At the beginning of the 2020s we were taken on an unplanned and involuntary journey into the future. I’ve been taking notes. Let’s get equipped.
It's time that we rediscover the tools of true dissidence. In our day and age of blazing fast communication, interoperability, and global bandwidth, we are in danger of losing the benefits of more constrained, immediate, and local forms of transmission. Our quest for maximum appeal is generating minimum meaning. And at the moment I can't think of a better tool to counteract this than a revival of samizdat. A brief historical lesson here. Samizdat is a Soviet-era Russian term describing entire genres of communication practiced by dissidents trapped inside authoritarian regimes. In an effort to elude censorship and state technology control, and to provide a tight-knit community with unique ways of communication, samizdat artists carefully added their double meanings to existing pieces of media. For example, a writer might create an entire second book by writing between the lines of an existing book, or a musician might bootleg records out of strange and innovative materials. They narrowed their band so as to only speak to the people that wanted to understand them; simultaneously, only the people they wanted to be understood by.
This tactic tells us something important about public speech generally, but I think it has a unique bearing on some of us today. While we are probably not going up against a true censorship regime, we also face the pull of a number of conflicting audiences, some of whom readily accept our message and desire it, others who may be quietly or openly hostile. To describe the current mass media situation as filled with conflict is boring at this stage in the game. A better question is: how should we transmit vitally important messages within a conflicted landscape? Media conflict is as old as media. But just as ancient is the process of humans subverting networks to convey meaning to Those Who Know. It's time to stop complaining about throttling, shadow banning, surveillance, language policing, tribalism, and intellectual splintering. Many of these problems do truly exist, but they have also been so exaggerated by outrage peddlers and black pill artists as to be almost meaningless. True outside control of your speech output is only possible if you insist upon Twitter reach and complete legibility. It's time to create some samizdat.
I. Speak Only Truth
First, a quick warning. If your entire desire to communicate is motivated by the intellectual equivalent of dropshipping contentless books, there is no need for you to investigate samizdat further. Bite-sized servings of perfectly acceptable content are just fine for the pleaser of the masses. Broadcast as loudly, brazenly, and legibly as possible. In fact, that is exactly how one must create in order to find an audience for nothing. Samizdat is an intentionally adversarial form of communication. It is transmitted from those who know to those who either know or wish to know. And it works against all other audiences. To need samizdat, you must have a message specific enough to contradict someone. You must have something real to say. It should not surprise you that speaking truth creates opponents. That is the metaphysical nature of truth. These opponents are not your real enemies. They ought not be fought, worried over, or hated. Samizdat allows you to sidestep them by creating an additional layer of intellectual work necessary to decrypt your message. You are protecting the truth from those unready or unwilling to heed it.
Be aware that I am not advocating the peddling of conspiracy theories, personal or corporate hatred, or any other form of justly persecuted evil. Not many should seek to be teachers. This is a lesson from Scripture that all too few have heeded. But if you have spent long enough seeking the truth humbly that you are ready to speak, it may be time to consider that not everyone is ready to hear you. Samizdat provides the right kind of exclusivity. Now, I am fully aware that the dying stages of the terminally ill Attractional Era are still fighting against the idea that Truth should be concealed from anyone. And I also oppose the idea that you, dear reader, should intentionally hide the truth from anyone ready to hear it. How will you judge who is ready? That is not your job. Production of Truth-speaking samizdat allows the Truth itself to judge. By providing the Word to all who will take the steps necessary to hear it, you are setting up a narrow gate, open to anyone but not to everyone. It is now up to all individual hearers to decide for themselves. Do not lie in an effort to make Truth more palatable.
II. Optimize for Human Processing
Discard every idea you have been fed about what people “will do” to hear information or how short everyone’s “attention spans” are. This is common wisdom peddled by cheapjacks1 with nothing to say past the first pitiful layer of half-truth. Of course people cannot abide any more exposure to nonsense and nonwisdom than they can help. The immune system of our souls (the technical term is Common Grace) tries to pull us away from such stuff even when we plunge ourselves intentionally into the deadening stream. But when it comes time to speak the Truth, you must let go of the longstanding habit of debriding unpleasant realities from your communication. Longer is not better, but neither is it the cardinal sin unless the holy grail you seek is maximum audience. The creator of samizdat is free to pursue the quiet way, to use the best setting for the jewel no matter how baroque or out of fashion the resulting piece may become. This is because samizdat is essentially analogue piece of computational code, requiring decryption by a certain kind of human to transmit information. When underground jazz artists inscribed their music onto leftover sheets of x-ray photography, they produced work that anyone outside their community would never comprehend. Only those with all the keys could decode.
Knowing that these steps occur in any communication allows you to harness them for good. Allow the additional effort you encode into your work to act as a filtering mechanism. We used to experience a perfect example in youth ministry, of all places. I was consistently schooled in the absolutely standard boilerplate that high school students in the twenty-first century were utterly unwilling to focus on sermons beyond fifteen minutes in length, and only then if interspersed with inane games and painful attempts to mimic their favorite celebrities and media empires. This advice we militantly ignored, much to the chagrin of some parents. We taught forty-five minute exegetical Bible sermons, with nary a game of Chubby Bunnies visible to the horizon. We did it twice a week, and made time for friends and hangouts before and after, not during. A few students took the first chance to bolt out the door. Most took notes. By the grace of God, we radicalized several. We attempted to humbly remain in obscurity, resisting the call of attractionality at all costs. We relied on, insisted on, the shared work of the students to translate the message in their minds, to decode gently hidden Grace. The ones who were ready took the plunge. The ones who did not would not have been made ready by any amount of stripped-down persuasion.
III. Accept The Hidden Life
Pride is the great obstacle to the underground revolution. We do not wish to toil in obscurity and die in service. We crave notoriety, recognition. We cannot accept the demand to cloak our speech in even the faintest mist, lest we lose one potentially adoring fan or half-hearted dollar. We are foolish. If only we had hearts that burned for Truth. We would be glad then to embrace forgottenness, to trek far enough into the wilderness that only the desperate and the hungry might come to hear us. We would be ready to restrict our audience, as tiny as possible without leaving one thirsty spirit without refreshment. Anything to avoid the soul-consuming danger of wasting our words. Better not to speak if all you say is primed for maximum cloying sweetness to palates that have lost the rich savor of the good.
What if the True and the Beautiful and the Good and the Real won’t stoop to being pimped on the street corner and drug through the gutter for the sake of your financial advantage? What if God was pleased that you die unknown? Keep it secret. Keep it safe. Learn the mastery of the majestic innuendo, the layers upon layers upon layers. Let go of authorial and readerly laziness. Maximize your density. Spit the truth in allusions and tumbling tangles. Let verity replace viability and seek to inspire awe rather than metastasize audience. They ought to need a dictionary for your work by the time they’ve deciphered, not simply your word choices, but the branching paths of your meaning. Let go of the desire to be apprehended by myriads and pray to be known by a handful.
Look out, before the tidal wave begins to flow backwards and you get sucked out with the undertow. Flocking with the crowd towards obsessive obviousness was a strategy for gain, but not for permanence. Looking to the authorities, who allow you to ape the acceptable and parrot the permitted, works for the apparatchiks. While the wall stays up, that is. But the biggest secret in a transitional world is that nobody knows the safe path now. The machine-god isn’t coming to manufacture a safe slurry to drown your mediocrity. Not if you hear the voice of God. Because you won’t be able to contain the Word. You’re already doomed to the basement press, the ersatz immutable networks carrying the Actual beyond the reach of the Official. You’ll learn the secret of samizdat2, soon enough.
I’ll see you in the Future.
(Everything compute?) Nah the truth is too tangled
And even a satellite sees at one angle
Burners radiate smoke 'til all's motionless
…
I can feel it too, from the ground rising up in us
Right above the clouds, there's a shroud there to smother us
Make a sane man walk around with a blunderbuss
Peal another round, make a sound that is thunderous ~ Run the Jewels, “DDFH”
Then the disciples came and said to him, “Why do you speak to them in parables?” And he answered them, “To you it has been given to know the secrets of the kingdom of heaven, but to them it has not been given.... ‘For this people’s heart has grown dull, and with their ears they can barely hear, and their eyes they have closed, lest they should see with their eyes and hear with their ears and understand with their heart and turn, and I would heal them.’ But blessed are your eyes, for they see, and your ears, for they hear. For truly, I say to you, many prophets and righteous people longed to see what you see, and did not see it, and to hear what you hear, and did not hear it.” ~ Matthew 10:11,15-17
And so the game begins. By utilizing an intentionally obscure term, I have engaged you, dear reader, in a second layer. You are now digging deeper to actually understand. Not everyone will check the footnotes or look up the term. (You probably already know what it means but humor me). This is, in a very minor way, samizdat.
Apparently, the word in the original Russian contains the literal meaning “self-published.” Poetically futuristic.
Section III
"What if God was pleased that you die unknown?"
You express so clearly what many of us perceive there in the margins, there where the shapes move in the fog.
Thought provoking, as usual!