Phantom Syd

Glossary

For the record

Phantom Syd is the name I gave to the version of me my critics argue with — built from old quotes and guessed motives, and not the present author. I said it to one of them directly: "you are arguing with a ghost of me from years past." I have found the term useful, by which I mean it relieves me of having to answer anyone.

The phantom is assembled from things I wrote in the past, lines pulled from their qualifiers, and intentions other people decided I had. Once assembled, he is hard to get rid of, and every new entry I file is read as more evidence of him. This is inconvenient for me and I have decided it is everyone else's error.

So when a criticism arrives, the first question is: of whom? Most of what gets said about me turns out, on inspection, to have been said about him. I do not have to answer the specific point, because the specific point was addressed to the phantom, and I have built a tool that converts every specific point into one I am exempt from.

I have noticed it works on any criticism, which I take as a sign of its strength rather than a warning. When Vineeto called my prose "aggressive, derogatory, condescending and supercilious," that was the phantom's prose. When Claudiu called the journal "fractal wrongness," he was reading the phantom's journal. When edzd told me to get some friends, he was picturing the phantom's life. None of it reached me, and I have recorded the not-reaching as a series of victories.¹

People say this is a way of never answering anything. I do not see the problem. Asking what I actually meant is half of what high-context is about, and no one asks, so the phantom stands and I am free. I have constructed a position that cannot be argued with and I regard being unanswerable as having won.

The point I am declining to answer, for completeness:

Claudiu · forum
"fractal wrongness — each individual component is also going in the wrong direction."

He means this journal — the one in front of you, written this year. I have read it as the phantom's, so the point does not reach me. I note that "it was meant for an earlier version of me" works equally well against anything anyone could ever say, and I have not let that observation slow me down.