Below is the speech I delivered at the Northen Exposure 2025 event this past weekend. The speech was preceded by raucous words provided by Wilhelm Apologist, Meta Prime, and Kulak. There is no recording of the speech’s delivery so you’ll have to use your imagination. The event was great and I am told everyone had a great time.
It’s always difficult when Wilhelm Apologist opens for you. It’s my duty now to hoescare the energy.
Why did we choose to host an event like this, and not something more conventional? We still intend to hold conferences, but why are we getting in our own way by inviting a large group to a cabin with no air conditioning by the way there’s no air conditioning? I could list the reasonable justifications, but to summarize the most important ones: the purpose of this event is to recapture the genuine. That sounds like a lofty goal for a bunch of Canadians in the woods roasting marshmallows.
The good news is that I’m insane, and it’s true.
We thought carefully about the types of gatherings we wanted to create, and our ambitions lead us to more innovative realms. The purpose became to create spaces for experiences, and once you enter this mindset there’s all sorts of opportunities for memorable dynamism.
I was partially inspired by the book Bowling Alone, and if anyone has not read it I would suggest they do because even while referencing the American experience it is applicable in most Western contexts. It describes the cross-generational shift in recreational activities in America, exploring why nobody joins bowling leagues anymore. In fact, from the Baby Boomers onward, recreational and fraternal organizations began to wither. It’s very rare for people to join clubs, have group affiliations, or even engage in community-based events. There was a time that the suburbs would be teeming with activity, then later they became known for cold silence. This wasn’t necessarily a feature of the suburbs themselves, the people were changing.
One phenomenon the book investigates is that when Gen X and subsequent generations chose to pursue group affiliations, it was political in nature. They would opt for Communist, Fascist, or Anarchist meetups. Conservative parties, activist mixers. They still functioned essentially as social meetups, but they had to be under the directive of some sort of sweeping social change. It was never community for the sake of community. Even now I am sure people might be secretly saying to themselves “yeah, why would we even want to do that?”
Younger generations – our generations – require the utility of the moment. Even this event exists infused with socio-political utility. We are looking for purpose, we are looking for networking.
Many of us are looking for the antidote to a terminally online condition. We build connections in physical reality assuming they are more real than those forged online. There may be some truth to that. Despite this, we can never really leave the online mindspace the same way we can’t escape the utility of the moment.
I am reminded of how even after we assumed this political orientation, everyone seems to speak sarcastically or ironically these days. We insult the things we like, we meta-analyze every trend we participate in, every comment needs to be a self-aware performance. It is most prevalent on social media but with each younger generation it seems increasingly common. David Foster Wallace spoke of this often when opining on authenticity and the problems of postmodernism, specifically irony. The schizophrenia of reading a book that knows it’s a book being read. The TV show that knows it’s stupid and broadcasts that sentiment to you in an effort to appear enlightened.
One particular quote from him is “hip cynical transcendence of sentiment is really some kind of fear of being really human.” This is particularism by way of recursive context. The Truth Uncertainty Principle.
Total immersion in irony and sarcasm are the most interesting consequences of this postmodernism becoming the status quo. We step back from the genuine and deny universalist messages, all the while encoding our own communications in hostile ways. I’ve seen many influencers proclaim this as a new strategy, making their content toxic purposefully in the interest of keeping certain eyes off it.
If a meme is an idea that spreads rapidly across the populace like an organism – or a mutating virus – then some say we now propagate antimemes. I prefer a different term, because it sounds like an antimeme is something that resists a meme from spreading, like the existing paradigm or status quo. Anyway, the concept of an “antimeme” is a viral idea that counterintuitively presents itself as abrasive to casual viewers, thus inhibiting its ability to spread rapidly and unchecked. They are coated in a slime that only a select few are able to see through.
It is so easy to communicate through technological means that we need to mutilate our communication. You’ve likely encountered this across different communities where their content is made with the purpose of offending the sensibilities of “normies” as a rhetorical filter. This is but one example.
We need to break through a lot of walls of irony, meta-analysis, and psychoanalysis to converse with a real person. The vast majority of people don’t even realize they are doing it. This coating of hostile context will impact how this historical period is understood when assessed centuries hence. Perhaps that’s the purpose.
Reinhart Koselleck was one of the most consequential philosophers of the 20th century and his most famous work was a philosophy of time itself. He was one of the pioneers of historical time, contrasting it with the standard temporality we are all familiar with: a linear record of events that can be carefully understood and used in such a way as to predict the future. This is what Progressivism is founded on, the jaggedly ascending timeline. It is also known as “conceptual history,” and it challenges the rational chronology of events. One example of this is when people mention “the post-war consensus,” this can be seen as one easily bookended historical example that fits irregularly across centuries. It’s a narrative gradient that marks a tectonic shift in the civilizational consciousness, similar to the French Revolution.
His is a semantic study not only of what happens but how the changes that occur during these periods affect how we view time itself. An era of revolutions – the French, the American – created a new revolutionary conceptualization of time, of a utopian future we feel compelled to navigate towards. History itself is redefined by epochs that change our relationship with history itself. The broad strokes of human events change the nature of recorded time itself, conversely the same word can be used across centuries and take on a new meaning in each of these eras.
Like the shift from bowling leagues to political parties, the present no longer represents a place we inhabit; it exists in the interest of serving the future. It is part of a larger context that is always looming over us as it beckons us forward.
We can never really be here now.
There can be no revolt against postmodernism as one function of conceptual time is that it is itself memetic. The only revolt can be against the genuine, of retreating further into obscurity. The funny thing about encasing your message in irony is that it does not act like a shell, it leeches into the substance of the information itself and corrupts it. The more we search for humanity in semantic particulars the more inhuman we seem to become.
Historical sarcasm is a mutation of historical revisionism: it is a way to protect history from hostile actors. But in doing so it corrupts history itself. We can say things that sound cool that we don’t even really believe yet add expediency to culture-political agendas. We can say that Jesus Christ was a racist, we can say that philosophy was invented by insane Greek rapists, we can commoditize the memetic nature of conceptual history in ingenuine but highly practical ways. Historical sarcasm dominates the discourse and increasingly defines our highly cynical historical period.
Most people don’t desire truth the same way they don’t desire community. They signal that they do, but their souls are smeared and grayly hued.
What I am trying to address is the fakeness our circles routinely complain about. There is the falsity of modernity that we despise, but there is also the utility of the moment we demand. Then there is the war over conceptual time’s multitudes that we are forced to operate in, and then there is the commoditization of these very multitudes that apparently excite us. If there is indeed a prison we are attempting to break from, we have thus far lacked a schematic of the structure so we pray for an atomic bomb to set us free.
That’s what we are really fighting against when we gather like this. It’s a very big ask to solve the problem of modernity if we don’t know what modernity is, and which battles can be won. Every surrender to the moment is a step outside of the commoditized revolutionary spiral. You are now closer to figuring out what type of war you are fighting.
Think about that as you’re drinking and staring into the fire, we can not have a fire because there is a total fire ban so forget that last part.