This blog post is part of the Agora Road Travelogue for June 2025

You know what I hate? Fake bitches and myself. Or at least that’s what I would have answered if you asked me before I started going to therapy. But there is still a persistent feeling of uneasiness when I’m around someone who is full of it, even if that person is myself. I wouldn’t call it anger anymore, maybe a sign of personal growth, rather I would say it’s something closer to disappointment, or even pity.

I often joke about being enlightened. There’s some paradox somewhere in the Internet that claims that no one who claims to be enlightened could actually be such a thing in this lifetime. I remember the names of the valleys (or seas) that Borges describes in his recount of The Conference of the Birds: the second to last one is called “Vertigo”; the last one, “Annihilation”. To reach the end of the journey one has to purify oneself through hardships, and there is no greater hardship than ignorance, or false-knowledge. That’s why I liked to believe that the first bhumi of the of the bodhisattva, called the “Very Joyous”, was called as such because they lived in a state of blissful ignorance, of the smugness of those who have glimpsed a shadow of the truth (or a shadow of a shadow) and thus believes, erroneously, that they are closer to grasping it than they actually are. Kind of a Dunning-Kruger effect for the spiritual progression.

The Internet has gotten worse with the years… to the surprise of no one. Everyhting is garbage content and everyone knows it. This is the first great realization, the first glance of what may lie beyond the cavern. And there are a couple of brave ones who dare to look into the eye of the beast (the algorithm) and say “no more”… or at least that’s what we all like to believe, because at the end of the day how free is our free will if we are still playing under the rules set by our digital overlords? That’s the main reason why I dislike YouTube video essays, specifically those who deal with issues such as freeing oneself from the grasp of the algorithm, digital detox, or overall nostalgia for a past that never was. There is some naiveness to them. As if the people making them were not aware that they are being played for fools by the very same companies they ought to destroy. I dislike the fake sense of confidence and achievement that arises from finishing one of those behemoths (they usually range from 30 minutes to 2 hours long) as if we have actually achieved something, as if we haven’t actually condensed 2 hours of doomscrolling into a single piece.

This is not to say that there are not some gems hidden among them. I still constantly revisit hazel’s excellent piece on interactive media (disguised as a review of Serial Experiments Lain for PS1), however I find myself unable to finish any other of her videos, as if they were made not for active watching, but to be passively consumed. Maybe I’m just an old crank, longing for a time when Internet-video-watching would take you a whole afternoon of continuous attention. There. I said it, and I didn’t require an hour long video aimed to be played as background noise while mindlessly scrolling TikTok, somewhat a multi-device equivalent of those clips of someone playing with kinetic sand while a gameplay of Subway Surfers plays beneath it.

Of course, the question that arises is if my blog-rambling is any different than those videos. Fake modesty pushes me to say: no, it isn’t, as if deep down I knew that they are fundamentally the same thing. Two shadows of the same archetype. In the The Approach to Al-Mu’tasim one of the friends of Al-Mu’tasim prefers to not be right when arguing. Maybe I wrote this piece secretly knowing than I’m no better than those I criticize. Maybe this is the blisfull ignorance that is the first bhumi of the bodhisattva.