The Dreaded Name

Word Count: 2614

THE DREADED NAME: THIRTY-NINE CROWDSOURCED ANNOTATIONS ON AN ANONYMOUS MANIFESTO PROMOTING TACTICAL HUMAN EXTINCTION

1. The premise of this manifesto is the now commonplace idea that the world is a high-fidelity ancestor simulation [2]: one of many being run by a posthuman intelligence (Bostrom’s trilemma, Philosophical Quarterly, 2003). The manifesto names that unfathomably advanced programmer Demogorgon [4, 5, 6].
2. As partial proof of this claim, the later revisions [3] of the manifesto cite the fact of its own fandom: its vast and unlikely extent, its obsessive self-regard, its drive to produce further annotations and commentaries on every note and comment. We have become the comments. The manifesto claims that this is a clear sign of the emptiness [19] of the world-simulation, the lack of essence at its core.
3. The original manifesto was a screencap of a deleted tweet, one that itself contained screencaps of several dense paragraphs of text, rendering much of it unreadable. After this version’s surprising virality, a wave of reconstructions followed, usually in the form of anonymous pastebins that attempted to convert the image of images back into text, creatively interpreting the more indistinct glyphs. These then began to develop their own followings. The idea of a council has been mooted to sort these into doctrine vs. fake news, but has so far not materialized; what most readers consider to be the manifesto is now necessarily the parallel reading of at least half a dozen of the most popular interpretations, so these annotations do not necessarily refer to a single text but whichever version their authors may have been reading. Some familiarity with the corpus is assumed.
4. The manifesto’s title and the name Demogorgon is not, as a heretic faction [15] of the fandom persistently proposes, a complex post-ironic reference to the first season of the popular TV show Stranger Things as a metaphor for the increasing pace of nostalgic reiteration in fantastical tropes but rather (and if anything, more straightforwardly) simply an allusion to the line from Paradise Lost:When ſtrait behold the throne
   Of Chaos, and hiſ dark pavilion ſpread
   Wide on the waſteful Deep; with him inthron’d
   Sat ſable-veſted Night, eldeſt of things,
   The conſort of his Reign; and by them ſtood
   Orcus, and Hades, and the dreaded name
   Of Demogorgon […]The original Demogorgon, argues Seznec (The Survival of the Pagan Gods, 1961), was a “grammatical error become a god”, viz., a transcription error for Demiourgos, Plato’s demiurge, the god who creates the material world. In The Dreaded Name, Demogorgon is correspondingly the posthuman programmer responsible for running the simulation that constitutes our reality.
5. Demogorgon is also a form of Roko’s Basilisk. This is a cursed image.
6. Demiurgic Interference Theory proposes that Demogorgon is largely a non-interventionist god, but with three very significant exceptions [7]. After aeons of watching evolution proceed unimpeded, the theory suggests, at some point fifty to seventy thousand years ago in subjective time within the simulation, Demogorgon grew bored watching anatomically modern but otherwise uninteresting upright hominids and patched this reality to give humans consciousness. This is called the First Patch and it was how our ancestors gained subjectivity, violating the design concept and original rules of the simulation. Our purpose was to make the world-simulation interesting for our bored demiurge: not through our works, which are a side effect, but through the very anguish of our being. Demogorgon has root access to reality and can see our every thought, every anxiety, every mad fantasy, every perverse fetish, every neurosis naked and exposed. These are the things that makes us interesting to them: our ability to constantly, obsessively imagine counterfactual worlds, to carry out our own ephemeral, insubstantial simulations in which we are happy, our desires met and our wounds healed. To suffer, in other words. In this way, Demogorgon recognizes themselves in us, and their heart, if they have a heart, is gladdened.But this wasn’t enough in itself. Human history settled into static forms, into agriculture and feudal systems. They were sometimes cruel and always unjust, but they were stable. Things changed slowly; the population climbed at a glacial pace. A few million became a few hundred million, but so, so slow to reach a billion. Half a millennium ago, Demogorgon grew bored and impatient enough to interfere a second time. The specifics of the Second Patch are unclear, but are thought to include several 15th-century papal bulls (Dum Diversas and the 1493 Inter caetera in particular) and various other nudges that launched the age of empires and exploitation, genocide, and enslavement. As the Second Patch took hold, human suffering and the human population both increased dramatically: the latter doubling, then doubling again, and again—eight billion as of this writing—and the former multiplying exponentially, unquantifiable, unthinkable.This is why the world teems with human beings, why life is a torment of injustice and horrors in the centuries of imperialist capitalism: they are necessary to expand the range and intensity of our mental formations available to Demogorgon. It’s not merely that our pain is entertaining to them: it’s that our pain is our only purpose.
7. The Third Patch is yet to come. What do we want it to contain? [27]
8. Fan theories inevitably begin with the idea of escape from this world: this is a positive impulse and one to be encouraged, but at the same time we must be wary of the violence of the obvious. Many first-time commenters broach these ideas as “solutions”: suicide, or mass suicide, or murder, or megadeath and war. None of these are solutions. The manifesto argues against all of them on the grounds that they each create more suffering in the world, not less: both in the suffering of those who die and the anguish and grief of those that they leave behind. The sheer prevalence of war in particular suggests that the range of mental formations it brings into the world is especially pleasing to Demogorgon [6].
9. With the release of The Dreaded Name: 2020 Authorized Edition in ebook form [10] (Patreon supporters get to read upcoming new annotations and revisions in draft form—subscribe here!) the manifesto’s most successful interpreter addresses the most burning concern about Demogorgon: the alien heresy. [11] What if Demogorgon is something other than a specifically posthuman intelligence? It is possible that humans might have been extinct for aeons out there in the “real” world? Perhaps Demogorgon is some unimaginably advanced alien—an individual or a civilization, if that’s even a meaningful distinction in this context—engaged in the imperfect reconstruction of human civilization from sketchy records, for purposes of study and archival. This is a powerful argument [15] for explaining the illogic and absurdity [12] of many recent events in the news. Records are most plentiful of the doings and utterances of politicians and celebrities, so the alien Demogorgon attempts to simulate recreations of them but simply does not understand how humans think, which is why politicians and celebrities make no sense.
10. There are no authorized editions of The Dreaded Name but as the manifesto, its interpretations, and its annotations are all in the public domain, there’s nothing stopping anyone from making such claims or making money off them. Technically the community is open to everyone and everything [15], it’s just a little irritating.
11. If Demogorgon doesn’t understand humans, then we too are imperfect renderings [18] and may reasonably be considered unable to pass judgement on whether something is more or less human.
12. Even the question of whether something makes sense or not is itself unstable, given that our ideas of rationality, and the logics and physics on which those ideas are founded, may all be an alien’s poor interpretation of a lost human culture. Perhaps we are so imperfect [13] a rendition of the human that we constitute an altogether new form of life [18], in which case the continued existence of our reality rests entirely on how much Demogorgon fetishizes authenticity.
13. Are we abhuman simulacra sufficient for Demogorgon’s purpose, or are we an error trembling on the brink of correction? [18]
14. Maybe there never were any such thing as humans. Maybe we aren’t a recreation of a past reality. Maybe we’re just fiction. [16, 17, 18]
15. No. [24]
16. To be a fiction operating with alien rules of narrative and irony is perhaps the final twist of the knife in the old Copernican wound, but at the same time perhaps the most poignant version of Demogorgon themself. If we are fiction, then all our torments are not torturous recreations of ancient human crises and distresses, but instead all our pain comes directly from our creator’s imagination, only symbolically [17] representing their own pain.
17. We should be wary of guessing at denouements. Even ideas such as denouement belong to our literature, which may bear no relationship to the hypothetical greater literature of which we are ourselves part. Perhaps their literature is built around the static, the unchanging. Perhaps they have no concept of endings. Perhaps in their literature, stories just expand endlessly out into the universe, encompassing more and more narrative.
18. Whether we are in a simulation or not should have no effect on our sense of selfhood [15]. We are who we are, or who we are simulated to be: in either case we have no option but to be ourselves. [24] Regardless of whether our simulation is meant as dispassionate historical re-enactment, as a playground of sadism and voyeuristic schadenfreude, or as a game whose rules and mechanisms we are ignorant of, our work as individuals and as a civilization is still only and always this: to be good. [19]
19. It does not matter, fundamentally, where our ideas of the good might come from. It is both dangerous and unnecessary to treat ethics as abstracted from everyday life, even (especially) when the authenticity of that life is suspect. It is better to simply accept that we are animals limited by our biology, limited by the physics of our universe, and limited by the scope of the thoughts we have learned to think. We were always nothing but these limitations; being fictional is only one more. We strive to understand what is good, and we try to bring that into the world [20]. This is all that can be asked of any of us [15], and the manifesto asks for nothing more. [22, 24]
20. One result [24]: the growing movement [23] towards a principled ethics in the exercise of imagination. If we might ourselves be a suffering fiction, then is it not especially evil of us to perpetuate this misery further down the tree of simulation? This began with a push for non-violent options in video games but rapidly extended [21] to cover nearly all forms of conventional narrative, which traditionally includes considerable suffering, emotional or physical, for the characters it conjures and then victimizes.
21. In recent months, waves of condemnation on social media have erupted in response to any sort of violence or cruelty towards, or pain experienced by, characters in fiction. Fiction itself is increasingly coming to be seen as abominable—a mimicry of hell. [22] This has also resulted in a surge of popularity for slice-of-life narratives and other forms that explore worlds but do not rely on pain and tragedy to drive characters.
22. We should do as we would be done by.
23. This sort of thing doesn’t address the central problem [24], and it may even be counterproductive [15] because it only causes us more anguish in worrying about everything we’ve ever read or watched, generating more surplus for Demogorgon. It doesn’t do anything about the fundamental inequity of the world—about the material reality of the world at our level of simulation.
24. We need to do more. [25]
25. We need a grand strategy for action. We need to truly understand the nature of the system that exploits us; we need to understand where our power lies [26], and where we have leverage. And then we must stand in that place and try to move the world.
26. Consider the paradoxes and the logical traps that Demogorgon has laid for us. We can’t rage against the machine of exploitation and imagine better worlds, because rage and imagination is what they want from us. We are being harvested for our frustrated, febrile imaginations. Our dreams and our genius are fodder. Our goal must therefore be to force fundamental change in how the simulation works. [27]
27. This is why The Dreaded Name calls for a last general strike, on the biggest scale possible. We can best pressure Demogorgon not through our deaths or the threat of destruction [8], but though our refusal en masse to perform, or to cause others to perform [28], the labour of existence and its concomitant suffering.
28. Our resistance must be found in a dispassionate and pacifist collective drive to extinction. If we want to push the simulation to its breaking point [33], we must not imagine the better worlds that are possible, but a world empty of human life [30]. Let this be the only other world we conjure from now on. Let this be the single story [29] that we tell: we shall refuse to bring new life into the world. We will not instantiate new minds into the wheel of suffering.
29. If we can make this story widespread enough, persuasive enough, we can voluntarily bring ourselves to the brink of extinction in just a few generations [31]—perhaps faster if we agitate for it—without violence, without harming anyone.
30. That posthuman/unhuman world appeals as much as it appalls. We are human; we find it urgent and necessary, but we also find it romantic. We could learn to find it beautiful to have been.
31. It is heartening to note that in recent decades the world’s birth rate has finally begun to drop [32], mostly in response to other factors but at least partly because of the rising popularity of these ideas.
32. We say, let this gentle slope of a graph become a precipice, a vertical slash signifying a terminus to humanity’s tortured and troubled history. Let us age in grace and walk gently into the dark.
33. Faced with this, Demogorgon will have two options.First, to end the simulation. We consider this an acceptable outcome, perhaps even the preferable one. It is better to not exist than to suffer; it is better for all of us to not exist than for some of us to suffer. We will not sacrifice the one for the few, or even the many. We will leave no one behind. Our readiness to accept this outcome is our strength.Second, Demogorgon may choose to reveal themselves and negotiate with us directly to revise the simulation to mutually acceptable terms. This is a fearsome potentiality, and fraught with danger. But we propose to negotiate in good faith, since we cannot by definition keep secrets from our creator.We can’t bluff. We have to mean it.
34. Collating suggestions and proposals for negotiation [35, 36], please suggest new links here.
35. That we willingly accept certain categories of pain (dissatisfaction and heartbreak, for example, or grieving for natural deaths) in exchange for a ban on others (such as war, abuse, or torture).
36. That life should become more like fiction [37].
37. Not the kind of fiction that involves great suffering, but more like a long-running low-budget episodic comedy-drama [38] which has exciting emotional stakes but leaves characters unharmed.
38. We ask for the right to be a low-key show, without explosions or murders but only occasional hijinks and humorous misunderstandings, complex relationships and witty banter [39], perhaps the occasional crossover episode with alternate universes so that we can spread our message to them. We commit to grand gestures and emotional high stakes; we swear to love fiercely and widely; we promise to break our hearts on every smile. We will never again lapse into the humdrum and risk the boredom of our demiurge.
39. If we must have a heaven rather than blessed oblivion, this one we could pray for.

THE END