Locked out of Instagram

Thanks to the encouragement of Andrew Briggs the other day, I started a new Instagram account. My previous one had me close to 5,000 followers. Most of those were fluff from a few meme reels that went viral. Now I’m building back more deliberately, and taking liberties to try something different. It’s not about maximizing clicks in general, but specifically a certain kind of clicks, people who are going to be genuinely interested in the story of Theory Underground.

But what happened to my previous account, you ask? I’ll let the images I shared there + text transcription of them tell the story. And if you’re not totally over Instagram yourself, if you even have an account, please, give my new account a follow and maybe help signal boost some of these posts.

Thanks!

First post:

I’ve been locked out of @theory_underground for two months. I lost access to the double athenticator app when my phone broke, and fixing it requires Instagram access I don’t have. Hence the new account. Anyway, WELCOME

I’m using this photo of me because it’s the last one I uploaded to the old account. It’s from one of the European legs of the TU International Tour, when we were visiting Ljubljana

Over the last several years I have traveled the world on a shoe-string self-funded budget to go out and meet people from the internet. Why?

Because I believe in the underground ethos of hardcore: say what you mean and mean what you say, no excuses, don’t ask for permission, just go to the people, build it and they will come. What’s this have to do with theory though?

“Theory” got captured. In academia, the attention economy, and in activist circles, “theory” became the same thing as “progressive liberal left theory” - or else it oriented itself that. “Lefter than thou” leftism is just as captured.

When I felt the squeeze of self-censorship shutting down the possibility to think and speak in these institutions and spaces, I left to work at Amazon. I would rather stow in a warehouse than capitulate. That’s where I discovered that workers with earbuds have more intellectual freedom than academics.

But freedom without direction is just slavery to the whims of one’s own impulses, or to the whims of market forces. The question is, what did I do with that freedom?

I surveyed the relevant literature that nobody has time for (or access to) in graduate school. I craved an intellectual community that was neither left nor right but instead committed itself to trying to understand the situation.

I realized that what I needed was a proper school for theory. Beyond post-left, it would be dedicated to understanding how the duopoly gerrymanders us at the level of dispositions in what I call the post-class fractured mass. PCFM

I want to go on, but is Instagram really the place for this kind of thing? Shouldn’t I be maximizing for clicks? Well, at this point, I think I have six followers. So I can kinda do whatever I want, actually. However

I’ve run out of room anyway. So if you are one of the rare people who made it to the end of this post, and you want to hear more of this origin story, click the heart button. Maybe repost this. It’ll take a while to build back. With your help, I’m going to do so deliberately, brick by brick.

https://www.instagram.com/tuthoughtsatwork/