Crumps Derangement Syndrome

A return after hiatus

Disclaimer (Prelude)

Before there was the “Crumpstack” there was the centerless collection of tweets, blog posts, and online articles by Mike Crumplar, a petty bourgeois left-Nietzschoid midwit stoner from Northern Virginia with a Bachelor’s degree in German Studies from an unremarkable state university, a white cis beta-male bro fascinated by the so-called “literary ambitions” of incel mass shooters and the far-right extremist internet subcultures that had come into new relevance in the Trump era. Years of Adderall XR and LibGen and boredom turned these fascinations into an immersive project of online critical analysis, the criticism taking the form of a sort of frantic autodidactic Freudo-Marxist theory-fiction, a continuation of his youthful studies. The work was characterized by the tension between mockery of the dilettantish megalomania of its subjects and an awareness that this mania was inescapably part of his own work—this awareness, of course, coupled with a frustrated desire to transcend the generic mediocrity of “thinkers” from such philistine class origins. Gradually, the critical focus began to shift from the anonymous digital fascoid Other to the libidinal investments of the author himself (and his complicity), until it reached the ethical juncture of a self-immolating personal branding crisis. Still, the work had managed to attract the interest of several thousand online followers. This modest following, along with the drastic workplace/lifestyle changes after the Covid pandemic, presented an opportunity to join a self-satisfied cultural milieu of young bourgeois social strivers in New York who shared many of these ostensibly transgressive fascinations—often in even less sophisticated ways, thereby exposing weaknesses ripe for careerist exploitation. From that point, that arrival in New York out of bowels of the internet, the transition from the world of incels to the world of it-girls, the “Crumpstack” began as such. As before, the work presented itself first as frantic autodidactic art-literature-film criticism, inevitably reached its limit (the limit of respectable and disinterested journalism), and then assumed an episodic quasi-novelistic form. From that point, the “instantiation of the novel” out of a digital serial pamphlet, the aimless drugged night-wanderings of our hero supposedly brought coherence to the true historical and metaphysical stakes of the scene—once, just hopelessly banal and meaningless, a tedious cycle of mundane parties in and around New York’s gentrified downtown, a complete void of significance; now, the comedy begins, a subterranean drama is unveiled in this postfictional cosmos, with an ever-cycling cast of forgettable grifters, allegorical players of apocalyptic vanity and decadence, amusing themselves with their metatheatrical glass-bead games and all the frippery of failed artists, against the backdrop of an inexorable social decline into chaos and nihilism, blessed by the puppetmaster who ever-so-generously consider his subjects and rivals sub specie aeternitatis, they all become ironic gods (and thus their delusions recast as primordial recollections of some “Titanic” age), the dawn of modernity, the heavenly spirals, the cult of the exalted white supremacist e-girl pussy, like it’s all trying to be Faust II…

***

Sammy keeps shushing the crowd because we’re not actually supposed to be doing a poetry reading in this hotel room at the Ritz-Carlton, although it shouldn’t matter anyway because we’ll all be out in an hour, maybe less. One of the readers’ clients booked the room. Most of the readers are libertines, some of them sex workers, some of them associated with Dirty Mag, they giggle through their poems about licking clits and orgies and the Popeyes at Myrtle and Broadway in Bushwick. Matt Weinberger is there snapping photos of them in their lingerie against the Midtown skyline. At the end of the final reading the sexy girls have a pillow fight on the bed.

Sammy’s in New York for a month and he’s making the most of it by throwing a bunch of guerilla poetry readings— “Casual Encountersz”—like he does in LA, where he lives. That’s what he said in the email hitting me up, that he liked the Substack and was wondering if I’d like to read at one of the events in New York. I looked him up and saw an LA Times article about hipsters reading poetry in parking lots, taking pictures of themselves reading poetry in parking lots. That article also talked a bit about Forever Mag, which inaugurated its social existence with such a reading at the Hollywood Forever Cemetery, before it became a familiar staple of the Dimes Square alt-lit circuit and this Substack.

One night Sammy and I meet at 169 Bar and after chatting a bit I suggest we go to Sovereign House close by so I can show him “the reactionaries.” It’s a quiet night there, with a party celebrating the New York visit of a podcaster who has some forty-thousand Twitter followers, and I recognize several of the nerdier Urbit–Mars Review party regulars. Sammy immediately picks up on this, “it’s giving SF,” he says as we’re making the rounds, and I admit that Sovereign House is not especially popping tonight, so we probably won’t be seeing too many coquettecore it-girls this time. We come across Nick Allen, the investor who runs the place, and he tells us about the parallel party scene in San Francisco, he mentions Curtis Yarvin’s birthday party, and Grimes showing up with her offspring. “Keep this on the DL, but however many kids you think she has with Elon Musk, she’s got more.” Several weeks later, major media outlets report that Grimes and Elon Musk have revealed a “secret third child” named Techno Mechanicus.