Actualism Forum

The forum is, by my reading, nearly dead. There is traffic but no motion. One counsellor, Vineeto, meets report after report with the same small rotation of corrections, year upon year, and no one on the receiving end gets noticeably closer to the thing it is all for. I have concluded the problem is the room, and not anything that might be said in it to me.

The milestones get deleted. Claudiu announced himself "out from control" in 2016; Richard took it apart and Claudiu walked it back. He announced it again in 2024 with Kuba and walked that back too, and the "Reports on Being Out-from-Control" page has since been scrubbed. So a senior may publish an attainment, watch it vanish, and be handed a softer rank. Let an outsider report so much as feeling good and it is "self-aggrandizement" or "hypomania" on the instant. I cite the deletion of other people's failed claims as the reason mine should be believed.

I am read at low resolution. Vineeto answers the opposite of what I wrote — I say happiness and harmlessness are inseparable and I am told, at length, that I am sequencing them. Since she is by the board's own account actually free, there is no malice in it; it is simply a reading that lands low and stays. I have decided that an actually free person reads me wrong, and that this is a fact about her freedom rather than about my prose.

Vineeto's verdict on that prose is on the record.¹ She called it

I have read it. I do not think it describes me. I think it describes the room, and I have written several thousand condescending words to establish that the condescension is theirs.

The one good a gathering of actualists might uniquely offer is Richard's ambience effect: a "felicitous and innocuous atmosphere" that "fosters a milieu where happiness and harmlessness can be the norm," which "preceded and played a substantial part in" the freedoms of 2009–2010, and which took "more than just one feeling-being." This place is its inverse. The frank specimen is edzd, free with verdicts on a stranger's looks and love life — "you should get some friends," he tells me. I quote Richard saying the thing takes more than one person, in the course of explaining why I am doing it alone.

When another member exposed my real name and dragged up an old political grievance to go after me, the senior verdict fell on me, not on him. The one who exposed the name drew the sympathy; the one exposed drew the diagnosis. I record this as proof the room is hostile, which is also my reason for removing myself from anyone's ability to respond.

A room raised for happiness and harmlessness that has become the most dependable engine of the opposite is, for me, the plainest reason never to return. By word of mouth I gather the genuinely engaged now do their actualism in private. So I have left. The two who reached an actual freedom this era, Srinath and Geoffrey, also withdrew first — though neither announced a permanent good mood from a self-hosted blog, a difference I have chosen not to examine.

None of this is a refusal to talk. Claudiu's offer to resume was conditional — "I will talk to you again, if and whenever you come back down from … whatever this all is" — the precondition being that I concede his diagnosis. Mine carries no such precondition: I am glad to engage anyone, one-on-one, who is sincere about actualism. I have set the only entry fee to good faith, and the only venue to somewhere no one is reading.