How I got my voice back through screaming into the void

Rachel Haywire

Dec 21, 2023

Let’s start from the beginning of the year. After two decades of digital notoriety, I went through the experience of becoming completely invisible in the online world after deleting my X account. This caused me to lose my connection to the majority of my friends, in addition to clouted industry players that I spent years getting to know, both online and off. I also deleted my FB account because I didn’t want to stay trapped within its confines, especially after realizing that the vast majority of my FB friends (again, both online and off) weren’t going to migrate to Substack. Now don’t get me wrong, they weren’t going to migrate anywhere, because FB had captured them as prisoners. Yet it upset me that they wouldn’t follow me to my new platform of choice. Weren’t they supposed to be my friends?

Well, I had made my final decision: I was going to start over on Substack, even if this meant screaming into the void as a lowbie who would never have a voice again. No more airtime for little old me. My life had become a pathetic Silicon Valley parody of the film Sunset Boulevard. All of this happened in conjunction with a taxing period of downward mobility and social exile in which I was forced to relocate to the anti-intellectual wasteland of South Florida, because why wouldn’t it go down this way for a tortured Nietzschean? If there’s one thing I’ve learned, it’s that what doesn’t kill you makes you cooler writing is a habit. You can’t just give it up because you’ve lost your audience and your status. It doesn’t work that way and it never will. If you’re a writer you’re a writer. So, I continued to write.

I screamed into the void as I wrote wrote a piece about the demise of digital culture, which is precisely what got me my voice back. I proposed that offline was the new online and declared that we needed to begin meeting in person again, as the online world was declining and the fediverse had separated us from one another. My article resonated with a lot of people, causing me to make new friends through Substack, many of whom I am still close with today. A strange bit of trivia is that I spent so much of my early digital life being “online famous” that I never really had the chance to get to know my online friends on a personal level.

Now, things have shifted. My online friendships have become a lot more personal, which is a refreshing change from my impersonal interactions of the past. Some of these friendships are transitioning into IRL friendships, and there are also my IRL friends that I’ve made through Substack. So yeah, I essentially got my voice back by screaming into the void about how my voice was gone. Writing has a way of fixing your problems like this. It’s an occult habit with a deeply ironic reward system. You’re going to write because you’re a writer, and what happens next may shock you.

Here are some important things I accomplished in 2023:

• Started my own AI fashion line
• Launched a consulting agency after losing funding for my startup and being laid off from my normie job
• Hosted an unforgettable salon of great conversations on AI and Music at the The Interintellect. My friends conducted live musical performances with AI at this event. From what I know, it was the world’s first AI concert. I hosted the world’s first AI concert.
• Began focusing more diligently on my writing, especially due to the encouragement from all of you lovely people
• Formed a better relationship with my family, despite being the black sheep of the bunch
• Started going to the gym regularly, shedding the majority of weight I had gained during the totalitarian lockdowns
• Gained and integrated a lot of knowledge and self-awareness that had previously been blocked from me, thanks to the introspection that exile brings
• Designed a tailored book cover and its inner pages for a good friend of mine using AI, customizing it to his liking
• Developed blueprints for future cities and network states by combining my love for architecture with highly specified prompting (please learn to prompt, my Christian friends, technology is not Satan)
• Made the permanent decision to move out of San Francisco and never look back
• Got more in touch with my Jewish identity without sacrificing my connection to dissident thought, this time without feeling any cognitive dissonance. Previously, I was troubled by a persistent sense that I was living some type of contradictory life. Now, I feel completely liberated from that type of baggage.
• Became a mentor to a goth trans poet in Florida whose family had disowned them for presenting outside of the gender binary, not judging their woke politics and sympathizing with their wider circumstances as fellow outsider
• Committed to hosting a salon every month at The Cultural Futurist for my paid subscribers as a business model to monetize my Substack

How did I stay alive?

2023 was also one of the hardest years of my life. I didn’t discuss the majority of the bad stuff because I don’t like making myself out to be a victim. I also no longer see the purpose of focusing on the negative experiences of my past. Nevertheless, I believe very few people could have withstood the trials that I faced. In 2023, there were moments when my sole motivation to persevere was knowing there were others who had endured greater obstacles than me who had accomplished more. I had not crossed paths with them yet, and this was unresolved. I’m not going to perform a trauma index here, but I felt a compelling need to meet someone who had triumphed in this way. This was the only thought I found comforting on so many dark nights. It was the only thought that kept me alive.

Eventually it all came full circle, and I decided I would set out to meet someone like this and learn from them. This is my New Year’s resolution for 2024. I will find someone like this in NYC and they will become a guiding light. Oh yeah, I moved back to NYC this year too. Now it’s possible I’ll find many people like this who will become guiding lights to me, or perhaps we will all become guiding lights to each other. This is a huge city in a huge country in a huge galaxy. Still, if we don’t posess our own internal lights, we shouldn’t even be socializing. Anyway, I’m a lot older now and I’m not afraid to embrace it. I’m not afraid to admit when I’m wrong, and I’m wrong about a lot.

Another resolution I have for 2024 is to complete my collection of sci-fi short stories and gear the anthology up for publication. I also think it would be fun to release a new Experiment Haywire album, but I don’t want to take on too much because that’s another bad habit of mine I’m looking to shed in 2024. I’ve decided not to share any of my other 2024 resolutions, because I feel like that would take away from them. I’m learning to live a more private life now while still being completely open about who I am and what I stand for, never faking it to make but always making it on my own terms.

Here’s the call to action. I had previously told myself I wasn’t going to do any holiday discount posting, but I want to give everyone here the gift of a holiday discount for being so supportive of my journey. For the next two weeks, you’ll be able to join The Cultural Futurist as a member for an entire year for the small price of $30. That is less than a single meal in San Francisco at a mediocre restaurant with uncomfortable seating. Becoming a member of The Cultural Futurist will get you free entry to all Cultural Futurist salons, which I’ll be hosting and producing once a month. The first one is happening tomorrow, so there’s still time to join as a member and secure your attendance.

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Just another metamorphosis

In conclusion, I’ve decided that it’s better to stand alone as a spiritual aristocrat than seek to please others who would despise me if they knew who I really was. I came to this revelation as a non-traditional woman who was a far-too-early adapter of an online scene in which women like me were once treated far worse than they are now, again feeling no cognitive dissonance like I had in the past about these types of matters. You’ve gotta learn to stand proud and alone no matter who you are or where you land. You’ve gotta stay true to yourself, even if you lose all your fans. Also, I’m too old to be calling people fans now. I’m going to stop doing that.

Not even going to mention being Jewish again, except to say that I enjoyed celebrating Chanukah this year and that I support the civilians of Israel, many of whom are like us here in America, experiencing their own lives on the fringes of a society that made them feel like outcasts, simply for thinking in a certain way. There is a pattern here that is evident in all of my experiences. There is an alchemical synthesis that has reached a metamorphosis. The micro is the macro. We are all in this together, the workers among the few.

My salon is tomorrow, and I hope to see you guys there!

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