Around a year ago I watched this No Boilerplate video on The Cult of Done. The video beautiful communicates the ideas set forth by Bre Prettiis and Kio Stark in their article of the same name. This is the complete Manifesto:

The Cult of Done Manifesto:

1. There are three states of being. Not knowing, action and completion.
2. Accept that everything is a draft. It helps to get it done.
3. There is no editing stage.
4. Pretending you know what you’re doing is almost the same as knowing what you are doing, so just accept that you know what you’re doing even if you don’t and do it.
5. Banish procrastination. If you wait more than a week to get an idea done, abandon it.
6. The point of being done is not to finish but to get other things done.
7. Once you’re done you can throw it away.
8. Laugh at perfection. It’s boring and keeps you from being done.
9. People without dirty hands are wrong. Doing something makes you right.
10. Failure counts as done. So do mistakes.
11. Destruction is a variant of done.
12. If you have an idea and publish it on the internet, that counts as a ghost of done.
13. Done is the engine of more.

These 13 laws above are an incredibly powerful tool. Morally I do take issue with tacit endorsement and proliferation of productivism. This manifesto works as a vehicle to reinforce the social milieu of lethargy we are already drowning in (read my essay on this for more background. This is seen through the text type it attempts to occupy “manifesto” in conjunction with the notion of a “Cult” structurally and semantically enforce an undying adherence to productivism. The manifesto operates under the assumption that the teleological (fundamental motive or goal) nature of humanity is production or efficient use of labour. These 13 statements form a system or code of ethics that deify it. I don’t profess to have correct knowledge of the end goal (or ultimate function) of a human, although I do have many ideas (which will be elaborated on at a later date, I am pretty sure this manifesto got it wrong. The framework enforces a culture of alienation (Marxist sense), reducing the human to just a machine, valuing a soul as nothing more then the labour or commodities (the done in this sense) it can produce. It glorifies this alienation, moving beyond accepting by showing how you can best serve it, forming the ethic of productvism. It is not uncontroversial to say we are more then machines, valued for more then just our labour. We exist outside the workplace as sons, daughters, parents, friends, lovers, constituents, thinkers, community member, philanthropists, volunteers… that is to say we have other ends not tied to production. However, in the sphere of relation which is global semiocaptilism, we face a population to large to value humans in any other way. By that I mean the nature of a global audience (near infinite), commands us to abide by the ethic of the hegemonic superstructure (capitalism) and deduce the value of a soul from this. It is not wrong per say to then create this manifesto or even follow it, you as an individual have no control over it. Until we make a system better then the dollar (exchange value) for classifying a human being I don’t think we will shake off this ethic. With the raise of data and computation I don’t think it is possible. Numbers, data and statistics when tied to evaluating a human are organs of productivism and alienation in an of themselves. Maybe it can be the root to salvation, but we need a new calculus of value first.

So website this website is a silent revolt against this, as I have tried to highlight aspects outside of my labour that people may value, it is a futile venture, especially with the parasocial nature of websites and blogs. I invite you know to think about my relationship with you the reader right now, especially if you don’t know me. More so as a narrative tool to transition to the “Cult of Done” and identity, you don’t really have to.

A bit of a morbid rant there but as a philosopher (I am getting my degree in it but a piece of paper shouldn’t need to validate that) I was identically (meaning for the sake of verifying my identity) compelled to. Identity and getting shit done is a topic I hope to write more on in the future, but here is a short(ish) description of it in relation to the motive of this article (announcing my unfinished ideas repository).

Hannah Ardnt in The Human Condition states that the self is constructed/disclosed through speech and action (I will write a separate article just on this as it is a massive assertion). Following this maxim the self or the our internal notion of identity is forever unravelling. While we all posses a history, a narrative of sorts cataloguing who we are, it is only through action of speech that a new paragraph is penned. Holding that history as a source of identity is common but only we know that history, no one has been with you for every second of your life, no one has been in your head, nobody knows the full you. The only way they can is through observing you and processing you speech or the things you reveal about your past.

While no one knows the full you, your identity is not controlled by you, when finding out someones identity people can look at your online presence, official record, digital footprint or ask the your relations about you in order to deduce the narrative of your life. This external source of information about you has a power of you, as it is used to create a depiction of your identity, allowing people to decide whether or not to engage with you. In essence you public self regulates your capacity to socialise. Human’s are also terrible at memory, we reprocess memories each time we recall them, with each retelling being further filtered by the story tellers bias. There is a wealth of psychological research behind this but I don’t want to detail it here. Government records can be incorrectly entered, your digital footprint could be a attribution of you. However one thing that you do control is your online and in person presence, this is equally unreliable because people lie. While it depends on the context of how old you are, the social sphere you are engaging in etc it can roughly be approximated to 1 lie every 10 minutes on average.

Of course not all lies are equal, but with the advent of modern technology even previously immutable facts can be rewritten. Your identity as a biological entity (gender, skin colour, height, weight, face…) and your biographical (narrative of your life up till now, name, place of birth, residence, major events, experiences, education…) facts can be obfuscated or or reconstructed depending on your needs. The biological is very difficult and expensive to reconstruct though so has less prevalence, biographical is much easier. One can lie on their resume, change their name, rewrite their online narrative, change their address etc. On the biological front it is also disingenuous to say it is not prevalent, plastic surgery is only getting more and more popular, insoles that make you taller are easy to buy and of course the non artificial mechanism of exercise and sun tanning also have an effect. This highlights a crucial point that to change your identity is not bad, trans people often have a biological prerogative to fulfil and thus change a biological fact (also a lot of research on this that I won’t detail here); people want to get more healthy and happy so exercise; countries can disappear requiring a change in the name of your place of birth etc. Regardless, not relying on outside source of identity we are only left with the self.

The self we present everyday is forever mutable. The identity we expose, via our actions and our speech, is fundamentally new. Each action is an interruption, an assertion of your ego onto the mind of the perceiving world. Interruption entails natality (birth or newness), creating a new paragraph in the narrative of you. Each action we do is not always in line with who we are, as humans we have the freedom at act how we want (although their are at times consequences). The self is continuous and can never be fully captured, as even in death know one fully knows you. So when we are talk, think and create our own identity we are capturing it in the time, place and situation that self is currently in. In being perceived by a stranger we construct our identity as it is in that moment, whether that be how we manifest physically or in your retelling of that narrative. While the digital world stores more and more truths of you - truths being ideas or information accessible about you that people have consented to be accurate but they can still be inaccurate - for the non public figure we can still completely fabricate the story of our life in any moment. We can reconstruct our identity at any moment to anyone we are interacting with, and we do.

We do for many reasons, if you look at the psychology of why we lie (lying may be the wrong word here but it passes the point for it’s moral implications, what I mean by this is act differently from the identity we embodied or just flat our lying about past events in your life) we see the following reasons:

• Avoiding consequence/responsibility
• Gaining social advantage/acceptance or maintain relationships
• Self protection (includes reasons associated to privacy)
• Habitual (this someone does not mess up my argument but I thought it did for a while, this is just repetition where lying becomes too powerful of a neural pathway in your mind, so much so it becomes an instinct)

All of these reasons for retelling formal reality (Descartes way of saying what is real in the world and not in our own heads), all are commanded by one biological imperative, the social. The history of the world could be retold through the social imperative. We created civilisations to protect against predators, find mates, have easier assess to food, know more so we can survive, have safe environments to raise our unusually (in terms of all animals) fragile children (long incubation, long till reach till they can rely on themselves) and then to make more money and own more things or to be more esteemed (all in the hopes of self preservation). Additionally this social imperative goes across species, fish swim in schools, wolfs in packs, even trees and most (maybe all idk) plants share roots. Across the history of our species we have manifested this drive for the social that supersedes all else. Lying as an immoral concept is socially derived ethic, we in civilisations created it to better mediate society as with most ethics. Lying as a moral wrong has not been around long enough to be genetically encoded, it is an idea that through repetition became powerful (able to control the actions of individuals) and now from the power operates as a disciplinary measure. This discipline and power in lying is crucial to the understand of the self. Every time we act and speak we are making on what would be best for this social environment. Whenever construct an image of our identity to someone else we determine first whether it is more advantageous to rely on our past narrative or reconstruct our identity. Reconstruct can be as simple as changing your hair or your dress or your action, more maliciously it can be telling false information about your life, trusting that either you won’t be discovered or the immediate value of lying in that moment is higher then the consequences of the individual or subset of humanity preceving you to be a liar. This can be lying about your name when someone is trying to kill you, or lying on your resume thinking they won’t be able to falsify your information.

Whenever you reconstruct yourself that identity becomes an idea in someones mind. The validity of it is irrelevant, the idea of you becomes as real as you yourself in the eyes of the beholder. Repeated interactions with those who know you can mutate that idea but if it isn’t something genuine it becomes a new character you inhabit in that sphere of relation. We all have these, we wear a face in front of our parents, faces for each friend, faces for different social environments demand different (polite company of a fancy ball or dinner for example or a prison) shifting your identity. These are not differnet version of your identity, they are one in the same they also constitue your identity, hence why Ardnt uses the word disclosure as you are nudifying yourself each time you demonstrate an aspect of your ‘self’.

Conflict in identity aries when are preceved in contradiction to the person they knew by someone outside of that sphere of relation. There is also biological evidence for this in schema theory, mental shortcuts our brains have developed that allow us to process information into categories. In repeated observations this object which the perceiver labels as you becomes more and more engraved, the neural pathways strengthen. Thus seeing something in-congruent (not matching) the schema requires more mental energy to process. This also doesn’t entail moral fault, seeing a professor or a teacher at a bar or with his family is weird and an example of this phenomenon. Real pain comes from when someone acts differently from how they professed to treat you or how you feel they ought to treat you. An example would be Lou Andreas-Salomé, who became the love of Niezsche’s heart, who rejected him when he proposed and then went on to write a book about him on her works on famous intellectuals, she went on to do this with several other “great men”. That was a clear violation of a relational contract they had either explicitly or tacitly agreed to, at least Neitzsche though so, and that breaking of a developed relation morality broke him.

Drawing a septate conclusion for this notion of the self we could say the end (telos goal) of humanity is the social, and our notion of the self is simply a response to the incarnation of the social we are currently exposed to. This is a bit of a mindfuck because it eradicates the self completely, as in essence we act to please/conform the environment we are in. This doesn’t (but can) mean changing your public self in every conversation but can explain our aversion to change and the why the insult of “fake” is so pervasive, it simply takes to much effort for our brain to process a new or upgraded schema of the object they were thinking of, and we don’t like to exert to much energy. Taking the opposite view, if our goal is to simply please and we don’t act on our preconceived identity where is truth, does it not mean that we rhetorically restructure reality to the desires of the person we are talking to. Expanding beyond the person to the spheres of relation I was talking about before (your friend group, your other friend group, your family, your club, you country etc) you then embody the identity prescribed to you by your role or function in that social.

That went a little to far, all this is to say action is very very important for identity and the brain dump before is a perfect example of what this entire article was meant to be about. Taking aphorism number 12: “if you have an idea and publish it on the internet that counts as a ghost of done”, this article will be a hub of my incomplete ideas (like the two paragraphs above). An idea can be powerful but spawn at the wrong time or to the wrong person. Maybe the person doesn’t have the experience, skills, tools, bandwidth, as demonstrated an incomplete work is still a piece or work. If I have an idea I would like to execute, it would be selfish and against virtue (in this sense the love of knowledge) to hide it from the world. The world has brilliant minds that can act on those ideas, for me to produce this incomplete and imperfect world is doing service to the thing I love so much, that being knowledge. In connection to the discussion on teology and the self, I with my identity as a philosopher (philo - lover of, sipher or sophia - wisdom), I take my life end as the love of knowledge. For a long time the axiom fell on for my source of identity was “another FOSS (free and open source developer) trying to understand (striving for wisdom) and change (act on) the world”. While FOSS is no longer as integral to my conception of the self (I got tired of trying to convince people) my love of action (enforcing my ego on the world) and knowledge have remained. Thus the ideas that I want to write about, or project I want to build will live right here at the bottom of the blog page (was originally going to leave it in this article but this has gone on for too long). My rule for this will be the same as No Boilerplate, if it sits on my todo list for more than a week without progress, then it will find itself in the graveyard here.

To feed my own ego here, I take the ontological conclusion drawn from above in conjunction with praxis of the cult of done’s ethic are an act of bravery. In a sense this is leaving a trace of my identity, an immutable (unless I change it but the git logs will show) record of my actions and thus my self. A permanent nudity of my identity available to all.

I don’t think I am satisfied with anything on this website, there is nothing I can ostensibly (meaning point at) demonstrate as excellent. But the manifestos 8th and 9th line explain this away, there is no expectation I or anyone else should have of me to be perfect. A fundamental part of my narrative (and what I think is the most important part) is my failure in every sense of the word. Thus taking this action and exposing it too everyone with an internet connection is me both me virtue signalling authenticity and enforcing that as a moral demand upon myself. And that is terrifying, but here I am - veni, vidi, feci (I came, I saw, I acted)