods of Lovecraft's Mythos- by the internet at large. The net's first eldritch god was born.

What intrigued me about Zalgo in retrospect was something that had been lost in the inevitable transition, as all old creepypastas experienced, into a DeviantArt safe edgy supervillain who fought Slender Man and Jeff The Killer in grand anime battles or even just into a normal, bog-standard Lovecraftian horror creature. Zalgo was no ordinary Lovecraftian horror, indeed it was uniquely suited to the modern era of mass entertainment and especially the then burgeoning realm of online, digital entertainment. Zalgo was originally, and was always meant to be, a being of corruption. The whole idea from the start was that Zalgo was this horrific thing that invaded and mutated, dare one say even mutilated, beloved media.

Some more examples of the initial Zalgo "phenomenon"

Indeed, as the Zalgo idea began to spread in the late 2000s, a TV Tropes page was made, with the creator excellently understanding and stating the idea of Zalgo far better than I could ever hope to put it:

"The idea behind Zalgo is that he/she/it represents corruption. Corruption of innocence, corruption of normality, corruption of the world as we know it, the list goes on but you get the idea. Zalgo is the embodiment of that which is right decaying grotesquely into something very wrong."

What more succinct elucidation of the Left could ever be made? Look at how they self-righteously seek to corrupt children into their own depravity, how they use the force of all of Western civilization's institutions to invert the very concept of normorality all while telling you to "have a normal one", and of course look at how they use the hollowed out husks of those institutions to spread their reach out into the rest of the globe like servants of Lovecraft's own Crawling Chaos: Nyarlathotep. Most importantly, look at the world around you, look at all which was once right now long since decayed into something very, very wrong. And we all already know how they all work and think completely in lockstep, programmed by their late night "comedy" show, early morning news, and Tiktok Overminds to be completely incapable of even fathoming the minds and ideas of anyone who is not exactly like them in thought and only desire their compelte and utter destruction. If anything at all can be called "Nezperdian" or a hive-mind of chaos, it undeniably is them.

More importantly, this allows for something else, the lack of which has irked me for quite some time now: that being the ability to put a name to, and thus be better able to talk about, the increasingly obvious connections and alliances between the Left and their various ideologies, and Capital and those who seek for number to eternally go up at the expense of quite literally everything else (save their pet social projects, of course). For all the pissing and moaning they do to the contrary, it's clear to just about everyone on the Right that the Left and the Corporations get along just swimmingly, and for all they complain about "rainbow capitalism" and whatnot; how they're not actually on the same side and supportive of the same causes- they sure do get awful mad the few times corporations have backpeddled on Progressive signaling in response to Rightist backlash, as if thuroughly and genuinely betrayed- you know, something a true enemy can't really do because... Well, why would you trust your mortal enemy? To anyone who's had even a passing conversation with a Libertarian, it should be clear that the only real difference between the Leftist and Capitalist branches of Nezperdianism are economics. And really, what else is there? In every other way, the Left and the Neo/Liberal Capitalists govern in the exact same, in every policy that isn't economic they are in complete lock-step- and even then! I hate to seem like the "Socialism is when government does stuff" kind of guy, but genuinely, what is Capitalist or even Liberal (in its "classical" sense) about the modern welfare state or the stifling managerial bureaucracy? Little, but there is a connection. I'm still not certain of it, but I've long been leaning into the notion that perhaps all post-Enlightenment ideology can be called "Nezperdian". Perhaps "killing God" ushered in the demon "Zalgo". It makes a kind of sense. For all their talk about Democracy, they sure don't seem to mind being the ones to actually destroy its pillars- and indeed, why would they! What else can Democracy be considered other than "free market politics"? And the Left hates the free market! And for all their supposed love of the free market, the liberal capitalists sure don't mind its practical banning by the governments of the world- and why wouldn't they! The supposedly Liberal politicians get their pockets lined by lobbyists, and the corporations get to be allowed to fuck us all over- completely legally! So long as they of course censor, ban, and help the government hunt down evil wrong-thinking dissidents wherever they may show up. It's a win-win for all the High Priests and ardent Followers of Zalgo.

When you've gone down this line of thought many times and in countless ways, it's hard to think the Enlightenment and its consequences were ever going to end up any other way. Like a crack was formed in the fabric of reality in the 18th century, one that has only been getting bigger and bigger ever since, and something is and has been looking to break through- something maddening, something deforming, something corrupting, something that has a visceral loathing for reality and normalcy, for being and love, family and friendship, for self and all and everything good and right in this world.

We all see and have seen this for many years now, I think, from it's heavy, headline worthy instances to the kind that it all began with. It's nothing like mutilating and grooming children or murdering babies, more surface level and annoying but still important for reasons that I'll probably discuss in depth on some later date- the continued, if slightly different; corruption, deformation, and infection of beloved media. The stories we tell are important, and the Nezperdians understand this, and they know that if they mutate and bastardize those stories; the more demoralized and less resistant to their long marching, crawling chaos the people unfortunately will be.

Some modern day iterations of "Zalgofication"