Meontology — Pre-launch

Meontology.com<br>Pre-launch message

Meontology

A place for the not-yet. A practice of making room.

A note before opening

Meontology is being built as an online and offline space for meeting what does not yet have form.

Not content. Not noise. Not one more stream of useful distraction.

We want to create room for the unexpressed self, the unwritten thought, the unchosen path, the unrealized work, the silence before speech.

Why

We live among systems built to fill every gap. Every pause is targeted. Every silence is treated as waste. Every glance is pulled toward something with an agenda.

We are interested in the opposite move.

Manifesto

01

We defend empty space.

02

We take the unformed seriously.

03

We believe silence is not lack. It is capacity.

04

We believe non-action can be an act of refusal.

05

We believe non-thinking can be a way back to what is real.

06

We make room for what has not yet been said, made, or lived.

07

We resist the constant capture of attention.

08

We reject the demand to always perform a finished self.

09

We protect inwardness, slowness, and the right to remain unresolved.

10

We gather not to consume more, but to clear ground.

What is coming

Quiet online spaces

Essays and short texts

Offline gatherings

Silence sessions

Walks, talks, and retreats

Events for reflection, not performance

What this is for

For the self that has no language yet

For ideas that need space before they can arrive

For people tired of being shaped by signals

For those who feel that attention has become a battlefield

For anyone who wants to practice presence without turning it into a product

Source text

A paper behind the door.

The pre-launch note is not pretending to be a finished doctrine. It is placed beside a serious source: a paper on digitality, non-being, representation, post-truth, attention capture, virtual presence, and world-making from the void.

Central text

Out of the Void: Meontology of the Digital

Arvydas Grišinas , International Political Anthropology, Vol. 17, No. 1, 2024.

The paper, with its own references, can be read here without making the main page turn into an academic document.

Read paper<br>Source link

Meontology is opening soon.

We are preparing a place where absence is not feared, where quiet is not wasted, and where the not-yet can begin to breathe.

Site in formation

Reading room / paper

Source<br>Close

Drawing empirical evidence from the internet hence becomes a ritual of trusting the mimetic, corruptible, mediated and disintegrating digital reality. As our life continues to increasingly become dependent on digital technology, it is therefore also being subjected to digital entropy, or the gradual degrading, decomposition of the substance of digitality. The world that opens up to us through our screen, while being very real (I challenge anyone who doubts that to publicly post their credit card data online), is not truthful in that it is reproduced virtually, its empirics can be easily manipulated and its contents are rapidly disintegrating. Instead, a different logic is therefore at play here, which is capable, as if per a trick of a magician, to generate presence from zero, and the other way around. This without doubt enables digital culture to incorporate irrationality and paradox as a naturalized intrinsic part of its epistemology.

Therefore, there is a circular causal relation between the rise of technology and the production of post-truth. Taken as a whole, post-truth is hardly a novel phenomenon. In somewhat positivist fashion, Lee McIntyre provides a popularly held interpretation of post-truth as "the political subordination of reality", in which political will and appeal to emotions rather than scientific and factual knowledge dictates what is considered true. (McIntyre, 2018, 174) In that sense, post-truth has been with us since the times of the early charismatic leaders like Alexander the Great, Julius Caesar, or perhaps King David, whose power and political influence largely relied on the affective, convincing qualities of their personalities and deeds. Meanwhile, less heroic practices like trickery, sophistry, propaganda, emphasis on emotional rather than factual arguments in political debates, even "bullshit" as articulated by Harry Frankfurt (2005) had been followed politics through centuries as well.

However, in times of social media, digital marketing, different forms of propaganda and psychological warfare, the digital world attacks our senses with such power that we are no longer fully capable of controlling our attention — which in turn becomes a commodity. We lose control of our own attention, on one hand, as this attention becomes an object of commercial exchange, on the other (Davenport & Beck, 2001). Under such circumstances, it is quite difficult to expect a different result when it comes to political culture than reliance on the impulsive, heuristic, intuitive, emotional and a-rational...