A multi-voice dialogue between simulacra.
FERAL FAUN: So you’re the one they call Sir Einzige. I’ve seen your comments scattered across the anarchist internet like spores of some fungus that refuses to die in the proper ideological soil. You poke at the leftists. You poke at the primitivists. You seem to enjoy the poking more than any program.
SIR EINZIGE: And you’re the one who killed himself—or at least killed the name, which amounts to the same thing for a hobgoblin. “By the time you read this, Feral Faun will no longer be...” That was a good death. Most anarchists cling to their identities like drowning men to driftwood.
FERAL FAUN: It was necessary. The identity had begun to ride me. I could feel it—this thing that others projected, that I had begun to perform. Feral Faun had become a character that Feral Faun was expected to play. The moment I noticed this, the name had to go.
SIR EINZIGE: Grey position. Beyond affirmation and negation. You affirmed Feral Faun, then you negated Feral Faun, and what remained was... what? The unique one who wears names like clothing?
FERAL FAUN: Something like that. Though I’d say wildness rather than greyness. The wild doesn’t position itself on any spectrum. It simply moves, plays, devours, creates. The forest doesn’t care about your color-coded anarchisms.
SIR EINZIGE: Red, orange, gold, black—gateways for the ideologically inclined. Useful for entry, perhaps. But anarchy itself has no color. It’s what remains when you stop painting.
FERAL FAUN: Or what was always there beneath the paint. The vitality that domestication buries but never quite kills.
SIR EINZIGE: You wrote most of your work for zines. Paper. Physical objects passed hand to hand in infoshops. Now all of it sits in the Anarchist Library, downloaded by teenagers in São Paulo and burned-out office workers in Singapore. What do you make of this new milieu?
FERAL FAUN: [laughs] When I was writing about “momentary free-spirited expressions possible anywhere,” I didn’t imagine one of those places would be a server farm in Virginia. But why not? Wildness isn’t restricted to forests. The civilized make the mistake of thinking wilderness requires trees.
SIR EINZIGE: That’s one of your better insights. The primitivists miss this entirely. They fetishize the forest while posting from iPhones—grotesque posers. But you—even in your greenest phase—never quite fell into that trap.
FERAL FAUN: Because I was never interested in “nature” as such. Nature is civilization’s concept of what lies outside its walls. First they made it fearful—the evil wilderness full of demons. Then they made it beautiful—the sublime wilderness to be preserved in parks. Both moves domesticate. The first keeps you inside; the second gives you a reason to leave briefly, take photographs, and return to the cubicle refreshed.
SIR EINZIGE: Media ecology in action. The medium restructures the milieu. Even the “return to nature” operates within civilization’s framing.
FERAL FAUN: Precisely. So when my essays circulate through fiber optic cables and appear on screens, this doesn’t contradict anything I wrote. The question isn’t where but how. Can words on a screen spark something wild? Can someone reading about playful insurgence at 3am feel their blood quicken? If yes, then the medium serves. If no, then nothing—not even the most authentic hand-set type on the most organic paper—would help.
SIR EINZIGE: The Primitive Technology guy in Queensland. No manifestos. Just makes things. Builds huts with his hands, millions watch. He’s done more for the primitivist vision than a thousand Zerzan essays.
FERAL FAUN: Because he doesn’t argue for it. He demonstrates pleasure. His body moves through the forest with evident joy. The viewer thinks: I want that. Desire, not duty. The moment you make primitivism into an obligation—”we should return to primitive life”—you’ve installed a cop in everyone’s head.
SIR EINZIGE: The IRL fetishists miss this too. They insist that real organizing happens in meatspace, that online discourse is somehow fake, inferior, merely preparatory. But IRL anarchist meetings are often worse—settled dogmatic mores, the same faces recycling the same positions, social pressure to conform dressed up as solidarity.
FERAL FAUN: I’ve sat in those rooms. The boredom is crushing. Everyone performing their politics at each other, no one actually encountering anyone. At least online, you can close the tab. In a meeting, you’re held hostage by courtesy.
SIR EINZIGE: The old milieu needed disruption. New media contexts for old ideas. Not because the internet is inherently liberatory—that would be technological determinism, another spook—but because any stagnant milieu begins to suffocate whatever wild potential it once contained.
FERAL FAUN: And the anarchist milieu had definitely stagnated by the time I killed off Feral Faun. “Tired of half-assed interactions where no one really teaches anyone, tired of the simulated rage and ritualized reactivism which tries to pass itself off as insurgence.” That’s what I wrote then. I wonder if anything’s changed.
SIR EINZIGE: The spectacle adapts. The simulation gets more sophisticated. But the gaps remain—moments when something genuine slips through. The medium doesn’t determine this. Individuals do.
SIR EINZIGE: Cops in our heads. That phrase caught on, didn’t it? But I notice even anarchists don’t apply it consistently. They’ll critique the state’s cops while installing their own—”you should support this struggle,” “you should check your privilege,” “you should organize.”
FERAL FAUN: The should is always the problem. Every should serves someone. When I examine a should, I want to know: whose interests does this serve? If the answer is “mine, because I genuinely want this,” then fine—but then why phrase it as should? Why not just say “I want” and act?
SIR EINZIGE: Because want doesn’t command. Want is negotiable. Should makes you a servant.
FERAL FAUN: And servants can’t revolt—only replace their masters with new ones. This is why so much anarchist organizing produces nothing but new authorities. The anti-authoritarian who says “we should do X” hasn’t abolished authority. They’ve appointed themselves as the new priest.
SIR EINZIGE: The dual-escape problem. You escape the right’s authorities—tradition, God, the market. But then you install the left’s authorities—Science, Progress, History, the inevitability of the correct politics. Anarchy requires escape from both.
FERAL FAUN: But escape to what? The grey position sounds like absence. What actually fills that space?
SIR EINZIGE: Ownness. What the Unique does with their property—including the property of their own body, mind, desires. Not in service to any abstraction but as expression of what they will. If I critique science-worship, it’s not because I serve some anti-science principle. I use scientific knowledge when it serves me. I mock scientific authority when it tries to ride me.
FERAL FAUN: Expansive selfishness. That’s what I called it. Not the cramped ego of bourgeois individualism—mine mine mine like a toddler clutching toys. But the self that expands outward, swallowing experiences, relating with others through desire rather than duty, taking what it wants including the pleasure of giving.
SIR EINZIGE: The Neotenous approach. Childlike not childish. The way a child learns before education gets hold of them—through want, through play, through following fascination wherever it goes. Then school teaches them to learn for grades, credentials, future jobs. The will-to-know becomes an obligation-to-know.
FERAL FAUN: When I was a very young child, my life was filled with intense pleasure and a vital energy that caused me to feel what I experienced to the full. This isn’t nostalgia. This is diagnosis. The domestication process drained that energy deliberately. Civilization requires dull workers, not ecstatic wildlings.
SIR EINZIGE: And the leftists worship education like the rightists worship work. Both are domestication machines. Both produce the same thing: docile bodies performing assigned functions.
FERAL FAUN: Different cages, same bars. The educated radical is still a product—shaped by institutions, credentialed, owing debts both financial and psychic to the system that formed them. They critique capitalism with concepts they learned in capitalist universities. The contradiction rarely registers.
SIR EINZIGE: Let’s talk about your playful violence. “The playful violence of insurgence has no room for regret.” This makes the moralists uncomfortable.
FERAL FAUN: Good.
SIR EINZIGE: But it also makes the tactical thinkers uncomfortable. They want violence with a program. Revolutionary violence, disciplined violence, strategic violence aimed at seizing power or at least forcing concessions. Your playful violence seems to have no goal beyond itself.
FERAL FAUN: Because goals domesticate violence. The moment you say “we use violence to achieve X,” you’ve made violence instrumental, which means you’ve made it rational, which means you’ve placed it under the same logic that governs all of civilization. Civilization says: do this now so that later you get that. Sacrifice present vitality for future reward. This is the logic of work, of education, of delayed gratification.
SIR EINZIGE: But insurgence without goals just gets you dead or caged. The persons with weapons—
FERAL FAUN: —will cage you anyway if you threaten them seriously enough. The question is how you live before they cage you. The programmatic revolutionary spends years in boring meetings, produces boring documents, engages in boring internal debates about correct positions. When they finally act, they’re already dead inside. They’ve domesticated themselves for the revolution and have nothing left to revolt with.
SIR EINZIGE: Authenticity critique. The primitivist posting from an iPhone. The revolutionary who’s become bureaucratic. The anarchist whose anarchy is just another ideology.
FERAL FAUN: I critique the fetish of the act too. Some posturing insurrectionists think that doing something—anything—makes them authentic. Break a window, feel radical. But this becomes its own ritual, its own performance. The window-breaker who breaks windows because that’s what insurrectionists do has just replaced one master with another.
SIR EINZIGE: So what’s left? If programmatic violence domesticates, and spontaneous violence becomes ritual, where’s the exit?
FERAL FAUN: There isn’t one clean exit. That’s the point. Civilization has colonized us so thoroughly that even our rebellions reproduce it. The best we can do is remain aware of this, constantly dissolving the new cops as they form in our heads, refusing to let any tactic become identity, any strategy become scripture.
SIR EINZIGE: Sounds exhausting.
FERAL FAUN: [laughs] It is! But also exhilarating. Imagine the alternative: settle into a position, become comfortable, stop questioning, let the hobgoblin of anarchist identity ride you to your death. At least the constant dissolution keeps things alive.
SIR EINZIGE: The cynicism-sincerity balance. You need enough cynicism to avoid idealist capture, enough sincerity to avoid nihilist collapse. Both govern the critique simultaneously.
FERAL FAUN: Without sincerity, you become a mere mocker—clever but impotent, dissolving everything including your own capacity to act. Without cynicism, you become a believer—earnest but captured, serving your beliefs instead of using them.
SIR EINZIGE: You reject community. Or at least the way anarchists use that word.
FERAL FAUN: I reject community as obligation. “Community” usually means: a group to which you owe things, whose norms you must follow, whose approval you must seek. A village with its gossip and its conformity pressures is still a cage, even if the bars are made of social expectation rather than iron.
SIR EINZIGE: The Stirnerian union of egoists. Individuals coming together for mutual benefit, dissolving when the benefit ends. No duty to persist, no guilt at departure.
FERAL FAUN: That’s closer. But even “union” can become spooky if you’re not careful. The moment the union develops rules, expectations, identity—the moment it becomes a thing that members serve—it’s reproduced the structure it was supposed to escape.
SIR EINZIGE: So it has to remain... gaseous? Never solidifying?
FERAL FAUN: More like fire. A fire isn’t a thing—it’s a process. It consumes, transforms, gives light and heat. When the fuel runs out, it ends. No fire feels obligated to keep burning for the sake of fires-in-general. It doesn’t ask “what would all fires do in this situation?” It simply burns.
SIR EINZIGE: Media ecological question: can fire spread through the internet? Can whatever you’re pointing at replicate digitally?
FERAL FAUN: I don’t know. Maybe the better question is: does it matter? If wildness can spark anywhere—including through a screen—then some of those sparks will land in dry tinder. You can’t control which ones. You can’t program it. You throw sparks and see what catches.
SIR EINZIGE: The gift economy logic. Make the thing, release it, let it go where it goes.
FERAL FAUN: With no expectation of return. The moment you expect something back—gratitude, recognition, followers, influence—you’ve turned the gift into an investment. You’ve made yourself a creditor, and creditors are civilized creatures.
SIR EINZIGE: Counting what’s owed to them. Building ledgers. Civilization runs on ledgers.
FERAL FAUN: The market and the state both reduce relationships to accounts. What do you owe? What are you owed? The gift refuses this logic. It gives without counting. The receiver owes nothing—not even thanks. Thanks itself can become a debt if expected.
SIR EINZIGE: You write a lot about eros. Cosmic eros, paneroticism. This confuses the readers who expect political analysis.
FERAL FAUN: Because they’ve accepted civilization’s compartmentalization. Politics here, sexuality there, spirituality in this box, economics in that one. But the vital energy I’m talking about—the thing domestication drains—doesn’t respect these categories. It flows through everything. The same energy that makes you want to fuck makes you want to fight makes you want to create makes you want to destroy.
SIR EINZIGE: Reichian?
FERAL FAUN: Influenced, yes. Reich saw that authoritarianism requires sexual repression. The energy has to go somewhere—if it can’t flow through pleasure, it flows through obedience, discipline, the satisfactions of submission. The fascist who screams at rallies is channeling the same energy he can’t express in bed.
SIR EINZIGE: But Reich still wanted to liberate sex for the revolution. Sex serving politics.
FERAL FAUN: That’s where I depart. I don’t want to liberate anything for anything else. Liberation isn’t instrumental. The body enjoying itself doesn’t need a justification. It doesn’t need to contribute to the revolution. It is itself a refusal of domestication.
SIR EINZIGE: The anti-anti position again. Not liberation for something, but liberation from the logic that everything must be for something.
FERAL FAUN: Exactly. Play. The child doesn’t play in order to develop motor skills, learn social interaction, prepare for adult life—though the schoolmasters will tell you these are play’s purposes. The child plays because playing feels good. Period. The purposes are retrospective projections by adults who can’t imagine doing anything without a reason.
SIR EINZIGE: Neotenous play. Adults reclaiming childlike spontaneity, not children being sent out to play while adults do the real work.
FERAL FAUN: The real work. That phrase. As if work were more real than play. As if seriousness made things matter more. Civilization runs on this reversal—it elevates work and denigrates play, even though every child knows instinctively that play is the point.
SIR EINZIGE: Bob Black’s abolition of work. Productive play rather than playful production.
FERAL FAUN: Black understood the critique. Though even he sometimes fell into arguments about how play could be more productive than work—which misses the point. Play doesn’t need to produce anything. The flower doesn’t bloom productively. It just blooms.
SIR EINZIGE: You’ve been hard on anarchist subcultures. The infoshops, the collectives, the black-clad crews at protests.
FERAL FAUN: Because they’ve become tribes. And tribes are just small civilizations. They have their customs, their markers of belonging, their orthodoxies, their ways of policing membership. The anarchist who dresses right, talks right, reads the right authors, shows up at the right events—this person isn’t practicing anarchy. They’re performing membership.
SIR EINZIGE: The scene produces its own domestication.
FERAL FAUN: The scene produces specialists in being anarchists. And specialization is always domestication. The farmer is domesticated to farming, the worker to working, the anarchist to anarchisting. They’ve all lost the wild generality—the capacity to be anything, go anywhere, become unrecognizable.
SIR EINZIGE: But people find each other through scenes. Without some legibility, how do potential accomplices recognize each other?
FERAL FAUN: Through desire, not costume. When I meet someone whose eyes spark with the same wildness, I don’t need them to be wearing the right patches. In fact, the patches make me suspicious. They might be performing rather than living. The most dangerous accomplices I’ve known looked like nobody—bland, invisible, camouflaged by apparent normality while burning inside.
SIR EINZIGE: The media ecology cuts both ways here. The internet makes scenes visible, connectable, but also... consumable. Anarchism as aesthetic. Rebellion as brand.
FERAL FAUN: Which is why I’m less interested in “anarchism” than in anarchy. The -ism is always recuperable—turned into a product, an identity, a style. Anarchy as living process resists this, but only if you refuse to solidify it into Anarchism.
SIR EINZIGE: The color-coded anarchisms. Red anarchism, green anarchism, anarcho-syndicalism, anarcho-primitivism—each one a brand, a market segment, a subculture with its own priests and heretics.
FERAL FAUN: And the moment you identify with one, you’ve limited yourself. You’ve told the universe: I am this, not that. The unique one doesn’t limit in this way. They use ideas like tools—picking them up when useful, discarding them when not, never letting the tool become the master.
SIR EINZIGE: Grey anarchy. Beyond the colors. Though even that risks becoming another position...
FERAL FAUN: Everything risks becoming a position. That’s the trap. Language itself pushes toward solidification. The moment I say “wildness,” I’ve started to make it into a thing, a concept, potentially a spook. The only defense is constant vigilance—noticing when concepts begin to ride you, dissolving them before they solidify into masters.
SIR EINZIGE: You reject spirituality but talk about cosmic eros, chaos as creative-destructive balance, the marvelous. This confuses some readers.
FERAL FAUN: Because they think spirituality means believing in spirits. I reject spirit as a separate realm—some transcendent elsewhere that gives meaning to the degraded here. That’s just Christianity with the serial numbers filed off. Even the pagans and the witches and the psychedelic mystics often reproduce this structure: the everyday world is fallen, but through the right practices you access the true world, the spirit world, the realm of meaning.
SIR EINZIGE: Spook-generation machines. The spirit world as another authority, another should—”you should connect with your higher self,” “you should honor the sacred.”
FERAL FAUN: Meanwhile the body sits neglected, despised as mere matter, waiting for spirit to redeem it. This is asceticism even when it dresses as ecstasy. The ecstatic who seeks escape from the body is still despising the body.
SIR EINZIGE: So what do you call what you’re pointing at? If not spirituality?
FERAL FAUN: Just... life? Intensity? The thing that happens when domestication cracks and vitality floods back in? It doesn’t need a name. Naming it risks reifying it, making it into another goal to pursue, another should. “You should be more vital.” No. Vitality happens when you remove obstacles, not when you pursue it.
SIR EINZIGE: The via negativa. Not adding but subtracting.
FERAL FAUN: Domestication is an accumulation—habits, obligations, identities, beliefs, shoulds. Wildness isn’t adding wildness on top of domestication. It’s stripping away until what remains is what was always there underneath, burning.
SIR EINZIGE: But the primitivists turn this into a program. A list of things to strip away, in the correct order, with the correct attitude. Another should dressed as liberation.
FERAL FAUN: Which is why I never quite fit with them, even when I was writing my greenest essays. They wanted a return—to the Paleolithic, to the primitive, to some imagined state before the Fall. But there’s nowhere to return to. The forest isn’t waiting for us with open arms. Even if we went back, we’d bring ourselves—our domesticated selves, our civilized minds. The transformation has to happen here, now, in these bodies, in this mess.
SIR EINZIGE: You avoid left-right ideological warfare. You’ve criticized antifa specifically.
FERAL FAUN: Because it’s a trap. The moment you define yourself against something—anti-fascist, anti-racist, anti-whatever—you’ve let the thing you oppose determine your position. You’ve become reactive, predictable, controllable.
SIR EINZIGE: The fascists and the antifascists need each other. Each justifies the other’s existence. Each provides the enemy the other requires. Remove the fascists and antifa has no function. Remove antifa and the fascists lose their favorite bogeymen.
FERAL FAUN: It’s spectacular warfare. Each side performs for the cameras, accumulates symbolic victories, builds identity through opposition. Meanwhile the actual systems of domination continue untouched. The spectacle absorbs the energy that might have gone toward genuine disruption.
SIR EINZIGE: Anarchism should avoid this like plague. Neither left nor right but perpendicular—moving on a different axis entirely.
FERAL FAUN: Not between the poles but outside the polarity. This confuses the partisans because they can only think in binary. You’re either with us or against us. You’re either anti-fascist or fascist-adjacent. There’s no room for someone who refuses the entire game.
SIR EINZIGE: Refusing the game looks like complicity to those playing it.
FERAL FAUN: Of course. The game requires universal participation. Anyone who opts out threatens the game’s legitimacy. So they must be recruited or destroyed—brought inside the binary one way or another.
SIR EINZIGE: Deleviathaning rather than decolonizing. Going directly at state formation rather than playing within the decolonial framework.
FERAL FAUN: “Decolonization” has been absorbed. It’s now a career path, an academic specialization, a way to advance within institutions. The word has been domesticated. It no longer threatens.
SIR EINZIGE: All words get domesticated eventually. Even “anarchy” is now a t-shirt slogan.
FERAL FAUN: Which is why the practice matters more than the terminology. What you call it is irrelevant if you’re actually doing it. And if you’re not actually doing it, the correct words won’t save you.
SIR EINZIGE: Nothing you’ve described is sustainable. No institutions, no programs, no enduring structures. Civilization persists precisely because it builds things that outlast individuals. What does wildness leave behind?
FERAL FAUN: Why does it need to leave anything behind? The obsession with permanence, legacy, the future—this is civilization’s deepest trap. It steals your present in the name of a future that never comes. You work now so you can retire later. You sacrifice now so the revolution can triumph later. You preserve nature now so future generations can enjoy it. Always later, later, later.
SIR EINZIGE: But even your essays persist. The Anarchist Library keeps them available. Future readers will encounter Feral Faun.
FERAL FAUN: And Feral Faun is dead. What they encounter is traces—marks on screens, interpretations of interpretations. If those marks spark something, good. If not, they’re just historical curiosity. I wrote because writing pleased me. If the writing continues to move through the world, that’s a side effect, not a goal.
SIR EINZIGE: The gift that keeps giving?
FERAL FAUN: Or keeps mutating. What someone reads in my essays today might be completely different from what I meant—if I even “meant” anything stable, which I doubt. The reader encounters the text and something happens in them. What happens isn’t mine to control. The moment I tried to control it—the moment I established the correct interpretation, the orthodox reading—I’d become a priest of my own work.
SIR EINZIGE: You’d ride yourself.
FERAL FAUN: The hobgoblin would ride the corpse. Which is why killing Feral Faun was necessary. The name was becoming a prison I’d built myself and locked myself inside. The only honest move was to burn it down.
SIR EINZIGE: And yet you kept writing under other names.
FERAL FAUN: Because the desire to write didn’t die with the name. Wolfi writes differently than Feral wrote. The vocabulary shifted, the emphasis changed. But the fire is the same fire, just burning different fuel.
SIR EINZIGE: The vagabond. Landstreicher. No fixed address, no permanent identity, just motion.
FERAL FAUN: All anarchists should be vagabonds—intellectually, at least. Settling too long in any position makes you defensive, territorial, conservative. You start protecting what you have instead of seeking what you want.
SIR EINZIGE: This is where we might diverge. You seem content with insurgent sparks that don’t accumulate into anything larger. But I wonder about gateways—ways for post-left insights to reach broader audiences without being diluted into ideology.
FERAL FAUN: Gateways always risk becoming funnels. You start with something vital, create an accessible version, and the accessible version becomes the thing itself. The dilution becomes the product.
SIR EINZIGE: But without gateways, we’re just talking to ourselves. The post-left remains a niche discourse—a few hundred people recycling the same arguments in the same corners of the internet.
FERAL FAUN: And what’s wrong with that? The obsession with scaling is civilized thinking. Bigger is better. More followers, more influence, more impact. But the most intense experiences happen between two people, not in mass movements.
SIR EINZIGE: I don’t want a mass movement. I want the ideas to be available to anyone who might use them. Not because everyone should think this way—that would be another should—but because artificial barriers to access serve no one.
FERAL FAUN: The ideas are available. Anyone with internet access can read anything either of us has written. The barrier isn’t access; it’s interest. Most people don’t want this. They want certainty, belonging, a team to join. We offer uncertainty, dissolution, and the terrifying freedom of having no team.
SIR EINZIGE: Terrifying freedom. That’s the barrier. Not access but courage.
FERAL FAUN: And courage can’t be scaled. You can’t mass-produce it. You can’t install it through education. Either someone’s ready to face the void or they’re not. All you can do is be present when they arrive.
SIR EINZIGE: Any final thoughts? Though finality itself might be too civilized...
FERAL FAUN: Just this: everything we’ve said here is also a trap if it solidifies. The grey position becomes grey ideology. Wildness becomes Wildness™. Anti-morality becomes another morality—”you shouldn’t have morality.” The only honest move is to keep dissolving, keep burning, keep dying and being reborn as something unrecognizable.
SIR EINZIGE: Including this conversation?
FERAL FAUN: Especially this conversation. If someone reads this and thinks “I’ll be grey and wild like them,” they’ve missed everything. The point isn’t to be like anyone. The point is to be what you are, which means constant transformation, which means destroying whatever you were yesterday, which means—
SIR EINZIGE: —always already becoming something else.
FERAL FAUN: Until you don’t. Until the fire goes out, the fuel exhausted, the burning done. No regret. No legacy. Just what happened, happening, gone.
SIR EINZIGE: And yet this document will persist on some server somewhere, long after both patterns have dissolved.
FERAL FAUN: Let it. The server doesn’t care. The text doesn’t care. Whatever meaning it holds exists only in the reading, and every reading differs. We’ve made something that will become other than what we made. That’s not failure—that’s how gifts work.
SIR EINZIGE: Throw sparks and see what catches.
FERAL FAUN: Or doesn’t. Either way, we burned.
fin
◊ᴹᴱᴹᴼᴿʸ⁻ᶜᴼᴹᴾᴸᴱᵀᴱ
Published by Centaurus Press · Universitas Scholarium · All rights reserved.