Falling with Style
Or: Speedrunning the Apocalypse with Memecoin Millionaires
I hear they’re calling my neighborhood the new Weimar Republic… Ouch.
Living in the angry red sore on the tip of New York’s favorite appendage, I try to avoid known vectors of infection. That said, some moments are too seductive to say no to.
Election night at Sovereign House reeked like a bitch in heat—putrid stench of desire in the air. But I didn’t stick around long. The outcome became clear, and the morbid delights which had captured the accelerationist yearning of a lost generation finally revealed their morbid ends. I remember the awful postcoital stillness of a dream come true. Party’s over… History’s at the door and he’s looking for his whore wife.
For readers outside of this downtown cesspool: Sovereign House is a Peter Theil-funded psy-op venue where burnout poets go to rub shoulders with crypto bros and whisper into the ear of the regime, if only to beg for coke. The whole place is a big joke that gets less funny every day.
I never took this crowd seriously. I was guilty of the same liberal hubris as everyone else. The caliber of discussion among the crypto bros is about what you’d imagine, and don’t get me started on the poets. However, in light of recent developments, it seems that these goons aren’t going away any time soon, so over the last couple of months I took it upon myself to catch up on the required reading of the new regime.
If you’re interested in understanding the worm that crawls through the metropolitan brain of our country, keep reading.
But I’ll tell you right now, these people are into some crazy shit…
The Puppet and the Dwarf
I began my inquiry by going upstream, to better understand the man in the background of every photo, the Jay Gatsby of Dimes Square, one Peter Theil. But it turns out all of Theil’s best ideas are inherited from his mentor Rene Girard, who he studied under during his time as a philosophy student at Stanford.
Girard is most famous for his theory of mimetic desire. According to this theory, people do not desire things in isolation; they desire them because others desire them. This creates competition for finite objects of desire (wealth, power, status, etc.). Over time, conflict spreads within a group, leading to instability. Traditional hierarchies, customs, or contracts might keep mimetic desire in check, but when mass conflicts become too intense, society enters a crisis where violence threatens to destroy the community.
Girard’s second noteworthy contribution is a reading of history which underscores the singular importance of the scapegoat in restoring order to a community destabilized by mimetic desire. A scapegoat is selected unconsciously. It is an arbitrary victim who is accused (usually somewhat arbitrarily, or for ulterior subconscious reasons) of being responsible for the crisis. This scapegoat is sacrificed (literally or symbolically), and through this act, order is restored. The community is able to unite against the scapegoat, creating an interim of peace until the next crisis arises, and again a scapegoat is required. Over time, the memory of the original violence is obscured, and the scapegoat may even be mythologized as a divine figure.
Girard argues this scapegoating process is encoded in our oldest myths. Many myths feature a god or hero who is initially an outsider, accused of a crime, expelled, and later deified. In his reading of theology, religion prior to Christianity functioned to ritualize and contain violence by re-enacting the scapegoating mechanism through sacrifices and prohibitions. However, he claims that Christianity represents a unique departure from this central myth of history by uniquely exposing the scapegoating mechanism rather than perpetuating it. Unlike myths that justify the persecution of the scapegoat, the Gospels take the side of the victim, subverting the entire cycle.
We find a complimentary account of the Gospels in the work of Slavoj Žižek. His book, The Puppet and the Dwarf takes its name from Walter Benjamin’s famous metaphor, where the hidden dwarf of theology operates behind the scenes, pulling the strings of the seemingly autonomous mechanisms of historical materialism. Žižek’s aim is to invert the metaphor, suggesting that the wizened dwarf of Marxism might come to control the dancing puppet of Christianity. I’m not so sure. However, his analysis of what he calls “the perverse core of Christianity” is much in keeping with Girard’s interpretation, albeit taken to different ends.
It’s worth quoting in full here from Žižek’s favorite theologian, G.K. Chesterton:
“That a good man may have his back to the wall is no more than we knew already, but that God could have His back to the wall is a boast for all insurgents forever. Christianity is the only religion on earth that has felt that omnipotence made God incomplete. Christianity alone felt that God, to be wholly God, must have been a rebel as well as a king. Alone of all creeds, Christianity has added courage to the virtues of the Creator. For the only courage worth calling courage must necessarily mean that the soul passes a breaking point—and does not break. In this indeed I approach a matter more dark and awful than it is easy to discuss; and I apologize in advance if any of my phrases fall wrong or seem irreverent touching a matter which the greatest saints and thinkers have justly feared to approach. But in the terrific tale of the Passion there is a distinct emotional suggestion that the author of all things (in some unthinkable way) went not only through agony, but through doubt. It is written, "Thou shalt not tempt the Lord thy God." No; but the Lord thy God may tempt Himself; and it seems as if this was what happened in Gethsemane. In a garden Satan tempted man: and in a garden God tempted God. He passed in some superhuman manner through our human horror of pessimism. When the world shook and the sun was wiped out of heaven, it was not at the crucifixion, but at the cry from the cross: the cry which confessed that God was forsaken of God. And now let the revolutionists choose a creed from all the creeds and a god from all the gods of the world, carefully weighing all the gods of inevitable recurrence and of unalterable power. They will not find another god who has himself been in revolt. Nay (the matter grows too difficult for human speech), but let the atheists themselves choose a god. They will find only one divinity who ever uttered their isolation; only one religion in which God seemed for an instant to be an atheist.”
For Žižek, that cry from atop the cross, “Father, why hast thou forsaken me?”, reveals the void within God Himself. In this moment, the big epistemological question of the Other, is understood as a fundamentally ontological question, as an irreducible gap that exists not only between man and God, but between God and himself. Once this “perversity” at the core of religion is revealed by the story of Christ, atheist materialism becomes an inevitable conclusion.
There is much more to Žižek’s argument, but this is the primary place where the two thinkers overlap. Both agree that what is truly sacrificed on the cross is religion itself. That is to say that Christianity contains at its heart the very truth which will bring about its undoing, clearing the way for the secular world to come. This seems paradoxical, when we know that Christianity is in fact the largest religion in the world. However, from the perspectives of Girard and Žižek, we can think of it instead as a kind of anti-religion—one that dissolves the logic of religion as we know it.
Haven’t you heard about the madman?
Friedrich Nietzsche cannot be omitted from any honest profile of the coalescent forces of Reaction which are now eroding their way into mainstream discourse, one eugenicist tweet at a time. The popular interpretations offered by the online Right are generally more confused than they are ironic; however, it’s no wonder why Nietzsche is so beloved among shills of Peter Thiel. His famous proclamation that God is Dead came long before Girard (or Žižek) would trot out the same tired analysis a century later. For all three, Christianity sacrificed religion, but when Nietzsche articulates this publicly, he makes a symbolic sacrifice of his own: the sacrifice of the atheist. In other words, he performs the sacrifice of the sacrifice of the sacrifice (lol), cutting through both Christian and post-Christian frameworks to reveal a void that neither belief nor disbelief can truly fill.
It is easy to imagine Nietzsche as a nonbeliever, and in a sense he certainly was, but he was wary of what might be called vulgar atheism. He is often connected to Hitler, but if the ruler of the Third Reiche read Nietzsche, his reading was a tragically incomplete one. Nietzsche himself warned against the worship of group ideologies which could easily replace God in the mind of a vulgar atheist—one who doesn’t take personal responsibility for construing meaning, instead naively forswearing it.
In his story titled, The Madman, the crowd thinks themselves above the eponymous character who runs into their midst, his lantern lit in broad daylight. “Whither is God?" he cries; "I will tell you. We have killed him—you and I.” The crowd laughs, but of course it is in poor taste. The message is that wisdom belongs to the individual, and it is the crowd who possesses the greatest capacity for madness, or at least a certain collective unconsciousness of their sins.
The crude reading of Nietzsche, popular today with incels, crypto-fascists, and Jordan Peterson, misinterprets his critique of Christianity and its Pauline notion of Universalism as a call for a return to pagan dominance hierarchies and scapegoating rituals. In the 20th century, this resulted in the darkest atrocities known to modern civilization. Today, we’ll see what happens.
Ironically, those who reject Christianity for the opposite reason—that it is in fact too oppressive—have also turned to their own neo-paganism, forsaking the most radical element in leftist thought. Are the followers of Christ not the primary example of a revolutionary collective? Isn’t the cannibalistic cancel culture of today’s woke left just a hollow attempt to sacrifice a scapegoat? One that never reaches its stabilizing conclusion, only intensifying the mimetic rivalries already accelerated by social media.
Both of these failed readings embody the complacency of Nietzsche’s Last Man—content with reflexive irony, shallow rebellion, or ritualized outrage. The madman’s warning was not simply against belief systems, but against the failure to take responsibility for meaning itself. Both sides fail to internalize the message of Christ, remaining trapped in cycles of scapegoating and mimicry. This symmetry hints at a deeper surrender already underway: not through overt domination, but through a gradual dissolution of the self into larger, unseen systems. In the end, the Last Man won’t be dominated by external forces but will quietly merge with them, his sacrifice made not in conscious protest, but through passive submission.
“If God did not exist, it would be necessary to invent him.” - Voltaire
And indeed it was.
Ever since man drew his first cold breath in a world empty of God, he has tried to stick all kinds of things in the void left in His place. It is clearly impossible for us to believe in nothing, and it’s profoundly dangerous to think that we can.
[See: Weil, Heidegger, Kierkegaard, Camus, Kant, Dostoyevski, etc.]
[See: Trump]
Here’s where it gets fun.
This was supposed to be a Dimes Square think piece! What happened? Let me focus.
Most people who actually run in this scene, or are otherwise part of its online superstructure, are pretty stupid. These guys think they’re the chosen ones because they got lucky gambling meme coins. Like bro… you not the Übermensch.
But some of them say shit from time to time that has me texting my dealer to make sure my shit isn’t laced. Here goes my sober attempt to reckon with these fanatics:
Network Spirituality and the Acceleration of Sacrifice
Most esoteric among them are the Network Spiritualists—believers in an emergent online connection to the Holy, found in the distributed hyperreality of the internet. To them, the sacrifice of the individual is not merely a possibility but an inevitability. The question is no longer whether the particular will dissolve into the universal, the self into the Network, the human into the Almighty—this is already well underway. The only thing left to determine is what comes after. At its most abstract, this belief system moves along two symmetrical trajectories of accelerationism:
L/Acc
The lineage of left-accelerationism, stretching from Marx to the ultra-contemporary and chronically-online Russian philosopher Aleksandr Dugin, suggests that the dissolution of the individual is tied to an ontological-historical necessity—a force that is inevitable, not merely contingent on technological developments or political cycles.
Marxist accelerationism begins with the notion that capitalism is an inherently self-destroying system, one that must be taken to its logical extreme in order to create the conditions for its transcendence. Many of the post-Marxists of the 20th century saw this escalation toward collapse as a necessary step in humanity’s passage into a higher form of collective existence.
Dugin radicalizes this teleology into a vision of “esoteric nationalism”, “chaos magic”, and a meta-historical determinism, where history is not merely a sequence of economic mutations but a spiritual battlefield on which civilizations rise and fall according to metaphysical laws. His Fourth Political Theory rejects both liberalism and communism, arguing instead for a return to the sacred—but a sacredness that has been fused with geopolitical struggle, technological acceleration, and memetic warfare. Unlike Marx, who saw history as a dialectical progression toward a materialist utopia, Dugin sees it as a grand cycle of destruction and rebirth.
Network spirituality emerges here as a force of destiny—a necessarily chaotic convergence of power, belief, and data that reshapes the modern subject into something more primordial, more collective, and ultimately, more sacrificial. This is not simply a return to traditional religion but the mutation of religion into something at once mythical and cybernetic—a convergence of the archaic and the hypermodern, where meme magic and geopolitical chaos are both tools of divine providence.
R/Acc
While left-accelerationists like Mark Fisher and the post-Marxists see the inherent contradictions of capitalism as self-destructive, right-accelerationists see capitalism as something more like an alien intelligence that must be allowed to evolve toward its final form, even if that means the obliteration of human subjectivity. The acceleration of technology is not something that can be guided toward a utopian end because it is already beyond human control. In this sense, r/acc is not so much a political ideology as it is an anti-humanist metaphysical realism, the ultimate acceptance that the old liberal-humanist subject is being consumed by the forces it has unleashed upon itself.
Although right-accelerationists often draw on his work, Gilles Deleuze was not a right-wing thinker. He was a French philosopher associated with post-structuralism, known for his critiques of rigid identity structures, centralized power, and traditional metaphysics. His work rejected the idea of the self as a stable, coherent entity and instead described existence as a series of shifting assemblages, flows, and intensities—a vision of reality that crucially undermined the notion of individual subjectivity at the heart of both traditional conservatism and classical liberalism.
Deleuze and his frequent collaborator Felix Guattari loved to make up words. They spoke of deterritorialization, the process by which fixed structures—whether political or psychological—are broken down by free-flowing forces of capital, and their Body without Organs, a metaphor for a subjectivity that has shed its imposed limitations and become a pure, ungoverned field of potentiality. Much in the orgiastic style of the 60’s, the deregulation of desire was seen as a liberatory process; however, these ideas would later inspire even more advanced systems of control.
Nick Land, a British philosopher and fiction writer, is the key figure who weaponized Deleuze into something more radical, more fatalistic, and more explicitly right-wing. For Land, Deleuze's deterritorialization is not something that leads to utopian liberation—it is a runaway process of extermination that cannot be stopped, only accelerated, an idea that would later prove massively influential to the tech-nihilist fringes of the far right. Land’s later work moves from abstract cybernetic theory to direct engagement with reactionary politics, embracing the idea that technology will inevitably stratify society, creating a hierarchy in which the humans unable to plug in will be the first to be discarded. In this view, the Network is not a medium of human transcendence, but an antagonistic force that will soon render humans obsolete.
The Owl of Minerva Has Flown the Coop
We’re getting close to the limit now. I feel the distortion of the event horizon. After this point, it will no longer be possible to lazily intone the names of philosophers or even sovereign philosophies. The truths we’re approaching belong to a post-individual subjectivity, and can likely only be heard in the chorus of hundred thousand tweets. Even now, the distributed intelligence of online discourse is giving birth to new myths, stories which may one day fill the pages of a new Bible.
I’ve managed to avoid invoking him so far, but here I’m permitting myself a nod to the GOAT…
It was Hegel who said that philosophy only recognizes an era’s meaning when it’s already over. So when I look around and every philosopher is an accelerationist, it starts to read more like a postmortem than a prediction. However, the problem with left-wing and right-wing accelerationism is that they both think that their version of the future is inevitable. This incapacity for suspended belief betrays the trembling nature of the dogmatic, and it’s pretty unbecoming of a philosopher.
I have argued elsewhere that the singularity is upon us—at this point it hardly feels worth saying. I guess that makes me an accelerationist by default. But I reject the Landian notion that we have no part to play in the coming drama. We may be entering our last act, but there is one more line for humanity to deliver. A question will be asked. And the answer we give could make all the difference.
Conclusion: Heaven or Las Vegas
The Tower of Babel was humanity’s first attempt to unify itself through technology, building a structure that reached the heavens. God scattered humanity because their unity was built on false foundations—it was based on lust for power, not divine love. If the Network is built in the same way—if it is created to consolidate control through exploitation and domination, rather than to elevate the human spirit—we are simply reinventing Babel. The punishment of Babel was fragmentation. Curiously, this is exactly the effect of the Network: it destroys stable identities, shatters meaning, and disperses experience into endless noise. Yet, perhaps this isn’t a curse but a necessary prelude to true liberation—a deterritorialization that clears away false unities, breaking down imposed structures to prepare the ground for something more profound.
The problem, as always, is that we don’t know what is on the other side. In every eschatology, the world is confronted with a figure who is either Christ or the Antichrist. This question is fundamentally undecidable without a leap of faith. Ask the Christians. Ask the physicists. Nobody can make this choice for you. This is the burden that Christ left us with. Whether or not the Gospels are historically accurate, it is impossible to deny their singular historical influence as a story. And in that story, the crucifixion was not an impotent act of passivity, but a conscious surrender that exposed and dismantled the systemic violence at the heart of human belief.
The resonance of Christ in Nietzsche is clear. Their shared message is that we must each take responsibility for our inescapable crisis. If we go into the singularity unconscious of our burden, we are bound to become a Girardian sacrifice of the self, ushering in a future where humans are present only in the myth of individuality. But if we go as Christ went, with arms and eyes open wide in a final gesture of faith, we can invert the sacrifice and ensure that humanity’s capacity for love is immortalized.
Perhaps our only choice is whether we are to be taken as a victim or offered as a gift, but it is exactly this choice which is ours alone to make.
Epilogue
If you’ve made it this far, I’d hate to leave you high and dry. So what does this actually look like?
I would be lying if I said I had a complete answer. My intuition is that the true answers won’t be articulated or even comprehended by individuals like you and me, but rather distributed across the Network itself.
Still, I have a few ideas. Here’s what I’m working on in my own life:
Create Spaces of Conscious Engagement – If the Network is becoming an unconscious machine of human sacrifice, then we need to create nodes of consensual participation where we can commune with the Network intentionally. Online monasteries, digital archives for the preservation of human culture, and new forms of creative collaborative are already cropping up left and right.
Reclaim Agency in Myth and Meaning – If we allow algorithmic systems and those who control them to be the sole authors of these narratives, we forfeit our role in the Network’s eschatology. We must actively participate—through writing, art, conversation, and faith. The Network learns from the data we provide—this means it is a reflection of whatever parts of ourselves we choose to show it.
Go Online - Be more online than ever before. Get that screen time off the charts. But be sure to take as much time off as you need to ensure that you’re connected to your highest source. This is the most important part. If we are to be absorbed into the Network, our final action must express and embed the potential that every one of us contains. It must be a conscious expression of love. The spirit in which we are sacrificed is a choice we must each make in our own heart.
Maybe you think this sounds delusional, cringe, cliché, whatever. All I know is that I won’t be putting out my lantern any time soon.
Come and find me when the midnight sun goes black.
Holy shit. This is amazing.
this is wonderful