Zed A. Shaw, Painter

Using art: Normal People: I wish I could write a novel. Novelists: I wrote a novel. Grandiose Narcissists: I wrote the greatest novel in the entire world. Insecure Narcissists: I should be a billionaire not JKR...for my erotic Batman/Robin fanfic I publish anonymously.

The reason I think insecure narcissism is the disease causing authoritarianism is that it conveniently hides the narcissism behind the idea that the narcissist can't be one because they are hiding. But, they still are, they're just being insecure and waiting to be "discovered".

When you think about almost all social media systems, it's like the a honey pot for insecure narcissist desires. They want to be famous, but are too scared to put in the real work and output to get there, so just a little tweet or post, wait for those likes, it's all low risk.

If the insecure narcissist fails on Twitter, it isn't a real failure (although they'll take it that way), so it's safe. They can be discovered without much effort. It *also* connects you with other insecure narcissists so you can satisfy those authoritarian urges.

The interesting thing about social media presentations of authoritarianism is how they seem to be leaderless, or organically hit on a leader that appeals to their desire to feel powerful and destroy someone else. Join a "cause" and you get to drive someone to suicide on twitter.

But, you know, the insecure narcissist is against the death penalty, or abortion, or murder...but hell that person on twitter totally deserved it because an ephemeral authority said they did, and fuck it I feel like shit today so let's kill a mofo to feel powerful.

Then when someone does actually commit suicide, well obviously the insecure narcissist can feed on that some more by pretending to be so emotion over the tragedy. They never expected they'd do that (after being told to do it by 200k people). We were just trying to call them out.

Coming from the technology world, I've been seeing this same interaction play out in a kind of microcosm. I've had people tell me to kill myself because I said Haskell is dumb. I questioned Rails and got death threats. I mean shit, Python is run by an actual Dictator for Life.

The very thin common thread between the programmer communities and the larger online authoritarian communities is insecure narcissism combined with a cause, enemies of that cause, and easy safe communication. To me, programmers baked this all right into their tech.

Reading through this paper, I wonder if the economic backgrounds of most programmers (many were Gen-X poors from the 80s recession) could be an additional factor. It could be this weird storm of a bunch of poor disease ridden kids feel cheated out of their narcissist destiny.

Finally, a way to tell the insecure narcissists who are just joining a cause to kill someone from real freedom fighters is who they go after. Real fighters attack the powerful and spare minor players. Insecure narcs are...insecure...so they like to attack weak individuals.