hey if you want to respond these words go to this thread

so i started this thread cause, as one of the folks who originally had a hand in creating the icarus site, i've been getting some behind the scenes shit for spending more time on myspace these days then around here. so this post is both an explanation and an apology and spans the gap from political analysis to personal struggle.

but it takes a little while for me to warm up, so in case you don't feel like reading the whole nuanced thing in all its glory i'll say the important parts straight up right here:

yes, myspace is an evil corporate videodrome monster and the icarus project is a badass revolutionary blossoming community. i, as someone who appreciates such social matters, find myspace to be an incredible networking tool and i'm grateful for the ability to be able to reach out to such large numbers of people and have them be able to reach back. i also think it's really cool when people i haven't seen since elementary school or street protests in 1989 track me down and reconnect and show me pictures of their kids.

as far as icarus project national or regional groups having official myspace sites i think a clear message on the front of each one making it clear we hate corporate media consolidation and directing people directly to our website would be a great and easy thing to do. lets do it.

as far as my personal relationship to myspace i think i just need to stop using it so much cause it's fucking addictive like video crack and i need to start putting my energy into this place again cause it's so much cooler. so that's the apology part. i think i was just burned out and needed a break. i'm sorry. i'm human, obviously. i'll start out with a fresh coat of wax on my wings and hope everyone understands or at least tries to empathize with the weird pressure i carry around for starting something that's gotten way bigger and more intense than i ever figured possible.

maybe me hiding in myspace world was the equivalent of a kid from a small town going to the big city to check out the flashing lights and all the exciting people and finding some comfort in the ananonimity of it all. i could dress however i wanted and say whatever i wanted and wouldn't have to be accountable in the same way. just something to think about.

alright, so with that out of the way...
 
has anyone ever seen the movie videodrome?
if it's not my favorite movie, it's probably the one that has had the most long term effect on my subconscious. it's about this cable tv station that ends up broadcasting signals which make tumors grow in people's brains and controls their thoughts. corporate mind control takeover, sexy 'blondie' era debbie harry s/m scenes, televisions talking directly to you and telling you to kill people, pretty grim and lovely and fascinating.
it came out in the early 80's and i saw it when i was a teenager and it definitely influenced the style and content of my first psychotic break where i was convinced that the world was going to end and we were all going to live on on television somehow.

this was when the internet was in its infancy, long before it was a popular tool of communication, 1992-93. years later, i find myself marveling at how much the apocalyptic fantasies i was having (from watching so many fucked up movies and having an overactive imagination) are coming true in the form of corporately controlled websites like myspace. there's this way, i think, similar to television, that the web as a medium that is well equipted for programming people's minds. i feel sometimes like just the medium itself, the frequency it broadcasts on, how it enters our eyes and our brains, ends up numbing us as human beings from the natural world.

for me, as a kid who grew up watching hours of television every day, it is so hard to reconnect with the natural rhythms of the world, like for example if i go out to the middle of a forest. for some people walking through the woods it is immediately relaxing and taps them back in to something deeper and older than themselves and they find some inner peace amidst the streams and moss and trees and little creatures. for me, on the other hand, it's quite often a painful experience to walk through the woods when i've been in the city for awhile because i become so aware of all the noise and garbage in my head and how short my atttention span is and how DISconnected i am from the larger ecology which disappears more everyday.

i end up feeling like a fucking cyborg and the only way i can make myself feel better about it is to pretend i'm in a science fiction movie and try to draw some conclusions about it that are thought provoking and make me feel connected to other people who feel like cyborgs and who want to work to change the way things are. the sophisticated defence mechanism of making meaning from the horror and turning it into a beautiful if not tragicly beautiful story.

once i go hang out in the woods for awhile i actually do chill out and acclimate, but because of the nature of my life the way it is these days, i inevitably have to go back to the city, or i have to get in front of the computer, or i have to talk on my cell phone, and all the endtime jazz that goes along with it. the modern world is a really complicated place, and our modern lifestyles clash really badly with most everything that already existed around here before us.
 
when ashley and i were on the first icarus tour going across the country in the spring of 2004, we made this really interesting discovery about how different we were. we actually already knew it, it was really obvious to us and anyone who knew us, but it became really glaring on our trip. inbetween icarus workshops we were going to all these beautiful place like an old growth forest in ohio and the badlands in south dakota and the redwoods in california. we were in these really expansive headstates at the time, high on life from finishing the book and being on tour and meeting so many amazing people - and once outside of the city we would both connect to these higher states of reality where we felt one with something larger than ourselves.

but for ashley that kind of connection was always with the mountains and the trees - feeling her place in the larger ecological life cycle of the planet and the universe.

for me, on the other hand, it was always history and the collective consciousness - the history of people on the planet, the history of thoughts and ideas and social movements, feeling my place and role amidst it all - between the ones who came before me and the ones that will come after me and everything inbetween.

i think it's like my inner psychic ecology is made up of people, all these different people. alive people, dead people, people who's books and ideas i feel coursing through my blood or energy and all the people i know or who write me emails or myspace messages or that i talk to on the subway or at the auto parts store. this is somewhat of an unfinished thought thati've been trying to figure out for awhile, how to talk about my relationship to groups of people and history -- the right set of metaphors and analogies that feel appropriate when talking about such things so grand in scale.

so yeah, an ecology of people:
when this website first started really taking off (like when it wasn't just ashley and i getting excited every time someone posted a new entry in the forum and sending each other an email about it) i felt this incredible connection with all the people who were writing on it. what an amazing crew! it felt like we were on a big ship or something, and more people were joining us all the time. i poured my heart into this community when i or someone else needed some help or i felt like it was under attack. it was my home, my virtual home, and there was always something interesting happening and some new exciting person coming through with a cool idea or a fucked up dilemma, and then another, and another...

its been so long since i've been on the site regularly that i don't even recognize most of the member names when i'm reading through the posts. there's so much writing on this site now! imagine how crazy that must be for me - it simultaniously makes me feel really proud and really overwhelmed, like, where do i start here? i used to come on this site and write about the struggles i was having in my life, but now the good majority of my struggles are somehow related to the icarus project in one way or another, and maybe it's not the most appropiate place for me to find some help. does that make sense? it's okay, you don't really have to answer.

a similar kind of dynamic happened in the local icarus project meetings in new york city. they quickly stopped feeling like support meetings to me cause i felt this pressure of having to hold things together. and when i stepped back from going to them i got the sense that i was being resented for not having done a good enough job setting them up before i took off. and yet i get the sense now that things are going much better with the nyc group. i had this sense, and i don't think it was just in my head, that my mere presence at the meetings was hindering people from stepping up to take responsibilities and claim the icarus project as their own. i held weight and power without having done anything except for come up with the idea and got it off the ground. i don't know if this is making only sense to anyone as i write about it now, but the whole situation left me feeling so strange and sadly lonely. i would joke to my friends that i needed to find a support group for other people who started support groups.

so i've felt similar issues with this place. there were a lot of different ways things could have gone with the forum community, some big hurdles we overcame in the early days. there were some really ugly moments there for awhile that left me and ashley and others exhausted (like when we were being personally attacked everyday by this one member who had nothing better to do than to make it his personal mission to take over the site and was so manic that he seemed to never leave the computer and could type faster than everyone else.) if anyone had ever told me when i was a teenager that in the early years of the 21st century i'd be fighting a  cyberwar on the internet for control of our community website with my band of merry anarcho-tech geeks against a flamer named z0tl i would have been very confused. thankfully folks rallied together and ended up banning him and updating the technology for reporting posts and coming up with community guidelines that we could hold down and it all seemingly worked out, but not without some burnout along the way.

i think i fall into the category of someone who got burnt out from spending too much time on this site trying to hold it together. as linda or seven or jeff or anyone who's taken on responsibility for maintaining the site for a period of time will tell you, it's a lot of work! the hours and the psychic drain. a lot of energy not just for the technical aspects and answering all the questions but also for maintaining a healthy social eqilibrium and space that feels safe to new comers and the folks hanging out on the edges. we were figuring it out together at the beginning: linda would send me articles she found on the web with rules and tips for creating healthy online communities. we would have all kinds of threads about what radical meant and what radical community might look like. they're all there archived in all their glory, waiting for you to dredge them up from the bottom of the thread lists.
 
anyway, i'm losing steam here. this is actually the most i've written on a computer in so long. i started writing on my drupal blog in the last couple days but i've just been typing up old journal entries. i'm out of the habit of it. most of my writing these days is in my journal and in little emails or PM's to people. so let me tie things together a bit crudely so i can get outside under the sunlight and so my eyes stop flickering:

so this is why i love myspace: that thing i was just talking about a few paragraphs up, that thing about feeling connected into people and history and the collective consciousness -- i actually feel that intensely when i'm on myspace. i love that a total stranger or an old friend or old lover or old freaky comrade or traveling partner can send me a message and i can look at hir friends and find my peeps and where they've ended up in their lives -- send messages to them, and their friends -- and then more people find me. i LOVE my friends, i'm fiercely loyal to my friends, i don't think there's anything more important for me to live for than to help support my friends and our extended community. and i also love that some 15 year old kid who likes my old punk band can find me and then look at my friends and see this incredible incredible network of people right on my front page, with links going in every direction and back again. there is clearly a bunch of wack ass commercial spam and bullshit floating around that site, but when i'm on myspace i honestly feel like i'm tapped into the collective consciousness of our greater culture and it's really intense.

it's also fucking evil. clearly clearly evil. like end of the world kind of evil - flashing spell icons of evil burning into your retina and you don't even realize it's happening evil. eerily like the visions i had when i was a teenager of the world ending and us all living on on television in little boxes. we don't have to touch each other. we don't have to actually look at each other. we can hang out along in our rooms and have conversations but not know how to do it when there are flesh and blood people around us. and everyone's a star on tv now, just like everyone always wanted (or they told us we wanted) and the whole thing is corporately sponsored, and the world is going down around us and we're glued to the screen. and it's so clearly going to get more and more twisted and demented as the technology evolves and the corporate consolidation grows ever tighter.   kids are getting raised to not ever go outside and climb trees or talk to strangers, they're tuned to the box, the equivalent of tumors growing in their brains controling their thoughts just like that movie videodrome.

yes, this is all true. so does it make someone a sellout for using the technology?
i would argue no.

does it make me, sascha scatter, co-creator of the icarus website, irresponsible for ditching out on my community to hang out in myspace world and bask in the glory of enormous corporately controled social networks?
maybe. i'm willing to be accountable as long as you can see where i'm coming from, and that it's not cut and dry but layered with paradox and complexity.

and i'd be really happy to come back around here and start posting again. i think i just needed to write a big long post like this to get me back in the swing of things. 
 i just heard word last night from seven and empties that they've both reached their burnout point and are stepping back from working on the site at the end of the month to spend more time in the woods and with each other and away from computers. if there's anyone i feel responsible for it's them because they've worked SO hard at holding things together when they hate computers just as much as i do and would really rather be doing other important things with their lives. so hopefully, at least on the forum end, cause i've never been much of a techie, i can help hold up some of the psychic weight of our community so it doesn't fall on too few people. and hopefully more people will step up. it's so confusing with this project, to figure out how to orchastrate the work and what's reasonable volunteer work and what should be paid for and on and on. burnout is a terrible thing, especially when it's the thing you love that's burning you so bad. very confusing.

so that's it, that's what i have to say, although for anyone who's not sick of reading my longwinded thoughts on the world, i'm going to leave you with this link:

http://www.theicarusproject.net/sellout-story

it's a story that i wrote a decade ago, when my friends and i first started using the internet. it was in a zine i self published called La Vida Secrita de los Gabachos (The Secret Life of White People), and it was the first story i ever wrote that ended up stirring up a bunch of interesting and productive discussion at the time. it fits right in to this whole issue of what it means to work within the system and use its tools to our advantage. i can't fucking believe its been ten years, when i go back and read it i get chills, especially the last line.

alright peoples, to be continued. thanks for having me in your space.
mad love,
sascha


death to myspace...long live the icarus project.
http://www.myspace.com/saschascatter