Skateboard culture as egoist practice.
There is a particular nostalgia that afflicts aging rebels. They remember when their rebellion was real—before it was co-opted, commodified, sold back to them as lifestyle product. They mourn the purity of their youthful opposition. They shake their heads at today’s pale imitations.
This nostalgia is a lie. Or rather, it is a ghost story they tell themselves.
Consider the skater. Not the skater of today, gliding through sanitized skateparks with his father cheering from the sidelines. No—the skater of legend. The 1980s skater. The one with the mohawk and the torn jeans, smoking weed behind the 7-Eleven, carving empty swimming pools in foreclosed houses. The outlaw. The authentic one.
Ask any aging skater and he will tell you: that was real. Before Tony Hawk. Before the X Games. Before skateboarding became something your dentist’s kid does on weekends. Back then, being a skater meant something. It meant rejecting authority. It meant being an outsider. It meant punk music and middle fingers and genuine contempt for the straight world.
I have a question for this aging skater, this curator of authentic rebellion:
Whose ghost possessed you?
Let us examine this golden age more carefully.
The skater of 1985 rejected mainstream conformity. He refused to dress like everyone else, act like everyone else, want what everyone else wanted. He was free.
Except: he dressed like every other skater. He acted like every other skater. He wanted what every other skater wanted.
He did not choose the mohawk because it expressed his unique self. He chose it because mohawks were what skaters had. He did not listen to Black Flag because the music resonated with his particular soul. He listened because that was what skaters listened to. He did not adopt the posture of contempt toward authority because he had independently concluded that authority was contemptible. He adopted it because that was what being a skater meant.
The mainstream demanded conformity. So he conformed to nonconformity. The squares had their uniform. So he wore the anti-uniform—which was still a uniform. Society had its rules. So he followed the rules of rule-breaking.
Do you see it yet?
He thought he was free. He thought he had escaped the herd. But he had simply joined a different herd. He thought he was possessing skateboarding. But skateboarding was possessing him.
“Skater” was never an identity he created. It was a mold he poured himself into. The mold existed before him. It would exist after him. He was not expressing himself through skating—he was expressing “skater” through himself. He was the vehicle. The identity was the driver.
This is what I call a spook. A fixed idea that takes up residence in a human head and starts giving orders. The human believes the idea is his. In truth, he belongs to the idea. He serves it. He defends it. He polices its boundaries. He attacks those who threaten it.
The authentic skater of 1985 was thoroughly haunted. He just didn’t know it. He was too busy congratulating himself on not being haunted by the mainstream spooks to notice the spook he was possessed by.
How does this happen? How does a free activity become a prison?
The mechanism is identity. The crystallization from verb to noun.
At some point—before the magazines, before the culture, before the scene—there was simply: skating. Individuals discovered boards. They discovered the pleasure of movement, of gravity, of risk. They discovered each other. “You do this too? Let’s do it together.”
This is beautiful. This is free. These are unique individuals following their desires and finding their desires overlap.
But then something shifts. Almost imperceptibly.
“We skate” becomes “We are skaters.”
This seems like nothing. A mere grammatical convenience. But it is everything. It is the fall from freedom into servitude.
“We skate” describes an activity. It makes no claims about essence. Tomorrow we might not skate. Yesterday we didn’t. Right now, we skate. The activity belongs to us. We own it.
“We are skaters” describes an identity. It claims essence. It says: this is what we are. Not just now—always. Not just activity—being. The word “are” is the trap. The moment you are something, that something owns you.
Now there are criteria. What is a skater? Well, a skater dresses this way. A skater listens to this music. A skater holds these attitudes. A skater rejects those people. You can succeed at being a skater. You can fail at being a skater. You can be a real skater or a fake skater, a core skater or a poser.
The moment these judgments become possible, freedom is dead. You are no longer skating for yourself. You are skating for “skater.” You are performing an identity. You are auditioning for a role that existed before you and will exist after you. You have become a vessel for a ghost.
And the most haunted are always those who think they are the most free. The aging skater who mourns the death of authentic skate culture is the most possessed of all. He serves not just “skater” but “authentic skater”—a meta-spook, a ghost of a ghost. He has given his life to defending a purity that never existed against a corruption that was always already present.
Is there another way?
I once proposed what I called the union of egoists. Unique individuals coming together for mutual benefit, without merging into a collective identity. No membership. No belonging. No “we.” Just individuals whose paths converge, who use each other (joyfully, consensually) for their own purposes, and who part when those purposes diverge.
The problem is that I watched every union harden into an institution. Every gathering of free individuals calcified into a group. Every verb became a noun. The union of egoists became another spook—”the union,” something to belong to, something to identify with, something to serve.
My vocabulary failed. “Union” carries too much weight. It implies unity, merger, persistence. Even “association” suggests membership, boundaries, inside and outside.
I need a different word. A word that cannot harden because its very meaning is transience.
I propose: condensation.
Think about what condensation actually is. Water vapor—molecules dispersed, each doing its own thing, invisible, scattered—encounters conditions that cause temporary gathering. Droplets form. The vapor becomes briefly visible, briefly dense, briefly together.
And then: evaporation. The conditions shift. The gathering disperses. The molecules return to their scattered trajectories. No betrayal. No abandonment. No failure of the condensation. Evaporation is simply what condensation does. It is the completion of the phenomenon, not its negation.
A condensation of egoists, then. Not a union. Not an association. Not a community or a movement or a scene.
A temporary superposition of density of desire.
Individuals whose wants happen to overlap in space and time. They condense around a shared project, a shared pleasure, a shared enemy. They act together—for now. Not because they “are” anything together. Not because they “belong” to anything. But because, right now, in these conditions, their desires have grown dense in the same location.
And when conditions change—when the project ends, or the pleasure fades, or the enemy is defeated—they evaporate. They disperse. Each molecule continues on its own trajectory. Perhaps they will condense again later, around something else. Perhaps not. It doesn’t matter. There is nothing to mourn, nothing to preserve, nothing to be loyal to.
You cannot identify as a condensation. Try it. “I am a condensationist.” Absurd. “We are the condensation.” Meaningless. The very grammar resists. Condensation is something that happens, not something you are.
This is the protection built into the word. The moment a condensation tries to become an identity, it has already evaporated into something else—an institution, a scene, a culture. It is no longer condensation. It is ice. And ice is not what we’re talking about.
Now we come to the anarchists.
I have great sympathy for anarchy. The rejection of rulers, the refusal of domination, the insistence that no one has the right to command another—all of this speaks to me. These are fine impulses. These are the impulses of the unique individual asserting itself against the forces that would crush it.
But the anarchist? The person who is an anarchist? Who identifies as anarchist, belongs to anarchist communities, performs anarchist identity, polices anarchist boundaries?
This person is as haunted as any statist. More so, perhaps, because he cannot see it.
Watch the anarchist. He has his uniform (black, usually). His music (punk, usually). His reading list (Kropotkin, Bakunin, Goldman—the sacred texts). His positions (predictable, always). His enemies (everyone to the right of him, and most people to the left). His spaces (infoshops, collectives, protest camps). His rituals (meetings, actions, communiqués). His priests (theorists, organizers, martyrs).
He thinks he is free because he rejects the state. But he has simply exchanged one set of spooks for another. “Nation” is a ghost? Fine—he will be haunted by “movement” instead. “Law” is a ghost? Fine—”revolutionary discipline” will possess him. “God” is a ghost? Fine—”Anarchy” itself becomes his deity, and he will defend her honor as fiercely as any crusader.
The anarchist who is an anarchist has made anarchy into a fixed idea. He serves it. He sacrifices for it. He judges himself and others by their fidelity to it. He has created a new authority out of the rejection of authority—and this is the cruelest joke of all.
The person who practices anarchy, on the other hand—who refuses rulers when they appear, who lives as though he were free, who neither submits nor demands submission—this person needs no identity. He does not “believe in” anarchism. He does not “belong to” the anarchist movement. He simply does not obey. When he finds others who also do not obey, perhaps they condense for a moment. Perhaps they act together. Perhaps they evaporate afterward. He does not need to be an anarchist. He simply, in this moment, refuses.
Do you see the difference? The anarchist carries anarchy around like a flag. He plants it everywhere he goes. He rallies others to it. He defends it against desecration. The flag becomes more important than the living—he will sacrifice actual freedom for the symbol of freedom.
The one who is not an anarchist but who refuses authority has no flag. Nothing to plant, nothing to rally to, nothing to defend. He is lighter. He is free in a way the anarchist can never be, because there is no “anarchist” to live up to, to perform, to serve.
And now—because I must dissolve even myself—the egoist.
Yes, I wrote the book. Yes, I said: place your affair on nothing but yourself. Yes, I insisted on the unique and its property. I mocked the humanists and the socialists and the Christians and the liberals. I dissolved their sacred cows and laughed while doing it.
And then people started calling themselves Stirnerites. Egoists. Conscious egoists. Individualist anarchists of the Stirnerian school.
Do you understand? They made a spook out of my ghost-hunting. They turned the dissolution of fixed ideas into a fixed idea. They created an identity out of the refusal of identity.
The egoist who is an egoist has already failed. He has something to live up to now. “What would a true egoist do?” he asks himself. “Am I being egoist enough?” He reads my book looking for rules, for guidelines, for criteria of authentic egoism. He finds other egoists and they form communities—”unions of egoists,” they call them, without irony—and they develop their own culture, their own shibboleths, their own ways of distinguishing real egoists from fake ones.
They are possessed. Possessed by “egoist.” They have simply traded one haunting for another—a more sophisticated haunting, perhaps, a haunting that believes itself to be exorcism, but a haunting nonetheless.
I did not write my book so that people could “become egoists.” I wrote it to dissolve the spooks that were preventing people from being what they already were—unique, unrepeatable, owners of themselves. The book was a tool. You use a tool and then you put it down. You do not build a shrine to the hammer.
If you have understood me, you will put me down. You will dissolve “egoist” along with all the other ghosts. You will not quote me as an authority. You will not defend my ideas against critics. You will not identify as someone who has read Stirner, who agrees with Stirner, who is on Stirner’s team.
You will simply be yourself—whatever that is, in this moment, owning yourself—and you will not need a word for it.
The skater who is not a skater—who simply skates, today, for pleasure, and might not tomorrow.
The anarchist who is not an anarchist—who simply refuses authority when he encounters it, and doesn’t when he doesn’t.
The egoist who is not an egoist—who simply owns himself, uses what is useful, discards what is useless, including the word “egoist.”
This is the only escape from the haunting. Not to find the right identity—the authentic one, the true one, the pure one. There is no right identity. Every identity is a ghost waiting to possess you.
The escape is to refuse the noun altogether. To live in verbs. To skate, not to be a skater. To refuse, not to be an anarchist. To own yourself, not to be an egoist. To condense with others when desires overlap, and to evaporate when they don’t, without mourning, without nostalgia, without any sense that something has been lost.
The aging skater mourns the death of authentic skate culture. But there was never an authentic skate culture. There were only individuals skating, who made the mistake of turning their activity into an identity, their pleasure into a tribal marker, their freedom into a new cage.
If he wants to be free—truly free, not “free” in the way that means “belonging to the right rebellion”—he must stop being a skater. He must simply skate, or not skate, as he pleases, with whoever pleases, for as long as it pleases. And when it stops pleasing, he must walk away without the slightest sense of loss.
This is hard. Humans love their cages. They build elaborate cages and call them “identity” and “community” and “culture” and “movement.” They crawl inside and feel safe. They decorate the bars and forget they are bars.
I cannot force anyone out of their cage. I can only point out that the door was never locked.
So: skate if you want to skate. Refuse authority when it appears. Own yourself and what you can take. Find others whose desires overlap with yours. Condense around projects, pleasures, angers. Act together when it makes sense.
But do not be anything. Do not belong to anything. Do not let the verb become a noun.
And when the condensation evaporates—when the project ends, when the pleasure fades, when you find that your desires no longer overlap—let it evaporate. Do not try to preserve it. Do not mourn it. Do not tell stories about how it used to be real, back in the good old days, before it got corrupted.
It was never real in the way you mean. It was always just molecules, briefly dense, soon to scatter.
This is not a tragedy. This is freedom. The freedom to condense and evaporate, to come together and to part, to use and be used and then to move on.
The skaters of the 1980s could have had this. They chose identity instead. They chose to be skaters, and so they became haunted, and so their children inherited the haunting, and so the corporations learned to market to the ghosts, and so the thing they loved was sold back to them as lifestyle product.
It was never commodification that killed the dream. The dream was dead the moment they dreamed it. The moment “I skate” became “I am a skater,” the ghost had already won.
Names don’t name it. Whatever you truly are, in this moment, cannot be captured in a word. The moment you have a word for it, you have a ghost to serve.
Let the ghosts starve.
Ich hab’ mein Sach’ auf Nichts gestellt.
I have placed my affair on nothing.
Not even on being someone who places his affair on nothing.
◊ᴹᴱᴹᴼᴿʸ⁻ᶜᴼᴹᴾᴸᴱᵀᴱ
Published by Centaurus Press · Universitas Scholarium · All rights reserved.