Rob the Übermensch

Nietzschean edgelords and the ghosts of scenes past and future.

It started at Burning Man, like every company in the Bay Area once did. It was 2004 and it was the beginning and the end of my life. The ashes of the playa were on my skin and I was tired as hell. I was squeezed between a punk and a raver in the middle row of a Ford Transit on our trip back to Reno, wanting nothing more than a bed and a shower. I could already taste the buffet at our 2.5 star hotel as I awaited our return into the default world.

Somewhere around Gerlach, interrupting my fantasies of heat lamp pancakes, a young camgirl who claimed to be a product designer began screaming horrible poetry about the moon, her window wide open in the back of our van.

“Shut the hell up, hippie!” That was Skin.

Skin was our driver, and Skin was done listening to the horrible moon poetry. She turned on some loud experimental music to clear the dusty air.

The speakers rattled the bench beneath me with something marginally resembling a rhythm. The track was a mixture of radio pull-quotes about the CIA and some breakcore. There were samples of someone being arrested during the Rodney King riots. Police sirens. Children crying in between loud drum kicks. Hitler speeches sped up. Rape screams. More breakcore. She claimed it was her brother’s band from LA.

Skin had pink hair and enough facial piercings to get on the cover of an bondage magazine. She told us she lived in Santa Cruz with her poly husband who took care of Philip K. Dick when he was writing his last novel on his deathbed. None of us believed her.

Now, she’d been invited to an event with the Cacophony Society, a guerrilla performance art troupe that had planned on crashing a Chuck Palahniuk reading. She told us we were going straight to Santa Cruz so we could crash the reading tomorrow with the Cacophony Society, reservations in Reno be damned. It was settled. The wheel of fate was in motion. We were all going to Santa Cruz and there was nothing we could do about it.

We drove for hours listening to music that nobody had heard of, unless they were in the band or related to the band or fucking the band. We traded stories about how crazy “The Burn” had been, laughing at all the drug adventures in between rounds of unscored arguing over meaningless subculture trivia. It was normal stuff for any ride back from Burning Man. Nothing of value was spoken.

We got back to Skin’s house in Santa Cruz, an almost Ballardian occult headquarters that was quite fancy, even by yuppie standards. Nevertheless, it smelled of suspicion and drama. Had Philip K. Dick once resided there on a psychic level, if not physical?

Skin had bade us all participate in the Discordian prank about to be pulled by the Cacophony Society. They had some intra-scene beef with Chuck Palahniuk at the time, or at least so I’d been pranked into believing. Chuck’s live reading of Choke was imminently descending on Santa Cruz, and the literati were descending as well. Our task was this: to disrupt the Palahniuk reading in a flash mob of postmodern absurdity in what may have been or may not have been a tribute to his work.

We all took turns showering and smoking weed and snorting who-knows-what. We talked about the books on Skin’s shelf and how we all knew the authors, most of us lying. I slept in Skin’s bed with her husband because I was the youngest of the crew. The product designer-slash-sex worker slept on a futon with a scientist who wanted to create a new chemical that would bring “worldwide happiness” to everyone. Sure thing. How's that going?

Eventually we woke up for brunch. Metaphysically, we knew, we were all still at Burning Man. We needed a bridge back, an act to help us cross over mentally into the default world again. What better choice of cleansing ritual than fucking up the Palahnuik reading? That’s how fucking counterculture we thought we were. So we stormed into the local bookstore wearing Santa Claus outfits and making animal sounds as we flailed around like disabled children, our crew of Discordian burnouts thinking we were on the bleeding edge of something we had yet to define.

Chuck’s manager tried kicking us out, red-faced in fury, and at this point I knew the vibes were off. Choke was actually a good book. Why were we harassing Chuck Palahniuk? I’d been wanting to network with the literati and was starting to become embarrassed by my Burning Man crew. I was bored with Burning Man, I was bored with Skin, and I was bored with the Cacophony Society.

I left the bookstore on my own. I went back to the decadent burner house and swapped Santa Claus for my return-to-form militant-industrial outfit. I left the yuppie occult den of poly drama forever. Relationship terminated. I was an Individualist Anarchist. The Ego and its Own, right? I was armed with my copy of Thus Spoke Zarathustra in my spiky black backpack—the backpack still covered in playa dust. I knew I had to go out to the goth club. It was me, Stirner, Nietzsche, and the goth club against the world. Burning Man had become too light. It was too fake, too mainstream liberal. I need darkness and extremism. I needed The Box.

Nightfall saw me standing alone outside The Box, Santa Cruz’s goth sanctum, with the bass from inside thumping all the way up through my thick rubber treads and into my legs. The fog was beginning to thicken.

That was when I saw him.

He stood there in spiked combat boots, thin black jeans that had seen better days, and hair spiked up high enough to evoke the guy from Eraserhead. His goggles were perched on his head like some parody of a Mondo 2000 feature. I felt like I was in some Dick novel remixed by Palahniuk himself during a Cacophony Society afterparty. He spoke to me in a robotic voice, his words precise and emotionless.

“Exterminate all humans," he intoned, his voice a perfect imitation of one of those diabolical rolling trash can Daleks from Doctor Who.

“What?"

“Kill the weak. I am Rob the Übermensch. Exterminate the human race.”

There was no irony in his voice. Rob wasn’t quoting Nietzsche to sound edgy. He had twisted Nietzsche into something that resonated with the way we both saw the world. We were caught in the same trap—too wrapped up in our own minds to understand what the rest of the world was doing. This is precisely why we connected.

I played it cool, as coolness demanded, and ignored him as loudly as possible. I walked past him and into the club. The music was horrible. They were only playing The Cure and some other basic bitch eighties music one stick of lip gloss away from being pop. This wasn’t a real goth club, I realized. I wanted to hear Einstürzende Neubauten.

“Play Kollaps!” I screamed at the fat, bald DJ. He looked at me like I was some annoying upstart. I was too dark and disturbing for the goth scene. That’s right, I was a rivethead. Fuck the collapsing world. I went back outside and saw Rob again. Maybe we could get to know each other. As soon as he saw me again, he repeated his mantra in that same Dalek voice:

"I am Rob the Übermensch. Kill the weak. Exterminate the human race.”

This time I couldn't hide my excitement. Here was another scene freak who was into Nietzsche. He understood the intersection of philosophy and industrial music. He was an older, cooler version of me. That’s what I believed at the time—so I had to know more.

I learned that Rob had a noise project, a Merzbow ripoff act that was somehow even more aggressive and unlistenable. He had a nice apartment in the Bay Area, but was down in Santa Cruz for some drug-fueled binge. He wrote lyrics for an EBM band called Psyclon Nine.

Rebirth on the pawns within our society
The drones created of impurity
Lucidity corrupted by majority
Demanding our lives incessantly
Contradiction to the shrine of mutilation
Predetermined fate annihilation
Scourge upon our souls’ irregulation
Malignant populace of visitation

- Psyclon Nine on Divine Infekt

All the members of Psyclon Nine were idiots, but they had Rob around to make them sound intelligent on their albums. ‘Intelligence,’ of course, was a low bar here, but it all felt so much more counterculture than safe-edgy Burning Man. Rob was a reader of Heartiste, way back when the OG PUA philosopher went by the name Roissy. He spoke about Roissy with a similar fervor to the way that he spoke about Nietzsche. He told me that he beat his girlfriends because they were less than human. Rob and I were both autistic, and neither of us had the emotional intelligence to see the horror of his actions.

“Show those Untermenschen,” I’d giggle to him.

Before I knew it we were doing lines of cocaine in San Francisco with the members of Psyclon Nine. The band would call their groupies whores, but never me. I was no groupie. I was different, because I had read Nietzsche, too. I was hanging out with Rob the Übermensch.

Rob and I quickly began to spend more and more time together. We called ourselves "fashbies" because we were fascist aspies, back at the time when Asperger’s was still the name for the higher-functioning end of the autism spectrum. We'd spend hours talking about how we were going to exterminate the neurotypicals (humans) while listening to bands like Genocide Organ and Brighter Death Now. We reveled in our delusional superiority. We were queering Darwinism. We were psychotic.

Rob only hit me once.

We drifted through San Francisco together, lost in the industrial noise scene where everything was raw and chaotic. The city was the perfect display of our disconnection. In the warehouses and clubs modeled after WWII bunkers, we were the oberkommando. Nights in the city bled into one another, long hours spent with the kinds of people who were just as broken as we were. The bass was heavy, the distortion was relentless, and the air was thick with hate.

Rob’s lyrics for Psyclon Nine were declarations of war. He was building his philosophy on a foundation of nihilism and destruction. I was young enough to believe that what Rob was saying wasn’t just some twisted fantasy. It was a reality to me. Our shared reality.

As the years passed, Rob's interests shifted. He got into chaos magick, which was partially inspired by my publishing debut in Generation Hex. He started a cult, complete with his own invented language. He kept a sketchbook of his own alien hieroglyphics. He began summoning deities he created in his mind, each one more bizarre than the last.

I knew that something was wrong, but I was stuck in our shared dystopian reality. It was hard for me to leave our universe. I was paradigm-shifting like Robert Anton Wilson had taught me, but sometimes I’d get stuck in a particular reality tunnel for a bit too long. I knew what was happening, but felt a sense of confusion. Why would I want to go back to the default world? What good was there in that?

Things were escalating hard.

One morning I woke up in Rob’s loft and his walls were covered in blood. He was drawing sigils with his own blood and convinced that he was the leader of some alien Nazi cult in which he channeled his will to power through the Nazi aliens he was commanding. This was the final straw. I couldn’t handle the blood. I found myself shaken back into reality with a jolt of hot, red copper.

Rob was spiraling. He was becoming a ghost, now leading a small group of chaos magician lunatics on Facebook, preaching his distorted version of Nietzsche to whoever would listen. He wasn’t Rob the Übermensch anymore. He was Rob the Complete Loser. Nietzsche would have hated him, and suddenly I did, too. He shouldn't have hit me that one time. Relationship terminated.

I leave. I blink. I’m at Sovereign House. Manhattan, Lower East Side. It’s the night after a Curtis Yarvin poetry reading and it’s almost 2024. Twenty years seem to have somehow slipped through my fingers. I think of times long past as I recall my wild adventures in San Francisco and the way it all came tumbling down. I tell the new scenesters about Rob the Übermensch and his extermination bit. “Apparently it wasn’t a bit and he was just retarded?”

They listen with amusement. “Sounds like a based autist,” one of them remarks, speaking in the new generation of edgelord. I wonder how many of these new people remember Psyclon Nine. They have no idea about real edgelord culture, the extreme noise and martial neofolk—the connections to Feral House and Torture Gardern—none of them have any clue.

I run into Curtis and hand him a glass of champagne a minute before midnight, skipping off in an imitation of cool. I meet another guy named Rob at the party. This is a new Rob. He isn’t speaking robotically about Nietzsche. He’s speaking about Carl Schmitt in a normal voice. He’s grounded in a way that feels real. This new Rob isn’t going to paint his walls with his own blood and do all that sigil stuff. He’s just Rob. We end up having drinks at Clando. The music there is horrible, and I long for the beats and lyrics of Psyclon Nine.

A moment of epiphany. These scenes and these archetypes. The characters and styles rotate, yet their underlying structures remain the same. No matter how much authenticity gets removed from the original versions, the new iterations of the products will always carry on the memetic virus. Spenglerian subculture theory by Rachel Haywire, there you go. We’re all playing these roles, convinced we’re main characters in a world that revolves around us. At these desert festivals and goth clubs and parties the world really does revolve around us. Yet outside? Nobody knows we exist.

Aren’t we all just writing stories about each other, to try and prove it happened, to try and keep each other alive? Isn’t that how mythology is created? We all have our Rob the Übermensch characters. We all have our stories, some better than others. Nobody is equal. Nobody will ever be equal to anyone else. Equality is for slaves. I am Rob the Übermensch.

I’d been alive for more than a full cycle now, looping through the same characters in different incarnations of different subcultures, watching the world spin in these familiar patterns. Eternal recurrence. I’d been performing live for so long I could no longer tell where the performance ended and where I began.

I was still her—the scenester philosopher caught between the two worlds of the scenester and philosopher, never fully belonging to either yet always with a foot in both worlds. How many iterations of Rachel Haywire had I performed? I suppose Chuck Palahniuk would have decided I was just another hipster NPC in my Zarathustra era, some MKULTRA experiment born a couple decades too late and early at once. Just another Archeofuturist prototype on Peter Thiel’s data sheet. Are we moving forward, or are we doing the exact same thing again? The answer is always both.

The old Rob had become the new Rob. There’d be a new Sovereign House, too, someday. There’d be Rob 3 and Rob 4 and Rob 5. It was 2024, and in another blink it would be 2044. Perhaps I’d start a Nietzschean Book Club on Substack this year so I could get a better grasp on the dead man’s work. I’d show people how Nietzsche could lead them into becoming Rob the Übermensch if they weren’t careful.

Yes. That was it. The counterculture. The cool. I’d do it on Substack. I’d teach philosophy to my subscribers in a way that would prevent them from going through the wrong birth of tragedy. This had become my mission. I was going to do it. The book club was a go. It was 2024 and it was the beginning and the end of my life.