Monday, January 1, 2024

2023 Gematria Recap

By accident or design, the use of gematria on social media evolves, going with the flow on the various baseless conspiracies it uses as background filler.  Mostly what has changed is themes that have been dropped.  Compared to nearly a decade ago, there are things that were common that simply do not happen anymore.  Or, if they do happen it’s so rare on the social media I pay attention to it’s just a side dish instead of a main course.  So let’s look back at what happened in 2023 of some significance.   As this is a recap a lot of this is old news previously detailed here.

 Dropouts

There was a sharp decline in mid level type account activity.  That is, a user who clearly is a huge fan of a clique leader.  Yet, they don’t conform to the biggest identifier of the clique leader —> incessant begging for money.  First of all, there were a couple of somewhat surprising frequent contributors that appear to have completely given up, e.g. Chigozie Truth and Net Void. The YouTube channels may still be up, but the new content about the daily bad news?  Nothing.  And some previously frequent posters have slowed down so much it’s almost like they found out that dealing with real life issues might actually require some effort.  For example, Dan seems to have only created *five* new videos for the entire year, and one of those was only up on YouTube for a week or two.  The driving force behind all this seems to be Zach’s abrasive personality and throwing people under the bus who don’t keep in line with everything he suggests they do. 

Gematrinator Calculator Fatigue

Related to the dropouts.  Vastly different from the early days, gematria has evolved into two main branches of practice.  Those that use only four ciphers and those that like the screenful of pretty colors and weird ciphers (that don’t make any sense). Derek himself produces far less new material than he used to.  Perhaps his advertising monetization on his site is good enough he doesn’t need to.  But he always seemed to enjoy the attention more than the average enthusiast.

Don’t misunderstand, there are still plenty of screenshots of the Gematrinator calculator gematriots.  But these are likely to be limited to the four main ciphers instead of throwing in a Keypad cipher or some other obvious 20th-21st century creation instead of uncovered esoteric knowledge from diligent research.  Zach has his own four base cipher calculator.  Qanon always relied heavily on gematrix.org.  We wonder if the decline is not just boredom with creating bogus connections out of nothing and also due to his change from free to paid memberships for full access. 

 Zach Has a Price Increase 

When one goes full blown cult mode like the other Hubbard, you get the advantage of your method of business being declared a form of religion.  Gambling on sports - no tax breaks there.  Part of Scientology’s problems stem from the lingering general population confusion on how something so obviously a business could gain tax exempt status.  But, whatever.  Zach, continually operating as a business instead of awakening sleeping sheep did the next best thing to making it obvious it’s the finances he cares about more than anything else.  There was a price increase announced on the membership levels of his Patreon.  And he continues to overuse the line about how he’s such a great sports picking champion he’s raked in millions of dollars from the casinos.  Yes, there are still plenty of dim witted people that don’t get the mutually exclusive thoughts of a price increase combined with being so great at gambling that you don’t need to charge for your services.

Gematria On Twixter 

Elon is definitely a tough nut to crack on figuring out exactly what he’s up to.  A lot of his decisions seem spur of the moment, “I can do anything I want to, I’m so rich I don’t care.”  Among these odd decisions was to reinstate previously deleted accounts and make it widely known that Twixter is a free speech free for all.  Without going too deep into the multiple cases of major, blatant hypocrisy this has lead to, let’s address the contrast with the typical gematria posts from before and after that decision.

Gematria was a perfect tool for shitposting.  A quick little set of numbers designed around political topics fit the limited number of available Twitter post characters.  You would get accounts that were:

1). A real human operator who had a job to shitpost a wide variety of politically charged content, with occasional reminders that their hate speech was their God given right to free speech.  Or:

2). Actual bot copypasta of the same content.  Quickly produced.  Using all the well known tricks like adding off topic replies to accounts with big followings and creating hashtags to go with the flow.

There was NOT a mass return of these shitposting gematria accounts to Twitter.  I am going to speculate that the reason for this is that since gematria was only a convenient excuse that there’s no need to disguise it.  Why bother when one can simply make bigoted comments directly.  I admit I do not go out of my way to analyze non gematria hate speech posts, so I defer to experts on those for a better analyzed assessment.  If they want to.  In summation, the Twixter gematria content now is just weird.

Protzman 

 If there was a loyalist to step in to fill the void from the death of -48 (a la Miscavige filling L. Ron’s shoes) then I’m not aware of it.  They’re still out there, posting confusing content that contradicts itself.  They haven’t made up their minds if he’s actually dead, now replaced by a clone in hiding and all other manner of doubling down on the loss of their hero.  But the motorcycle accident was newsworthy, and that brings us to -

MSM and Gematria

The death of Protzman may be a big blow for gematria that will be difficult to overcome.  Of course, conspiracy theorists hate the mainstream media since at least at times a respectable reporter latched on to a story and does a fair job reporting.  There was significant coverage and the word gematria included in the text.  Awareness of the harmful parts of gematria usage is out there, instead of just some weird dude’s blog.  Also, the Daily Show has had some fun poking directly at gematria.  Eight years ago, with just the nuttier sports stuff going on gematria wasn’t too newsworthy.

No comments:

Post a Comment