The Local Weirdo
I’ve got a birthday coming up, and it has put me into a reflective mood about my roles and stature in life, and some reflection upon this website and its contents feels long overdue. I don’t intend to write some kind of heavy retrospective here, but it feels productive to me to do some of this thinking out loud.
Sometimes, I am like, “I am married to a literal rabbi. What insecurity drove me to invest so much in a teaching platform of my own?”
The truth is, much of the work on this site predates me even having met her, and I considered rabbinical school myself for a while. That was the subject of Ariel’s and my first serious conversation, actually, which happened before she had decided to ordain. But my work didn’t find its form as @taalumot until well after we were married, and when it started to develop some buzz, I leaned into it as hard as I could. I am no longer leaned in nearly that hard, and I mostly feel relieved about it, so I have begun to wonder what all the fuss was about.
The only thing I’ve come up with so far is that in 2021, 2022 — you know, the @taalumot Era — I was pretty insecure about whether Ma’alot was going to work out!! There was an extent to which I felt I had to hedge our bets about how and where our Spiritual Work™ could be done. Ariel, of course, was 150% in on Ma’alot, so if any bet-hedging was going to happen, I had to do it. For a while there, it really felt like we were neck and neck in an exciting way. Now, it feels like she has made it to escape velocity, and my booster rocket has run out of fuel. To be clear, I think that’s wonderful. What she’s doing is unimpeachable. What I was doing trying to make it happen online, I’m not so sure.
As I have written about before, the @taalumot Era was not a singularity but part of a succession of social media scenes. I was participating in various discourses, and my perspective appeared to resonate, and that’s what gave my work a sense of an audience to whom I was speaking — to whom I knew what to say. As I have also written about before, that all ended in frustration, and I have decamped to parts of the internet where my tiny minority of people who have anything left up there other than a brain stem use communication tools for purposes other than ecstatic dissociation. I definitely haven’t cured myself of ecstatic dissociation, but I’ve rebuilt my internet habits around normal stuff enough to reflect better on how that whole thing affected what I’ve done here so far, which is important for understanding what to do here now.
It feels safe to say that I related to my social media activity as a form of spiritual warfare. I mean, I still do, I just try not to fight the war anymore. There were things going on in the scenes I was in that felt deeply wrong, and the good thing about those scenes was that they enjoyed correcting their own errors, so my most notable contributions were all screeds people read masochistically and then begged for more of. I fed this appetite for a while, and then eventually it consumed me and turned me into Gollum.
The thing the social media spirituality posters were most right about was the egregores. This was a very useful concept for modeling other people’s beliefs and what-have-you in an intensely culturally and ideologically heterogenous space.
But they were wrong about what the problem was.
They thought the problem with egregores was that people are enslaved to unconscious projections, and that by pointing them out at each other constantly, we could somehow liberate everyone to be free, autonomous, rational beings. The actual problem was the egregores everybody used to understand each other, dehumanizing masses of living, complex people into personifiable collective abstractions in order to address them. This is practically the definition of what works on social media: world-collapsing stereotypes upon which someone with zero milliseconds of attention span available can instantly project.
Attachment to waging “spiritual warfare” on social media assumes that the quality of attention people are spending on social media is worth fighting over. It was worthwhile in that I found enough people who wanted to go do something else with me, but that number felt pretty finite, and the returns diminished quickly and utterly.
I call it a “war,” but in many ways it was actually more like a form of toxic workplace positivity at the influencer level that just had war-like casualties for the poor lowbies consuming the posts. For those of us who were trying to build audiences for our work, these discourses were basically duels of positive and negative sentiment in which scene members attempted to steer scene economics to their advantage by optimizing for as little work and as much money as possible.
The dangerous part was that any individual whose sentiment-driving inconvenienced a sufficient proportion of the scene had to be silenced to maintain homeostasis.
Am I saying this happened to me? Well, I’m not not saying it. All I know is, when I started to push harder on cultural repair instead of sticking to the endless gyre of marketable spiritual practice, I stopped getting links and comments, and thus I stopped getting traffic. I continued to post as if I was in the war, projecting forcefields of my own preferences and trying to get some swath of the online spirituality audience to believe in them, but this was a nonstarter in a scene that just wanted to keep the party going.
As I planned and implemented The Great Exodus™, I continued to believe for a while that a sufficient portion of The Audience™ would come along, or that federation with Threads would allow me to continue to reach them from the comfort of my pirate ship (could still happen, I suppose), but it’s been long enough now that my internet use has mostly just reverted to normieposting like I used to do on Facebook a million years ago, I just use way nerdier apps now because that’s what my current friends and I like to do. Including the app I made! Base is just an app for normieposting with people I like that offers us our ideal feature set.
Sure, there is some sense that I make stuff for them as the guy who made the website, but I include them all in it, which seems especially fun for the people who aren’t yet making their own stuff, and those who are get just as much airtime and appreciation as I do from everybody else and probably way more from me than I get for mine from any one person. Great. This is called “local community.” It’s the sensible scale at which people are supposed to be known and respected for what they do.
And I’ve been thinking a lot about this in both directions. When I started @taalumot, I didn’t have a built-in village-scale job as the local weirdo in a community like Ma’alot, but now, as the rabbi’s husband, I do. Not only has the work I’ve done as @taalumot — both the writing about householder spirituality and the building and moderating of intentional online communities — informed the work I’ve since taken on with Ma’alot, writing about that work has proven a source of super popular @taalumot content! Even the astrology part has become an IRL role; I just helped a community member rectify her birth time in person yesterday. This is the scale at which this person — the local weirdo — existed for all of human history. Social media certainly helped me practice for this role, but I didn’t really have the role until I downsized that @taalumot character to the same scale as my local scale.
And then, lo and behold, they began to merge into one coherent life instead of a painful split personality I had for all those years when @taalumot’s offline life was a secret. I just planned the fifth TIGER TIME episode with an entirely offline friend as the guest. People who were Twitter avatars to me at first are now Tiger Pajamas clients. The @taalumot character simply does not live in a purely online world anymore.
So what do I do now with this website and its various publications and properties? I guess it just becomes more about my real life than the paltry 20 posts in the Life Stories field as of this writing would indicate it has thus far been. While that may not contribute to the self-perpetuating orgy of social media enough to provide the site the traffic it once had, I hope it will be more useful to people who don’t live in purely online worlds.
And I still intend to help such people find sustainable cultural expression and connection online. I pray for a day I can envision so clearly, perhaps five years away, when algorithmic and manual culture will have entirely separated, and it will make manual culture stronger than it has ever been.
