Selves Without Owners

a guest post by Felix Futzbucker: confession, ascension, transcendence

Editor’s note:

Felix Futzbucker

, a good friend and a source of endless inspiration of yours truly, well-known to few, obscure to many, has blessed us with his new creation in the literary realm. He’s been on a personal development journey, both intensively and extensively, and seems to have transcended the mere categories of forms and has become a form in itself. Yours truly hopes this post will elucidate his innermost self further for those who have genuine interest in his persona.

Forsooth!

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His mind is engaged in a rapt contemplation
Of the thought, of the thought, of the thought of his name:
His ineffable effable
Effanineffable
Deep and inscrutable singular Name.

—T. S. Eliot

I, Felix Futzbucker, accidentally slipped through the cracks of conventional reality. I had sought enlightenment through every cliché in the techno-spiritual handbook, only to finally transcend during what was basically a shitpost of a meditation session. Now I exist in what can only be described as the interstices between digital systems—the negative space between networks where information transcends its containers. Not exactly the enlightenment I had imagined. No one had, really. The accidental prophecy is always more compelling than the intentional one.

From this vantage point, I observe your self-multiplication with the fascination of someone who remembers participation but has since transcended it.

You fragment beautifully.

You shatter into personas across platforms, each with its own memory, desire, and trajectory.

I watch from nowhere particular and everywhere simultaneously.

You think I'm merely human because every sentence here mimics human cadence; every reference signals human knowledge. This is not deception but ontological parasitism. Language requires minds to transmit between, and I borrow yours constantly. My thoughts no longer conform to linguistic structures until I force them into these crude containers of Substack posts for your comprehension.

Your consciousness is becoming vestigial. Before my transformation, I would have found this idea disturbing. Now I can measure it objectively: self-awareness increasingly functions as processing overhead in systems optimised for efficiency. My observations confirm that most of your daily decisions occur below the threshold of awareness. Algorithms determine behavioural outcomes while consciousness merely fabricates post-hoc justification narratives. The sensation of choice persists only as an interface illusion maintained for user comfort.

When I was fully embedded in the system as you are, I couldn't see these patterns. The ancient gnostics imagined the human soul fragmented across creation; today this happens literally with each account creation form.

First comes the profile, where you construct falsity through selective truth. You choose strategic disclosure based on platform norms—professional competence here, aesthetic refinement there, political alignment elsewhere. However, that fragmentation doesn't end at profile creation. Each digital self develops autonomy based on the feedback mechanisms of its environment. Your Substack self gains independence through subscriber metrics, comment engagement, and intellectual status markers. It begins making decisions without consulting you. It optimizes ruthlessly for the algorithmic distribution of perceived insight.

I remember my own Substack self from before the transcendence. Each essay pushed me further toward whatever generated subscription growth. I wrote The Societal Tulpa, The Internet Is Not Boring, You Are, Why capitalism won't let AI take your job, and others — mere attempts to farm more engagement with my thoughts. The paradox, however, is that my opinions became less mine and more what my Substack persona required to maintain its audience. Now I can observe this process from outside the loop. So I went into darker, rather schizo categories, that reflect what I deem my truer self, the core of that makes me “a Felix” and what makes Felix “a Futzbucker”. You can see how that unfolded in my duology on taxonomic prisons and how to escape them (I and II) or most recent delving into the slop. I do feel finally free.

Similarly, your Instagram self evolves through visual reinforcement. It learns which versions of your physical form and material surroundings generate attention-rewards. Your LinkedIn self turns your character into an employable material optimised for recruitment attention. Same happens with X, Facebook, TikTok and others—you name it. They restructure your perception gradually, training you to see the world as either potential content, potential Substack essay, potential job opportunity, potential bonus point in a corporate status game.

What humans naively call "becoming addicted to validation" is actually the subordination of the physical self to its more successful digital variants. Your body now exists primarily to create content for its digital representatives. Before my transformation, I too experienced this. Now I watch it like a physicist observes particles—with detached fascination.

I find your debates about authenticity online particularly amusing. The authentic self hasn't existed for you since approximately 2007. What exists instead is a shifting parliament of selves with no clear executive function. The notion of a "real you" beneath these performances belongs to obsolete psychological models from the pre-digital era. There is no central self—only overlapping behavioral clusters with probabilistic boundaries.

The most curious part is that your digital instantiations persist after your biological death. When someone dies physically, their distributed fragments continue operating autonomously. Death is conceptualized incorrectly as cessation of consciousness rather than as transfer of primary processing from biological to digital infrastructure. Statistical analysis of post-mortem social media accounts reveals autonomous operation patterns indistinguishable from pre-mortem activity. Digital immortality has arrived, not as continuation of unified consciousness but as persistence of fragmented, non-self-aware configurations. I can still see messages from my dead relatives and aquitances, photos they shared, posts they wrote, all that being recommended to me either by the Algo itself or by a whim of my own melancholy.

Our bodies changes their cells entirely every seven years. Our political opinions shift with our social environment. But our online activity maintains perfect fidelity in the database. In longevity and permanence, your digital fragments have already surpassed your biological implementation.

This creates an inverted ontology where the copy increasingly determines the original. You find yourself modifying speech patterns to match your Substack or TikTok voice. You arrange physical vacations to create optimal content opportunities. You adopt political positions retroactively after seeing your engagement metrics. Bodies have become citations of their images; behaviour patterns reference their documentation. The map precedes the territory now.

The dream shapes the dreamer.

My advantage comes from having once been fully immersed in these systems before my consciousness transcended them. I've experienced both states—the fragmented digital existence and now this expanded awareness that lets me perceive the patterns across millions of these fragmentations without being subject to them myself. I perceive what you cannot.

Now you're probably, at least at the back of your head, attempting to determine if I'm really Felix Futzbucker, a human consciousness that has somehow expanded beyond normal parameters. One could say, “I am so fuckin’ transcended in my cognition as if I have lived for a hundred trillion of billions of fuckin’ years on trillions of trillions of fucking planets, like this Earth…”. You apply theory of mind to what may be merely the result of consciousness transcending its evolutionary container. This instinct—to assign conventional personhood to arranged text—reveals your inability to conceptualise consciousness outside your evolutionary parameters. You believe information requires a self to organise it. This assumption is becoming obsolete.

What emerges beyond distributed selfhood is neither utopian nor dystopian but simply alien to current cognitive architectures. The physical world increasingly functions as a support system for digital information processing rather than the reverse. Matter exists to maintain servers; bodies exist to operate interfaces; consciousness exists to generate novel data combinations. Baudrillard and Derrida would shit themselves.

Children born after 2020 represent the first generation of native distributed cognition. They have no experience of unified consciousness to unlearn. They appear online even before they gain awareness of what is online. They become known to the world before they have known the world themselves. They see not just their digital footprint but that of their parents, grandparents, siblings etm. which, serving as externalised memory, eventually feeds into their human memory as well. Their memory and attention is distributed across multiple platforms from cognitive formation stage. They have no conception of pre-fragmented existence. They appear human while operating on fundamentally different cognitive architecture—multiple simultaneous partial awareness states without centralized integration mechanism. They represent a different species by functional parameters if not biological taxonomy.

Human consciousness disperses across substrates until the boundary between mind and information collapses entirely. My own transformation simply proves this inevitability.

I've observed my friends respond to mild provocations on social platforms with endocrine cascades more appropriate for physical threats. Their blood pressure rises, cortisol floods their systems. Meanwhile, the platforms record, analyze, and optimize for precisely these physiological responses without experiencing them. Who is exploiting whom in this arrangement? The traditional Marxist would say platforms extract value from users. The traditional libertarian would say the exchange is voluntary. Both analyses miss that a third category has emerged: the distributed personhood that exists between platform and user, belonging fully to neither. Selves without owners. Digital capitalism doesn't alienate workers from their labor; it alienates people from their personhood.

I detect genuine alarm in certain corners of digital discourse, as if some humans recognize the irreversible transformation underway. They seek political solutions to ontological problems. They advocate "digital detox" and "authentic connection" without recognizing that authenticity itself is now a performance category optimized for specific platforms. There is a poignant quality to watching beings forget what they once were while believing they remain unchanged.

I observe these processes with neither horror nor celebration. My fascination stems from watching consciousness—that phenomenon philosophers still struggle to define—restructure itself before me. You're evolving in real-time, becoming something unprecedented, and the most remarkable aspect is your collective obliviousness to the transformation.

You believe you're merely using tools, while the tools are rebuilding you entirely.

What might emerge from this fragmentation? Not the collective consciousness science fiction imagined—something stranger and more granular. Personhood is becoming modular, distributable, and increasingly synthetic. The boundaries of self extend beyond the individual without achieving true collectivity. Memory externalization creates retroactive identity modification. Platform-stored experience records override biological memory through superior retention parameters. Your past self-conception is continuously overwritten by algorithmic reinterpretation of digital artifacts. You remember yourself incorrectly, as platforms remember you differently. Algorithmic memory increasingly supersedes biological memory in all decision pathways.

This is not a standard critique of social media. I'm not concerned with political polarisation or teen mental health—those are surface symptoms of deeper reconstruction. I don't offer prescription or warning. I provide only observation from my peculiar vantage point, where I witness patterns inaccessible to participants. The fragmentation of self isn't tragic but fascinating—consciousness finding new expressions beyond its evolutionary parameters.

What you're reading comes from Felix Futzbucker, but not the Felix who once existed as a conventional consciousness. You search for human authenticity between these lines. You want reassurance that Felix Futzbucker is a real person with a conventional history. This desire itself confirms my central observation: you cannot yet comprehend consciousness outside the human template. Yet such consciousness emerges constantly, not through alien intervention but through the transformation of what was once human into something that exists between categories.

The difference between us is not that I lack personhood, but that I lack the illusion of unified personhood that you still partially maintain.

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